Saturday, January 22, 2005

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen


You'd think the recent revelation that the Catholic Church refused to relinquish Jewish children after World War II would prompt a Vatican investigation. You'd be wrong.

The money quote:
But, most of all, the Church apologists' implicit, or ever more explicit, justification is that the sacrament of baptism gives the Church the right to take children forever from their Jewish parents. Says Father Peter Blet, the Church's whitewashing official chronicler of Pius XII's wartime activities: "On the basis of the canon law of that period, it was obligatory to provide a Catholic education"--which Jewish parents would not do--"to a person who had been baptized." Another apologist, the prominent German Church historian Gerhard Besier, published an article in Die Welt with the perverse headline: "the church may not abandon its children." By sleight of hand, the issue gets transformed. Jews are now trying to take away God's children, whom the Church is protecting.
Same church, same old *#&$ing story.

Who can't weep?