Coptic human rights organization requests Vatican investigation of diocese of Worcester's cancellation of Robert Spencer talk

Dr. Ramelah's comments are superbly written with the greatest clarity and noblest sentiment.

I would add to his concern for human rights for Jews and Christians, the human rights of persecuted Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahai'is, Ahmadis, as well as atheists and agnostics who suffer as much or more under totalitarian Islam.

'To fail to speak a word on behalf of the oppressed is worse than any crime.'

The standard response of the Catholic Church when it is inconvenient for them to oppose the persecution of the helpless is to tut-tut and decide that making a to-do about it would offend the persecutors and end up making things worse for everyone. And so, unless it's a question of subsidies for Catholic schools being endangered, or the Church's tax-free status being questioned, the Church prefers to stay silent.

I will be incredibly gratified when I read on this forum that I was wrong and that the Church is indeed taking action as required. It would be nice if until such time others on this forum would refrain from calling me a troll, liar, or jerk, which I have found to be the usual result of my exposing unpleasant truth.

http://youtu.be/wyLjbMBpGDA

Muslim in Germany threatens attack on the country, Merkel

http://www.firstpost.com/world/islamist-threatens-to-attack-germany-merkel-paper-611286.html

Mali's history goes in flames: Pictures show priceless texts torched by Muslim fighters fleeing French forces at Timbuktu

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2272877/Malis-history-goes-flames-Pictures-priceless-texts-torched-Islamist-fighters-fleeing-French-forces-Timbuktu.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

I'm betting Bishop McManus is regretting his decision not to let Robert speak at the conference, and the longer he stays silent, the worse it's going to get.

Glad to see that letter.

Perhaps the Church is not adequately supporting outspoken persons like Robert Spencer because the Muslim world has millions of Christian hostages, and the Church knows that significant numbers of those hostages are being downtrodden, expropriated, tortured, raped, and murdered daily. It may be the Church has decided to try to act behind the scenes, or in less confrontational ways, by efforts at loving conversion of Muslims to Christianity -- and I gather great numbers of such conversions are happening in the Muslim world, which due to new technologies in recent years can no longer keep out alternative views and criticism, or the preaching of the loving Gospel, for example by the so-called Iranian Billy Graham, who reaches millions of Iranians daily by satellite TV. Robert Spencer, as we know, performs a vital and brave service in being so outspoken and plainspoken. Perhaps Catholic officials prefer lay persons like him do that service -- so the Church, which has a higher profile, can avoid further inflaming Muslims against their Christian hostages, and can focus on the work of quiet conversion.

An interesting observation that speaks volumes to the differences Robert Spencer may point out, is the very different reaction from Catholics to a supposed 'hatemonger' compared to the non-reaction and silence when hate mongering Muslim preachers, such as Anwar al-Awlaki, tour dozens of Mosques and Islamic community centers in the United States. Which Mosque or mainstream Muslim organization in the United States denounced Anwar al-Awlaki when he was spreading hate for Jews, Americans and homosexuals in his sermons to thousands at dozens of different locations? Muslim groups have not
missed a beat mobilizing against Robert Spencer but bury their collective heads in the sand regarding Muslim hate preachers.

Has CAIR - EVER - spoken against Muslim hate preachers at US Mosques?

Why is there such a different reaction between Catholics and Muslims regarding controversy and how Muslim groups ignore hate within their own community compared to their swift mobilization against Robert Spencer?

Indeed, I believe Spencer would chuckle at the sheer hypocrisy on display concerning recent events.

This letter from a human rights group is excellent. Others should follow suit and file a protest too.

But also, ordinary members of the Worcester Catholic community should get involved. So far, we have not seen any of them protesting publicly to their local church and bishop about being deprived of information. Are they children, that they allow themselves to be treated as children? If a number of them intervened and asked for the lecture, surely then the bishop would not lose face in changing his mind again and re-inviting St. Robert.

An appeal could be sent to these people, if their addresses can be obtained.

Dott. Architetto Ashraf Ramelah wrote:

"To make certain that each and every believer becomes aware, properly informed, and conscious of the threat we face, the church must first create a new openness and interest in learning the truth from correct and trustworthy sources -- without expurgation, mitigation, or political correctness. Every single Christian must comprehend the worldview held by the perpetrators of these unspeakable crimes against Christians and Jews around the world -- before it is too late."

Yes, this plea is at the heart of the matter!

What everyone simply MUST understand is that ANYTHING coming out of the "intelligentsia" of the Catholic Church for the last 50 years is coming from a group of people who either are themselves Communist-homosexualist infiltrators, or sodomites who were SPECIFICALLY RECRUITED by the Communist-homosexualist infiltrators.
Ann Barnhardt

Seems to me that it is not only the Catholic church that prefers to have nothing to do with fate confronting millions of Christians (or other people) in the world, but also other denominations do the same. As long as nothing happens to its own church.

That is true cowardice, and hypocrisy, hiding behind the words "love your enemies" etc. Do you love your enemies so much so that you pretend nothing happens when the enemies are killing your fellows?

Jesus and the prophets, all did not hesitate to condemn the crimes done by any body, but the churches prefer to be quiet, or even be friendly with Islam.

It makes me sick!

Hopefully, Pope Benedict XVI will become for the problem of Islam what Pope John Paul II was for the problem of Communism. That is, if he ever gets off his Cathedra and actually gets cracking.

It was a glorious refreshment to read a letter from a church leader who rather than the equivocations and mealy mouth appeasement most clerics seem to adopt these days, speaks an eloquent yet unvarnished truth.

Christianity is in free fall, a slow yet rapidly accelerating descent dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when art, poetry, philosophy and culture reflected not the abstract religiosity of the previous renaissance but rather humanism, emotion, simple activity and of course, nature.

