A matter of comparison

Author: Rosa Maria Young

We are living in dangerous times full of incertitude and angst. For those of us boomers it should be easier if only we could go back to the beliefs of our youth. Oh, how we despised our parents materialism, and what great ideals we had about the world we were going to build for us and our future children… And then reality inserted itself in our lives and we realized how nice it was to have a great house, comfortable cars, to travel, to be able to send our children to good schools, in fact to have better and more affluent lives than our parents. We not only became like them, we got ahead of them. We just embraced capitalism with gusto. And why not? The problem is that things got too good and our children not knowing anything else followed our ways and did not understand what to make a sacrifice meant, what to have ideals was. They had to have what they wanted on the spot. We became enablers of their actions if only with our silence. The government, the banks, the credit card companies became enablers and everybody borrowed above their means. The result: the actual financial debacle we are in. What is going to happen? I don’t care how many meetings, speeches and proposed solutions politicians, economist and financial officers have or talk about, I fear for the generations of our children. They are the ones who are going to suffer.

In all this mess, as if wanting to distract us, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI, is trying to make the cause for the beatification of Pope Pius XII, a very controversial Pope for his acts during World War II. One of the reasons for his possible beatification is according to the church that he had worked “secretly and silently” to save Jews during the war. This same reason is disputed and the cause of the opposition to the beatification, the last step to sainthood, by many Jews as well as members of other religions including Catholics. They believe that Pius XII did not act aggressively enough during the Holocaust. This past Monday, 6th of October, during the Vatican’s annual synod of bishops, the first rabbi ever invited to address it, Shear Yeshuv Cohen of Haifa, created a stir when he said he did not think that Pius should be beatified. In front of the Pope and the 300 bishops and experts present he said: “We cannot forget the painful action that many people, even some great religious leaders, did not stand up to save our brothers and that they chose to keep silent. (…)We cannot forgive and forget that and I hope that you understand.”
Those were certainly not easy times in the world either. In fact, the current financial problems seem in comparison rather small for many of us.