Science + Creation

[Angrboda]

What? Catholics have killed Jews in the past, but to say the Church sanctioned their slaughter wholesale? When? Where? Most of the quotes from Popes I know of explicitly condemn violence aimed toward Jewish folk.

"We would risk causing the victims of the most atrocious deaths to die again if we do not have an ardent desire for justice, if we do not commit ourselves to insure that evil does not prevail over good as it did for millions of children of the Jewish people...Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again." ~ Pope John Paul II

"Nazi anti-Judaism was the work of godless, anti-Christian criminals. But it would not have been possible without the almost two thousand years' pre-history of 'Christian' anti-Judaism..." ~ Hans Küng, a leading Catholic theologian

Two Church teachings became the foundation stones for centuries of oppression of Jews by the Church:

• Supercessionism: (a.k.a. Replacement Theology): The belief that God had rejected the Jews, unilaterally cancelled his covenants with them, and now favored Christians as the new chosen people.
  
• Translated responsibility: Holding all Jews, from the first century onwards, responsible for Jesus' execution circa 30 CE. This includes Jews who lived throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE who never heard of Jesus, and Jews who were born as much as 19 centuries after Jesus' death.
  

From 315 CE, (when the Roman Empire extended freedom of religion to Christians) to 395 (when Christianity had become the state religion) Christians were able to initiate programs of discrimination and oppression against Jews. Some early examples were:

• 306 CE: The church Synod of Elvira banned marriages, sexual intercourse and community contacts between Christians and Jews.
  
• 325: The Council of Nicea decided to separate the celebration of Easter from the Jewish Passover. They stated: "let us have nothing in common with this odious people..."
  
• 337: The marriage of a Jewish man to a Christian woman became punishable by death.
  
• 339: Conversion to Judaism became a criminal offense.
  
• 367 - 376: St. Hilary of Poitiers referred to Jews as a perverse people who God has cursed forever. St. Ephroem referred to synagogues as brothels.
  
• 380: The Bishop of Milan initiated the destruction of a synagogue, which he referred to as "an act pleasing to God."
  

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance:

During this period, there were dozens of other instances of persecution of Jews by the church, including exiling Jews from cities, dioceses and entire countries; destruction of synagogues; denial of the right to own land or to hold office; and their reduction to serfdom and slavery. Perhaps the worst instances during these centuries were genocides during the Crusades. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered in cold blood by Christian armies on their way to and from Palestine.

• 1205: Pope Innocent III wrote to the archbishops of Sens and Paris that "the Jews, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord...As slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspire, they shall by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ's death set free..." i.e. they would be slaves of Christians.
  
• 1227: The Synod of Narbonne required Jews to wear an oval badge -- reminiscent of the Star of David that the Nazis required Jews to wear.
  
• 1478: The Spanish Inquisition was organized by the Church in order to detect insincere conversions of Jews to Christianity.
  
• 1555: A Roman Catholic Papal bull, "Cum nimis absurdum," required Jews in Vatican controlled lands to wear badges, and be confined to ghettos. Over 3,000 people were crammed into about 8 acres of land. The public health problems were horrendous.
  
• 1648-9: Massacres of Jews occurred in Nemirov, Polonnoye, Tulchin, Volhynia, Bar, Lvov, and other cities in Ukraine. About 100,000 Jews were murdered and 300 communities destroyed.
  

During these centuries, there were a few attempts by various popes to reduce the impact of the church's policies against the Jews. They were largely ignored. None had any lasting impact.

During 19th and first half of the 20th century CE:

In earlier centuries, persecution by church and state was directed at followers of Judaism. The Church believed that some Jews must be allowed to live, because the biblical book of Revelation indicated that they had a role to play in the "end times." However, since the Church at the time believed that all Jews were responsible for Jesus' death -- past, present and future -- then it was acceptable to make Jews' lives quite miserable. Jews could escape oppression by giving up their religion, converting to Christianity, and being baptized.

Subsequent attacks against Jews were mostly racially motivated, and perpetrated by Christian, governmental and secular groups and individuals. The Jewish people were viewed as a separate race more than as followers of a different religion.