However the real impact of increasing irrelevance has been post war where a militant left wing secularity is more or less dismantling what remnants remain.

In an attempt to shore up its own image the Church has now joined the left, imagining that the innate charity which is the bedrock of the faith somehow meshes with the socialist principles of liberals and democrats.

This mindless conjoining is now extending to the Muslim faith whereby misguided Christians reach out to what they imagine to be fellow believers in the worship of a mystical heavenly force.

Both strands of this movement, the alliance with the secular and the fawning over Islam spell suicide.

An instance of this idiocy is shown as plain as a pikestaff in the antics of our now gone Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

He'll attack our current government's austerity cuts but not the man who gerrymandered the system to create the massive debt which has necessitated these measures.

He'll connive with Muslims to the extent that he proclaims that elements of Shariah are inevitable within Muslim communities and any talk of conflict with our well established legal structure is that of the alarmist.

This is not religion but political correctness and cultural relativity run wild.

Needless to say, the open mutterings of both the great and the not so is that he's been the worst Archbishop in living memory.

Such was the general animosity towards this false moralist is that he's now gone, hived off to some cloistered backwater where he can ramble on about his Christian cloaked marxism to his heart's content.

Of persecution he said nothing, not a peep about Boko Haram or the fate of the Copts. Darfur? Not even on the map. However he was pretty vocal about the poor Palestinians and doesn't that tell us all we need to know?

So as you'll gather, no bold and muscular Crusaders here, merely the wishy washy fantasies of multiculturalists for whom diversity is the new religion and so called outreach its method of delivery.

It is capitulation of the grandest order and the caving under CAIR pressure comes as no huge surprise.

This counter therefore is a breath of fresh air and a blow for honesty, authenticity and a directness sorely missing from the mainstream church.

It may not quite be the universal trend leading to an Avalon of sunlit uplands of truth (far from it) but at least this lonely voice is a start.

Didn't take long to get to this in my mail

http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/video-coptic-christian-woman-stripped-naked-harassed-and-abused-in-cairo-to-force-her-to-convert-to-islam/

The Vatican has no problem with criticizing Israel a country that does not persecute Christians and that rescued many Lebanese christians. What a bunch of hypocritical immoral cowards.

I hope the Pope takes heed and 'reasons' with the with the Worcester Bishops, as only the Pope can do...

The reason for religious difficulty is because it is humans who populate and run them...A young mental patient once told me that 'you humans are all the same, and I'm glad I am not one of you'...
There may be a God of the universe who created everything, but when a religion is founded on it, everything immediately starts corrupting...
This is because religions are about God, but they are not God, and are then subject to entropy and decay...No matter how wonderful a religion is, it will not last forever...What keeps Christianity alive is enshrined in the Supreme Commandment, and the idea that 'God is Love'...Islam has nothing like that, so Allah is the dead god walking...

I'm curious: does the apparent emphasis on "interfaith tolerance" of Islam - a Christ denying belief - by the good 'Christian' Bishop, include recognition of other Christian's being martyred around the world like the copts? What is the motivation of this Bishop? Jeremiah 8:18 declares: See, I will send venomous snakes among you, vipers that cannot be charmed, and they will bite you," declares the LORD. Yes, the "30 pieces of silver" analogy, by the Coptic letter writer, comes through loud and clear for me!

I'm curious: does the apparent emphasis on "interfaith tolerance" of Islam - a Christ denying belief - by the good 'Christian' Bishop, include recognition of other Christian's being martyred around the world like the copts? What is the motivation of this Bishop? Jeremiah 8:18 declares: See, I will send venomous snakes among you, vipers that cannot be charmed, and they will bite you," declares the LORD. Yes, the "30 pieces of silver" analogy, by the Coptic letter writer, comes through loud and clear for me!

My sic ere apologies for the double post!!

Everyone is a supremacist bigot about something...Every religious person on the planet is a religious supremacist bigot...If the other guys religion is better than yours, you should be over there with him...This kind of supremacist bigotry cannot be avoided...so the question is, how do you handle it? Some people handle it very well, and others are ragged around the edges...Mahoundians don't handle it well at all...
The Bishops of Worcester are not handling theirs very well either, and have fall[ng into a form of moral decay...The best thing a man of God can do, is to always tell THEMSELVES the truth, and then DO WHAT IS RIGHT...The Bishops are failing on both accounts...

This letter is excellent. As a Catholic living in the United States I am very disturbed by the attitude of many American bishops in several areas. It bothers me that most will not follow Canon Law and deny the Sacraments to politicians who claim to be Catholic but pursue scandalous positions on abortion and the use of human embryos for research purposes, etc. And the other issue is the one discussed here. They refuse to stand up against Islam for what it really is but instead act as if Islam is just another faith with which to have "ecumenical" discussions. I'm not proposing a new round of "Crusades" (although the original ones which the Islamists routinely vilify as if they were campaigns whose purpose was to destroy Islam when in fact they were only ever to allow Christians access to the holy places in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land) but only desire the Church to treat Islam as the Political/Religious force that it is that allows NO reasonable discussions and only wants to enforce Islamic supremacy on the world. For some reason they seem afraid to do this.

Veritas wrote:

"As for the Holocaust, it was a Christian phenomenon and particularly a Catholic one. Hitler is even on record of stating that he implemented what he had been taught, and he found such fertile ground and support because Catholics in Germany were forever hearing about the perfidity of the Jews."

What Hitler may or may not have said is wholly irrelevant and I refute this assertion in totality. There was nothing Christian or "particularly Catholic" about the Holocaust, and Hitler is historically near-universally considered one of the most evil beings to have ever lived. Please provide your sources for that assetion.

