by W. E. Gutman
Albeniz is less ambassadorial in an off-the record comment on the Honduran Church’s coziness with that nation’s military establishment, a tryst he characterizes as contrary to Christian ethics. Careful not to name names, Albeniz also criticizes high-ranking prelates who, “owing indifference, personal inclination or stratagem,” shield known pedophile priests from imminent prosecution and reassign them to remote parishes in the wilds of Honduras. News of the recent assassination of a Maya tribal counselor, the fiftieth in less than ten years, inspires an icy denunciation by Albeniz of the “state-sponsored cleansing” of ethnic minorities by ranchers and land speculators.
A day later, Albeniz is found dead, face down in a remote corner of the vast municipal garbage dump outside Tegucigalpa, felled execution-style by a bullet to the back of his head. Overhead, vultures glide in wide sweeping circles, surveying life and espying death, smelling it as it wafts from the bottomless chasms and sulfurous pits where the corpses of street children are often dumped. Emboldened by some irresistible effluvia, a few make landfall. Waddling from side to side, wary and cunning, they fight for the foulest scrap of offal in their path.
A police account, endorsed by a press all too eager to bamboozle the public with fabrications rather than risk the authorities’ wrath by reporting the truth, concludes that Albeniz wandered “in an unsafe part of town where he was robbed and killed by ‘delinquents’.” Eyewitness reports that men driving a late-model SUV with dark-tinted windows dumped the lifeless body are ignored.
Spain’s envoy to Honduras calls for an investigation. Back-room diplomacy triumphs when the papal nuncio in Madrid intercedes, first with King Juan Carlos I, then with Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, urging them to discourage Honduras from pursuing the matter “in the spirit of appeasement.” Hondurans need not be coaxed to look the other way. They have a long history of sloth and indifference. A slapdash inquest by a jaded constabulary drowns in a sea of apathy, ineptitude and obscurantist bureaucracy, and the murder, one in a daily cavalcade of homicides, is quickly forgotten.
Insisting that the case be kept from going cold, the Spanish ambassador in Honduras is recalled to Madrid and hastily replaced. Rumors that men working as gofers for right-wing Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez murdered Albeniz are promptly muted when it is learned that the alleged perpetrators are in fact members of an undercover squad headed by Police Chief Ofelia Galeano, commander of Honduras’ Anti-Narcotraffick-ing Detail. Galeano is later charged with soliciting bribes from high-level drug traffickers and conspiring, with the help of a number of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency operatives, to siphon large sums of money from fines assessed against criminals. Galeano, a devout Catholic, quietly resigns her police post and is promoted to a low-profile but high-power executive position in the Honduran National Congress.
When Padre Antonio Quetglas, vicar of Tegucigalpa’s Archdiocese, blamed the investigation of parish priest Enrique Vásquez Vargas, a self-confessed child molester, on a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy to deflect attention from Israeli atrocities against Palestinians,” was he speaking his mind or echoing the voice of his master, Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodríguez? Or were the unceasingly fanned embers of anti-Semitism being stirred yet again by the Church to deflect from another sex scandal? The cardinal, a fast-rising star in the Roman Catholic hierarchy who was scolded by the Anti-Defamation League for voicing anti-Jewish sentiments -- and summarily forgiven -- put Reverend Vásquez to work in two remote Honduran parishes. He also shielded Vásquez, who had spent time at two “clergy treatment centers” and has since become an international fugitive, from prosecution. Claiming he’d rather “go to jail than harm one of my priests,” Cardinal Rodríguez steadfastly kept the police at bay. The 44-year-old Vásquez, who fled his native Costa Rica in 1998, served in at least two U.S. dioceses before absconding to Honduras where he was arrested in 2007.
Cardinal Rodríguez, once short-listed for the papacy, first drew fire in the U.S. in 2003 when he characterized the media covering the scandal as “protagonists of a persecution against the Church.” Speaking on condition of anonymity -- “I don’t wish to be ‘accidentally’ hit by a bus or have my Coke laced with strychnine… -- an eminent Honduran journalist offered this laconic perspective:
“Cardinal Rodriguez is ambitious and arrogant. He hobnobs with the rich and famous. He disdains the poor. His sermons are more political than pastoral and his private conversations are peppered with an-Semitic remarks.”
The rich and famous include the political elite, members of Opus Dei and high-ranking military officers, many of whom committed atrocities during the “dirty war” of the 80s. While three incorruptible archbishops were murdered, two in Guatemala, the third in El Salvador, for blowing the whistle on human rights violators, Rodríguez maintained a cozy association with caudillos and generals. He continues to coddle the plutocrats and the military and still hopes to occupy the papal throne in the not too-distant future.
