{"id":1165,"date":"2007-07-25T10:27:47","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T10:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/07\/varia-4.html"},"modified":"2007-07-25T10:27:47","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T10:27:47","slug":"varia-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/07\/varia-4.html","title":{"rendered":"Varia"},"content":{"rendered":"

At First Things, William Doino, Jr. takes on the treatment of Pius XII in Saul Friedlander’s <\/a>widely-praised history Nazi Germany and the Jews.<\/em><\/p>\n

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These are not the only concerns. Relying on the farfetched claims of Susan Zuccotti<\/span><\/a>, Friedlander writes: \u201cPersonally he [Pius XII] was not involved in any of the rescue operations throughout Italy. No trace of any written directive has ever surfaced; moreover, from among the main religious personalities involved in assistance to the victims, in Rome or elsewhere, no indication of an oral directive from the Holy See to help the fleeing Jews has ever been mentioned. The rescue activities were mostly spontaneous.\u201d <\/p>\n

These statements are demonstrably untrue, and it is shocking that Saul Friedlander would so easily accept them. Even Fr. John Morley, a critic of the wartime Church whom Friedlander quotes selectively, affirms: \u201cOfficial sanction and assistance were given to the lodging of thousands of Jews in the religious institutions of Rome, and all canonical restrictions were suspended. These efforts, no doubt, saved thousands of Jews.\u201d Grazia Loparco, professor of church history at the faculty of Educational Sciences Auxilium in Rome, who has extensively researched the matter, concurs: \u201cFrom the documentation and testimonies<\/span><\/a> emerges evidence of the full support and instruction of Pius XII.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Catholic sources. Reporting from Vatican City, just after the liberation of Rome, the Palestine Post<\/em> revealed: \u201cSeveral thousand refugees, largely Jews, during the weekend left the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo\u2014the Pope\u2019s summer residence near Marino\u2014after enjoying safety there during the recent terror. Besides Jews, persons of all political creeds who had been endangered were given sanctuary at the Palace. Before leaving the refugees conveyed their gratitude to the Pope through his majordomo\u201d (\u201cSanctuary in the Vatican,\u201d Palestine Post<\/em>, June 22, 1944, p. 3). No one but Pius XII had the authority to open Castel Gandolfo; those refugees were saved because of his direct intervention.<\/p>\n

Yet Friedlander believes the pope did not save a single Jew: Anything good that happened, he argues, really happened without Pius XII\u2019s significant involvement\u2014even if the good being achieved was by his own handpicked secretary of state and nuncios, acting and speaking in his name. Had Friedlander wanted to criticize a prominent Italian leader legitimately, he might have chosen the \u201cCatholic\u201d fascist Roberto Farinacci, who wrote furious attacks against Pius during the War, culminating with this outburst: \u201cFor a few years, Pope Pius XII has fully espoused the Jewish cause. . . . We never imagined that our Pastor, the Vicar of Christ, the Head of our Church, could one day be regarded as the most influential defender of the interests of the Jewish people\u201d (Regime Fascista<\/em>, January 17, 1945).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Tom Piatak on Hitchens’ Hubris:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The effectiveness of Hitchens\u2019 book is also undermined by the large number of errors it contains, many so glaring that they will be picked up by even a casual reader with some knowledge of history and theology.  The Gnostic gospels are not of the \u201csame period and provenance\u201d as the canonical Gospels, but were written several decades later; the \u201csynoptic\u201d Gospels are not synonymous with the \u201ccanonical\u201d Gospels; \u201cQ\u201d is an assumed source for the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, but not Mark and John; the process of deciding which books to include in the New Testament was not one in which \u201cmany a life was horribly lost;\u201d \u201cthe Vulgate\u201d was what the Reformers were trying to get away from, not what they were attempting to translate the Bible into; Luther declared \u201cHere I stand, I can do no other\u201d at Worms, not Wittenberg; John Adams was not a slaveholder, nor was T. S. Eliot a Catholic; the amount of wood from relics of the True Cross would not be sufficient if gathered together to recreate the Cross, much less create a \u201cthousand \u2013 foot cross;\u201d Christians have never practiced animal sacrifice, nor did the Arian heresy teach that the Father and the Son were \u201ctwo incarnations of the same person;\u201d the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were promulgated in 1854 and 1950, not 1852 and 1951; the Lateran Treaty was signed seven years after Mussolini marched on Rome, not after he \u201chad barely seized power;\u201d Maryland never prohibited Protestants from holding office, and condoms are not a \u201cnecessary\u201d condition for preventing the transmission of AIDS, or else celibates would all be infected.  Given all these errors (and many more), there is no reason to accept anything Hitchens writes on his own authority, and he offers no authority other than his own for most of what he writes. <\/p>\n

