I’ve been mentioning the Pope quite a bit lately because he’s been so nasty lately. I’m really not anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, or anti-religion — my take is that you can believe whatever you want, but the line stops at forcing me to believe it, too. Fair enough, right? But the Pope has just gone off the deep end with his promotion of Holocaust deniers and calling gays an impediment to world peace.
I’m not the only one who feels that the Pope has gone too far. Some of his own bishops are protesting:
“If the pope wants to do some good for the Church, he should leave his job,” eminent liberal Catholic theologian Hermann Haering told the German daily Tageszeitung.
. . . “A pardon that tastes of poison,” wrote Franco Garelli, an expert in religious history, in Italy’s daily La Stampa Monday.
. . . “There is obviously a loss of confidence” in the pope and “rehabilitating a denier is always a bad idea,” the bishop of Hamburg, Werner Thissen, told the daily Hamburger Abendblatt on Monday.
The bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, Gebhard Furst, meanwhile spoke of his “uncertainty, incomprehension and deception” in the national Bild.
. . . Vienna’s cardinal and archbishop, Christoph Schoenborn, on Sunday lashed out at the decision to bring Williamson back into the fold, saying that “he who denies the Holocaust cannot be rehabilitated within the Church.”
Belgian daily La Libre Belgique slammed the Vatican’s “blindness” and “deafness.”
4. February 2009 at 5:21 am
Get your facts straight, buddy. The Pope has not “promoted” a bunch of Holocaust-deniers at all. Gee whizz….. “Promote”! The Roman Catholic Church is not the corporate world.
The Pope has only lifted the excommunication of four bishops in schism with the Church. THE ARE STILL UNDER SUSPENSION. Lifting the excommunication menas that they can now start talking. If those guys persist in their right wing rebellion they will stay right where they are:out of communion with a Church where things like anti-semitism is called a sin. The MSM made a furore of something they don’t seem to understand at all. “Promote”…..
Even some Catholics don’t seem to grasp what the lifting of an excommunication means – or does NOT mean.
4. February 2009 at 6:34 pm
Marlene,
1) I used the word “promotion” in the marketing sense, not the corporate sense, but I understand the confusion. (Although the Catholic church can and does give many corporations a run for their money.)
2) Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said, ” . . . Williamson was invited back into the Catholic Church by none other than the pope, he brings with him an aura of legitimacy. And that legitimacy stains the pope.”
3) So, the issue isn’t so much what kind of excommunication is given or rescinded – the real issue is that the pope appeared to legitimize (tacitly, implicitly, or mistakenly) Williamson’s anti-Semitic beliefs. The Pope must have ultimately come to the same conclusion because just today he called for Williamson to recant before the excommunication will be lifted.