Posted on 01/21/2002 6:28:01 AM PST by VinnyTex
You Mean Hitler Wasn?t A Priest? Dave Shiflett is coauthor of Christianity on Trial . |
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shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity. This news flash comes courtesy of a group of students at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, who have posted papers on a website detailing Hitler's desire to eradicate Christianity. The documents are from the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan and were originally prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, so we can safely assume they are authentic. To be sure, Hitler's antagonism toward Christianity will not be news to everyone. That its central figure hails from a Jewish family did not set well with him, and its teachings of universal love ran contrary to his violent precepts. Yet one could easily get the impression, these days, that Hitler believed himself to be something of an altar boy on a mission for God. The Rutgers project's editor, for example, seems to have been taken a bit by surprise. Julie Seltzer Mandel told the Philadelphia Enquirer that "When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective." The Nazis, she says, "wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity." That film was altered after protests by, among others, conservative Jewish writers. But the same message crops up elsewhere. Soon after the September 11 attacks, a spokeswoman for the Freedom From Religion organization pronounced Hitler a Catholic. In 1999, Maureen Dowd included Hitler as yet another Christian zealot. According to Dowd, "History teaches that when religion is injected into politics ? the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo ? disaster follows." Hitler was indeed a baptized Catholic, but his rejection of the faith was profound. "My pedagogy is strict," he once explained. "I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication." That domestication, of course, was in large part due to the influence of Christianity. Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." That promise was to come true in a frightful number of cases. Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes ? about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps. None of which is to suggest that Christians were uniformly opposed to Hitler, or that some did not actually embrace the Reich. The lesson from Rutgers, however, is that Hitler was no altar boy, acting on behalf of the Christian faith. Indeed, his hope was to be its undertaker ? which was another of his profound miscalcul |
There is no comparison between an Elizabethan excommunication and what should/shouldn't have happened in the case of Hitler.
The position of the Catholic Church in England was very much an open issue at the time. Queen Mary was an avid Catholic, and there were Catholic kings and queens following Elizabeth. The excommunication of Elizabeth was thus a political act, but it was also something more than political.
A primary feature of the Church of England is that it is established: IOW, the King/Queen have the right and responsibility of appointing bishops. Thus the Catholic church also had a canonical interest in the matter which wasn't finally resolved for decades after Elizabeth's death.
None of that applies to Hitler.
I have a reason for wanting to know about nuns involved in abortion providing as a nun who does a lot of social justice work in these parts indicated, by a verbal slip, what I took as support for abortion.
I was chiding her on the extreme amount of pandering to the young unmarried women with babies. We constantly have giving trees at our church and they get enough stuff to have five kids. This sounds uncharitable, I know, but how about some hand me downs? I object only that it seems an undignified celebration of illegitimate birth and no stigma attaches. Stigma has an important place, or had. She said: "for those we work with who choose to have their babies," or some such statement which was ambiguous at the least. V's wife.
The fact that Hitler, baptized a Roman Catholic, (and marrying Eva von Braun in a Roman Catholic ceremony right before death? I'm not certain that is true...) wasn't ever formally excommunicated really does bother me... The latae sententiae argument notwithstanding, it seems a cop-out. I mean by definition every heretic of any kind has a self-made latae sententiae excommunication BEFORE formal public excommunication, by default...excommunication is as much for the sake of the Body as it is for the person who is thrown out. The biblical pattern of I Corinthians shows excommunication's purpose is to purge the Church and hopefully to bring the excommunicant into repentance... Latae sententiae excommunication does neither of those two things. For example, I'm sure there are many uninformed (or ill-informed) Roman Catholics, otherwise faithful, who are influenced by the pro-choice Catholic arguments... however if they knew these were no longer Catholic, they would not be so influenced. Similarly there probably are even believing otherwise faithful Catholics who, due to liberal brain washing, are "pro-choice," who, given a choice between formal, public, excommunication and promoting abortion would choose to abandon their pro abort ways... So why is the Church silent?
The Hitler issue was recently brought up by an intelligent friend recently (not a Catholic basher), and it does strike me as bizarre...
That's PRECISELY what it was. These are some savvy chicks, make no mistake about it. There are certain linese they can't APPEAR to cross.
Have you ever read "Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism"? I can't recommend it highly enough. All of these groups are related, like some sticky spider's web. The book is an excellent catalogue of major players as well as an insight to their tactics and belief systems.
They are definitely pro-aborts but far more clever and insidious than the NOW types. They're working the "inside" as it were.
That's nonsense, only those who consider themselves to be "in communion" with the Church at large and the Holy See in particular can be excommunicated.
No. Dead people are beyond the authority of the Visible Church. It would make no sense to excommunicate them.
Also as to only excommunicating "practicing Catholics," haven't a LOT of people been excommunicated in the past who didn't claim to be under the authority of Rome?
Martin Luther and Calvin were definitely one-time Catholics. The case with Elizabeth I is murky, but arguable, since she received Trinitarian baptism, probably by immersion, by the Bishop of London who was certainly validly ordained. (Not that ordination is necessary to confer Christian baptism, but it tends to stengthen the agument that Elizabeth was a Catholic at some point in her life, and almost certainly received the Sacrament.
The fact that Hitler, baptized a Roman Catholic, (and marrying Eva von Braun in a Roman Catholic ceremony right before death? I'm not certain that is true...)
I have never heard that Hitler's marriage to Eva Braun was religious, and inthe absence of good evidence, would not be inclined to believe it.
... wasn't ever formally excommunicated really does bother me... The latae sententiae argument notwithstanding, it seems a cop-out.
You are entitled to this opinion. If the Church somehow erred in not proceeding with the fruitless and extraordinarily provocative act of a public excommunication (and I doubt that not to do so was an error), it was merely a political error, at a time of terrible danger, when the fruits of such a vain gesture would have been vastly outweighed by mortal risks needlessly imposed upon millions of Catholics.
LOL; it's a good joke, but the name Sixtus actually has little to do with the Roman habit of naming successive children after ordinal numbers (Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, for example). "Sixtus" (spelled with an "i", not "e", N.B.) is the Latinized spelling of a name that was originally rendered "Xystus", itself a slightly corrupted spelling of the Greek nickname Xystos, meaning "shaved." The fact that Xystus/Sixtus was the sixth successor of St. Peter probably contributed to the popular adoption of the Romanised spelling.
The fact is there has ALWAYS been a tension in the Church between those who wanted more temporal power and those who wanted a more purely spiritual role. Unfortunately, those attracted to the bureaucracy of the Church have often been of the latter.
yes, the Lateran Treaty is no big secret. What is wrong with having one's own state? Hell, I would let the Mormons have Utah if they truly wanted it.
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