Pope Benedict XVI met with a holocaust-denier yesterday.
Bishop Richard Williamson? No, Nancy Pelosi.
A Pelosi-led delegation of Catholic Democrats who dismiss
the moral significance of millions upon millions of abortions
turned up at the Vatican yesterday.
Last month these same abortion-holocaust deniers had
lectured Benedict for mishandling the flap over Richard
Williamson’s lifted excommunication.
Seizing on a chance to embarrass the Pope, fifty Catholic
Democrats, Rosa DeLauro and George Miller among them, wrote a
letter
to him demanding a “clarification” in the Williamson matter. (He
had already done so, but they felt it just wasn’t emphatic
enough.)
“Bishop Williamson has said as recently as this past
November that, ‘historical evidence is hugely against 6 million
Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a
deliberate policy by Adolf Hitler.’ Yet, the Holocaust is a
verifiable fact and as people of good will would agree, one of
the darkest chapters in our history as a human family. There are
still thousands of people amongst us — Jews and non-Jews — who
can attest through eye-witness accounts to the horrors of the
Holocaust,” they wrote in part.
“As a spiritual leader and the head of the Catholic Church,
we believe it is vital that you publicly state your unequivocal
position on this matter so that it is clear where the Church
stands on one of the most consequential events of the 20th
century…”
William Delahunt, who pulls down a 100% rating from the
National Abortion Rights Action League, piously
explained to the Boston Globe the
pressing need for this letter of rebuke. “The moral authority of
the church is important to retain, and having those statements
out there was unacceptable,” he said.
Pro-abortion Catholic Democrats don’t normally warm to the
cause of preserving the Church’s moral authority, and certainly
not to the concept of excommunication. But in Williamson they had
finally found a Catholic not fit for entrance to their communion
line.
They would of course say that an important difference
exists between them and Williamson. And they are right: He opined
egregiously about a historical evil; they finance and facilitate
a contemporary one. Engaging in appalling historical speculation
about past evil is bad; paying for a present evil as they do is
worse.
It is rich that after slapping Benedict’s hand over
Williamson they would tumble over themselves to kiss it on
Wednesday. To its credit, the Vatican denied them a photo-op,
though quickly after the meeting Pelosi cranked up the PC wind
machine to spin it as constructive.
“It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with
His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, today. In our conversation, I
had the opportunity to praise the Church’s leadership in fighting
poverty, hunger, and global warming, as well as the Holy Father’s
dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message
to Israel. I was proud to show His Holiness a photograph of my
family’s papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of
our children and grandchildren.”
Global warming? The last time I recall Benedict broaching
the subject of global warming he pointedly observed that
environmentalists need a “human ecology” with which to stop
killing unborn babies.
The Vatican’s post-meeting description was diplomatically
devastating in its clinical tone: “His Holiness took the
opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law
and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life
from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and
especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the
common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and
women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of
protecting human life at all stages of its development.”
In January pro-abortion Catholic Democrats angrily asked if
the Vatican would force Williamson to recant. This month the Pope
in effect asked them if they will. Will Pelosi, DeLauro, and
company disavow their views? Or will they continue to
rationalize, minimize and revise the massive, ongoing holocaust
of unborn human life?
