Posted on 04/17/2010 5:46:07 AM PDT by markomalley
Perhaps the most remarkable defense of Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church vis-à-vis the sexual abuse crisis to appear in recent weeks ironically never mentions the current pope, and it comes not from a senior Vatican official but a lay Italian sociologist of religion. In a nutshell, the suggestion – never made explicit, but clear nonetheless – is that today’s drumbeat of criticism of the church over “pedophile priests” amounts to a replay of a Nazi smear campaign.
Massimo Introvigne, who directs the international Center for Studies on New Religions, published an essay in the April 16 edition of L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops, about a Nazi campaign in 1937 led by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to discredit the Catholic Church following Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. Introvigne argues that Goebbels created what sociologists would later call a “moral panic,” based on real facts, but facts which are distorted and amplified.
In the end, Introvigne says, the plan backfired – Goebbels’ attempt to smear the church generated more outrage than actual cases of sexual abuse in 1930s-era German Catholicism, which were reported in the German media and tried in German courts.
The following is an NCR translation of Introvigne’s essay, the Italian original of which may be found here: http://www.avvenire.it
Goebbels and the pedophile priests operation
In 1937 the Nazi propaganda minister organized a campaign to discredit the Catholic Church in response to the encyclical ‘Mit brennender Sorge.’ The head of the German military’s counter-espionage unit, Wilhelm Canaris, passed the documents to Pius XII.
By MASSIMO INTROVIGNE
“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”
An editorial from a great secular newspaper in 2010? No: It’s a speech of May 28, 1937, by Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. This speech, which had a large international echo, was the apex of a campaign launched by the Nazi regime to discredit the Catholic Church by involving it in a scandal of pedophile priests.
Two hundred and seventy-six religious and forty-nine diocesan priests were arrested in 1937. The arrests took place in all the German dioceses, in order to keep the scandals on the front pages of the newspapers.
On March 10, 1937, with the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) condemned the Nazi ideology. At the end of the same month, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda headed by Goebbels launched a campaign against the sexual abuses of priests. The design and administration of this campaign are known to historians thanks to documents which tell a story worthy of the best spy novels.
In 1937, the head of the counter-espionage service of the German military was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887-1945). He became gradually anti-Nazi, and at the time was maturing the convictions which led him to organize the failed assassination attempt against Hitler in 1944, following which he was hanged in 1945. Canaris disapproved of Goebbels’ maneuver against the Church, and instructed a Catholic lawyer named Josef Müller (1878-1979) to carry to Rome a series of highly secret documents on the subject.
In different phases, Müller – before he was arrested and sent to the Dachau extermination camp, where he survived, and later became the post-war Minister of Justice in Bavaria – carried the secret documents to Pius XII (1876-1958), who asked the Society of Jesus to study them.
With the approval of the Secretary of State, the study of the Nazi plot against the Church was entrusted to the German Jesuit Walter Mariaux (1894-1963), who had inspired an anti-Nazi organization in Germany called “Pauluskreis.” He was later prudently sent as a missionary in Brazil and in Argentina. There, as leader of the Marian Congregation, he exercised his influence over an entire generation of lay Catholics, among whom was the noted Brazilian Catholic thinker Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (1908-1995), who attended his group in São Paulo. In 1940, in London in English and in Argentina in Spanish, Mariaux published two volumes on anti-Catholic persecution by the Third Reich under the pseudonym “Testis Fidelis.” They contained over seven hundred pages of documents with comments, which aroused great emotion in the entire world.
The expression “moral panic” was only coined by sociologists in the 1970s to identify a social alarm created as a kind of art, accomplished by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers through statistical folklore, as well as “discovering” and presenting as “new” events which in reality are already known and which date to the past. There are real events at the base of the panic, but their number is systematically distorted.
Even without the benefit of modern sociology, Goebbels responded to the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 with a textbook case of the creation of a moral panic.
