Sen. John McCain / Rev. John Hagee
Posted on 03/01/2008 6:21:35 AM PST by NYer
.- The endorsement of Senator John McCain by a Catholic-bashing Texas minister won swift rebuke from the president of the Catholic League and a Jewish leader concerned about his “vicious and inflammatory” anti-Catholicism.
Both compared the minister to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
On Wednesday Pastor John Hagee endorsed Senator John McCain’s bid to become the Republican presidential candidate in the 2008 election.
Senator McCain responded to the endorsement by calling Hagee “the staunchest leader of our Christian evangelical movement,” praising Hagee’s pro-Israel stance.
President of the Catholic League Bill Donohue harshly criticized the endorsement.
“There are plenty of staunch evangelical leaders who are pro-Israel, but are not anti-Catholic. John Hagee is not one of them,” Donohue said on Thursday. “Indeed, for the past few decades, he has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church. For example, he likes calling it ‘The Great Whore,’ an ‘apostate church,’ the ‘anti-Christ,’ and a ‘false cult system’.”
Donohue said that in Pastor Hagee’s latest book the minister claimed Hitler was a Catholic who murdered Jews while the Catholic Church did nothing. “The sell-out of Catholicism to Hitler began not with the people but with the Vatican itself,” wrote Hagee, according to Bill Donohue.
Donohue criticized the remarks, saying, “For the record, Hitler persecuted the Catholic Church and was automatically excommunicated in 1931—two years before he assumed power—when he acted as best man at Joseph Goebbel’s Protestant wedding. Hitler even bragged about his separation from the Church. As for doing nothing about the Holocaust, Sir Martin Gilbert reminds us that Goebbel denounced Pope Pius XII for his 1942 Christmas message criticizing the Nazis (the New York Times lauded the pope for doing so in an editorial for two years in a row). Much to Hagee’s chagrin, Gilbert also says that Pius XII saved three quarters of the Jews in Rome, and that more Jews were saved proportionately in Catholic countries than Protestant countries.”
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, echoed Donohue’s criticisms. In a Friday statement, Rabbi Kula said, “Just as Jews and other people of good will have appropriately demanded that Barack Obama unambiguously renounce and reject the endorsement of Minister Louis Farrakhan because of his bigotry and rabid anti-Semitism so Jews and other people of good will should demand that John McCain renounce and reject the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee because of his vicious and inflammatory anti-Catholicism.”
Rabbi Kula said Pastor Hagee’s position on Israel “does not mean he should be given carte blanche to denigrate and malign another religion.” He continued, saying, “Barack Obama showed his integrity when he rejected Minister Farrakhan’s hate whatever the political costs and sensitivities. John McCain is also a man of integrity. He needs to similarly reject Pastor Hagee’s hate whatever the political calculations and consequences.”
In a Friday statement Bill Donohue said Senator McCain’s opponent for the nomination, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, had expressed “disappointment and surprise” that Hagee had not chosen him. Donohue also compared Hagee to Louis Farrakhan, wondering why the candidates were fighting over the endorsement of such a figure.
Donohue also called on McCain to shun Hagee’s endorsement.
“Just this week, McCain repudiated the remarks of talk radio host Bill Cunningham,” Donohue said. “He should now repudiate Hagee’s long record of bashing Catholicism. After all, George W. Bush apologized for speaking at Bob Jones University, and Hagee makes Jones look like a lightweight in the ring of bigotry."
Hitler considered Christianity a belief for weaklings.
You are wrong about Hitler...he was baptized a catholic but rejected chrisitianity.
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/11/01/was-hitler-a-christian/2
Was Hitler a Christian?
Posted Nov 1st 2007 10:10PM by Dinesh D’Souza
Filed under: Christianity, History, Controversy, Atheism
Embarrassed at the murderous legacy of atheist Communist regimes in the twentieth century, leading atheists seek to even the score with believers by portraying Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime as theist and specifically Christian. Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great depicts Hitler as a pagan polytheist-not exactly a conventional theist but still a theist. Atheist websites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, he never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and he wrote in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Atheist writer Sam Harris writes that “the Holocaust marked the culmination of...two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews” and therefore “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.”
How persuasive are these claims? My New York Times bestseller What’s So Great About Christianity has the full story and the requisite citations but here’s the condensed version. Hitler was born Catholic just as Stalin was born into the Russian Orthodox Church and Mao was raised as a Buddhist. These facts prove nothing as many people reject their religious upbringing, as these three men did. From an early age, historian Allan Bullock writes, Hitler “had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarding it as a religion fit only for slaves and detesting its ethics.”
