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Posted on 07/15/2006 7:49:19 PM PDT by Dqban22
All I can say is, thank God for Patton. Without him, Ike and Zhukov would still have been in Poland and France in 1946.
The crusades were an abyssmal failure. They all went native and lost focus on the goal.
"contemporary Islam is being debated and its struggle to find a place in modern society."
There is no such place in modern society. Its place is Hell.
It's appeasement and it never works. The Pope should be ashamed. He should be condemning Islamic attacks. I liked this guy but have lost all respect.
You are dreadfully wrong, while the world slept, the Vatican and His Holiness Pope Pius XII risked the Church and their own lives in order to save lives, Jews and Christians alike, many people ignores or shamefully disregard that in the Holocaust died as many Christians as Jews and that the hatred of Hitler towards the Christians and specially against the Catholics, was as strong as against the Jews.
THE FORGOTTEN VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST. The persecution of Catholics.
Without belittling the unspeakable horrors suffered by Jews, we should not ignore the fact that millions of Catholics were also victims of the Holocaust, as were gypsies, homosexuals, and in much less scale, Orthodox and Protestants. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe and was the only country where there was a mandatory death penalty for those hiding Jews. Many, who were caught sheltering Jews, were killed in a gruesome manner, such as being publicly burned as a warning to others.
Although not every Catholic was a victim of the Nazis, it is certain that all the Jews were victims of Hitler’s hatred. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was targeted to the total extermination of the Jewish race-an abhorrent and unforgivable crime against humanity.
We should keep in mind the prevailing situation of complete despair throughout Europe at the beginning of the forties. The Germans already occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Norway; and the invasion of the Soviet Union was going on while England was being bombed daily in preparation for the eventual invasion. The United States stayed out of the war until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American naval base in Pearl Harbor. The neutral nations, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden and the Vatican, were the only temporarily remaining free territories. Without any military force, all the Pope had was his powerful moral pulpit to encounter the all powerful and victorious German troops. Although the Vatican was neutral, The Church and its flock were being brutally attacked and decimated in the Nazi’s occupied countries.
According to historian William J. O’Malley, S.J., “to the genocide of six millions Jews we have to add nine to ten millions Slavic victims (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs) who were eliminated-not in war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but sorely because they were Slavic.” The Nazi’s genocide, based on race, should also include half a million gypsies who, just as the Slavs, were executed because they were not member of the superior race, the Aryans. The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than 3 million Catholics together with over 3 million Jews. (13)
About 2,800 clergymen were interned between 1940 and 1945, at Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Among them, 2,579 were Catholic clergymen, 109 Protestants, 30 orthodox and two Moslem clergymen. The Catholics came from 38 nations; 1,780 were Polish, 447 German and Austrian, 109 Czech and Slovaks, 50 Yugoslavs, 156 French, 63 Dutch. The auxiliary Polish Bishop of Wladislava died of typhus while imprisoned at Dachau. At least 1034 died in the camp, some victims of medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Rascher. In 1940, 800 priests died in Buchenwald, 1,200 in 1942 and 3,000 in 1943. And that was just in Buchenwald.
Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage.
Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage. When Msgr. Andrew Szeptyckyi was consecrated as Archbishop of Lwow of the Ruthenians, he asked the Pope during the ceremony, an explicit vocation for martyrdom. With that idea he approached Himmler personally on behalf of the Jews; their fate rent his noble spirit. There were many Catholics such as Oskar Schindler and St. Maximilian Kolbe who in brotherly love risked and even offered their own lives in behalf of the Jews.
Hitler, a self-proclaimed pagan, considered the Catholic Church on par with the Jews, as his mortal enemies.
It is documented that Hitler planned for the total obliteration of the Church. For Hitler Jews and Christians were the sources of every evil. “The heaviest blow to humanity” he once said, “was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of Jews.” In his diabolical mind, the extermination of the Jews would be needed for victory. Hitler designed and implemented a plan at Warthegau, in western Poland, to extirpate the Catholic and the Protestant churches from Europe. There is documentation that Count Von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, who was an outspoken critic of the racial and eugenic policies of the Nazis, if it were not for the prominence and prestige of his position, would have been annihilated
In 1942, Pius XII told Fr. Paolo Dezza, rector of the Gregorian University, “They want to destroy the Church and crush it as a toad…there will be no place for the Pope in the new Europe, they say that I am going to America, I have no fear and I shall remain here.” (16) Among the many ideological fundaments shared by the Nazis and the Communist was the hatred for religion, specially the Catholic Church. The only form of worship allowed was the cult to the leader of the totalitarian state. Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty went from a Nazi jail to a Communist jail after the war. There was no respite for Catholics after the War; in fact, the persecution of Catholics increased in the Soviet occupied countries.
