Maybe I Don' Wanna Be In This Club.....
Benedict yesterday welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church Richard Williamson and three other men who were excommunicated in 1988 after being ordained without Vatican permission. The three had been appointed by breakaway French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The Vatican decree issued yesterday spoke of overcoming the "scandal of divisiveness" and seeking reconciliation with Lefebvre's conservative order, the Society of Saint Pius X, which opposes the modernisation of Catholic doctrine.
But Jewish groups have warned the Pope that the decision could damage Catholic-Jewish relations after Williamson claimed in an interview, broadcast last week, that historical evidence "is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... I believe there were no gas chambers"....
In an interview taped last November and aired last Wednesday on Swedish television, Williamson said he agreed with the "most serious" revisionist historians of the second world war who had concluded that "between 200,000-300,000 perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber".
For a major religion hemmoraging members and crediblity worldwide, this seems to be just another nail in its coffin. When the pope's policy is harsher against gays than holocaust deniers, or pedophiles for that matter, where do you go from there?
The church has already shown it is more intersted in real estate than the members of its poor parishes. Witness the treatment of the poor black congregation of St. Augustine Parish in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Archdiocese saw valuable real estate and a chance to turn the Church into a tourist shrine. So, the church did everything in its power to extinguish the unique character of their church and stop the social services the parish provided. They won, the parishoners lost.
3 comments:
I realize my illustration might seem a little over the top, but I am struck by the arrogance of this organization and the extreme right leanings of Ratzinger.
The catholic church, as it drifts further and further away from relevance seems to be closing the wagons...becoming more elitist, obsessed with its portfolios, obsessed with holding onto its conservative base and even the fascists that are the militant core of this religion.
I feel the way they are reacting to the Obama Administration is overtly foolish and short sighted and will only destroy the catholic church as a popular religion in a class struggle. People will either succumb to the populism of evangelicism or abandon organized religion altogether. I'm for the latter!
The Catholic Church is headed for a fissure- liberal and conservative. The majority will remain in the ever-right moving church, but a smaller group will continue on [excommunicated of course!] in a liberal expression of Catholicism.
Micro, I was going to post about this. I think it brings up a few good avenues of interest, not the least of which is the idea of holocaust denial. How could an educated and presumably intelligent man who lived during our lifetime deny that it happened? Maybe he's right, I say to myself. Could the rest be wrong then? Could it all have been an exaggerated victimization plot on the part of Jewish people? I mean, I personally don't know anything except what Steven Spielberg keeps telling me. And, what I was taught in school, which should always be suspect.
There's so much more but I'll leave it at that. Great story.
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