That is funny. Which thread is that? I’d like to read it.
This one, people are saying that Catholics should have taken up arms for the church to resist the Nazi regime, that the Pope should have threatened people with excommunication who did not resist their own national government. That’s a call for the Church militant.
It’s laughably naive, you think that if the church did raise an army and march on Berlin that they’d put the swords back down again?
One of the greatest sweeps in western history is the reformation where the power was taken from the church and put into the hands of secular authorities, and here people are saying that the Pope should have ordered Catholics to overthrow their secular rulers, declare Jihad if you will.
Except that isn’t likely. It’s more likely it would have turned most of the Catholics in Germany and Italy against the Catholic Church. What do you think would happen if tomorrow the Pope said “The American government is evil, and it’s every good Catholic’s job to overthrow it.” What do you think is more likely, that there would be a mass uprising by American Catholics, or that most American Catholics would say, “What the hell is the Pope talking about? The old man has lost it.”?
Your drasticly overestimating the Pope’s influence over modern Catholics. They respect the pope, they love the pope, but they’re not going to kill for him, or even obey him if what he says goes against what they already believe.
It’s a call for people to not in any way cooperate with the Nazis and to resist them. It’s not a call for the Templars to rise again. The purpose was not to raise a Catholic state that would last for a thousand years but to defeat Hitler. There is some middle ground there.
It ultimately worked pretty well when the Allies did it. And it’s more laughable and more naive (or blindly zealous) to think that when faced with the greatest willful slaughter of humans ever seen on the Earth before or since was going on that what Christ would have wanted his ambassador with portfolio to do was live in a palace and “help out where you can so long as it doesn’t inconvenience you”.
Are you saying that because Hitler was a “democratically elected” secular ruler that the Holocaust was hunky dory and in keeping with the tenets of the church?
Then so mote it be. Wouldn’t it better that the Vatican itself go down in flames than it spread its legs for Satan in the name of pragmatism? Did not Jesus Christ himself say that the Temple walls were not his church and denounce the hypocrite praying in the street and say that “what you neglect to do for the least you neglect to do for me?” Do you really really really think He would approve of his Vicar’s actions or non-actions? Really? Really?
Do you really think the American government in the 21st century and the Nazi government of the late 1930s-1945 are a good parallel? I’ll admit the American government has done some very bad things over the past century, but deliberate extermination isn’t one of them. If Benedict XVI compared the American government to his old boss then he would have lost it. Nobody has been ordered to report to concentration camps in America, neither Jews nor others have not been forbidden to own businesses, there is no movement to deprive any natural born citizens of their rights and in fact there is a huge movement to extend rights. There is no analogy to be made here.
Does his condemnation of condoms and abortions have no resonance with Catholics? Are you saying that most Catholics are such hypocrites that they’ll ignore the church if it inconveniences them? If the Pope- the Church for that matter- has no influence over the morality of its members, what good is it? And if the church is not doing the will of God anyway or keeping the teachings of Christ (the “turn the other cheek” thing was not a command for self preservation or cowardice) then, imo, then perhaps it would have been for the best if every priest had been stood against a wall and shot and the buildings bombed into the rubble and covered with a gigantic football field; the devout would have gone to their reward if it exists and the corrupt to theirs if it exists and the whole pretense of the church as moral instructor removed once and for all.
As repulsive as I find religious bigotry, I have a million times more respect for a snake handling hillbilly or a People’s Temple member giving their child the Kool Aid and in so doing actually living their beliefs than I do for somebody who likes pretty robes and dead languages and the bingo games and socials and the rituals and rites but sure as hell isn’t going to inconvenience themselves (though they’ll be glad to condemn abortion, gay marriage, birth control, etc. since they hadn’t planned on doing those anyway). Weirdly I think I have more respect for the church than many of its alleged members.
It’s a call to overthrow the secular government of Germany actually. Asking Catholics to rise up and overthrow the most powerful secular government in Europe is essentially asking for the Templars to rise again.
Yeah, that’s a pretty valid point I must admit. But the point where it falls apart is where you talk about inconveniencing the Pope, he made a strategic decision, he wasn’t just sitting around. He was thinking about protecting his flock. Maybe Jesus would want them to do so, but then again Jesus might want Christians to invade Darfur and stop the genocide now. Pope Benedict has done less for the people of Darfur than Pius did for the Jews, what does that say about him? Should Catholics take up arms and overthrow nations every time they become genocidal? What about the American Indian genocide, what of the Pope then?