How then do we account for Hitler’s claim that in carrying out his anti-Semitic program he was an instrument of divine providence? During his ascent to power, Hitler needed the support of the German people-both the Bavarian Catholics and the Prussian Lutherans-and to secure this he occasionally used rhetoric such as “I am doing the Lord’s work.” To claim that this rhetoric makes Hitler a Christian is to confuse political opportunism with personal conviction. Hitler himself says in Mein Kampf that his public statements should be understood as propaganda that bears no relation to the truth but is designed to sway the masses.
The Nazi idea of an Aryan Christ who uses the sword to cleanse the earth of the Jews-what historians call “Aryan Christianity”-was obviously a radical departure from the traditional Christian understanding and was condemned as such by Pope Pius XI at the time. Moreover, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not religious, it was racial. Jews were targeted not because of their religion-indeed many German Jews were completely secular in their way of life-but because of their racial identity. This was an ethnic and not a religious designation. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was secular.
Hitler’s Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer’s private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great “scourges” of history, and said of the Germans, “Let’s be the only people who are immunized against this disease.” He promised that “through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity.” In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.
Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler’s leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany.
Recognizing the absurdity of equating Nazism with Christianity, Christopher Hitchens seeks to push Hitler into the religious camp by portraying his ideology as a “quasi-pagan phenomenon.” Hitler may have been a polytheist who worshipped the pagan gods, Hitchens suggests, but polytheism is still theism. This argument fails to distinguish between ancient paganism and modern paganism. It’s true that Hitler and the Nazis drew heavily on ancient archetypes-mainly Nordic and Teutonic legends-to give their vision a mystical aura. But this was secular mysticism, not religious mysticism.
The ancient Germanic peoples truly believed in the pagan gods. Hitler and the Nazis, however, relied on ancient myths in the modern form given to them by Nietzsche and Wagner. For Nietzsche and Wagner, there was no question of the ancient myths being true. Wagner no more believed in the Norse god Wotan than Nietzsche believed in Apollo. For Hitler and the Nazis, the ancient myths were valuable because they could give depth and significance to a secular racial conception of the world.
In his multi-volume history of the Third Reich, historian Richard Evans writes that “the Nazis regarded the churches as the strongest and toughest reservoirs of ideological opposition to the principles they believed in.” Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, they launched a ruthless drive to subdue and weaken the Christian churches in Germany . Evans points out that after 1937 the policies of Hitler’s government became increasingly anti-religious.
The Nazis stopped celebrating Christmas, and the Hitler Youth recited a prayer thanking the Fuhrer rather than God for their blessings. Clergy regarded as “troublemakers” were ordered not to preach, hundreds of them were imprisoned, and many were simply murdered. Churches were under constant Gestapo surveillance. The Nazis closed religious schools, forced Christian organizations to disband, dismissed civil servants who were practicing Christians, confiscated church property, and censored religious newspapers. Poor Sam Harris cannot explain how an ideology that Hitler and his associates perceived as a repudiation of Christianity can be portrayed as a “culmination” of Christianity.
If Nazism represented the culmination of anything, it was that of the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century ideology of social Darwinism. Read historian Richard Weikart’s revealing study, From Darwin to Hitler. As Weikart documents, both Hitler and Himmler were admirers of Darwin and often spoke of their role as enacting a “law of nature” that guaranteed the “elimination of the unfit.” Weikart argues that Hitler himself “drew upon a bountiful fund of social Darwinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy” and concludes that while Darwinism is not a “sufficient” intellectual explanation for Nazism, it is a “necessary” one. Without Darwinism, quite possibly there would not have been Nazism.
The Nazis also drew on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, adapting his atheist philosophy to their crude purposes. Nietzsche’s vision of the ubermensch and his elevation of a new ethic “beyond good and evil” were avidly embraced by Nazi propagandists. Nietzsche’s “will to power” almost became a Nazi recruitment slogan. I am not for a moment suggesting that Darwin or Nietzsche would have approved of Hitler’s ideas. But Hitler and his henchmen approved of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas. Harris simply ignores the evidence of the Nazis’ sympathies for Darwin , Nietzsche, and atheism. So what sense can we make of his claim that the leading Nazis were “knowingly or unknowingly” agents of religion? Clearly, it is nonsense.
So in addition to the mountain of corpses that the God-hating regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pot Pot and others have produced, we must add the body count of the God-hating Nazi regime. The Nazis, like the Communists, deliberately targeted the churches and the believers because they wanted to create a new man and a new utopia freed from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality. In an earlier blog, I asked what is atheism’s contribution to civilization? One answer to that question: Genocide.