• 1806: A French Jesuit Priest, Abbe Barruel, had written a treatise blaming the Masonic Order for the French Revolution. He later issued a letter alleging that Jews, not the Masons were the guilty party. Beliefs in an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world came from this source; they continue today.
  1846 - 1878: Pope Pius IX restored all of the previous restrictions against the Jews within the Vatican state. All Jews under Papal control were confined to Rome's ghetto - the last one in Europe until the Nazis recreated ghettos in the 1930s. Pius IX was beatified in the year 2000 -- the last step before sainthood.
  
• 1894: French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was framed by antisemitic officers, found guilty and was given a life sentence. The church, government and army united to suppress the truth. Ten years later, he was declared totally innocent. The Dreyfus Affair became world-wide news for years.
  
• 1930s: Some American clergy used their their radio programs to attack Jews. Father Charles E Coughlin was one of the best known. "In the 1930's, radio audiences heard him rail against the threat of Jews to America's economy and defend Hitler's treatment of Jews as justified in the fight against communism."
  
• 1936: The Nazi government passed the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, which paralleled earlier Church laws against Jews.
  
• 1936: Cardinal Hloud of Poland urged Catholics to boycott Jewish businesses.
  
• 1938: Hitler brought back various century-old church regulations, ordering all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David as identification.
  

The Roman Catholic Church reversed its theology later in the 20th century and is now a strong supporter of religious tolerance towards Jews. [Gee, isn't that speshul! -ed]

What the exact role of the pope during the Nazi atrocities was is not known in depth, though there were some good things he, or the church, did. However, below is a list of less salable items:

• Although informed of the massive Nazi attacks of synagogues and Jewish business in on Kristallnacht 1938-NOV, Pope Pius XII issued no public criticism.
  
• Although informed during 1940 to 1943 of Nazi atrocities in at least Austria, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, and the Ukraine, (including deportations to death camps) he made no public comments.
  
• "He refused to join a resolution of the Allies condemning the Nazi crimes."
  
• "He never excommunicated any Nazi," although he did excommunicate some German Catholics who supported cremation as an alternative to burial.
  
• "He never declared it a sin for Catholics to participate in the slaughter."
  
• 1941 when asked about proposed anti-Jewish laws in Vichy France, Pius XII answered that the church condemned racism, but did not repudiate every rule against the Jews.
  

In late 1999, the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews established an international panel, composed of three Jewish and three Christian scholars from the U.S., Canada and Israel. They were given the task of trying to evaluate role of Pope Pius XII and the rest of the Vatican during the Holocaust. The panel was able to search published volumes of wartime Vatican documents. They found that the Vatican had received reports of Nazi atrocities as early as 1941-JAN. However, "the pope's responses to reports of atrocities were missing from the sources they examined."

In 2000-OCT, the panel issued a preliminary report, "The Vatican and the Holocaust," asking 47 questions which can only be answered by consulting the unpublished Vatican files from the World War II era. They unanimously asked for access to the records. In 2001-JUN, the Vatican refused. [In other words, the Vatican refused its own commission access to the documents they needed to complete their task. I wonder why? -ed]

All statements not sourced above may be sourced to The Ontario Consultants On Religious Tolerance: Anti-semitism, the Nazi Holocaust,
and the Roman Catholic Church

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The Inquisition had been created in the twelfth century by Pope Lucius III to fight heresy in the south of what is now France. The Catholic Monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to Castile, and requested the Pope's assent. On 1 November 1478 Pope Sixtus IV published the Papal bull, Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, through which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile; it was later extended to all of Spain. The bull gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors. [unsourced paragraph]

During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and long afterwards the Inquisition was active in persecuting people for offences such as crypto-Judaism, heresy, Protestantism, blasphemy, and bigamy. The last trial for crypto-Judaism was held in 1818.

The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (not from the Kingdom of Navarre) and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year.

The edict was formally revoked on 16 December 1968, following the Second Vatican Council. Today, the number of Jews in Spain is estimated at 50,000.

Ferdinand and Isabella took seriously the reports that some crypto-Jews were not only privately practicing their former faith, but were secretly trying to draw other conversos back into the Jewish fold. In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella made formal application to Rome for a tribunal of the Inquisition in Castile to investigate these and other suspicions. In 1487, King Ferdinand established the Spanish Inquisition in Aragon. It is not known how many had not truly converted, had lapsed from their new Christianity, or were attempting to persuade others to revert.

