It means I have the authority to admonish posters who break the rules of this message board and I have the responsibility to attempt to keep flame wars and other disruptive behavior from getting out of hand.
In order to pursue those objectives, I have been provided the power (via access to vB software) to modify or remove posts which or posters whom I deem disruptive.
On the other hand, were I to modify or remove a post simply because it offended my personal beliefs (or to save myself from losing an argument) I am pretty sure that I would be removed from my position (and possibly from the board).
I am constrained by the rules of the position from altering the text of another poster except to correct errors in vB code or to remove links that may prove damaging.
I am not in the habit of using my mystical powers of doom outside my fairly well prescribed duties.
I have made no objection to any claims that the RCC has been or even continues to be repressive. On specific issues I may agree or disagree with the particulars of a charge. I have already noted that I disagreed with the executions of Hus and Giordano, even though they clearly opposed the teachings of the church, because I do not believe the church should use execution to silence people. I suspect that if we went through every act of “repression” I would see some as truly illegitimately repressive and others as acts of the defense of a particular world view that do not rise to the level of repression. Obviously, others will disagree with my assessments on those same particulars.
In this thread I have only objected to the particulars regarding the threatened torture of Galileo (which numerous scholars claim never happened) and with an earlier claim that Giordano was executed for promoting scientific discovery when all the evidence I have seen indicate that he was executed for religious beliefs unconnected with science. I have also cast doubt on a particular story regarding a purported “exorcism” while not making any claims regarding the actions of the church in various international fora on women’s rights.
If you have criticisms of the RCC, you are welcome to voice them. I may agree or disagree. If you are going to take this thread off on a hijack and employ popular tales not accepted by historians to "prove"your points, I am probably going to point out the factual errors in the specific claims.
In any event, my agreement or disagreement will have no affect on your ability to post.
This idea that the Spanish Inquisition was not the fault of the Catholic Church because Torquemada officially reported to Ferdinand and Isabella is typical of the kind of rationalization that people use in excusing the Catholic Church’s historical record.
Similar rationalizations are used, for example, in alleging that the burning of heretics was actually acomplished by the secular authorities, and that the Inquisition merely made sure that the persons were heretics according to church doctrines. As if the Church did not 100% participate in this system of bloodthirsty repression.
While the Spanish Inquisition was distinct in being under the control of the Monarchs of Spain, it is simply a sophism to allege that the Catholic Church and the Papcy were not complicit in its atrocities.
Here is what respected historian Diarmaid MacCulloch says in his book “Reformation- Europe’s House Divided”.
“. . . . .after complicated royal haggling with Pope Sixtus IV, between 1478 and 1480 to create (the Spanish Inquisition’s) legal framework, it settled down to work against “Judaizers” in the Kingdom of Castille, burning alive around 700 of them between 1481 and 1488. . . . .Pope Sixtus finally yielded to royal pressure in 1483 and appointed the Dominican friar Tomas Torquemada as Inquistor-General (of Spain). . . .”
In other words, Torquemada was appointed by the Pope, and Domincans carried out the Inquistion. The slight variation in administrative reporting systems is hardly an exoneration of the Catholic Church and a negation of its implicit and whole-hearted support of this system of torture, terror and religious genocide against those who dared differ with its doctrines.
The “protested by the Church” apparently refers to one of two specific cases, such as when the Inqusition in 1499 burned nearly 400 people in Cordoba “and even tried to arrest the eighty-year-old Archbishop of Granada, who sensibly fled the region…” (MacCulloch, op. cit., pg. 63).
Catholic apologists regularly cling to straws of this kind when it comes to history. For example, it is regularly claimed that Pope Puis XII was actually a stanch anti-Nazi because he helped author the 1937 encyclical *Mit brennender Sorge * (With Deep Anxiety) which is supposed to have been a direct attack against Naziism and which was read in German Catholic Churches under the very noses of the Nazis.
In fact, as John Cornwell, author of “Hitler’s Pope-- The Secret History of Pius XII” points out, the encyclical was mainly a complaint of the Reich’s treatment of the Catholic Church who had signed a concordat with Hitler a few years earlier. The enclyclical arrived “late in the day and failed to condemn National Socialism and Hitler by name.”