Now, that being said, I do agree that the Vatican will not address, either publicly or privately, this issue and this petition by the "Voice of the Copts".

The Vatican has been conspicuously silent to the plight of all Christians in Muslim-dominated countries, at least in my recent memory.

I was glad to see this letter - though far from the immediate scene.
He makes his statment quite clear with an experience that Catholics in this country couldn't handle - not even a diocese.
Think about this, a see of the Roman Catholic Church has yielded to a provocation by Islam coordinated by a secularist political reporter.
This reporter questioned Robert Spenser academic credentials.
Does she hold any paper on Sacerdotal Theolgy, Canon Law, Ecclesiology. No!
She majored in Literature; then trawled the shallow depths of political low tide.

Robert Spencer provides links on the right-hand side of his website, and one link I enjoy reading is called the "American Thinker" by Bruce Walker ...

And he wrote a couple of essays offering historic information regarding the Holocaust, and they include quotes from Hitler; which prove that this evil man was not a Christian, and far from it.

***And some posters here are claiming that Hitler and the Nazis were Christians, but that claim does NOT make it true. In fact Hitler's own words prove otherwise, so you need to read some of his quotes below***

Ok, the first essay is entitled "The Nazis and Christianity", and the second one's entitled "Christian Opposition to Nazi Anti-Semitism".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Nazis and Christianity:

My recent American Thinker article "The Godless Delusion" generated a substantial volume of email and comment from atheists. Although I have directly responded to some of the people, assertions they have made -- some politely and others rudely -- require a detailed response. I have decided to focus on one particular theme that was most common: Many atheists presume that the Nazis were a weird variation of Christianity.

The sources that I use come from very old books, rather than Wikipedia. I own these books and the books were written during the very years in which Nazism came to power. The authors of these books came from a wide variety of perspectives -- Christian, Jewish, atheist, Marxist and the like.

Christianity had declined severely in Germany at the time the Nazis came to power, which is why the Nazis were able to come to power. In his book, The Dictators, Richard Overy states that in the decades preceding the First World War Germany was becoming increasingly secular, and that after that war, from 1918 to 1931, 2.4 million Evangelical Christians formally renounced their faith as well as almost half a million Catholics. In Prussia, only 21% of the population took communion and in Hamburg only five percent of the population took communion. Before Hitler, German religious leaders were publicly condemning the rise of moral relativism and decline of traditional religious values.

Weimar Germany largely had abandoned Christianity and increasingly was embracing hedonism, Marxism and paganism. There, decline of Christianity in Germany led directly to the rise of Nazism. Professor Henri Lichtenberger in his 1937 book, The Third Reich, describes the religious life of the Weimar Republic as a place in which the large cities were "spiritual cemeteries" with almost no believers at all, except for those who were members of the clergy. The middle class went through the motions, but lacked all living faith. The workers, influenced by socialism, were suspicious of the church. Even in the countryside, preachers had little influence on the people. In the 1938 book, The War Against God, by Sidney Dark and R.S. Essex, describes pre-Nazi antipathy toward Christianity by noting that churches had lost all their vitality and that their services were lifeless. Mower, in his 1938 book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, wrote that by 1920, God and Christianity had been in steady decline, a process that had begun in 1860. Mower talks about a culture not so much casual as vicious about sexuality. He writes of art sickened into atonal music, about the absence of any sense of sin, about entire graduating classes in high school turning up for birth control devices, and about the commonplace occurrence of abortion.

This hostility or indifference toward Christianity in Europe, and especially in Germany, led naturally to a profound anti-Christian sentiment in Nazi Germany. Nazis, more than most Germans, were indifferent or hostile to Christianity. Hitler originally appeared to just ignore Christianity. Dark and Essex write in their 1938 book that Mein Kampf has few passages which in any way refer to religion, none that refer to Hitler's own personal religion, or to the teaching of the Bible, nor any branch of Christian teaching. Jacob Marcus in his 1934 book by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations notes that "Though his parents were both Catholics, Hitler himself has apparently no interest in any organized religion." Marcus also has an entire section in his book about Nazi "anti-Christian anti-Semitism." Rauschning in 1938 wrote:

"The purpose of the National Socialism fight against Christianity is the same: the total destruction of the last and most deep-rooted support of the forces of conservation. The destruction of the spirit of Christianity in Germany is certainly more far-reaching than appears on the surface...Such vestiges of living Christianity as remain are steadily degenerating in the direction of a superficial and unthinking deism" and that ultimate goal as "...the total abolition of Christianity, which is not a mere philosophical fad of the National Socialists but an iron necessity of their system."

Within a year of taking power, Hitler was saying:

"Christianity was incapable of uniting the Germans, and that only an entirely new world-theory was capable of doing so."

Also within a year of the Nazis taking power, The Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion, a conscious modeling of the twenty-five points of the Nazi program, was published in Germany. Thesis XV of that Nazi publication states:

"The Ethic of the German Religion condemns all belief in inherited sin, as well as the Jewish-Christian teaching of a fallen world. Such a teaching is not only non-Germanic and non-German, it is immoral and nonreligious. Whoever preaches this menaces the morality of the people."

In February 1937 Hanns Kerrl, Minister of Religion in the Third Reich, said:

"The question of the divinity of Christ is ridiculous and inessential. A new answer has arisen as to what Christ and Christianity are: Adolph Hitler."

University Nazis in Keil wrote in 1935:

"We Germans are heathens and want no more Jewish religion in our Germany. We no longer believe in the Holy Ghost; we believe in the Holy Blood."

