Week in Review: Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust

In this week’s news review, I’d like to draw attention to two stories I haven’t yet mentioned. One is the Holocaust denial—statements denying the execution of gays by Nazi Germany—this week by a Scottish bishop. The other is the astonishing appeal of a Vatican official to the re-elected Socialist government of Spain for the Spanish government to mend fences with the church—after the church itself attacked the Spanish government prior to the 9 March election.

On 11 March in Glasgow, the Catholic bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, used the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day to lambast the gay community for claiming that gay people have been or are persecuted (see blogs linked to this blog, especially Clerical Whispers).

In his remarks, Bishop Devine decried a “huge and well orchestrated conspiracy” operating through an “ever-present” “homosexual lobby” intent on undermining the church. In the good bishop’s considered opinion, “It is all about a lifestyle alien to the Christian tradition. There is a giant conspiracy against Christian values, an agenda here."

Bishop Devine further opined that gay people are riding on the coattails of Holocaust remembrance, seeking to give “the impression . . . . that they have been equally persecuted” and to “create for themselves the image of a group of people under persecution." In an apparently nostalgic hankering for a time when gay people could be thrown into jail in the British Isles merely for being gay, Devine also offered the following bizarre aside, as he spoke in remembrance of Holocaust victims: “I saw actor Ian McKellen being honoured for his work on behalf of homosexuals, when a century ago Oscar Wilde was locked up and put in jail.”

What to make of such arrant nonsense?

First and foremost, it’s evil. Cutting words designed to cow and whip. Ignorant words. Words hurled like missiles by a man of God at a group of people who do, in fact, still face oppression, regardless of whether the bishop chooses to recognize this oppression or not.

Words hurt. Words cut deep. Words rationalize and gloss over and foment hate. Words incite people to do more than throw more words at others: they incite violence that goes beyond mere verbal violence.

In speaking as he did at this Holocaust remembrance, the good bishop places himself where a minister of Christ should never place herself: at the center of the circle from which violence emanates.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Second, the bishop has apparently not learned his catechism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “They [i.e., gay persons] must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence.

Finally, the bishop is apparently ill-informed. Before addressing Holocaust remembrance groups, he should perhaps make it his business to learn what actually occurred in that horrendous event. An undetermined but not insignificant number of gay persons—estimated at between five and fifteen thousand—were executed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The system used to classify those targeted for extinction in Nazi Germany included a designation for gay persons: just as Jews were required to wear yellow stars of David, gay people were forced to wear pink triangles.

Gays need not give the impression that we were persecuted in the Holocaust. We were persecuted during the Holocaust. We were put to death because we were gay.

No man of God should hanker for the days in which it was possible to jail (or otherwise abuse or torment) a human being simply because she is gay. If headlines about Bishop Devine’s talk are to be accurate, they should read, simply, starkly, “Catholic Bishop Denies Holocaust.”

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting anti-gay violence.

And in that ever-astonishing category of victimizer seeking to paint himself as victim, this week, in comments to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, the undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Msgr. Melchor Sanchez de Toca, called on the newly re-elected Socialist government of Spain to “work to restore serenity” with the Catholic church.

I’ve blogged before about the attempt of some Spanish bishops and of Pope Benedict to influence the 9 March Spanish elections. As I’ve noted, on the Feast of the Holy Family at the end of December, some of the Spanish bishops organized a mass demonstration in Madrid, to which the pope was beamed by satellite. The pope spoke on wide-screen t.v. about “the” Christian model of family—one man, one woman married for life—as the crowd cheered. This “pro-family” demonstration, along with subsequent remarks of some Spanish bishops, was widely understood as a signal to the Spanish electorate to repudiate the Socialist government, which has legalized gay marriage, in the March election.

The church now finds itself in an awkward position, following the elections, in which the Socialist government was returned to power by a comfortable majority. Now the church is seeking to depict itself as the victim rather than the aggressor in the electoral process. Msgr. Sanchez de Toca reproaches the Socialist government of Jose Luis Zapatero as “excessively harsh” towards the church, confrontative in its stance regarding the church. He denies that the Spanish bishops sought to instruct the people in their voting choices, but “offered a reflection” on the choices confronting the Spanish electorate in March. He states that the pope and bishops routinely offer such political “reflection” everywhere in the world, but thinks that “in Spain, there was a disproportionate response on the part of the government.”

Umm, I don’t think so. The obtrusive attempt of the church to influence the Spanish election goes quite a bit beyond the church’s attempt to wield political influence on other governments. This was a direct attempt to get the Socialists thrown out of power in Spain. It was overt political meddling. It represents a last-ditch effort of some sectors of Catholicism that have not repudiated the medieval model of Christendom to hang onto that model in one of the last European countries in which the church has recently had more or less direct control over the government.

The attempt to influence the Spanish election was a rather despicable attack on a fragile democracy whose human rights record is already vastly preferable to that of the Franco regime, to which the church was long wedded.

It’s time for the Catholic church to refrain from such meddling—to stop hankering for the days of Franco or jailing gays in England. As the world moves toward postmodernity, the church is still struggling to accept and interact with the modern world.

And in the process, it’s losing adherents right and left.

The church should hold its pastoral representatives accountable for inciting violence. And if it wishes to retain the respect of its followers and the world at large, it also must refrain from crying foul and playing the victim, when its hands get burned as it plays political games.