Madam, - Vincent Browne got his Piuses mixed up (August 24th).
He wrote: "Pius XI was openly anti-Semitic, approving, for example, of the abduction of a Jewish child to rear her as a Catholic".
That was Pius IX (who also did a great injustice when he excommunicated the Fenians in 1870), and the abducted child was a boy, not a girl.
On June 23rd, 1858, Pope Pius IX disgracefully used his army to abduct the six-year-old Edgardo Mortaro from his parents' home in Bologna, which was then part of the Papal States - on the specious grounds that a family maid in the Mortaros' home had secretly baptised the child. Edgardo would eventually become a Catholic priest.
However, Browne is absolutely right when he claims the Catholic Church (the popes and the Vatican) bear a great responsibility for the spread of anti-Semitism. The authoritative book on the Church's shameful role is The Popes Against the Jews by David I. Kertzer (Knopf, NY, 2001). All Irish people should read it.
Anti-Semitism is the original sin of the Catholic Church - its most ancient and most blasphemous heresy.
The church, in the name of God, persecuted, demonised and oppressed God's Chosen People - sowing the seeds of, and building the antechambers to, the Holocaust. Martin Luther, a former Catholic priest, inherited this heresy and also passed it along to his followers.
Luther was a fanatical anti-Semite. Indeed, the pre-eminent Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, blamed Luther for being a major influence on the fanaticism that would inevitably help lead to the Holocaust.
All Catholics and Protestants need to repent for the great evil done to God's Chosen People. - Yours, etc,
Fr SEAN McMANUS, President, Irish National Caucus, Capitol Hill, Washington D.C.