Hitchens\u2019 errors extend even to fields in which he claims to be an expert.  This self-professed admirer of Evelyn Waugh describes Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited<\/em> as being \u201cheir to an old Catholic nobility.\u201d In fact, Sebastian was the younger son, with little prospect of inheritance, and the Flytes became Catholic only when Lord Marchmain converted to marry his wife.  As luck would have it, the very paragraph following the one sentence Hitchens quotes from Brideshead begins: \u201cSebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended.  Brideshead was not an old established centre of Catholicism.\u201d All the humor in Hitchens\u2019 book is similarly unintentional, such as reading about Christianity\u2019s supposed obsession with sex in a book with page after page discoursing on such topics as the evil of virginity, the horror of circumcision, and \u201cthe hideous consequences of the masturbation taboo.\u201d <\/p>\n

But what of Hitchens\u2019 major arguments?  Is there a persuasive core buried beneath the errors and falsehoods?  Even Hitchens admits there is not.  The book eschews philosophical argument in favor of anecdote, with the reader offered a parade of horrible religious extremists to contemplate.  But such argument does not prove that religion is false or that God does not exist.  As Hitchens acknowledges, \u201cI do not say that if I catch a Buddhist priest stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is thereby discredited.\u201d Exactly.  The fact that some horrible things have been done in the name of religion, and that some repulsive men have professed religious belief, does not disprove the existence of God, or show that religion is a malign force. <\/p>\n

The main arguments that Hitchens offers against Christianity are that evolution explains the origin of life on earth, that portions of the Bible are not literally true, and that the four Gospels are not mathematical reproductions of each other.  These arguments don\u2019t get Hitchens where he wants to go.  Many eminent Christians have seen no contradiction between evolution and their belief.  John Paul II stated that evolution was \u201cmore than a hypothesis,\u201d and Cardinal Newman<\/a> wrote shortly after the publication of Darwin\u2019s work that \u201cMr. Darwin\u2019s theory need not be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and skill.\u201d Newman also echoed the Thomistic belief that reason and revelation are complementary, not antagonistic, in words all Christians should take to heart: \u201cif anything seems to be proved by astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed, but to something which has been confused with revelation.\u201d <\/p>\n

And long before Newman or John Paul, such important figures as St. Augustine<\/a> and St. Jerome looked to the Old Testament not primarily for historical or scientific knowledge, but to see how it pointed the way to Christ.  Indeed, Augustine speculated that different species of animals were not the result of separate miraculous acts of creation, as a literal reading of Genesis would suggest, but the result of a process in which the conditions for life created by God gradually became operative. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A brief note: an interview I did with the great KVSS in Omaha aired this morning – you can listen here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At First Things, William Doino, Jr. takes on the treatment of Pius XII in Saul Friedlander’s widely-praised history Nazi Germany and the Jews. These are not the only concerns. Relying on the farfetched claims of Susan Zuccotti, Friedlander writes: \u201cPersonally he [Pius XII] was not involved in any of the rescue operations throughout Italy. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}