The effect of such religious practices and beliefs is well illustrated by the witness of Ingrid Shafer. Andreas of Rinn was the theological twin of St. Simon of Trent. Indeed, multiple child saints supposedly murdered by Jews were popularized in multiple European countries. Ingrid Shafer recounts how she tried to rationally understand how so many good persons could have become complicit in the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. She found that the blood libel stories of St. Simon of Trent and Andreas of Rinn were at the center of Holocaust psychology.
"I was born in Innsbruck, Austria, one month before Hitler marched into Poland, and have been haunted by images of the Holocaust ever since I was old enough to read magazines and interrogate adults. In my teens I began to seek a rational explanation for what seemed the unconscious, knee-jerk anti-Jewish prejudices of so many good people I knew--teachers, other children, even my father. One day, as part of the study of regional history, our class hiked up the mountain to the nearby village of Rinn to visit Judenstein (“Jew-stone”), the shrine of the “Blessed Anderle,” the final resting place of a small boy whose throat, the teacher told us, had been slit by a band of Jewish merchants centuries before. In the chapel, we saw the large grey boulder on which the toddler had been slaughtered, and marveled at the imprint of the tiny body, miraculously left behind, a silent witness to a crime so heinous it softened the very stone. We listened to the story of Anderle’s martyrdom, how on this stone altar his tormentors had torn pieces of flesh from his body, stabbed him numerous times, and cut his arteries, catching the blood in containers. Later the Jewish monsters planned to use the blood to prepare the dough in order to bake bread for their heathen ritual, mocking the Eucharist. We looked at the pictures of the crime being committed on the chapel walls, knelt for prayer in the pews, and imagined the child’s agony and his mother’s grief when she discovered her son’s lifeless body hanging from a birch tree.”
What does one learn from this personal narrative. One, allegedly even the very stone was miraculously softened by the martyr's tiny body. Two, even good people such as Ingrid Shafer's father were effectively inculcated with a visceral hatred of Jews. Generation after generation, impressionable school children were taught by persons in whom they instinctively trusted, fathers and elementary school teachers, that greedy, blood-thirsty Jews slit the throats of innocent Christian children as a critical part of their RELIGIOUS nature. This was a slur upon the most sacred Eucharist, the very blood and body of Christ. Much worse than the blasphemous 20th century artist who put a crucifix in a bottle of urine and called it art; arguably worse than burning the Koran which recently happened in Afghanistan.
If one really believed Jews inherently and inextricably had such a criminal nature, could it be any wonder that any decent Christian would advocate exterminating such a demonic race?
We will see in our future blog that an inextricable connection exists between St. Simon of Trent, Andreas of Rinn, and many other accusations of blood libel and other Christian anti-Semitic theology and teachings. This helps explain both the Holocaust and the famous French Dreyfus Affair.
But for now, I wish to leave you with the following question: If the Catholic Pope, the Catholic Emperor, Catholic judiciary proceedings, the local Catholic bishop, and millions of Catholic elementary teachers and parents, (like the father and teacher of Ingrid Shafer), taught such a murderous, incredible, and blatant lie about St. Simon of Trent for centuries, should anyone trust in their moral authority and historical believability today in matters of faith and morals--for example, regarding use of birth-control pills, the necessary celibacy of the priests, the exclusion of females from the priesthood, homosexuality, abortion? Also, what predisposed the Christians to believe such an outrageous slander about the Jews? One thing is for certain, it did not spring to life ex nihilo by spontaneous generation.
Obviously, if European Catholics, from the most ignorant peasant to the most illustrious Emperor, Maximilian revered Saint Simon of Trent as a martyred victim of Christ-killing Jews who answered their prayers by performing countless miracles, it would be natural for them to consider Jews as demonic vampires worthy of the most horrific tortures and sadistic deaths. This is, of course, precisely what happened. As Kertzer documents: “In 1887-1891 alone, at least twenty-two different ritual murder accusations were widely reported in the press.” This led to what he describes as “obsessive reports of Jewish ritual murder by the Catholic press” in multiple nations, including “publications closest to the Vatican.” Often such reports were followed by pogroms and other murderous attacks on scores of Jewish communities. Such reports doubtless influenced Luther to describe Jews in his 1543 essay, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” as a “plague of disgusting vermin” seeking world domination and to urge that their books, synagogues, schools, and houses be burned. [1] Thus, there is a direct link between the Catholic religion’s elevation of Simon of Trent to sainthood, through the violent anti-Semitism of Martin Luther to the Nazi gas chambers for extinguishing the “plague of disgusting vermin.”
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