Israel seeks Vatican archive answers about Pope Pius XII during WWII

Open the Vatican's WWII archives so that questions about the WW II papacy of Pius XII can be answered and Catholic/Jewish tension reduced, was Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom's request to Pope Benedict on Sunday.

This shortly after the pope's visit to the main Jewish synagogue in Rome, Italy, where by way of welcome the president of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, told him "the silence of Pius XII before the Shoah [Holocaust], still hurts because something should have been done.

"Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," Pacifici said.

The pope replied that the Vatican helped Jews and "provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way." He also asked forgiveness for the church's contribution to anti-Semitism and urged Jews and Christians “to come together to strengthen the bonds which unite us and to continue to travel together along the path of reconciliation and fraternity."

Israel's answer, then, is something like "Good. Prove it." And a review of Reuter's timeline of Vatican-Jewish relations shows how the rising Catholic/Jewish tension of the Joseph Ratzinger papacy led to Israel's request and provoked some (notably Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, president of Italy’s rabbinical assembly) to boycott the pope's visit to the Rome synagogue. They were aware that the pope had been unilaterally invited, but would not accept his "clarification" of the decision to recognize the "heroic virtues" of Pius XII.

Tension over the matter can also be seen in B'nai B'rith Europe's online petition opposing beatification of Pius XII.

The issue also provoked a request in 2005 by Jewish leaders to open the Vatican's WW II archives when Pope Benedict visited the Cologne synagogue.

One need not be Jewish to wonder why the archives would not be opened now when it is clear that there is not only no resolution like well-verified truth, but also no likely resolution to this matter but a public review of those archival materials.

'Stop with Holocaust Comparisons'

One horrific detail at a time, North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor Norman Jameson shows that Southern Baptist Convention ethics chief Richard Land was wrong to apply holocaust metaphors to the health care debate.

For example, Jameson writes:

I refer to the holocaust, the one in which German Nazis created and documented the stone cold slaughter of 11 million to 17 million people, including six million Jews. Inured to their victims’ pain or their own emotions they experimented on people, including children and especially twins as if they were lab rats. They tested the rate of death under an assortment of circumstances; the ability to survive poisonous chemicals smeared into wounds; whether it was possible to change eye color with injections into the eyeball.

. . .


It was explained to me in the somber halls of Yad Vashem, the premier memorial in the world to the Shoah, that “holocaust” is too broadly and casually utilized to any longer reflect the singular horror of the Nazi actions.

After Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, compared aspects of nascent health care reform bills to the holocaust, other religious leaders said, “enough.”

Land's disingenuous failure to acknowledge real error in his apology is overlooked. Similarly, Jameson is focused on Land's abuse of the facts and Nazi imagery in a Sept. 26 speech to the Christian Coalition in Florida, and overlooks the October barrage of counterfactual claims which attended Land's Louisiana references to Nazi practices.

Fair to a fault, Jameson gives Land credit for having said health care reform is needed, and for supporting the state of Israel before concluding that "the holocaust are so unimaginably horrible, it is not appropriate to compare them with anything since." And for that he draws immediate dissent a pro-life commenters who suggests that it is appropriate to compare abortion to the Nazi industrialized program of eradication of entire cultures.

Land and his peers are resistant to logical/historical persuasion such as Jameson offers, possibility because their goals are not logical. They may seek to reignite the culture-war hysteria whose fade toward calm has drained away much of their political power.

Ethics Daily calls Richard Land out on his unapology

Contributing Editor Brian Kaylor in the Baptist Center for Ethics' Ethics Daily, writes:

One week after apologizing for comparing Democratic leaders to the Nazis, a prominent Southern Baptist leader has reneged on his promise to stop using such comparisons.

Land is president of Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).

Nice name, but what's in a name?

Land pseudo-apologizes to ADL for Holocaust references [Addenda I & II]

The president's healthcare advisor Ezekiel Emanuel was given the "Josef Mengele Award" by Land. (photo courtesy Center for American Progress)

In a chummy, self-aggrandizing letter to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Richard Land expressed some regret for accusing the Obama administration and congressional Democratic leaders of attempting to do with health-care reform "precisely what the Nazis did."

In the paragraph devoted to apology, Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission czar Land wrote:

. . . I deeply regret the reference to Dr. Josef Mengele. I was using hyperbole for effect and never intended to actually equate anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele. I will certainly refrain from making such references in the future. I apologize to everyone who found such references hurtful. Given the pain and suffering of so many Jewish and other victims of the Nazi regime, I will certainly seek to exercise far more care in my use of language in future discussions of the issues at stake in the healthcare debate.

Thus Land disingenuously fails to acknowledge real error, instead offering bloodless amends for hurt feelings.

We dealt yesterday with the barrage of other counterfactual claims which attended Land's Louisiana misuse of Holocaust images and references to Nazi practices. That piece was a followup to a review of Land's abuse of the facts and Nazi imagery in a Sept. 26 speech to the Christian Coalition in Florida.

Land's disregard for the facts and use of Nazi imagery are of one piece. His summary intentions were well-explained by professor of history emeritus at Indiana State University Richard V. Pierard, who wrote in response:

To evoke images of Hitler or the Holocaust to thwart health-care reform is a brutal insult both to the victims and survivors of that Holocaust. We must proclaim as widely as possible that the term 'Nazism' and images of the swastika have nothing to do with the issues at hand. Any such comparisons are false and are intended only to frighten and confuse people.

Pierard's warning is as important as Land's pseudo-apology is vacant.

Addendum: Land's just another echo

As a member in good standing of the Religious Right, Land is just another echo of the Religious Right Party Line.

For another party-line variation on Land's Obama = "end of Christian civilization" line to the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Founders' Day audience, watch Pat Robertson and Bill Donohue discuss how liberals are trying to "tear down society:"

Addendum II

Kudos to the Associated Baptist Press for unflinching coverage of the pseudo-apology. Although the ABP story may owe more than it acknowledges to Sam Stein's blog at Huffington Post.

U.S. Bishops demand a high standard for full reconciliation

The price of full reconciliation of the four disastrously un-excommunicated, right-wing Catholic Bishops?

A full-throated end to their anti-Semitism and holocaust denial, demanded the The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Tuesday.

Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, the president of the group, also "called the statements by Bishop Richard Williamson 'deeply offensive and utterly false' and called the outrage from Jews and Catholics 'understandable.'"

Specifically about full reconciliation, reported the Boston Globe, George said:

The Holy Father's lifting of the excommunications is but a first step toward receiving these four bishops, and the priests who serve under them, back into full communion with the Catholic Church. If these bishops are to exercise their ministry as true teachers and pastors of the Catholic Church, they, like all Catholic bishops, will have to give their assent to all that the Church professes, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Mention of the Second Vatican Council is important here. because it resulted in the church's renunciation of anti-Semitism and led to a historic warming of relations between Catholics and Jews.

Until Tuesday the U.S. Catholic bishops were largely silent on the matter, thus provoking criticism.

Now, they are apparently pushing back against any real or perceived Vatican impulse to give the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X any but the most exacting path to full reconciliation.

Pushing back is what service of their church requires, given the pope's refusal to invest more heavily in quieting the waters he has whipped into an unrelenting storm.