So the Catholic Church, originally (and laudably!) created to preserve and proclaim the Light that Jesus demonstrated, has been, and continues to demonstrate, the same Darkness that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees (Matthew 23, the “8 woes”, all evident in this Pope, and previous, for almost 2000 years!). Power corrupts, and most notably in authoritarian organizations like patriarchal churches and autocratic governments. More reason to do democracy!!!
Thank you Ruth for this essay as I have been wondering and waiting for the Pope to be more clear and denouncing of Putin. I am not Catholic and have an older friend who exclusively watches Italian TV and I asked her periodically if the Pope has said anything more and she updates me on his previous messages. She, waits on his word and gives greater weight to it than for instance President Biden. But she senses a juxtaposition of this too now because it's like the elephant in the room. Some commenters have added more Catholic history to fill gaps. As a protestant, and know of no Catholic history, I see the Pope not as a negotiator with heads of states, I view him first as a shepherd of the people, to influence the masses. So is outrage to the war and its effects more muted with American Catholics because of this neutrality? My Italian friend says war, aggression over land has always been and will always be, citing Old Testament times. The Gospel of New Testament overlays that with peace, grace and forgiveness. There is no place for aggressiveness and war, theologically. This ambiguity to not denounce Putin, creates another potential or muted division among people or raises significant questioning as people wait. To not denounce Putin is to stand for Trump could be the wrong assumption.
The Church is a business first. It has investments to protect. So it plays a waiting game when such things happen. If the Chuch upsets a leader then they might just take their property. If they wait the leader out another will eventually come into power and it's back to business.
A Pope has no power and very little influence today. When it did the Pope was the authoritarian killing others or backing those in power.
Ruth: A Very intriguing piece. I have obtained the book and enjoyed the program about the book in which you participated while in Rome. I too question what the Holy See’s moral authority may be. I am interested in how authoritarians approach religions in their midst. Mussolini and Hitler and the Catholic Church; Trump and the Evangelicals and Putin and the Orthodox Church. It will be interesting to look at this.
For all intents and purposes, that has been eclipsed by sheer hypocrisy, especially after news media revelations about the serial sex abuse of children by clergy, on a massive scale, that was condoned, covered up and even spread (through the stealthy reassignment of pedophile priests to unsuspecting parishes) by the hierarchy. Then again, one of the popes in overall charge for nearly 27 years, while all this continued to go on, was named a saint in 2013, so the Catholic Church is as adept as ever at PR.
The Church is a business, as it always has been, but it's hard to see it as a moral bastion anymore.
Moral suasion is a very difficult tool to use effectively. Unlike the force of arms, the nature and extent of its power or weakness in any given situation is almost impossible to discern clearly and precisely. Might a pope or any religious leader or any group of religious leaders be able to incite action that defeats or even stymies evil action? Theoretically, yes but has that ever happened to any substantial degree? It may well be that the best that moral suasion can do is to nudge things a little this way and a little that way. Do we expect too much?
"I have done my precise duty, taking care not to offend anyone, avoiding any particular references, indeed, studiously taking care to say the least possible," said the pope. I'm reminded of a quote "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.” Dante Alighieri
Can the Vatican really be seen as a true moral institution? Or is it just a corrupt entity in the business of acquiring great wealth and power? If you look at its history of cover ups protecting priests from charges of sexual molestation and abuse, which has gone on for hundreds of years, its morally ambiguous stands taken during some of humanities's darkest hours during WWII, you see that they saw and looked the other way as the fascist genocide and mass murder were raging through Europe and did nothing, they shrugged their collective shoulders.
Is Francis corrupted by evil historical forces beyond his control? Is it fear, intimidation, some sort of calculated political expediency? I don't really know exactly. The abiding moral lesson of Dante's Inferno is that evil is always punished. Given the historical record of human history and the Vatican's role in it, I'm not so sure.
