How the Big Lie Perpetuates Itself
Here’s how it works: Tell a big lie. You can even tell people you know it’s not true, but it’s symbolic of the truth. Let other people tell the same lie; the impact is lessened because it is not new. Eventually people get used to the big lie and no longer care whether or not it is a lie. This emboldens those who want the big lie believed, and sometimes they get careless in their lying.
That’s how the Big Lie accusing Pope Pius XII with complicity with the Nazis has worked. It started with The Deputy, a 1963 play by a young, leftwing West German playwright named Rolf Hochhuth. Hochhuth depicted Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) as a Nazi collaborator, guilty of moral cowardice and silence in the face of the Nazi onslaught. Despite the fact that The Deputy was a fictional and highly polemical play that offered little or no historical evidence for its allegations, it was widely discussed and acclaimed. New generations of revisionist journalists and scholars were inspired by it to discredit the well-documented efforts of Pope Pius XII to save Jews during the Holocaust.
In perpetuating this Big Lie recently, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica got careless. On February 20 it published an article entitled “Pacelli Sapeva” (“Pacelli Knew”) that made the same, tired accusations against the Pope and the Catholic Church of complicity with the Nazi regime. Agencies and newspapers of other countries quoted the article.
To support the accusation, in March La Repubblica published a letter presumably written by Jesuit priest, Fr. Friederich Muckermann, that denounced the weakness of the Church of Rome in face of the Hitler regime. The article stated that the letter was found in the Vatican secret archives by an anonymous researcher.
Subsequently, the Zenit news agency did some research of its own. It verified that the article in question had many mistakes and that the letter attributed to Fr. Muckermann was falsified in the translation. The author of the newspaper article wrote that Fr. Muckermann was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Dachau concentration camp where presumably he died.
On the contrary, Fr. Muckermann was not arrested, nor was he sent to a concentration camp. He died on April 2, 1946 in Montreux, Switzerland. Fr. Muckermann did send a letter dated Nov. 15, 1934, to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, then the Vatican secretary of state, but the Italian newspaper published a biased and falsified version of it.
The text that the anonymous researcher gave to La Repubblica, of which the newspaper published an Italian translation, has 552 words. Fr. Muckermann’s note that is in the Vatican secret archives has 1,552 words. Hence the letter published by the newspaper represented little more than a third of the Jesuit priest’s original text.
According the Zenit, a careful comparison of both texts show the following:
1. The article in La Repubblica does not state what parts of the original text were omitted.
2. The parts omitted are essential to the meaning of Fr. Muckermann’s note. For example, an important phrase written by the priest—”The whole world knows that the German bishops have done much” against Hitler— is not quoted.
3. In the abbreviated text, the meaning of a significant phrase regarding the conduct of the Catholic Church was modified to mean exactly the opposite. The Italian translation published by La Repubblica says, “The reproach made to the bishops is justly extended to Rome.” The German original says, “The reproach made to the bishops is frequently extended unjustly to Rome.”
But no one in the secular press took much notice. The Big Lie has done its job.
As Though All That Is Not Forbidden Is Compulsory
First the death penalty. Now just war theory. The Pope and bishops offer a prudential judgment about the justice of war with Iraq and some prominent Catholics—Fr. James Schall and George Weigel, for instance—respectfully disagree. Immediately the cries of “cafeteria Catholicism” go up; liberal dissenters from the Church’s teaching on issues like homosexual practice and abortion say, “See! So-called ‘orthodox’ Catholics dissent from the Church’s teaching just as much as we do”—as though in Catholic teaching all that is not forbidden is compulsory.
Uh, not quite. Here’s what the American bishop said about their attempt to read the current world situation in light of just war theory:
“We offer not definitive conclusions, but rather our serious concerns and questions in the hope of helping all of us to reach sound moral judgments. People of good will may differ on how to apply just war norms in particular cases, especially when events are moving rapidly and the facts are not altogether clear.”
The bishops make it clear that they are not binding the conscience of anybody believer to their opinion, precisely because the possession of specialized knowledge (such as classified intelligence) makes all the difference in the world in assessing the situation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes it clear that, among other things, “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (CCC 2309). That means Caesar in the first place, not the bishops, since it is Caesar who is in charge of the public good.
This does not mean, of course, that Caesar is not to abide by just war teaching. Nor does it mean that he has no obligation to pay attention to the input of the bishops in forming his response to military threats. But it is to say that Catholics who are forming their consciences on the matter of war with Iraq are not bound to march in lockstep with the bishops in their opinions. There is no dogma being promulgated here, only a prudential judgment. This is not the case with liberal dissent that would attempt to square the circle and call moral what is intrinsically immoral—such as the direct taking of innocent human life by abortion.
Mighty White of Them
Speaking at a recent Nordic meeting on “Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights,” Dr. Steven Sinding, the director-general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, called the current state of affairs “perhaps the most challenging time since the modern ‘population movement’ began in the 1960s with respect to reproductive health and rights.
“One cannot ignore the assault on the Cairo Program of Action mounted by the United States of America and its allies in the Vatican and a small handful of other countries with fundamentalist governments,” said Sinding. He cites this “conservative backlash” as contributing to the IPPF’s hard times. “Nordic leadership was essential to the invention and promotion of the rights-based approach,” he said, “and it is as crucial as ever at this moment of peril posed by the United States.”
