Sunday, September 06, 2009

There is a report...

...in the Catholic press to the effect that the Holy Father's advisers are now reading blogs to find out people's opinions, especially following the Williamson affair. So if they are reading Auntie's blog, I contribute some comments:

It is not just Williamson's denial of the murder of six million Jews in World War II that is horrible but the realisation that until his views hit the headlines he was heading a seminary run by the Lefebvrists and thus presumably communicating something of his world-view to successive groups of new young Lefebvrist priests year on year.

Why does Williamson attempt to deny the Holocaust? I mean, what's his motive? The problems with the Lefebrivists are not - repeat not - essentially concerned with liturgy but are rooted in the huge ramifications of a breakaway group that allowed such a man to head up a seminary, to be made into a bishop and to be taken seriously by people under his direction.

I have had, over recent months, a sufficiency of nasty anti-semitic material sent to me to make be really worried about a certain noticeable faction that is apparently within the Church, or considers itself to be. Who are the people, for example, writing from a London address and sending rants about Jews to me and announcing the publication of books on the subject? Who were the people from America who sent me similar material?

Tackling the Lefebvrists means tackling the reality of a faction that apparently believes a whole set of horrible fantasies. This is a problem for the Church and merely denouncing anti-Semitism is not enough. People influenced by it need to be taught that they have been given a set of untruths that need to be unravelled, that it is time to acknowledge wrong beliefs and wrong assumptions, and that a fresh start can only be made once there has been a genuine acceptance of this.

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