The perversions of religion are as old as the religions themselves. The depths of degradation within the Catholic church, much less its tolerance of genocide, starvation, cruelty, and corruption are without parallel in the world, although every religion has been thoroughly corrupted. The apartheid in Israel, civil wars in India, mass incarcerations in China, genocides in Africa...As long as humans support these perverse institutions, they'll continue to do more harm than good.
Seems like there is a never ending supply of anti-Catholics around............biased? maybe...Bishop Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) worked to save around 12,000 Hungarian Jews by making false baptismal certificates for them and issuing travel papers. Roncalli wrote letters to Pope Pius XII urging him to ask Miklos Horthy to stop the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. In June 1944, the Pope contacted Horthy and asked him to stop the deportation, which Horthy finally did in July. The irony is that when the 2000 kids with "fake" baptismal certificate arrived in Palestine, the Jewish aid societies refused to assist them because they were not Jewish!!! they capitulated when Roncalli and other churchmen embarrassed the authorities into accepting them.
What is not generally known, but which Pope John himself admitted, is that he had always acted on precise orders received from Pope Pius XII. Pinches E. Lapide, at one time Israeli consul in Italy, contended that "the Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together. Its record stands in startling contrast to the achievements of . . .Western democracies."
Acting as an intermediary for certain German anti-Hitler generals, Pius XII attempted in January 1940 and again in February 1940 to elicit the aid of the British in a plot to curb Hitler's militaristic ambitions. His interventions failed.
What would have occurred if Pope Pius XII had denounced Hitler's criminal activities from every pulpit in every Catholic cathedral, church and chapel the world over? No one really knows. But an event that occurred Sunday, Aug. 3, 1941, is worth some reflection.
On that date, Clemens Count Galen, bishop of Munster, the most courageous and outspoken Catholic bishop of World War II, a man who dared directly challenge the authority of the Gestapo, preached a powerful sermon. In his homily, he informed the congregation that the German government was in the process of murdering "unproductive" citizens—in particular, the mentally ill.
Very interestingly, 20 days later, on Aug. 23, 1941, Hitler dissolved Aktion T, the program aimed at exterminating the "unfit." (Another program was already in process, however. Aktion 14F, "begun in the spring of 1941, to 'comb out' the concentration camps, and exterminate the physically or socially undesirable, continued." If the Bishop Galen story-involving a German ordinary in a large city of western Germany-can be viewed as illustrating favorably what open, public confrontation with Hitler could accomplish, another story, with less favorable consequences, must also be told.
The story involves Jewish converts to Christianity in Holland. In July 1942, the Catholic and Protestant churches of Holland agreed to publicly protest the Nazi deportations. They had prepared a message to be read publicly. Intimidated by German threats, the Protestant churches backed down at the last minute and did not read the protest message. The Catholic churches, however, went through with the agreed-upon plan. "Consequently, the Jews who had converted to Catholicism were arrested and deported, whereas the Protestant converts remained in Holland."
This last story indicates that the Pope's fear of speaking out with resounding clarity against Hitler's atrocities was not unfounded.
Even without a change in the historical circumstances, noncooperation with the Nazis on the part of the Poles and other defeated peoples would certainly have been met with great harshness. Father Maximilian Kolbe was one of 10 men of Cellblock 14, Auschwitz, executed by the Nazis in the summer of 1941 in retaliation for the fact that one Polish prisoner fled the German concentration camp.
While Pope Pius XII undoubtedly feared that even greater atrocities might be inflicted upon Catholic Christians if he openly and forcefully denounced Nazism and the deportation of Jews, and especially if he exhorted Catholics to block deportation efforts, he also feared that reckless moves or use of authority on his part could lead to an increase in the deaths of innocent Jewish people.
On Sept. 5, 1944, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Palestine, met in Cairo with Msgr. Hughes, papal delegate to Egypt and Palestine. The chief rabbi had been seeking a meeting with the Pope so that he might plead for his help on behalf of Hungarian Jews being deported by the Germans. Msgr. Hughes explained that a telegram to the chief rabbi inviting him to come to Rome had been held back by the Vatican at the last minute. "The reason was the Holy Father's fear that Your Reverence's coming to the Vatican in connection with measures to save the people of Israel might, perhaps, drive the Germans to wreak vengeance on the remnants of Jewry in Europe."
