Bad Pope!

The Jewish Week has an interesting story on how the Jewish community is responding to the proposed beatification of Pope Pius XII, who “failed to speak out publicly against the Holocaust.”

The ADL has suggested that there might be serious ramifications for the Catholic-Jewish relationship if Pius gets his Sainthood, and of course the article ends up talking about… Israel.

And of course it sucks, and yeah… this guy sounds like he was a big fat fucking coward. Especially since Hitler was marching on Catholics all over the place too. But I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know what he was doing secretly, or why he made the choices he made. For all we know he was smuggling Jews through the basement of the Vatican. And now he’s dead, so we’ll never know.

So I have mixed feelings about this issue. For a lot of reasons.

Part of me feels like this isn’t our business in the least. I want to argue that people have a right to organize their own religious structures without political pressure from the outside world, or other religions. It’s why we separate church and state (not just to protect the state, but also to protect the church, allow it autonomy). And while the ADL and the press aren’t “government” they are political, and they are an outside force…

I don’t begin to understand Popes, or Saints, or why Catholics care in the first place. But for that very reason, I’m not in a position to stick my nose into this affair. I have nothing invested. I don’t believe in any of it.

And really, for those who do believe, this is where reason departs. If he’s a Saint, he’s a Saint. God says so. Crazy shit, but that’s what religion is. And no amount of pressure from us will change this man’s goodness.

Dangerous stuff… the politics of faith. Faith in politics.