The Splooge Of Lileks

Not for the first time, James Lileks betrays a lack of education. In the midst of a meandering something or other about how the Catholic church can't change and its position on modernity is preferable to the alternatives, he writes:

Note: every era is the modern era to the people who inhabit it; a “modern” pope in 1937 would have announced that godless collectivism was the wave of the future, and ridden the trains to Auschwitz standing on top, holding gilded reins, whooping like Slim Pickens.

Interesting hypothetical, is it not? Because the most modernist of all popes---the one who convened the council in which the church abandoned anti-Semitism, allowed for mass in local vernaculars, etc., in general took some baby steps towards entering the modern world---also happened to be among the heroic European gentiles of the World War II era. Of course, John XXIII was not pope at the time; his decidedly not-modern predecessor Pius XII was, and though Pius did not exactly work himself into a Slimpickensian euphoria over the extermination of the European Jews, he did absolutely nothing (and he could have done plenty) to at the very least obstruct Nazi designs.