Posted on 03/15/2008 10:17:55 AM PDT by big'ol_freeper
More than once during these talks I referred to Luther and what always occurred to me as his destructive influence. I pointed out that even in such an admirable book as Rohan Butler's “The Roots of National Socialism” the spiritual origins of Nazism and Luther's influence had not been given the necessary importance. Then I was asked if I would be prepared to elaborate to them—about a dozen of the very senior boys, that is—my own views on Luther and Lutheranism. I agreed—with the proviso that they would be my own views and nothing else. Admittedly, I had read more on Luther and about Luther than on most other subjects. But I wanted to make it quite clear that I would not speak to them with the voice of a great authority, but would merely give them my own interpretation. I told them, moreover, that I should try to prove how dangerous it is to accept legends; and that the picture I had of Luther and his influence was thoroughly contradictory of the customary Luther of the legend.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicapologetics.info ...
Cornwell’s book is in serious trouble these days. Ever since Rychlak published Hitler, the War, and the Pope (which included a detailed examination of Cornwell’s claims) and Rabbi Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope came out, the table has been turned. The simple fact - an irrefutable fact too - is that all of the archives being opened, all of the original sources being published, vindicate Pius XII.
Luther’s statements about Jews go far beyond disappointment and were far more insidious than you are stating. Much of what he said about the Jews would be closer to an Islamic Imam in the Middle East than any Christian leader.
This is where it starts getting silly. The theory of Apostolic Succession is discredited by Scripture itself.
Christ was down to one Apostle and some women by Friday afternoon.
And it wasn't Peter.
I'll take my stand on the divine life of the blessed Trinity which lives in my soul.
You can take your stand on a judicial fiction invented by Martin Luther, which directly contradicts Scripture.
Last time I checked, Peter repented and Christ reaffirmed his choice of him in the final chapter of John's Gospel.
ROFLOL!!! Just where did I condemn anyone to Hell? Spin much? What a bunch of twisted bull! WOW! You have given me a lot of power I simply can’t have.
In Daniel Johah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he writes:
“One leading Protestant churchman, Bishop Martin Sasse published a compendium of Martin Luther’s antisemitic vitriol shortly after Kristallnacht’s orgy of anti-Jewish violence. In the foreword to the volume, he applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day: ‘On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.’ The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words ‘of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.’”
Godwin’s Law...
It also rules when discussing Benedict’s membership in the Nazi party as a youth. It applies when we speak of “Hitler’s Pope.”
Beware trying to associate 16th century Christians, who knew nothing of Nazism, with Hitler, when there are plenty of examples of 20th century Christians who were far too comfortable with the actual Hitler himself.
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The flip side to that coin is the centralized hierarchy where flawed theology can become doctrine with one bad leader.
You spit the words “Godwin’s Law” like they are some magical incantation that will make Luther’s role disappear.
Ain’t gonna happen.
Excuse me, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, not the Nazi Party. He joined the HJ because otherwise, they would have forced him to leave Catholic school and go to public school, where he would have been required to say prayers to Hitler (you read that correctly). He went to one HJ meeting.
He also deserted from his post in the army. Desertion was punishable by death.
And 26,000 shiny white suits.
You wrote:
“Cornwell had access to Vatican documents that no man before or since ever had, including Lapide and Yad Vashem.”
Nonsense.
1) Count the mss. that Cornwell actually claims to have examined. The number is puny.
2) Everyone who has wanted it has had access to the same documents.
3) People before Cornwell saw most if not all of the same documents.
4) Cornwell even lied about how many times he VISITED the archives.
In brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule— if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all Christians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe-conduct, or communion with us. . . . With this faithful counsel and warning I wish to cleanse and exonerate my conscience.
-Martin Luther (On the Jews and Their Lies)
Unsurprisingly, you are wrong again:
What, then, did Cornwell find in the "long-buried Vatican files"? The supposedly "new" information Cornwell presents comes from two letters of Pius written in 1918 and 1919— before Hitler even began his political career.
But let's begin at the beginning.
