'No I'm not – you are!' (When in Doubt, Libel Catholics as National Socialists or Communists)

19/1/06 – The Independent has recently allowed two commentators to either assert or insinuate that Adolf Hitler was a practising Christian, flying in the face of observations such as this by William L. Shirer: “[U]nder the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler [nominally a Catholic], the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany . . . and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists”¹. (Perhaps next The Independent will suggest that Henry VIII's nominal Catholicism was what led him to break with Rome.) Having done this, the paper attempts to provide some balance by inviting an unbeliever to defend religious faith (as you would). As luck would have it, this paradoxical request allows a letter writer to observe, wryly, that “Dominic Lawson's prescription for our society is . . . a set of beliefs that are too silly for Lawson to believe himself” (see letter entitled, “We need a morality without a god”). This slam dunk comes a day after yet another fatuous letter stating that “All belief is potentially dangerous”, and that one ought not to believe, but to “question and prove” (“Perils of belief”, 18/1/06). If The Independent would allow it, it would be good to question this letter writer as to whether he believes what he wrote, and, if so, how he intends to prove it. With another letter writer complaining on the same day about “the Catholic right” (“Minority religions in British life”, 18/1/06), it just goes to show that, when it comes to bashing Catholicism, there is no such thing as “yesterday's news”. To round off the week, the News section of The Independent today (20/1/06) includes a plug for a charlatans' gallery display “that could be deemed blasphemous”, but which is also “a bold attack on the evils of organised religion”. (There are no quotation marks around the word “evils”.) It seems that subtlety was becoming too much of a strain for the organisation-loathing Independent News and Media Limited. Special for Saturday: An Independent letter writer remarks that “faith schools "examine all faiths" . . . in the same sense that Communist seminars in the old Soviet Union examined the politics of capitalism. At the end, students knew precisely why their system was so good and the others so bad” (second letter under “Unscientific theories about religion”, 21/1/06). The writer then goes on to explain why the system of faith schools is so bad, and why his recipe is so good.

This week begins with The Guardian predicting a “public backlash” over Vatican participation in a T.V. documentary on “the Inquisition” (30/1/06; see also The Daily Telegraph; the “backlash” starts in The Daily Telegraph of the following day). The anticipated attacks appear to fall into two main categories: those concerning the procedures employed in prosecuting heresy, in particular the use of judicial torture, and attacks on the concept of prosecuting heresy full stop. With regard to judicial procedure, no account seems to be taken of the possibility of reform through education and experience. To take a related example, Church history professor Kenneth Pennington reminds us that, “Prior to the twelfth century [trial by] ordeal [principally by fire or water²] was a pervasive mode of [judicial] proof”. “During the course of the twelfth century,” he goes on to relate, “. . . the ordeal was replaced by the ordo iudiciarius” of Romanist and Church law, i.e. modern rational trial procedure, involving, amongst other things, witness testimony under oath and legal representation for the accused. Pennington further points out that these revolutionary changes were finally encapsulated by French jurist Johannes Monachus (d. 1313), who cited a decretal of Pope Innocent III to justify the now famous assertion that “a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty”. If enlightened reform was possible here, what reason is there to presume that it would not also have overcome the customary use of judicial torture, irrespective of the upheavals caused by the Protestant Revolt and subsequent history?

As regards the prosecution of heresy itself, one could compare the detention awaiting trial in Austria of historian David Irving. The charge he faces of denying the Holocaust – effectively a heresy against historical truth – is comprehensible in its (presumed) rationale that if denial were to become widespread, this terrible period may be in greater danger of being repeated³. The potentially devastating consequences of unrestricted “freedom of truth” are illustrated by the United States Supreme Court in its decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Upholding its earlier ruling in Roe v. Wade, the Court delivered what could be described as the archetypal defence of such a freedom: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”⁴. The killing of forty million unborn American children in pursuit of this “liberty” must surely cry out for mercy to those who would belittle the sometimes urgent necessity of defending truth⁵. When their interests are at stake, on the other hand, it appears that Liberals are not quite so liberal about freedom of truth (9/9/06). (Compare also this report from 9/2/07.)

The above Guardian article also makes reference to the “notorious [seventeenth century] trial of the astronomer Galileo”, in which the court took judicial notice of the then commonly held scientific hypothesis, since falsified, that the sun revolves around the earth. In 1992, Stefan Kiszko was finally released after sixteen years in prison, having been wrongly convicted by a secular court of the sexual assault and murder of a young girl. According to this online article, from the very beginning Mr. Kiszko's innocence was an easily demonstrable fact. He died a year after his release. Secularists have yet to apologise for this appalling miscarriage of justice.

Et cetera, et cetera

Further examples of this point may be found here: New Scientist (see first and fourth letters, 18/2/06; because of their fanciful evolutionist theorising these libels are more pitiful than offensive); The Guardian (see fourth letter, 20/2/06), in which a correspondent tries to equate the slaughter last century of millions under the U.S.S.R., including 6 million in the Ukraine through famine resulting from “the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization”⁶, with “the inquisition”; The Economist (see first letter, 23/2/06). Of course, no anti-Catholic diatribe would be complete without traducing “the Crusades”. This article in The Australian contains its own laudable refutation of the latest unhistorical attack (8/3/06). The “Christian totalitarian” libel appears to be headed for cinema screens (again) this coming week via a screenplay that even the author on whose novel it is based has described as “imbecilic” (10/3/06). On the other hand, when Christians are not depicted as running oppressive regimes, BBC sees them as feasible enemies of the State (16/2/06), or, it seems, avaricious murderers (23/1/07; compare also this Guardian review of 13/5/02). Variety Magazine, meanwhile, cannot see the irony in characterising its attempt to silence complaints about anti-Catholic films as “resisting censorship” (12/3/06). Particularly obnoxious is the following libel: “we've not seen the last of protesters who think the book and film [The Da Vinci Code] are anti-Catholic. . . . Words, images, musical notes do hurt, and sticks and stones are being hurled to curtail them” (first emphasis in original, second added).

This article in today's Daily Telegraph, which seems to incite the murder of Catholics, deserves a paragraph all to itself (24/6/06). Marek Edelman is right to say, “Persecution starts with language . . . then murder”. This Telegraph article contains shockingly inflammatory examples of such language. Whitewashing over the killing of an estimated 3 million Catholics in Poland by the virulently anti-Christian National Socialists, the writer of this article juxtaposes the word “Catholic” with either “extremism”, “nationalism”, “anti-semitic”, “racist” or “racism” 5 times, while using Mr. Edelman's history to justify a call to “take up the knife and hit them”. Would the writer, for example, care to compare this anti-Catholic statement from the Pupils' Initiative – “Look at all the cases where fundamentalists impose their ideas on states and you see how dangerous it can be” – with this typical statement from a 1935 radio broadcast by the Hitler Youth: “We want to see our country in the clear light of eternity, not in the dark shadows of the Church”? Or how about comparing hostility to the concept of a Catholic state with this statement from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, delivered in 1938: “What these good Cardinals say in the churches themselves is entirely their own business. But the political arena and the streets belong to us”? Perhaps the European Parliament could ask The Daily Telegraph to tone down its rhetoric.

Eschewing the “Nazi” label, this believer in the suppression of Church by State (TIME Magazine blogs, 14/8/06) has opted for the obviously more plausible accusation that Christians who exercise their political rights are equivalent to Mohammedan jihadists.

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