Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Saint Michael the Archangel is often depicted wielding a sword and a set of scales to vanquish Satan. His scales have an ancient and surprising meaning.

I worked for days on a post about Saint Michael the Archangel. 
I finally finished it this morning, exactly one week before
 the Feast of the Archangels, then rushed off to work in the 
prison library. When I returned four hours later to print the 
post and get it into the mail to Charlene, my friend Joseph
 stopped by. You might remember Joseph from a few of my posts,
 notably “Disperse the Gloomy Clouds of Night” in Advent and
 “Forty Days and Forty Nights” in Lent.

Well, you can predict
 where this is going. As soon as I returned to my cell, Joseph
 came in to talk with me. Just as I turned on my typewriter,
 Joseph reached over and touched it. He wasn’t aware of the 
problem with static charges from walking across these concrete 
floors. Joseph’s unintentional spark wiped out four days of
 work and eight pages of text.

It’s not the first time this has happened. I wrote about it 
in “Descent into Lent” last year, only then I responded with 
an explosion of expletives. Not so this time. As much as I
 wanted to swear, thump my chest, and make Joseph feel just 
awful, I couldn’t. Not after all my research on the meaning 
of the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel. They very much 
impact the way I look at Joseph in this moment. Of course, 
for the 30 seconds or so after it happened, it’s just as well
 that he wasn’t standing within reach!

This world of concrete and steel in which we prisoners live is 
very plain, but far from simple. It’s a world almost entirely
 devoid of what Saint Michael the Archangel brings to the 
equation between God and us. It’s also a world devoid of 
evidence of self-expression. Prisoners eat the same food,
 wear the same uniforms, and live in cells that all look alike.

Off the Wall, And On

In these cells, the concrete walls and ceilings are white — or
 were at one time — the concrete floors are gray, and the 
concrete counter running halfway along one wall is dark green.
 On a section of wall for each prisoner is a two-by-four foot
 green rectangle for posting family photos, a calendar and 
religious items. The wall contains the sole evidence of
 self-expression in prison, and you can learn a lot about a
 person from what’s posted there.

My friend, Pornchai, whose section of wall is next to mine,
 had just a blank wall two years ago. Today, not a square inch 
of green shows through his artifacts of hope. There are 
photos of Joe and Karen Corvino, the foster parents whose 
patience impacted his life, and Charlene Duline and Pierre
 Matthews, his new Godparents. There’s also an old photo of 
the home in Thailand from which he was taken at age 11, photos
 of some of the ships described in “Come, Sail Away!” now at 
anchor in new homes. There’s also a rhinoceros — no clue why
 — and Garfield the Cat. In between are beautiful icons of the 
Blessed Mother, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Saint Pio, and one of 
Saint Michael the Archangel that somehow migrated from my wall
 over to Pornchai’s.

My own wall evolved over time. The only family photos I had
 are long lost, and I haven’t seen my family in many years. It 
happens to just about every prisoner after ten years or so. 
In my first twelve years in prison I was moved sixteen times, 
and each time I had to quickly take my family photos off the 
wall. Like many prisoners here for a long, long time, there
 came a day when I took my memories down to move, then just
 didn’t put them back up again. A year ago, I had nothing on
 the wall, then a strange transformation of that small space
 began to take shape.

When These Stone Walls — the blog, not the concrete ones — began
 last year, some readers started sending me beautiful
 icons and holy cards. The prison allows them in mail as long 
as they’re not laminated in plastic. Some made their way onto
 my wall, and slowly over the last year it filled with color 
and meaning again.

It’s a mystery why, but the most frequent image sent to me by
 TSW readers is that of Saint Michael the Archangel. There are
 five distinct icons of him on the wall, plus the one that 
seems to prefer Pornchai’s side. These stone walls — the 
concrete ones, not the blog — are filled with companions now.

There’s another icon of Saint Michael on my coffee cup — the 
only other place prisoners always leave their mark — and yet 
another inside and above the cell door. That one was placed
 there by my friend, Alberto Ramos, who went to prison at age
 14 and turned 30 last week. It appeared a few months ago. 
 Alberto’s religious roots are in Caribbean Santeria. He said 
Saint Michael above the door protects this cell from evil. He 
said this world and this prison greatly need Saint Michael.

Who Is Like God?

