Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

As I mentioned in a previous post, the historian Derek Hastings has investigated the religious roots of Nazism, not in a broad civilizational sense, but specifically the Catholic groups in Munich from which the early Nazis came. Hastings is the only historian to have done this. I have just read his Catholicism and the Roots [...]

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Israel is experiencing a growing tension between secular Jews and the ultra-Orthodox, the Haredim. The National Post has an article on the phenomenon. The men of the Haredim are exempt from conscription and spend all their time studying Torah – and fathering children. They do not work, but live on welfare.

About half of ultra-Orthodox adults [...]

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On March 15, I asked If the Freemasons Come, Can the Jews Be Far Behind? 
The answer is by about a month. The Guardian reports:
A furious transatlantic row has erupted over quotes that were attributed to a retired Italian bishop, which suggested that Jews were behind the current criticism of the Catholic church’s record on tackling [...]

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 Whispers in the Loggia reports: 

Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien, Archbishop of Baltimore, issued the following statement in response to Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s Good Friday comments (fulltext) at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome:Father Cantalamessa’s words on Good Friday, somehow linking the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal with anti-Semitism, were unfortunate and reprehensible. They pose harm to Catholic-Jewish [...]

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Is there a school at the Vatican where priests and bishops are taught how to offend everyone? 
The NYT reports that the papal preacher, the Franciscan Cantalamessa, compared criticism of the hierarchy to anti-Semitic persecution: 

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have [...]

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The inimitable Bishop Gerhard Mueller of Regensburg has opened his episcopal mouth and put a red-slippered foot into it. His attitude to sexual abuse and his general humaneness can be studied by looking at my case study of an abuser in his diocese:  Peter Kramer. 
 
Now he has decided the Freemasons are to blame for all [...]

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Anti-Semitism has the ability to flourish in the absence of Jews. Reality had never troubled anti-Semites. I remember reading about the world system of a primitive tribe in Central America. Their mental map placed themselves (naturally) at the center, then neighboring tribes, then Spaniards, then Americans and in the outermost fringes and darkness witches and Jews (Not that [...]

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In Honduras it is not just leftists (I will post that when my computer lets me) who like to blame the Jews for everything. After American papers starting in 2002 printed stories about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga realized who was behind these attacks (guess):
     “It certainly makes me [...]

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David Ben Gurion observed that where there are two Jews, there are three opinions.
One Jewish web site agrees:

Although Jews have excelled in many different sports, only one sport truly has a claim as being the Jewish national sport. Soccer? Dreidel? No. The Jewish national sport is…arguing!

Jonathan Kay in the National Post reports the opinions of [...]

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Archbishop Dadeus Grings

Catholic clerics have not learned that one must be ultra-cautious in making any statement about the Holocaust. Jews are understandably sensitive about anything that tends to minimize their unimaginable suffering.

Archbishop Dadeus Grings of Porto Alegre in Brazil has not learned this lesson.

According to reports here, here, here, and here he has said

The [...]

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The efforts of victims (and now of a U.S. attorney) to make bishops accountable is often derided as bringing up ancient history (i.e., 1970) or criticized as demonstrating a failure to carryout the great biblical principle of forgive and forget (I have never been able to locate that verse).
Of the Holocaust, Benedict said:
Das Vergangene ist [...]

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Kathnet reports:
 
“The Society of Pius X on Tuesday for the first time clearly distanced itself from controversial Holocaust-denier Bishop Williamson, a member of the Society.”
 
Bishop Bernard Fellay, the head of the Society, said that he has become aware of the interview and “that it was obvious that a bishop speaks with religious authority only [...]

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Although Israel’s - and Hamas’s – actions are subject to moral scrutiny, the demonstrations that occurred when Hamas was firing thousands of rockets into Israel were invisible – because they didn’t occur.
Nor do critics of Hamas associate with racist ant-Arabs, mostly because there aren’t any.
But Catholics and others feel no taint in joining with anti-Semites [...]

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German police tore down an Israeli flag because it offended Moslem protestors. When will Germans start arresting Jews and ah, “disposing” of them so that Moslems won’t tear Germany apart? Der Spiegel reports: 

Police in the western German city of Duisburg have admitted they removed flags a student had hung in his apartment in support of [...]

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