Mary Valle: Thank G-d Benjamin Weiner discusses the Catholic Church’s “playing” of the “Jew” today at Religion Dispatches: Catholics are daring to don the “shroud” of the “victim” while Pontifigate continues to swirl. Catholics comparing their “suffering”  (because other people are daring to look into their crimes?) to that of Jews (untold) is problematic on so many levels, but let’s just start with numbers. There are fewer Jews in the world than there are Catholics in Venezuela. It’s like comparing Hershey’s Kisses to Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. I actually prefer the Goldenbergs (I refuse to call them Chew-ets Peanut Chews) but there’s no way in Hades that 80 million of them are being manufactured each day in Hershey, PA. Or, if you prefer, it’s like comparing Goliath to David. Guess who you are, Catholics? You’re #1! You don’t get to play the sympathy card!

Weiner also discusses the problematic issue of the near-sainthood of controversial Holocaust-era Pope Pius XII vis-a-vis Jewish-Catholic relations (and the Pope’s creepy campaigning on Pius’ behalf) plus the whole turn-back-the-clock attitude regarding Latin prayers for Jewish conversion and  the Pope’s seeming “steering Church doctrine away from Nostra Aetate—an affirmation of the validity of other religious traditions—and back toward a vision of the son as the only path to the father.”  Benjamin, I hate to break it to you but: That One True Church stuff? Never went out of style. As far as the “decidedly post-Vatican II papacy” of Benedict is concerned, I’m reminded of something that Peter Fonda’s character says in the Limey, regarding “the 60s:” “It was just ’66 and early ’67. That’s all there was.”