Scholars disagree about how many Jews left Spain as a result of the decree; the numbers vary between 130,000 and 800,000. Many (likely more than half) went to Portugal, where they eluded persecution for only a few years (see Portuguese Inquisition). The Jewish community in Portugal (perhaps then some 10% of that country's population) were then declared Christians by Royal decree unless they left, but since their departure was severely hindered by the King (who needed their expertise for Portugal's overseas enterprises), the vast majority was forced to stay as nominal Christians.

Other Spanish Jews (estimates range between 50,000 and 70,000)[citation needed] chose to avoid expulsion by conversion to Christianity. However, their conversion did not protect them from ecclesiastical hostility after the Spanish Inquisition came into full effect; persecution and expulsion were common.

The Portuguese Inquisition was formally established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of the King of Portugal, João III. Manuel I had asked for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515 to fulfill the commitment of marriage with Maria of Aragon, but it was only after his death that Pope Paul III acquiesced.

It held its first auto-da-fé in Portugal in 1540. Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts on rooting out those who had converted from other faiths (overwhelmingly Judaism) but [who] did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic orthodoxy.

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[FallentoReason]

So this is why I've never met a single Jew...

[Angrboda]

ps. I didn't go to either Nizkor or the Anti-defamation League's websites. If you'd like me to see what I can dig up there, let me know. I should have a little time by Thursday or Friday.

[Epimethean]

Love the hypocrisy in the title of this article.

http://articles.cnn.com/2012-03-23/ameri...M:AMERICAS

Since when did Catholicism ever respond to reality? Moreover, when der Popenfuhrer describes Communism as evil and goes on to say that the RCC's responsibility is to unmask evil, the potkettle-o-meter pegs.

[The Grand Nudger]

You are seriously complaining that different Church Fathers thought different things, while leaving the Faithful all the freedom to believe in whatever they like? The exact same thing is true today. Catholics can be single instant Creationists, they can be 7 day Creationists, they can believe in evolution. This has always been true. This example is particularly ridiculous because nothing here was defined, nothing here was changed, nothing here was a swap of "party lines". We went from "no official position because its irrelevant" to "no official position because its irrelevant".

Agreed, your creation superstitions are irrelevant. Of course, it's a bit disingenuous to state that they are irrelevant -to catholicism-, isn't it? Now, why on earth would I complain that a bunch of human beings change their minds over time? I'm not, you are again attempting misdirection. Case in point, I'm not even complaining, just calling you on some particularly blatant bullshit.

What "rulings"? Popes are infallible in matters of Faith+morals when speaking in their office as a Pope. Give me a single example of this "ruling" being overturned.

You've already been given an example, and I'm not interested in pandering to your feigned ignorance.

Small t tradition are just practices and expressions. The exact same beliefs, you just change what color the altar cloths are. It has absolutely nothing to do with actual doctrine, so this whole conversation just betrays your ignorance more than anything.

"We don't change stuff except when we do, except that we don't, and if we did it doesn't matter because it;s no big deal"

No Rhythm, not so"I" claim. So every single bit of research we have claims. Please, find me any evidence of an early manuscript without this "Petrine passage" and then I will continue to humor you. Until then, no.

You have research? Thusfar I've only seen you reference the articles of your faith, still waiting on that opus. You need the Petrine passage (and the entirety of the narrative as well) to be genuine, I don't. It's your baby, make it so.

And while I am at it, this goes for all the stuff about the Church "changing its mind" as well. I don't want to do your homework for you. Give me a concrete example or I won't even pretend to humor you. This is just goofy and you come across as more ignorant by the post.

You've been given multiple examples in multiple threads, again, I'm not interested.

