Worshipping One's Golden Ass

To: Truthout
Re: Article on Jewish "Exceptionalism"

In the West, "Exceptionalism" -- also known as stuck up self-righteousness -- is particularly prevalent among Protestants and Jews, the main difference here being that between a sneer and a whine.

The Nazis too were steeped in exceptionalism, and Pope Pius XI's words to them in 1937 are particularly appropriate:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State or any other value of the human community— however necessary and honorable their function -- above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God and is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

No one would think of preventing young Germans establishing a true ethnical community in anoble love of freedom and loyalty to their country [But] None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God and of a national religion, or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are "as a drop of a bucket" (Isaiah XI, 15).

In so saying, Pius went to the heart of the matter: i.e. that exceptionalism which by extalting self (or tribal self) goes beyond a happy pride and ends up debasing and destroying others.

Whether this exceptionalism is Nazi, Protestant, Jewish, or German, Anglo-American or Israeli, it is all cut from the same cloth and is equally obnoxious to the rest of us.

One of the true virtues of Catholicism is the belief in Original Sin, which counterbalances individual and tribal ego with sentiments (in Latin) such as "Who am I, when the Just are mercy needing?"

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