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T h e A p o l o g i s t ’ s E y e
Lourdes Miracles Continue
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This Rock
Volume 14, Number 2
 February 2003 
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The latest officially recognized miracle at Lourdes involves a Frenchman who was once paralyzed by multiple sclerosis. The French newspaper Le Monde dedicated an entire page to the scientifically inexplicable cure of an illness that began affecting Jean-Pierre Bély in 1972. He was classified by the French health system as a total invalid by the time he went on pilgrimage to Lourdes in October 1987, at age 51.
Those who accompanied Bély did not think he would survive the trip. At the end of the pilgrimage he received the anointing of the sick in the shrine’s esplanade. When he returned home, he was already able to walk. Today virtually all traces of his illness have disappeared.
Patrick Fontanaud, an agnostic physician who looked after Bély, said there is no scientific explanation for his patient’s healing. It was Lourdes’ 66th officially recognized miracle since the 1858 apparitions of the Blessed Virgin. The head of the Lourdes Medical Office, Dr. Patrick Theillier, told Le Monde that there are two other miraculous cures about to be recognized: a 25-year-old French woman and a 60-year-old Italian woman, both cured in 1995.
How Nazis Hated the Catholic Church
Nazi hatred for the Catholic Church has been documented in Konrad Löw’s new book, Die Schuld (The Guilt). Resch Press, the book’s publisher, promotes it as "a response to Amen and The Vicar," film and theater works that accuse Pope Pius XII of having been too conciliatory to Nazism. It is also a response to Daniel Goldhagen’s work Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), which accuses Germans in general of being accomplices of Nazism.
Löw uses specific historical documents (there are 1,063 footnotes and a 331-item bibliography) to address little-known aspects of Nazi policy—in particular the continuous and systematic persecution of Catholics. The author, a native of Bavaria, demonstrates how Zentrum, the Catholic party, was supported and voted for by Jews, a phenomenon that can be explained by the fact that the Catholic Church condemned the nascent racism and nationalism with great clarity. The author also points out that Protestant groups were to a large extent fascinated by the racial theories.
Löw documents that Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was applauded by Protestant denominations, while the Catholic bishops condemned Nazi theories. This was why the Nazis persecuted Catholics as well as, if not as much as, Communists and Jews. According to the Nazi theory, Christianity’s roots in the Old Testament meant that whoever was against the Jews should also be against the Catholic Church. Ample documentation gathered by Löw records Catholics’ assistance to Jews, which angered the Nazis.
The book recounts in detail what Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Martin Bormann said and wrote about Jews and Catholics. In particular, Hitler wished to trample the Catholic Church "as one does a frog."
To give an idea of what the Nazis thought of Catholics, Löw presents an SS report that states, "It is indisputable that the Catholic Church in Germany is decisively opposed to the governmental policy of opposition to Hebrew power. As a consequence, it carries out work in support of Jews, helps them flee, uses all means to support them in daily life, and facilitates their illegitimate stay in the Reich. The people in charge of this task enjoy the full support of the episcopate and do not hesitate to take away from Germans, including German children, the little food they have, to give it to Jews."
Vatican: Homosexuals Not Fit for Priesthood
We reported on this briefly last month in a reply to a letter to the editor. The Vatican has gone public with its opinion that a homosexual person, or one with homosexual tendencies, "is not fit" to receive priestly ordination.
The position is stated in a letter written by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments published in the November-December issue of the dicastery’s bulletin, Notitiae. The letter was written in response to an unidentified bishop’s inquiry if it is licit to confer priestly ordination on men with manifest homosexual tendencies.
The Congregation for Clergy presented the request in turn to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, whose prefect at the time of the response last May was Jorge Medina Cardinal Estévez. As explained in the letter, the Congregation for Divine Worship, before replying, consulted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Below is the full text as translated from Italian by the Zenit news agency.
"Vatican City, May 16, 2002
"Most Reverend Excellency:
"The Congregation for Clergy has sent this Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments your Excellency’s letter, asking us to clarify the possibility that men with homosexual tendencies be able to receive priestly ordination.
"This Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, conscious of the experience resulting from many instructed causes for the purpose of obtaining dispensation from the obligations that derive from holy ordination, and after due consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, expresses its judgment as follows:
"Ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore, fit to receive the sacrament of holy orders.
"I take the opportunity to send you my most cordial greetings.
"Yours sincerely in Domino,
"Your Most Reverend Excellency Jorge A. Card. Medina Estévez, Prefect."
A Clone by Any Other Name
When Stanford University announced plans in December to produce stem cells for medical research by means of what it called "somatic cell nuclear transfer," Dr. Irving Weissman, director of Stanford’s Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the research is "not even close" to cloning. The university itself also denied any link to cloning.
