Talk about a “winter of discontent.” Shakespeare’s Richard III was referring to civil war in England, but we have much bigger fish to fry.
January 22nd marks the 32nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions that legalized abortion on demand in all states. January 27th marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Russians, and the revelation of the scale of Nazi atrocities.
Tens of millions of words have been written, and will continue to be written about all the victims of World War II, but surely, the purposeful extermination of innocent civilians—mainly Jews—affects most of us in some deep recess of our very soul. Indeed, memorialization of the Holocaust has replaced actual Judaism for many so-called non-practicing Jews. That this near pagan martyr worship could supplant the world’s oldest monotheistic religion is not lost on the Orthodox, and is lamented daily.
Then there are those who have made a career off the blood of the victims. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, with such works as Hitler’s Willing Executioners and A Moral Reckoning, takes rapturous glee in attacking the German people and the Catholic Church en masse, playing to that very same audience of martyr worshippers and functional atheists. No matter that it is a huge leap from institutionalized anti-Semitism (nearly as common in America as it was in Europe at the time) to a willing genocidal force. And, despite tons of evidence to the contrary, that is trotted out at every opportunity, Goldhagen knows that there is always a market for calumny on the Church.
His latest piece, published in The Sunday Times and elsewhere acknowledges that thousands of Jewish children were saved by Catholics (although not, he assures us, at the behest of the Pope), but that “many” were not returned to their birth parents after the war. This latest charge is based on a 1946 letter, released last month. For what it’s worth, this calumny was almost immediately debunked by famed French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.
In fact, Klarsfeld could find only one case where this could have happened, and the boys were returned to their parents after a court battle.
Vatican documents did indicate that baptized Jewish children with no surviving relatives should not be handed over to Jewish institutions that had no custody rights. “It would be a different story if relatives asked for the children to be returned,” the documents state. Some smoking gun.
Meanwhile, the much larger holocaust of Roe, now at 40 million and counting doesn’t seem to get the same ink, nor passionate heralds such as a Goldhagen.
One would think that it is at least time to investigate what benefits, if any, have accrued to us in the wake of this slaughter. Has child abuse lessened? Hardly. Even if we correct for enhanced reporting since 1973, it has still increased by a factor of ten. How about keeping relationships intact? The statistics indicate that an overwhelming number of relationships between singles break up after an abortion.
And, what about the “slippery slope” argument, advanced after Roe? It appears that the prophets of doom were right. Euthanasia or infanticide, anyone?
Yet, it all comes together in a strange and wonderful way. Two of the very strongest forces against abortion are Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, pitted against many of those aforementioned martyr worshippers and functional atheists, who profess to honor individual rights, while denying that most fundamental right of all—the right to life.