I would link you to the Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum (phew!), which is pretty much the official list of all Catholic dogmas within a single list, but since the free English translation of the site is down, I can link you to some Catechisms instead which might give you an idea, albeit incomplete, of Catholic doctrine which we might use as a starting point for your alleged "changes" (especially Trent + the CCC since those come officially from the Church:

Catechetical Instructions of Thomas Aquinas (13th Century): http://www.basilica.org/pages/ebooks/St....ctions.pdf
Catechism of Trent (1566): http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/ma...tindex.htm
Vaux's Catechism (1583): http://www.aloha.net/~mikesch/vaux.htm
Douay Catechism (1649): http://www.aloha.net/~mikesch/DouayCat.htm
Baltimore Catechism (1886): http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/ma...bindex.htm
Catechism of St. Pius X (1908): http://www.cin.org/users/james/ebooks/ma...pindex.htm
Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997): http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

These all sprang forth from the rock of peter did they? Or where they added, revised, and is this all that there has ever been or are we missing a few? Uh-huh.... Look, throw your chips in with whatever church you like, structure your beliefs to be in accord with whatever dogma feels comfortable to you. Who cares if I think the beliefs are ridivulous? Nobody. Thing is, you don't have to put forward such blatantly dishonest arguments to defend your faith, and you do your faith no great service in doing so (nor does engaging in this sort of bull-shittery actually defend your faith at all....nor does it require defense). The church's history is what it is. The church has changed over time, catholic beliefs have changed over time. Sometimes Popes don't agree with their predecessors, there was once no such thing as a pope. The church has actively participated in terrible things, and they've hand their hand in a fair share of good as well. This is to be expected, it is a group of human beings, there is no pedestal in reality, only the one you have afforded them through faith.

"We believe that the popes office and authority are grounded in the church established by christ as stated in the Petrine passage." That's fine, but it's a belief, that's not how or when (or why) the office was established.
"We believe that the church has final authoritative say on certain matters" That's fine, but stop pretending that it's "authoritative" rulings haven't been monkeyed with, because they have, and as you have mentioned, it has been done in the open.

The catholic church does not need you weaseling through conversations, it really doesn't

[Aiza]

post

Sigh. Just say "No I cannot name any source for my aformentioned 'rumblings' and I cannot give any concrete examples of what I would consider a change".

Otherwise we are just going in circles with you dancing around vague accusations and meaningless and transparent equivocations with absolutely nothing substantial.

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Apo, I want the Church sanctioning murder of Jewish folk wholesale. You are giving me the full history of Christian anti-Semitism, including the murdering of Jews by Catholics, and I am aware of all of it, but yet none of the actual wholesale murders were at all sanctioned by the Catholic Church. Keep in mind sanctioned means to Give official permission or approval for it. The only mass murder incident by Catholics (ie the murders during the Crusades, which you so kindly bolded/underlined) were expressly condemned by Pope Calixtus II and many other Popes throughout the Middle Ages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicut_Judaeis

Which you would know if you had bothered to research.

You seem to have copy+pasted everything you could (btw, religioustolerance.org has terrible fact checking, I'd be wary about using them as any sort of source) but neglected to answer the actual question. When did the Catholic Church sanction murder of Jewish folk wholesale? Give me the exact Papal or Ecumenical document with said sanctions on wholesale murder. It could be a one sentence post.

The ghettoization of Jewish folk is an extremely ugly and terrible thing. But it isn't "wholesale murder" which is what you said that the Catholic Church sanctioned.

What the exact role of the pope during the Nazi atrocities was is not known in depth, though there were some good things he, or the church, did. However, below is a list of less salable items

Wow. Very cherry picked items, at that. First of all Venerable Pope Pius XII was not even the Pope on Kritallnacht ("NOV 1938"). He was still Cardinal Pacelli until March 1939. So right off the bat, I need to ask: "what?"

Here's a bit of Ven. Pope Pius XII's history through WWII, all from wikipedia:

In the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, drafted by Pope Pius XII when he was still a cardinal,[67] Pope Pius XI denounced Nazism and breaches of the Reichskonkordat. Read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches, it has been described as the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organization.[68] Nazi persecution of the Church in Germany then began by "outright repression" and "staged prosecutions of monks for homosexuality, with the maximum of publicity."[133] When Dutch bishops protested against the deportation of Jews, the Nazis responded by deporting Jewish converts, including Edith Stein.[68]

In 1939, the newly elected Pope Pius XII appointed several prominent Jewish scholars to posts at the Vatican after they had been dismissed from Italian universities under Fascist leader Benito Mussolini's racial laws.[170]

