The Holocaust is no laughing matter, but I can't help but giggle at the religious leaders of the groups most invested in popular mythologies who can't seem to agree that it was a bad thing. Popes are never wrong it seems.
The Vatican ambassador to Israel has sparked a row after refusing to attend tomorrow's annual Holocaust memorial service in Jerusalem in protest at a description of the wartime role of Pope Pius XII.
Monsignor Antonio Franco, who arrived in Jerusalem last year, has called on Israel's official Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, to change a picture caption that criticises the pontiff for failing to condemn the deportation and mass killing of Jews under the Nazis. Earlier this month he turned down a formal invitation to Sunday's torch-lighting remembrance ceremony.The museum said it was "shocked" at Msgr Franco's decision and called on the Vatican to open its archives for examination of the troubled history of Pius XII.
The dispute revolves around a paragraph-long caption of Pius XII installed when the newly designed museum was opened in 2005. A letter of complaint was also sent by the previous Vatican ambassador a year ago.
The text notes that Pius XII's reaction to the Holocaust is controversial and states: "When he was elected pope in 1939, he shelved a letter against racism and anti-semitism that his predecessor had prepared. Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican the Pope did not protest either verbally or in writing." The description also says Pius XII chose not to sign a December 1942 Allied declaration condemning the extermination of Jews and did not intervene when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz.
Pius XII has long been regarded as one of the most controversial popes. In the past critics have dismissed him as "Hitler's pope" for failing to speak out against the Holocaust and suggested his silence was aimed at averting a communist takeover in Europe. Others, though, have argued he was trying to defend a Catholic minority in Germany from the Nazis and should be fast-tracked for canonisation.
I'd be annoyed if I were a Jew; it seems that if the Vatican is so sure Pius was a hero and all around good guy, they'd open the archives and prove it. Of course they won't, and the Catholic church will continue its long slide into irrelevancy as a social and moral force in this world.
Just having a little atheist fun on the Holy day.
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Pius' attitude is echoed
... in our present behavior in the Sudan/Darfur genocide. We have made verbal commitment to the belief that genocide is being committed, but we haven't taken the measures needed to stop that genocide. A new pair of shoes, or condemning those who actively seek peace, take precedence with our State Department's representative.
Ruth
Uhh, the Pres' ambassador to the Sudan
says there is no genocide there. Andrew Natsios was quite emphatic about it.
Think Fast - Andrew Natsios, No Genocide in Darfur
How DO we proceed in Darfur? I don't think more violence is the way. Are there levers we aren't pulling with Sudan's rulers? I think that is very likely, but I have no idea why.
Jake
al-Bashir Plays his hand
.. very slowly, as Osama bin Ladin was in Sudan before Afghanistan, as I understand it. And we get info about Osama a little pinch at a time, in return for not rocking his boat.
I couldn't open your link to see what Natsios was saying at this juncture. Natsios has also said that we have to give Moon at the U.N. a few weeks he's requested to try and get the U.N. peacekeeping force into Darfur. Although al Bashir has approved the force, he hasn't let it in. Businesses working with the al-Bashir government can be forbidden, as with 'oil for food' in Iraq, hahahaha, and actually there's a bill before the TX legislature to end investment in any firms that do business with Sudan with funds of state pension funds, and firms like insurance co's that do business with the state.
Ruth
The archives at Think Fast really load slow
this morning. Or maybe all the time, but this morning for sure. It does seem to be better now.
Jake
Jake, see what you mean now.
And I heard a similar interview with Natsios not long ago, with him insisting that he couldn't tell the questioners what he'd worked out with his co-negotiators in Sudan, or they would refuse to deal with him. We should have some idea of any developments there may be in a couple of weeks. Hopefully this isn't another screw up by cretin in chief's appointed incompetents, but what are the odds. For a more in-depth review of U.S. hands off policy toward Sudan, may I recommend http://cabdrollery.blogspot.com/2007/03/....
Ruth
So, Ruth, I went to Cab Drollery
Wellesly, eh?
I know a person or two down your way. I've had my sailboat at Grandpappy for 3 years now.
China, Osama, Oil, genocide. What a mix. And what a trade, if true - the deaths of 200k people for info on a man whom GW insists is no longer relevant.
Jake
More evidence
...that the entire cabal wants a czar to do their work for them, if any. Spending the rest of his term at Crawlforth would be the best choice and safest course for the C-i-C and the U.S.
Hey, I was having lunch overlooking Lake Texoma on Wednesday. It was gorgeous, and some one was playing around in a little Sailfish/Sunfish sailboat.
Yeh, me and Hillary and Wendy Gramm.
Ruth
An utter failure
So what would you propose to do about Darfur? At this point it is clear that the international institutions have failed completely. By the time the UN gets around to doing anything beyond talking and "condemning", there will be another couple hundred thousand dead. So the question is, are you willing to have the US use its miiltary power to do something, or is all your concern just empty talk?
Military power has worked out so well
...I'm amazed anyone would bring it into play at this time. We've made a total circular firing squad out of Iraq, and you think that would be useful in Darfur? Of course, it would mean lots more Sudanese dying in addition to Darfur's black population - but how that would be an improvement? We had control in Iraq when we used sanctions, and if they had been allowed to play out, we would have most likely had never made ourselves into the pariah nation we have become, or the killing field out of Iraq that it has become.
Ruth
nuddie isn't a big fan of diplomacy, ruth
gunz blazin seems to be his favorite, and perhaps only, answer to the world's problems.
Ya know, Ruth, maybe we should hold a TX/OK
Corrente get together. I think there are several readers from these parts. It'd probably be fun.
Well, as long as we can get SOMEBODY to drink too much. Otherwise, well, ya never know.
I could see a "Corrente Drinking" evening in Dallas or wherever.
Jake
Keep in mind that a
Keep in mind that a previous pope saved an escaped concentration camp inmate in Poland. The current pope was in the Hitler Youth because all the good scholarships went to them.
A lot has changed this past few years.
not just hitler jugen scholarships, julia
he was a concentration camp guard.
as i argued at the time of his elevation, that alone should've disqualified him. there is "being forced" to be a nazi, and then there is being a part of a concentration camp and watching what happens there day after day, and holding the guns which make it continue.
...i had such an argument with a german catholic friend over this, we no longer speak.
God's Rottweiler...
...is full of crap, and it will take more than a pooper-scooper to clean up after the kennel of mongrels at the Vatican.
Besides the whole 'Church-enabled Swiss Bank Accounts and Couriers for Nazi War-Loot' thing, the Papal Pound-Puppy has another teensy little problem lurking in His Archives:
The legal age of consent in the Sovereign Nation of the Vatican is age 12, and has been that way for a long time. This begs the question, if priests are supposed to be celibate, why the insistance on such a low age of sexual consent within the Holy See?
If the Archives were opened, the world would clearly and finally understand that not only does the Church have no real interest in curtailing the activities of child-molesting priests, it's actually a sort of robe-wearing, genuflecting 'Club Ped', with a purposefully low age of consent to ensure 'legal' priestly access to boys serving the church there. And since the Vatican is a Sovereign Nation which judges it own, it's a powerful father of the church's word against a 12-year-old with regard as to whether or not the sex was consensual. So Cardinal X gets an in-house hand-slap and a few 'Hail Marys' as penance for a little 'all in fun' forcible sodomy, and the Archives are kept firmly closed.
Add to these things the Vatican-sponsored 'underground railroad' for escaping Nazi war criminals, and money laundering for the Mafia, and it becomes plain that there's a lot of puss in the abcess of the Vatican Archives...