In Poland, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek is in a bit of trouble.

He apparently said recently that, in Europe, the Jews “have a good press, because they have powerful financial resources – extremely powerful, with the unconditional support of the United States. And this promotes a kind of arrogance, which I consider to be unbearable.”

He also mentioned that the Jews created the term “Shoah”, or “Holocaust”, to define the extensive killings of Jews by German Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s – and to suggest that those sufferings were unique, with no precedent in history.

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One journalist chose to misquote these latter remarks under a headline, “The Shoah, an invention of the Jews.”

Bishop Pieronek  restated his original words — that it was not the account of the historical killings, but the use of the term “Shoah”, that he calls an “invention”.

Anyway, the bishop is now threatened with “legal action for defamation”.

Various versions of this story are circulating, and it isn’t easy to get the facts.

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Anyway the notion that Jewish killings by the Nazis were unique in history is not true.

Unfortunately such things have occurred since the human race began – and still do — massacres of entire populations and ethnic groups.

Christians should point this out.

It’s basic to Christian Faith that the one case of suffering that was unique was the suffering of Jesus Christ on the Cross – unique because Christ was, himself, unique.

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Saint Catherine of Siena records, in her Dialogue, how Christ appeared to her, telling her that:

“Though my act of suffering was finite, the fruit of that suffering which you have received through me is infinite. This is because of the infinite divine nature joined with finite human nature. It was this human nature in which I was clothed that suffered in me . . . but because the two natures are fused with each other, the eternal Divinity took to itself the suffering I bore . . . for this reason what I did can be called infinite . . . had it not been infinite, the whole of mankind, past, present, and to come, would not have been restored.”

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The central message of the Catholic Faith is that Jesus Christ — a Jewish man — was God Incarnate. Most Jews find themselves unwilling to believe this. Many others doubt it, too.

But the Church must continue to proclaim it, because it is God’s message of salvation to his human children, both Jewish and Gentile, whom he loves so much.