The references to the Archangel Michael are few and cryptic in the canon of Hebrew and Christian Scripture. In the apocalyptic visions of the Book of Daniel, he is Michael, your Prince, “who stands beside the sons of your people.” In Daniel 12:1 he is the guardian and protector angel of Israel and its people, and the “Great Prince” in Heaven who came to the aid of the Archangel Gabriel in his contest with the Angel of Persia (Daniel 10:13, 21).

His name in Hebrew — Mikha’el — means “Who is like God?” It’s
 posed as a question that answers itself. No one, of course, 
is like God. A subsidiary meaning is, “Who bears the image of
 God,” and in this Michael is the archetype in Heaven of what 
man himself was created to be: the image and likeness of God. Some other depictions of the Archangel Michael show him with a
 shield bearing the image of Christ. In this sense, Michael is 
a personification, as we’ll see below, of the principal 
attribute of God throughout Scripture.

Outside of Daniel’s apocalyptic vision, the Archangel Michael 
appears only two more times in the canon of Sacred Scripture. 
In Revelation 12:7-9 he leads the army of God in a great and 
final battle against the army of Satan. A very curious
 mention in the Epistle of Saint Jude (Jude 1:9) describes 
Saint Michael’s dispute with Satan over the body of Moses.

This is a direct reference to an account in the Apocrypha, and
 demonstrates the importance and familiarity of some of the
 apocryphal writings in the Israelite and early Christian
 communities. Saint Jude writes of the account as though it is
 quite familiar to his readers. In the Assumption of Moses in
 the apocryphal Book of Enoch, Michael prevails over Satan,
 wins the body of Moses, and accompanies him into Heaven.

It is because of this account that Moses and Elijah appear 
with Jesus in the account of the Transfiguration in Matthew 
11. Moses and Elijah are the two figures in the Hebrew 
Scriptures to hear the voice of God on Mount Sinai, and to be 
assumed bodily into Heaven — escorted by Saint Michael the 
Archangel according to the Aggadah, the collection of
 milennia of rabbinic lore and custom.

Saint Michael as the Divine Measure of Souls

In each of the seven images of Saint Michael the Archangel
 sent to me by TSW readers, he is depicted brandishing a sword 
in triumph over Satan subdued at his feet. In five of the 
icons, he also holds a set of scales above the head of Satan. 
A lot of people confuse the scales with those of “Lady Justice” 
the famous American icon. Those scales symbolize the equal
 application of law and justice in America. It’s a high ideal,
 but one that too often isn’t met in the American justice
 system. I cited some examples in “The Eighth Commandment.”

The scales of Saint Michael also depict justice, but of 
another sort. Presumably that’s why so many readers sent me 
his image, and I much appreciate it. However, some research
 uncovered a far deeper symbolic meaning for the Archangel’s 
scales. The primary purpose of the scales is not to measure 
justice, but to weigh souls. And there’s a specific factor 
that registers on Saint Michael’s scales. They depict his 
role as the measure of mercy, the highest attribute of God for 
which Saint Michael is the personification. The capacity for 
mercy is what it most means to be in the image and likeness of
 God. The primary role of Saint Michael the Archangel is to be
 the advocate of justice and mercy in perfect balance — for
 justice without mercy is little more than vengeance.

That’s why God limits vengeance as summary justice. In 
Genesis chapter 4, Lamech, a descendant of Cain, vows that “if 
Cain is avenged seven-fold then Lamech is avenged seventy-seven
fold.” Jesus later corrects this misconception of justice by 
instructing Peter to forgive “seventy times seven times.”

Our English word, “Mercy” doesn’t actually capture the full
 meaning of what is intended in the Hebrew Scriptures as the 
other side of the justice equation. The word in Hebrew is 
”hesed,” and it has multiple tiers of meaning. It was 
translated into New Testament Greek as “eleos,” and then 
translated into Latin as “misericordia” from which we derive 
the English word, “mercy.” Saint Michael’s scales measure 
”hesed,” which in its most basic sense means to act with 
altruism for the good of another without anything of obvious 
value in return. It’s the exercise of mercy for its own sake,
 a mercy that is the highest value of Judeo-Christian faith.