As Cornwell's narrative opens, he is already protesting too much. He tells us he decided to study Pius XII's role in World War II "convinced, as I had always been, of his innocence" because he wanted "to write a new defense of his reputation for a younger generation." In short, Cornwell is presenting himself as an objective observer, taking up this project wishing to defend Pius only to be bowled over by powerful, unexpected evidence which overwhelmed his initial resolve....
"I applied for access to archival material in the Vatican," Cornwell tells us, "reassuring those who had charge of crucial documents that I was on the side of my subject." Ah! — a reader may think — that's how Cornwell got into the Vatican archives, by tricking them into giving him a pass! But here, too, Cornwell is misleading. Today any qualified scholar can obtain access to the Vatican's archives to do scholarly research. None has to pass a test or profess beforehand that they will be "favorable" or "unfavorable" to any pontiff or ecclesiastic — only that they will report accurately what they find.
In May of 1997, Cornwell (like other scholars before and since) was admitted into the Vatican Secret Archives. This is how he describes the experience: "For months on end I ransacked Pacelli's files, which dated back to 1912. in a windowless dungeon beneath the Borgia Tower in Vatican City..." (My God! — an unsuspecting reader might think — What an adventure! Working in a dungeon(!),feverishly rifling through top secret files, just a few feet below the room where the Borgias committed unspeakable crimes! What an intrepid hero of truth!) But the fact is, the archive is not a dungeon, just an underground vault where files are stored. And when Cornwell writes that he "ransacked" Pacelli's files (leading us to believe he was all alone pawing through boxes of secret documents), he omits telling us that an archivist was there to bring him the files he requested.
And when he tells us that the Pacelli files he was "ransacking" went "back to 1912," he omits telling us the archives he was "ransacking" ran forward up until only... 1922. That is, he gives his readers the impression that he "ransacked the files" from 1912 to 1958, the year Pius died, including the crucial years of World War II; but the only files he "ransacked" were those from 1912-1922.
Why is this important? Why does Cornwell carefully omit these points? It seems clear that he does so to conceal the fact that the documents he "ransacked" contain nothing whatsoever about the matters which interest him — Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust.
There are other peculiarities in Cornwell's account of his labors. For example, the length of time he spent in the archives. Cornwell tells us it was "months on end." But a memorandum from Archbishop Re, (the "Sostituto" or Deputy Vatican Secretary of State), obtained by Inside the Vatican, reveals that Cornwell was given a pass to the archives for... three weeks. It would appear, then, that "months on end" is Cromwell's way of describing a few days at the end of May and a few more at the beginning of June. A slight exaggeration.
So Luther is in Heaven?
Walter Buch, the head of the Nazi Party court, admitted Luther’s influence on Nazi Germany:
When Luther turned his attention to the Jews, after he completed his translation of the Bible, he left behind “on the Jews and their Lies” for posterity.
-cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds.
-”Geist und Kampf” (speech), Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
Hans Hinkel, a Nazi who worked in Goebbels’ Reich Chamber of Culture said:
Through his acts and his spiritual attitude he began the fight which we still wage today; with Luther the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.
-cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich
Erich Koch, the Reich Commissioner for Ukraine and President of the East Prussian Protestant Church Synod wrote:
Only we can enter into Luther’s spirit.... Human cults do not set us free from all sin, but faith alone. With us the church shall become a serving member of the state.... There is a deep sense that our celebration is not attended by superficiality, but rather by thanks to a man who saved German cultural values.
-Konigsberg-Hartungsche Zeitung, 20 Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
Bernhard Rust served as Minister of Education in Nazi Germany. He wrote:
Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance.... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp [Schrot und Korn].
-Volkischer Beobachter, 25 Aug. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich]
It is a safe bet though, that none of the Pius XII bashers on here own a single copy of it, let alone three.
That statement shows quite a lack of faith in the promises of Jesus Christ when he established the Church and said he would be with us always and entrusted them with the power to loose and bind and to forgive or not forgive sins. Our faith is in God through his Son Jesus Christ and the promises he made not in a tradition of each man's personal testimony unguided by the Holy Spirit. The heresy started by Luther is a repudiation of the divinity of Christ by the very nature that he would have had to have failed in His promises.
As Shakespeare, another child of that era, would remind us:
Shylock: I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
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