Nazi Concordat Had Broader Religious Exemption Than HHS Mandate

An interesting little historical note.  The proposed HHS mandate on contraception includes a narrow religious exemption, even under the recently announced accommodation.  Excerpts:

...The mandate includes a limited religious exemption that only applies to non-profit organizations that exist to inculcate religious values and that serve and employ primarily members of their own faith.  The narrow scope of the exemption sparked outcry because most religious groups and even some churches would fail to qualify for it...

The 1933 concordat between Germany and the Holy See, the result of negotiations with the Weimar Republic and concluded after the Nazis were voted into power, had the following clause included:

Young Frankenstein

No, not the Mel Brooks movie--the real thing.  Warning: if you have a weak stomach, this piece from 2006 will be a little too much.  Excerpts:

It’s the hidden side of medical research. A massive industry harvesting pieces of dead children for experiments, or transplanting into animals. IAN WISHART discovers the University of Auckland has imported body parts from American babies for a research project, and asks some hard questions...

Jews for Pius XII

From a past issue of First Things:

...The New York Times is amused by the fact that Pope Pius XII has at least one Jewish defender. He is Mr. Gary Krupp, a retired medical-equipment dealer and the president and cofounder of the Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF), a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve relations among different religions. In 2000, Pope John Paul II honored Krupp for his charitable efforts by naming him a Knights commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St . Gregory the Great.

In the last few years, Mr. Krupp has devoted himself to defending the reputation of Pope Pius XII. Mr. Krupp used to accept the common allegations against Pius XII, but after taking the time to study the evidence, he concluded that the wartime pope has gotten a bad rap. The Pave the Way Foundation’s website, www.ptwf.org, contains its research on the wartime pope and includes many primary-source documents.

Reporter Paul Vitello portrays Krupp as an eccentric and loose cannon whose work is dismissed by mainstream scholars. In fact, in the last decade, many new books have been published in Europe that defend Pius XII. Unfortunately, the work of these scholars in Italy, Germany, and France is largely unknown in the United States (and apparently to the staff of the New York Times).

As for Gary Krupp, is he really the only Jew who has a favorable opinion of Pius XII? Since the late 1990s, a number of Jewish scholars and writers have defended the pope’s reputation. They include Prof. William D. Rubenstein, who tore apart John Cornwell’s biased and unreliable Hitler’s Pope in these pages; our friend Rabbi David Dalin, who wrote The Myth of Hitler's Pope: Pope Pius XII And His Secret War Against Nazi Germany (2002); Prof. Jacques Adler of Australia; Michael Tagliacozzo (who escaped the Nazi roundups of Jews in Rome and now lives in Israel); Serge Klarsfeld, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter; Bernard Henri-Lévy, the French philosopher and Jewish atheist; and Great Britain’s Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill and a world-renowned authority on the Holocaust.

Earlier Jewish authors who defended Pius XII include: Leon Poliakov; Pinchas Lapide, the author of Three Popes and the Jews (1967); Jenö Levai, who testified as an expert witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and then wrote the book Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pope Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent (1968); and David Herstig, the author of the German-language book Die Rettung (“The Rescue,” 1967). In 1963, when German playwright Rolf Hochhuth first turned Pius XII into a villain with The Deputy, Dr. Joseph L. Licthen, the late interfaith director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote a persuasive monograph, “A Question of Judgment: Pope Pius XII and the Jews,” which can be found on the Internet. Clearly, Gary Krupp has company...

Sarandon, the Pope, and the Nazis

A brief rundown of her initial comments and reactions.  Excerpts:

...the Oct. 15 remarks she made about how she had given a copy of the book “Dead Man Walking” to the pope. Sarandon hastened to add that the pope to which she had given the book was Blessed John Paul II, “not this Nazi one we have now,” meaning Pope Benedict XVI.

It’s been well-documented that Pope Benedict was registered into the Hitler Youth while a teen in his native Germany, but he never went to meetings, and his lack of participation resulted in hardships for his family. But you can’t let context get in the way of a good quip.

But pushback against Sarandon has emerged from both Catholic and Jewish circles, condemning the remarks and demanding an apology...

A Concentration Camp Martyr

Never forget.  Excerpts:

Sixty-eight years after he died of starvation and disease at Dachau, early on this "Good Shepherd Sunday" brought the beatification of the German priest Georg Haefner, whose death at the hands of the Nazis was judged to be "in odium fidei" -- out of "hatred for the faith" -- and, thus, has seen his designation as a martyr.

One of nearly 500 German and Austrian clerics to be jailed, Hafner's reported offense was to preach against the rise of the Third Reich.

With this morning's rites, the new Blessed (1900-42) becomes the fourth member of the fold who perished in the concentration camps to be raised to the honors of the altar, following Saints Maximilian Kolbe and Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), and Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, the Austrian farmer who was executed for refusing to be conscripted into Hitler's army. (Another lasting light of the era was now-Blessed Cardinal Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), the "Lion of Munster" whose preaching against the Nazis during the war exposed the regime's manifest evils.)...