Sacred Scripture is filled with examples of hesed as the chief 
attribute of God and what it means to be in His image. That 
”the mercy of God endures forever” is the central and repeated
 message of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The references are
 too many to name, but as I was writing this post, I
 spontaneously thought of a few lines from Psalm 85:

“Mercy and faithfulness shall meet. Justice and peace 
shall kiss. Truth shall spring up from the Earth, and 
justice shall look down from Heaven.”

— Psalm 85:10-11

The domino effect of hesed-mercy is demonstrated in Psalm 85. 
Faithfulness and truth will arise out of it, and together all 
three will comprise justice. In researching this, I found a
 single, ancient rabbinic reference attributing authorship of 
Psalm 85 to the only non-human instrument of any Psalm or 
verse of Scripture: Saint Michael the Archangel, himself.
 According to that legend, Psalm 85 was given by the Archangel 
along with the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Saint Thomas Aquinas described Saint Michael as “the breath of
 the Redeemer’s spirit who will, at the end of the world,
 combat and destroy the Anti-Christ as he did Lucifer in the
 beginning.” This is why St. Michael is sometimes depicted bearing a shield with the image of Christ.  It is the image of Christ in His passion, imprinted upon the veil of St. Veronica.  Veronica is a name that appears nowhere in Scripture, but is simply a name assigned by tradition to the unnamed woman with the veil.  The name Veronica comes from the Latin “vera icon” meaning “true image.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas and many Doctors of the Church regarded Saint 
Michael as the angel of Exodus who, as a pillar of cloud and
 fire, led Israel out of slavery. Christian tradition gives to 
Saint Michael four offices: To fight against Satan, to measure 
and rescue the souls of the just at the hour of death, to 
attend the dying and accompany the just to judgment, and to be 
the Champion and Protector of the Church.

His feast day, assigned since 1970 to the three Archangels of 
Scripture, was originally assigned to Saint Michael alone
 since the sixth century dedication of a church in Rome in his 
honor.  The feast was originally called Michaelmas meaning, “The Mass of St. Michael.” The great prayer to Saint Michael, however, is 
relatively new. It was penned on October 13, 1884, by Pope 
Leo XIII after a terrifying vision of Saint Michael’s battle
 with Satan:

---

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, 0 Prince of the heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

---

It’s an important prayer for the Church, especially now. I know the enemies of the Church lurk here, too. There are some who come here not for understanding, or the truth, but for ammunition. For them the very concept of mercy, forgiveness, and inner healing is anathema to their true cause. I once scoffed at the notion that evil surrounds us, but I have seen it. I think every person falsely accused has seen it.

Donald Spinner, mentioned in “Loose Ends and Dangling Participles,” gave Pornchai a prayer that was published by the prison ministry of the Paulist National Catholic Evangelization Association. Pornchai asked me to mention it in this post. It’s a prayer that perfectly captures the meaning of Saint Michael the Archangel’s Scales of Hesed:

“Prayer for Justice and Mercy
Jesus, united with the Father and the Holy Spirit, give us your compassion for those in prison. Mend in mercy the broken in mind and memory. Soften the hard of heart, the captives of anger. Free the innocent; parole the trustworthy. Awaken the repentance that restores hope. May prisoners’ families persevere in their love. Jesus, heal the victims of crime; they live with the scars. Lift to eternal peace those who die. Grant victims and their families the forgiveness that heals. Give wisdom to lawmakers and those who judge. Instill prudence and patience in those who guard. Make those in prison ministry bearers of your light, for ALL of us are in need of your mercy! Amen.”

Saints and Sacrifices: Maximilian Kolbe and Edith Stein at Auschwitz

Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — Edith Stein — are honored this week as martyrs of charity and sacrifice.

In a post some years ago I invited our readers to join my friend Pornchai Moontri and me in a personal Consecration to Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s dual movements: the Militia of the Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross. Our Consecration took place at Mass on the night of August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption, and the day after Saint Maximilian’s Feast Day. Visit the website of the Militia of the Immaculata for instructions for enrolling in the Militia Immaculata and the Knights at the Foot of the Cross.

We’re very moved by the number of people who have pledged to join us in this Consecration. The invitation remains always open.

Consecration as members of Saint Maximilian’s M.I. or Knights at the Foot of the Cross does not mean I plan to take on any more suffering or that I will never again complain. It does not even mean that I accept with open arms whatever crosses I bear and embrace them.

