Posted on 02/06/2009 7:16:25 PM PST by SeekAndFind
WASHINGTON -- I recall sitting at a Kigali restaurant with a Tutsi woman who described the death of her younger sister, a university student, during the Rwandan genocide. The girl had been given up for murder by one of her own teachers, who was a nun. The survivor across from me, previously a Catholic, had never attended church again. In the sacrifice of the Mass, she could only see the sacrifice of her sister.
Many items on the list of horribles laid at the door of religion are libels or exaggerations. But this charge -- the indifference or complicity of many Christians during the great genocides of modern history -- is one of the genuine scandals.
In Hitler's Germany, Christians responded to mass murder with general acquiescence and only isolated defiance. Protestants earned the most shame. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church elections of 1932, so-called "German Christians" won two-thirds of the vote -- and later praised the fight "against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race." Catholic leaders were less overt in their anti-Semitism, but hardly heroic in their resistance -- usually accommodating rather than confronting the Nazi regime. "Charity is well and good," said one Vatican official at the time, "but the greatest charity is not to make problems for the church."
During the Rwandan genocide, writes Timothy Longman, "Numerous priests, pastors, nuns, brothers, catechists and Catholic and Protestant lay leaders supported, participated in, or helped to organize the killings." Two Benedictine nuns collaborated with Hutu militias in the murder of 7,000 people just outside their convent grounds. A priest participated in the burning and bulldozing of a church with 2,000 men, women and children inside.
It is very difficult to understand how those who worship a man on a cross could help to drive the bloody nails themselves. But the record is clear: When religion is infected by racism, ideology or extreme nationalism, it can become a carrier of hatred instead of conscience. And when churches are concerned mainly for their institutional self-preservation, they often end up neck-deep in compromise or paralyzed by cowardice.
This is the historical context for the Catholic Church's recent lifting of the excommunication against Richard Williamson, a bishop of the ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius X. Williamson claimed last month, "I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. ... I believe there were no gas chambers."
There is no reason to believe that Pope Benedict XVI has backtracked on the admirable Catholic engagement of the Jewish community under John Paul II. Benedict was obviously distressed and surprised by the Williamson controversy, using his audience last week to affirm his "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews. His attempted reconciliation with dissidents such as Williamson was intended to be a statement about church unity, not about Holocaust history.
But it was a large, insensitive error. The Vatican admitted that Williamson's Holocaust denial was "unknown to the Holy Father at the time he revoked the excommunication." Not only the Obama administration struggles with an incompetent vetting process.
The stakes of such failure, however, are higher for the Vatican. Christianity -- still accused by the anger of genocide survivors and haunted by the unquiet ghosts of Auschwitz and Kigali -- cannot tolerate leaders who deny the Holocaust without adding to its greatest scandal and further discrediting its deepest ideals.
Benedict has ended up at the right place, demanding that Williamson recant his statements. But serious damage has been done because the wounds are so recent, and the historical offense so massive.
While Christian resistance to the Holocaust was rare, there were exceptions. Bernhard Lichtenberg, the provost of St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, was convicted of violating the Sedition Law after two parishioners informed on him to the Nazis. The judge summed up his crime as follows: "On 29 August 1941, the defendant held evensong ... before a large congregation. He closed the service with a prayer in which he said, among other things: 'Let us now pray for the Jews and for the wretched prisoners in the concentration camps.' ... He states that he has included the Jews in his prayers ever since the synagogues were first set on fire and Jewish businesses closed."
Lichtenberg served two years in prison and died on the way to Dachau. A church dedicated to his ideals cannot be the church of Bishop Williamson.
The Catholic Church is just a bigger, more visible target.
Christians need to ALWAYS stand up against the MEN who do the will of SATAN.
In this country, we can at least vote pro-life.
God help up if we end up on the list of those who do not.
And for every “nun” that helped in the murder of Tutsis I'll give you dozens of examples of those that hide or rescued Tutsis...
Bernhard Lichtenberg, the provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin,....
‘Let us now pray for the Jews and for the wretched prisoners in the concentration camps.’ ....
Lichtenberg served two years in prison and died on the way to Dachau. A church dedicated to his ideals cannot be the church of Bishop Williamson
_________________________________________
What a righteous man of God...
What guts...What an example...
Does the author even know that alone 10,000 Polish priests were killed in concentration camps...?
Frankly, I have my doubts about this Rwandan stories. It’s all hearsay, and I haven’t seen any really convincing proofs of it.
Did this girl see her sister betrayed by a nun? Or was she told that that was what happened, perhaps by someone with an ax to grind? I suspect the latter.
Certainly all those tales about Pope Pius X as “Hitler’s Pope” are outright lies. A lot of people will stop at nothing to defame the Church. Which, I am afraid, seems to be the case with Michael Gerson.
I don't mean to minimize, not at all. We not only live in occupied territory, we ARE occupied territory. The Spirit has not yet rooted out all the enemy's forces. And so we sin, and when we sin we do real harm to the spreading of the Gospel.
It is grievous. All we can do is weep.
Courage in Rwanda was rare. And usually didn’t end well.
As there are many who will never accept criticism of their particular faith tradition...
Well, I don’t know the story. But I suspect that a bunch of thugs came to the nunnery and similar places, surrounded it, and simply took everyone away. In other words, not much the nuns could do. Too late to hide anyone.
That’s just speculation, but it’s awfully easy for someone sitting in a comfortable civilized armchair to criticize people who are suddenly confronted with this sort of barbarity.
I guess the nun could have volunteered to die with the girls, but that wouldn’t have done them much good.
And of course it’s always possible that there were a few bad apples who really did betray their charges, who otherwise would have escaped. But I doubt it was common.
The problem with all these "Christians" is that they weren't being Christian at all in aiding in these killings. They were being humanists, the anti-thesis of Christianity.
The Old Testament is filled (and I mean filled) with the struggle of believers to put God first consistently. All failed to some degree. We struggle in the same way today. These priests, etc., that failed to sacrificially love their neighbors (even at the cost of their lives) were not failures because they were Christians; they were failures precisely because they failed to live up to their Christianity. They failed to put God and His law first in their lives, and let fear or hate or what have you, rule them instead.
When middle class people — including pregnant women! — take up machetes against other middle class people because some radio DJ told them to, the idea that religion or lack thereof is the cause is a joke. There was something wrong with Rwandan people, and it’s shocking but not surprising that Catholic and Anglican clergymen were as involved as other types of Rwandans. I’m sick of hearing about how other people and groups — the US, the UN, the various churches — were responsible for the free, morally depraved choices thousands of Rwandans made.
ping
The problem with these Rwandans was not that were Catholic, but that they were Rwandan. You can convert a third world savage with an IQ of 85 to any religion, and he will still be a third world savage with an IQ of 85.
Actually, according to most studies, sub-Saharan African IQ averages are about 70. At least half the population is, by Western and Asian standards, functonally retarded.
That’s not nice to say but it is true. Remember that the overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly African-American followers of Jim Jones thought they were ‘Christian’ too.
I guess stupid is as stupid does...
BTW, it’s not much different in this country with some.
It is sad that a person so indoctrinated by the left would be writing at Townhall.com
I recommend Romeo Dallaire’s book “Shake Hands with the Devil”.
Most of us here have little respect for the UN to begin with, but even so I was shocked at the UN’s utter fecklessness in the face of the massacre. Dallaire believes in the UN and its mission, and seeing the UN’s uselessness through his naive eyes just makes it even more shocking.
There is plenty of shame to go around. The French provide training and weapons including machetes to the Hutu milia. After the genocide burned itself out the French troops intervened to cover the hutu retreat.
Belgian troops at one point abandoned 2000 refugees under their protection to the mob. The refugees were dead within minutes of the Belgian withdrawal.
Mobs went into churches, orphanages, schools, and killed everyone there. Hutu clergymen in several famous cases joined the mobs but other foreign clergy stayed through the madness and did what they could. Tutsi clergy were killed instantly just like every other tutsi.
In the end it wasn’t the UN that did anthing at all to solve the problem, it was the Tutsi guerrilla army that drove the Hutus out of the country... despite French intervention to cover their retreat. Shameful. There were no troops to spare to help Dallaire stop the killing, but there were troops available to save the killers from retribution. In the end it was an armed citizenry that ended the hutu slaughter. The UN, the foreign troops did little other than be witnesses to it. And, in the case of the French, actively help the baddies.
Yes, that was the impression I had, especially the role of the French. And you don’t mention Bill Clinton, but he certainly didn’t help matters, although he hypocritically rewrote history afterward when he visited to apologize for American slavery.
There were millions of Christians who were killed alongside the Jews, it's just that we don't hear about the Gentiile victims as much, because there weren't specifically targeted because of their race (with the exception of the Gypsies), or their religion.
Seeing how the author manipulates this info, I'm not inclined to believe him in his efforts to blame the Catholic Church for anything that happened in Rwanda.
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