As always in moral panics, the facts are not totally invented. Prior to the encyclical there were some cases in Germany of abuse of minors. Mariaux himself considered a religious in the school of Bad Reichenall guilty, as well as a lay teacher, a gardener and a janitor, who were condemned in 1936, although he believed that the sanction imposed by the Ministry of Public Instruction in Bavaria – revoking the authorization to run scholastic institutes of four religious orders – to be entirely disproportionate, and he linked it to the desire of the regime to undercut Catholic schools. Also in the case of the Franciscans of Waldbreitbach, in Rhineland, Mariaux was open to the hypothesis that the accused were guilty, although later historians have not excluded the possibility that they were framed by the Nazis.
The cases, which were few, but real, produced a very strong reaction from the episcopate. On June 2, 1936, the Bishop of Münster – Blessed Clemens August von Galen (1878-1946), who was the soul of Catholic resistance to Nazism, and who was beatified in 2005 by Benedict XVI – had a declaration read at all the Sunday Masses in which he expressed “pain and sadness” for these “abominable crimes” that “cover our Holy Church with ignominy.” On August 20, 1936, after the events at Waldbreitbach, the German episcopate published a joint pastoral letter in which they “several condemned” those responsible and underlined the cooperation of the Church with the tribunals of the state.
By the end of 1936, the severe measures taken by the German bishops in reaction to these very few cases, some of which were doubtful, seemed to have resolved the real problems. Submissively, the bishops also pointed out that among teachers in the state schools and in the very youth organization of the regime, the Hitler Youth, the cases of condemnations for sexual abuses were much more numerous than among the Catholic clergy.
It was the anti-Nazi encyclical of Pius XI that led to the great campaign of 1937. Mariaux proved it publishing highly detailed instructions sent by Goebbels to the Gestapo, the political police of the Third Reich, and above all to journalists, just a few days after the publication of Mit brennender Sorge, inviting them to “reopen” the cases from 1936 and also older cases, constantly recalling them to public opinion. Goebbels also ordered the Gestapo to find witnesses willing to accuse a certain number of priests, threatening them with immediate arrest if they didn’t collaborate, even if they were children.
The proverbial phrase “there’s a judge in Berlin,” which in German tradition indicates trust in the independence of the court system from the political power of the moment, applied – within certain limits – even in the Third Reich. Of the 325 priests and religious arrested after the encyclical, only 21 were condemned, and it’s all but certain that among them some were falsely accused. Virtually all of them ended up in extermination camps, where many died.
The effort to discredit the Catholic Church on an international scale through accusations of immorality and pedophilia among priests, however, did not succeed.
Thanks to the courage of Canaris and his friends, and to the persistence of the Jesuit detective Mariaux, the truth was already out during the war. The perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt of some religious. The father of all moral panics in the area of pedophile priests blew up in the hands of the Nazi propagandists who had tried to organize it.
ROTFLOL.
Thank you, dear Jesus, God and only Savior, for preventing me from the blasphemous idolatry practiced by the RCC of believing my pastor to be "another Christ."
akin to Penis Envy
Ah, finally something the Vatican knows well.
Why does everything the papacy thinks about have to do with penises?
This unhealthy preoccupation with male sexuality is unseemly. Just look at the trouble Ratzinger is in for protecting his pederast priests from prosecution.
LOL. You people can be so amusing at times. There may be some protestants who are envious of the rich pagan traditions of the Papists but I doubt many Christians are. Our Father is God. Your holy father was in the Hitler Youth.
Did you get that from the bong and Ouija Board or did a Machen apparition tell you that? For one who attempts to play self appointed FR Hall Monitor your attempts at mind reading are woefully hypocritical.
lol. AMEN!
No, I got it straight from your post 38.
What greater testimony to the redemptive powers of the Catholic that a young man can, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, overcome that beginning and become a direct participant in the Apostolic succession. Dare we say it was a Road to Damascus like event?
Thank you, dear Jesus, God and only Saviour, for the Scripture opposing the blasphemous doctrines of the children of the Reformation which cause people to believe that Reformed women should instruct men. Women of the Reformation are easily deceived and often transgress. Let us pray that they assume only the role that God meant for them, according to Paul, and stay out of things that they were not intended to do, for Reformed women are extremely liable to error, as Paul says. And we have a complete posting history which justifies his instruction.