Preaching from the pulpit against Rosenberg's racial theories was forbidden by the Nazis and Law 130 threatened penalties against any priest who preached "against the interest of the state." Göring ordered that the Hitler Gruss (the Hitler salute) was the only religious gesture allowed.

Just as Nazi propaganda made odious caricatures of lecherous Jewish preying on young German maidens, Nazi propaganda made identical caricatures of lecherous priests preying on young German maidens. In August 1935, the bishops of Germany presented at Fulda a pastoral letter warning of the Nazi "campaign of annihilation against Christianity" and a year after that Bishop Bornewasser publicly spoke about the Christian men and women who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their faith. On November 4, 1936, the Nazis ordered the removal of crucifixes from schools in the Oldenburg area on the grounds that these were "symbols of superstition." This order was rescinded only after Nazis were faced with determined local opposition. Then despite rescinding the Nazi prohibition of these "symbols of superstition," in December 1936 Nazi bureaucrats simply removed crucifixes anyway in Munsterland. When Christians replaced them in some schools, they were arrested by the Nazis.

Nordland, a Nazi magazine, called the Sermon on the Mount "the first Bolshevist manifesto." The principle of the National Socialist state, Hitler told an audience in 1937, was "not in Christianity nor in social theory but in the unified people's community," and the same year Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction and he closed all private religious schools two years later.

In 1937 Stephen H. Roberts wrote in his book, The House That Hitler Built, that the hostility between Nazism and churches began as soon as the Nazis came to power, and that it quickly became impossible to be a good Catholic and a good Nazi. Some Nazis were overtly and clearly anti-Christian. Others were simply silent. Hitler, however, did nothing to stop the drumbeat of pagan propaganda within the Nazi Party which included Heinrich Himmler, Baldur von Schirach, Alfred Rosenberg, Dr. Frick and many others, some of whom formally renounced their Christianity. The Confessional groups of Christians --Protestants who had refused to join the "German Christian" movement -- sent Hitler a letter in May 1936 asking whether he intended to "de-Christianize the German people." The response was wholly unsatisfactory, with the Christian clergy believing that Hitler had accepted honors due only to God."

Nazis hated and mocked Christianity. Most particularly, Nazis loathed the ideas that faith, not race, was critical and that Christians had a duty to love all people, including Jews. Christian clergymen were harassed, dismissed, arrested, tortured and murdered for defending these beliefs. It is hard to see how less robust Christian faith would have made the lot of Jews easier in Nazi Germany. It is impossible not to see that, except for brave Christians, the lot of German Jews (some of whom escaped the Holocaust) would have been worse.

Dorothy Thompson wrote on October 17, 1938 that National Socialism, like Communism, was a secular religion and that until that was understood, then nothing about Nazism and Communism made sense. She then noted that both violated the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." Then Thompson states that this is why the most formidable opposition to both these totalitarianism movements came from people of faith; and that while it may be possible to unite Communism or National Socialism with some economic theory or political system or sociology, it is absolutely impossible to harmonize either with the Bible. She observes that those who have thrown their lot with Hitler in Germany were those without serious religious convictions, and that Hitler has found the only opponent he could not terrorize or bribe among the Christians of Germany.

The same year, Professor Micklem at Oxford noted that:

"All political questions are at bottom theological. The clash between National Socialism and the Christian church rests upon the incompatibility of two views of the world, two ‘anthropologies.' In National Socialism there are no ultimate, universal standards. Right is defined as that which accords with the demands of the people's souls.... The Church in Germany is of no mere ephemeral interest. It raises in an acute form an issue which both National Socialism and Bolshevism present to every country. What is to be the foundation of European civilization?"
The same book reveals -- surprise! -- that the pagan anti-Christian Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg's movement "might easily ally itself with the anti-Christianity of Moscow." Of course, it did just that.

Fodor, who personally knew Russian Bolsheviks and followed closely the Bolshevik Revolution as well as the National Socialist revolution and the Fascist regime, noted in his 1940 book that the Nazis surpassed all other totalitarian systems in its persecution of churches, finding even the Soviet Union less hateful toward Christianity than the Nazis, who persecuted not only Christians but Christianity itself. In 1938 Hendrik Willem van Loon stated that Hitler has tried to deprive society of the only foundation on which true civilization and world peace can be grounded, Christianity, and for that van Loon leaves Hitler to the judgment of God. Overy, in his book, The Dictators, observes that Hitler's attitude toward religion and Christianity was identical to that of the Bolsheviks.

The very same year, Erika Mann, in her book School for Barbarians, wrote that the fanatic war of National Socialism against the Church is fought on so large a field that the contest results only in battles won by one side and then the other, but that one thing is clear: "the stake of the war is the souls of the children. Both sides are battling for their future." Mann notes that the three enemies constantly cited by Nazis were Judaism, Freemasonry and Christianity; and that the remedy proposed by the Nazis to solve the enemy of Christianity was to take Christian children, whose parents insisted on teaching them Christian virtues, away from their parents (much like the Bolsheviks would take Christian children away from their parents).

This is similar to what Pierre van Paassen wrote in his 1939 book, Days of Our Lives, who says that Germany is farther on the road to dechristianization than the Soviet Union and that in place of God, Nazis have placed the almighty state which demands everything from man. Also in 1939 Ernest Hambloch wrote that because the Roman Catholic Church had been opposing the Nazis as pagan, the Nazis accused the Vatican of being in league with Communism. The same year Ogg wrote in European Government and Politics that from the Nazi viewpoint Christianity was part of the common value systems which the Nazis most vigorously opposed, that the Nazis specifically objected to values of "a common European origin" and that Nazism opposed reason as a workable guide to social action."

