Dowd to Vatican: “Ne Eas Ibi”—Don’t Go There

Specifically, in her Easter Sunday morning op/ed piece in the New York Times today, Maureen Dowd was referring to the Roman Catholic Church’s long-time history of anti-Semitism and the fact that The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, a preacher in the Pope’s household, told people in St. Peter’s Basilica yesterday that the current accusations against Pope Ratz of papal misdeeds were akin to the suffering of the Jews that lead to the Holocaust. The New Republic literary editor and Jewish scholar Leon Wieseltier couldn’t understand why the church would want to bring up anything about anti-Semitism. Dowd quoted Wieseltier: “Why would the Catholic Church wish to defend itself by referring to other enormities in which it was also implicated? Anyway, the Jews endured more than a bad press.” Dowd said, “this solidarity with Jews is also notable given that Italy’s La Repubblica reported that ‘certain Catholic circles’ suspected that ‘a New York Jewish lobby’ was responsible for the outcry against the pope.” Nevertheless, not to be outdone by Father Cantalamessa’s ill-chosen, ill-timed, clueless, inappropriate and inapt simile, this morning the dean of the College of Cardinals in the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Sodano said during the Pope’s Easter message: ''Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometimes buffet the community of believers.'' In reporting on Easter Sunday in Vatican City, the New York Times said, “Sunday's edition of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano denounced the accusations against the pope as a ‘vile defamation operation’.” One can only repeat the words that Special Counsel Joseph N. Welch said to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel Roy Cohn at the McCarthy Communist witch-hunt hearings, and direct it at The Vatican, the College of Cardinals and Pope Benedict XVI: “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”