The Slide to Modernity

So I was prompted by John C. Wright's rather good post on the possession of the modern age to do an overview of the current situation.

The vision of Pope Leo XIII indicates the past century held the freest action of the devil out of any age in the history of humanity--or any age to come. When one looks at the means of obscuring the truth, blinding humans to reality, and the sheer extent of the turn from reason/nature/God & supernature/Lewis's tao accomplished and set in train, it is not hard to believe that this was the time of the Lord of the Lie.

I would argue that the dictatorship of relativism described by Pope Benedict XVI and the movements towards post-modern deconstruction in academia are strong contributors to obscuring the natural order and rendering humanity far more susceptible to their own fallen natures and the lie.

Dr. Scott Hahn has been doing a discussion of fundamental/natural theology based around Romans 1:20ff, tracing out the pattern of human sin. Once God is rejected for the natural and the natural (animals, plants, whatever) are worshiped, we are given over to our fallen nature. But the slide continues, straight on past the natural to the unnatural, and eventually to the anti-natural.

Well, God was rejected for the natural a long time ago. As I'm discovering while reading Joseph Pearce's excellent biography of Solzhenitsyn, the turn began with the Renaissance repudiation of a God/spiritually centered society (in reaction to purported excesses of the Middle Ages) to an embrace of an anthropocentric society, in which Man assumed the center stage. That right there is the turn to nature, away from supernature.

Since nature is fallen and a wrongful object for worship (which belongs to God alone), worship of nature will make the devotee like the object of devotion. Sin/fallenness increases, and the process of corruption goes forward. For one bit of evidence of this, I offer you the introduction of Machiavellian realpolitik. For another, look at the spectacle of the Borgias and the explosion of clerical corruption only taken care of with the Catholic Counter-Reformation. (I acknowledge the splendors of Renaissance art, the amazing cultural contributions, and the genius pouring out of Italy during that time period. Still, the turn to Man went too far.)

From the new emphasis on Man and in revulsion against the corruptions of society/Church in the course of the Renaissance, we get the Reformation, with the turn to the personal/subjective absolute power to interpret Scripture over against any institutional authority, even if such an authority could claim the apostolic succession. And from the rejection of one external authority, we get the Enlightenment rejection of Scripture as well, repudiating all external authority in favor of the common rule of reason, leading to the dictatorship of the supposedly smarter. Worship of nature grows stronger, perhaps even reaching its height, with the enthronement of the goddess Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in place of the Christian God. And, as Chesterton points out:

...when the dregs of Diderot's bitterness were reached; when they dragged the Goddess of Reason in triumph through Notre Dame, the smouldering Gothic images could look down on that orgy more serenely then than when Voltaire began to write; awaiting their hour. The age was ended when these men thought it was beginning. Their own mystical maenad frenzy was enough to prove it: the goddess of Reason was dead.

From the Enlightenment, we reach the very strange position of the high modern mind, teetering in the wind on the edge of a cliff. Predominantly, the venerators of the Enlightenment hold that Reason is the highest thing, the governing thing. This belief is dealt some serious blows with the world wars and is only toppled in the wild times of the 60s. Reason did not secure peace or end injustice, as promised--therefore, we must delve deep into emotion, into feeling, into sheer sentimentality. If it feels good, do it.

With the repudiation of reason comes the repudiation of even the God of the philosophers, the God accessible through natural reason, who ruled the world at the beginning, even if we hold that he's never taken a hand in things since. We repudiate the natural and in so doing open the way to choose the unnatural. We repudiate the existence of the God knowable by reason and thereby repudiate his law, written into nature, also knowable by reason.

We arrive at atheism--the repudiation of natural religion. We get the defiant challenge to the notion of any God at all, even one who does not reveal, does not claim any sort of interfering authority, and merely laid down laws at the beginning of all things which ought to be obeyed. One ends up with Nietzche--antiChristly and proud of it, rejecting the Jewish religion and heritage as enslavement, rejecting the rule of reason as an awful dominance of the mind over the strength and energy at the heart of vital life--and Marx--foul is fair and fair is foul because the system is oppressive, and all that it approves merely serves to enslave the individual human. We must therefore draw every circle counterclockwise, turn every crucifix upside down (ala Frost's "objectivity training" in Lewis's That Hideous Strength), because anything evil that is done by the oppressed is really the fault of the oppressor, because we wouldn't be in this war if it weren't for God, now, would we? Cause he made us this way. And it is now all his fault.


So--gender is a cultural construct. Heteronormativity is a cultural construct, as is any imposed system of ethics such as a belief in the right to life (which depends on rational acceptance on the nature of the human person, the existence of natural law, and a law-giver as outlined in the Declaration of Independence--this country and its remarkable understanding of human freedom was founded on natural law/theology/religion), anything factual/true to reality which does not follow the party line, and cultural constructs must each be an artifact of an oppressive patriarchal society, ultimately set in place at the dawn of all things by a Father who art in heaven in order to grind the fascist boot in the face of Lucifer...who is the first Marxist rebel in the history of...history.

