One final note on a troublesome matter

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

It seems somehow appropriate on a day in which the Secretariat of State of the Holy See declared that Richard Williamson, in order "to be admitted to episcopal functions in the Church, must also distance himself in an absolutely unmistakable and public way from his position on the Shoah, which was unknown to the Holy Father in the moment of the lifting of the excommunication" that we learned about the fate of Dr. Aribert Heim, known more accurately as "Dr. Death".

What might interest Williamson is what this man, who died in 1992 in Egypt under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, was guilty of, among other atrocities, "performing operations on prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a souvenir." Of course, most, if not all of these prisoners were Jewish, imprisoned and tortured for no other reason than being Jewish.

According the twisted rationale of that walking contradiction, known as the Christian anti-Semite, the Jews are God's enemies, guilty of deicide, and opposed to God. According to the SSPX, "the status of this opposition must be universal, inevitable, and terrible." What is terrible are atrocities committed by people who hold such evil beliefs. It is important to take note of what the Lord says himself: "No one takes it [his life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father" (Jn 10:18 ESV). He laid down his life of his own free will in obedience to the Father, whose love for us caused him to not spare his only begotten Son (Jn 3:16). Through his only begotten Son, by means of our rebirth through the waters of baptism, we are adopted daughters and sons of God, children of Abraham, our father in the faith because his trust in God's promise and ours. To paraphrase Pope Pius XI, the Jews are our elder brothers in the faith and, spiritually, we are all Semites. This is more consistent with what St. Paul writes in those vital of chapters of his Letter to the Romans, chapters 8-11.

I have to be honest, I dislike the terms Holocaust and Shoah, using these terms give this horror a certain theological legitimacy and/or mystical credibility. I prefer to call it what it is, to face reality squarely, it was mass murder. Given certain situations in the world today (i.e., Darfur), this shows forth the hollowness of our recitation of the slogan Never again!.