Anti-Catholic drivel harms case for Lisbon

IT’S easy to appreciate why anti-Lisbon sentiment continues to grow when one reads the continuing in-denial, highly offensive drivel of its home-grown advocates.

In his letter (September 4), Cllr Declan MacPartlin shows that history wasn’t his strongest subject at school. As a matter of fact, as opposed to half-baked opinion, the slaughter of the 20th century’s gulags, death camps and killing fields was a product of extremist atheist ideologies, driven by a hatred of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Adolf Hitler, in particular, had a virulent hatred of Catholicism to such an extent that after the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the next largest victims by far were Catholics, particularly religious.

A good source book in this regard is The Myth of Hitler’s Pope by Rabbi David Dalin. IIt’s a brilliant defence of the role of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in general in assisting Jews against their atheist persecutors.

Indeed in more recent times something of the same mentality towards Catholicism could be seen in the witch-hunt against the prospective European Commissioner, Rocco Buttiglione. Can I suggest that if pro-Lisbon proponents wish to advance their cause, they need urgently to put a gag on their more fundamentalist supporters.

Eric Conway

7 Balreask Village

Navan

Co Meath