Posted on 03/08/2009 5:04:58 AM PDT by GonzoII
.............so all those abortion supporting Americans are already excommunicated? Why are the priests giving them communion and the bishops letting it go?
Ignorance, fear, hubris, sloth, love of transient things, the same reasons for any sin I suppose.
Was waiting for you to teach us more about automatic excommunication when the church apparently doesn’t believe in it anymore.
The Church teaches against murder, theft, lying and a host of other sins and yet people, including Priests and Bishops continue to sin. Don’t let lack of instruction, poor enforcement or lax observation of Church teaching deceive you into thinking that the real effects of ignoring same are not felt, eventually, when it counts the most.
Not deceived by any of it. Wondering about the church’s duplicitous behavior.
And how many of those who attended mass were refused communion? Who was stricken from the rolls of Church membership? Which Nazis were not given a Catholic funeral if their families asked for it?
By contrast, the Church's condemnations of Communism were clear and unequivocal, for example (from Godman p105,):
"the entire teaching of Communism about human society is incompatible with the true Christ; they say that Communism and Christianity are at odds and irreconcilable: no one can be, at one and the same time, an upright Catholic and a sincere Communist..." --1934.
And voices within the Church were just as unequivocal against Nazism, for example, head of the Fulda, Germany, Bishops Conference, Cardinal Bertram, in 1936 warned (Godman p110):
"In leading positions of the National Socialist Party the spirit of Bolshevism as hatred against Christianity, and especially against the Catholic Church, is so acute that I have repeatedly remonstrated with the government that the publications and illustrations of the official journals of Nazi organizations are worse and more disgusting than they have been Russia. The spirit of the leadership is similar to the sounds of official organs."
But despite such warnings, the Church was not as aggressive against Nazism. My analogy is this: where the Vatican threw Communists out of school, at worst it gave Nazis a rap on the knuckles, and too often simply ignored their bad-boy misbehaviors.
It was even suggested in 1938 that Adolf Hitler himself should be officially excommunicated. But who do you suppose the suggestion came from? It was from formerly one of Hitler's strongest opponents, but soon to become his hapless ally: the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini.
Of course, the Vatican did nothing of the sort in 1938, or any year after.
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