The Pope's Visit

[donkey]

I want to add the answer to a question which you never asked: should Ratzinger have resisted as a young believing Catholic, wanting to be a priest?

 

He might have done so, because members of several Catholic youth groups were still surreptitiously around (in my book I explain that Catholic youth groups were the ones most viciously fought by the consolidating HJ after 1933, and some were STILL around) and reorganizing under different names, until Sept. 1939 (beginning of the war, when controls were too strict).

 

Most of these were caught, some came around in time -- a few were harmed or killed by the Nazis.

 

During he war, Himmler kept a colony of priests (mostly Polish) who tended a special herb garden for him in Dachau. But there were also many German priests in concentration camps, though none were systematically killed (as were Jews and Gypsies), especially not in the liquidation camps of the (Polish) East -- Belzec, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka.

 

To claim that Ratzinger should have been in their number is like writing history in hindsight.

 

He could not have told himself: I have to be in this militant Catholic youth group opposing the Nazis and survive this too, because eventually I might be Pope.

 

This is totally unrealistic.

 

 

Of course if he had been and had survived and had capitalized on that record as a priest and bishop until now, he would have been a hero in human life. But nobody decides to become a hero and survive and reap the mortal benefits of this.

 

http://hnn.us/articles/11987.html

 

A persecution of catholics in Nazi Germany is pure historical invention, and an insult to those groups who were persecuted by the various fascist regimes of the day, not least in Spain, where the Nazi backed Franco regime enjoyed the full support and blessings of the catholic church.

[flamingjimmy]

Inventing a persecution of catholics in Nazi Germany is pure historical revisionism, and an insult to those groups who were persecuted by the various fascist regimes of the day, not least in Spain, where the Nazi backed Franco regime enjoyed the full support and blessings of the catholic church.

 

He spent all of yesterdays trying to do it too, despicable really.

[spindrift]

I would respond, but you'd just ignore it like yesterday, so it would be a waste of my time. You are intellectually bankrupt.

 

 

I choose who I respond to matey, you insult me, you get ignored, simples!

[spindrift]

A persecution of catholics in Nazi Germany is pure historical invention, and an insult to those groups who were persecuted by the various fascist regimes of the day, not least in Spain, where the Nazi backed Franco regime enjoyed the full support and blessings of the catholic church.

 

 

I've seen the cell where Father Kolbe was starved to death. Killed because he was a catholic priest.

[Rich Siddall]

Thanks for that Plekhanov. A very interesting read.

[flamingjimmy]

I choose who I respond to matey, you insult me, you get ignored, simples!

 

Liar (not an insult a description)

 

You ignored practically everything I said yesterday, then claimed that you hadn't, so I showed that you had, then you went away and didn't respond.

 

You're only making this excuse with hindsight anyway, yesterday you were claiming that you weren't ignoring me, can't you at a least try being honest?

 

also worth noting I started off being nice to you, and wasw actually quite patient yesterday, I only started throwing in the odd insult after you'd already ignored about 10 of my posts. Before yesterday, I liked you in fact, you're usually quite nice. It was only during our exchange yesterday that I came to the realisation you are heavily prejudiced against atheists and I took issue with that.

 

How can you reconcile all of this lying with your Christian beliefs? Jesus would be ashamed.

[flamingjimmy]

I've seen the cell where Father Kolbe was starved to death. Killed because he was a catholic priest.

 

No he wasn't, he was arrested and killed because he was hiding jews and broadcasting anti nazi sentiments on the radio, his religion was incidental.

 

I suspect you already knew that though

[donkey]

I've seen the cell where Father Kolbe was starved to death. Killed because he was a catholic priest.

 

Five million Poles were murdered by the Nazis. The fact that one of them was a priest does not indicate a specific targeting of the Catholic church. Having googled father Kolbe, it seems he was a man who stood by his principles, and also published a nerwspaper. These are the reasons he was murdered.

 

Incidentally, I wonder if father Kolbe were alive today, how he would feel about the present Pope's involvement (and that of many other high ranking clergy) in the cover up of widespread sexual abuse of children by numerous members catholic clergy?

[flamingjimmy]

Five million Poles were murdered by the Nazis. The fact that one of them was a priest does not indicate a specific targeting of the Catholic church. Having googled father Kolbe, it seems he was a man who stood by his principles, and also published a nerwspaper. these are probably the reasons he was murdered.

 

Quite, he sounds like a sound bloke.

[spindrift]

That science blog again, historians bickering among themselves:

 

I've presented a variety of independent pieces of evidence that, instead, Nazism is best seen as a secular movement, and Hitler's theism (or belief in destiny; he seems to have used "God" and "destiny" interchangeably) retained little if any specific Christian content by the time he'd taken power.

 

I've pointed out that the ongoing strife between the Nazis and the churches, though doubtless a power struggle, had elements of anti-clerical ideology about it (spelled out in a comment above, and a feature of secular, not religious, political parties):

 

That Hitler, though the most vicious of antisemites, explicitly disavowed religious motivations for antisemitism in favor of alleged racial knowledge or racial science;

 

that the other important component of Hitler's ideology, unlimited conquest, was justified first and foremost on secular rather than religious grounds: the seizing of necessary Lebensraum

 

that Hitler had no objection to Nazis being atheists, deists, or neo-pagans (e.g. a small number of Nazis listed their religious allegiance as "Gottglaubig--"deist"; they suffered no adverse consequences for doing so; also, the SS distributed anti-Xn propaganda without arousing Hitler's wrath);

 

that Hitler espoused doctrines, like euthanasia and Social Darwinism, that were condemned by the Catholic Church and by other Christian churches, and that his T-4 Program (mass murder of the physically and mentally disabled) was a natural next step in the Nazi ideology of euthanasia, but quite antithetical to the teaching of the Catholic and other churches (and kept secret because Hitler knew it would rouse a storm of outrage);

 

that although most historians DO NOT reject the Table Talk (which is chock-full of anti-Xn statements) in its entirety, you can ignore it and still find independent but congruent testimonies to Hitler uttering anti-Christian sentiments to his inner circle;

 

that Hitler's architectural fantasies of a future Linz and future had no place for religious structures.

 

If, considering these lines of evidence, you elect to give different weights to them, that's one thing.

 

 

But if you conclude that they're comparable to the evidence for Bigfoot, you're either not paying attention or you have an antecedent commitment that's getting in the way of your addressing the issue as a skeptic should.

 

 

 

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/list_of_hitler_quotes_in_honor.php