Catholic League Statement Re: UMD Holocaust Events

BY DR. WILLIAM A. DONOHUE

It has come to my attention that the University of Minnesota Duluth is hosting a series of events on the Holocaust; they are scheduled to run between April 12 and April 19. Because many of the events address the religious response to the Holocaust, it is of great interest to the Catholic League. For example, we have a wealth of information on our website about the Catholic response to Hitler. Moreover, we have raised funds for books and articles on the subject, and we even have a reader on Pope Pius XII that covers the Jewish reaction to his noble efforts.

It is our hope that these events will foster an intellectual dialogue that is both educational and productive of good interreligious relations. But I am less than confident that this will happen. Unfortunately, some of what I have learned is very disturbing. There appears to be an effort to cast the Catholic Church in the role of an enabler, if not worse, of Nazi efforts. This is not only historically inaccurate, it is scurrilous.

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How Pius XII Protected(!) Jews

BY JIMMY AKIN

“The twentieth century was marked by genocides on an monstrous scale. One of the most terrible was the Holocaust wrought by Nazi Germany, which killed an estimated six million European Jews and almost as many other victims.

During this dark time, the Catholic Church was shepherded by Pope Pius XII, who proved himself an untiring foe of the Nazis, determined to save as many Jewish lives as he could. Yet today Pius XII gets almost no credit for his actions before or during the war.”

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A Rabbi’s Defence of Pope Pius XII

“The Jewish people had no greater friend in the 20th Century,” says the historian.

According to Rabbi Dalin, who on August 22 addressed the meeting organized by the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, “during the Second World War, Pius XII saved more Jewish lives than any other person, including Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler.”

Q: You have labeled historians who have criticized Pope Pius XII as revisionists. Why?

Rabbi Dalin: Today there is a new generation of journalists and experts determined to discredit the documented efforts of Pius XII to save the Jews during the Holocaust. This generation is inspired by Rolf Hochhuth’s play “The Vicar,” which has no historical value, but levels controversial accusations against this Pope. However, Eugenio Pacelli’s detractors ignore or neglect Pinches Lapide’s enlightening study.

[Lapide] was consul general of Israel in Milan and met with many Italian Jews who survived the Holocaust. In his work, Lapide documents how Pius XII worked for the salvation of at least 700,000 from the hands of the Nazis. However, according to another estimate, this figure rises to 860,000.

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The Catholic Betrayal of Religious Freedom

BY GEORGE WEIGEL

It was not surprising that ill-educated Catholics in Congress rushed to embrace President Obama’s “accommodation” on the HHS mandate on sterilization and contraception (including possible abortifacients), or that the faux accommodation was defended, if risibly, by another embodiment of Catholic Lite, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. One does not look to Senator Patty Murray, or to Representative Rose DeLauro or Nancy Pelosi, or to Secretary Sebelius, to learn anything about Catholic doctrine or the history of the Church’s teaching on moral issues. Nemo dat quod non habet, as the scholastic philosophers used to say: No one gives what (s)he does not have.

The willingness of the Catholic Health Association and its president, Sister Carol Keehan, to embrace the Obama shell game was also unsurprising; CHA is a trade association far more concerned about a friendly relationship with HHS and access to federal largesse than about Catholic solidarity on a question of first principles. CHA’s role in helping to pass Obamacare clarified for all with eyes to see what the association understands to be its primary interests. These interests define its true loyalties, which were on full display when Sister Carol helped the White House roll out the Obama “accommodation” ruse and sell it to an eager-to-be-sold press.

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In Defense of Religious Freedom

BY EVANGELICALS AND CATHOLICS TOGETHER

At the beginning of our common work on behalf of the gospel, it did not seem likely that religious freedom would be one of our primary concerns. The communist project in Europe had collapsed; the commitment of Christian believers to defeat totalitarianism through the weapons of truth had triumphed; and throughout the world, a new era of religious freedom seemed at hand.

