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?”

Unfortunately, the published report (March, 1998) represents another lost opportunity to face up to unpalatable historical truths and is a rather pathetic whitewash.

Instead of facing the truth squarely and honestly, the report attempts a defence of innocence based on a distinction between anti-Judaism, an apparently ‘acceptable’ form of Christian anti-semitism resting on ‘religious’ objections to Jews and Jewish practices, as opposed to the unacceptable anti-semitism based on political, social and racist grounds as practised by all the fascist states from the 1920s until 1945. Even the internal historical record (Vatican sources: Archives of the Inquisition; Secret Vatican Archives) tells a very different, immensely sad and totally depressing story that I can only assume Mr Broderick doesn’t know about.

Just to give two examples.

With the restoration of the Papal States at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, one of the first actions of Pope Pius VII was to reinstate the Jewish ghettos in all the major cities under his political control — the wearing of the distinctive yellow star again became mandatory and Jews were actively discriminated against as a matter of public policy based on canon law!

Catholic emancipation (Ireland and England 1829) was welcome, but the emancipation of the Jews was unthinkable to a church that believed and taught that the political, social and religious order was divinely ordained and unalterable.

This remained the position until the loss of the Papal States to the new Italian Republic in 1870. In 1938, when fascist Italy passed its race laws revoking the citizenship of its Jewish population, the silence from Pius XI was deafening, except in one very revealing respect: there were objections to those aspects of the laws that affected the marriages of Catholic converts from Judaism because the concordat with Mussolini in 1929, which established the Vatican State, also recognised Catholicism as the official state religion in Italy, but there were no principled objections of any kind.

Likewise, no objections were raised to the Nuremberg Laws promulgated by Hitler in 1935, except in so far as they impinged on the concordat that Pius XII signed with him in 1933.

On the contrary, parish priests all over Germany opened their baptismal registers to the Nazis to help them establish the extent of people’s Jewish ancestry.

These examples could be multiplied a thousandfold, but would still not do justice to the vitriolic hatred of Jews that spilled regularly from the pages of the Catholic press in Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Poland for over a century preceding the Holocaust.

If Mr Broderick wishes to confirm any of this he need only consult the archives of Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit paper that consistently engaged in spreading anti-Jewish propaganda from its beginnings in 1850 right up to the second Vatican Council in 1965.

Of course it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Catholic Church was alone to blame for the Holocaust — nevertheless the relentless dehumanising of Jews through official church publications, and the constant encouragement of large numbers of people right across Europe to view them as evil and dangerous, made the building of the road to Auschwitz and other extermination centres so much easier.

The truth is that the case against is far stronger than the case Dawkins presents in his book.

Again Mr Broderick’s cavalier dismissal of clerical abuse scandals is not only appalling, but seriously insulting to the victims. I can only assume he is unaware of the full extent of the problem and how deep it runs.

As the case of Fr Marcial Maciel (Mexican founder of the Legionnaires of Christ) shows, the cover-up goes right to the heart of the Vatican.

Credible allegations by nine former members of his order have been made against this man for over half a century, but he was protected and honoured by none other than the late pope.

Mr Broderick should do a bit of honest soul-searching on how one should distinguish between good and evil before he puts on that bullet-proof vest following his defence of Fr Con McGillicuddy (Letters, September 17).

Con Hayes

Kerry Road

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork