Holocaust Revisionism

As the celibate Benedict XVI lectures us on eros, and the politician Joseph Ratzinger "stresses the importance of charity", an erstwhile colleague of theirs in the re-branded Holy Inquisition has had a sudden attack of moral relativism. The Very Reverend Joseph Augustine Di Noia, under-secretary for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, has deigned to be interviewed for an American television documentary which is based, "at least in part" on research done among the Vatican's own archives. "It is a mistake to torture people," Di Noia told the film-makers, though he was quick to make clear that, as practised by the Inquisition, torturing people is not the sort of error that has no rights. "Torture was regarded as a perfectly justified, legitimate way of producing evidence and it was therefore legally justified", man's law, in the Very Reverend's view, taking clear precedence over God's. "Killing people over ideas, generally speaking," - there are exceptions, then - "seems to us not to be a very good idea after 2,000 years of history"; the Mosaic prohibition being, presumably, either more flexible or more recent than is generally believed. Generally speaking, "we disapprove deeply of this kind of purgation" - the torture of heretics, the robbery of their families, the murder of Jews: it was not a crime, much less a sin; it was merely a purgation, the removal of poison from the body politic; only it was done in a terribly clumsy, primitive way, of which nowadays, generally, we tend to disapprove. Nevertheless, it seems to the Very Reverend that "it is possible to understand it within the context of its times and also to understand it within the sociology of religion, how communities react to threats which they regard to be dire or fatal." The moral liberalisation of the Church has come a long way, it appears.