Category: History

L’Espresso‘s www.chiesa department presents an excerpt from the testimony of Romanian priest Tertulian Ioan Langa to the persecution of the Church under Communism.
(Thanks, CWN.)

The world didn’t notice his death the first time around either. Joseph Loconte remembers. (NYT, LRR)

Mark Shea made a comment about the irony of blaming the Pope for the Holocaust when he had few material tools to end it — or even interfere. Point well taken. I love Mark and his blessed blog, but he’s incorrect in one respect. Here’s the full passage:
“It is one of the weird twists of history that so many in both the Catholic and Jewish communities should survey the wreckage of WWII, a wreckage in Allied Leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill refused to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz and in which Stalin did nothing as the Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated, and look past this to a man who had not a single gun to defend himself, and yet who was responsible for the rescue of more Jews than any other man in Europe–and condemn him as practically being the architect of the Holocaust.”
America bombed lots of German rail lines (and railheads and railway yards), but the Germans were very clever about fixing them. It doesn’t take any skill to fill a bomb crater, and it doesn’t take hardly any skill to mend a rail. Bombing the lines only caused a few hours’ delay, or a day at most. Given the horribly inaccurate bombs of the day (it took a squadron of planes dropping hundreds of bombs to destroy a single target), it would have been impossible to destroy the rails altogether.
The Germans, as everyone knows, are organizational geniuses. Their wartime production kept humming along until the Allies started conquering Germany proper; a big part of their industrial prowess was dedicated to killing human beings. Since we couldn’t stopped industrial processes such as tank production or oil refinement, saying we could have destroyed the killing process is inaccurate.

It’s conventional to give Protestantism the credit for fostering virtues and attitudes conducive to economic advancement, but Michael Novak points out the Catholic roots of capitalism, in the inventiveness of monastic communities and the stability fostered by the Church’s legal system.

23 years ago today, on the feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus, Pope John Paul landed in Boston for his first visit to the United States after his election. As a Cardinal Archbishop and professor of theology, he had already been across the river in Cambridge where he had lectured to the eminences of Harvard Divinity School, but now he was coming to his own. And his own received him in a big way, filling Boston Common with a hundred thousand souls, a big crowd for a city of 500,000. We college pals who arrived on foot at 7:30 am — making a little pilgrimage of it — were rewarded with a place close enough so that we saw the Pope — that is, if we had our glasses on — and that was enough for us. He told us as the rain poured down on us all, Catholics and catechumens alike, and even a few Evangelicals: “Do not be afraid to follow Christ!”