Later, in the same Cairo meeting, Msgr. Hughes told the chief rabbi of an interview he had had with the Pope in the company of J.A. Clifford, the British minister in charge of dealing with refugee matters in Italy, a man who conjured up numerous rescue plans to save Jews. During the interview, an expression of extreme suffering came over the Pontiff's face. According to Msgr. Hughes, the Holy Father then said: "We must do all in our power to save the people of Israel. But every step we take must be calculated with the greatest caution, because I could not bear the idea that our activity might have an effect opposite to the one intended and cause the death of still more Jews."
In the current situation with Ukraine, matters are neither simple nor straight-forward. No sane person approves of this war. The current Pope certainly doesn't. But managing one's response to the war requires some intelligence and nuance. A good bit of discussion has taken place in the NYTs and The Guardian about the "artless" boasting by some US intelligence people about their involvement in providing real time intelligence to Ukraine troops, enabling them to kill Russian generals. Critics are worried that such careless boasting might make matters more difficult if and when negotiations to end this blood bath begin. Diplomatic options can be lost through artlessness.
My hope is that the internationally coordinated response to Putin's war in Ukraine can be managed successfully without its widening out and becoming something else -- notably, a hot war between Nato/US troops and Russian troops. Part of that successful management is ensuring that back channel diplomatic possibilities are not precluded by careless speech.
Diplomacy is an imperfect art. And I have great sympathy for those who are charged with its performance. Mistakes will be made.
For those unaware of the Doctrine of Discovery 1452-the church has always been on the side of violence and cruelty when it comes to taking from others what they want because the Church will benefit from every form of "conquering" under the guise of "spreading the faith". The Vatican has never revoked, edited or changed the major form of the document, and benefited in every age where people's were conquered.
Sounds a bit like American foreign policy for the last 50 years. Perhaps the problem is not religion per se, but, rather, human imperfection, of which there is more than enough to go around.
What is there to say about “The Church that Sits Upon the Seven Hills.” History has well documented the atrocities from beginning to now. I did very good with this post. I’m learning how to shut up.
When did the church decide that it no longer had a role to play as the voice of conscience in society? I think you can make the case that the church lost all claim to the moral high ground long ago when its corruption became so widespread that Luther was motivated to post the 95 Theses. Or in more modern times, when the church engaged in a global coverup of secual abuse of children. But what prevents Pope Francis from speaking out?
It may be easy to excuse Pope Pius XII for keeping silent. He may have had a well founded fear that Hitler and Mussolini would have seized the assets of the church or worse, for the pontiff - imprisoned the leadership, after all, Hitler did send Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a concentration camp for speaking out. But that was then, this is now.
There is little that Putin could actually do to Pope Francis in retaliation for a forceful stand against the aggression in Ukraine and the war crimes that have accompanied it. The Swiss Guards would see to it that the Pope's personal safety is assured so Putin's usual responses - poisoned tea, falls out of windows, fatal touch - are unlikely to work. But is there something more? The Vatican still controls billions in wealth and assets. Where are those assets invested? What are the unseen financial connections between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church?
We may be left with only one conclusion, papal cowardice. That seems out of character for Pope Francis. His history suggests that he has no fear speaking truth to power. Could it be then that the Vatican establishment is keeping him bottled up for fear that he may rock the boat for many of their powerful friends in Russia and other countries?
So the Catholic Church, originally (and laudably!) created to preserve and proclaim the Light that Jesus demonstrated, has been, and continues to demonstrate, the same Darkness that Jesus condemned in the Pharisees (Matthew 23, the “8 woes”, all evident in this Pope, and previous, for almost 2000 years!). Power corrupts, and most notably in authoritarian organizations like patriarchal churches and autocratic governments. More reason to do democracy!!!
