Everything is about us and our story
One thing that is annoying about people steeped in a particular ideology is that everything is about them and their story. A fanatical Marxist sees every human interaction as a symptom of class conflict and political struggle. A fanatical Led Zeppelin fan thinks all music is somehow derivative of Led Zeppelin. A paranoid person sees in everything a sinister conspiracy against their well-being. Not only are these people often wrong, they are also excruciatingly dull, which is a crime almost as great as being wrong.
One of the most annoying examples of this is how some Christians see every bit of history, literature, mythology, and religion as either foreshadowing the Christ story, or reflecting aspects of the Chirst story. I remember having this reaction in Art History class, when for centuries the European mind seemed so shackled to this religion that it was incapable of producing any art free of Christian symbolism. (This may have been the result of the selective nature of the survey class.)
Anyway, Andrew Sullivan points to an annoying manifestation of this "everything is about us phenomenon". In this Commonweal Editorial, the authors criticize the Pope (who recently visited Auschwitz) for interpreting the Holocaust as an attack on Christianity. You see, according to this interpretation, the genocide of Jews was an effort to "...to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."” This seems pretty absurd to me. If the Nazis wanted to tear up the Christian faith, I suspect they would have sent Christians to the gas chambers. But I suspect that to someone steeped in Christian dogma and history as a Pope, it seems only natural to see the Holocaust (during which the Vatican acted shamefully) as part of the overall narrative of Christian persecution by powerful, godless, evil empires.
Why is it so hard to say, "we were wrong?" When I redesign the human brain, I'm going to make it easier for people to believe things without centering their identity on them. That way, people will be able to change their minds without having to tear out their souls.
One of the most annoying examples of this is how some Christians see every bit of history, literature, mythology, and religion as either foreshadowing the Christ story, or reflecting aspects of the Chirst story. I remember having this reaction in Art History class, when for centuries the European mind seemed so shackled to this religion that it was incapable of producing any art free of Christian symbolism. (This may have been the result of the selective nature of the survey class.)
Anyway, Andrew Sullivan points to an annoying manifestation of this "everything is about us phenomenon". In this Commonweal Editorial, the authors criticize the Pope (who recently visited Auschwitz) for interpreting the Holocaust as an attack on Christianity. You see, according to this interpretation, the genocide of Jews was an effort to "...to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."” This seems pretty absurd to me. If the Nazis wanted to tear up the Christian faith, I suspect they would have sent Christians to the gas chambers. But I suspect that to someone steeped in Christian dogma and history as a Pope, it seems only natural to see the Holocaust (during which the Vatican acted shamefully) as part of the overall narrative of Christian persecution by powerful, godless, evil empires.
Why is it so hard to say, "we were wrong?" When I redesign the human brain, I'm going to make it easier for people to believe things without centering their identity on them. That way, people will be able to change their minds without having to tear out their souls.
Comments
"I suspect they would have sent Christians to the gas chambers"
Actually, many Catholics were sent to the gas chambers. Thousands of priests were executed for their defiance of nazism and you have shamefully dishonored their sacrifice.
Here is an article refuting much of the recent anti-catholic lies about Pope Pius XII during the holocaust in case you're interested.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/dalin.html
Have a nice day.
The article you cited relates many examples of anti-Nazi activity of which I was not aware. It seems, however, that many Jewish groups that study the Holocaust are not happy with the behavior of the Pope, though they do acknowledge that individual Catholics often rendered great assistance. These sentiments are expressed here:
http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/holocaust.html#idthec
I think this is a reasonably accurate representation of what many people believe. I understand that the Vatican and its advocates are trying to counter this perception, in articles like the one you link to and elsewhere. Why do you think there are such divergent views of Pius XII? After reading the article you linked, I think it was clear that the Pope wasn't mute on the subject, but clearly many Jews feel that he was remiss in his actions. The author you cite says these attacks are motivated more by current dissatisfactions with the Catholic Church, and that these attacks are unfairly distorting the Church's past behavior to score political points. Is this the case?
I was already aware that many Catholics perished at the Nazis' hands, and that many priests sheltered Jews from death. (The film "Au Revevoir Les Enfants" depicts one such group of Catholics, if I recall correctly.)
But the heroism of individual priests and Catholics does not excuse the behavior of the church heirarchy (if indeed that behavior was reprehensible, which I know you dispute), which is what I meant by "The Vatican". I did not say "Priests" or "Catholics" acted shamefully. It seems that there is often an enormous gulf between Catholics and their heirarchy on many issues, especially here in the United States.
