Even with all the error that has crept into that church, it's hard to believe the clergy at the highest levels would be filled with hate for a racial group. They would have to be evil at the core. I just can't believe it to be the case.
I think it goes back to the discarded notion of Apostolic Succession.
If you are "stuck" at home you could do much, much worse than Macarthur.
Great message. He talked about the religious hierarchy in the Temple and the woman who gave the last of her money to the Temple in the hopes that it would buy her blessings and change her circumstances. What was interesting was Jesus did not hold up the woman as an example of Faith, or condemn her for misplaced Faith. Rather Jesus condemned the Temple hierarchy and a religious caste that would treat widows and orphans so terribly.
He then pointed out how indulgences to build cathedrals and empower the religious caste prior to the Reformation were no different. Again widows were giving their last pennies to hope for a blessing. Very powerful I hadn't really though of indulgences with the Temple hierarchy in mind.
Some believe it.
Kertzer has done a staggeringly thorough job of tracing Catholic statements on the Jews, and in using the Vatican archives to show what support was given to the people making these statements. From this he argues that the debate over what Pius XII might have done during the Holocaust is a distraction from a more important question -- what did the Catholic church do to help bring on the Holocaust in the first place? It did a great deal. The anti-Semitic campaign against Alfred Dreyfus, the French military officer convicted of treason in 1894 on forged documents, was largely driven by a fanatical band of Catholics denouncing Dreyfus for his perfidious Jewishness. The Assumptionist Fathers made this a special mission of their daily newspaper, La Croix. Owen Chadwick, the author of the excellent ''History of the Popes: 1830-1914'' (1998), says of this campaign that it ''was the most powerful and extreme journalism ever conducted by an otherworldly religious order during the history of Christendom.'' Pope Leo XIII, though he criticized the paper for other reasons, never objected to this rabid effort. He said in 1899, ''I love La Croix.'' And no wonder. His own official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, had also prejudged Dreyfus's guilt. Later, it defended anti-Semitic mobs resisting a reversal of his rigged conviction: ''The Jewish race, the deicide people, wandering throughout the world, brings with it everywhere the pestiferous breath of treason.'' Kertzer brings the story down to the late 1930's, when Pius XI's attempt at writing an encyclical condemning Nazi anti-Semitism was sabotaged by the superior general of the Jesuits (a Polish aristocrat) and the editor of Civilta Cattolica. For that matter Pius XI himself, who served as a papal diplomat in Poland during World War I, dismissed reports of pogroms there as inventions of Jewish propaganda. He wrote to the Vatican secretary of state: ''One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews.'...""David Kertzer, a professor of history at Brown University, has undertaken the sickening task of compiling a sampler of such material issuing from church-sponsored newspapers. He earlier wrote ''The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,'' which told how Pius IX took a 6-year-old boy away from his Jewish parents because the Inquisition had decided that the boy had been secretly baptized by a Christian servant working in the Mortara household. ''The Popes Against the Jews'' is even more disheartening than ''The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,'' besides being a more formidable scholarly achievement, since it traces, over a stretch of two centuries, the Vatican's endorsement of things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus or the charge that Jews regularly commit ritual murders of Christian children. Pope John Paul II's document on the Holocaust, ''We Remember,'' said that the Catholic church in the past objected to Jews only on theological grounds, not racial ones. Kertzer easily destroys this falsehood. To quote again Oreglia's article, cleared by the Vatican secretariat of state: ''Oh how wrong and deluded are those who think Judaism is just a religion, like Catholicism, Paganism, Protestantism, and not in fact a race, a people, and a nation! . . . For the Jews are not only Jews because of their religion . . . they are Jews also and especially because of their race.'
A used copy of the book is available for only a few dollars on Amazon.