Thank you Ruth for this essay as I have been wondering and waiting for the Pope to be more clear and denouncing of Putin. I am not Catholic and have an older friend who exclusively watches Italian TV and I asked her periodically if the Pope has said anything more and she updates me on his previous messages. She, waits on his word and gives greater weight to it than for instance President Biden. But she senses a juxtaposition of this too now because it's like the elephant in the room. Some commenters have added more Catholic history to fill gaps. As a protestant, and know of no Catholic history, I see the Pope not as a negotiator with heads of states, I view him first as a shepherd of the people, to influence the masses. So is outrage to the war and its effects more muted with American Catholics because of this neutrality? My Italian friend says war, aggression over land has always been and will always be, citing Old Testament times. The Gospel of New Testament overlays that with peace, grace and forgiveness. There is no place for aggressiveness and war, theologically. This ambiguity to not denounce Putin, creates another potential or muted division among people or raises significant questioning as people wait. To not denounce Putin is to stand for Trump could be the wrong assumption.
The Church is a business first. It has investments to protect. So it plays a waiting game when such things happen. If the Chuch upsets a leader then they might just take their property. If they wait the leader out another will eventually come into power and it's back to business.
A Pope has no power and very little influence today. When it did the Pope was the authoritarian killing others or backing those in power.
The Reformation was long ago.
Ruth: A Very intriguing piece. I have obtained the book and enjoyed the program about the book in which you participated while in Rome. I too question what the Holy See’s moral authority may be. I am interested in how authoritarians approach religions in their midst. Mussolini and Hitler and the Catholic Church; Trump and the Evangelicals and Putin and the Orthodox Church. It will be interesting to look at this.
Today's Catholic Church has very little prestige and zero moral authority. It seems in no hurry at all to change that.
re "the Church's prestige and moral authority":
For all intents and purposes, that has been eclipsed by sheer hypocrisy, especially after news media revelations about the serial sex abuse of children by clergy, on a massive scale, that was condoned, covered up and even spread (through the stealthy reassignment of pedophile priests to unsuspecting parishes) by the hierarchy. Then again, one of the popes in overall charge for nearly 27 years, while all this continued to go on, was named a saint in 2013, so the Catholic Church is as adept as ever at PR.
The Church is a business, as it always has been, but it's hard to see it as a moral bastion anymore.
Moral suasion is a very difficult tool to use effectively. Unlike the force of arms, the nature and extent of its power or weakness in any given situation is almost impossible to discern clearly and precisely. Might a pope or any religious leader or any group of religious leaders be able to incite action that defeats or even stymies evil action? Theoretically, yes but has that ever happened to any substantial degree? It may well be that the best that moral suasion can do is to nudge things a little this way and a little that way. Do we expect too much?
"I have done my precise duty, taking care not to offend anyone, avoiding any particular references, indeed, studiously taking care to say the least possible," said the pope. I'm reminded of a quote "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality.” Dante Alighieri
Can the Vatican really be seen as a true moral institution? Or is it just a corrupt entity in the business of acquiring great wealth and power? If you look at its history of cover ups protecting priests from charges of sexual molestation and abuse, which has gone on for hundreds of years, its morally ambiguous stands taken during some of humanities's darkest hours during WWII, you see that they saw and looked the other way as the fascist genocide and mass murder were raging through Europe and did nothing, they shrugged their collective shoulders.
Is Francis corrupted by evil historical forces beyond his control? Is it fear, intimidation, some sort of calculated political expediency? I don't really know exactly. The abiding moral lesson of Dante's Inferno is that evil is always punished. Given the historical record of human history and the Vatican's role in it, I'm not so sure.
Another quote (from a 20th-century American statesman) that also seems pertinent:
"I can think, personally, of no worse punishment than somehow to be permanently confronted with one's own cowardice."
That assumes you have shame or a conscience.
The perversions of religion are as old as the religions themselves. The depths of degradation within the Catholic church, much less its tolerance of genocide, starvation, cruelty, and corruption are without parallel in the world, although every religion has been thoroughly corrupted. The apartheid in Israel, civil wars in India, mass incarcerations in China, genocides in Africa...As long as humans support these perverse institutions, they'll continue to do more harm than good.