A person who is unjustly imprisoned must do all in his power to reverse that plight just as a person with cancer must do everything possible to be restored to health. Consecration does not mean we will simply acquiesce to suffering and look for more. It means we embrace the suffering of Christ, and offer our own as a share in it. In the end, I know I cannot empty myself, as Christ did, but I can perhaps attain the attitude of “Simon of Cyrene: Compelled to Carry the Cross,” of which my own is but a splinter.

I have written in the past that history has a tendency to treat its events lightly. The centuries have made Saint Patrick, for example, a sort of whimsical figure. History has distorted the fact that he became the saint he is after great personal suffering. Patrick was kidnapped by Irish raiders at the age of 16, forced from his home and family, taken across the Irish Sea and forced into slavery.

The life and death of Saint Maximilian are still too recent to be subjected to the colored glasses through which we often view history and sainthood. As with nearly all the saints — and with some of us who simply struggle to believe — great suffering was imposed on Maximilian Kolbe and he responded in a way that revealed a Christ-centered rather than self-centered life. What happened to Father Maximilian Kolbe must not be removed from what the Germans would call his “sitz im leben,” the “setting in life” of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. As evil as they were, they were the forges in which Maximilian cast off self and took on the person of Christ.

Scene from the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust”

“And the Winner Is . . .”

Do you remember the television “mini-series” productions of the 1970s and 1980s? After the great success of bringing Alex Haley’s “Roots” to the screen, several other forays into history were aired in our living rooms. One of them was a superb and compelling series entitled “Holocaust” that debuted on NBC on April 16, 1978. It was a brilliant and powerful example of television’s potential.

“Holocaust” won several Emmy Awards for NBC in 1978 for outstanding Limited Series, Best Director (Marvin Chomsky), Best Screenplay (Gerald Green), Best Actor (Michael Moriarty), Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and a number of Supporting Actor and other awards. As a historical narrative, however, “Holocaust” was deeply disturbing and shook an otherwise comfortable generation all too inclined to want to forget and move on. That was a complaint during the famous Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946.

Just two years after the Allied Invasion of Germany and Poland ended the war and exposed the Death Camps, writers complained that Americans had lost interest and were not reading about the Nuremberg Trials. The aftermath of war revealed the sheer evil of the Nazi Final Solution, and it was more than most of us could bear to look at — so many did not look.

As I wrote in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich,” there are some who would have you believe that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the 20th Century. Viewing “Holocaust” (the miniseries) would quickly shatter any such revisionist history. Its first episode was so graphic in its depiction of Nazi oppression, and caused me so much anguish, that I struggled with whether to watch the rest.

I was 25 years old when it first aired, and finishing senior year at Saint Anselm College, a Benedictine school in New Hampshire. I was a double major in philosophy and psychology, and was in the middle of writing my psychology thesis on the relationship between trauma and depression when “Holocaust” kept me awake all night.

The morning after that first episode, I sought out a friend, an elderly Benedictine monk on campus who recommended the series to me. I thought he might tell me to turn my television off, but I was wrong. “This happened in my lifetime,” he said. “We cannot run from it. So don’t look away. Stare straight into its heart of darkness, and never forget what you see.”

He was right, and his words were eerily similar to those of biographer, George Weigel, who wrote of Pope John Paul II and his interest in Saint Maximilian Kolbe in Witness to Hope (HarperCollins, 1999):

Maximilian Kolbe . . . was the ‘saint of the abyss’ — the man who looked into the modern heart of darkness and remained faithful to Christ by sacrificing his life for another in the Auschwitz starvation bunker while helping his cellmates die with dignity and hope.

— Witness to Hope, p. 447

That was what the Holocaust was: “the modern heart of darkness.” I have been a student of the Holocaust since, but I am no closer to understanding it than I was on that sleepless night in 1978. As I asked in “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich”:

“How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?”

We have all been reading about the breakdown of faith in Europe, and about how decades-old scandals are now being used to justify the abandonment of Catholicism in European culture. This is not a new phenomenon. This madness engulfed Europe just eighty years ago, and before it was over, six million of our spiritual ancestors were deprived of liberty, and then life, for being Jews.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” exterminated fully two-thirds of the Jewish men, women, and children of Europe — and millions of others who either stood in his way or spoke the truth. Among those imprisoned and murdered were close to 12,000 Catholic priests and thousands more women religious and other Catholics. The determination to rid Europe of the Judeo-Christian faith did not begin with claims of sexual abuse, and this is not the first time such claims were used to further that agenda.