It is fitting that Dr. Sinding should address something called a Nordic meeting (though perhaps “Aryan” might be even more fitting, given that Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a racist whose views on how to deal with all those nonwhite races are still enshrined in Planned Parenthood policy though hidden in their rhetoric). We wonder why Dr. Sinding neglected to tell the “Nordic” folks that, according to LEARN (the Life, Education and Resource Network), an African-American pro-life organization, a whopping 78 percent of all abortion clinics in the U.S. are in or near minority neighborhoods.
Black America, 12 percent of the general population, accounts for 40 percent of the abortions. That might have something to do with why Rome worked so hard to thwart the “enough of us, way too much of you” agenda of the Cairo conference.
Who’s the Wielder of the Club that’s Made for You and Me?
“BERLIN (Reuters)—Hoping to capitalize on a wave of nostalgia for Communist East Germany, a Berlin company is planning to build a theme park that revives life behind the Iron Curtain in the country that disappeared nearly 13 years ago.”
Catholic teaching holds that the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called hell. Thus, the gates of hell are barred from the inside and a damned soul is, in the end, in hell because it wants to be there. Some people find this proposition incredible and ask, “Nobody would want eternal torture and separation from all joy, hope, love, and happiness.”
The news article above suggests that this incredulity may be unrealistic. It is actually possible for people to prefer misery to happiness. Kept up to the end, obedience to that impulse is simply hell. Who would want to be Himmler, or Stalin, or Jeffrey Dahmer? And yet somebody has chosen to be these people in all their hideousness.
Hell remains a possibility due to the radical nature of human freedom. But then, so is love and repentance.
SNAP’s Stockholm Syndrome
Boston bishop Most Rev. Richard Lennon’s proposed a Lenten time of prayer and penance for priests due to the scandal.
“There is certainly a role for the spiritual in getting out of this crisis, but it is only a limited role,” said Ann Hagan Webb, New England co-coordinator of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “What has happened is not spiritual; it is criminal and immoral. Prayer isn’t going to fix it. Action is going to fix it. Real changes are going to fix it.”
Here is yet another example of the notion that healing for the Church can only come by more rejection of the Tradition. To think that the situation is not rooted in sin and therefore in spiritual realities is to be blind to any hope of either resolving it or preventing it from happening again.
Yes, pietism is not a replacement for action. But neither is a shallow activist mentality a replacement for rootedness in prayer and the apostolic Tradition. It is the essence of catastrophically bad thinking (a.k.a. heresy) to insist on choosing one or the other. In fact, prayer and action are necessary—and prayer is the top priority. Right action spring from it.
Ratzinger on Politics
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said that Catholics’ involvement in politics as well as church-state relations must avoid the “theologization of politics” as well as the “ideologization of religion.” In a round-table discussion in April at the University of the Holy Cross, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explained the conditions for “the rightful autonomy of the participation of lay Catholics” in politics.
Together with Italian politicians, intellectuals and theologians, he commented on the doctrinal note on “Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life,” which the CDF published in January. (The document can be found online at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20021124_politica_en.htm.)
“The right profanity of politics excludes a theocracy,” the cardinal explained, adding that the doctrinal note insists on “the need that politics has to remove the theocratic concept of politics . . . and . . . to exclude a positivism that mutilates reason.”
Cardinal Ratzinger defended the notion that politics is part of the sphere of common sense, which enables us to “know the great values that determine our actions.”
Faith can cure sick reason, as “there is a certain connection between faith and reason: faith can enlighten [reason], cure it when it is sick, and help it to be itself.”
If only materialist criteria prevail, reason would be blind to moral values, which would be relegated to the sphere of the individual, said Cardinal Ratzinger. Such a “mutilation . . . destroys politics and transforms it into a mere instrument conditioned by the strongest,” where morality is excluded, he warned. “At the same time, politicians who are believers can illuminate the political discussion with their conduct, witnessing to faith as a real presence, thus contributing with reason in the governance of every political act.
“The moral imperatives that the Catholic politician has are values to be defended always, including when the majority is opposed to them,” the cardinal said.
Barbara Nicolosi: Culture Warrior
Compare the circulation numbers of This Rock with the numbers for even an unpopular TV show or movie, and you have a pretty good idea what forms most people’s worldview. “Everybody” knows things about the Catholic Church and the world we live in which are false or grossly distorted because they have picked up these “facts” through their pores by living in a media culture hostile to the Church. The Holy Father has made clear that it is faith and culture, far more than faith and reason, that is the real battleground in the present age. It is through story, art, music, and other forms of culture that the battle will be won or lost.
Catholic screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi understands this and directs a workshop aimed at training Christian writers to write quality work for Hollywood. It’s called Act One: Writing for Hollywood (http://www.actoneprogram.com/main.shtml), and she sums up its mission this way:
“For too long, the Church has complained about what Hollywood has brought to it. At Act One, we focus instead on what the Church can bring to Hollywood: stories of hope, of redemption, of sacrifice, and of the power of love. Stories like this aren’t easy to write. Solitude. Soul-searching. Courage. Vulnerability. And that’s all before you start writing.
“This is not, of course, to say that apologetic undertakings are a waste of time, any more than it is to say that an encyclical is a waste of time because most people would rather read John Grisham. It is, however, to say that the role of Catholics in forming culture is absolutely indispensible.”