The ideology is systematically applied to every aspect of life. Anything which we believe is oppressive becomes a legitimate target for anything and everything necessary to "fix" the problem. We get the spectacle of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed as well as the spectacle of "conservative" adoption of Saul Alinsky's tactics. Of course, ever since Machiavelli, the belief that the ends justify the means has dogged politics on both ends of the spectrum--the left focusing on "social justice", the right on "national defense/law and order/security/stability"--but it wasn't until the remarkably successful repudiation of natural law/natural theology/natural religion that the full force of the Machiavellian moves could be felt.

Solzhenitsyn chronicled what this looked like in Soviet Russia. Orwell predicted it in 1984 and Animal Farm. Chesterton warned of it and all the consequences of modernity throughout his works. Such moves were played out on the world stage by Hitler, and Lenin, and Stalin, and Mao, and on, and on, till the present day, the most recent political news.

So, in the name of human autonomy, liberation, and choice, we worship the anti-natural, seek to undo the natural by means of everything we have. Looking out upon the world, it is clear that we are plumbing the depths of the anti-natural as we speak. The biological engineering that promises to alter the very meaning of being human (ala Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), the refusal to see or accept the logic of the natural law, and all the revolt against even the Enlightenment faith in reason is the logical consequence of the initial revolt against revelation, against supernature, against the logic of the divine plan.

Fatima gives us the prediction that unless Russia is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Bishops of the world in communion with the Pope, there shall be the spread of the errors of Russia throughout the world and the destruction of many nations. John XXIII, the pope of 1960, did not do the consecration. He said that the third secret was not for the present time. John Paul II completed the consecration in the mid 80s--it appears to have served to mitigate matters, not to heal or reverse.

The possession of the world is well in hand. The powers and principalities of the heavens, the rulers of this present darkness, cling close to their kingdoms because their time is short. Fatima also predicted a triumph of the Immaculate Heart, which is not dependent on human cooperation--it will come in time. There is a limit to the destruction permitted to the devil, as Pope Benedict wrote in his collection of essays "Values in a Time of Upheaval," and we are called as Christians to live in hope.

Heck, there's a limit to the destruction God permits, period. Even the Apocalypse is full of portions, and times, and half a time, and so forth. So the Devil grasps what he can while he still can. But we have ways to fight him--always have, always will. For more on that, Father Gabriele Amorth's books are good, as well as Matt Baglio's The Rite. For more on what we can do to help turn things around, see Carl Anderson's Civilization of Love and Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ's Healing the Culture.

Pius XII, Righteous Gentile

Once again, the canard is resurrected that Pius XII failed to act or speak out against the Hitlerian genocide of the Jews. Once again, it must be refuted:

The claim that Pius XII was “silent” during the Holocaust is contradicted by his own wartime statements, and those who praised them after the war. When he died in 1958, the Jewish community hailed his wartime leadership, above all because he did “speak out.”

Golda Meir, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, reacted with this tribute: “We share in the grief of humanity at the passing away of His Holiness, Pope Pius XII. In a generation afflicted by wars and discords, he upheld the highest ideals of peace and compassion. When fearful martydom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised in compassion for the victims.”(Reuters, October 10,1958)

In his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (October, 1939), in his Christmas addresses, in his radio appeals, in his allocution to the College of Cardinals on June 2, 1943, Pius XII condemned race-based murder, and thus came to the clear, public defense of European Jews - a fact recognized at the time, even if it is generally ignored or denied today.

On October 1, 1942, the Times of London editorialized: “A study of the words which Pope Pius XII has addressed since his accession in encyclicals and allocutions to the Catholics of various nations leaves no room for doubt. He condemns the worship of force and its concrete manifestation in the suppression of national liberties and in the persecution of the Jewish race.”

Charles Pichon, a leading wartime correspondent, described Pius XII’s wartime addresses succinctly: “The pontifical texts condemned most strongly the anti-Semitic persecutions, the oppression of invaded lands, the inhuman conduct of the war, and also the deification of the Race, the State and the Class.” (The Vatican and its Role in World Affairs, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950, p. 167)

In reaction to his 1942 Christmas address, the Nazis themselves, furious about Pius XII’s public stand, railed: “That this speech is directed exclusively against the New Order in Europe as seen in National Socialism is clear in the Papal statement that mankind owes a debt to ‘all who during the war have lost their Fatherland and who, although personally blameless have, simply on account of their nationality and origin, been killed or reduced to utter destitution.’ Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice towards the Jews, and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.” (The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922-1945, by Anthony Rhodes, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p.273).

Similar examples of Pius’s anti-Nazi, pro-Jewish statements are found in the wartime issues of the Palestine Post, the New York Times, the Tablet of London and the Jewish press of various countries...

Much more where that came from. Read the whole thing. For more, check out Ronald Rychlak's Hitler, the War, and the Pope, or Rabbi David Dalin's The Myth of Hitler's Pope.