The Great Lie and Revealed Truth

This of all weeks keeps me riveted on the Holocaust.  It was in this week that two of my dearest spiritual friends were murdered a year apart at Auschwitz by that madman, Hitler, and his monstrous Third Reich.  Father Maximilian Kolbe traded his life for that of a fellow prisoner on August 14, 1941, and Edith Stein — who became Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross — was dragged from a cattle train and murdered along with her sister, Rosa, immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942.

We must not forget this line from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (Vol. 1, Ch.10, 1925): “The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” In order for a lie to disseminate and prevail, the truth must be controlled. In 1933, the Third Reich imposed the “Editor’s Law” in Germany requiring that editors and publishers join the Third Reich’s Literary Chamber or cease publishing. In 1933 there were over 400 Catholic newspapers and magazines published in Germany. By 1935 there were none.

The Nazi law was imposed in each country invaded by the Reich. In Poland, Father Maximilian was one of many priests sent to prison for his continued writings, but time in prison did not teach him the lesson intended by the Nazis. He was imprisoned again, and he would not emerge alive from his second sentence at Auschwitz. He was not alone in this. Nearly 12,000 priests were sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

“Come, Let Us Go For Our People.”

Edith Stein was the youngest of eleven children in a devout Jewish family in Germany. She was born on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on October 12, l891. As a young woman, Edith broke her mother’s heart by abandoning her Jewish faith in adolescent rebellion. She was also brilliant, and it was difficult to win an argument with her using reason and logic. She was a master of both.

Edith received her doctorate in philosophy under the noted phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, and taught at a German university when the Nazis came to power in 1933. During this time of upheaval, Edith converted to Catholicism after stumbling across the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. “This is the truth,” Edith declared after reading it through in one sleepless night. A few years after her conversion, Edith Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Germany taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Blessed by the Cross).

March 27, 1939 was Passion Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In response to a declaration of Adolf Hitler that the Jews would bring about their own extinction, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross wrote a private note to her Carmelite superior. She offered herself in prayer as expiation against the Anti-Christ who had cast all of Europe into a spiritual stranglehold. In her letter to her superior, Sister Teresa offered herself as expiation for the Church, for the Jews, for her native Germany, and for world peace.

As the Nazi horror overtook Europe, Sister Teresa grew fearful that she was placing her entire convent at risk because of her Jewish roots. Edith was then assigned to a Carmelite Convent in Holland. Her sister, Rosa, who also converted to Catholicism, joined her there as a postulant.

Catholics in France, Belgium, Holland and throughout Europe organized to rescue tens of thousands of Jewish children from deportation to the Death Camps. Philip Friedman, in Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society, 1980) commended the Catholic bishops of the Netherlands for their public protest about the Nazi deportation of Jews from Holland. In retaliation for those bishops’ actions, however, even Jews who had converted to Catholicism were rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz.

A 2010 book by Paul Hamans — Edith Stein and Companions: On the Way to Auschwitz — details the horror of that day. Hundreds of Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland in retaliation for the bishops’ open rebellion, and most were never seen again. This information stands in stark contrast to the often heard revisionist history that Pope Pius XII “collaborated” with the Nazis through his “silence.” He was credited by the chief rabbi of Rome, Eugenio Zolli, with having personally saved over 860,000 Jews and preventing untold numbers of deaths.

The last words heard from Sister Teresa as she was forced aboard a cattle car packed with victims were spoken to her sister, Rosa, “Come, let us go for our people.” On August 9, 1942, Sister Teresa emerged from the cramped human horror of that cattle train into the Auschwitz Death Camp to face The Sorting.

Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel described The Sorting:

“How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukranian landscapes to their deaths? No, I can’t do it. And because I’m a writer and teacher, I don’t understand how Europe’s most cultured nation could have done that.”

That August 9th, Edith Stein went no further into the depths of Auschwitz than The Sorting. Some SS officer glared at this brilliant 50-year-old nun in the tattered remains of her Carmelite habit, and declared that she was not fit for work. This woman who had worked every day of her life, who taught philosophy to Germany’s graduate students, who scrubbed convent floors each night, was determined to be “unfit for work” by a Nazi officer who knew it was a death sentence.

