Catholic Church fails to face up to unpalatable historical truths

IN his letter headlined ‘The Godless delusion, flights of fancy and pointless questions’ (October 22), Oliver Broderick makes a dismissive reference to Hitler and the myth of his Catholicism.

Maybe Mr Broderick is unaware that Pope John Paul II set up a commission in 1987 to determine what responsibility, if any, the Catholic Church bore for the Holocaust.

As the investigators themselves put it, might there be some link between the destruction of Europe’s Jews and “the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards the Jews” since the Holocaust had taken place in countries of “long-standing Christian civilisation?”