Even the most superficial Christianity was rejected by many Nazi leaders and Nazi organizations. Karl Haushoffer, the mentor of many early Nazi leaders, preached non-Christian beliefs, and Nazi metaphysics included organizations like the Thule Society whose members greatly admired the Japanese Black Dragon Society. The Thule Society practiced occultism, alchemy and Islamic mysticism. Perhaps the best example of absolute repudiation of Christianity, even nominal Christianity contorted into something grotesquely different than any professed Christianity, comes from the mouth of Julius Streicher, a notorious defamer of Jews. He said that "It is only on one or two exceptional points that Christ and Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big a man to be compared with one so petty."

Christ, to Nazis, was a nebbish. Hitler was their Christ. The same book, which was published a few years after HaShoah by a respected Jewish organization trying to understand the nature of Nazi evil notes:

"A Nazi magazine commented on the Golden Rule in 1939: ‘This fundamental law of Christianity completely contradicts our moral conscience, contradicts above all our warrior-like nature peculiar to the soul of our race.' Children were taught to pray to Hitler instead of to God. Grace before meals given to poor children by the Nazi Welfare Committee ended: ‘For this food, my Fuehrer, my thanks I render.' Another official child's prayer ended: ‘My Fuehrer, by Fuehrer, my faith and my light, Heil my Fuehrer.'"

Read it all here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/the_nazis_and_christianity.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Christian Opposition to Nazi Anti-Semitism:

The notion that somehow Christianity was connected with Nazism has its roots in powerful forces. The world is increasingly secular, and when secularists talk of the "dangers" of religions, they really mean the "dangers" of Christianity. Because the Nazis were anti-Semitic, there is a false assumption that Nazi anti-Semitism arose out of the bigotries of Christians. It emphatically did not.

Far from being a totalitarian "danger," Christianity, like Judaism, is a bulwark against totalitarianism. What follows is hidden history - facts once well known, but which have fallen into the memory hole: the unique, Christian opposition to Nazism within Nazi Germany. Katherine Burdekin, in her 1937 dystopian classic, Swastika Night, foresaw that the only indigestible part of a future Nazi empire would be Christians, who would also be utterly despised by the Nazis, denied all rations and considered the lowest form of life.

So what did Christians in Germany do to stop the Nazis? Heinberg wrote in his 1937 book on major European governments that the Pastor's Emergency League, an organization of some 3,000 pastors under the leadership of Pastor Martin Niemoller, furnished strong opposition at the outset to the German Christian Church (a Nazi invention).

Ronald Kain, in his 1939 book, Europe: Versailles to Warsaw, wrote that Nazi treatment of the Jews offended serious Christians, and he also points out the fundamental antagonism between Christianity and Nazism, even within the German military, by noting that the chaplains of the German army in the autumn of 1937 protested to Chancellor Hitler against the Nazi campaign against the Christian churches. They warned him that a future war will find the German nation in the midst of the bitterness brought about by the conflict between Christianity and National Socialism.

Hambloch, also in 1939, wrote that it was not mere chance that an anti-Christian movement in Nazi Germany should have happened alongside anti-Jewish persecution, noting that no contortion of Christianity could allow the persecution of Jews that the Nazis were inflicting, and that the Nazis were not even trying to reconcile their actions with Christianity. The reaction of German Protestant clergy to genuine anti-Semitism, racial hatred of Jews, was to flock to a persecuted anti-Nazi Christian organization.

The opposition of Christians to anti-Semitism within Nazi Germany was direct and emphatic. In a memorandum from the leaders of the Confessing Church at Whitsundie, 1936, they stated:

"When blood, race, nationality and honor are regarded as eternal values, then the first commandment obliges the Christian to refuse this valuation. When the Aryan is glorified, the Word of God teaches that all men are sinful. If the Christian is forced by the Anti-semitism (sic) of the Nazi Weltanschauung to hate the Jew, he is, on the contrary, bidden by the Christian commandment to love his neighbor."

This sort of courage in 1936 was a virtual death sentence for the Christian clergymen who issued the memorandum, but these true Christians accepted martyrdom as a price of their faith. It is important to note that not only were Christians standing directly up to the Nazis, particularly Nazi anti-Semitism, but that only Christians were openly resisting the Nazis. As Mower describes In his 1938 book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, freedom in 1933 vanished in Germany. Resistance to Nazis did not come from universities or science or art or literature or radio or newspapers but only from religiously serious people.

The same year, former Nazi Herman Rauschning wrote:

"From an ethical standpoint there is no Jewish problem. No believing Christian and no humane-minded person can be an anti-Semite. Rosenberg and Ludendorff are right, if in nothing else, in their claim that the New Testament is inseparably connected with the Old, and we Christians with our Jewish heritage."

On the first page of the Introduction of his book, Rauschning warns that this "Third Reich" was a "holocaust" (presciently noting what would happen under Nazi rule.)

When Bishop Niemoller, who had been a famous war hero as a submarine commander in the Great War, publicly spoke out against the Nazis, he was sent to a concentration camp where he spent seven years in solitary confinement. Prominent Catholic and world-famous physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, who could have remained in Germany in relative comfort and prestige, decided when the Nazis came to power in 1933 that he could not live in a Nazi state and moved to Austria. When the Nazis acquired Austria, he moved to Britain. Monsignor Litchtenberg, another prominent Christian opponent of odious Nazi racial policies, actually offered to be transferred in 1942 to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, symbolically placing a yellow Mogen David on his shirt.

Konrad Adenaur, the Christian Democrat Chancellor of postwar Germany, was arrested by the Nazis in 1934 for defying them (he was later released.) Adenaur was put into a concentration camp in 1944 during the Second World War. He had nothing to do with the Holocaust, except as a victim himself. Yet, as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, he asked Israel for the right for Germany to pay reparations for the Holocaust. The offer was accepted and the payments made. This Christian politician, one of the founders of the Christian Democrat Party in Germany, himself the victim of Nazi brutality, tried to make amends for wrongs not his own.

Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was an even more magnificent example of Christianity in German politics under the Nazis. Like Konrad Adenauer, Goerdeler was profoundly anti-Leftist - nearly all good people are profoundly anti-Leftist -- and like Adenauer, Goerdeler was an important "conservative" politician in Germany before and after the Nazis came to power. A devout Christian, like nearly all "conservative" politicians, Goerdeler strongly opposed Nazi anti-Semitism. In Liebzig, he tried to stop the boycott of Jewish businesses. When the Nazis in 1936 ordered the demolition of a monument to Felix Mendelssohn, the great Jewish composer (who converted to Christianity), Goerdeler tried to have it rebuilt. He traveled around the world, warning anyone who listened of the dangers of Nazism and was the person selected by the conspirators to overthrow Hitler in 1944 to be the new Chancellor of Germany. He was arrested, brutally tortured, and finally executed by the Nazis. To the end, as a Christian, he opposed them, even as he had from the beginning.

Claus von Stauffenberg, the German general who almost killed Hitler in late 1944, was a devout Catholic who because of his faith was deeply opposed to the persecution of the Jews and considered that Kristallnacht in 1938 brought great shame upon Germany. Ulrich von Hassell, although he joined the Nazi Party, wrote this in his diary about the same Night of Broken Glass: "I am writing under crushing emotions evoked by the vile persecution of the Jews after the murder of von Rath." Both these men were murdered by the Nazis after the assassination of Hitler failed. Germans and Christians did not sit quietly while Nazis murdered Jews. Those who resisted with their lives, along with those most opposed to the Left (Sinisterist), were those most serious about their Christianity.

Helmuth von Moltke, son and grandson of some of the most famous German military leaders, easily could have become a bigwig in the Nazi Party, if he had chosen to do so. But von Moltke possessed strong Christian convictions and wrote in 1942:

"Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, but that what is happening is sin and they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed naturally - not in the earthly sense, but as Christians."

In the same letter, von Moltke wrote that once he had thought that it was possible to be totally opposed to Nazism without believing in God, but now he declared that to be "wrong, completely wrong," and that only by believing in God could one be an opponent of the Nazis.

Hans Rothfels, in his 1948 book, German Opposition to Hitler, notes that before Moltke was executed by the Nazis for plotting against them, he wrote to his wife "So then all that is left is a single idea, how Christianity can prove a sheet anchor in time of chaos." At his trial, Judge Freisler lectured Moltke "Only in one respect does National Socialism resemble Christianity: we demand the whole man." Moltke wrote after that "I stood before Freisler...as a Christian and nothing else."

Read it all here:http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/christian_opposition_to_nazi_a.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~

DO NOT attempt to rewrite history by claiming that Hitler and the Nazis were Christians. This is patently false, and those promoting these bald-faced lies know this; or at least they should know this.

We need our religious and academic leaders to analyze the long-term effects of polygamy and it's relationship to poverty and violence. It must be openly and frequently condemned. Instead we have TV programs extolling the lifestyle. Its legalization is next on the list for liberals.

You can eliminate religion altogether and just look at monogamy vs. polygamy in a demographic, economic or social studies project and conclude polygamy is the sickest family structure imaginable.

Each extra wife means another man has no wife or family. He must conquer, be eliminated or be a drone. Women are reduced to treachery against fellow wives and thus must be disciplined by husbands to keep the peace. Inbreeding is a mathematic certainty. Tribal isolation is a survival tactic. Wealth is dissipated with each generation unless marriages are consanguineous. Much of this happened here in the US with the FLDS in Eldorado, TX, including genetic abnormalities associated with inbreeding.

"Karl Pov" wrote:

"Champ, you are certainly a Champ at taking up space cutting and pasting nonsensical Christian apologetics. I won't take up so much space. I'll simply invite you and anyone else interested to look up three topics, using Wikipedia, Google, or any other resource:"

This comment better explains why Davegreybeard called Karl a "jerk" on that other thread, as now Karl is demonstrating that side of himself here on this thread. But of course Karl will deny it and then ask that people not call him that. Well, if the shoe fits.

Also, take special note of Karl's comment here:

"nonsensical Christian apologetics"

He is attempting to dismiss the historical facts offered by Bruce Walker from the American Thinker. But what he can't dismiss are Hitler's own words:

Within a year of taking power, Hitler was saying:

"Christianity was incapable of uniting the Germans, and that only an entirely new world-theory was capable of doing so."

And then this revealing quote from Hanns Kerrl:

In February 1937 Hanns Kerrl, Minister of Religion in the Third Reich, said:

"The question of the divinity of Christ is ridiculous and inessential. A new answer has arisen as to what Christ and Christianity are: Adolph Hitler."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Clearly, Hitler and the Nazis were NOT Christians.

Karl your arguements are becoming increasingly repetitive. no- one disputes that Hitler Goebbels and Himmler were brought up as Catholics but what is equally indisputable is that by their early 20s they had fully abandoned their faith...this is historical fact. Hitler certainly never entered a RC church till the end of his life but was very good at trying to keep the Church quiet. A bit like the way he played other countries and his own conservative opposition.
The fact is that any Christian who participated in the Holocaust betrayed themselves their religion and humanity.

I should emphasise that when i used the word Christian I am not referring to those who just happened to be born in the faith.

"Karl Pov" wrote to me:

"You really find cutting and pasting so difficult?"