We are now concerned—indeed, deeply concerned—that religious freedom is under renewed assault around the world. While the threats to freedom of faith, religious practice, and religious participation in public affairs in Islamist and communist states are widely recognized, grave threats to religious freedom have also emerged in the developed democracies. In the West, certain religious beliefs are now regarded as bigoted. Pastors are under threat, both cultural and legal, for preaching biblical truth. Christian social-service and charitable agencies are forced to cease cooperation with the state because they will not bend their work to what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

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What Contraception Has Wrought

BY FATHER RAYMOND J. DE SOUZA

In a departure from the usual fare over at Business Insider, a column appeared last week entitled: “Time to admit it: The Catholic Church has always been right on birth control.” Moral theology in the Business Insider?
Contraception was the hot topic in American politics these weeks, ever since the administration launched an egregious attack on religious liberty by mandating religious employers to purchase contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. According to U.S. President Barack Obama, if a Catholic soup kitchen serves a meal to a non-catholic poor person, it ceases to be a Catholic agency, and so must pay for the dishwasher’s morning-after pill.

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The Parable of the Kosher Deli

BY BISHOP WILLIAM LORI

For my testimony today, I would like to tell a story. Let’s call it The Parable of the Kosher Deli.
Once upon a time, a new law is proposed, so that any business that serves food must serve pork.
There is a narrow exception for kosher catering halls attached to synagogues, since they serve mostly members of that synagogue, but kosher delicatessens are still subject to the mandate.

The Orthodox Jewish community — whose members run kosher delis and many other restaurants and grocers besides — expresses its outrage at the new government mandate.

And they are joined by others who have no problem eating pork — not just the many Jews who eat pork, but people of all faiths — because these others recognize the threat to the principle of religious liberty.

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The Church and Suicide

BY FATHER MIKE SCHMITZ

Many people in our day are deeply affected by this question, both directly and indirectly. Many readers know someone who has committed suicide, and all of us are living in a country that continues to consider allowing physician-assisted suicide as part of “health care”. Catholics must take an absolute stand against every form of suicide. Suicide is “contrary to the love of God”. It is truly evil. Now, please understand me here. In saying that suicide is evil, I am not saying that a person is evil. Catholics believe that each human person is intrinsically good. But we can choose to do evil actions. There are some actions which are evil in and of themselves, regardless of motivation or circumstance. Of these, suicide is one.

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Response to “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus”

BY FATHER ROBERT BARRON

Every once in a while, a video unexpectedly becomes an Internet sensation, garnering attention all over the place and spreading like wildfire through the virtual world.

Just this past week, a phenomenon of this type has emerged in the form of a slickly produced video of a 20-something-year-old man in a leather jacket half rapping, half speaking a poem about Jesus and religion — more specifically how the former came to abolish the latter.

Incredibly, this five-minute video (without much musical or visual enhancement) featuring a single person offering a not very sophisticated argument, as of today [Jan. 20] has garnered upward of 12 million views! A student of mine at the seminary first clued me in to the video, but then, through the Word on Fire website and Facebook page, I was flooded with requests to comment on it.

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The Failed 9/11 Memorial

BY R.R. RENO

Rush-hour traffic emerged from the Battery Tunnel and roared up West Street on that gray, overcast afternoon as I made my way through the narrow, temporary passageways that snake around partially constructed buildings and deep foundation pits. My ticket for the National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site gets checked one last time at the temporary entrance on the southwest corner, and then I feel my heart rate climb and my throat constrict.

Designed by Michael Arad, the central foci of the memorial are two deep, square pools that mark the footprints of the two destroyed buildings. A delicate screen of water cascades down the sides, evoking the thin vertical strands that were the main architectural feature of the two towers that once dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan. The pools of water drain into still deeper shafts at their centers. Bronze railings surround the two pools of falling water, and into them are inscribed the names of those who died on September 11, 2001, not just at the World Trade Center, but also at the Pentagon and on the airplane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside.

I am looking for the names of the three men who were my college classmates.

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