Catholic Thoughts For Today

From Monty Python:

KRASZT: But with certain exceptions, you accept his (Christ's) teaching?

VICE-POPE: Oh yes, it's been an invaluable basis for our whole operation really. Of course people accuse us sometimes of not practising what we preach, but you must remember that if you're trying to propagate a creed of poverty, gentleness and tolerance, you need a very rich, powerful, authoritarian organisation to do it.

From His Holiness the Pope, referring to the systematic pedophillic abuse by priests:

"It is difficult to understand how this perversion of the priestly mission was possible,"

Because he (and others) helped cover it up.

He was the head of the Inquisition, charged with fact-finding. And he helped cover up what he found - while working against it - thereby providing an example that others beneath him learnt from. They too covered up, so that the Inquisition never found out about it. And they too never found out about the abuse their immediate subordinates found.

And that is why the Inquisitor was more like Inspector Clouseau rather than Sherlock Holmes. Clueless.

"Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live,"

Rather like His Holiness' reference to Intersexed people, who blur the line between male and female, as a "threat to the human ecology". Vermin by any other name.

But I thought a former member of the Hitler Youth would have recalled some of Der Fuehrer's speeches on the subject. Words such as:

"We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion."

-- Radio address October 14, 1933

National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles

-- Koblenz speech, August 26, 1934

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith."

That one's in the Vatican Archives. It's part of the Vatican-Nazi Konkordat of April 26, 1933

As the Nazi State Labour Leader, Reichsarbeitsführer Robert Ley proclaimed:

We believe that there is a Lord - God in heaven, who created us, who leads us, who directs us and who blesses us visibly. And we believe that this Lord—God sent Adolf Hitler to us, so that Germany become a fundament for all eternity.

-- NS-Schulungsbriefe, Heft 4/1937.

Yes, it was Godless. But not Atheist, it wrapped itself in the trappings of Religion, and often, Catholicism.

And yet.....

The Catholic Church is not just the hierarchy. Not just the Pope, or the Cardinals, the Archbishops or Priests. The Vatican collaborated, but some Germans in the Catholic Church did not. From Catholic Culture:

Senior clerics who challenged the Third Reich in its racist and anti-Christian policies included Bishop Clemens Count von Galen of Munster, Archbishop von Preysing of Berlin, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, Cardinal Schulte of Cologne and possibly the most famous of all, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich. His series of Advent sermons, preached from the pulpit of St. Michael's Church aroused national and international interest. They became so popular that thousands listened, some even in the streets outside. In the first of the sermons, preached on December 3, 1933, Faulhaber defended Christianity by defending the people from whom it had sprung: the Jews. He reminded them that Christianity made no racial distinction between Jew and Gentile, but asked only that its adherents should possess faith.

His Holiness meanwhile joined the Hitlerjugend. He had to.

Not everyone did though. And they paid a price.

Maybe someone should give His Holiness a gift. Perhaps... a White Rose, with the words Mene, Mene, Tekhel, Upharsin.