The Vienna daily “Österreich” reports on February 10 Greens’ MP Karl Öllinger had said the revelation would make it necessary to re-evaluate Pope Benedict XVI’s position on the right-wing Pius X Brotherhood and British Bishop John Williamson, a Holocaust denier.

The newspaper said an article written by the Pope was published by the publishing house “Aula-Verlag” 11 years ago.

The Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW), which has charged Aula-Verlag is an extremely right-wing operation, confirmed that the Pope had actually written the article, entitled “Freedom and Truth,” in 1995 when he was Josef Cardinal Ratzinger.

The article appeared in an anthology entitled “1848 – Heritage and Mission” published by Aula Verlag in 1998. Aula is probably the most important publisher of the extreme right in Austria.

The Vienna daily “Österreich” reports on February 10 Greens’ MP Karl Öllinger had said the revelation would make it necessary to re-evaluate Pope Benedict XVI’s position on the right-wing Pius X Brotherhood and British Bishop John Williamson, a Holocaust denier. The newspaper said an article written by the Pope was published by the publishing house “Aula-Verlag” 11 years ago.

The Publisher of Aula,  Otto Scrinzi, is a former member of the Nazi party and former SA-Sturmführer. His co-editor was the German extreme right wing propagandist Jürgen Schwab. Most of the authors belong to the hard-core extreme right.

In Cardinal Ratzinger’s Article “Freedom and Truth” there is criticism of National socialism, which was according to Josef Ratzinger apart from Marxism “the greatest slave-system of modern history”. But in the long philosophical article the Cardinal also criticises Liberalism and Democracy.

According to Green MP Karl Öllinger, “one has to see the role of the pope in a totally new light” and: “It is remarkable, that the pope has published an article in a book together with extreme right activists and Holocaust Deniers.”

The Vatican’s claims that the Pope did not know about the peculiar radical attitude of the Pius brotherhood should be also re-evaluated, believes Öllinger.

Erich Leitenberger, the spokesman of the archdiocese Vienna disagrees. The article of Ratzinger was published first in 1995 in the international periodical Communio. The publishers of Aula, he says, “evidently did not ask for the Cardinal’s permission to publish”.

However, after the election of Benedict XVI, Aula-Publishers have claimed that Ratzinger did put his article “at the disposal of the edition”. Aula published the picture of Josef Ratzinger in May 2005 on its title page entitled: “The German Pope From Aula-Author to Holy Father”

According to MP Öllinger, this Pope is liked by the German Neo-Nazi-Scene this article. Horst Mahler, a former German RAF-Terrorist, has used Ratzinger’s article as part of the defence in the court case against the German Holocaust Denier Ernst Zündel.

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When the religion class was taught, I had to leave the classroom. During the break after this lesson, we used to play in the courtyard. I was always abused as “murderer of God” and accused of having “crucified the savior”. I was jostled and pushed around. The catechist stood on the first floor and looked out upon the cheerful children and gave a kindly smile. It was a prologue of what was to come.

Exactly at the time that I was as an eight year old boy abused by boys of my age after their lessons in the Catholic faith, something else happened. “Father Georg Bichlmair, the Jesuit leader of a missionary group for the conversion of Jews called the ‘Paulus-Missionswerke’ declared in a public speech in March 1936 that Jews belonged to a different race that the German people,” writes Bruce F. Pauley in From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism. “Sympathy for the Jews should not blind Christians to the dangerous, contagious effects of the Jewish national character and to the spiritual homelessness of the Jews. Because of their race, Bichlmair believed, Jews remained different from Christians even if they were baptized. He therefore opposed baptized Jews holding any high office in the church hierarchy or the civil service up to the third generation.”

The Austrian Nazis could quote Catholic antisemites to make it clear to the people that they were just continuing what Catholics had proclaimed for many decades. All Nazi outrages were accepted by the official Church in silence: dealing with “the others”, the non-Christians, especially the Jews, Aryanization, the orgy of terror and theft, ostracism of the Jews first from the public then from the private economic sector, and finally deportation. True, a few individual Catholics asserted themselves bravely on behalf of a few Jews. But it is to its eternal shame that the Church did not even save the converted Jews, allowing their deportation instead. Even now, the Church is proud of having provided them with parcels before they were taken to the cattle trains.

