Posts Tagged ‘holocaust’

Holocaust denier removed as head of Argentine seminary

Monday, February 9th, 2009

CNN) — A Holocaust denier Pope Benedict XVI welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church last month has been removed from his position as head of a seminary in Argentina.

Bishop Richard Williamson, shown in a recent Swedish interview, says he'll recant  "if I find this proof."

Bishop Richard Williamson, shown in a recent Swedish interview, says he’ll recant “if I find this proof.”

Click to view previous image
1 of 2
Click to view next image

The views of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has led the seminary in La Reja since 2003, do not reflect those of The Society of St. Pius X, said Christian Bouchacourt, head of its Latin American chapter.

“It’s obvious that a Catholic bishop cannot talk with the ecclesiastical authority, but to things related to faith and morality,” Bouchacourt said in a written statement.

Williamson, shortly before the pope lifted his excommunication, denied the Nazis had systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II.

In his blog Saturday, Williamson, referring to himself, posted a note, saying, “His Excellency is neither dead, dying, nor retired.”

Earlier Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel phoned Pope Benedict about the issue, though neither side seemed to have shifted its position over Williamson.

“It was a very constructive conversation,” the German government and the Vatican said in a joint statement about the call. Merkel and the pope expressed respect for each other’s opinion, the release said — diplomatic-speak for saying neither side budged.

Merkel demanded Tuesday that the pope firmly reject Holocaust denial.

“The pope and the Vatican must make absolutely clear that there can be no denial of the Holocaust,” Merkel said.

The Vatican has pointed to several statements by Pope Benedict in the past few years condemning the destruction of European Jewry, including his visits to concentration camps. He has also said he did not know of Williamson’s views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication.

“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” Williamson said recently in an interview with a Swedish television station, which also appeared on various Web sites after its broadcast. “I believe there were no gas chambers.”

Germany’s Catholic bishops Saturday called for the expulsion of Williamson, a member of an ultra-conservative group expelled from the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Read Complete article….

Holocaust denier removed as head of Argentine seminary – CNN.com.

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum Views the Holocaust Not From Then but From the Here and Now

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

BERGEN-BELSEN, Germany — Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called “Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust.” He asked a question one evening during a break: “Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?”

Consider it raised.

The new memorial is an immense concrete and glass museum emerging from a copse of trees beside the cemetery of mass graves (there are more than 70,000 bodies buried there), which had been the camp site. The permanent exhibition is a model of its kind, focused on the meticulous and sober reconstruction of the past. From time to time the present literally intrudes with a bang, though, when practice rounds of tank fire from the British military base next door boom over the treetops.

VIEW COMPLETE STORY HERE:

Abroad – The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum Views the Holocaust Not From Then but From the Here and Now – NYTimes.com.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, Antiques Roadshow, The Antiques Rogue Show

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

Anne Frank

Amsterdam has three main attractions: Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum; hookers in windows; and Anne Frank in the attic. It’s a contradictory cultural compendium in a contradictory city. You walk past the office on the canal, above and behind which are the secret rooms the Frank family silently lived in for two years; beneath it is a long, silent line of American-Jewish students waiting to get in for half an hour’s empathy. And you know that somewhere down this street or the next one is the house of the person who betrayed the Franks. Unknown, unremarked, still secret, there is a room where someone sat and thought: “After lunch, I must pop down to the Gestapo and hand in that family in the attic.” The Dutch hid 30,000 Jews, most of whom survived the war, but handed over more than 100,000, most of whom didn’t.

The English translation of Anne Frank’s diary was published here in the 1950s. It made a modest impact and went out of print. It was in America and, oddly, Japan that it became iconic. In Germany, it was regularly accused of being a forgery; too well written for an adolescent, they said. Anne did rewrite it. She wanted to be a novelist, dreamt of it being published; after the war, her father censored it to take out the critical things she had said about her mother. After he died, they went back in.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, Antiques Roadshow, The Antiques Rogue Show – Times Online.

Calendar
May 2012
M T W T F S S
« May    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
Categories
My Communities
  • May 22
    “What is it that makes a person great, admired by creation, well pleasing in the eyes of God? What is it that makes a person strong, stronger than the whole world; what is it that makes him weak, weaker than a child? What is it that makes a person unwavering, more unwavering than a rock; […]
  • May 21
    “The realm of faith is thus not a class for numskulls in the sphere of the intellectual, or an asylum for the feeble-minded. Faith constitutes a sphere all by itself, and every misunderstanding of Christianity may at once be recognized by its transforming it into a doctrine, transferring it to the sphere of the intellectual. […]
  • May 20
    “I know all this, I know too that the highest conceivable enjoyment lies in being loved; to be loved is higher than anything else in the world. To poetize oneself into a young girl is art, to poetize oneself out of her is a masterpiece. Still, the latter depends essentially upon the first.” ——————————————————————– ~Source: […]
  • May 18
    “Nowadays one becomes an author not through one’s originality but by reading. One becomes a human being by aping others. That one is human is known not from one’s own case but by inference: one is like the others, therefore one is human. God knows whether any of us are! And in our age, when […]
  • May 17
    “In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged. Children are always well-behaved as long as they are enjoying themselves. This is true in the strictest sense; for if they sometimes become unruly in their play, it is because they are already beginning to be bored — boredom is already approaching, […]
  • May 16
    “The existing individual becomes concrete in his experience, and in going on he still has his experience with him, and hence may at any moment lose it; he has it with him not as something one has in a pocket, but his having it constitutes a definite something by which he is himself specifically determined, […]
  • May 15
    “The loving man, he in whom there is love, hides the multitude of sins, sees not his neighbor’s fault, or, if he sees, hides it from himself and from others; love makes him blind in a sense far more beautiful than this can be said of a lover, blind to his neighbor’s sins. On the […]
  • May 14
    “A landscape painter, whether he strives to produce an effect by a faithful rendering of the subject, or by a more ideal reproduction, perhaps leaves the individual cold, but such a picture as I have in mind produces an indescribable effect for the fact that one does not know whether to laugh or cry, and […]
iLike
Connections
Contributions
View my FriendFeed
Connect with me!
Seeing the World!
Blog Network