Sorry if that’s how I came out. I didn’t mean that the Catholic Church and its members can’t be criticised, we sure can and I’m sure there are plenty cases to chose from. So if you want to, say, criticise Bishop A for protecting Priest B when he was molesting kids, knock yourselves out; heck, I’ll join you. Nevettheless you have to admit the 60s were a bad time for any old institutions and a good time for attacks. I’ll say it again, we Catholics have mess up many times and we should take the attacks and shut up, but not accept unfair or overblown attacks.
** t-bonham@scc.net ** I’m out of my house so I’ll post the quotes on the evening.
Some saints that have been taken out of the “books”, St. Christopher being the most famous, are due to the fact that the historical facts are so unclear that not even their existance, let alone their sainthood could be proven.
Wheel I think your position and mine are now completely clear. You go for a “totally-reject-everything-you-did-in-the-past” idea, whereas I go for a inculturation of the externals but never compromising the central message.
Moriah, this is a good point. It is certainly possible for someone to become pope and do rotten things. The point about Pious XII should be that he, this pope, wasn’t guilty of the charges against him. But there has certainly been some rotten popes and if Cecil wanted to write a column on them I woundn’t mind so long as it is written with genuine and honest intentions. I think it’s true much of this stems from political ideologies, but I would resist making too much of that. There has been a lot of misunderstanding over religion. Catholics often feel there faith is under attack, and to be honest it often is. But with something as deeply personal as a person’s religion, it is hard not to react with a great deal of defensiveness when things are called into question. When their values are challenged, people who are religious often feel they are upholding the veracity of their faith. Take this initial level of misunderstanding combined with people’s current and age-old biases and prejudices, and you can see the result is often both sides taking to the most extreme position. Here I often see both sides taking to explanations on the basis that they are appealing to there cause, that they tell them what they want to hear.
Wheel, I would like to see the context the Augustin quote was in. I find it difficult to reach your conclusion from the excerpt you gave.
Rodrigo, do you feel that people are obligated to obey unjust and immoral laws?
Who are the “blood libel saints”? As I understand it, the blood libel is the all-too-common lie that Jews slaughter Christian children in order to drink their blood or use it in rituals, but I’ve never heard of any putative “saints” associated with this idiocy.
Simon of Trent (in Austria) was the only blood libel saint whose cultus gained offical recogntion (beatified after several miracles were reported at his shrine, though his cultus was supressed as fiction by the Catholic church in the wake of Vatican II) from the Catholic church, but others whose shrines became popular places of pilgramage include William of Norwich and Anderl von Rinn.
Basically the blood libel saints (usually children) were the alleged victims of the fictional Jewish rituals which were the subject of the blood libels.
Sorry, evening turned into two days…that happens when you’ve got three kids and the oldest is 3 1/2, not much “me time”. Here’s the quote, taken from an article.
Among the secondary sources on which Goldhagen relies is Susan Zuccotti’s controversial book Under His Very Windows. Zuccotti found that Catholic clergy and lay persons defied the Nazis and the Fascists by providing food, clothing, and shelter to Jews and other refugees throughout Italy. As a result of these efforts, while approximately 80 percent of European Jews perished during World War II, 85 percent of Italian Jews survived Nazi occupation. Despite this, Zuccotti gives no credit to Pope Pius XII, allegedly because she could not find written evidence of a directive from him to the Catholics in Italy. Goldhagen expands this to say that “there is no evidence of the Pope’s guiding hand.” The identical argument is used by Holocaust deniers to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the death of six million Jews. They too point out that there is no “written evidence” of Hitler’s guiding hand, much less of a direct order.
Oh, I don’t know, maybe the Ustashi’s favorite Bishop, Pavelic, might make it onto the short list of “worst RC Saints”, but since he mostly killed Orthodox (http://www.pavelicpapers.com/features/essays/psg.html), few people in the West hear about his foibles.
Well, Chetniks (sp?) and Ustashi don’t get much publicity either way and I’m sure that I can find an Orthodox Eparch backing the Chetniks.
Your wrong, though, because this isn’t “WHO’S THE WORST CATHOLIC EVER” thread, at the guy’s got to be canonised to be in the group.
Aren’t you confusing (Ante) Paveliæ with Aloizij Stepinaæ, Archbishop of Zagreb who’s been beatified?
Quote:
Croatian Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac originally welcomed the Ustashi government, but after he learned of the extent of the brutality, and after having received direction from Rome, he condemned its actions. [The British Minister to the Holy See during the war years, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, wrote that Stepinac always acted according to the “well-intended dictates of his conscience.”] A speech he gave on October 24, 1942, is typical of many that he made refuting Nazi theory:
“All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction. Those who are Gypsies, Black, European, or Aryan all have the same rights… for this reason, the Catholic Church had always condemned, and continues to condemn, all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories of class, race, or nationality. It is not permissible to persecute Gypsies or Jews because they are thought to be an inferior race.”
The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of that Nazi puppet regime, condemning its “genocidal policies, which killed tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats.” He thereby earned the enmity of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic.
Although Cornwell argues that the Holy See granted de facto recognition to the Ustashi government, in actuality the Vatican rebuked Pavelic and refused to recognize the Independent State of Croatia or receive a Croatian representative. [Actes et Documents, vol. IV, no. 400 (“Pavelic is furious… because… he is treated worse by the Holy See than the Slovaks”).] When Pavelic traveled to the Vatican, he was greatly angered because he was permitted only a private audience rather than the diplomatic audience he had wanted. He might not even have been granted that privilege, but for the fact that the extent of the atrocities that had already begun were not yet known.