Did the Catholic Church come out after their terrible failure during the “Volksgemeinschaft” (national socialist community) with more than verbal condemnations of antisemitism after the liberation 1945? No, on the contrary, Bishops had a soft heart for Nazis and helped war criminals to escape justice.

On March 29, 2008 Cardinal Schönborn published “Judaism’s Way to Salvation” in the Catholic weekly “The Tablet” and favored the conversion of Jews. He reminded the readers about the strengthening of the “positive moments” of relations between Catholics and Jews and wrote: “Tensions have, however, kept cropping up. The discussions concerning Pope Pius XII, the beatification of Pope Pius IX, or the revised wording of the Good Friday Prayer for the 1962 Rite … are a few such examples.”

Cardinal Schönborn is albeit for peaceful persuasion: “On the other hand, it means that this mandate must be carried out in the most sensitive way, cleansed of all un-Christian motives.”

In his open letter to the Chief Rabbi this week, Cardinal Schönborn now writes: “It is shameful and frightening that there are still people who openly deny the Holocaust and question the Jewish People`s right to exist.”

Unfortunately, there is not one word about the Holocaust Denier bishop Richard Williamson, who was just a few days before Holocaust Memorial Day readmitted by Pope Benedict XVI into the Catholic Church.

It is strange. Whenever prominent Austrian Catholics voice crude antisemitism, the church condemns antisemitism in general, but very seldom says a word about its actual manifestations. We experienced that right after the Second World War, when conservative ÖVP politicians denigrated Jews returning to Austria, during the antisemitic campaign of former President Kurt Waldheim and when, in 2001, the late far-right politician Jörg Haider came out with an scathing attack against Ariel Muzicant, president of the Austrian Jewish Communities.

The one exception to the rule was Bishop Reinhold Stecher who forbade the cult of alleged ritual murder of the Christian boy Andreas Rinn in Tyrol. However on this Catholic website, Jews are accused until today of having committed ritual murder.

Cardinal Schönborn says in his letter: “After the horrendous catastrophe of the Shoah, Christians realised that they, too, were burdened with guilt. The declarations of the Second Vatican Council and of the Popes have meanwhile made it clear to all Catholics that awareness of Christianity`s Jewish roots also includes affection for contemporary Judaism. This is all the more important at a time in which the dramatic conflicts in the Middle East continuously bring with them the danger that old anti-Semitic prejudices are once again beginning to spread their pernicious influence in a new form.”

Sadly, such noble words have no influence whatsoever on some Catholic priests and organizations whose favorite pastime is Israel bashing. Meanwhile, Pope Benedict just now made his peace with the traditional anti-Jewish wing of the Church, including the acceptance of Bishop Williamson, who denies the Nazi industrial mass murder by relying on the Neo-Nazi falsifier of history, Fred Leuchter. And Williamson is quoted by Lorenzo Salvia, in article dated January 28th in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, as repeating his denial of the existence of the gas chambers.

I have no doubt when it comes to the goodwill of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. However, the general condemnation of antisemitism and of Holocaust Denial is inconsistent, to say the least, with the tolerance in the Church for antisemites and Holocaust Deniers. Now is the time for words to become meaningful through deeds.

UPDATE

Karl adds:

Holocaust row: Schönborn sees mistakes in Vatican

Cardinal Schönborn sees after the revocation of the excommunication of the British lefebvrianish bishop Richard Williamson mistakes in Vatican.

“Those who deny the Shoa cannot be rehabilitated in his ecclesiastical office” said Schönborn on Thursday in ZiB 2 (night journal of Austrian State TV) Here “Vatican collaborators have not looked at it sufficiently” and had not enough informed about Williamson.

"Unambiguous" rendering of facts. However, Schönborn emphasized that the clarification of the pope was “absolutely unambiguous”. Benedict XVI has definitely condemned the Denial of Holocaust and assured the Jews of his “complete and undisputable Solidarity”. The pope had at the weekend revoked the excommunication of four bishops, who are followers of the traditionalist French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, among them also Williamson.

