Cardinal Sin
A top German cardinal has criticized insensitive comments from a group of German bishops who seem to be men of Godwin, rather than men of G-d.
Germany’s top Roman Catholic official has said that a controversial comparison made by a group of German Bishops between conditions in the West Bank and the Holocaust was “not appropriate.”The comments, made in a letter by Cardinal Karl Lehmann to Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev, came one day after Israel’s Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority blasted the German comparison between the Palestinian-controlled West Bank cities and the Warsaw Ghetto as “political exploitation and demagoguery.”
The German Cardinal wrote to the Yad Vashem director that the “oppressive situation” in the West Bank, “in the shade of security fences and walls in Bethlehem,” was “reflected in some harsh statements, of which some‚Ķwere certainly not appropriate,” according to an English translation of the March 7 letter released Thursday by Yad Vashem.
Lehmann wrote that it was important for such statements to “stay sensitive to the complexity of a situation, and must not hurt the feelings of others, especially in regard to past suffering.”
He added that “completely independent of the situation, one cannot connect in any way current problems or situations of injustice with the national socialist mass murder of the Jews.
“For this reason, I can well comprehend that a statement, which referred to the Warsaw Ghetto in the face of Palestinian suffering, caused irritation and objection.”
The German bishops’ bitterly contentious comparisons stunned Yad Vashem officials, who had hosted the senior Christian leaders just hours earlier on a tour of the Holocaust Museum, where they had talked about guilt, joint liability and remaining shame.
“Photos of the inhuman Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem in the morning, in the evening we go to the ghetto in Ramallah – that blows your lid off,” Eichstaett Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke reportedly said.
Actually, Ramallah is a great place to have your lid blown off… but it helps if you are Jewish.
About the Author
An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.Filed Under: General
It is utterly FALSE, utterly absurd, and utterly wrong to refer to Catholics or the Catholic church as “Christians”. Non-Christians, however, don’t seem to “get” this fact. True Christians obey and follow the Holy Bible/scriptures and believe it’s CORE doctrines regarding salvation, the absolute diety of Christ, the atonement (ALONE) for salvation, and Christ ALONE as intercessor between God the Father and man (thus eliminating ANY possibility of Mary and “saints” being any kind of intercessors AT ALL). What Catholicism IS, is a form of APOSTATE “christianity”, no different from any OTHER cult and WORKS-BASED RELIGION, such as Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Heaven’s Gate, Oneness Pentecostals,
David Koresh’s group, Marianism, and the like. As a born-again Bible-believing Christian who puts GOD”S WORD before the Word of man (a.k.a religious leaders, scribes, and Pharisees), I am really tired of hearing the media call Catholics “christians”. Obviously very few people know the true BIBLICAL definition of the word, as opposed to the cultural one which has wrongly been accepted worldwide. This of course will offend any non-Christian, but then, the Germans found the Jews offensive during WWII and the Palestinians still do today… Anyone who defends their religious beliefs is going to be a rock of offense. But better that than a coward.