The Pope’s Problem

Writing for The Washington Post, Michael Gerson nicely sums up what’s so troubling about the Catholic Church’s rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier. “It is very difficult to understand how those who worship a man on a cross could help to drive the bloody nails themselves. But the record is clear: When religion is infected by racism, ideology or extreme nationalism, it can become a carrier of hatred instead of conscience. And when churches are concerned mainly with their institutional self-preservation, they often end up neck-deep in compromise or paralyzed by cowardice.”