I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating:

It is easy enough to criticize the Pope for his handling of this affair, and indeed he left himself wide open to it. But amidst the righteous anger at Williamson, we see a great number of people using this affair as a peg on which to hang their Catholic-bashing hats.

Williamson remains under order to recant, and if he doesn’t, he will be ostracized within the Church. Not re-excommunicated, because the original excommunication had nothing to do with his political views. It was because of his violation of canon law for accepting an illegal consecration.

Of all the great Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has done the most ex officio to apologize and atone for past sins of anti-Semitism. Check out the statements of certain Russian Orthodox or Serbian Orthodox officials, and see if you can discover anything equivalent to Nostra Aetate in their Church’s teaching.

What really irks me, however, is the ease with which Merkel and everybody calling for anything from re-excommunication for Williamson up to and including the Pope’s resignation can make such statements. Not that they’re wrong, per se: It is perfectly legitimate for such statements to be aired. No, what bothers me is that there’s no similar outrage from Merkel or the international community when people marching on their streets call not for the denial of the Holocaust - after all, denying the truth may be an outrage, but it has no effect on the truth - but for a new one. I mean, of course, the recent demonstrations all over Europe and the US calling for the destruction of Israel. I mean the videos we’ve seen here from Muslim clerics (some considered “moderates” in the West) gloating over the Holocaust and hoping for the next one to be at the hands of Muslims.

Why aren’t they condemned in terms as loud as we hear in the Williamson case?

Answer: The Pope and the Church will not behead you for calling them names.

Europe is more worried about a rogue priest and his repugnant views than it is by the hordes of active, potentially and actually violent anti-Semites and Muslim fanatics in its midst.

So the uproar over this affair is in fact a kind of stand-in for what they are afraid to say about the seething, spluttering, knife-wielding, bomb-making, Jew-hating fanatics inhabiting a large minority in the heart of their societies, whether they be Muslims or their Western supporters.

It’s time to wake up and call the leaders who are rightly criticizing Williamson and the Pope to account for their complicit silence on this other small matter. Anything else is cowardly capitulation.