as hellbent on persecuting Jews or converting them by force. Now he says an assault on the Jews is a direct assault on his own church, effectively throwing Jews under their direct protection--and you're mad about that?
While I don't agree with Eric on the whole of his arguments let me then say to you the following.
A church that in much of occupied Europe aided and abetted the Nazi rise to power, in much of Europe it saw its own flocks and coffers grow fatter from the new state presented by the Nazi's. A Church whose upper level leadership viewed the preservation of the church as a greater good then the preservation of those who suffered under Nazi persecution, how can this pope speak to the Church's protection when instead of speaking to the unchristian charecter in the hearts of many catholics of his own generation, he speaks of a criminal cabal who forced its black vision on the nation.
A pope who says "god why did you allow this to happen" instead of a pope saying " I swear oh lord, I will seek and I will guide the souls of every catholic to the mercy and justice you preached to so this never happened again." how can you trust the words of that pope to protect the Jewish people.
A pope who ignores the fact the catholic church in poland and other states set the seeds into the fields to call for the death of the Jewish people. Many of those same writers were read by and inspired Adolph Hitler. His crying out to god does ring hollow. He was a pope who wore the broken cross, he was a pope who suffered under the broken cross and who lived in that germany. He had a unique position to say "we failed you lord" and he failed to take it.
Some are of the philosophical bent that an economic and social system based on lies will wind up making false promises it cannot possibly sustain--like the vision of the great, glorious, perfect third reich united in socialism and corporatism under the all-beneficent state that would cleanse all ugliness and badness (read: Jews and other undesirables) from our midsts.
your using an attack on utopianism of the Nazi's as a false doctrine in defense of a church that teaches in its own faith a utopian doctrine that speaks to a New Jerusalem born from the purging and the war of those who sin. Dean the same values and teachings of the church can be found in a new form in the teaching of the Nazi's.... this is why it worked, and why it was able to snake its way into the hearts of so many in the world.
And how could you ever expect the patron of a church not to take special notice of members of his own flock, a Roman Catholic who was made a saint because she sacrificed her life to save Jews? He's not to take special notice of her memorial thats there? You're going to get mad at him for this?
Dean you need to learn a lot about Poland and about the Fact the Catholic church has taken this black spot and made it into a holy place
Jewish protests against Christian symbols were increasing in 1998, and there was a new demand that the Catholic Church in the former SS administration building at Birkenau be removed because it is not appropriate at the place where over a million Jews perished in the gas chambers......
It was only after the fall of Communism in 1989 that the genocide of the Jews was even mentioned on the monument in the former Birkenau camp. Before 1989, few people from outside Poland had ever seen Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there were actually more visitors during the Communist regime than there were in 1998 because all Polish citizens were encouraged to go on group tours of the camp and most of these visitors were Catholic. In 1998, the largest group of visitors were the Polish Catholic high school students who were fulfilling an educational requirement to visit Auschwitz where so many of their Catholic grandfathers suffered and died bravely during the Polish resistance to the Nazi occupation.......
For the Polish people, who are 98% Catholic, Auschwitz-Birkenau is the place where not one, but two, of their Catholic saints died as martyrs. Both Father Maksymilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest, and a Carmelite nun named Edith Stein met their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau and have been canonized as Catholic saints. The prison cell in Block 11 at the Auschwitz main camp, which was occupied by Father Kolbe who volunteered to die to save the life of a fellow prisoner, is a prominent Catholic shrine. In 1998, the controversial crosses were placed in front of the side wall of the Block 11 building, where Father Kolbe was imprisoned in a "starvation cell."
Edith Stein was born a Jew and was an atheist, but converted to the Catholic religion and became a Carmelite nun under the name of Sister Benedicta of the Cross. Because she was a Jewess, she was gassed in the gas chamber in the little cottage known as Bunker 2 at Birkenau on August 9, 1942; she was canonized a saint in the Catholic Church in October 1998.....
On June 7, 1979, Cardinal Wojtyla came back to Poland, as Pope John Paul II, and honored the country of his birth by saying Mass at the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz II or Birkenau. Birkenau was chosen because it is the closest place to the Pope's home town that was large enough to hold the crowd of 500,000 people who attended this unique event in the history of Catholic Poland.
So first the saint he mentioned did not die because she helped jews, she died because she was to the Nazi world view a Jew
Secondly Pope John Paul choose to make a mass at the camp where most of the Jews in Poland were killed.
The Church has been pushing its ideological footprint on the largest Jewish mass grave in the world Dean, so by the pope honoring by name one of his own it is continuing a long process which has been wrestled with by Catholic and Jewish leaders and has invoked fights of Polish Nationalism as well over the nature of the place that stands as a scar to human suffering. So -YES- their is a point to the offense.
I also think you ignore a very important critique Eric makes of Hitlers actions (and the actions of others like him in Germany)
The first part of this claim is deeply contestable; religious antisemitism had a long European history, but the form of antisemitism that culminated in the Final Solution was grounded at least as much in early-20th-century racial "science" as it was in religious hatred. Martin Luther's antisemitism may have been essentially theological, but Adolf Hitler hated Jews not so much because they were adherents of a hated religion as because they were members of an enemy and inferior race.
While Eugenic Anti-Semetic thought hitler created was rather virulant it was a scientific justification for a theological Jew hatred that Christians in much of europe practiced with enthusiasm. He did not say "They killed Jesus" he said "They bring sickness, disease, infermity, and moral weakness" the difference is striking and when taken by the pope as an assault on Christianity makes the pope simply look foolish.
Dean your defense of the pope I guess is admirable, but it shows a lack of knowledge of the land he picked to make his speech, and what the Catholic Church has been doing there.
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