Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Boston.com: Vatican releases WWII letter aiming to show aid to Jews
The Vatican has been opening its private archives in an attempt to flesh-out and hopefully cast a kinder light on its own history during the Nazi period.
What got me pondering was this part:
In it, Cassulo writes that the "overwhelming portion" of paperwork going through the Vatican Embassy in Bucharest related to requests for information about the fate of "people of the Hebrew race."
Cassulo writes that "some people" had told him that it was "inopportune for the offices of the Holy See to give this type of preference to Jews."
One of those who had complained to the Vatican Embassy was the Roman Catholic bishop of Timisoara, whose surname was Pacha. His first name was not given in the letter.
Writing in Latin to Cassulo, Pacha complained that the great majority of the faithful in his diocese were ethnic Germans who were "indignant."
He said his faithful were "publicly and openly accusing the church of having a good relationship with the Jews, enemies of the German people."...
Here are ethnic Germans, not living in Germany, complaining on their own, thus representing their true, uncompelled feelings. A bit of data to indicate that the Holocaust, while directly performed by a relative few, was in fact a direct expression of an over-arching and representative cultural condition - another straw on the camel's back of a myth that a minority of radical extremists hijacked a nation - or at the very least, an indicator of why it was so easy for them to do so.
Any parallel between that and stories of what we are assured are 'small minorities of extremist radicals' who nevertheless manage to operate, recruit and even prosper in societies world-wide today? The number of actual actors may be small, but how fertile is the ground they operate in? And how small is the minority, really?
I'm honestly not providing an answer, it's just a few thoughts that crossed my mind while reading the piece above.