Reconciliation. The cardinal stressed that the intention of the pope was „a reconciliation with this group“ and a “gesture of co-operation”. Though the four bishops are “not yet confirmed in their office and authority”. As long as “they do not recognize the 2nd Vatican council, there will be no reconciliation”.

The post A Challenge for the Church appeared first on Jewcy.

Parliamentarians from the Green Party held up a poster declaring: “You have not learned the lessons of history.” As one who watched this spectacle live on television, I can say the election of this man is a shame for this country, which was only resurrected in 1945 because of the many Allied soldiers who gave their lives for its liberation.

FPÖ member Martin Graf, 48 years old, has attended extreme right-wing demonstrations on May 8 – according to the extreme right, on May 8,1945, when Nazi Germany surrendered, the occupation of Austria began. Graf is also a member of an extreme right wing student fraternity which once hosted a Neo-Nazi singer. Included in his repertoire was a song containing the lines, “fun starts after 6 million Jews are killed.”

Only one day after a tram conductor who greeted the guests of a Vienna tram with the Nazi “Sieg Heil” was removed from duty, Martin Graf has been elected to one of the most senior positions in a country which is apparently so proud of its anti-Fascist constitution.

We can hear all kind of noble declarations in parliament concerning how Austria condemns National Socialism. For example, Austrian chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer declared in 2000: “The SPÖ (Social-Democratic party) has established in its program, in its history as an Anti-Fascist party deeply connected with democracy, which rejects National Socialism and its crimes resolutely.” But it’s quite different in practise.

Such declarations are spoken, as we say in Austria, “out of the window,” meaning that they are mainly for foreign consumption. The same can be said about some of the declarations heard today in Austrian parliament.

Karl Öllinger, a Green MP, has published a dossier about the Austrian extreme right, including “Olympia.” Öllinger sent his dossier to all members of parliament. Despite its contents, the Austrian parliament has elected with majority Martin Graf the nominee of the extreme right FPÖ. Only the Greens and a few other members of parliament opposed it.

It is necessary to shed light on the activities of Graf, who is – despite all the facts known about Olympia – still a member of that organization.

Members of Olympia do not like to speak in public and when they speak they keep quiet about a lot of things. They prefer to let their guests speak or sing. One can not find their publication (”Der Olympe”) in a public library and their website is offline. But Graf has made statements such as this one: “Today’s state borders were drawn arbitrarily; the German people (”Volkstum”) must be free to spread out in Europe” (Der Spiegel 24/97, S. 54.)

Various far-right activities are punishable under Austrian criminal law; open support of National Socialism and advocacy of Nazi objectives are prohibited by legislation dating from 1947. Amendments to the laws approved in February 1992 widened the scope of prohibited activity to include denial of the Holocaust or “trivialization” of Nazi genocide. Martin Graf remarked on this law: “In a democratic world it should be permitted to criticize a law that restricts the freedom of speech and political activity.” (Format 21/00, S. 50)

But Graf finds it difficult to speak about the Holocaust. Interviewed on Austrian TV earlier this month, the following exchange took place:

Martin Graf on Austrian TV ( ZiB 2) on 1.10. 2008 interviewed by Armin Wol):

Armin Wolf: “So you do not doubt like your long standing party colleague John Gudenus that in the gas chambers millions of Jews were assassinated in the German Reich?”

Martin Graf: “I do not doubt, that masses have been annihilated, yes.”

Armin Wolf: “This is somehow a different formulation. I have asked you about millions of Jews. You have said now – masses annihilated. The million you doubt?”

Martin Graf: “If you so wish, millions yes, I said masses…”

Armin Wolf asked explicitly about millions of Jews assassinated in the gas chambers. Martin Graf does not take a stand on the millions of Jews who were murdered in gas chambers. This is the decisive point for the Holocaust deniers like Irving, who deny the existence of gas chambers and the planned murder of millions of Jews. They admit only the rampant epidemics in the concentration camps.

Why did Martin Graf not say a word about the gas chambers and the millions of murdered Jews?

