Well, here we are three months on and yet it feels as though so much has happened since that Summit. I can honestly say that the influence of our team has made a significant difference to the business, both financially and in the shaping of the organization - and that's a good thing.
Too often attempts at innovation, especially in large organizations, are derailed if not totally shut down. We are a group of guys that are not that easily put off and so we persevered. True, it has taken longer than we would have liked and is a work still in progress but we are gradually changing things. Perhaps the economic downturn has helped, after all, folks have to learn to do better with less or to do things differently which is what we were advocating.
Here I am, sitting in a hotel conference room surrounded by work colleagues. We're having a Summit - the whole team sorting our new role in the aftermath of more organizational change.
Well, another Thanksgiving over and done with. Did the typical family thing with the addition of some WII activity. Good, clean fun. Sounds somewhat boring probably but what can I say, sometimes it is good to ease up, reflect and give blessing for what you have.
As far as work is concerned I'm having to catch up on all the days off I've accrued so I'll be taking quite a fair chunk of December off.
Over the last few months it has been a real pleasure working with two, small Behavioral Healthcare organizations.... getting back to basics and helping the consumer population. It sure makes a welcome change from dealing with corporate side of things.
Lots of Americans get their knickers in a twist - if you'll pardon the earthy English expression - over the subject of the separation of religion and government. Now, the idea of not allowing the state to impose one religious doctrine over another, thereby permitting any individual to hold fast to his own faith or atheism, is admirable. There is far too much state intervention these days as it is. All that being said, to deny the Christian roots on which the United States of America were founded is quite something else.
Let me make it clear that I am not saying that non-Christians are bereft of virtue. That would be absurd. What I am saying is that the founders were well aware of the potential destructive consequences when man is exposed to the power f civil government. They understood that virtue, and liberty are inseparably united, and that liberty cannot long be preserved in the absence of virtue among the people and their representatives. Christianity's part in the foundation of the United States of America is painstakingly assembled and explained in the Reverend Benjamin F. Morris’ magnum opus, the Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States.
I point this out because the anti-Christianity forces at large today are self evident. Believe me, I am no Holy Roller as we used to say, but I do detest the forces that are turning this country into something unrecognizable from that envisioned by the founders.
One of my daughters recently did a breast cancer run here in Phoenix. Like many cities this is a regular event...egad, I even participated myself a few years ago. That being in my consciousness I came across the following in the Chillicothe Gazette.
Many of us know a mother, a daughter, a relative or a friend diagnosed with breast cancer. You saw the tears, witnessed the fear and hoped to yourself it never would happen to you. It is a cancer that frightens many because years ago, being diagnosed with breast cancer meant certain death. Today, the five-year survival rate is 98 percent if the breast cancer is caught before it spreads. Sadly, many women are not aware of the risk factors for breast cancer and the need for early detection.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Throughout the month various hospitals and organizations will be promoting breast health issues. Pike Community Hospital is joining other health-care providers in this endeavor
Many women think they are not at high-risk for breast cancer if they have no family history. The reality is all women are at risk for and susceptible to developing breast cancer, although having several risk factors does not mean you will get the disease. Some women who have one or more risk factors never get breast cancer, and others with no risk factors will develop the disease. Your healthcare provider can help you understand your personal risk factors and discuss ways you can lower that risk.
So, how can you fight breast cancer? The best chance of fighting the disease is to establish a breast health regimen that focuses on breast awareness, regular screenings to ensure early diagnosis and lowering your risk factors for developing breast cancer.
Breast awareness begins with becoming familiar with your breasts and what they look and feel like normally. Beginning in your 20s, women should consider performing a monthly breast-self exam. If you are unsure about how to perform a breast-self exam, your health-care provider can show you. Complete the exam on the same day each month, preferably a week after the start of your menstrual cycle. If you do not menstruate, conduct the self-exam on the same day each month. Be sure to give yourself a visual and physical exam, from several angles.
While some changes are normal in the breast throughout a woman's lifetime; other changes are not.
Any suspicious breast changes should be reported to your health-care provider immediately. Also, beginning in your 20s, your health-care professional may perform a clinical breast exam during your regular exam. Such exams are recommended every three years for women in their 20s and 30s and annually for women 40 and older.
The best breast cancer detection methods according to the American Cancer Society are: regular mammograms, MRI testing for women at high-risk, finding and early reporting of breast changes to your healthcare provider and clinical breast exams. Some women believe they need to travel to Columbus or further, for some of these diagnostic options. Pike Community Hospital offers both mammography and MRI services. There are also other resources in this area to assist women in obtaining a screening mammogram and other services if further care is needed.
The following is a summary of some material from the Jewish Virtual Library.
Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust
Pope Pius XII's (1876-1958) actions during the Holocaust remain controversial. For much of the war, he maintained a public front of indifference and remained silent while German atrocities were committed. He refused pleas for help on the grounds of neutrality, while making statements condemning injustices in general. Privately, he sheltered a small number of Jews and spoke to a few select officials, encouraging them to help the Jews.
The Pope was born in 1876 in Rome as Eugenio Pacelli. He studied philosophy at the GregorianUniversity, learned theology at Sant Apollinare and was ordained in 1899. He entered the Secretariat of State for the Vatican in 1901, became a cardinal in 1929 and was appointed Secretary of State in 1930. Pacelli lived in Germany from 1917, when he was appointed Papal Nuncio in Bavaria, until 1929. He knew what the Nazi party stood for, and was elected Pope in 1939 having said very little about Adolf Hitler's ideology beyond a 1935 speech describing the Nazis as "miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel."
Pacelli told 250,000 pilgrims at Lourdes on April 28, "It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of the social revolution, whether they are guided by a false conception of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."
Even as Cardinal, Pacelli's actions regarding Hitler were controversial. On July 20 that same year, Pacelli and German diplomat Franz Von Papen signed a concordat that granted freedom of practice to the Roman Catholic Church. In return, the Church agreed to separate religion from politics. This diminished the influence of the Catholic Center Party and the Catholic Labor unions.
Pacelli was elected Pope on March 2, 1939, and took the name Pius XII. As Pope, he had three official positions. He was head of his church and was in direct communication with bishops everywhere. He was chief of state of the Vatican, with his own diplomatic corps. He was also the Bishop of Rome.
As the security of the Jewish population became more precarious, Pius XII did intervene the month he was elected Pope, March 1939, and obtained 3,000 visas to enter Brazil for European Jews who had been baptized and converted to Catholicism. Two-thirds of these were later revoked, however, because of "improper conduct," probably meaning that the Jews started practicing Judaism once in Brazil.
Throughout the Holocaust, Pius XII was consistently besieged with pleas for help on behalf of the Jews. In the spring of 1940, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Isaac Herzog, asked the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to intercede to keep Jews in Spain from being deported to Germany. He later made a similar request for Jews in Lithuania.
Within the Pope's own church, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna told Pius XII about Jewish deportations in 1941. In October 1941, the Assistant Chief of the U.S. delegation to the Vatican, Harold Tittman, asked the Pope to condemn the atrocities. In late August 1942, after more than 200,000 Ukrainian Jews had been killed, Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrej Septyckyj wrote a long letter to the Pope, referring to the German government as a regime of terror and corruption, more diabolical than that of the Bolsheviks.
Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, president of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed to the Pope in January 1943 to publicly denounce Nazi violence. Bishop Preysing of Berlin did the same, at least twice. The Pope finally gave a reason for his consistent refusals to make a public statement in December 1942.
The Allied governments issued a declaration, "German Policy of Extermination of the Jewish Race," which stated that there would be retribution for the perpetrators of Jewish murders. The Pope did speak generally against the extermination campaign.
On January 18, 1940, after the death toll of Polish civilians was estimated at 15,000, the Pope said in a broadcast, "The horror and inexcusable excesses committed on a helpless and a homeless people have been established by the unimpeachable testimony of eye-witnesses."(14) During his Christmas Eve radio broadcast in 1942, he referred to the "hundreds of thousands who through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction."(15) The Pope never mentioned the Jews by name.
The Pope's indifference to the mistreatment of Jews was often clear. On September 8, 1943, the Nazis invaded Italy and, suddenly, the Vatican was the local authority The Nazis gave the Jews 36 hours to come up with 50 kilograms of gold or else the Nazis would take 300 hostages. Pius XII knew that Jewish deportations from Italy were impending. Privately, Pius did instruct Catholic institutions to take in Jews.
On October 16, the Nazis arrested 1,007 Roman Jews, the majority of whom were women and children. They were taken to Auschwitz, where 811 were gassed immediately. The Pope did act behind the scenes on occasion.
During the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, he, along with the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, advised the Hungarian government to be moderate in its plans concerning the treatment of the Jews. In the later stages of the war, Pius XII appealed to several Latin American governments to accept "emergency passports" that several thousand Jews had succeeded in obtaining. The Church also answered a request to save 6,000 Jewish children in Bulgaria by helping to transfer them to Palestine.
Historians point out that any support the Pope did give the Jews came after 1942, once U.S. officials told him that the allies wanted total victory, and it became likely that they would get it.
Furthering the notion that any intervention by Pius XII was based on practical advantage rather than moral inclination is the fact that in late 1942, Pius XII began to advise the German and Hungarian bishops that it would be to their ultimate political advantage to go on record as speaking out against the massacre of the Jews.
One of the only cases in which the Pope gave early support to the allies was in May 1940. He received information about a German plan, Operation Yellow, to lay mines to deter British naval support of Holland. Pius XII gave his permission to send coded radio messages warning papal nuncios in Brussels and The Hague of the plot.