Edith and Rosa were taken directly to a cottage along with 113 others, packed in, the doors sealed, and they were gassed to death. Their remains, like those of Maximilian Kolbe a year earlier, went unceremoniously up in smoke to drift through the sky above Auschwitz. And Europe thinks it would be better off now without faith!

“Thus the way from Bethlehem leads inevitably to Golgotha, from the crib to the Cross. (Simeon’s) prophecy announced the Passion, the fight between light and darkness that already showed itself before the crib … The star of Bethlehem shines in the night of sin. The shadow of the Cross falls on the light that shines from the crib. This light is extinguished in the darkness that is Good Friday, but it rises all the more brilliantly in the sun of grace on the morning of the Resurrection.

“The way of the incarnate Son of God leads through the Cross and Passion to the glory of the Resurrection. In His company the way of everyone of us, indeed of all humanity, leads through suffering and death to this same glorious goal.”

— Edith Stein/Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross

Catholic Scandal and The Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic

“The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Ch. 10 (1925)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tribute to Saint Maximilian Kolbe on the April 28th anniversary of his ordination. I made a controversial point in that post:

“Almost without exception, the typical claims of abuse by Catholic priests so roiling the news media were alleged to have happened thirty to forty years ago.”

Go back just another thirty to forty years, I wrote, and you will find yourself right in the middle of the Nazi horror that engulfed Europe and claimed the lives of six million Jews and millions of others. I suggested that Catholics should not accept what some would now impose: that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the Twentieth Century.

A TSW reader responded to that insight by sending me a rather startling document.  As I began to read it, I almost tossed it aside dismissing it as just another sensational headline. You might be tempted to do the same.  Resist that temptation, please, and keep reading:

“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of the Catholic clergy. Unfortunately it’s not a matter of individual cases, but a collective moral crisis that perhaps the cultural history of humanity has never before known with such a frightening and disconcerting dimension. Numerous priests and religious have confessed. There’s no doubt that the thousands of cases which have come to the attention of the justice system represent only a small fraction of the true total, given that many molesters have been covered and hidden by the hierarchy.”

This isn’t an editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, nor is it the opening gun in a new lawsuit by Jeffrey Anderson. It also isn’t a quote from S.N.A.P. or V.O.T. F. It is part of a speech delivered on May 28, 1937 by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich.

As a direct result of Goebbels’ speech, 325 Catholic priests representing every diocese in Germany were arrested and sent to prison. The story was uncovered by Italian sociologist and author, Massimo Introvigne and republished by LifeSiteNews.com. According to Mr. Introvigne, the term “moral panic” is a modern term used since the 1970s “to identify a social alarm created artificially by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers” and by “presenting as ‘new’ events which in reality are already known and which date to the past.”

It all has a terribly familiar ring. Though “moral panic” wasn’t a term used in 1937, it describes exactly what Joseph Goebbels was called upon by the Third Reich to create.  And the propaganda campaign, like the current one, had nothing to do with protecting children. It was launched by the Third Reich because of a 1937 Papal Encyclical by Pope Pius XI entitled “Mit brennender Sorge” — “With burning concern” — in which the Pope condemned Nazi ideology. According to Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of lifeSiteNews.com, the encyclical was smuggled out of Rome into Germany and read from every pulpit in every Catholic parish in the Reich.

The propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels was later exposed as a clear exaggeration and exploitation of a few cases of sexual abuse that were all too real, but for which the Church had taken decisive action. In the end, the vast majority of the priests arrested and imprisoned, their reputations destroyed and the Church’s moral authority in Germany impugned — were quietly set free. When the campaign finally evaporated, only six percent of the 325 priests accused were ultimately condemned, and it is a certainty that among even those were some who were falsely accused.

By the end of the war, according to Introvigne, “the perfidy of the campaign of Goebbels aroused more indignation than the eventual guilt” of a relatively small number of priests — a number that was a mere percentage of those first accused.

The accused priests were not Goebbels’ real target, of course. The Nazi Ministry of Propaganda targeted the Church and its bishops and papacy declaring a cover-up of the claims and keeping the matter in the daily headlines.

According to Massimo Introvigne who uncovered this story, “Goebbels’ campaign followed the same pattern seen in recent media attacks on the Church.” Like today’s moral panic, the Goebbels campaign attempted to revive old claims that had long since been resolved to keep the matter in public view and to discredit the Catholic Church.