Graf’s extremist pedigree goes back many years. He was a steward at a lecture given by the German Neo-Nazi Reinhold Oberlercher in 1987 at an institute of Vienna University, where Oberlercher called Jews “disease-causing agents.”

The Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) has long characterized Olympia as an extreme right organization. The invitation of well known Neo-Nazi and Holocaust deniers to Olympia demonstrates the spirit reigning there.

• The British Holocaust-denier David Irving was on his way to deliver a speech to Olympia (on “Adolf Eichmann’s negotiations with Jewish leaders in Hungary”) when he was arrested on November 11, 2005. He was sentences on the terms of the law forbidding Nazi activities by an Austrian court.

• Jörg Hähnel, leader of the extreme-right German NPD in Berlin, was invited on January 26, 2008 to Olympia. In January 2007, Hähnel defended the Nazi legal system. In May 2007, he carried a cudgel on a visit to the Landtag (parliament) of Mecklenburg. And just recently he was fined 4,500 Euros in Berlin for justifying the assassination of the communist Rosa Luxemburg.

• On November 20, 2004 Olympia was jointly responsible for the performance of Michael Müller, a functionary of NPD. He wrote and performed the following song:

“With 6 million Jews just begins the fun,

Until 6 million Jews the oven is turned on,

(…).(…) we have plenty of Zyklon B. (…)(…)

At 6 million Jews, for a long time it is not over.”

Mit 6 Millionen Juden da fängt der Spaß erst an,

bis 6 Millionen Juden da bleibt der Ofen an.

(…),(…) wir haben reichlich Zyklon B.(…)(…)

bei 6 Millionen Juden, ist noch lange nicht Schluss.

• Frank Rennicke, an extreme right-wing singer, is founding member of the “Association of the Persecuted because of Holocaust Denial” ( “Vereins zur Rehabilitierung der wegen Bestreitens des Holocaust Verfolgten. “) Rennicke was featured in the publication of Olympia, “Der Olympe,” which is edited by Martin Graf.

On May 7, 2008 the German Ministry of Internal Affairs banned Rennicke’s organization and closed their wesbite. The reason? “The aims and activities of this organization are contrary to the criminal law and are directed against the constitutional order of the German Federal Republic. The activity consisted of antisemitic propaganda, Holocaust denial and glorification of the National Socialist terror regime.”

In the Proclamation of the Second Republic of Austria of April 27, 1945 we find this remarkable passage: “The National Socialist Reich government of Adolf Hitler had on account of the complete political, economic, and cultural annexation of the country, led the people of Austria – rendered powerless and impotent (macht und willenlos) – into a senseless and hopeless war of conquest that no Austrian ever wanted, or was in a position to foresee and approve, for the waging of war against nations against whom no true Austrian had ever harbored feelings of hostility or hatred.”

We know that this was a brazen lie; many Austrians were also perpetrators.

Whatever Austrian politicians declare this time, there can be no doubt that, with Graf’s election as President of Austria’s parliament, this country now has a senior political figure who is a member of an extreme right organization.

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Usually anti-Semitism is coded. But the code is very simple. Here just one example of recent days. The right-wing daily Magyar Hirlap reported on October 10 on the the unveiling of a statue of Catholic Bishop Ottokár Prohászka (1858-1927): one of the leading ideologues of the “Christian course” in the years after the First World War. Prohászka advocated anti-Semitic discrimination, the so called numerus clausus restricting the number of Jews admitted to institutes of tertiary education to 6 percent of all matriculants. That was before the Holocaust the proportion of Jews in the population.

The numerus clausus was the first rupture in the constitutional equality granted to Hungarian Jews in 1867.

It is not a bit surprising that the vice-president of Hungarian parliament Sándor Lezsák (Fidesz) gave a speech, an apologetic review of the so called “Christian course”, of history and politics between the two world wars, when the “Christian-national” idea was official ideology. Lezsák was not disturbed by the fact, that one of the main pillars of this idea was political anti-Semitism and that the rulers of Hungary were the first ones in Europe in the 20th century to carry out anti-Jewish discriminative jurisdiction.

