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 |
And do you know what ELSE is like beating a dead horse? Trying to teach anti-Catholic smear artists like Viva and faith_j the truth about the Catholic Church. They don't know because they don't want to know. Why would they want to interrupt a really good hate?
Your second paragraph of article 8, which we just 'have to' read, doesn't say what you imply. Sorry about that 'facts' thing backfiring on you.
Be sure to ping me to your anti-anglican rant.
Hitler found quite fertile ground for his anti-Semitic poison in the majority Lutheran culture that was early 20th Century Germany.
If I start believing hearsay, they take away my lawyer card. Please cite which laws you want me to prove no longer exist. And also, please post examples of the language of these banned circulars. They could be anything from kindhearted goodwill to Jack Chick slanders. It would make a difference.
Lol ... aw, that was almost too easy.
I wonder if she's in favor of "faith-based" partnerships and US "Holy Wars" and our President's use of Scripture (from his "favorite philosopher") to found his decision to use already been killed human lives for federally funded research?
I'm not up on the current movement to petition the Church to make a pro-abort stand (as taken by a public politician) grounds for excommunication so I can't really speak to the arguments they're using.
I do know that such a movement would unfair preclude the "religious" -- such as the radical nuns behind "Network" -- from being excommunicated as they are careful always to avoid the subject of abortion as they seek to influence the political views of ignorant faithful by selectively quoting from legitimate Catholic teaching.
My guess is that such partaking of the sacraments -- if truly in error due to the malformed conscience or ignorance of the Catholic -- is a case of "invincible ignorance". Where the Catholic is purposefully disobeying his conscience and the teaching of the Church both with respect to abortion AND the partaking of sacraments while under a cloud of grave or mortal sin ... I think the act could be described as "unlawful".
This is how a Mass would be treated if the priest took liberties with the liturgy clearly outside the precepts of the sacrifice. The Mass is still valid but is has been celebrated "unlawfully".
I suppose by this reasoning, one leaves room for the operation of the sacrament (affording the necessary graces by which a Catholic in error might right himself) but under a cloud of illicitness that attaches only to the Catholic himself, not the sacrament.
I'll bet one of the other more well-catechized Catholics might know better than I. So, I'm pinging Eastsider, Romulus and Campion for starters.
(Can you imagine the look on her face when she comes before the throne?)
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