Congratulations, Howard!

Howard Owens' Global News Watch made The Big Time yesterday, in Opinion Journal's Best of the Web Today:

Sounding Off at the Saudis--III

If you missed today's rally at the Saudi Embassy--it's recently come to our attention that not all of our readers even live in Washington--blogger Howard Owens suggests you make your views known in other ways: "Let's make our voices heard. Let's send a simple but clear message: 'Let our people go.' Let's not be nasty or mean or argumentative. Just a clear simple message that the Saudi government is not making friends with the American people by holding our citizens against their will." E-mail and phone contact information is here.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 07/26/02 09:50:02 PM
Categorized as Classic.

"A Pope and His Critics"

"What the young people are responding to and the elites don’t get."

A fine article, including remarks on subversive traitors, by Michael Novak at NRO today:

.... The pope's great gifts as a professional philosopher and man of profound, almost mystical prayer life give a rare depth to his papal writings, which guarantees their durability over many generations. Catholic "progressives" in North America, however, will never forgive him. Among them, Pope John Paul II has many harsh critics, not to say sworn enemies. I have met two priests who say with some intensity that they pray every day for his speedy passage to God, so greatly do they resent his interpretation of Vatican II. Former priest James Carroll calls for the pope's resignation, and preposterously describes the pope's policies as "anti-reform-closed, secretive, dishonest, totalitarian." The reason is that "progressives" such as Carroll have developed their own legend about Vatican II. According to them, Vatican II repealed the strong papacy of Vatican I and even the Council of Trent, and gave the church in a revolutionary way to "the people of God." Power to the people! ....

The "progressives" will not forgive John Paul II because what they call sexual liberation the pope, in a quite well-founded, traditional way, regards as the tyranny of the libido, a form of slavery. Whereas they want eagerly to accept the norms of secular society on divorce, homosexual acts, premarital sex, and other pelvic desires, the pope stands with "the democracy of the dead," the voice of the faithful of the past, so many martyrs, so many lovers of chastity. That stand is an outrage to those who regard "Vatican II" as their own playpen, within which to do what they feel like doing. In their minds, "Vatican II" overturned everything unpleasant and challenging in the teaching of the Church. It liberated their desires. It made them feel liberated and modern. Among the most powerful and deepest of the pope's intellectual initiatives is the new, phenomenological foundation he has given "the theology of the body." "Progressives" avoid arguments at that depth. But it is exactly the unity that the pope sees between soul and body, the unity arising from our persons being thoroughly embodied, and our bodies being thoroughly pervaded by our personhood, that makes the pope's vision seem so "together." He looks at young people whole. He calls them to their wholeness. That is what young people are responding to....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 07/26/02 03:54:24 PM
Categorized as Classic & Pope John Paul the Great.

"Pius the hero"

Excellent article on Pope Pius XII in The Spectator, July 20:

.... Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Pius XII was the object of adulation by Jews and Gentiles alike because of the Catholic Church’s role in saving more than 700,000 Jewish lives. As Rabbi David Dalin has shown, the people who showered official and public praise on Pius XII include Albert Einstein in 1940; Chaim Weizmann in 1943; the Chief Rabbi of Israel in 1944; the secretary of the World Jewish Congress in 1945; Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, in 1945; the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 1955; the State of Israel via the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, which gave a special concert for the Pope in the Vatican in 1955; and Golda Meir on his death in 1958. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Israel Zolli, converted to Catholicism in 1944 and took the Christian name Eugenio in recognition of the Pope’s personal record in saving Jews.

Jewish historians and experts have followed suit in their praise of Pius: the list of his defenders includes Sir Martin Gilbert and the former deputy chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert Kempner. A brilliant lawyer of German Jewish origin, Kempner wrote a preface and epilogue to Jenö Levai’s 1968 book on Hungarian Jewry and the Papacy: Pope Pius XII Did Not Remain Silent, in which he says that the book ‘depicts truthfully the part played by the Catholic Church in the struggle against the “Final Solution of the Jewish question in Hungary”’. Kempner denounced ‘a deliberately fabricated myth’ that the Church had remained silent and done nothing — a myth he equates with pro-Nazi revisionism because it attempts to displace blame for the Holocaust from the Nazis on to the Catholic Church.

This unanimously favourable view of Pius XII was singlehandedly overturned in 1963. The cause was not a new piece of historical research but instead a fictional play by a former member of the Hitler Youth, Rolf Hochhuth....

The author makes an interesting observation about "Catholic" subversive traitors:

.... Yet, according to Fr Gumpel, ‘This is not a Jewish–Catholic argument.’ Indeed, Rabbi Dalin accuses three of Pius’s attackers, two former seminarians and a former priest, of using their accusations to conduct an internal argument within the Catholic Church about the future of the Papacy after John Paul II....

(Thanks Kathryn.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 07/26/02 11:33:02 AM
Categorized as Classic.