Please go away

I have a long-standing policy not to discuss in person or in print what happens to or in a certain mini-state from yesteryear, but the latest display of insensitivity from His Popeliness is too spectacular to ignore. After several of his predecessors struggled admirably over Christianity’s historical fellow-traveling with anti-Semitism, a certain church has just taken a 600-year step backward and doesn’t appear to be all that sorry.

It’s ironic that just as the United States is getting used to its first non-white president, world Catholicism decides to make nice with a raving Holocaust-denier welcomed back from the cold because he’s reactionary enough to meet all the Vatican’s strict limits on what may be believed.

Belief that the Jews made up all that stuff about Auschwitz not included.

I guess it’s good to know what Benedict the Sixteenth’s priorities are: sex, no; Virgin Mary, yes; Elders of Zion, who cares?

If it were just a nutcase bishop somewhere, one could argue that a billion-person tent is always going to include a wacko. But this action is far too consistent with Benedict’s steady rehabilitation of discredited anti-Semitic currents.

Lest we forget, the execrable Mel Gibson made a movie a while back that resuscitated old anti-Semitic slanders about who killed the Messiah. I personally saw Catholic nuns in Santiago shepherd whole classrooms of tender youths in to see it with the blessings of the local bishops—luckily, they weren’t attending a sex-ed class, merely two hours of torture-porn.

Benedict XVI saw no problem with that display. But I guess we shouldn’t expect an ‘A’ in cultural competency from a guy who could proclaim, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman. . . ’

Still, rehabilitating British-born bishop Richard Williamson puts him in the W category of tone-deafness. Williamson not only denies the Holocaust and thinks women should not attend universities, he even ‘suggested that the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as an excuse to invade Afghanistan’, according to Michelle Boorstein in the Washington Post.

And these aren’t some musty old off-the-cuff remarks. Williamson reiterated on Swedish television his belief that ‘there were no gas chambers’ just this month.

His buds at the society of Saint Pius X told him to hold off on ‘ill-advised’ statements. How about adding ‘trying to cover up the worst crime in human history’? I guess that’s not important to pastoral leadership.

Benedict obviously concurs with the Saint Pius X gang that anti-Semitic comments may be ‘abhorrent’ but are not ‘heretical’, which fully clarifies what’s important and what’s not in that body of dogma. Glad I have nothing to do with it.