The Wehrmacht Pope Speaks

There are several circumstances that help fuel my Nazi-interest addiction: (1) the fulsome record-keeping, film-making, accounting and cataloguing of the Dritte-Reichists themselves (2) the dumping into the public domain of the above by the Allied conquerors (3) the hundreds of thousands of post WWII memoirs by and interviews with and trials of combatants and non-combatants. So we do really know what happened, OK?

And yes, they, the National Socialists really did kill a whole heck of a lot of people, Jews and Romanis and Slavs and Gays and Jehovah's Witnesses and the Infirm and Intellectual and Freethinking, and they really did run the exhaust into the back of the transport trucks and they really did slaughter them wholesale in gas chambers and they did machine gun them while standing in their self-dug graves and they did work them to death to build weapons and vengeance weapons and did inject them with diseases and decompressed and pickled and chopped up and tortured and starved and killed in every way imaginable. And such behavior naturally upsets those who remember or are related to those who remember.

And thus, the denial of the same is a reasonable symptom of a certain type of mental illness, a lack of willingness to accept reality, the real reality that is, i.e., our consensus hallucination of the way things actually are. I personally think that one needs to suffer from this particular illness to accept the Catholic Church's teachings and behaviors through the centuries, from the Assumption of Mary to the Cadaver synod, so maybe it isn't hard to understand that a Catholic bishop might believe that "the historical evidence" was hugely against the Holocaust, but still, for a Church and a Pope that suffer from too close a connection to the above, one would think they would be sensitive to the unbelievable awfulness of the whole situation, bending over backward to salve and soothe the wounds so recent and so deep.

But no, today we see that Benedict XVI doesn't get it, reinstating Richard Williamson and other right-wing bishops. The story in the NY Times here. Yes, these are "declarations that we don't share in any way," well, except that we have brought these declarations back into the Church. Gott im Himmel.

UPDATE: Richard Williamson's un-excommunication has now been made contingent on his recanting of his no-gas-chamber belief. zmjezhd sent me a link to the bishop's blog where I'm sure we will all be able to follow his crisis of faith.