I like what Calvin said on this topic...
“Two years ago, John Knox in a private conversation, asked my opinion respecting female government. I frankly answered that because it was a deviation from the primitive and established order of nature, it ought to be held as a judgment on man for his dereliction of his rights just like slavery — that nevertheless certain women had sometimes been so gifted that the singular blessing of God was conspicuous in them, and made it manifest that they had been raised up by the providence of God, either because he willed by such examples to condemn the supineness of men, or thus show more distinctly his own glory. I here instanced Huldah and Deborah.” (John Calvin in a letter to William Cecil, 1559)
Note that nowhere in Scripture are pastors forbidden to marry.
And nowhere in Scripture are pastors called to be "another Christ."
And nowhere in Scripture are pastors given license to sexually abuse young boys and to have their putrid, God-denying crime secretly cover up by church authorities.
Yet the papacy contradicts all three.
Flee from idolatry, Mark. It will only end badly.
From the Hitler Youth to exalting himself as the "holy father" is a step in the wrong direction.
The OPC is as irrelevant as Ralph Nader. I said nothing about ordaining women. I quoted Paul in terms of Reformed women instructing men.
Note that nowhere in Scripture are pastors forbidden to marry.
You have redacted Paul, too?
And nowhere in Scripture are pastors called to be "another Christ."
I don't know about your pastors, but Paul says to imitate him, as he imitates Christ. Or is that redacted too?
And nowhere in Scripture are pastors given license to sexually abuse young boys and to have their putrid, God-denying crime secretly cover up by church authorities.
Nope. Nowhere.
Flee from idolatry, Mark. It will only end badly.
Dante says that heretics will wind up in the City of Dis in red hot sepulchers. Do you plan on wearing asbestos underwear when you come up for your Judgement?
Still unable to comprehend altus Cristus meaning "acting in the place of Christ" instead of "another Christ"?
lol. I plan on thanking God for giving me, a poor sinner, the covering of His Son's perfect righteousness and adherence to the Law of God.
No hope without it.
And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." -- 2 Corinthians 5:17-21"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
Rome arrogantly believes its priestcraft to be an "alter Christus" -- another Christ.
Just typing the words produces a shudder. Repent from such clear idolatry. Sooner rather than later.
Don't you just hate it when Paul gets all Papist and starts making like he represents Christ or something?
Paul says God appeals through him. (You posted the verse yourself!) Paul says, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ". Paul says, "Now not I live, but Christ lives in me".
If we're idolatrous, so is that, because that's exactly what we're talking about.
lol. I plan on thanking God for giving me, a poor sinner, the covering of His Son's perfect righteousness and adherence to the Law of God.
How do you know that He has given you, a particular Reformed, salvation?
"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.
Yes, but if you are not in Christ, as many of your postings indicate, then nothing is new and you are dead in your tracks.
I see no evidence of your claimed salvation. Your confession is no different from any in the Branch Davidians or the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Seventh Day Adventists or...
Men are not called to become Christ.
Repent.
Because I believe in Jesus Christ as Lord, God, King and Savior.
Read your Bible, Mark. You, too, can have the assurance Christ promises His flock.
"Be not afraid; only believe." -- Mark 5:36
I see no evidence of your claimed salvation. Your confession is no different from any in the Branch Davidians or the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Seventh Day Adventists or...
It certainly doesn't surprise me that you do not recognize faith in Christ. Darkness cannot comprehend light.
But your error is truly the false heart of Rome which fantasizes men can become their own gods by their own good works.
Because I believe in Jesus Christ as Lord, God, King and Savior.
Your posts do not indicate that. Your expressed concept of Jesus is foreign to Christianity.
"Be not afraid; only believe." -- Mark 5:36
Do we need another lesson? I have showed you that this does not mean what you claim.
I see no evidence of your claimed salvation. Your confession is no different from any in the Branch Davidians or the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Seventh Day Adventists or...
It certainly doesn't surprise me that you do not recognize faith in Christ. Darkness cannot comprehend light.
Exactly what your phone booth cult needs to understand.
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