"Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected Pope last month, served briefly in Hitler Youth during the war, when membership of the Nazi paramilitary organization was compulsory."

Reuters ~ Thursday, 12 May 2005

It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?

Edgar Allen Poe ~ The Imp of the Perverse

I promised myself (in your behalf) not to write about religion for awhile. I thought I should maybe, you know, give it a rest for a while. At least a day or two. But this has turned out to be an idle, if well intentioned, intention. Because I almost immediately found cause to break my word -- as you will see for yourself, gentle (and of course highly valued) reader, if you but read on.

I have made it a habit, for better or worse, to admit my worst character defects publicly on the Internet (or [this one's for you Frank] internet). In keeping with this habitual pattern, I find myself compelled by my own inner imp of the perverse to admit that, at least in what we have come to call the real world (not to be confused with MTV), my home away from home is -- and you have no idea the shame it causes me to say this -- Barnes & Noble.

But it's true. And I went there earlier tonight. Or last night, I suppose, as it's now 3am Thursday morning. Oh my, and the things I found! Which is weird, as I go there nearly every day, and sometimes spend hours browsing (not an internet term; it merely entails walking around) without finding anything of even passing interest. Those are occasions of great disappointment, I can tell you, so this evening's foray, by contrast, was especially rich.

Now, bookstores are not all books these days, as I'm sure you already know. There are music CDs and spoken-word CDs, movie DVDs and even software, wow. But what you may not expect, even knowing all this, is that even the bathrooms (or the toilets, as the British say, in this case less Puritanically euphemistic than their American cousins) are potential sources of high-grade information. If I were training knowledge engineers, as we called them before artificial intelligence became utterly passè at the tail-end of the '80s, I'd have them all start in the toilet. Which, ironically -- though they never did begin there -- is where they ended up. But, characteristically, I digress.

[And as I just broke out of this to do some rare email processing, and actually replied to a few people, now it's 5:30am and I'd better get a move on if I plan to publish this Thursday morning, which it already is.] [A bit later: oh well.]

For the observation that follows to make the sort of sense (broadly speaking) to you that it made to me, I should first say that I've been wondering lately if my various researches into neo-Nazism, antisemitism, racist bullshit in general, etc., were really all that relevant to Our Modern World. After all, everyone is pretty nice and nothing hurts all that much -- sentiments that Kurt Vonnegut once said he wanted engraved on his headstone. The following helped me answer this question definitively (which sort of certainty is rare enough in itself). What I saw on the men's room stall-wall was this.

Someone had painted over it, but the graffito was still quite legible. Nice, huh? I asked a manager if he was aware of this lovely little lemma on one of the store's bathroom walls. He said he'd get on it right away, so I imagine somebody's scraped it off by now. Not quite as easy to scrape off the taste it left.

So that was one thing I discovered at Barnes & Noble that I wasn't expecting. Probably in some sort of direct response, I bought a book I'd previously only glanced at -- The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by cartoonist Will Eisner, with a foreword by semiotician supreme Umberto Eco. Let me just say: highly recommended.

I saw another book that captured my fickle and flickering interest. The publisher says of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization:

Ask a college student today what he knows about the Catholic Church and his answer might come down to one word: "corruption." But that one word should be "civilization." Western civilization has given us the miracles of modern science, the wealth of free-market economics, the security of the rule of law, a unique sense of human rights and freedom, charity as a virtue, splendid art and music, a philosophy grounded in reason, and innumerable other gifts that we take for granted as the wealthiest and most powerful civilization in history.

It would make this post a lot shorter if I could just say "no comment," but I can't quite bring myself to pass on this one. I haven't read How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization yet, but I'm going to guess it doesn't say a whole lot about the other gifts the Church bequeathed to us, like the Inquisition and the collusion of Pius XII with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Just a hunch. I was born into a devout (some would rightly say fanatical) Catholic family, so I know a fair bit about its doctrine and history. And yeah, I sort of take these issues personally. But I wouldn't want anyone to think my attitude represented blind prejudice. It represents informed prejudice.

There's a review of The Bad Popes on Amazon that reads...

Forgotten History, October 27, 2003

Reviewer:

Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

One of the problems Catholicism has always had to battle is the notion that the Pope may appear to be a devil but when he is acting or speaking "ex cathedra" his words and deeds are said to be infallible. This is a story of such popes - those who led armies, who jocked [sic] for political position, who tortured, maimed, committed sacrilege so dreadful that it was only a whisper.

Yet, if one is a faithful Catholic, one would say that this is all just appearances - that they were REALLY the representative of Christ on Earth only they didn't act like it. It seems they never asked that ubiquitous question, "What would Jesus do?" It is hard to select the "worst" one...what is more awful - to massacre your opponent or to commit adultry [sic] on the throne? To lead a slaughter of "infidels" or join with Earthly political powers. Urban is a real winner, my candidate for Bad Pope of the Millenium [sic] but others are also listed.

