{"id":36,"date":"2006-04-13T09:08:30","date_gmt":"2006-04-13T13:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=36"},"modified":"2006-04-13T09:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-04-13T13:08:30","slug":"polish-catholic-radio-denounces-german-pope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=36","title":{"rendered":"Polish Catholic Radio denounces German Pope"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m in Vienna right now, and stumbling down for a tourist breakfast I found a glorious story1<\/a><\/sup> in Der Standard,<\/em> bylined from Warsaw.<\/p>\n\n

A Polish Catholic radio Station, Radio Marja, whose programme could be summarised as “back to the2<\/a><\/sup> Thirties” has displeased the Vatican with the strain of anti-semitism in its broadcasts. At the risk of another torrent of green ink, I will point out that there is a long history of popular anti-semitism in Poland, as well as of its opposite, and that the last pogrom on Polish soil took place in 1946 when the rest of Europe had rather outgrown the practice. There is a sort of patriotic Pole who talks as if every single communist was actually a Jew, and not a Pole at all.<\/p>\n\n

These are clearly the people running Radio Marja. There has been trouble there before, and at the end of March someone called Stanislaw Michailkiewicz broadcast a commentary attacking the Jewish societies which have for the last few years been reclaiming synagogues, graveyards, hospitals, and schools which had belonged to the community.<\/p>\n\n

There was a storm of criticism. The Vatican wrote to the Polish Bishops’ Council demanding that they take steps against the radio station. Within Poland, the critics included the country’s official Council on Media Ethics, a voluntary body which seems to correspond to the British press council. Radio Marja retaliated by setting up a committee of its own supporters, “The Independent Ethical Council for the Media”, whose chairman, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Warsaw University, explained to the listeners of “the Catholic voice in your house” what lay behind the whole thing.<\/p>\n\n

“The Third Reich took the moral backbone out of the Germans, and [Pope Benedict’s] hasn’t grown back yet”.<\/p>\n\n

This is a remarkable thing for any Catholic radio station to say about a Pope, but Professor Wolniewicz is a remarkable philosopher, went on in a later broadcast: “”The terrible suspicion grows in me,” said Wolniewicz to Radio Marja’s audience of millions, “that the people who have organised the latest attacks against you are trying to exploit the fact that the Pope is a German, and that it must seem extraordinarily difficult for him openly to defend anyone who has been accused of antisemitism by the media, and possibly even by some of his closest advisers.”<\/p>\n\n

In other words, the Pope is not just a German, tainted by Nazism: he is a crypto-Nazi who is being manipulated by the Jews.<\/p>\n\n

After I had stopped laughing at this story, and after I had stopped marvelling at the inexhaustible creativity of the religious imagination, which can breed such monsters as a German Pope being manipulated by the Jews against honest Polish patriots, I felt (how can one, here, in Vienna, avoid it?) a chill of real horror at persistence and versatility of anti-semitism throughout history.<\/p>\n\n

The Polish bishops, who help to fund Radio Marja have so far kept silent about the matter. They have to make a decision soon, though: Pope Benedict is due to make another foreign visit at the end of May, and this time he will be coming to Poland.<\/p>\n\n

1<\/sup> Some details of this translation may not be accurate. I don’t have a dictionary handy; my German has not had much practice for many years now; and when I saw on the German for “of the ethical council” I read it at first as a reference to the little-known pre-Socratic philosopher, Ethikrates.<\/p>\n\n

2<\/sup> I don’t know enough Polish politics to be sure whether these are the nineteen, seventeen, or the fifteen thirties<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m in Vienna right now, and stumbling down for a tourist breakfast I found a glorious story1 in Der Standard, bylined from Warsaw. A Polish Catholic radio Station, Radio Marja, whose programme could be summarised as “back to the2 Thirties” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}