Cardinal Secretary of State Luigi Maglione received a request from Chief Rabbi of Palestine Isaac Herzog in the spring of 1940 to intercede on behalf of Lithuanian Jews about to be deported to Germany.[46] Pius called Ribbentrop on 11 March, repeatedly protesting against the treatment of Jews.[140] In his 1939 encyclical Summi Pontificatus, Pius rejected anti-semitism, stating that in the Catholic Church there is "neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision."[172] In 1940, Pius asked members of the clergy, on Vatican letterhead, to do whatever they could on behalf of interned Jews.[173]

In 1942, the Slovakian chargé d'affaires told Pius that Slovakian Jews were being sent to concentration camps.[174] On 11 March 1942, several days before the first transport was due to leave, the chargé d'affaires in Bratislava reported to the Vatican: "I have been assured that this atrocious plan is the handwork of ... Prime Minister (Tuka), who confirmed the plan ... he dared to tell me — he who makes such a show of his Catholicism — that he saw nothing inhuman or un-Christian in it ... the deportation of 80,000 persons to Poland, is equivalent to condemning a great number of them to certain death." The Vatican protested to the Slovak government that it "deplore(s) these... measures which gravely hurt the natural human rights of persons, merely because of their race."[183]

In late 1942, Pius XII advised German and Hungarian bishops to speak out against the massacres on the Eastern Front.[191] In his 1942 Christmas Eve message, he expressed strong concern for "those hundreds of thousands, who ... sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race, are marked down for death or progressive extinction.[192]

n 26 September 1943, following the German occupation of northern Italy, Nazi officials gave Jewish leaders in Rome 36 hours to produce 50 kilograms of gold (or the equivalent) threatening to take 300 hostages. Then Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli recounts in his memoir that he was selected to go to the Vatican and seek help.[195] The Vatican offered to loan 15 kilos, but the offer proved unnecessary when the Jews received an extension.[196] Soon afterward, when deportations from Italy were imminent, 477 Jews were hidden in the Vatican itself and another 4,238 were protected in Roman monasteries and convents.[197] Eighty percent of Roman Jews were saved from deportation.[198]

In March 1944, through the papal nuncio in Budapest, Angelo Rotta, the pope urged the Hungarian government to moderate its treatment of the Jews.[203] The pope ordered Rotta and other papal legates to hide and shelter Jews.[204] These protests, along with others from the King of Sweden, the International Red Cross, the United States, and Britain led to the cessation of deportations on 8 July 1944.[205] Also in 1944, Pius appealed to 13 Latin American governments to accept "emergency passports", although it also took the intervention of the U.S. State Department for those countries to honor the documents.[206] The Kaltenbrunner Report to Hitler, dated 29 November 1944, against the backdrop of the 20 July 1944 Plot to assassinate Hitler, states that the Pope was somehow a conspirator, specifically naming Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII), as being a party in the attempt.[207]

So lets see, he hid Jewish people in the Vatican, arranged for emergency passports for many more, expressly condemned anti-Semitism and genocide on mutliple occasions, ordered clergy to do whatever they could to help Jewish people, and authored the very first condmenation of Nazi Germany by any major institution (at a time when he had many supporters in the US). All this while engulfed by facist Italy at the same time. And it already was a sin for Catholics to "slaughter" anyone, mind, and going against the Church results in automatic excommunication, so um....either you are being rather dishonest or whatever site you copy+pasted that from is being rather dishonest (as if it wasn't already for accusing Pope Pius XII for not speaking out at Kristallnacht, ffs) .

[Anomalocaris]

Her world views is "RCC has already explicitly claimed that it hasn't ever done anything wrong, I can quote RCCs who says much the same thing, therefore the Roman Catholic God".

[Epimethean]

Her world views is "RCC has already explicitly claimed that it hasn't ever done anything wrong, I can quote RCCs who says much the same thing, therefore the Roman Catholic God".

LOL! That is EXACTLY it!

[The Grand Nudger]

Vague accusations? No, Aiza, I've been fairly explicit. The history you have offered and the actual history of the office of the papacy are not equal. One is an article of faith, the other is an account of politics and religion that is grounded in reality. The petrine passage is used as a part of this faith narrative of the pope, but the petrine passage (and indeed the biblical narrative itself) is not history. The church has been and continues to change, and this includes what is or is not dogma. Also, at this point, I think you're trolling.

Is that direct enough for you?

[Angrboda]

@Aiza: Thank you for an enjoyable and lively debate. xie xie.