Interestingly, Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, did not have a word to say against the Nuremberg Laws against Jews or the persecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. Nor to my knowledge did the Catholic Church have a word to say against such things as Mussolini’s use of poison gas and other agressions in Italy’s war against Ethiopia. Nor against the terror bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil war by their favourite Spanish Fascist, Franco.
Yet amazingly, Catholic apoligists will cling to any document to allege that the Catholic Church was not heartily in favour of fascism in general.
Amen, brother! Er … I mean … yeah, what he said. My wife attended a parochial school throughout her childhood and graudated from a Roman Catholic high school (I learned to make the “Roman Catholic” distinction as a licensed lay minister in the Episcopal church, which also considers itself part of “one holy, catholic and apostolic church.”) She has utterly repudiated the Church and all of its teachings – and yet, every time she flies, she wraps that rosary around her hand, crosses herself and recites Our Father and Hail Mary repeatedly until landing. So, yeah, you can walk out of a church and never return, and you can even officially and legally sever all ties with the religion – but the totems and rituals remain for a very long time, sometimes forever.
Valteron, [del]you’re a loon[/del] Your “theories” are insane and vehemently anti-factual. You’re not starting out very well on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance.
Strikeouts do not save this from being inappropriate to Great Debates.
Please leave the personal insults out of GD; we have another Forum for that sort of thing.
Interesting. I had my name removed a few years ago with little diffculty. (I still have my letter around here somewhere).What may have helped, incidentally, was moving to another state where the people in my ward didn’t know me and probably didn’t care much if I stayed or left. I met with the bishop, explained my reasons for leaving, and soon got a nice letter about them striking my name from the records and cancelling my baptism – allowing me 30 days to change my mind, just in case!
Really, you mean I didn’t have to get dunked over and over while some elder badly mangled the foreign names of the people being baptised by proxy? Huh. It felt wetter than just prayer to me.
Maybe I am a loon. But the facts I present are facts. If I am wrong, then it would make sense to correct them instead of using an ad hominem argument.
I have said that many Catholic apologists hold up the 1937 Encylclical Mit brennender Sorge, to which the future Pope Pius XII contributed as being an example of how he was really anti-Nazi. Except that the document in question does not condemn Hitler or Naziism by name.
There is also not a word or document that I have ever seen in which Pius XI or the the future Pius XII condemned the Kristalnacht or the Nuremberg laws or other anti-semitic atrocoties. If you have documents of this kind, pledase reveal them to me and the world instead of calling me names.
It is also true that Hitler said in July 1933 that his negociations with Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, and the then Papal Nuncio to Berlin, had “. . . created an area of trust. . . . in the devloping struggle against international Jewry.”
Now, I realize that Hitler said this, not Pacelli. But surely Pacelli made some comment or published some document in which he dissociated himself and the Vatican from this horrible statement? May I see a copy please? Or is it easier to call me names.
By the way, in case you are wondering I am not Jewish. I am an ex-Catholic.
Had you paid a bit more attention while you still were Catholic, you might have noticed that encyclicals rarely “name” the positions or people or movements against which they may be directed. Each encyclical is written with an eye to future positions of the church and generally refrain from being so specific that later generations cannot weasel out of their prescriptions by claiming that they are not the named parties in the document. (Although the document in question does refer to specific German eventsof the time.)
There is no question, however that Mit brennender Sorge condemns the Nazi movement, particularly as it existed in the Spring of 1937.
You noted that
and yet the document, after opening with a list of issues in which Germany has reneged on the Concordat, goes on to say that those are not the matters being addressed, and spends the next two dozen sections attacking the platform of the Nazi party and encouraging members ofthe church to resist those calls from the Nazi party.
I agree that the Catholic Church should have been more outspoken regarding the atrocities that took place. I will note, however, that even critics of the Vatican can see a more nuanced position than that the Vatican (or the Catholic Church) simply did not care, as noted by historian Michael Marrus, who is decidedly not a fan of Pope Pius XII.
