The scandal is this: Koch has dared to say that trends which are widespread in today's German Church resemble trends among certain German Christians during the Nazi Ascendancy.
How offensive!
For heaven's sake: the Nazis wore shiny jackboots and went around hurting people. They were unkind to Jews and homosexuals. But how different is your modern German Catholic ... all Kindness and Light. For example: he displays the Love of the God of Love to the remarried divorcees; to homosexuals and 'trans' people.
Hadn't you noticed?
How plain wicked to compare two such totally antithetical groups! One lot so abominably nasty, the other lot so quintessentially the epitome of all that is Nice and Good.
Once upon a time, there was a day when the Gestapo raided diocesan offices and presbyteries all over Germany. The previous day, Palm Sunday, when the churches were packed, priests all over Germany had read publicly the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge of the Holy Father Pope Pius XI. It had been smuggled into Germany in the Nuncio's Diplomatic Bag and secretly printed (rather like when the secret press was thumping away in the attic of Stonor House to produce S Edmund Campion's Decem Rationes); secretly distributed by special couriers and proclaimed in every pulpit. And nobody leaked it; at least, not in time for the government to intervene.
It burst upon the Fuehrer and his admirers as the most wonderful surprise. Not many people in the state apparatus will have had much sabbath rest that Sunday, as arrangements were frantically made to secure all copies for destruction. Rumour has it that in some places a copy was hidden in the Tabernacle. Unrubrical, as you will remind me; but, dare I say it, most wonderfully suitable. To Prepon!
It had been drafted by Cardinal Faulhaber, Fr Ratzinger's ordaining bishop, no 'leftie' but an old-style conservative German nationalist; and it was toughened up a little by Cardinal Pacelli. Sadly, since I am not a Germanist, I am reduced to reading it in an English translation. But it still strikes me as immensely moving: to hear the authentic voice of the Vicar of Christ roundly condemning the Zeitgeist of the 1930s in such ringing and unmistakable tones brings tears to my eyes. Those were the days! I commend it to you, if you have not read it recently, or at all.
It condemns the then dominant ideology of Race and of Blood, and of a Superman who mystically incarnates in his own person those crazed and dangerous myths. But in its essence, it condemns an evil that is still very much with us today despite any and every legislative proscription of Nazism: the attempt, any and every attempt, to set up a rival to Christ the King.
That is what the Nazis did. Despite a very different cultural appearence, that is precisely what is being done today in 'Modern' and 'Western' countries ... including our own and including Germany. The slight difference is that, in Germany, the tyranny of the Zeitgeist appeasrs to have been adopted as the official and imposed dogma of the 'Catholic' Church.
The real object of the Letter of Pius XI was the habit of pandering to, of following, of tolerating the Spirit of the Age. At our present moment, the Zeitgeist summons us, both here and in Germany, to applaud Abortion; Fluid Gender; all Sexualities which dissociate the sexual act from the actions of a Man married to a Woman. Then, the Age commended to its craven victims and stooges the murderous ideology of Race and Blood.
With thoroughly Petrine intolerant insensitivity, the Vicar of Christ condemned the error of his day, and did so boldly, even dramatically. This is the duty of every Roman Pontiff ... and of every minister of the Word of God ... of every Christian!! ... in every age.
Perhaps PF will get round to doing this before his pontificate ends. May the Almighty give him long enough to do so before it is too late.
Evil wears a different face and speaks a different patois in each different era. The smart thing is to be able to spot it despite its differing disguises. Jackboots in one age; soft music and a kindly affirming smile at the door of the abortion clinic in the next.
But the dogma is the same, the same the murderous enormity.
Pius XI's Mit Brennender Sorge is a condemnation of all the fashionable dogmas of all the ages which challenge the Lordship of the Redeemer.
Long live Christ the King!