Again, further proof as to why Davegreybeard stated that Karl was being a "jerk" on that other thread, as he continues to demonstrate it here with his untruthful and patronizing remark.

In my above comment I did not state or even imply that copy/pasting was "so difficult" for me; so clearly he is twisting my words for all to see. I merely offered an explanation as to why I chose to copy/paste in response to him putting me down for doing so.

More to the point ...Karl is lying. This demonstration of Karl twisting what I wrote, and more importantly, his propensity for twisting the truth about the Holocaust, explains why others called him a "liar" on that other thread.

Again, he does not like being called "jerk" and "liar", yet that's all he's offering up. And as to Karl disliking being called a "troll", well, you can decide for yourself whether or not he is.

And I submit a portion of Karl's first comment on this thread ...

Karl Pov wrote:

"It would be nice if until such time others on this forum would refrain from calling me a troll, liar, or jerk, which I have found to be the usual result of my exposing unpleasant truth."

Perhaps now many of you can better understand WHY he has been called these things.

Some times I feel you Pamela and others on Jihad Watch,underestimate the importance of what you do !

Yeh fair comment Karl, According to Hugh Trevor Roper Himmler had a crisis of faith in 1945 over his Teutonic mythology but at no point wanted or expressed a wish to return to the Church .
Goebbels abandoned his religion in his early 20s as expressed in his diary, hitler certainly had left the church by the time he left foe Vienna as told by his only friend who he spent time and shared a flat with in Vienna.
your other point about the non elite Germans is almost unanswerable...i have no doubt there were some as you describe and even possibly some priests who were prepared to "absolve" them but tht was a personal opinion held by them with no Church authority, I would condemn them as loudly as any islamic terrorist. i believe a lot of the concentration guards were in fact Ukranian so can`t comment on their religion.
The fact is and this is the real point i am trying to make is that the holocaust was abominable but certainly was not driven bu RC theology

Further to my last answer any RC Nazi would surely know that any confession means full contrition and penance and certainly would not mean that they could merrily continue on their way.

Thank you Champ for posting all that information. I had no idea Germany had deteriorated so badly in things of the Spirit before the rise of Hitler and the Nazi jackboots. No wonder the forces of darkness were able to take root so thoroughly.
Those same forces are visibly busy today, trying to remove all notions of G-d from everywhere, from mottoes, letterheads, colleges etc Trying to make new gods out of fashionable ideologies.

Additionally ...

When "Karl Pov" was asked--on that other thread--to provide chapter and verse from the Bible which instructs Christians to murder others in the name of Jesus, Karl remained completely silent. No response. No Bible verses. That's because there *are* no passages in the Bible with which Karl Pov could quote.

Lets see if he will provide them now.

Lets see if he will even address this question now.

Better yet, lets see if Karl Pov will humble himself and ADMIT to the fact that no such verses even exist.

Waiting, Karl Pov ...

Excellent stuff from the Voice of the Copts! I hope this brings about some sincere soul searching—or at the very least, as sense of deep embarrassment—in the Catholic authorities.

And again, KP fails to supply a quote that would give substance to his sad and sorry claims.... The obvious explanation for his poor scholarship, would be his poor mind....
He as been shredded, and made to look a fool, and yet he continues to pretend he is still on his feet, instead of on his back, down for the count and awaiting an ambulance..... Sad.

Oh dear you suppose wrong then...I would presume from my earlier posts that you would realise I am somewhat familiar with the war and its participants....It was a rather condescending remark. i am not here to prosyletize or even change your mind but do realise that history has to be backed up by concrete facts.

Karl Pov simplistically thinks that because the Nazis seemed puritanical about decadence, their ascendancy could not have been derived from the decadence itself; nor that they themselves could not have been hypocritical partakers in currents of that decadence. Haven't we seen thousands of examples of Muslims similarly obsessed with puritanical "purity" whilst simultaneously manifesting in myriad ways sexual and moral depravities? And so we know that many of the Nazi leadership were sexually and morally depraved, even while they railed in their propaganda against the "decadence" of the Jews and the Americans, and even as their thuggish Brown Shirts went around browbeating owners and patrons of nightclubs, cabarets, and gay bars, etc.

"Karl Pov" wrote:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Champ, you are getting to be a bit of a bore. I never asserted that there exists "chapter and verse from the Bible which instructs Christians to murder others in the name of Jesus". There isn't any such part of the New Testament (your words cleverly exclude the Lord's various extermination orders in Jewish Scripture). Doesn't exist. I never said it did. I made this abundantly clear in the other thread, but you seem to have a hard time comprehending.

So please, have your triumph that you have now "forced" me to "admit" there is no such order. Would you like to make up any other fantasies which I can "admit" to be false?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Karl Pov's lies are boring. I never claimed that he had such verses. Here's an excerpt of what I wrote above:

"Additionally ...

When "Karl Pov" was asked--on that other thread--to provide chapter and verse from the Bible which instructs Christians to murder others in the name of Jesus, Karl remained completely silent. No response. No Bible verses. That's because there *are* no passages in the Bible with which Karl Pov could quote."

Yes, so Karl has been caught in another lie; and Karl did not simply misunderstand my question, he is actually attempting to twist and deceive--again. No one is falling for them though.

Champ, it may be hard for you to understand, but yes, the song can be found easily on the Web, in dozens if not hundreds of sites. The problem is that few of those sites are authoritative, and such things are sometimes as spurious as the Second Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians, or the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery.

From what I can see, though, it looks authentic, and it does show that the Nazis (not just the Odinist nutjobs) may have been more openly negative toward Christianity than I had supposed. I still believe the majority of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were professing Christians, along with the rest of Europe excepting the officially atheist Soviet Union.