At any rate, if you would like to launch a separate attack on the RCC, you are welcome to open a new thread either here or in the Pit, but this is, strictly speaking, pretty far off topic fron the OP of this thread.
First of all, Tomndebb I thank you for the suggestion that I start a new thread. We ARE getting pretty far off topic with this discussion and both our arguments tend to get buried where nobody sees them. But I find it revealing that you term it “an attack on the RCC”. I consider that I am setting the record straight.
I would not have time to start this thread immediately, because I am writing this from my country home where I am spending a few days, and I do not have all of my books and refernce materials with me.
However, Tomndebb, I simply cannot let you get away with perpetrating the myth that Mit bennender Sorge was a brave, frontal commando attack by the Catholic Church against the whole barbaric, racist, anti-semitic and anti-democratic system that was Naziism.
Text without context is pretext
To understand the encyclical that was read in German Catholic Churches in 1937, you have to look at the historical context. The Catholic Church approved strongly of fascism. It was authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-Communist and reactionary.
The Vatican was more than happy to sign concordats with the Italian Fascist Government and with the Nazi Government soon after they came to power. They strongly supported Francisco Franco in all his crimes against democracy and the Spanish people. As long as Fascist regimes were ready to recognize and respect Catholic institutions and privileges (such as the tax that all German Catholics and Protestants had to pay to their Churches) Catholic schools, etc., the Vatican would not say a word against all of their other atrocities.
It was in fact Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, who negotiated a concordat with the new Nazi regime in 1933, at the very same time that the Nazis had unlashed their terror against German Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, Gays, Jehovah’s Winesses, and anyone else they deemed unacceptable. This is why Hitler in July of 1933 praised Pacelli for his wonderful cooperation in the fight against “international Jewry” a statement that Pacelli did not refute or dissociate himself from.
It was at this time that the Nazis were wiping out labour unions and that all opponents of the regime (who were often leftists that the Catholic Church opposed as well) were being carted off to concentration camps to be worked to death.
None of this mattered to the Vatican. Nor did they have a word to say against Franco working to death his former opponents in the Spanish Civil War. Nor are they on record as saying a word against the vicious Italian invasion of Ethiopia which included poison gas dropped on villages by the Italian Air Force. Nor against the repression of democracy or freedom by all of these regimes.
But by 1937, when the Nazis had been carrying on their barbaric repression and ever-increasing anti-semitism to a chorus of deafening silence from the Catholic Church, some of the more radical Nazis began to show hostility to the Catholic Church in Germany. What they wished to do was get Germans to abandon both the Protestant and Catholic faiths in favour of a sort of neo-pagan German religion based on race and the myth of the Aryan.
They were trying to get German Catholics to send their children to Nazi state schools rather than Catholic schools. If you will consult the recently-published history “the Third Reich in Power” you will find extensive explanations of what the Nazis were up to.
They had also begun extensive prosecutions of Catholic clergy for such things as sexual abuse of children in their care. Some historians call these charges “trumped up”. Now, I would be the last to defend the Nazi “justice” system, but given the hundreds of cases of pedophilic abuse, some dating back decades, that are rising all over the world lately, are we certain that every singleone of these charges was groundless?
If you will go back and read the paragraphs you have quoted from the encyclical in the light of this historical context, you will realize that the objections of Pius XI and Pacelli were entirely focused this attempt to get German Catholics to subscribe to a new “Aryan” racial religion that wold replace loyalty to Rome with loyalty to Germany. The Church was protecting its power base, and nothing more.
Taken out of historical context today, those quotes can be made to sound as if Pacelli was attacking the very fundamental barbarism of fascist ideology. In fact, the following year, he had not a word to say against the Kristallnacht or the Nuremberg Laws, or the invasion of Ethiopia. The Vatican said not a word against such outrages as the bombing of Guernica by Nazis and Fascists.
Basically the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge was not a courageous broadside against fascism and naziism. It was nothing but a lover’s tiff in the Catholic Church’s long-standing love affair with Fascism.
However, this is a bit of a straw man, as I have not held it up as a “courageous broadside,” but simply as a condemnation of Nazi philosophy, which it clearly was.
