On another thread a long time ago, a radical defender of Catholicism hinted that executing heretics wasn't such a bad idea. Whereas I, as an Evangelical Protestant, would NEVER suggest or dream of killing or persecuting Catholics -- Catholics such as my mother and all her family, and most of my wife's family.
I find this phenomenon so disturbing that I will repost, here, my comments from several months ago:
Until VERY recently, I had no problem with Catholics. I have Catholic ancestors (Irish) who were persecuted by Protestants as well as Protestant ancestors (Huguenot, Scotch-Irish) who were persecuted by Catholics. I ended up in the Evangelical camp because I read the Bible myself and found numerous variances between Scripture and present Catholic practice, but I respected the Catholic church for their moral stands. For instance, the Catholics were the first ones to raise a ruckus about abortion, before the Evangelicals realized what was going on -- and Catholics deserve credit for this.
I certainly never feared Catholics -- my mom's side of the family is Irish, after all. How could I be afraid of my own mother and cousins? And so I never understood the howling anti-Catholic paranoia and conspiracy theories that one sometimes encounters in the more hardcore segments of Evangelicalism.
In fact, I assumed that both Catholics and Protestants (everywhere but Ulster, at least), have finally figured out that peaceful persuasion and Christian tolerance ("Do unto others...", "Romans 14", etc) is the correct Christian way to handle doctrinal differences -- provided that public morality is upheld, of course. William Penn's noble experiment in religious tolerance, and the First Amendment forbidding a state church, seemed to have worked. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the America he observed was such a great place, in large part because although Americans differed on our opinions regarding our duties to God himself, we were unified in our opinions regarding our duties to our fellow man. To put it another way, we had a strong Christian public morality that all denoniminations agreed on, and we handled our theological differences by peaceful discussion and persuasion instead of launching "jihads' against heretics as was the case back in Old Europe.
De Tocqueville, a Catholic, thought this was laudable and so do I. In fact, I thought that EVERY Christian, by this point in history, understood that this a better way, and I was perfectly content to work for a shared public morality with people with whom I respectfully disagreed. But in the last year, here at FreeRepublic I have heard Catholics justify or excuse some of the horrible persecutions of the past. Someone actually quoted Aquinas' justification of killing heretics a few months ago. Although he backed off from saying that HE would personally burn me, once gets the feeling that he'd prefer to. It's absolutely chilling. All of the sudden, the wild paranoia of militant, persecutory, conspiratorial, inquisitional Catholicism, that I used to recoil at, now seems to have a grain of truth. I'll never look at Catholicism so trustingly again.
Praise God for the Second Amendment.
It's a shame that this thread, in which all the posters seem to be Christian and fans of the Pope, became a replay of the reformation. John Paul II transcended all of that, and inspired protestants and jews with his love of humanity. There will always be those who try to divide us because this doctrine or that is not to their liking. We have to always rise above that, while staying true to our own beliefs. Cunningham is just staying true to his beliefs, but his aggressive certitude on an issue that is anything but certain (just ask a married pastor such as yourself if he thinks he's violating Jesus' teaching by not being celibate) is not helpful to having a dialogue.