Redeeming the Pope: Preface

Right in the middle of our dual howls, Spartacus still managed to set down his flintlock long enough to weigh in on one other point in our two big Sunday-tirades. In it – during my turn at the steaming mike – I mentioned a photo at a particular UK website, adding that the site's owner-writer

 […P]uts credence in the much ballyhooed claim that the Vatican was a Nazi collaborator up to and during World War II. I want to address that in another blog – this ludicrous assertion is demonstrably untrue (despite the photograph Condell offers out of any context, showing a pair of smiling cardinals shaking hands with Hitler), and it walks along the same intolerant path as that strode by the Holocaust-deniers.

Spartacus's comment to me on that posting included this statement, which floored me:

Regarding the pic of the Cardinals & Nazis -- I don't know the context of that pic, but I am under the impression that it has been fairly well established that the Catholic Church, if not outright collaborators with the Nazis, certainly didn't go too far to inconvenience themselves by opposing Hitler either. Of course, the Catholic Church was hardly unique in that regard -- other than a handful of courageous individual clergy, it's my understanding that organized religion was mostly mute on the subject of the Nazis?

I'm easily one of the top poster-children demonstrating the sad fact that there are some folks out there who have a modicum of brains, yet who've also taken as true an oft-repeated slander/slur or simple piece of hearsay. (My own cases in point being too numerous to mention; I'm confident they've been showing up here from time to time.)

Add to this a naïve-streak that I'll likely never grow out of (which isn't the same thing as a sweet innocence): having known Sparkster since Vietnam was the Iraq of its day, and well aware of his broad swath of skills and fields of knowledge, I was startled (and actually, unreasonably, angry) that he had come to accept this calumny.

My naïveté here is my automatically, non-consciously assuming that a good friend knows what I know.

There was only one thing for me to do, of course. With apologies to Spartacus, with whom I want to start looking at some immediate fallout from my posting of last Sunday's tirades, I'm pulling hard on the brakes of what I'd been mentally lining up for the next couple weeks here – picture, in fact, a huge brake lever that looks like the traditional railroad-track switcher. The image is apt – I’m sidelining the other stuff for now while I work on, and post here when complete, a document / response / essay I can also send out whenever I run into this particular bit of silliness (including to that UK chap). I hope to have it up in a few days.

Stay tuned, folks… and start opening your minds, too – it's the only way to fill them. To once again quote the good admiral, Robert Heinlein, from Time Enough for Love:

If "everybody knows" such-and-such, then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one.


Blue Dog commented:


Blue Dog Aug 20, 2007
I will look forward to it. I basically assumed that there was no truth to those particular conspiracy theories. But my default position on most such theories is disbelief until I look into them myself. So it will be nice to get educated via your response.