On the contrary, Lezsák did not mince his words. He said that during the time after 1945 the names of Horthy and Prohászka were not to be mentioned and that “the influence of this spiritual terror exists until today in our homeland”. According to one of the highest dignitaries of Hungary one of the biggest “crimes” of Ottokár Prohászka was, that “he advocated in politics in publications and teaching the Christian-social doctrine, and that he raised his voice to drive back the cosmopolitan-parasite class…”

It was just this language, describing Jews as “parasites”, this “moderate” antisemitism that contributed to the fact, that the overwhelming majority of Hungarians were onlookers, when about half a million Hungarian Jews were deported during six weeks in spring 1944.

When on October 14 the liberal (SZDSZ) MP Péter Gusztos spoke in parliament about this scandal, a storm of protest broke out in the conservative camp, demanding that he should ask for forgiveness for describing Prohászka as one of the leaders of Hungary’s home-grown antisemitic ideology.

According to the Catholic daily Magyar Kurir, the Archbishop Balázs Bábel said in his speech when unveiling the statue of Prohászka, that he was educated in the doctrine of Ottokár Prohászka, and that as seminarist, he was “witness to the shameful event when in 1945 at the instigation of Mihály Károlyi (democratic Hungarian politician) the poet György Faludy and his communist comrades destroyed the statue in the Karolyi park”. What makes his account particularly amazing is that he was born in 1950, and therefore might have found it difficult to witness an event that was said to have taken place in 1945. And, as a matter of fact, Faludy was at the time not a communist, but a social democrat and the event did not take place in 1945 but a year later.

According to Magyar Kurir, a journalist asked the bishop whether he found it acceptable that in the Budapest Holocaust museum the picture of Prohászka is located near the picture of Hitler accompanied by the text: “one of the leading persons of the antisemitic ideology”.

Archbishop Bábel answered that he “will not visit the Holocaust museum until they change the text and the setting.”

Prohászka had of course some “good Jewish friends” and he was also ready to convert Jews who were Hungarian nationalists. But in most of his declarations about Jews he did not speak about conversions. Already in 1893 he explained in an article that the Christian state should not accept Jews, “but as soon as possible should remove them”, because they are “cancer,” who has “gnawed off the Hungarian people to a skeleton” and “because they have no conscience, they strangle heartlessly their victims, whom it had succeeded to take in” who “wanted always to rule the [Hungarian] nation.”

Prohászka also described the Jews as “damned people” he saw them as dangers for the nation as “bugs and rats” according to the catholic priest György Kiss, who published his autobiography in 1987. Prohászka also published his antisemitic views in English.*

The Budapest Nazi editors Gede brothers published in 2003 the selected writings of Ottokár Prohászka under the title “My antisemitism” and no Catholic protest was heard.

As the Hungarian writer András Nyerges said, it is not decent to say that Prohászka was as far as “race doctrine” is concerned a follower of Hitler, because he advocated much earlier that doctrine.

So the picture of this antisemitic ideologue is to remain in the Holocaust museum in Budapest.

With the erection of statues for Prohászka, one of the ideologues of Hungarian “Christian” anti-Semitism comes also the desire to change the name of a Budapest street named after the teacher and journalist Béla Somogyi (1868 – 1920) who was murdered by officers of the Horthy regime who threw his corpse into the Danube.

Somogyi, did not participate in the short lived Hungarian communist regime in 1919. But during the white terror – when thousands of Jews, communists and supposed “communists” were murdered by those inspired by the “Christian-national” idea – he courageously reported on their crimes in the social-democratic daily “Népszava” (an antifascist paper published until Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944; today probably the best Hungarian daily).

There is one street in Budapest named after this martyr of the labor movement and the conservative Fidesz councilors of the district voted for the change of the name together with the representative of the liberal SZDSZ party. Socialists and other democrats protested against this planned change and it looks as if that protest will be successful.

* (The Jewish Question in Hungary. The Hauge, Holland. 1920 respectively in German: Die Judenfrage in Ungarn, Hammerschlaege, Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund. Hamburg 1921, Heft 21.)

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