Nope, I am saying that you are way oversimplifying the ramifications of what you are suggesting and not giving any deeper thought to the notion of nationalism versus the church and recognize that Germany was the culmination of how far nationalism can go. Nationalism was born at the expense of the church when Henry VIII declared his sovereignty over his realm to be beyond the scope of the Pope’s jurisdiction.
I think we have a very different interpretation about what leading Christ’s sheep means.
My maternal grandmother developed Alzheimers when I was little. I had been close to her and used to love seeing her and cuddling up in her lap. One day when I was about 6 or 7 I sat in her lap and she looked at me and said “Whose little boy are you?” and I said, thinking it was a game, “I’m my Meemaw’s!” She said “Who are you? You should be going home! Who’s your mother?” I didn’t understand what was going on but it was soon clear that this wasn’t a game- this woman I’d always thought loved me (and in fact she did of course, at one time) did not have a clue in Hell as to who I was. She very literally did not know me.
As Alzheimer’s patients will her senses returned a bit later, but for the remaining months of her life she had these lapses. Some days she’d know her grandchildren but not her children, or her children but not her husband, or one grandchild but not another, etc… My parents explained that “Meemaw’s very sick” and I really got to where I understood at least that there was nothing personal in her not knowing who I was, but I never forgot the fear the first time she forgot me.
Later on, when I was an adult in my 30s, my mother was in ICU and under the influence of heavy duty painkillers with amnesiac properties, and it was clear again- this woman I’ve always loved and who’s always loved me doesn’t know who in the hell I am. She didn’t recognize my brother and sister either, just kept asking about her baby. (An odd consistency among women I’ve known in distress- her mother did as well when the Alzheimers consumed her, but that’s too far beside the point.)
And my other grandmother- had a stroke and in her early 90s it was clear half the time she didn’t know who I was. My great-aunt who lived with us would have cloudy moments in her late 90s when she didn’t recognize me. Very frustrating when you’re the caregiver as I was for her, but it happens.
Anyway, I was a religious child and I used to read the Bible constantly. The incident with my grandmother when I was a little boy is why Matthew 7 struck me like a thunderbolt when I first read it, and I’ve never read it without thinking of how I felt when Meemaw forgot me, or since the incidents with my mother and the ancient ones without thinking of them as well. Significant portion bolded by me:
Very powerful to me when I was religious, the notion of God, who’s love I had counted on and taken for granted, saying like my senile grandmother saying, and in complete honesty, “I don’t know who you are”. So the point of the glurge is—
I have a feeling that if, which I’ll admit I doubt to the point of outright disbelief, that God exists as depicted in the Bible, then one day Pius XII and those who seem to think the Church is just there to play dress up and pick on people who have different vices from theirs and tell you “to try playin’ it safer/drink the wine and chew the wafer” and the sin’s all gone gone, are going to get to heaven and find the artwork God most resembles may be less Michelangelo than Mueck.
I have no idea. I’ve always been of the opinion it’s better to bend to the inevitable and survive than to get into a fight you can’t win and be destroyed, and I think that was probably the prevailing opinion in the Vatican in the 1940s. Idealists eager to martyr themselves don’t generally become part of the Curia.
I’m not saying that the two governments are comperable. What I’m saying is that German Catholics in the 1930s-40s were no less patriotic and no less supportive of their government than current American Catholics are of their government. If the pope had in 1943 said publicly, “There’s a massive extermination of Jews going on, and all Catholics have to stop participating in it or else they’ll go to hell”, then at their most charitable, most of the German Catholics would have said, “Oh, the Pope’s been taken in by Allied and Zionist propaganda, how terrible.”, and at their worst, they’d say, “How dare the Pope spout such lies against Germany and the German people?”
Abortion yes, condoms, not really. And it’s not that most Catholics are hypocrites that will ignore the church if it inconveniences them. It’s that a large number of Catholics are either cultural Catholics, who don’t really know or care much about what the Catholic church says anyway, and whose identification with it comes from tradition, or they’re people who already think that they’re good Catholics, and if they don’t agree with an official teaching, just figure the institutional Catholic Church is wrong on the issue. It’s not that the Church has no influence over the morality of its members, but it’s that the Catholic Church guides and teaches, it doesn’t compel. And the Catholic Church at that time already taught that murder was wrong, it taught that totalitarianism was wrong, it taught that aggressive war was wrong, it taught that slavery was wrong, and it taught that racial discrimination was wrong. People were perfectly willing to disobey those teachings.
