'The Representative'
SIR,—The reply by Marjorie Wallace to my criticism of the late Pope Pius XII, and of the rigid modern despotism of the Catholic Church, is a feeble attempt to defend what is indefensible. She admits that the Roman police have acted foolishly and clumsily in trying to suppress the stage performance of Hochhuth's The Representative, but forgets to mention, however, that the real instigator of such suppression is the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in the Vatican, which, as is well known, influences the political and social government policy of Roman affairs. Your correspondent states further that the Vatican is now engaged on the preparation of a White Paper dealing with the whole issue of the late Pope Pius's attitude towards the Nazi massacres of European Jews. Surely it is axiomatic that no one can be an impartial judge in his own cause. In spite of the true facts of the late Pope's cynical machinations to ensure only the safety of the Catholic Church during the recent war, no one really believes that the proposed White Paper will con- tain one breath of adverse criticism against the late pontiff. In fact, the White Paper will be so much whitewash. Only an impartial secular tribunal, having fully examined the facts and documentary records, can be qualified to issue a true, objective
assessment of the late Pius's actions and motives in refusing to condemn Nazi Germany for her massacre of a third of world Jewry.
Your correspondent describes my original accusa- tion of the Catholic Church's guilt for the spilling of Jewish blood throughout the ages as being `quite incomprehensible.' But can anyone deny this isl so? The bloodstained record of the Catholic Church speaks for itself most devastatingly, through the pages of recorded history. Who was responsible for, the Jewish massacres in the Rhineland at the end of the eleventh century but the Crusaders of Catholicism? By whom was the murder of Jews in their thousands carried out in the communities of Lorraine, Metz, Worms, Mayence, Cologne and Treves. in the Middle Ages? Who instigated the bloodshed of the Jewish infidel' in the reign of Richard I. in the old English towns of Norwich, Lynn. Dunstable, Stamford, Lincoln and York? Under whose zegis were the obscene tortures and burnings alive of Jews perpetrated during the Spanish Inquisition? And through whose incitement Were the pious German-Jewish communities of Halle, Erfurt, Mecklenburg, Frankfurt-am-Main, Pforzheim, Wilrzburg, Nuremberg and Ratisbon butchered and decimated during the thirteenth century? The ineradicable testimony of history gives one answer to all the above—the 'holy' Roman Catholic Church. So much for my condemnation of the ,Catholic Church being 'incomprehensible.' The Church of Rome stands guilty and accused before the bar of mercy and elementary humanity. Her, barbarities and enormities in the name of sup- ,Poriedi, religion are a perpetual and imperishable niOekery of the entire content of Christ's teaching, summed up in the words—.Thou shalt love thy fellow-man as thyself.'
S. WARSHAW
69 Cannon Lone, Pinner, Middlesex
Previous page
