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	Editorial: Holocaust Comparison Rankles The Register-Citizen April 3, 2010 http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2010/04/03/opinion/doc4bb6b724e8b1c448203019.txt How out of touch with the realities of tragedy could you be? On Friday, the pope’s personal preacher compared accusations against the pope and the Roman Catholic Church to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Rather than elicit sympathy for the pontiff and the organization he leads, the comparison showed only how distant top-ranking church leaders are from real life. “They [Jews] know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said in a Good Friday homily in front of Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Basilica. The assertion was that priests accused of sexual violence against minors know what it means to be victims of collective violence, too. There are two comparisons being made here — the obvious comparison between accusations against clergy and the torture and murder that went on during the Holocaust, and an insinuated comparison between the clergy and their accusers. It’s insulting. It’s an insult to Jews (as Jewish leaders were quick to point out) but, perhaps more importantly, it’s an insult to the victims of that sexual violence, who watched the church sweep the issue under the rug. They “know what it means”? Do the pope and other church leaders know what it means to be sexually abused by a respected member of the community and then watch your abuser be transferred to another job where he abuses more children? Do the pope and other church leaders know what it means to be dragged out of your home and watch your family and friends be worked and gassed to death? It’s not about the Jews or the Holocaust — Cantalamessa might have easily picked the Cambodian, Bosnian or Rwandan genocide as an equally inappropriate comparison — but the choice does hearken back to the how the church handled itself during World War II. Pope Pius XII, then the Roman Pontiff, refused to officially denounce the Nazi discrimination against Jews even in 1943, when his own closest advisors were advocating such a condemnation for political reasons. The issue is still one of historical debate — the church and its priests were responsible for saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust — but the pope himself never issued an order to that effect. It wasn’t until 1965, during the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II, in a document known as the “Nostra Aetate,” that the Vatican declared that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” “The church … decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone,” the document says. Maybe it’s time for a Vatican III where the church explicitly states that sexual abuse perpetrated by its priests will not be tolerated.
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