During the whole sexual abuse scandal, I would say much of the church heirarchy acted shamefully by covering up evidence and not removing abusing priests. But I would not accusation to be interpreted as an attempt to dishonor the uncountable good deeds of that Catholics do.
(As curious aside, I was actually baptized Roman Catholic myself, but I do not consider myself to be Catholic.)
But certainly the Nazis seem to have had no love of Christianity either. Then there are those stories that they considered Christianity a Semitic conspiracy to destroy their original, Aryan religion, but again I cannot vouch for the truth or falsehood of such tales.
But you are right that there is a certain crassness to the attitude that "Well, OK, he was exterminating the Jews, but he was really after us", whatever the other circumstances may be.
And you are right, the way Cristians have traditionally seen the world through a Jesus-shaped lens gets a bit tiresome. Someone once said to me "Now that we can read the Dead Sea Scrolls, Christians will finally realize how derivative their religion is." That's a silly thing to say: the pagans were throwing that one at the Christians right from the beginning, and the Christains just said "No, we're not copying your religions. Your religions were anticipating ours!"
Thank you for taking the time to read Rabbi Dalin's article and for responding to my comments.
I apologize if my comments seemed a bit too strong but I think this is an important issue. There is an effort to rewrite history to portray the Catholic Church as some how complicit in the holocaust. Rabbi Dalin’s article alluded to some of these reasons.
A commenter above makes an important point. The Nazis had no love for Christianity and in particular Catholicism. Hitler and Goebbels despised Christianity and saw it as a philosophy of weakness antithetical to the idea of Nordic superiority. It was part of their plan that Christianity would eventually be eradicated since it was only a weight around the neck of the master race. Hitler was very much immersed in the occult and was trying to create (He would say revive) a Germanic mythology to replace Christianity. Hence the enormous Nazi rallies with Wagnerian music and full of Teutonic ritual.
Pope Benedict understands this better than almost anyone alive. I see that as part of what he is referring to in his Auschwitz speech. The murder of the Jews was just the beginning of Hitler’s evil plan.
People like Andrew Sullivan have a particular axe to grind with the Pope and the Catholic Church (I don’t differentiate the two). It suits their agenda to portray Benedict, JPII, Pius XII, the entire magestarium as without moral credibility. If we want to truly honor those who have died under the Nazis we should learn the truth. We should also strongly condemn those who would distort the history of the holocaust to further their particular agenda.
As far as what the Vatican did during WWII I can refer you to some good sources. One great story is that of Father Hugh O’Flaherty who ran a network that hid Jews and escaped prisoners from the SS all over Europe. He operated under the full knowledge and encouragement of Pius XII. He eventually had to go into hiding in the Vatican since the SS had orders to assassinate him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_O'Flaherty). It was made into a movie with Gregory Peck called the “Scarlet and the Black.”
Let’s remember that Pius the XII had Nazis guards holding him prisoner inside Vatican City during the war. All the while Vatican radio broadcast anti Nazi programming and encoded messages to the resistance. What if Roosevelt had Nazis surrounding the White House? For that matter what did Roosevelt do during the holocaust? He knew of the death camps but made no effort to speed up D-Day. He did little to help Jews escape from Europe. In fact he ran his own interment camp of Japanese men, women and children.
I’m sorry you have left the Church. It makes me think that if people didn’t say such horrible things about the Church people like you might give it another chance.
Joe
I think one important issue on which we differ is how we look at the Catholic Church. I see the Vatican has the top of the church hierarchy, but not necessarily representing the church as a whole. I have more experience with leftist Catholics who are as different from Benedict as Ralph Nader is from George W. Bush. So it's hard for me to put them together into one category.
I agree that Andrew Sullivan has an axe to grind with the Catholic Church, but I agree with his "axe". I think the Catholic church's stance on homosexuality (that there cannot be a way for homosexuals to make their love legitimate in the eyes of the church) is wrong and is very painful for gay people who otherwise love the Church a lot. There has been rhetoric coming out of the Vatican recently that homosexuals shouldn't be priests and shouldn't enter Seminaries, regardless of their ability to be chaste, because of some intrinsic flaw in their nature. It is not surprising to me that gay people have an "axe to grind". In fact, what surprises me is that their love of Catholocism is so strong that they don't just leave and join a more gay-friendly denomination. (That being said, there are gay-friendly Catholic churches, which I take as further evidence that on many issues you must consider the Vatican and individual Catholic churches as separate entities.)