Wide skepticism has greeted the claims. In fact, the American Association of Medical Colleges, of which Stanford is a member, equates somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) with therapeutic cloning. It defines it as the "removing [of] the nucleus of an unfertilized egg cell, replacing it with the material from the nucleus of a ‘somatic cell’ (a skin, heart, or nerve cell, for example), and stimulating this cell to begin dividing."
Asked at a news conference if nuclear transfer and cloning were the same, Nobel laureate and Stanford professor Paul Berg had a two-word response: "It is."
Berg’s view was echoed by Fr. Joseph Howard of the American Bioethics Advisory Commission (ABAC), a project of American Life League. "Dr. Weissman’s claim that somatic cell nuclear transfer is not human cloning is simply false," he said. "It is immoral and an outrage for a scientist of his stature to purposefully mislead the public for his own personal agenda. Finding treatments and studying diseases is noble, but not on the backs of human embryos, who are living human beings that deserve to be protected by law."
In July 2001 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a ban on all human cloning, including the procedure now proposed by Stanford. Last July the President’s Council on Bioethics recommended a four-year moratorium on the production and use of cloned human embryos for biomedical research.
"Stanford’s announcement is important," The Weekly Standard magazine noted. "In a country still weighing the significance and moral dangers of taking the first steps toward human cloning, a major research university has decided to plunge ahead. Stanford seems to believe that the question of whether to harvest and exploit cloned human embryos—and perhaps eventually cloned human fetuses—is one for scientists and internal university review boards, not citizens and their democratic institutions."
Rescuing the Babies from the Bathwater
Two Louisville, Kentucky, Catholic laymen have started a pastoral initiative of sorts to help the clergy in the United States. Joe Lilly and Rick Redman, both former television news workers, wanted to make a statement of support for the good priests in their own lives—and wound up doing considerably more than that.
"Our television news experience taught us the media would hammer everything negative they could out of the [priestly sexual abuse] story, and we felt that was unfair to the good priests," Redman told the National Catholic Register.
"Priests we knew told us they were afraid to go out in public with their collars on," Lilly added.
So with volunteer help from a few friends, the two created the Thank You Father web site (www.thankyoufather.com), which has received over 25,000 messages since its inauguration last August. The site introduction reads, "Recent headlines have showcased serious allegations involving several members of the clergy. Those cases will work their way through the legal system, as they should. We pray for justice and healing for all victims.
"However, the crisis in the Catholic Church has reminded us how important priests are to us. They’re with us throughout our lives. They lead us during good times and bad. They minister to us on our spiritual journey. Now it’s time we minister to the ‘good guys.’"
Catholics around America are telling their stories on the web site. Like the woman from Rockford, Illinois, who thanks "Father Joe" for helping to save her marriage by seeking out her non-Catholic husband at his workplace and talking to him. Or Ken and Joan in Springfield, Illinois, who remember the priest who came to their home to comfort them when their daughter died. Or the anonymous writer who recalled the indispensable role of each priest in making the sacraments available.
But, as Lilly and Redman point out in the site’s introduction, the best way to express gratitude to priests is by going to them and thanking them in person.
Rabbi Laments Jewish Silence at Vatican Overtures
Shortly before Christmas, an American rabbi congratulated the Catholic Church for its attempts to come closer to the Jewish people. Reformed Rabbi Jack Bemporad, director of the Center for Interreligious Understanding of Englewood, New Jersey, pointed to the 2001 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission titled The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.
Rabbi Bemporad called the pontifical document "courageous and stimulating, and a great step forward in understanding between Christians and Jews," and he lamented that there has not been a similar effort by the Jews.
"What is lacking is a Jewish text that thanks the Catholic Church for its position," he said. According to the rabbi, the declaration Dabru Emet—the document often cited as a Jewish response to Catholic affirmations, "is not an official document." He said, "I myself could not sign it because I am in disagreement on fundamental points."
The rabbi offered his own response to The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, which begins with a prologue by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in which he expresses the hope that this text "may offer important help for renewed understanding between Christian and Jews." Although Rabbi Bemporad said he was pleased with the text, he disagrees with two aspects: what he deemed ignorance of the rabbinical interpretation of the biblical texts and the use of the Qumran texts.
"To use these Dead Sea texts, of which I am personally skeptic, and reject the rabbinical interpretation endorsed by Judaism is like approaching Christianity while forgetting the Gospels and using instead apocryphal texts like the Gospel of Thomas, [which is] not recognized canonically," he said.
The rabbi acknowledged that there is a lack of knowledge of Jesus and of Christianity in general among Jews. He himself, who has been a professor at New York’s Hebrew College, a Reformed rabbinical school, is an enthusiast of Jesus’ parables, which he described as "marvelous."
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