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Honestly, what course of action would they take? I guess they could have preached to them... "Pray
to Jesus to absolve your sins or you will be damned to the fiery regions of hell."
Seriously now, there's nothing 'the church' could have said or done to change what Hitler's Nazi's
were doing. Hitler was an intelligent man (insane yes, but smart) and he would not be easily
persuaded to stop doing what he felt was right. |
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That is the Catholics for you;-) |
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Definitely not. The catholic cult had a centuries long history at that time of hating Jews - exile,
purges, forced conversions, witch hunts, blood libels, etc. Pius saw the Nazis as furthering goals
his religion had been trying for hundreds of years.
If Pius were truly interested in protecting Jews, he would have put his neck and the entire catholic
religion between the Jews and Nazis, allowing himself and others to be "martyred". Instead they did
an "Olé" to save their own skin, pretending to cover the Jews with a cloth when in reality they
were leading the bull to gore their desired target. Pius may have talked about protecting Jews, but
when it came time to act, he did nothing. |
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 K9  18 May 2008 15:52
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Not only did the church not do anything to stop the Nazis, they were ardent supporters up until it
became clear that Hitler was out of his mind. Then they backpedaled a little to maintain face, but
after the war, the Catholic Church did everything in their power to smuggle Nazi war criminals out
of Germany under Red Cross visas.
In other words, they worked hard to keep the Nazis from being prosecuted. I've got all kinds of
pictures of Church leaders meeting with Hitler and doing the Nazi salute.
Great job there, Pope Pius XII. |
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Actually, I read a story about a preacher who helped the Jews and opposed Hitler. If I remember
correctly, he wrote sermons that insulted the Nazi's operations, and one church service the Nazi
officers came in and arrested him. I can't remember if he went to a concentration camp or was just
shot on sight, but I'm thinking it was the former. |
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Actually, the Catholic Church spoke out against Nazism before any Western power ever did. I refer
you specifically to a document from March 1937 entitled "Mit Brennender Sorge," which translated
into English means "With Burning Urgency." The document was an encyclical published under Pope Pius
XI, but it was actually written by Cardinal Pacelli, who would later become Pius XII. The papal
encyclical criticized the Nazi regime and its racial ideology in no uncertain terms, observing that
"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the
depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community (...) whoever raises
these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and
perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and
from the concept of life which that faith upholds." The document then went on to label all those who
believed in national religions and a national God as having "superficial minds."
There was absolutely no question that this document was directed at Nazi Germany, since it was
written in German, rather than in Latin, which would have been the language used in almost all other
cases. The document was then read out in Catholic parishes in Germany on Palm Sunday and caused
quite a stir. I would also point out that this protest from the Vatican occurred four years before
the start of the Final Solution, at a time when nearly everyone in Europe was silent about growing
anti-Semitism and racialist ideologies in Germany. |
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I think the church lost it's power after the inquisitions. Did leading church figures not protest
against the war in Iraq? Hitler would have done what Hitler did anyway, their would just have been a
few more bodies in the ovens. We don't really have a leg to stand on when it comes to protesting the
decisions of our governments. Propaganda works the same in a democracy as it does in a dictatorship,
and the ones who could have thought about what Hitler was doing, would have been committing suicide
if they had told the truth. Hitler wasn't killing the Jews because he needed to kill the Jews, but
because he could. The church would not have prevented that. I am sure those in the positions of
power within the institution were to comfortable to risk speaking out. Remember, the Catholic church
is based in Rome, which was controlled by Musolini, Hitlers ally. Germany, which I believe was
mainly Protestant, but still a country which could turn a blind eye to discrimination, believed in
the power of the economy, not the difference between right and wrong, those who benefited, including
the church, allowed genocide. Who is to claim the world is any different today? I couldn't. |
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Oh, you mean like the priests that lost their lives protecting Jews? Hitler wouldn't listen to the
Church anyway. He was a racist little bigot. Don't you dare say he was a Christian. He would have
had Jesus shot for being a Jew. He stated that Christianity was evil for being "an invention of the
Jew". Don't try to defend that. |
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 Mark 05 May 2008 23:26
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