As to why I "left" the church, that happened long before I knew anything about the accusations against the Vatican regarding WWII. I was never really a member of the Catholic Church. My mother was nominally Catholic (and is now a Unitarian Universalist) and my father is a Presbytarian deist. When I was born, they decided to baptize me Catholic, because they thought that while Protestants often don't mind if their daughter marries a Catholic, Catholics often do mind if their daughter marries a Protestant. And my loving parents wanted to give me as many matrimonial options as possible. (I ended up marrying a formerly Catholic Unitarian Universalist whose parents have no problem with my religious persuasion that I know of.) So I never had a Catholic upbringing. I did occasionally go to Sunday school in Presbytarian church as a child, but when I got the letter inviting me to start confirmation class I did some thinking. I decided that atheism made more sense, and have been an atheist since then. (At least that's what I recall, the actual mechanisms at work that determine my beliefs or anyone elses beliefs may not be open to easy introspection.)
So you see, my distance from the Catholic Church is not just because I dislike the Vatican's politics or because I had a mistaken view of its behavior against the Nazis. It is because I disagree with it on extremely fundamental metaphysical premises such as the existence of God (I think there isn't one) and the immortality of the human soul (in which I don't believe).
In my last paragraph I didn’t actually mean that WWII controversy would have played a decisive role in your view of Catholicism. I meant all the bad press the Church receives in liberal media in general turns many people away. Bishop Fulton Sheen said, “Only a few people hate the Catholic Church but thousand hate what they think the Catholic Church is”.
Anyway, I was baptized as a baby, had first communion, and then was confirmed all on schedule. Only problem was, like most cradle Catholics you will meet, I was taught very little about my faith. I became an atheist as a history student while in college. I was pretty much an Andrew Sullivan style libertarian until my late twenties when I started reading Solzhenitsyn. His passion for the Russian Orthodox Church made a big impression on me. I then began to study my own roots and read many of the great Catholic teachers (Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Benedict, Saint Thomas More, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton, not to mention the Bible). This drew me closer to the traditional Catholic Church. I finally went to a traditional Latin Mass with its great reverence for the Eucharist and I was in. I met Jesus Christ on the most profound level that I could have never even imagined. That is my story. I’m definitely not a liberal Catholic or a republican Catholic.
Nice talking to you.
Joe
And wasn't C.S. Lewis an Anglican, not a Catholic? (Yes, I just Googled it.)Those are similar denominations, if I have my Christian family tree correct. But I know Lewis is often read and quoted by Christians of many denominations.
I think C.S. Lewis' best work is "Till We Have Faces". In fact, I recently quoted it in a post here.
And C. S. Lewis also had a phase of atheism, just like you. Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my own "atheist phase", but I don't think so. Time will tell, I suppose.
Pearse says that Tolkein help to turn Lewis away from atheism. By the end of his life Lewis was very much a high church Anglican. I think he would have crossed the Tiber had not been for his Northern Irish Protestant roots.
This is an interesting discussion...where to begin?
One distinction I'd like to make, if only to add another facet to the original discussion, is that of culture. I can only address directly the culture(s) of Catholicism. There are many who no longer practice (prehaps because every Catholic knows you can never perfect it ;), but still feel close to the community or at least feel comfortable in it. This can of course contribute to social and political identity and division.
(Whilst Anglicanism and Catholicism may not be too far from each other on the 'religion tree', they are culturally as distinct as can be. And *please* don't conflate "Catholic" with "Christian". All Catholics are Christians, but not all Christians are Catholics. Some are Mormons.)
Those who find themselves speaking as apologists for Pius XII may in fact be speaking from some loyalty to cultural community, however unwittingly (they often use the 'render unto Caesar' argument, rather incorrectly). Or perhaps they argue from a broader historical perspective, comparing Pius XII to the role of many religious leaders in conquered countries, e.g. the history of the Patriarchy under Ottoman rule.
Yet, there are counterarguments for each.
People compare Pius XII to John Paul II, who was actively politically critical. Even ardent anti-Catholic writers must acknowledge his contribution in bringing the Cold War to a close. But his circumstance was different. He was surrounded and protected by a friendly state. He had immediate and open communication to other world leaders, especially to Ronald Reagan. Pius XII had none of that. He was a hostage in his own palace , though he did little to challenge that.
Should Pius XII have done more? Absolutely. Should he have at the very least denounced the Nazi regime? Without a doubt. Is there disturbing evidence that continues to surface attesting to disconcerting relations with high-level Nazis? I wish there wasn't.