Check the beam in your own eye.
“Donohue is in violation of the provisions of the Treaty of Westphalia “
WTF? Bill is in violation of an agreement made in 1648? Which part? I’m sure it is germane to our presidential election in 2008./s
Just exactly when did these ill-tempered teenagers take over our political process?
No, Donahue is doing a fine job. Many non Catholics for some strange reason think Catholics should sit down and shut up whenever Catholics are slandered.
So are all the Jews that vote Democrat pagans then?
Yes !shalom b'SHEM Yah'shuaThey are not followers of YHvH.
The Bible was banned from schools during Hitler’s reign and replaced by Mein Kampf. His top leaders: Goebbels, Himmler, Goerhing, etc. were all atheists. Hitler disbanded Christian organizations and persecuted some christian faiths (notably Jehovah’s Witnesses). He said Nazism and national socialism cannot exist.
I cannot stand arguing with atheists online. They are so full of anger, piss and vinegar they cannot see straight.
I can't stand Donohue, but this statement is just patently false. You should really go to the Catholic Leauge site and see what they speak out about: 90% of the time they are denouncing something Democrats report. And, b/t/w, I can't stand the Catholic League either, so I'm not shilling for them.
Those figures that say 55% of Catholics voted Democrat in the last two presidential elections do not take into a account all those people who call themselves "Catholic" when they haven't been in a Church in years. There are tons of these folks - born Catholic, fallen away, and harming practicing Catholics (and skewing voter statistics) by describing themselves as Catholic for demographic purposes.
The fact is that 87% of people who go to services weekly(Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish) voted Republican in 2004.
The guy is bad news and McIdiot should know better than associate with him.
If you agree on politics then what does it matter.
Would you say the same thing if we were talking about the head of the Mafia?
As long as you stay free to defend your faith,...
Thank you, but just because I am free to defend my faith does not mean that I wish to strengthen those who attack it.
... as long as Hagee’s beliefs are not imposed on you by law, what does it matter?
That same argument was used by pro-homosexual advocates back in the 80's. Twenty years later we have politicians pushing for same sex unions.
I vote for Catholics all the time and I’m not Catholic.
That's very big of you. I'm usually not aware of whether or not a candidate is Catholic. It wouldn't matter to me anyway. There are way too many CINO's (Catholics in name only) out there, like Kennedy and Polisi.
The guy is a pastor. He will be vocal about his beliefs.
His beliefs have a bit too much in common with the KKK for my tastes.
Besides, John Hagee is 'The Great Whore'. He runs an 'apostate church', and has proven himself to be the 'anti-Christ' while leading his followers into a 'false cult system'.
LOL How was that for being "vocal about beliefs"?
See my post above for the demographic problems with this statistic. “Catholics” who were born Catholic but haven’t set foot in a Church since Confirmation will still call themselves “Catholic” when asked their religious affiliation, thus skewing the statistics for actual, practicing Catholics. I think the only accurate statistic for Catholic voting practices is if the pollster controls for churchgoing v. non-churchgoing.
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No. Donohue has every right to speak out about this issue.
This Catholic agrees with you, Ghost. Hope all is well. :-)
At the same time Donohoe is speaking against the theological positions of Hagee ~ and that's really not the same thing as speaking against public policy advocated by a political party.
Let's hear him take on Obamasama's preacher's strange theology first!
I'm not asking you to like Hagee or to not refute him if you want to. What I am against is this demand that politicians must repudiate a supporter's theology. That is very anti-First Amendment. Though McCain being otherwise anti-First Amendment, I suppose you have a sypathetic ear. Just be willing ready to see a close examination of the theology of all his Catholic supporters as well. Fair is fair. Let's all play by the same rules here.
I have relatives like that. Fortunately, they are still practicing Conservatives.
I think the only accurate statistic for Catholic voting practices is if the pollster controls for churchgoing v. non-churchgoing.
You'll have to be more specific in those two categories. Bear in mind, our church attendance triples on Christmas and Easter. The ChrEasters no doubt consider themselves to be "churchgoing".
Yeah? Go take a Flying Fandango.
That's a theological position anyway ~ BTW, your Pope considers me totally outside the pale of Christian orthodoxy anyway, so there!
Not if you think it is the role of a politician to go around denouncing and repudiating other people’s theology. Your Donahue must live by the same standards. If someone feels offended by him, he must be repudiated. Your rules, not mine. You can’t have it both ways.
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