Even as one of the more strident Catholics, I want to emphasize that this is one of those dicey topics where there is some truth to charge, the association is unfair. So I’d say “have at it” for acadmic purposes, but expect some people who respond to this jsutified anger.
Ping!
So this means that former Popes, due to the prevalence of homosexual perversion throughout the Catholic church today, can be held responsible for the rapes of boys and girls of today?
Adolf Hitler was a Catholic. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_hitler.html
Wow...I wish I could read as fast a you all have apparently been able to. That’s a lot to read in five minutes and then post your obviously well thought out and highly intellectual thoughts.
This is sooooo STUPID!
What does it matter if Hitler was a CATHOLIC, a LUTHERAN, a JEW? It doesn’t matter at all - just as it doesn’t matter that Ted Bundy was a Republican.
What a waste of thread.
People should read directly what Luther had to say about Jews. It’s shocking.
You may justly criticize Luther for a lot of things, but it is true the church had come way off its center and mission by Luther's time and was in need of a huge correction.
Without Luther, the protestant reformation doesn't take place, nor would the Catholic church have reformed to the point that it would recognizable as Christ's Church once again.
My 2 cents.
I would drop this garbage. There's enough guilt to go around.
If you contrast Protestant North Germany and Catholic Bavaria and Austria, you'll find opposition and support for Hitler and the Nazis at various times and among various people. You can't draw a clear line between bad Protestants and good Catholics (or good Protestants and bad Catholics).
Rather, the line is between an era that was very receptive to statist or totalitarian ideologies, and our own, more libertarian epoch. After Hitler and Stalin, it doesn't take much virtue or intelligence to be anti-totalitarian, but if all of us had been alive and active seventy years ago, some of us would certainly have favored the dictators of the day.
Personally, I think God led to Hitler, because God made good things and Hitler perverted them horribly, and if God hadn't made good things, there'd be nothing for Hitler to pervert.
I think I Augustine lead to Hitler because Luther was an Augustinian canon.
I think Bush led to Hitler because everything is Dubya's fault.
According to the boss-lady, I led to Hitler because the whole point of getting married is to have someone to blame stuff on.
According to Freud, my mother led to Hitler.
Okay? Are we done here?
A rarely-used component of Irving's Law has been invoked. The entire thread is forfeit.
So Catholics hate Luther. Who didn’t know that. The fact that they’d blame Luther for Hitler (born a Catholic, although they will deny that) shouldn’t suprize anybody.
Hitler's spirituality has nothing to do with the church as a matter of fact he hated it.
This is simply a ludicrous argument, as if Martin Luther would not thoroughly and entirely reject any Christianity that Adolf Hitler espoused.
Because Luther underscored his disappointment that Judaism is an enemy of the gospel does not in the least mean that Luther would have supported the murders of this socialist man, Hitler.
Godwin’s law.
The author of this article automatically loses.
First of all, I have to repeat my thesis: I do not believe myself, nor have I wanted to give the impression, that Luther and Lutheranism are the sole source of our present-day troubles. Economic, political, geographical, and many other causes have to be taken into account if we want to explain the destructive present-day mentality of the Germans, which is above all other causes to blame for the misery in which the modern world finds itself twice within a third of a century.
I did not mean for one minute either to deny that there are things that are good and laudable in Luther—that he pronounced and taught some very fine things which, if they had become the ethical standard of modern Europe, might have brought us peace and prosperity instead of war and misery. All I maintain is that Luther and his doctrines are one of the causes why Europe could follow such a fatal road—that Luther, the man and his teaching, had many disastrous sides, as well as good ones. This negative aspect of Lutheranism is not only generally ignored, but is just the very aspect which as influenced German ethics and standards.
Luther, who is generally shown as a demigod, was nothing of the kind, and his influence was anything but godly. An evil and dangerous legend has been spun round the man and his work. “It is most mysterious how complete the victory of the Luther-legend has been.”
Luther himself led a most immoral life, and destroyed the moral standards of his time. The result of Luther's teachings and his life during his own time was “general moral and religious chaos”. With his denial of reason he produced a complete “decay of intellectual life”. Neitzsche, as so often, describes Luther best when he calls him “a barbarian of the intellect”.
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“I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ,” he said on one occasion quite shamelessly (“Table Talk”, 2397b). “When I beheld Christ I seemed to see the Devil”. I had a great aversion for Christ”. “Often I was horrified at the name of Christ, and when I regarded Him on the Cross, it was as if I had been struck by lightning; and when I heard His name mentioned, I would rather have heard the name of the Devil” (see Janssen **, 72; also Maritain, “Three Reformers”, p. 169). “I did not believe in Christ,” wrote Luther in 1537. The example of Jesus Christ Himself very often meant nothing to Luther (see E29, 196).
Luther knew that he was superior to any man or saint. “St. Augustine or St. Ambrosius cannot be compared with me.” “They shall respect our teaching which is the word of God, spoken by the Holy Ghost, through our lips”. “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He as on me” (E61, 422). “God has appointed me for the whole German land, and I boldly vouch and declare that when you obey me you are without a doubt obeying not me but Christ” (W15, 27).
God, on the other hand, seemed to him “a master armed with a stick”. “God did mischievously blind me”; “God often acts like a madman”; “God paralyses the old and blinds the young and thus remains master”; I look upon God no better than a scoundrel”; “God is stupid” (“Table Talk”, No. 963, W1, 48)