Despite the efforts of Vatican I, Pius XII has shown to be quite fallible, a weak man actually. The wrong man at the wrong time. He was governed by temporal fears more than divine inspiration. He tried to compete in the difficult waters of difficult diplomacy, for which he was wholly unsuited and unprepared. His legacy unfortunately overshadows the work and sacrifice of so many Catholics in Nazi-controlled countries. (Of course, these Catholics, we must remember, were a distinct minority at the time. There were also several Catholics in Holy Orders and in the laity who capitulated.)
From his papacy, the Church has at least learned to place potential successors to the papacy under greater scrutiny.
Benedict XVI's statement at Auschwitz was, I think, in no way trying to usurp or subvert the horrors of the Holocaust. He has written a lot, before his consecration as pope, about the global and historical communities of faith. I think his remarks were given in that mindset. Since he grew up in very Catholic Bavaria, which was torn apart along cultural lines under Hitler, and especially considering his adolescence and early career, he felt the need to comment on it.
If he took advantage of anything, it was the international media corps that always follows him, and perhaps the curernt global focus on Germany, which always invites comparisons to the Nazi regime (A recent press piece on the renovation of the Berlin stadium wondered whether Merckel would not only be present for any matches involving Côte d'Ivoire and Angola, but whether she would apologize to them.)
At least Benedict XVI didn't put on a show like Willy Brandt or Gerhard Schröder.
Excellent blog, by the bye.
Cheers
I totally agree with your pointing out the existence of "cultural Catholics". It used to baffle me how someone could disagree with so many of the Church's rules, yet still consider them thoroughly Catholic. But now I think of it just like being an American: I still consider myself an American even if I loathe the current administration and its policies.
Of course I think everyone is aware that all Catholics are Christians, but not all Christians are Catholics (Just like all of Elmer Kogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people is Elmer Kogan.) I hope nothing I said implied some other set-subset relationship.
Thanks for your contribution to the Pius XII/Vatican discussion. So much to learn here.
I don't mean to be rude but that is just completely wrong.
Here is an encyclical CLEARLY condemning Nazism written by Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) when he was Secretary of State for the Vatican(The only one ever written in German by the way).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_Brennender_Sorge)
“Mit brennender Sorge (German for "With deep anxiety", word by word: "With burning worry") is an encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published on March 10, 1937 (but bearing a date of Passion Sunday, March 14). The encyclical dealt with the condition of the Roman Catholic Church in Nazi Germany, and condemned Nazism. It is one of the few papal encyclicals in history not written in Latin. The encyclical was addressed to German bishops and was read in all parish churches of Germany. Pope Pius XI credited its creation and writing to his Papal Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who later became Pope Pius XII. It had to be disseminated in secrecy.”
App Crit’s comments are a perfect example of how popular myths are being created about Pius XII. This quote clear shows Pius XII condemning Nazism and anti-semitism.
Pope Pius XII, “Mark well that in the Catholic Mass, Abraham is our Patriarch and forefather. Anti-Semitism is incompatible with the lofty thought which that fact expresses. It is a movement with which we Christians can have nothing to do. No, no, I say to you it is impossible for a Christian to take part in anti-Semitism. It is inadmissible. “
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pius_XI)“Catholic youth groups were abolished and all youth were forced into the Hitler Youth; religious education in schools was cut back and finally abolished; show trials of priests were held to discredit the clergy; vandalism of churches by Hitler Youth members was tacitly encouraged; seminaries were interfered with and closed”
If you’re saying I’m biased because I’m Catholic that is fine but I don’t think wikipedia is exactly a Catholic biased resource. These are irrefutable facts.
Could Pius XII have done more? I suppose he could’ve walked through the streets of Rome carrying a cross and ordered the Swiss Guard to nail him to it and be left for dead to show solidarity with the concentration camp victims. Maybe he should’ve.
Maybe he had relations to high level nazis because he was the Ambassador to Germany.
BTW, Papal infallibility is a very specific thing. It only refers teachings of faith and morals “ex cathedra.” It doesn’t mean the Pope can pick who is going to win the Dodgers/Rockies game tonight even though God cleary roots for the Dodgers.
You manage these discussions like a gentleman.
As for your original point, yes, I agree. Many within Christianity (present company included, I concede, cultural Catholic or not) have a habit of reverting any discussion back to them.
In the case of Benedict XVI, I don't think he was guilty of it here.
But, it seems that in the US the evangelicals, and those who align with them, are 100% guilty of it, almost all the time. And that is not good news.
Cheers