In occupied Poland, Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church…
Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church and the creation of a national German Church loyal to the Führer in Warthegau. The final goal was the complete Germanization of that Polish region, to which end Greiser worked without respite. Bishops were driven out, priests killed or imprisoned. Within a few years one third of the pre-war 2,000 priests were dead and 700 imprisoned; seminaries were closed, the Catholic press and voluntary associations suppressed. The Holy See found itself desperately fighting in two fronts, for the survival of the Jews and for the survival of his own flock. The Church in a beleaguered Poland was being bled to death by the two great scourges of humanity, the Nazis and Communists. In Poland three million Catholics went to their death along with three million Jews at the Nazi’s concentration camps in addition to the millions murdered by the Soviets.
It is documented that, according to Robert M.W. Kempner, former U.S. Deputy Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, among the measures scheduled to follow upon Hitler’s victory were the following: “every Catholic State must select its own Pope”…(and) “the Bishop of Muenster will go before the firing squad one day.” Every propaganda move by the Catholic Church against Hitler’s Reich would have been not only “provoking suicide”, but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and Priests. These and similar threats appeared in the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, the nazi theoretician of racial purity, and in Hitler’s Table Talk.
Millions of Catholics were victims first of the Nazis and later of the Communists.
Most Catholics were anti-Nazi and anti-Communist. We should not forget “the fact that hundreds of thousands of anti-Nazis from communist occupied territories as Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia, were sent by Moscow to German concentration camps, while hundreds of thousands of anti-Stalinists refugees living in Nazis territories were sent by Berlin to the Soviet concentration camps” as part of the Stalin / Hitler’s diabolical pact. Shamefully, the Western democracies did the same after WWII; thousands of anti-Communists who fled the Soviet Union during the war were forcedly deported to the Soviet concentration camps, the dreadful gulags. Entire families opted for suicide rather than deportation.
Those were actually the words of Cardinal Sodano, a lefty who was JPII's Secretary of State and is being retired and replaced with a younger man by Benedict XVI in September. For him, however, the statement was pretty moderate because he actually condemned the terrorist attacks that led to the situation, something he rarely used to do in the past (when everything was the fault of the West, according to him).
Furthermore, bear in mind that no Pope is ever going to be thrilled about any war, anywhere, so when the Pope does make a statement (he's on vacation right now), it's not likely to be a call to arms. Medieval popes spent a good deal of their time and energy trying to get the local kings to stop killing each other and destroying each other's kingdoms, and negotiating truces was a big part of their job description.
In any case, if you think this Pope is soft on Islam, maybe you should stop and read the article that this thread is based on. He is very realistic, much more so than many of our secular leaders, in fact, and I don't think he's worried in the least about attacks on the Vatican. Catholics do not regard the Vatican the way Muslims regard Mecca; it's a beautiful set of buildings with some great art treasures and a long tradition, but it is not essential to the existence of the Catholic Church. The Pope is not going to cease to speak the truth in order to preserve some buildings.
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If he understands human nature, he must realize that this is impossible.
I believe you meant to say ....
Millions of Jews are alive today thanks to Pope Pius XII. That would include a good friend who was hidden in a convent where the nuns educated her in the Jewish faith.
That said, this thread is about Islam.
On the contrary ......
"As in the past, the Holy See condemns both the terrorist attacks on the one side and the military reprisals on the other. Indeed, a State's right to self-defense does not exempt it from respecting the norms of international law, especially as regards the protection of civilian populations.”
Excellent posts .... both of you! Kudos!
The Pope knows perfectly well that Islam does not accept the centrality of the person, and that was what he was calling for. His point was that it is not possible for Islam and Christianity to agree on religious matters, but perhaps we could all agree on a "humanistic" ethic. However, he has made the point that Islam has a very remote god with no interest in human beings and human personhood; therefore, Islam is going to have to change a lot if it wants even to get along on a "humanistic" basis, since it is fundamentally a totalitarian (i.e., individuals count for nothing) ideology.
