Posted on 02/19/2005 1:07:04 PM PST by wmichgrad
FRANKFURT, Germany - A German Jewish leader criticized the pope Saturday for making what he called an unacceptable comparison between abortion and the Holocaust in a new book.
Paul Spiegel, the head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the Netzeitung daily that Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II's statements reflect similar "unacceptable" comments made by a Roman Catholic Cardinal in Cologne.
Spiegel was referring to a passage in "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums," where the pope draws a broad comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, saying both came about when people decided to usurp "the law of God."
The book is based on the pope's conversations in 1993 with two close friends from his native Poland.
After noting that a legally elected parliament allowed Hitler's rise to power in Germany, which led to the Holocaust, the pope says: "We have to question the legal regulations that have been decided in the parliaments of present day democracies. The most direct association which comes to mind is the abortion laws ...
"Parliaments which create and promulgate such laws must be aware that they are transgressing their powers and remain in open conflict with the law of God and the law of nature."
Spiegel told the daily that "such statements show that the Roman Catholic Church "has not understood or does not want to understand that there is a tremendous difference between factory-like genocide and what women do to their bodies."
Criticism for the book also came from a Greens parliamentarian, Volker Beck.
"For the pope to draw a comparison between abortion and the Holocaust shows a lack of moral and ethical direction," Beck said in Berlin.
The book is to be published Feb. 23 in Italy by Rizzoli, which also plans an English version.
40+ million in the US alone vs. 6 million....
Hmmmm....
It is a holocaust and if you believe in legal abortions, you're a Nazi
For the Catholic ping list.
What else can you call the abortion epidemic? Babies are being targeted for destruction as a group!
infanticide
Agreed. But let's get back to the subject at hand - abortion. That's when women - or doctors - do something to someone ELSE's body, namely, destroy it.
Abortion is in at least on respect WORSE than the Holocaust: worldwide the number of abortions has to be in the hundreds of millions.
When Cardinal Lawrence Shehan of Baltimore publicly defended the civil rights of African Americans almost thirty years ago, he was expressing a moral truth about the equal dignity before God of all human beings. The same conviction leads his successors and should compel all of you today to defend the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death, to care for and protect the unborn and all those whom others might deem "inconvenient" or "undesirable". That moral principle is not something alien to America, but rather speaks to the very origins of this nation!
-- Pope John Paul II, Baltimore Cathedral, 1995
I hope you were being sarcastic. While I have no problem with the abortion/holocaust comparison, many people who support abortion are merely shallow and do not support abortion out of malice.
EXCELLENT reply.
BRAVO!
So much for "never again". Like the Nazis, simply make the victims non-human and it's okay to kill them.
I wonder if the same could be said of any Nazi era Germans...
The abortion holocaust is precisely a holocaust, even more so than what the Nazis did to Christians and others. The abortion holocaust is a religious sacrifice, the offering of human life to the false god of convenience and pleasure. In some cases its more sinister than that, the deliberate dedication of the aborted child to the devil by the intention of the abortionist who is demonic.
World wide Holocaust! Bravo to the Pope! How saddened God must be to see all His beautiful children being killed!
Not a Catholic, but I think the Pope is right on th money with this one.
So much for "never again". Like the Nazis, simply make the victims non-human and it's okay to kill them.
Exactly.
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