I agree with you, hw.
Seems like there is a never ending supply of anti-Catholics around............biased? maybe...Bishop Angelo Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) worked to save around 12,000 Hungarian Jews by making false baptismal certificates for them and issuing travel papers. Roncalli wrote letters to Pope Pius XII urging him to ask Miklos Horthy to stop the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. In June 1944, the Pope contacted Horthy and asked him to stop the deportation, which Horthy finally did in July. The irony is that when the 2000 kids with "fake" baptismal certificate arrived in Palestine, the Jewish aid societies refused to assist them because they were not Jewish!!! they capitulated when Roncalli and other churchmen embarrassed the authorities into accepting them.
What is not generally known, but which Pope John himself admitted, is that he had always acted on precise orders received from Pope Pius XII. Pinches E. Lapide, at one time Israeli consul in Italy, contended that "the Catholic Church saved more Jewish lives during the war than all other churches, religious institutions and rescue organizations put together. Its record stands in startling contrast to the achievements of . . .Western democracies."
Acting as an intermediary for certain German anti-Hitler generals, Pius XII attempted in January 1940 and again in February 1940 to elicit the aid of the British in a plot to curb Hitler's militaristic ambitions. His interventions failed.
What would have occurred if Pope Pius XII had denounced Hitler's criminal activities from every pulpit in every Catholic cathedral, church and chapel the world over? No one really knows. But an event that occurred Sunday, Aug. 3, 1941, is worth some reflection.
On that date, Clemens Count Galen, bishop of Munster, the most courageous and outspoken Catholic bishop of World War II, a man who dared directly challenge the authority of the Gestapo, preached a powerful sermon. In his homily, he informed the congregation that the German government was in the process of murdering "unproductive" citizens—in particular, the mentally ill.
Very interestingly, 20 days later, on Aug. 23, 1941, Hitler dissolved Aktion T, the program aimed at exterminating the "unfit." (Another program was already in process, however. Aktion 14F, "begun in the spring of 1941, to 'comb out' the concentration camps, and exterminate the physically or socially undesirable, continued." If the Bishop Galen story-involving a German ordinary in a large city of western Germany-can be viewed as illustrating favorably what open, public confrontation with Hitler could accomplish, another story, with less favorable consequences, must also be told.
The story involves Jewish converts to Christianity in Holland. In July 1942, the Catholic and Protestant churches of Holland agreed to publicly protest the Nazi deportations. They had prepared a message to be read publicly. Intimidated by German threats, the Protestant churches backed down at the last minute and did not read the protest message. The Catholic churches, however, went through with the agreed-upon plan. "Consequently, the Jews who had converted to Catholicism were arrested and deported, whereas the Protestant converts remained in Holland."
This last story indicates that the Pope's fear of speaking out with resounding clarity against Hitler's atrocities was not unfounded.
Even without a change in the historical circumstances, noncooperation with the Nazis on the part of the Poles and other defeated peoples would certainly have been met with great harshness. Father Maximilian Kolbe was one of 10 men of Cellblock 14, Auschwitz, executed by the Nazis in the summer of 1941 in retaliation for the fact that one Polish prisoner fled the German concentration camp.
While Pope Pius XII undoubtedly feared that even greater atrocities might be inflicted upon Catholic Christians if he openly and forcefully denounced Nazism and the deportation of Jews, and especially if he exhorted Catholics to block deportation efforts, he also feared that reckless moves or use of authority on his part could lead to an increase in the deaths of innocent Jewish people.
On Sept. 5, 1944, Rabbi Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Palestine, met in Cairo with Msgr. Hughes, papal delegate to Egypt and Palestine. The chief rabbi had been seeking a meeting with the Pope so that he might plead for his help on behalf of Hungarian Jews being deported by the Germans. Msgr. Hughes explained that a telegram to the chief rabbi inviting him to come to Rome had been held back by the Vatican at the last minute. "The reason was the Holy Father's fear that Your Reverence's coming to the Vatican in connection with measures to save the people of Israel might, perhaps, drive the Germans to wreak vengeance on the remnants of Jewry in Europe."
