THE BAD PRESS CATHOLICS GET IN THEIR OWN PARISH NEWSLETTER

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If Catholics feel disheartened, disillusioned and dismayed about the bad press they're getting over sex abuse and coverups, how do they feel about the bad press the Church gets in their own parish newsletter?

Disgusted, I reckon.

Holy Trinity's latest, out today, features Pope Pius XII,  whose documents the Vatican have announced will be released next year, as "helping or ignoring the plight of Jews during the holocaust. 

"He has often been criticized by Jews for his apparent silence (but) some Catholic leaders say Pius helped European Jews." I call that ambiguous to say the least. 

Ambiguity is perhaps the defining characteristic of 'the spirit of Vatican II', of the Novus Ordo and the current papacy. I call it a pretty feeble endorsement for a Pope who saved 700,000 Jews from the death camps, hiding many in religious houses throughout Italy.

In 1945 the representative of the Italian Hebrew Commission affirmed that: "Above all we acknowledge the Supreme Pontiff and the religious men and women who, executing the directives of the Holy Father, recognized the persecuted as their brothers and with effort and abnegation hastened to help us, disregarding the terrible dangers to which they were exposed." 

In the same year, 1945, 80 representatives of Jewish refugees from various concentration camps came to Rome to "express their great honour at being able to thank the Holy Father personally".

The great Albert Einstein has said that, "Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly."

When Pius died, Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir, paid him tribute: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people, the voice of the Pope was raised for its victims … We mourn a great servant of peace".

Catholics should know that Pope Pius' strenuous efforts to save Jews from the Nazis were universally acknowledged until the mid '60s, when a generation who hadn't experienced WWII were suckers for a KGB campaign of misinformation and lies which had failed in the '40s.

It's more than feeble, it's disgusting that an organization calling itself 'cathnews.com' and which I suppose is a regular feed for many NZ parish newsletters, should join a smear campaign started by Communists, spread by liberal, socialist-minded Catholics and now served up as Sunday reading in the pews.

What we need is a jolly good, morale-boosting homily on the days when the Church was a force to be reckoned with, when Hitler saw the Catholic Church as an enemy of the Third Reich, a homily extolling a great Pope, a pope to be remembered and revered as one of the heroes of the 20th century.

The Lent of pain and suffering in the Church caused by ambiguity, vice, coverups and lies are grist to God's mill of mercy and justice: great popes will come again. 

You won't have heard this morning's verse before the Gospel, because our NZ priests don't bother with it any more, so here it is:


Cast away from you all the crimes you have committed, says the Lord, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit.

Adelie Reid says:
Yes. Apparently one of Hitler's top men said he feared no one but that little man in white. Referring to Pope PiusXII.

Paul Collits says:
P12 was an absolute champion in all sorts of ways, including his attitude to our older brothers and sisters in the faith.
I say: Que?

'Anon' says: 
Priests tell me they often have the problem that ferocious parishioners or church staff take control of the parish newsletter and try to use it as their own private outlet. I don't know if this is one such instance.

I say: In this instance, that's not the way I'd put it.