Catholic and Enjoying It!
Holocaust denial is intolerable.
It’s not a startling message for anybody who is even moderately willing to credit the good faith and brains of Joseph Ratzinger. But it’s a smack in the face for enemies of the Church who are bound and determined to construe Benedict’s attempt to reconcile with SSPXers as an imprimatur on Williamson’s quackery. Sullivan has been promulgating this lie for a week or two now.
Meanwhile, Williamson has been feeling the squeeze: public ridicule (richly deserved), loss of his position at a seminary he should never have been allowed to teach at, and (best of all) a big concerted push by the SSPX leadership to flush out the anti-semitic nuts who constitute far too big a percentage of the ranks of Rad Trads. That’s a promising beginning. I hope the squeeze continues till Williamson recants his Jew-hatred and makes a real apology and not merely a “Gee! I’m just so darn committed to truth that I let my passion for honesty embarrass the Church” crapola.
Some of a traditionalist bent are attempting to defend him by saying “The extent of the Holocaust is not de fide.” True. Neither is 2+2=4. A fool who denounces that proposition as “lies, lies, lies” is nonetheless a fool. A fool who denounces the victims of one of the best documented cases of mass murder on record as liars is not merely a fool, and is emphatically not an honest fool, but is a fool whose folly springs from a manifest and obvious hatred of the victims and seeks to deny their sufferings in a way that makes him complicit, I believe, with the murder. He is an assassin of memory.
Holocaust denial is intolerable. Learn it. Live it.
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