by Giuliano Guzzo (translated by Paolo Francesco Danesi)
I understand the emotion, I understand the enthusiasm, I understand the anger. I understand everything. I even understand ignorance. But what I don’t accept is ignorance ex cathedra. This is why I jumped when I read a sally by Enrico Mentana to expose which, however, a premise is needed. The popular journalist was irritated by the comment by Simone Angelosante, mayor of Ovindoli and regional councillor of the League [political party ndt], who compared the conversion to Islam by Silvia Romano to that of a Jew who, interned in a concentration camp, had converted to Nazism , returning home in the uniform of Hitler’s Germany.I do not intend to dwell on this combination. The point is that, of the many ways to reply to Angelosante, Mentana found nothing better “than to remember that the Auschwitz camp was located in the most Catholic Poland, and that Hitler himself was a baptized and confirmed Catholic”. Now that one of Mentana’s level juxtaposes the Holocaust to Catholicism leaves the reader stunned. Just considering Poland, we can remember how the Nazis exterminated about 3,000 Catholic priests. Exemplary, to dwell on Auschwitz (idea of the Nazi occupiers), was the sacrifice of St. Maximilian Kolbe, a figure perhaps not known in the studios of La7 [an Italian TV b´casters´- director: Mentana ] but of immense moral stature.No less serious is the Mentanian allusion to the “Catholic Hitler”. Does not the well-known journalist know that the future Führer already in his Mein Kampf called Christianity “first spiritual terror”? Do you, editor of Open, ignore that the dictator, in table Conversations said that “the hardest blow that humanity has received is the advent of Christianity”? In addition, it is ascertained that Hitler – so Catholic as to think that “either one is Christian or one is German” – meditated to kidnap the Pope, as evidenced by the archive of the papal gendarmerie containing a secret plan to defend the Holy See and hide Eugene Pacelli.To those who are not yet convinced of Hitler’s anti-Christianity, we can ask one of his closest collaborators, Joseph Goebbels, who in his diaries pinned how the Führer was – verbatim – “A fierce opponent” of the Church of Rome and Christianity in general, enemies that the dictator did not openly target only for “tactical reasons”; and we could continue on and on with evidence about the fact that National Socialism was all but Catholic, so much so that it had tireless enemies in Churchmen.Just think of Clemens August von Galen, a bishop that the New York Times and not just a parish bulletin, called “The most obstinate opponent of the National Socialist program”. All this to say that, if Mentana’s intervention was aimed at defending Silvia Romano, the only goal that he actually achieved was to offend not so much and not only Catholics – a category usually hamstrung by the media – but historical truth. For a front-line information professional in the fight against so-called hoaxes, he is truly a very slim figure.