Slate: Time for the Catholic Church to stop being antisemitic

In a reasoned and solid essay in Slate, "The pope and the Jews: As his embrace of a Holocaust denier and a right-wing sect proves, Benedict just doesn't get it about the church's ongoing problem with anti-Semitism," Frances Kissling presents a concise argument that the pope and his church need to end their antisemitism.

The problem that Kissling does not understand is that antisemitism is essential to the belief system of the Catholic church.

It is not at all accidental that church selected as pope a man who served as a soldier in the Nazi army and was a member of the Hitler youth. These bullet points were big pluses on his resume for the position, not detriments.

Kissling's essay reviews the current scandal of the pope's reinstatement of the Holocaust denier Bishop and concludes brilliantly as follows with damning facts about soon-to-be-saint-Pius and a valiant but vain plea:

But the story is unending. Soon we will see the architect of the Reichskonkordat, another Pope Pius ( the Xll), made a saint. His canonization is in process. As with Benedict, Jews were just not high on his agenda; theo-politics was more important. In the 1933 Concordat he negotiated with Hitler while he was Vatican secretary of state, Pius agreed the Catholic Church would stay out of German politics in return for preserving, indeed expanding, church privileges and authority. The Concordat revoked the church's ban on Catholics joining the Nazi Party and the Vatican pledged that German bishops would obey and honor the German state. Guenter Lewy's seminal work "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany" asserted that "there is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler's regime around the world."

And some still wonder why the Catholic Church gets criticized. The last acceptable prejudice, they claim, is anti-Catholicism. Are these people serious? The Vatican has been getting away with anti-Semitism for centuries. Isn't it time we all said, "Enough"?

As I said, it's not correct to suggest that the church has been "getting away with antisemitism."

It is correct to assert that the popes and the church have fostered and embraced antisemitism as a core value - and continue to do so today, as demonstrated by their actions and policies, regardless of what lip service and show they may offer to pretend the contrary.
[Hat tip to Henry, thanks.]