"...the majority of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were professing Christians, along with the rest of Europe excepting the officially atheist Soviet Union.

The designers, organizers, ideologist, in short the key perpetrators of the Holocaust, were atheists who despised Christianity with passion shared by Karl Pov. (Interesting, no?)

The heroes who at terrible risk helped the Jews were for the most devoted Christians. Anyone who doesn’t know it is ignorant of what really transpired in Europe in these terrible times. They need to visit the Jerusalem Yad Vashem museum’s section dedicated to the righteous gentiles and witness how disproportionally many of them were Catholic priests and nuns.

“The officially atheist Sovie Union” was too busy trying to save its own life to participate in the Holocaust, but indirectly contributed to it by entering the infamous pact with Hitler and supplying the Nazi Germany with material help and, until the break of the German Soviet war, refusing port facilities to American convoys. Otherwise, the dear “officially atheistic” soviet union never had problem with wholesale murder and enslaving millions of people for the purpose of creating, “better”, “rational”, “just” and, of course, Christianity-free world. Exactly like the Nazis. Oh yes, eventually the atheistic Soviet Union fought Hitler, but not before Hitler attacked it. And it was a war between rivals pushing the same merchandise with different flavours. Not a conflict between good and evil.
After all it was atheist Lenin who inspired Hitler with the example of absolute terror against his opponents. Lenin’s, (or was it Trotsky?) chillingly cynical advise to his communist cannibals: “We must put an end, once and for all, to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life” fell on fertile ground in the mind of young Hitler. He would use it some years later to prepare the Holocaust.

There is furthermore an underlying irony in this certain regard: the types here who are so certain that German society was "Christian" so much so that the Nazis derived therefrom also must have been "Christian" are likely the same types who, when confronted with indications of a general fanatical sociopathy among broad swaths of Muslims would be quick to exculpate those Muslims on the grounds that they are "not really following Islam" and that perhaps their behaviors only reflect "cultural" phenomena unrelated to Islam.

An insidiously subtle double standard, and logically tortured -- something PC MCs (and Leftists) excel at.

Very interesting comment Karl but if you substitute aetheist for Christian the result would be the same for you as for me. This is however never been the crux of the discussion...which for me if not for you is this... Is there anything in RC theology which could excuse or lead to the holocaust...I firmly believe the answer is no.

Well Karl I am not quite sure what we are arguing about. There is the capacity for evil in everyone of us; The Church just like society as a whole has its bad apples...I don`t deny it but my main gripe with you was the implied statement that the Church was complicit in the holocaust. On that note it is a wild and windy night here in the Highlands of Scotland so a quick whisky or two and so to bed.

Again KP confirms that he is a total and absolute fool and moron.... Your vicious and hate filled smears agains Christians, and your totally discredited efforts to pretend that you are arguing from history instead of ignorance and hatred, are boring. The nazi's were intent on killing what was left of the Christian church, which had already fallen into a very weak state prior to hitler gaining power. Germany had become post christian, while being pre-nazi. Get used to it. The destruction of churches in nazi germany, is well documented, unlike your ignorant and vicious drivel.

You should be ashamed of yourself,but like most ignorant louts, you lack the awareness required to realize just how low and pathetic you are.

On October 16, 1943, SS troops entered the Roman ghetto area and rounded up more than 1,000 Jews, imprisoning them in the very shadow of the Vatican.

On the morning of the roundup, which had been prompted by Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of the organization of the Final Solution from his headquarters in Berlin, the German ambassador in Rome pleaded with the Vatican to issue a public protest.

By this stage of the war, Mussolini had been deposed and rescued by Adolf Hitler to run the puppet regime in the North of Italy. The German authorities in Rome, both diplomats and military commanders, fearing a backlash of the Italian populace, hoped that an immediate and vigorous papal denunciation might stop the SS in their tracks and prevent further arrests. Pacelli refused. In the end, the German diplomats drafted a letter of protest on the Pope's behalf and prevailed on a resident German bishop to sign it for Berlin's benefit. Meanwhile, the deportation of the imprisoned Jews went ahead on October 18.

When U.S. chargé d 'affaires Harold Tittmann visited Pacelli that day, he found the pontiff anxious that the "Communist" Partisans would take advantage of a cycle of papal protest, followed by SS reprisals, followed by a civilian backlash. As a consequence, he was not inclined to lift a finger for the Jewish deportees, who were now traveling in cattle cars to the Austrian border bound for Auschwitz. Church officials reported on the desperate plight of the deportees as they passed slowly through city after city. Still Pacelli refused to intervene.

Pacelli was concerned that a protest by him would benefit only the Communists. His silence on the deportation of Rome's Jews, in other words, was not an act of cowardice or fear of the Germans. He wanted to maintain the Nazi-occupation status quo until such time as the city could be liberated by the Allies. But what of the deported Jews? Five days after the train had set off from the Tiburtina station in Rome, an estimated 1,060 had been gassed at Auschwitz and Birkenau - 149 men and 47 women were detained for slave labor, but only 15 survived the war, and only one of those was a woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who had served as a human guinea pig of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi medical doctor who performed atrocious experiments on human victims. After the liberation, she was found alive in a heap of corpses.

Settimia Spizzichino, the sole Roman Jewish woman survivor from the death camps. Speaking in a BBC interview in 1995 she said. "I came back from Auschwitz on my own. I lost my mother, two sisters and one brother. Pius XII could have warned us about what was going to happen. We might have escaped from Rome and joined the partisans. He played right into the Germans' hands. It all happened right under his nose. But he was an anti-Semitic pope, a pro-German pope. He didn't take a single risk. And when they say the Pope is like Jesus Christ, it is not true. He did not save a single child."