It’s no surprise that an op-ed commenter listed as having recently left the Catholic Church would attack her alma mater, but this hit piece in the Philadelphia Daily News is particularly vile. It is vile because it makes a long stretch to insinuate that Joseph and Georg Ratzinger were not involuntarily conscripted into the Nazi army as has been said, but “made a different choice”, and that different choice is evident in Pope Benedict’s election to the papacy.
The concept of choices made and examples set is important in understanding the deep-seated corruption that is now evidenced in the pedophilia grand jury documentation. These cardinals, alleged moral leaders, elected Ratzinger - a man surrounded by astonishing acts of evil against his neighbors, and who was incapable of personal risk to resist.
This is the worst kind of personal attack, insinuating based on no evidence at all except an anecdote from one elderly German woman that the Ratzinger brothers were more concerned with saving their own skins than opposing evil and this somehow is evidence that their whole lives have been lived with this philosophy.
It has long been held by people on all sides of debate that the fact that a German man or boy was conscripted into the German army in World War II did not automatically make him a Nazi or guilty by association of the Nazis’ crimes against humanity.
If Donna Gentile O’Donnell wants to be outraged over the Scandal as it erupted in Philadelphia, then she can join the club. But her disgusting ethnicity-based slurs and slander against Pope Benedict—who I shouldn’t have to remind you wasn’t even Pope when all this stuff occurred—goes way over the line. And shame on the Philadelphia Daily News for printing this trash.
The hatred of faithful Catholics and their Church: the only sanctioned prejudice.
What was the last line of the gospel yesterday?
Something about cursing you and reviling you etc.
Nice timing.
An interesting thing at work here is that Donna Gentile O’Donnell is the wife of the former speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Bob O’Donnell, a Democrat…. She did a column for the Daily Pennsylvanian (UPenn’s paper) during my time there.
The link drawn here strains credulity… And tying Rigali to B16 outside the essentials is downright foolish. Then again, we’ve come to expect that from the ones who like venting.
Oh, and here’s something from an interview she gave in a Salon piece three months before the Philly grand jury broke:
“I’m leaving my church since it named [conservative Cardinal Joseph] Ratzinger pope, and now I’m disturbed about my party,” O’Donnell says. “The anti-intellectual trend in the Catholic Church is troubling….”
More of the same.
This woman accuses the Catholic Church of being “anti-intellectual”!! Yet another example of someone accusing others of their own principal faults.
When she campaigned for the city council, with the support of the gay community, she raised ethical concerns herself.
I talked this issue over with a non-Catholic German friend when Cdl. Ratzinger was elected pope, and was suprised to learn that, not only is it universally recognized in Germany that membership in the Hitler Youth was forced (her own mother had been forced to enroll), but the kids who were sent to “guard” military facilities, as the young Josef Ratzinger was, are regarded by Germans as *victims* of wartime atrocities. These kids were being used as cannon fodder; they weren’t qualified to act as guards, but would be the first ones killed in an attack on the facility. Which is why so many deserted, including Ratzinger.
Young Josef Ratzinger was a victim of Nazi Germany, and to portray him as a participant is an insult to the memory of the German kids who were killed by being deliberately placed in harm’s way.