In Which a Man Who Helped a Paedophile Discusses a Former Member of the Hitler Youth Criticising a Holocaust Denier. Isn't Christianity Lovely?

I’ve been a bit behind in my ‘Popewatch’ documentation of his every move. He recently offended a number of people when he appointed an ‘ultra-conservative’ bishop (as if there were some other kind). Apparently, this guy ‘wrote in a parish newsletter that Hurricane Katrina was an act of “divine retribution” for the sins of a sexually permissive society’, ‘warned children against reading JK Rowling’s novels about the boy wizard Harry Potter, describing them as spreading satanism’ and ‘said it was no coincidence that the Tsunami disaster had occurred at Christmas, inferring that it was punishment for “rich western tourists” who had “fled to poor Thailand”’. All of the above is pretty shitty, but probably for the most part fairly harmless and to be expected of some part of any large religious group. What is despicable in this story is that the Pope made the man a bishop. The Pope has the power to make Catholicism a respectable, progressive religion or to make it an dangerous and oppressive cult, and he appears to have picked ‘cult’.

Before that, he… er…

Okay, I don’t know what the word for the opposite of ‘excommunication’ is. I shall use ‘incommunication’.

Anyway, Pope Ratzinger has incommunicated a former cleric thrown out of the church for being a Holocaust denier. He can’t be a priest again unless he changes his mind, apparently, but he’s still back in the church. The Pope’s explanation is that he didn’t know about his views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication. Smart readers will have spotted that that story makes no sense, and the reason it makes no sense is that I made a mistake. Here, I blithely assumed that a Holocaust denier thrown out of a religious order with a professed moral authority might have been thrown out because he was a Holocaust denier, but it turns out that he was thrown out on a technicality. More bizarrely still, he has in the last hour built a bizarre simulacrum of utter reasonableness and issued this statement:

Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence. It is about historical evidence, not about emotions, and if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

For a Holocaust denier to say something like that is simultaneously massively encouraging and terrifying, but given that his job is to promote belief in Jesus, a man whose historical existence is predicate on a handful of accounts of his life written decades after the event and who claims to be the son of a virgin and an invisible wizard who lives in the sky, it’s just too surreal to try to analyse further.

I had no idea this quote existed when I started this post. Every time you look into the inner machinations of any church nonsense like this appears. The whole system is so entirely unhinged that any place you choose to dig will lead to something like that pretty soon.

I mention it principally because I was surprised to read in the news that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, a cleric I despise more than most, not least because he is complicit in the sexual abuse of children, had done something good for a change by publicly criticising the Pope for this, in a letter to the Chief Rabbi…

Dear Chief Rabbi, I am writing to express my dismay at the effect of the Vatican decree releasing from excommunication bishops consecrated illicitly. Specifically I naturally deplore the comments made by the Englishman, Rev Williamson, in his denial of the full horror of the Holocaust. His statement and views have absolutely no place in the Catholic Church and its teaching. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of this on 28 January 2009 was made very clear when he expressed ‘full and unquestionable solidarity with our brother and sister recipients of the First Covenant ’¦ May the Shoah be for all a warning against forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because violence against a single human being is violence against all’. Perhaps I should add that the lifting of excommunication is only a first step towards reconciliation of the bishops concerned. None of them is yet able to exercise any office either as priest or bishop in communion with the Catholic Church. I put this in writing to assure you of our continued understanding and friendship. In these difficult times we are called to bear witness to peace and goodwill. I like to think this is especially true of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish Community here in Britain. With kindest wishes, Yours sincerely, Cormac Card. Murphy-O’Connor Archbishop of Westminster

…but then I read the letter and it turns out he didn’t actually say anything at all.

I can’t work out why that’s considered news. He doesn’t criticise the Pope at all (which is fair enough as he didn’t do anything wrong in this case), despite what the Telegraph may think. He basically says “I think it’s a shame that undoing a piece of beaurcracy happened to increase the number of Holocaust deniers in the church, but it’s not that big a deal. We’re still cool, right?”. Which is fair enough, but why report it?