It's a challenge to Islam, delicately phrased because that, of course, is how the language of diplomacy goes, to try to adapt its discourse even on a secular level so that we can find some common ground. I'm sure the Pope is very aware of how unlikely this is, but he sees it as his duty to try. Note how he refused to be drawn into saying the old "Islam is a religion of peace" mantra.
Islam, unlike most religions, is an evil cult born in violence, spred through violence and maintained through violence.
There is no coexistence with a cult which seeks to dominate the world through violnece.
Very, very, very interesting. Thanks for posting. Thanks to all contributors to this thread.
His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI is not naïve. It most be noted this Pope is the greatest living theologian (Cardinal Kasper is another) and through his long services as Prefect of the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith, Pope Ratzinger, in addition to his solid doctrinal background, has an extraordinary grasp of foreign affairs.
We are living as dangerous times as during the WW II, and as Pius XII had to try to protect Catholics living under Nazi occupied Europe, Pope Benedict XVI has not to further endanger the lives of Catholics living in Muslim countries, including the Lebanese Maronites, the Caldeans in Syria, the Copts in Africa as well as many Palestinian Catholics. Even under those difficult circumstances, both Popes did spoke strongly in defense of the weak and those persecuted for political or religious reasons.
When even the pope has to whisper
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com
Islam is the unexploded bomb of global politics. US foreign policy - the only foreign policy there is, for the United States is the only superpower - proceeds from the hope that a modern and democratic Islam will emerge from the ruins of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Through democratic institutions, Washington believes, the long-marginalized Shi'ites will adapt to religious pluralism. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Islam, fixed in amber since the High Middle Ages, will metamorphose into something like American mainline Protestantism.
Alas, the available facts suggest that the opposite result will ensue: more freedom equals more fundamentalism. Not the secular Shi'ite parties but the pro-Iranian religious parties dominate the Iraqi polls. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood quadrupled its vote despite heavy-handed measures to intimidate its supporters; Hamas threatens to displace Fatah in the Palestinian elections this month; Hezbollah has become the strongest electoral as well as military force in Lebanon; and, most important of all, Mahmud Ahmadinejad crushed a more pragmatic opponent in last June's Iranian presidential elections.
Islam was founded as a theocracy, such that the Western innovation of church-state separation remains alien to its culture. Is it possible for Islam to reform? A negative answer implies that Ahmadinejad's January 5 call for world domination falls within the Islamic mainstream. He told an audience of religious students, "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world."
The interviewer then asked Fessio, "And so the pope is a pessimist about that changing, because it would require a radical reinterpretation of what the Koran is?" Fessio replied, "Yeah, which is it's impossible, because it's against the very nature of the Koran, as it's understood by Muslims."
That is precisely what I argued in an essay titled You say you want a reformation? on August 5, 2003:
Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from "the mouth of God by the hand of Moses", a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity's Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.
The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character? In that respect the Koran resembles the "Golden Tablets" of the Angel Moroni purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian bibles.
I claim no originality whatever in this matter, for I simply follow the leading Muslim authorities, who are unanimous that Islam is in no need of reform. The immutable character of Islamic revelation makes the subject of Koranic criticism into a minefield. It is universally known among scholars that alternative texts of the Koran have been discovered in various archeological sites - something of an embarrassment for the Archangel Gabriel - but the subject has disappeared from the media. [1]
It is dangerous to publish anything that Muslims might interpret as blasphemy, as Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, discovered when it published 12 cartoons of Mohammed, some portraying the Prophet in violent acts. Muslim protests and threats caused two of the cartoonists to go into hiding. After Arab foreign ministers condemned Denmark for refusing to act against the newspaper, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen offered a near-apology in his New Year's address.
Strange as it may seem, the pope must whisper when he wants to state agreement with conventional Muslim opinion, namely that the Koranic prophecy is fixed for all time such that Islam cannot reform itself. If Islam cannot change, then a likely outcome will be civilizational war, something too horrific for US leaders to contemplate. What Benedict XVI thinks about the likelihood of civilizational war I do not know. Two elements of context, though, set in relief his reported comments concerning Islam's incapacity to reform.