Thank you Father. This is encouragement that I needed to read.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard not to compare the ‘Health Services’ instituted by the Nazis to the ‘Gender Affirming Care’ being pushed on minors today. Then it was elimination of anyone not considered a ‘Perfect Aryan’ through mass-killing and horrible ‘medical’ procedures.
ReplyDeleteChildren’s Hospitals here in the US have been exposed for promoting ‘gender reassignment’ programs including irreversible surgeries on teenage and younger children. One even boasted about how lucrative these programs are to the doctors and hospitals.
Unsurprisingly, Planned Parenthood is one of the biggest promoters of these programs through videos targeting children.
This is a long way from the Hippocratic Oath. Where is the outrage from parents and the Media?
Father, a much-needed blog to dispel somewhat the engulfing miasma of madness and wickedness brought on by the Woke Tyrants. How we need a pontiff like the great Pius XI today! Alas, what we have, as we too painfully know, is a brazen, public accomplice of the Woke Gestapo sitting on the sacred throne of Peter. One gentle, friendly correction to your blog, though: the evil Nazis, with their shiny boots and arm salutes, did not go around hurting only Jews and homosexuals (bad enough had their pagan cruelty been limited to these groups) but countless Christians and courageous Catholics as well. Why do we tend, at times, to forget our own? Their remembrance in the various holocausts of that wicked 20th century and even now is not in the least chauvinistic, self-serving or disparaging of other groups, but rather a matter of simple justice. No group around the globe is more abused, persecuted, killed, and denied the precious "civil rights" the lying Left is always parroting about than Christians---there is serious and ample statistical evidence for this. And their suffering all too often meets with silence. Let us remember our own first, and do what we can to help them in whatever corner of the world they pray and suffer. It is vital to remember the biblical injunction to be kind to all men but "ESPECIALLY THOSE OF THE HOUSEHOLD OF THE FAITH."
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ReplyDeleteAh, the Zeitgeist. I calqued the German compound to its English cognates as the Tide Ghost. I like that. Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Age can sound somewhat airy, ethereal or abstract. Tide Ghost has a more earthy, ominous and uncanny sound to it. You know right away that this is a spirit to beware.
ReplyDeleteDear Reverend Fr. Hunwicke.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent Article of profound importance.
Thank You.
What we are watching is what I call “the self Nazi-fication of the Left.”
ReplyDeleteAnd big kudos to Grant Milburn for naming the sinister “Tide Ghost.”
ReplyDeleteChristopher: One law of the internet is that after you have come up with a brilliant name for some concept, you google that name to see who thought of it first. I did so, following my first post and discover that I have to share my kudos with the Episcopal Church. I refer, of course, to the famous editorial in volume 183 of The Living Church, issued on August 30 (Pentecost 12) in 1981. The short editorial is entitled The Tide Ghost.
'The church is often criticized for being out of touch with the modern age, but it is also criticized for being too much in touch with it. Those who emphasize the later danger sometimes invest the spirit of the age with an ominous Protestant dignity by referring to it in German as the Zeitgeist.
'Literally rendered into equivalent Anglo-Saxon words, this is the Tide Ghost.... Perhaps the term Tide Ghost can disclose something about the spirit of the age. Tide is used most commonly nowadays to mean the time of the sea, with its relentless coming in and going out. So the fads and fashions of this world endlessly ebb and flow. What was considered "in" yesterday will be "out" today, but again back "in" tomorrow.'
At any rate, the tide ghost for me will now always have something of the entrancing danger of Burns' Cutty Sark. I imagine a banshee howling over desolate mud flats, with the sea water flowing in, and threatening to drown one, and then flowing out, and leaving boats high and dry.
https://books.google.co.id/books?id=KmDkAAAAMAAJ&pg=RA10-PA12&lpg=RA10-PA12&dq=tideghost&source=bl&ots=RtjwJWi3zL&sig=ACfU3U1_EQasXzzFELzJq4HWDc_CQUiw4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6xtmyneb6AhVEDLcAHTHtBm4Q6AF6BAgcEAI#v=onepage&q=tideghost&f=true