It was all because of the Papal encyclical denouncing Nazi ideology and tactics and defending “the Church’s Jewish heritage against Hitler’s racist attacks,” according to Hoffman.

Consider the Source

How the Massimo Introvigne article came to me makes for an interesting aside. It was sent to me by a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated twenty-two years ago by a priest in my diocese, a priest with whom I once served in ministry. The young man he violated has worked to overcome his anger and to embrace the grace of forgiveness. He sought and obtained a modest settlement for the abuse he suffered years ago, and he used it for counseling expenses. This man is a reader of These Stone Walls who recently wrote to me:

“I have been scouring the Internet and doing a great deal of reading … For what it is worth, I believe you are serving an unjust sentence for a crime you did not commit. If I do not do everything in my power to be of assistance to you, I would be committing a grave sin.”

That is certainly a far different reaction than the rhetoric of most other claimants against priests and their “advocates” among contingency lawyers and the victim groups that are receiving major donations from contingency lawyers. My more recent exchanges with this man lead me to conclude something I have long believed: that the people most repulsed and offended by false claims of abuse and the rhetoric of a witch hunt should be the real victims of sexual abuse.

It is no longer the Nazi state that stands to win big from the creation of a moral panic targeting the Catholic Church and priesthood. But the current propaganda campaign is little different in either its impetus or its result.

Dr. Thomas Plante, Ph.D., a professor of Psychology at Santa Clara University, published an article entitled “Six important points you don’t hear about regarding clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church” (Psychology Today, March 24, 2010). Dr. Plante’s conclusions from studying the empirical data are far different from what you may read in any propaganda campaign — either the 1937 one or the one underway now. These are Dr. Plante’s conclusions:

“Catholic clergy are not more likely to abuse children than other clergy or men in general.” [As I pointed out in “Due Process for Accused Priests,” priests convicted of sexual abuse account for no more than three (3) out of 6,000 incarcerated, paroled, and registered sex offenders.]

“Clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church cannot be blamed on celibacy.” The majority of men convicted of sexual abuse are married and/or divorced.

“Almost all of the clergy sexual abuse cases that we hear about in the news are from decades ago,” most from the 1960s to 1970s.

“Most clergy sex offenders are not pedophiles.” Eighty percent of accusers were post-pubescent teens, and not children, when abuse was alleged to have occurred.”

“There is much to be angry about,” Dr. Plante concluded, but anger about the above media-fueled misconceptions is misplaced. Why this isn’t clearer in the secular press is no mystery? As one observer of the news media wrote,

“More than illness or death, the American journalist fears standing alone against the whim of his owners or the prejudice of his audience.”

— Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America, Ch. 9, (1988)

You know I was born on April 9, 1953. That was just eight years to the day after Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged at age 39 on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler. It was to be Hitler’s last gesture of contempt for truth before he took his own life as the Allies advanced on Germany in April, 1945.

Since childhood, I have been aware that I shared this date with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man I greatly admire. He was imprisoned and hanged because he made a decision of conscience to resist Hitler with every ounce of strength God gave him. I concluded my Holy Week post with an excerpt of his most famous book, The Cost of Discipleship.

The truth of what happened in Germany and Poland emerged into full public view just sixty-five years ago. The entire world recoiled in horror and revulsion. The revelations changed the world, radically altering humanity’s world view. It marked the dawn of the age of cynicism and distrust. How did a society come to stand behind the hateful rhetoric of one man and his political machine? How did masses of people become convinced that any ideology of the state was worth the horror unfolding before their eyes?

As the truth slowly emerged during the years of war and slaughter, The New York Times, in its 1942 Christmas Day editorial declared:

“No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world at this season. This Christmas more than ever he is a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent.”

In 1942, The New York Times was joined in its acclaim of Pope Pius XII by the World Jewish Congress, Albert Einstein, and Golda Meir. The March 2010 issue of Catalyst reported that Pope Pius was officially recognized for directly saving the lives of 860,000 Jews while the chief rabbi in Rome, Eugenio Zolli, converted to Catholicism and took the name “Eugenio” in honor of the Pope’s (Eugenio Pacelli) challenge of the Nazi regime.