Manuel Albeniz’s remains are flown to Barcelona. Officers of the Grand Lodge of Spain conduct a Masonic funeral in his honor and memory. The Museo del Prado in Madrid flies the flag at half-mast. He is cremated and his ashes are scattered over the ruins of an old Jewish cemetery. Jewish graves in Spain, some going as far back as the 12th century, are slowly being emptied and the bones reburied in unmarked plots. A more sinister form of inquisition now endeavors to erase all memory of a once thriving and influential Jewish presence in Spain. Long gone is the Iberia of the “learned” King Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284) who surrounded himself with Jews, notably in his great scientific, cultural and commercial enterprises.
On January 21, 2009 Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the extreme right-wing of the Catholic Church, invalidates the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including one whose denial of the Holocaust provokes outrage. The revocation is seen as a clear sign that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy is increasingly supporting traditionalists hostile to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which sought to create a more modern and open Church. Among the men reinstated is Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who, a week earlier, had said in an interview:
“I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler … I believe there were no gas chambers.”
Williamson was elaborating on a speech he had made 20 years earlier at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes church in Sherbrooke, Québec:
“There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new State of Israel … Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism.”
Like Williamson, the other four reinstated men were members of the Society of St. Pius X, founded by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 to protest the modernizing reforms of Vatican II. Archbishop Lefebvre made the men bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.
In a letter sent to followers, Bishop Bernard Fellay, director of the Society of St. Pius said,
“Thanks to this gesture, Catholics attached to tradition throughout the world will no longer be unjustly stigmatized and condemned for having kept the faith of their fathers.”
Somehow, a tradition that inhibits religious freedom and promotes anti-Semitism does not seem to enhance Church unity or improve its reputation. But in recent years, Benedict has made other concessions to Lefebvre’s followers. He allowed a broader recitation of the Tridentine rite, a service that was made optional in the 1960s and which includes a prayer calling for the mass conversion of Jews.
Pope Benedict arrives in Israel on May 11, 2009. Ill at ease and diffident, the pontiff speaks like a historian, like someone observing a not-so-distant past from the secure sidelines of officialdom. It is clear
that the horrors to which he alludes with professorial aloofness have little more than academic significance. He fails to mention the Nazis by name, to characterize their actions as cold-blooded murder. He glosses over his own past so he doesn’t have to explain it.
A Papal spokesman defends Benedict:
“He can’t mention everything every time he speaks.”
It is this abject spin doctoring that prompts demands for a few extra words by the Pope about the details that haunt his Papacy, about the fact that of all the people on earth it was a man with his background who was chosen to be Pope.
Hanoch Daum writes in his column.
“You were not asked to do something unprecedented or heroic. All that was required from you was a brief, authoritative and compassionate sentence. All you had to do was to express regret. That’s all we wanted to hear.”
Another editorial called the visit “a missed opportunity.”
“[His] statements condemning anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial lost their potency because of his lukewarm remarks at Yad Vashem [Holocaust Memorial]. The Pope’s visit shows that there is no real dialogue between Israel and the Vatican.”
While the Pope’s past as a member of the Hitler Youth and the German Army was widely acknowledged, it is understandably very difficult for some people to get beyond it. What revolts Michel Montvert, who lost nearly nine-tenths of his family to Hitler’s gas chambers, is that cardinals of the Catholic Church, meeting in secret conclave in the Sistine Chapel, knowing these facts and aware of the Church’s dubious history during the Second World War, chose among all the candidates in their midst to select the man who would later call himself Benedict. This was blindness or arrogance or worse. Certainly, they knew their choice would unsettle at least one group of people sharing a long and difficult history with the Church. Certainly, they might have foreseen a moment when the new Pope would stand before a Holocaust memorial and be seen both as a representative of his Church and of his past. Yet, they went ahead, as if by design, and appointed as the head of an empire with the Vatican’s discreditable history someone with a blemished history like that of former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He could have, Montvert observed, easily addressed these issues in the state whose creation was in part a by-product of that abomination. The Vatican’s argument that he had addressed them before was unconvincing because by choosing not to do so in the one place where such a statement of acknowledgement and regret would have made the most difference, he raised questions not about a choice but about the motives behind it.
It is impossible to assess Pope Benedict XVI's ostensible love of Jews based on a homily he delivered fifteen years or so ago, or on his assertion that Catholic-Jewish relations remain his “top priority.” A preoccupation with interfaith harmony suggests the existence of an underlying conflict. For the Catholic Church, the 20th century opened with a strong conservative reaction against a modernism that infused life into the moribund institution. The chief instigator of this reaction was the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which tells Catholics what they may and may not read and defends against any form of heterodoxy.
As John Paul II lay dying, Catholics prayed for a Third World pope. But the old, diehard, Eurocentric Vatican insiders picked a German so the Church could retain its stranglehold on power instead of dealing with real-world issues like poverty, overpopulation, AIDS and priestly buggerism.
