School has closed for the summer holidays and I have time, for the first time in a while, to resume posting! This post came about after a conversation in my parish a week or so ago. I was unaware of any of the events that follow which points to just how few ripples this news story generated.
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The Pope and the BBC
One of my favourite TV
programs has been, and still is, The
Golden Girls. Its waspish humour,
deft handling of issues that, for the 1980s at least, were considered somewhat
“delicate” for mainstream entertainment, and dealing with the realities of four
women of a “certain age” still gives me great laughs. Estelle Getty’s character - Sophia Petrillo – was probably the glue
that held the show together. Sophia had
a great one liner that would launch her into one of her stories – “picture this
… Sicily 1910 …” – and would often earn her the incredulous look of her
daughter, Dorothy, Bea Arthur, and the remark, after a suitable pause, “ma,
you’re making it up”. She usually was. However, what is funny on a sitcom, is not
funny when it is presented as historical fact.
In July 2016 Pope Francis
visited Poland to join with millions of young people in World Youth Day. As a part of the journey he made a visit to
the former death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau
on 29 July. Francis followed in the footsteps of John Paul II and Benedict XVI
who also stood in what is the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. And like his predecessors, he stood in
silence.
That evening in its regular
news broadcast the BBC reported on the pope’s visit. In language that points to the growing gulf
between people of faith, good people of different faith, good people of little
or no faith, well-meaning journalists under pressure to produce the seconds of
“sound bite” for the editors, the news said quite clearly that the Pope’s
silence at Auschwitz reflected the “silence” of the Catholic Church during the
Holocaust. I want to believe the
journalist was, as David Alton described in a blog entry, simply lazy and had
not done their homework.
I have not heard the BBC report
and have not been able to find it, a point the blogger Catholic
Voices made reference to as they re-posted Lord Alton’s blog entry.
Reading the text version of the
pope’s visit to Auschwitz I was generally impressed by the level of awareness
of Catholic Christian practice, even if the reporter did seem impressed by the
pope’s “white robes and skullcap”.
It was this sentence that
caused considerable offence:
“Silence was the
response of the Catholic Church when Nazi Germany demonised Jewish people and
then attempted to eradicate Jews from Europe”.
Several generations of
gradual historical amnesia and sloppy reporting meant that many people were
probably not aware of the import of the journalist’s words. Certainly there was no worldwide upset. Reactions, such as that of Anne
and Ian Dawson, have been few and far between.
The contentious statement is bald,
generalised and historically inaccurate.
It demonstrates a lack of basic knowledge that could have been remedied
by some equally basic research work online.
I wholeheartedly agree with Lord Alton.
This is the mark of lazy journalism.
I mention Lord Alton because within
twenty-four hours he had written a measured
and restrained rebuttal of the BBC’s report, especially when he referred to
the comment made by the same reporter immediately after the statement about
“silence”.
The BBC’s reporter clearly didn’t see the
irony of stating that the Catholic Church had remained silent in the face of a
genocide only to then describe how Polish Catholics were arrested and killed
for sheltering Jews and how Fr. Maximilian Kolbe was executed at Auschwitz
after taking the place of another prisoner. Why was he in Auscxhwitz [sic] in
the first place? He had been arrested for publishing a denunciation of the
Nazis in his magazine, Knight,
which had a circulation of around one million people. Hardly silence, then.
I can only
agree. Lord Alton continued outlining
the very familiar and accessible history of the church and its condemnation of
racism and anti-Semitism along with references to action during the war. My only complaints are to do with the
references to Pinchas Lapide’s unverifiable assertion regarding the rescue of
860,000 Jews and citing Gary Krupp’s work.
Since I have written a length on both Lapide
and Krupp
I suggest the interested reader look for themselves.
Lana Adler, writing in The
Forward on the same day penned a more perceptive article than the BBC but
remained firmly positioned in the “the Catholic Church has come a long way, but
there is much more to be done” camp; a position that does have validity
especially when dealing with the question of the Archivo Segreto Vaticano files on Pius XII. Adler’s criticism is a timely reminder that
the last major opening of files was in 2006 but also a challenge to historians
to keep looking through material that is already available.
Formal complaints were made and on 9
December the BBC admitted the report was biased and unfair. The Editorial
Complaints Unit said in its judgement:
The reporter said “Silence was the response of the Catholic Church when Nazi Germany
demonised Jewish people and then attempted to eradicate Jews from Europe”.
In the judgement of the ECU, this did not give due weight to public statements
by successive Popes or the efforts made on the instructions of Pius XII to
rescue Jews from Nazi persecution, and perpetuated a view which is at odds with
the balance of evidence.
Lord Alton wrote a response to the
ruling under the heading BBC
owes us the truth on the Church and the Nazis. And while much of his
article is well written, I am not convinced by references, again, to Lapide and
the oft-toted theories of KGB
plots ordered from the Kremlin to smear the memory of Pius XII.
Is there anything to be learned from one line made by
a harried and hurried journalist who had not checked their facts before
speaking? Yes, there is. My senior history students will share their
wisdom: “If in doubt, check it out!” Or
as Dorothy so often said to her mother, Sophia: “Ma, that’s not true, you just
made it up!”
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