The New York Times has sure changed its tune since then, and has helped build a revisionist history of Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church that takes a polar opposite point of view. Today, commending a pope, or even mentioning Christmas, would be anathema to the Times’ editorial agenda.

By the end of April, 1945, within days of ordering Dietrich Bonhoeffer hanged, Adolf Hitler took his own life. Joseph Goebbels, intensely loyal to Hitler, murdered his wife and children before also committing suicide. The terror and propaganda of the Third Reich were over.

The propaganda of the current moral panic is just getting fully underway, however. British atheist Richard Dawkins has declared the Catholic Church to be “a child-raping institution” and wrote in The Washington Post a few weeks ago of Pope Benedict’s planned visit to England in September:

“This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares 
set foot outside the tin pot fiefdom of the Vatican and he should be tried in an appropriate civil court.”

Does this sound like reasonable discourse to you? And it isn’t just the secular press engaged in this sort of hate speech. I was utterly dismayed a few weeks ago to see a highly respected Catholic weekly newspaper box off and highlight a letter from a reader calling for the imprisonment of all priests accused from thirty and forty years ago.

Don’t be so quick to consign 80-year-old men to prison for things alleged to have happened decades ago — things that cannot be proven at all. It’s tempting to toss the rights of all priests out the window in the heat of a global media witch trial, but it is not the way of our Church to abandon all reason in favor of the mob.

The secular press is going to do what it always does: sell newspapers to the mob. But this hateful rhetoric should not be appearing in the Catholic press. Calling upon the Vatican to set aside the rights of priests under Church law is no way to conclude the Year of the Priest.

Adopting the rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels simply doesn’t bring light to the issues. It is caving in to our basest nature, and reflects not the Truth upon which our faith is built. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran, would be calling Catholics to a much higher standard of discipleship.

Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazi ideology in his 1937 Encyclical "Mit bennender Sorge."

St. Maximilian Kolbe and the Man in the Mirror

For someone on the outside looking in, it must seem an odd place to begin. Virtually every prison cell has one: a small stainless steel sink with a matching toilet welded to its side. Bolted to the cinderblock wall just above it is a small stainless steel mirror, dinged, dented, and scraped so badly that the image it reflects is unrecognizable.

I begin each day at the break of dawn in prison by shaving in front of that mirror. This morning ritual has repeated 5,412 times. [At this writing, it 10,530 times.] I seldom cut myself shaving — a minor miracle as I can see very little of me in that mirror. I often think of St. Paul’s cryptic image in his first letter to the Church in Corinth (13:12): “For now I see dimly, as in a mirror, but then I shall see face to face.” It is a hopeful image.

I sometimes find that my mind calculates dates and their meanings on a sort of autopilot. There came a day when I stood at the mirror to shave and realized that on this day it was Dec. 23, 2006. I have been a priest in prison for the exact amount of time that I was a priest “on the streets” as prisoners like to describe their lives before prison.

From that day until now, I wonder which I see more of in that flawed mirror. Do I see the man who is a priest of 27 years? Or do I see only Prisoner 67546, the identity given to me inside these stone walls?

A strange thing happened on the day after I first reflected — as best I could in that mirror — on who I see. It was Christmas Eve, December 24, 2006, the day that the equation changed. It was the day that I was a priest in prison longer than anywhere else. That night at prison mail call, I had a few Christmas cards. One of them was from Father James McCurry, a Conventual Franciscan priest who once visited me in prison.

Inside Father McCurry’s Christmas card was a prayer card that is now one of my enduring treasures. It is taped to the stone wall just above the shaving mirror of my cell and has been there ever since the day I received it. The holy card has an image of St. Maximilian Kolbe who offered himself for execution in place of another prisoner in Auschwitz in 1941. The card depicts Father Kolbe in his Conventual Franciscan habit. He has one sleeve in the striped jacket of his prison uniform with the number 16670 emblazoned across it. There is a scarlet “P” above the number indicating his Polish nationality. He was also a priest and a falsely accused prisoner. Does either designation extinguish the other? Father Kolbe is at once both, though only one identity was chosen by him.

The image is a haunting image for it captures fully that struggle I have so keenly felt. Father Maximilian appeared in my cell just a day after I asked the question of myself. Who am I? I thought at the time, that it was a rhetorical question, but it was a prayer. As such, it begged a reply — and got one.

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