the sin of omission by the vatican

apr 16th

as christists celebrate the mythical resurrection of the non-existent jesus, here's something real they participated in with glee: genocide.

papal infallibility -- these guys have the temerity to claim this in today's sceptical world. godman ratzinger -- so he's always right in everything he says and does? yeah, right. this is exactly like mohammedans' claim of koranic infallibility! birds of a feather in blind faith.

in fact the vatican has no moral locus standi whatsoever considering its role in genocides, pogroms and cultural obliteration all through the centuries.

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'The Vatican's sin of omission'

Arthur Hertzberg, international herald tribune, may 16, 2005
 
Earlier this month, Pope Benedict XVI vowed to Rome's former chief rabbi that he would renew the Vatican's commitment to Catholic-Jewish dialogue…

But from my own experience as the chairman, more than 30 years ago, of the first international Jewish delegation to meet formally with a comparable delegation from the Vatican, I am far from certain that a new age in the Jewish-Catholic relationship has dawned. 

At that Paris meting in 1971, we asked the Vatican to acknowledge that it had remained sllent while Europe's Jews were murdered. The Catholic delegation responded that it was not empowered to act.

The delegates were following the instructions of the Vatican's commission on theology, which held that the policies of Pope Pius XIII and the church under the Nazis could not be questioned, because the church and its leader are, as the First Vatican Council declared in 1870, free of error on matters of doctrine and morality. 

When Cardinal Ratzinger became the head of that Vatican commission, he issued the same advice to Pope John Paul II, who pronounced the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis an unspeakable crime, but a crime by some Catholics, not by the church.

This position obscures the fact that in the 1930s and 1940s Europe, the Roman Catholic Church was the only institution that possessed the moral stature and strength to denounce and forbid the murder of the Jews. It did not do so.

And in all the years since, rather than acknowledging this failure to provide moral leadership in the critical hour, the Vatican has repeatedly claimed that while individual Catholics behaved sinfully or misunderstood what the church taught, the sin of letting the Holocaust happen at its doorstep need not haunt the church as an institution.…

No amount of personal outreach towards Jews and Judaism from the new pope will make Jews forget that the institution of which he is the monarch has not come to terms with that history.

Arthur Hertzberg, a visiting professor of the humanities at New York University, is the author of "the Fate of Zionism"