The International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), a group comprised of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars, was appointed in 1999 by the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
In October of 2000, the group of scholars finished their review of the Vatican's archives, and submitted their preliminary findings to the Comission's then-President, Cardinal Edward I Cassidy.
Their report, entitled "The Vatican and the Holocaust," laid to rest several of the conventional defenses of Pope Pius XII.
The often-espoused view that the Pontiff was unaware of the seriousness of the situation of European Jewry during the war was definitively found to be inaccurate. Numerous documents demonstrated that the Pope was well-informed about the full extent of the Nazi's anti-Semitic practices. A letter from Konrad von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, that proved that the Pope was aware of the situation as early as January of 1941, particularly caught the attention of the commission. In that letter, Preysing confirms that "Your Holiness is certainly informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany and the neighboring countries. The letter, which was a direct appeal to the Pope himself, without intermediaries, provoked no response.
In 1942, an even more compelling eyewitness account of the mass-murder of Jews in Lwow was sent to the Pope by an archbishop; this, too, garnered no response. The commission also revealed several documents that cast a negative light on the claim that the Vatican did all it could to facilitate emigration of the Jews out of Europe. Internal notes meant only for Vatican representatives revealed the opposition of Vatican officials to Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine. Some Catholic higher-ups violated this position of the Vatican by helping Jews to immigrate when they were able to; most did not.
Similarly, the attempts of Jews to escape from Europe to South America were sometimes thwarted by the Vatican. Vatican representatives in Bolivia and Chile wrote to the pontiff regarding the "invasive" and "cynically exploitative" character of the Jewish immigrants, who were already engaged in "dishonest dealings, violence, immorality, and even disrespect for religion."
The commission concluded that these accounts probably biased Pius against aiding more Jews in immigrating away from Nazi Europe. The claim that the Vatican needed to remain neutral in the war has also been refuted in recent months.
In January of 2001, a document recently declassified by the U.S. National Archives was discovered by the World Jewish Congress. The document was a report in which Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Pope Pius XII's secretary of state, detailed and denounced several abuses committed by the Soviet Army against German inhabitants of the Soviet Union. The report was widely viewed as demonstrating that the Vatican had no compunctions about speaking out against atrocities, even when doing so would violate neutrality. The preliminary report released by the IJCHC also asked the Vatican for access to non-published archival documents to more fully investigate the Pope's role in the Holocaust. This request was refused by the Vatican, which allowed them access only to documents from before 1923. As a result, the Commission suspended its study in July 2001, without issuing a final report.
Dr. Michael Marrus, one of the three Jewish panelists and a professor of history at the University of Toronto, expained that the commission "ran up against a brick wall....
In 2004, news was disclosed of a diary kept by James McDonald, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees coming from Germany. In 1933, McDonald raised the treatment of the Jews with then Cardinal Pacelli, who was the Vatican secretary of state. McDonald was specifically interested in helping a group of Jewish refugees in the Saar region, a territory claimed by France and Germany that was turned over to the Germans in 1935.
The Pope's defenders cite his intercession on these Jews' behalf as evidence of his sympathy for Jews persecuted by the Nazis. In 2005, the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, discovered a letter dated November 20, 1946, showing that Pope Pius XII ordered Jewish babies baptized by Catholics during the Holocaust not to be returned to their parents. Some scholars said the disclosure was not new and that the Pope's behavior was not remarkable.
In 2006, an Israeli scholar, Dina Porat, discovered correspondence between Haim Barlas, an emissary of the Jewish Agency sent to Europe to save Jews in the 1940s, and Giuseppe Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII. Roncalli expressed criticism of the Vatican's silence during the war. In June 1944, Barlas sent Roncalli a copy of a report compiled by two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz documenting the mass murder at the camp. Roncalli forwarded the report to the Vatican, which had claimed it did not know about the report until October.
The Pope's reaction to the Holocaust was complex and inconsistent. At times, he tried to help the Jews and was successful. But these successes only highlight the amount of influence he might have had, if he not chosen to remain silent on so many other occasions. No one knows for sure the motives behind Pius XII's actions, or lack thereof, since the Vatican archives have only been fully opened to select researchers.
It is now nearly mid-2007 and this consultant has had much activity since my last post. Since that time I have had various web projects in the local government area (Texas), chiropractic arena, behavioral healthcare and recently, in the U.K., in Business Resiliency.
I must say it is good to be back in sunny Phoenix. More later.
Well, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since I was last here.
So much so that I have had three or so consulting engagements and a short-lived, full-time position as Manager of Software Engineering to a company here in the Valley of the Sun.
Needless to say, the IT industry has taken a tremendous hit and things here have been tougher than in some other areas of the country. I am currently working for myself; that is for Woodbury Resources Consulting, Inc. See www.woodburyresources.com .
