By Celestine Bohlen on 10 February 2009 for Bloomberg News
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKCGumhQ2_GI
At a time when the world is looking forward to a new spirit of reconciliation, the Catholic Church has been caught looking backward. It’s an ugly sight.
On Jan. 20, President Barack Obama stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and talked about reconciling Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and non-believers.
The next day, Pope Benedict XVI gave a wink and a nod to a renegade sect that, in stubborn defiance of the Church’s own teachings, is stuck in the Dark Ages, when popes had armies, Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus and suggestions that the Earth orbited the Sun constituted heresy.
What was he thinking?
image above: Detail of caricature of Pope Benedict XVI by Court Jones found at http://www.courtjones.com
If his intention was to offer an olive branch to the schismatic movement founded by the ultra-right-wing French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, then he missed even that narrow mark. The leaders of Lefebvre’s St. Pius X Society have yet to withdraw their rejection of the Second Vatican Council, which in the 1960s, accepted such basic principles as the separation of church and state, freedom of religion and a repudiation of anti- Semitism.
Worse, by lifting the excommunication of four bishops illegitimately ordained by Lefebvre in 1988, Benedict has alienated millions of modern Catholics who have been looking for tolerance in other spheres, such as divorce or birth control.
All of this has only confirmed doubts among liberal Catholics about the real views of Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who until he became Pope in 2005 had stood guard over the church’s doctrinal standards.
Holocaust Denial
The revoking of the excommunications might have gone unnoticed had one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, not given an interview on Swedish television claiming that only several hundred thousand Jews were killed in the Holocaust. As if to say the Nazis weren’t so bad after all!
Those comments set off a firestorm of outrage and disgust, particularly in the pope’s native Germany, where denying the Holocaust is a crime. Chancellor Angela Merkel, joining leaders of all faiths, called for a retraction by Williamson.
The shocking thing is that it took Pope Benedict two weeks to demand that Williamson renounce his comments. And even then the Vatican, in its statement, insisted that the pope had not been aware of Williamson’s remarks when he lifted his excommunication.
The excuse was that this was a “management error,” which the Vatican blamed on its sprawling bureaucracy.
Pope’s Clulessness
Others would say it has more to do with this pope’s cluelessness about the modern world.
“Unnamed sources in the Vatican are saying that they did not know that Williamson was a Shoah denier,” wrote Thomas Reese, a Jesuit scholar and senior fellow at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “Haven’t they heard of Google?”
It really is pretty hard to imagine that Williamson’s views were a surprise to anyone, much less the pope. Followers of Lefebvre, who died in 1991, are a throwback to an old royalist Catholic tradition in France that stretches from the anti-Semitic campaign against Alfred Dreyfus in 1898 to the Vichy regime of Marshall Philippe Petain.
Consider Williamson’s views on women: he disapproves of their wearing pants, and believes that they shouldn’t be permitted to attend universities. Among his stranger ideas is that the World Trade Center was destroyed by explosions, not by hijacked airplanes.
Canon Law
No one is suggesting that Pope Benedict endorses Williamson’s lunacies, or the political conservatism of the Lefebvrist movement. Like his predecessor John Paul II, Benedict tried, and failed to bring Lefebvre back into the Church. As for the Holocaust, John Paul II apologized for the Church’s silence in 1998, and Benedict himself has specifically condemned any “forgetting, denial and reductionism” of the Holocaust.
Nor, according to Canon Law, was the lifting of the excommunications in any way a rehabilitation of the Lefebvrists or their beliefs. Rather it was a cease-fire in the Vatican’s long-standing battle against the schismatic movement, and an invitation for its members to return to the fold.
But that wasn’t the message heard around the world. The reaction of Jewish leaders was one of pain and revulsion, as old feelings of bitter distrust rushed to the surface, drowning out two decades of efforts to reconcile the two faiths.
Surely the biggest damage in the whole affair has been to the Church itself.
Many of Lefebvre’s followers joined the movement because of its devotion to the traditional Latin Mass, dropped by the Second Vatican Council and reinstated by Pope Benedict in 2007. But in essence, the movement stands for something else -- something narrow, dark and very dated.
So when the Pope opened the door of the Church to the four bishops -- even if only by a crack -- he actually was closing it on the wider, modern world where most Catholics live and worship.
(Celestine Bohlen is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net
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