Free will means that you can be evil.
That was my point.
Sorry if I’ve offended your sensibility
I am not a Catholic, so are you saying that to the Catholic Church power and size are paramount over, you know, the spiritual aspect of it? It is not like it hasn’t split before, right? Why couldn’t it do so again if circumstances so dictate?
Is this a serious response?
There are organized groups that mass at least once a week in virtually every town in the US and Europe, many if not most have more than one such group.
This is far more organization than any army on earth can muster in terms of command and control, and all of the strategies enumerated by Sun Tzu.
I don’t know how many, you count them and let us know, but I’d hardly look to Stalin as a preferred authority on diplomacy. Is that really who you want the Pope to be compared to?
Yes, that is why I worded it as I did, to appease you here.
Or are you suggesting that the actions of the rank and file Catholics of Germany supporting the evils of their countrymen were in line with church teaching?
No, it was the Pope that was present in Jerusalem for a speech yesterday. Check the news to see what happened there.
Apparently you skipped over the part where it explicitly states that you are not qualified to judge the fate of his immortal soul. Again you are assuming that you know what God would want him to do better than he did. Pius DID warn people against Hitler, he DID warn that he was a false prophet. What you are complaining about is that he didn’t issue a call to arms to overthrow the German National government. That’s plain as day. This nonsense about the Pope just ‘playing dressup’ is a childish at best analysis of what went on because the Pope did quite a lot, he wasn’t resting on his laurels here.
I don’t speak to anyone’s motives - the issue was, who did more, not why did they choose to do it.
Right and you guys are, I guess willfully at this point, ignoring my salient point. That you are advocating that the Vatican overthrow a European Government. It’s so willfully ignorant of European history over the past 500 years that it makes discussing it rather pointless.
Give some actual thought, I mean actual thought, no don’t respond yet, think about your response first, and then come back and tell me what you think the consequences of the Vatican overthrowing a European Government might be.
I have read this thread, where did anyone say Catholics should have taken up arms for the Church? Which post was it, I missed it?
Hmm, so now you seem to be implying the only thing that keeps the world safe from domination by the Vatican is its gracious refusal, out of the goodness of its heart, to exercise its true abilities, and that it merely let;s the rest of the world play?
Again, perhaps you can actually quote the posts you are referring to. If they exist, that is.
How should they have resisted Hitler then? In a sternly worded note? They’re Catholics not Anglican for Chrissakes!
No, I am pointing out that the Vatican is evil crowd will point to any action it takes as evil, and point to any inaction they see on its part as evil, basically they just want to see the Vatican as evil. I am saying they wouldn’t like the outcome they are asking for any better.
You are not a good faith interlocutor, I don’t even know why I talk to you. I am not redacting the thread for you. There were plenty of people calling for the Vatican to ‘resist’ Hitler, which it did in all ways except calling for Catholics to take up arms against it. As that’s the only option left, then if you are saying the Vatican did not do enough, and then comparing it to the allied invasion as many have done, then yes they are calling for the Church Militant.
I asked you to actually think before you responded, you clearly did not think that was necessary.
Not really. There are many ways to undermine a regime. You don’t work as hard or as well - you don’t tighten the bolt you are responsible for in the factory the right amount if that is what you can do.
The cumulative effect is definitely a hindrance to the regime, and it can evolve to worse.
It is not like the Pope’s declarations are not an issue in American politics, and it is not like, e.g. in the free choice issue, the vast majority of the opposition doesn’t present their position, thinly veiled or not, as that of their preferred religion.
“Interlocutor”? “Salient”? (and “ad hominem”!) - someone’s been doing vocabulary homework, I give you credit for that!
I looked, I didn’t see where anyone said Catholics should take up arms, let along lots of people. No one said it explicitly. I concede you may be reading it between the lines somewhere, not making it up out of whole cloth.
So why is it bad faith to ask you to show us where you drew the conclusion from?
Only option?
That is your level of understanding about how persuasion works in creating and influencing governments?
Did the people take up arms in overthrowing Marcos?
You can’t take up arms you don’t have, but you can use what you do have. It’s been known to work 
You know, “impressive” new vocabulary notwithstanding, that I don’t think the way you do, is no insult to me at all. More like a compliment actually.
And you might want to review what you said before about “ad hominem” attacks before posting stuff like this again
Right, but German Catholics loved Hitler more than they loved the Pope.