In the US, we’ve become quite used to comparing the legalization of abortion to the Holocaust. It’s not a controversial comparison at all. Not so in Germany. Cardinal Joachim Meisner has sparked an outcry for doing just that and now he’s had to apologize.
“I regret that it has got to this pitch,” the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said, stressing that he would never have made such a comparison if he had thought it could have been open to misinterpretation. During a sermon in the city’s cathedral on Thursday, the cardinal declared: “First there was Herod, who ordered the children of Bethlehem to be killed, then there was Hitler and Stalin among others, and today unborn children are being killed in their millions.”
Germans are still living with the collective guilt of the Holocaust and thus anything that people think minimizes it is verboten, especially from the left-wing perspective which thinks of abortion as the State’s gift to women, not the slaughter of unborn innocents. And it would be one thing if it were just pro-abortion zealots who were offended, but it’s not.
The Germans build memorials to the Holocaust, and in so doing they condemn themselves for the crime of abortion.
Of course, we Americans build memorials to the Holocaust, too.