“There are cases of sexual abuse that come to light every day against a large number of members 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.”
Does the above quote come from an editorial from a newspaper in 2010? No, it’s from a speech of May 28, 1937, by Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich. It was just after the Pope of the day had released an encyclical condemning the Nazi regime. A very interesting article. According to the article -
The expression “moral panic” was only coined by sociologists in the 1970s to identify a social alarm created artificially, by amplifying real facts and exaggerating their numbers through statistical folklore, as well as “discovering” and presenting as “new” events which in reality are already known and which date to the past. There are real events at the base of the panic, but their number is systematically distorted.Even without the benefit of modern sociology, Goebbels responded to the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 with a textbook case of the creation of a moral panic.
Sound familiar?
It was the anti-Nazi encyclical of Pius XI that led to the great campaign of 1937. Mariaux proved it publishing highly detailed instructions sent by Goebbels to the Gestapo, the political police of the Third Reich, and above all to journalists, just a few days after the publication of Mit brennender Sorge, inviting them to “reopen” the cases from 1936 and also older cases, constantly recalling them to public opinion. Goebbels also ordered the Gestapo to find witnesses willing to accuse a certain number of priests, threatening them with immediate arrest if they didn’t collaborate, even if they were children.The proverbial phrase “there’s a judge in Berlin,” which in German tradition indicates trust in the independence of the court system from the political power of the moment, applied – within certain limits – even in the Third Reich. Of the 325 priests and religious arrested after the encyclical, only 21 were condemned, and it’s all but certain that among them some were falsely accused. Virtually all of them ended up in extermination camps, where many died.
Yes, the journalists. Sounds like today's media, doesn't it? I'm not saying that there haven't been priests that were guilty in the past or that today's media are Nazis, but this current engineered 'scandal' against Pope Benedict seems more like that manufactured by Goebbels all those years ago.
Story: MercatorNet