In effect, the Inquisition was reinforced under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The doctrinaire prelate was summoned to Rome to cover and redress the perceived theological failings of John Paul II. Ratzinger was promptly appointed Prefect of the Congregation and immediately launched a conservative rear-guard assault against the progressive faction of the Church, especially in Latin America, and with the assistance of Opus Dei, the Vatican's most radical right-wing (and anti-Semitic) crusaders.
Ratzinger was quick to enunciate the theoretical basis of the Mass which, in his view, was being diluted by “Liberation Theology,” the oxygen-rich ministry that redefined and enlivened Catholicism south of the Rio Grande. Under Ratzinger's guidance, the political, anti-Socialist aspect of the Inquisition was beefed up. Two of his acolytes, Cardinals Sebastian Biaggio and Bernardin Gatin (both members of Opus Dei) led a silent campaign that resulted in the “defrocking” of scores of bishops and parish priests whose greatest sins were to teach poor children how to read and write, and encourage workers to unionize.
Short on political clout but long on memory, the poor in Latin America have not forgotten that Pope John Paul II paid a courtesy call on then-president of El Salvador, Armando Calderón Sol -- a man widely suspected of engineering the assassination of Archbishop Romero and, with Ronald Reagan’s backing, of masterminding the massacre of 900 men, women and children at El Mozote by U.S.-trained death squads. Surely the Pope must have known that in El Salvador, like elsewhere in Central America, the rich and powerful have systematically defrauded the poor and denied most of the people any voice in the affairs of their country.
The election of Benedict XVI has reopened old wounds. Though in decline in Latin America, the Church maintains a deeply symbiotic rapport with the plutocracy and keeps tapping into the reactionary power base to maintain both doctrinal monopoly and political custody over the masses. This has in large part contributed to the success of a shrill and militant form of evangelical Protestantism marketed in theater-like arenas by skillful actor-preachers who drive their congregations to fits of trancelike religious fervor dangerously reminiscent of hysteria.
Eleven days after the Pope’s visit to Israel, the incoming and retiring Archbishops of Westminster launch a joint offensive against atheists and secular society. At the installation of the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols at Westminster Cathedral, his predecessor, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor describes a lack of faith as “the greatest of evils.” Surrendering to hyperbole, he blames atheism for war and destruction, implying that it is an even greater evil than sin itself. While the hostility that atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words, -- no war has ever been waged in the name of atheism -- Murphy-O’Connor speaks of the “battles that will be won and lost in the effort to sustain a Christian presence in secular society
“The things that [result from secularism] are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trust between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to the people.”
Archbishop Nichols, glitteringly vested in newly minted gold miter and chasuble, and sounding more like a warrior than a man of God, declares open season against what he calls the “secular agenda.”
But angry reaction to flippant comments Nichols makes about child molestation casts a shadow over the installation. Referring without a hint of apology to a report that exposes decades of abuse by Catholic priests and nuns in Ireland, he warns that the scandal threatens to overshadow the “good done by the religious orders.”
Michèle Elliott, chief executive of the charity Kidscape, is indignant.
“This is ludicrous. He should have issued a straightforward mea culpa. This is all about the children; the rest of them be damned.”
Patrick Walsh, a spokesman for the group Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, also condemns Nichols’ remarks.
“Rubbish is too kind a word for what the Archbishop has said. He ought to take a long hard look at the character of the people he is talking about and ask himself if they are capable of being good.”
Tom Williams, of Oxford, sums up the proceedings with beguiling irreverence and wit. He suggests that the words of Murphy-O’Connor and Nichols would not be out of place in a Monty Python farce.
“Have two supposedly intelligent men ever spouted such nonsense? God bless the atheists -- oh, how we need them to protect us from these nitwits.”
The Inventor Speaks
The Appendices of Hieronymus Bosch, translated from the Flemish and prefaced by Jan Van den Haag, with commentaries by Michel Montver
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Copied, counterfeited and cloned but unrivaled, Hieronymus Bosch soars above his imitators. The attention he devotes to the hidden source of things, to the ideals they impart, his contempt for the mighty clergy and for the evils they commit, their intolerance, political dogmatism and theological rigidity, all attest to his nonconformist genius. Also betrayed in his work are the inner paroxysm of doubt and the disgust for his fellow men that must have guided his brush.
His universe reeks of the infernal odor of sulfur. One can imagine the nausea he must have felt as he detailed an orgy of transgressions and elaborate punishments before a public all too familiar with their terrifying realism. The Hell that awaits sinners is not much different from the actuality that punctuates their existence, an actuality they magnify as imagination, fear and the fetters of religious indoctrination subdue and defeat them.
Bosch’s prime objective is to communicate with and, in so doing, to respond to a public evenly split between those who will not see, no matter how clearly the truth is expressed, and those desperately thirsting for the freedom to exhume it from an ossuary brimming with myths and lies.