Later, in the same Cairo meeting, Msgr. Hughes told the chief rabbi of an interview he had had with the Pope in the company of J.A. Clifford, the British minister in charge of dealing with refugee matters in Italy, a man who conjured up numerous rescue plans to save Jews. During the interview, an expression of extreme suffering came over the Pontiff's face. According to Msgr. Hughes, the Holy Father then said: "We must do all in our power to save the people of Israel. But every step we take must be calculated with the greatest caution, because I could not bear the idea that our activity might have an effect opposite to the one intended and cause the death of still more Jews."
In the current situation with Ukraine, matters are neither simple nor straight-forward. No sane person approves of this war. The current Pope certainly doesn't. But managing one's response to the war requires some intelligence and nuance. A good bit of discussion has taken place in the NYTs and The Guardian about the "artless" boasting by some US intelligence people about their involvement in providing real time intelligence to Ukraine troops, enabling them to kill Russian generals. Critics are worried that such careless boasting might make matters more difficult if and when negotiations to end this blood bath begin. Diplomatic options can be lost through artlessness.
My hope is that the internationally coordinated response to Putin's war in Ukraine can be managed successfully without its widening out and becoming something else -- notably, a hot war between Nato/US troops and Russian troops. Part of that successful management is ensuring that back channel diplomatic possibilities are not precluded by careless speech.
Diplomacy is an imperfect art. And I have great sympathy for those who are charged with its performance. Mistakes will be made.
Pertinent to the complexities of the Ukraine situation facing the US, Andrew Bacevich's latest essay in TomDispatch is right on point: https://tomdispatch.com/the-f-word-the-other-one/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=9f98352c92-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-9f98352c92-308811797#more
I’m so glad Ruth wrote about this topic today, as I just read today about Kertzer’s new book. I knew she would have great insight.
For those unaware of the Doctrine of Discovery 1452-the church has always been on the side of violence and cruelty when it comes to taking from others what they want because the Church will benefit from every form of "conquering" under the guise of "spreading the faith". The Vatican has never revoked, edited or changed the major form of the document, and benefited in every age where people's were conquered.
Thank you for that insight.
Sounds a bit like American foreign policy for the last 50 years. Perhaps the problem is not religion per se, but, rather, human imperfection, of which there is more than enough to go around.
What is there to say about “The Church that Sits Upon the Seven Hills.” History has well documented the atrocities from beginning to now. I did very good with this post. I’m learning how to shut up.
When did the church decide that it no longer had a role to play as the voice of conscience in society? I think you can make the case that the church lost all claim to the moral high ground long ago when its corruption became so widespread that Luther was motivated to post the 95 Theses. Or in more modern times, when the church engaged in a global coverup of secual abuse of children. But what prevents Pope Francis from speaking out?
It may be easy to excuse Pope Pius XII for keeping silent. He may have had a well founded fear that Hitler and Mussolini would have seized the assets of the church or worse, for the pontiff - imprisoned the leadership, after all, Hitler did send Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a concentration camp for speaking out. But that was then, this is now.
There is little that Putin could actually do to Pope Francis in retaliation for a forceful stand against the aggression in Ukraine and the war crimes that have accompanied it. The Swiss Guards would see to it that the Pope's personal safety is assured so Putin's usual responses - poisoned tea, falls out of windows, fatal touch - are unlikely to work. But is there something more? The Vatican still controls billions in wealth and assets. Where are those assets invested? What are the unseen financial connections between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church?
We may be left with only one conclusion, papal cowardice. That seems out of character for Pope Francis. His history suggests that he has no fear speaking truth to power. Could it be then that the Vatican establishment is keeping him bottled up for fear that he may rock the boat for many of their powerful friends in Russia and other countries?
Just as the pope in the 40s condoned Hitler, Pope Francis is condoning Putin. What's now is not new.