{"id":253,"date":"2009-02-04T15:15:22","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T15:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/bill-donohue-blames-german-gui.html"},"modified":"2009-02-04T15:15:22","modified_gmt":"2009-02-04T15:15:22","slug":"bill-donohue-blames-german-gui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/bill-donohue-blames-german-gui.html","title":{"rendered":"Bill Donohue blames “German guilt” for attacks on Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s the typically pugnacious take of the head of the Catholic League in its latest release:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

“No one has been worse than the Germans. Reeking with guilt over the Holocaust, we now have the spectacle of German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the pope he needs to clarify his views on the Holocaust. Talk about hubris. This is a man who was forcibly conscripted at a young age into a Nazi group and saw his family suffer economically because he refused to attend the Hitler Youth meetings. This is a man who as Cardinal Ratzinger unequivocally condemned the Holocaust at a Jerusalem conference in 1994 and wrote about a book about it, Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World. And he needs to ‘clarify’ his views to Merkel?
\n“Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust is obscene, but this doesn’t excuse the grand-standing of the Regensburg D.A. who is investigating whether the bishop broke their illiberal laws when he made his comments in Sweden. Then there is the German press which has exploited this issue beyond belief: one major story says the pope has previously offended ‘Muslims, women, native Indians, Poles, gays and scientists.’ Translated this means that the pope speaks the truth and some don’t like it. Perhaps most embarrassing is the left-wing Catholic theologian Hermann Haering who implored the pope to quit. What a disgrace this man is to Catholics everywhere.
\n“Today, the Vatican announced that Williamson must ‘unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah’ if he is to be reinstated (he is still not in full communion with the Church, and may never be). The pope, the Vatican statement said, was unaware of this bishop’s views when he lifted his excommunication.
\n“There will be those who won’t believe the pope didn’t know about Williamson. Yet these same people no doubt believe that President Obama didn’t know about the thieves he’s been appointing. Moreover, there are approximately 3,500 bishops spread throughout the world. The pope is smart, but he’s not a seer.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s the typically pugnacious take of the head of the Catholic League in its latest release: “No one has been worse than the Germans. Reeking with guilt over the Holocaust, we now have the spectacle of German Chancellor Angela Merkel telling the pope he needs to clarify his views on the Holocaust. Talk about hubris.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nBill Donohue blames "German guilt" for attacks on Pope - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/bill-donohue-blames-german-gui.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bill Donohue blames "German guilt" for attacks on Pope - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"That’s the typically pugnacious take of the head of the Catholic League in its latest release: “No one has been worse than the Germans. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}