First, and most importantly, Pope Benedict used today's General Audience to make three special announcements. He welcomed the election of Patriarch Kyrill as the new Patriarch of Moscow. More about that later. He then spoke of the lifting of the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops. Rorate Caeli has an English translation of the original Italian text in which he spoke of the importance of his duty to call to unity and said that he decided to remit the excommunications "precisely in the accomplishment of this service of unity, which qualifies, in a specific way, my ministry as Successor of Peter." the Holy Father went on to express his hope for their solicitous effort to accomplish the remaining steps necessary to accomplish full communion with the Church.
In his third announcement, the Holy Father recalled the images imprinted on his memory from his several visits to Auschwitz
"one of the camps in which the brutal killing was carried out, of millions of Jews, innocent victims of a blind racial and religious hatred."The Holy Father went on to say:
"I hope that the memory of the Shoah leads mankind to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the heart of man. May the Shoah be for all a warning against forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because the violence against a single human being is violence against all."Also today, the District Superior of the SSPX has issued a strong statement dissociating himself from the behaviour of Bishop Williamson and apologising for it. See the translation at Rorate Caeli: Note of the District Superior for Germany of the SSPX.
And in a surprising development, La Ciguena de la Torre has claimed another scoop via his Vatican mole "Cardinal Re" who has alleged that Bishop Williamson has written to the Vatican to apologise of the damage caused by his reckless statements. (Cathcon has a translation of the post.)
Via Cathcon, I found the link to an interesting article by Christopher Ferrara in the Remnant: Triumph and Tribulation. On the question of the present canonical status of the four bishops, Ferrara argues that it was only ever Archbishop Lefevbre who was suspended a divinis and that the only penalty imposed on the four bishops was excommunication. Since that has been lifted, he says, they are no longer under any canonical penalty. However the article in Inside the Vatican with which he takes issue, alleges that all the priests of the Society were suspended. My own guess, for what it is worth, is that Cardinal Castrillon would be keen to dispel any such doubts in fairly short order and affirm the good standing of the Bishops and priests of the Society. I found it amusing that Ferrara referred to the SSPX as an "ecclesial movement" - it would certainly be an advantage if they were to bring to new movments generally a sense of what is "sacred and great" in the Church's Liturgy.
Ferrara also scorns the "usual conspiracy-mongers" who would see the Holy Father's gesture as "part of a sinister neo-Modernist plot to capture and neutralize the Society." He also has some very sensible comments to make on Holocaust Revisionism, together with some of the obvious evidence for the Holocaust, especially from Nazi sources themselves.
3 comments:
The argument Mr Ferrara makes so light of, viz. that the clergy of the SSPX has now reverted to the pre-1988 state (suspensio a Divinis), is the one accepted by most reputable canonists. It was put forward on the front page of Tuesday's "Tagespost" as a matter of course by the famous Professor Fr Georg May, who is himself a strong advocate of tradition and the TLM. I'm afraid therefore I didn't make it beyond the first paragraph of Mr Ferrara's article.
Addendum: Here is a link to Fr May's article: http://www.kath.net/detail.php?id=21963
This Richard Williamson business has brought the "Pius XII and the Holocaust" nutters out of the woodwork.
As someone once said, "Tell a lie big enough..." In fact, Pius XII was first ever called "Hitler's Pope" by none other than John Cornwell, in his 1999 book of that name, a thinly disguised liberal rant against John Paul II with the 'thesis' that the future Pius XII, while a diplomat in Germany, could have rallied Catholic opposition and toppled Hitler.
Pure fantasy, like the origin of the whole "Pope supported Hitler" craze: the 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, who was later successfully prosecuted for suggesting that Churchill had arranged the 1944 air crash that killed General Sikorsky.
Pius XII directly or indirectly saved between 8500 and 9600 Jews in Rome; 40,000 throughout Italy; 15,000 in the Netherlands; 65,000 in Belgium; 200,000 in France; 200,000 in Hungary; and 250,000 in Romania.
This list is not exhaustive, and the Dutch figure would have been much higher had not the Dutch Bishops antagonised the Nazis by issuing the sort of public denunciation that Pius is castigated for failing to have issued.
After the War, Pius was godfather when the Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic, and was declared a Righteous Gentile by the State of Israel, whose future Prime Minister (Moshe Sharrett) told him that it was his "duty to thank you, and through you the Catholic Church, for all they had done for the Jews."
When Pius died in 1958, tributes to him from Jewish organisations had to be printed over three days by the New York Times, and even then limited to the names of individuals and their organisations.
All of this is contained in works of serious scholarship by Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Ronald J Rychlak, and others, most recently the superlative Rabbi Professor David G Dalin.
Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, currently getting the full Tom Cruise treatment, was a devout Catholic, with close dynastic connections to the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach (whom the Jacobites would have on the Thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland), to the family of Saint Philip Howard (martyred Earl of Arundel), and do on.
In Austria, Hitler had murdered the Chancellor, Englebert Dolfuss, who in fact defended, on the borders of Italy and Germany, Catholic Social Teaching and what remained of the thoroughly multiethnic Hapsburg imperial ethos (to this day, numerous German, Magyar and Slavic names are found throughout the former Austria-Hungary) against both the Communists and the Nazis.
Yes, he was authoritarian. But look at his neighbours, and look what he was up against domestically. Imagine if a Fascist putsch in the Irish Free State (and at least one was attempted) had coincided with very serious Communist and Fascist threats in Britain. The British Government of the day would have been authoritarian, too. And, while the emergency lasted, it would have been right. In the same tradition was Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.
Examples of Catholic anti-Nazism could be multiplied practically without end. The more Catholic an area was, the less likely it was to vote Nazi, without any exception whatever.
As for Williamson, it is simply not a heretical proposition or a schismatic act to deny the Holocaust. It is purely an historical error, like saying that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1067 or not at all. One cannot be excommunicated for that, nor can one be denied reconciliation to the Church for it.
And Williamson's is not the bespoke voice of Lefebvrism on the subject. On the contrary, one of this country's leading scholars of Judaism – Professor Robert Hayward, Professor of Hebrew at Durham – is a very active Lefebvrist.
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