[Haeretz] A leading Polish Catholic bishop caused a stir on Monday when he was quoted as saying that Jews had "expropriated" the Holocaust as a "propaganda weapon".
The comments by Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, a former head of the Polish bishops' conference, prompted concern among Jewish leaders in both Poland and Italy after they were published on the conservative Italian Catholic website www.pontifex.roma.
Pieronek later went on Polish television to say his comments had been manipulated and he denied one phrase in which he was quoted as saying "the Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention".
He also said that he did not "authorise" the publication of the interview, which was still on the website on Monday evening.
"It is undeniable that the greatest number of dead in concentration camps were Jews but there are also Polish gypsies, Italians and Catholics on the list," he was quoted as saying.
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Tadeusz Pieronek, a Polish bishop, declared that the Holocaust was invented by Jews to garner support from the rest of the world. According to Bishop Pieronek the Holocaust is mere “propaganda.” This astonishing statement, however, comes from a Catholic bishop from a country with a notorious history of Christian antisemitism and in which millions of Jews perished. Many Poles collaborated with the Germans, and most looked the other way as their Jewish neighbors were dragged from their homes and shot in a nearby forest or gassed in a death camp down the road. Even after WWII and the defeat of Germany many Jews were victims of Catholic Poles.
ReplyDeleteNone of this should be too surprising, though, given what the Catholic Church in Poland taught the faithful. Cardinal Augustyn Hlond, primate of Poland, said in a pastoral letter in 1936, three years before the German invasion and as part of an official Catholic endorsement of the Nazi boycott of Jewish business in Poland:
“There will be the Jewish problem as long as Jews remain. It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in freethinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a negative one.”
This was read from the pulpits of all churches in the country.
Gabriel Wilensky
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Author
Six Million Crucifixions:
How Christian Teachings About Jews Paved the Road to the Holocaust
http://www.SixMillionCrucifixions.com
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Dr. Wilensky:
ReplyDeleteDo you make a lot of money spreading hate?
Wilensky, do you actually take yourself and your rabid anti-Catholicism seriously? You are an utter hypocrite, you hateful git.
ReplyDelete