The first is that Benedict's comments regarding the nature of Muslim revelation are deliberate and informed, for his primary focus as a theologian has been the subject of revelation. In his 1953 doctoral thesis, biographer George Weigel reports, Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, ... following Bonaventure, argued that revelation is "an act in which God shows himself"; revelation cannot be reduced to the propositions that result from God's self-disclosure, as certain forms of neo-scholasticism tended to do. Revelation, in other words, has a subjective or personal dimension, in that there is no "revelation" without someone to receive it. As Ratzinger would later put it, "where there is no one to perceive 'revelation', no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed". [2]
The Judeo-Christian view of revelation, as summarized above by Father Fessio, expresses the mutual love between Revealer and recipient of revelation, a concept alien to Islam. [3]
A second element of context is Benedict's admiration for the US separation of church and state. In an essay published in this month's issue of First Things, Benedict makes the remarkable (for a pope) statement that the US model is what the early church really had in mind. He proceeds from the famous argument of Pope Gelasius I (492-496) that "because of human weakness (pride!), they have separated the two offices" of king and priest. Neither the state church model of Northern Europe nor the secular model of France, Italy and Spain has sufficed, Benedict observes. But he continues:
Situated between the two [failed] models is the model of the United States of America. Formed on the basis of free churches, it adopts a separation between church and state. Above and beyond the single denominations, it is characterized by a Protestant Christian consensus that is not defined in denominational terms but rather in association with its sense of a special religious mission toward the rest of the world. The religious sphere thus acquires a significant weight in public affairs and emerges as a pre-political and supra-political force with the potential to have a decisive impact on political life.
It is useless to bemoan the fact that Americans do not understand what they are until a European comes along and explains it to them; that has been true since Alexis de Tocqueville. It is most promising that a European, indeed one who speaks with the authority of the throne of St Peter, has explained the difference between the Christian foundation of the US political system and theocratic Islam - even if the explanation came in the form of a stage whisper. I expect this to have profound consequences.
Later in the same essay, Benedict takes up a theme I have addressed over the years, namely the moral cause of Europe's demographic implosion (see Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003), writing:
Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen - at least by some people - as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire.
My investigation of the causes of Europe's present decline was inspired by comments of then-cardinal Ratzinger in a book-length interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald published in 1996 as The Salt of the Earth. Nothing is really new in Benedict's present formulation except, perhaps, his sense of urgency as the hour grows late and the moment of truth approaches. In the cited essay, Benedict excoriates the pessimism of Oswald Spengler, who claimed to have discovered a deterministic pattern of rise and fall of civilizations. Instead, he argues that "the fate of a society always depends upon its creative minorities", and that "Christians should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority".
I agree with the pope, not with my namesake. My choice of nom de guerre is ironic rather than semiotic. The fact that the West still has such a leader as Benedict XVI in itself is cause for optimism. It might be too late for Europe, but it is not too late for the United States, and that is where the pope's mustard seeds may fall on fertile ground.
Notes
1. See Toby Lester, "What is the Koran?", in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.
2. God's Choice by George Weigel (HarperCollins: New York, 2005), p 167.
3. For more background see Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)
Prairiebreeze found this:
There's an interesting followup blurb on Michelle Malkin's blog about the Catholic church's response.
Douglas Urbanski, who has inside Vatican contacts, reports that the views expressed by Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who issued the statement while the Pope was on vacation, are renegade views and asks the question that needs to be asked: Does the Pope back Sodano's statement? Urbanski points to this story on the rift between Pope Benedict XVI and Sodano. He'll have more tonight as a guest host on the Rusty Humphries show. Tune in.
A dirty trick indeed if Benedict didn't authorize this response
A very interesting piece by the always interesting Spengler on the Holy Father. Benedict XVI is, by far, the most impressive leader in the West.
Since the Europeans prefer importing working Muslim adult barbarians to raising Christian childen, rather than whispering a "challenge" to Islam, it would be more practical to explain to already defeated Europe how best to get along as dhimmis. When one is reduced to whispering around Muslims, one is already second class.
It is useful to remember that in the early Muslim conquests, the Christians of north Africa were full dhimmis while still a substantial majority. The orthodoxy of Islam itself is maintained by a tiny violent minority. The only way to eliminate it is to eliminate Islam. That will take more than a whisper.
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What a tragedy, when you contribute so much.
Well, at least you pondered. ;o)
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