Changing Perspectives on Civilization Gerry OShea People often ask how Germany, home of so many great artists and writers, could also have produced the Nazis with their record of horrendous cruelty and inhumanity. How could a culture that generated the three B’s, Brahms, Bach and Beethoven also claim Goebbels, Himmler and Adolf Hitler? At the Nuremberg trials, the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, told the judges that “the real complaining party at your bar is civilization.” The trial heard that the Nazi regime had completely discarded widely-accepted standards of decency and civility. Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich Minister for Propaganda, proclaimed that the Nazis were defending Europe against the pagan Bolshevik hordes coming from the east. He also condemned “British Barbarism” for bombing historic German cities and towns, describing these actions as “English assassination of European culture.” Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied P
Sexuality and the Catholic Church Gerry OShea The encyclical Laudato Si surely stands out as Pope Francis’ signature contribution to humanity. In it he identifies the earth as “our home” which we have carelessly neglected, especially since the Industrial Revolution that was getting underway two hundred years ago. The consequences of our immature behavior, a proliferation of floods, fires, droughts and famines, are clear, and the perilous state of our oceans points to a worsening crisis. There have been five previous mass extinctions of life in the universe. Francis has raised a large red flag warning that we may well be heading for another. This pope is also prophetic in his regular pronouncements on the devastating consequences of the prevailing level of world poverty. No other international leader can match his denunciations of economic systems that tolerate such awful levels of human deprivation. He mocks the neo-liberal contention, with its many