This is not, by the way, an anti-Catholic tirade. If anything, the Church can claim to be truly divinely blessed for having survived these creatures.

Was this review helpful to you?

I marked it "yes." Because papal infallibility "in matters of faith and morals" is an article of faith, the Catholic Church cannot fully admit and truly apologize for its moral culpability in supporting and assisting the Nazi regime during WWII.

As the following is already fairly long, and the subject matter hugely sensitive, I've marked my elisions in red (...). You can see what I've left out for brevity by clicking on the link.

from: Long-awaited Vatican document on Jews defends Pius XII
by Frances D'Emilio, Associated Press Writer
source: AP Online, 16 March 1998.
via: HighBeam™ Research

VATICAN CITY (AP) _ The Vatican today expressed deep regret for the "errors and failures" of Roman Catholics during the Holocaust but strongly defended wartime Pope Pius XII in a statement promised a decade ago to Jewish groups.

The 12-page document stopped short of apologizing for any failures by church leaders, something bishops in several European countries have done in recent years.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II had promised a statement to Jewish groups based on what role, if any, the church might have had in the Holocaust.

In a preface, the pope, who has made improving relations with Jews a cornerstone of his papacy, expressed hope that the document "will indeed help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices."

But the document, prepared by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, seemed destined to anger those hoping for specific apologies.

Only hours earlier, Israel's chief rabbi expressed dismay after learning that the document would only refer in general terms to the church's attitude to the persecution.

Chief Rabbi Meir Lau, himself a Holocaust survivor, demanded an "explicit apology for the shameful attitude of the Pope (Pius XII) at the time."

Instead, the document defended Pius XII for using his first encyclical, in 1939, at the start of his papacy, to warn "against theories which denied the unity of the human race and against the deification of the State," and which could all lead to a real "hour of darkness."

The document praised the "wisdom of Pius XII's diplomacy," saying it had been acknowledged several times by Jewish groups. It quoted Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, as saying in 1958 at Pius' death that he raised his voice "when fearful martyrdom came to our people." ...

Last fall, French bishops apologized for their silence during the deportation of Jews, and German bishops have said that the church did not do enough to fight Nazism and condemn the Holocaust.

Today's document did not move the pope's position beyond what he expressed last fall to a seminar on anti-Jewish relations: "In the Christian world - I do not say on the part of the church as such - erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people" engendered "feelings of hostility toward this people." ...

The last Vatican document of landmark proportions on Jewish relations was a 1965 statement that came out of the Second Vatican Council under Paul VI and said the Jews cannot be collectively blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus.

And I'd have to agree; that was mighty white of them. Though there are other views of the matter, to be sure...

For another but opposite instance, try the unmistakable impression left by the image to the left from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The caption says, "When you see a cross, then think of the horrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha."

That provides a fittingly unnatural segue to the final bit of this way-too-long post. But we need a little context first, and what better source to turn to once again than the Catholic Encyclopedia -- a little out of date (thank you AKMA for the consult) but a valuable resource nonetheless. Here's what you need to know as background. According to the CE article linked here, Mount Calvary was:

The place of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The word Calvary (Latin Calvaria) means "a skull". Calvaria and the Greek Kranion are equivalents for the original Golgotha.

Hold that thought.

So the last thing I came across at Barnes & Noble last night (if you don't count Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which is what I went there looking for) was Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith, as bizarre a tome as you're likely to run into anywhere, trust me. The relevant section for our purposes here -- which also constitutes the wholly-inappropriate-from-every-angle punch line to this post, is...

Golgotha Fun Park? Turns out it's a miniature golf course. I almost choked on a strangled sort of twisted laughter when I read this on the inner flap, and two seconds after picking up the book (what's this then?) I knew I had to own it, study it, marvel at its consummate, breathtaking weirdness.

The author writes:

It's not easy to venture a theological interpretation of Golgotha Fun Park. [but he tries. and then...]

For most of us, of course, it's not the course's outstandingly challenging or clever holes that draw us to this place. It's the name. "Golgotha," "the place of the skull," doesn't exactly go with "fun." Whether intentional or not, the jarring association of skulls, crucifixion, and fun is a stroke of poetic genius uncommon in the world of miniature golf, let alone theology.

The front flap also includes this nonpareil passage:

...he found himself deep in conversation with people like Bill Rice, whose Cross Garden envelopes the visitor in a surreal landscape of plywood boards, rusty old appliances, and makeshift crosses tilting this way and that, all bearing words of divine judgment, death, and hellfire: HELL HELL HELL. HOT HOT. JESUS SAVES. YOU WILL DIE.

Lest you think all this purest blasphemy, the back flap reveals that author Timothy K. Beal "is Florence Harkness Professor of Religion and director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case-Western Reserve University..." Publishers Weekly says: "Although he can be critical, Beal is never cynical or snide, guiding readers to an informed understanding rather than simply proffering these sites as case studies in a religious freak show."

Yeah, but it is a freak show. And that, as they say, is all she wrote.

For now.