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.
As I said, darkness cannot comprehend light.
If you interpret "alter Christus" as "another Christ" you are demonstrating that whatever hypothetical doctorate you have certainly isn't in Latin, English, or theology. Flee from the stupidity.
When you take off the Calvinist dark glasses, you may be welcomed into Christianity. Until then, there is no hope:
Titus 2: 11 2 For the grace of God has appeared, saving all 12 and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age, 13 as we await the blessed hope, the appearance 3 of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good.
We Christians wait in hope. We are not heretics who claim our own salvation.
ROTFLOL.
I'm just following what Roman Catholics on this forum have told us hundreds of times and post in Roman Catholic caucus threads. Perhaps you don't read them. Here's one that clearly tells us that the papacy teaches "alter Christus" means "another Christ."
"...Simply stated, the Catholic priest is another Christ. Through his ordination he has been granted the amazing gift of being a channel of divine grace for the eternal salvation of those he come into contact with — both in his official ministry and in his personal life..."
I'm more than happy to "flee from this stupidity" but Roman Catholics keep posting it and elevating it to the status of Biblical truth when, in fact, it is a lie from the pit of hell and condemns all those who believe it.
Like Alinsky, Mikhail Gorbachev followed Gramsci, not Lenin. In fact, Gramsci aroused Stalins’s wrath by suggesting that Lenin’s revolutionary plan wouldn’t work in the West. Instead the primary assault would be on Biblical absolutes and Christian values, which must be crushed as a social force before the new face of Communism could rise and flourish.
http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communism/alinsky.htm
There is another Latin phrase you need to become familiar with; nihil obstat. You cannot represent anything as the position of the Catholic Church without it. It would be exactly like you claiming the existence of glatt kosher pork rinds because someone posted it on the internet.
No, I got that opinion from a variety of posts Roman Catholic apologists write which concern “penis envy...”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2410209/posts?page=785#785
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2410209/posts?page=805#805
lol. Seems to be catching.
AMEN!
How simple is that to understand?
Apparently not so simple when a dying edifice of superstition wrongly insists Mary, assorted dead people and men who consider themselves to be "another Christ" usurp the office and function of the Holy Spirit.
lol.
Do you realize how foolish you, a non-Catholic with absolutely no Catholic education, appear when trying to argue the meaning of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its dogma with life long, university educated Catholics base upon what you got off the internet?
Unlike your cult we don't all get together to vote on what things mean nor do we take the go it alone approach that you seem to be so fond of. Just because a single priest or even a majority of Catholics believe something to be the position of the Church doesn't make it so. That is why I advised you to become familiar with nilil obstat.
lol. Thank God for eyes to see.
lol. That emperor’s got no clothes on.
AHHH!!! THE EYES!!!
And you could be the first female Reichbishop.
“Men are called to become LIKE Christ.
Men are not called to become Christ.”
You seem to have over-stated your position here.
“All of you are Christ’s body, and each one is a part of it.” 1 Cor 12:27
RCCs misunderstand Scripture at their peril. Paul likewise tells us...
"So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another." -- Romans 12:5
By your false line of thinking, Paul here is telling us you are me and I am you.
And that's not what he's saying at all.
Men are the lively stones who make up the church; Christ is the cornerstone of the church. Men are called to become Christ-like; we do not become Christ. The arrogance of the RCC knows no bounds.
To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" -- Colossians 1:26-27"Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints:
Men are mortal, physical, temporal. Christ is divine, spiritual and eternal.
But this confusing the spiritual with the physical has always been Rome's most profound error as it seeks to make men into mini-gods who wrongly presume they can keep the law perfectly.
Only Christ can keep the law perfectly and He graciously does this for us because we can't.
"Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you" -- 2 Corinthians 13:5
See the difference? Jesus Christ indwells believers. Their good works are His works. Their faith is His faith. Their lives are His life.
Therefore we are saved by the righteousness and obedience of Jesus Christ, mercifully and freely imputed to us as if it were our own.
But it's not. It is His and His alone. Christ does it all.
"Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it." -- 1 Thessalonians 5:24
No, I'm Presbyterian and the Presbyterian Church does not have bishops. We have elders and presbyters elected by and from the congregation, a system upon which the U.S. government was specifically modeled.
(And my Presbyterian denomination does not ordain women as pastors, so spare me the attempted insult.)
But thanks for thinking of me.
Of course, if we did have bishops we'd abide by the word of God when he described a bishop...
"A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach" -- 1 Timothy 3:2
Wake up, Rome. You're going the wrong way.
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