On the other hand, you seriously overstate as a “love affair” the relationship between the church and the Fascists. In each case, there was a different background to the relationship.
In Italy, Mussolini was willing to negotiate with the church regarding properties that had been confiscated and anti-clerical rules that had been imposed on the church following independence and the church did negotiate to remove those restrictions.
In Germany, the church had been a bulwark of the Weimar Republic and was negotiating with the Nazis to remove the restictions recently imposed when the Nazis came to power.
In Spain, the Syndico-Anarchists were supported by the Communists in imposing restrictions on the church and even went so far as to begin a campaign of murder against outspoken church members. Franco was seen as the man who was defending the church from aggression.
I do not think that anyone in the church in 1922 or 1933 or 1936 foresaw where the Fascist movements would lead (which certainly indicates short-sightedness on the part of church leaders), but Europe following WWI was not the nice, clean “bad Fascists” vs “good everyone else” that we can see through the filter of WWII. There were numerous political factions and social movements that could have been just as evil had they come to power and the church was dealing with the powers it encountered. It is also true that some members of the church did embrace fascism–just as some members of the church tended to be involved in most of the other political movements at the time. Selecting those as representative of “the church” is mere cherry-picking.
I do agree that the church did far too little to condemn anti-semitism in that period, but that is not the same as claiming that the church embraced Fascism (where anti-semitism was pretty much a foundation point only in Germany).
My Grandfather was part of the Mackenzie-Papineau (Canadian) Brigade of International support from many countries who fought to stop fascism in Spain. The difference between the evil of fascism and democracy was pretty clear to them. The crushing of democracy, the years of vicious anti-semitism, the concentration camps, all of these were plainly known facts by the late thirities. All that encyclical does is rant against the Nazis stepping on Catholic toes. There was not a word against the labour leaders and social democrats murdered. Not a word against the Nazi terror that had been reigning in Germany for 4 years. Do you have a single word from the Vatican condemning Mussolini for his agression against Ethiopia? Or condemnig his repression of other parties or of press freedoms?
To take one small example, Franco continued to imprison and actively persecute gays, until well into the second half of the 20th century, but the Church had NOT A BLOODY WORD to say against him. But when the Spanish Parliament passed a law allowing gay civil marriage last year, the Church managed to come out swinging with every document and campaign available. Funny how they can be very specific and activist when it suits them? But talking to a Catholic apologist is like talking to a wall. This discussion is at an end, as far as I am concerned.
Perhaps, instead of simply ranting, you could have read what I have written?
I have made no defense of the church in terms of its failure to defend Jews or others. However, you continue to use a broad brush that includes legitimate criticisms mixed with false claims. I have only pointed out that some of your claims are in error, not that the church has been an exemplar of Christian virtue.
When you claim that “The Catholic Church approved strongly of fascism.” you are simply in error unless you can provide the context for the statements.
When you claim
you are actually ignoring history. The Catholic Church was the first religious denomination to oppose the Nazis and fought them throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. When Hitler came to power, his votes (such as they were, since the Nazis were always a coalition party), came mostly from the Protestant North, not from the Catholic strongholds of Bavaria/Franconia/Schwartzwald. The Concordat of 1933 was an attempt to mitigate the oppression that the Nazis were already imposing on the Catholic church and a claim that the Nazis waited until 1937 before launching any anti-Catholic actions is simply false and ignores four years of increasing persecution that followed seven years of open hostility between the two factions.
Now, I would agree that the Catholic church spent too much effort covering its own butt and not enough effort looking out for others in the world. It is a shameful period. However, you are not content to demonstrate the real failures of the church, but insist on inventing tales of cooperation that are historically inaccurate.
To get back to the OP: You should read Once a Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Work by Peter Occhiogrosso. It contains thoughts gathered in interviews with people who were raised Catholic. Even those who didn’t stay with it talked about the lasting effect their Catholic upbringing had on them. I read it years ago; all I remember now is Frank Zappa saying sometimes he found himself playing a melody from the Latin Mass during his guitar solos. In “St. Alphonzo’s Pancake Breakfast” he sang “Et come spear a tutu, oh.”
