By @BGinKC
The Catholic Church has clearly knocked huge holes in the wall of separation between church and state, so it is time that they pay the cover to see the band. If they want to meddle in politics and electioneer from the altar, they need to pay taxes.
And if a Bishop wants to make historic analogies, he needs to get the facts and the history right, especially given the current Pope’s actual, good-German Nazi past.
The Anti-Defamation League wants an apology from Peoria’s bishop following a recent homily comparing President Barack Obama’s policies to those of despots Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
During the message at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Jenky contended social services for Catholics could be eliminated if Obama’s directive to include contraceptives in health insurance continues. Jenky went on to compare the actions to past cultural wars against the Catholic Church.
“Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room,” Jenky said.
In comparison, he pointed to Otto von Bismarck’s “culture war against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.”
“Clemenceau, nicknamed ‘the priest eater,’ tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century,” Jenky said. “Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care.”
“In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama, with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path,” he said.
Has he already forgotten the apology Pope John Paul II made for the collaboration of his predecessor, Piux XII with the Nazis?
Individual Catholics behaved in a Christ-like way, hiding Jews in their attics and in general resisting the Nazi regime, but “Holy Mother Church” herself? Ha! Tis to laugh! After some initial resistance to the new Chancellor, they folded like a cheap cassock and fell in line. Hitler took power on January 30, 1933, and it took less than two months for the Bishops to back off and clear the path for a Concordat between the Vatican state in Rome and Hitler’s government. Signatures were affixed in July and the pact with the devil was in place. The Church had decided that it was in their best interest to strike a deal that would save their sorry asses and leave them to go about their business and in ecxhange for being left alone, they turned a blind eye to the attrocities going on all around them.
For the next 12 years, the Catholic church would be in league with the Nazis as they went about committing crimes against humanity and the genocide of six million Jews. (Maybe that was before they were “pro-life”?) Anyway, that’s the real history that the Bishop of Peoria chose to ignore when he decided to stand on the Altar and spew vicious and hateful lies to the assembled congregation.
He is also an ahistoric moron. It was Bismark in the late 1800’s and years leading up to World War I who shut down Catholic institutions in Germany and undermined the connections the German Catholics had with Catholics in neighboring states, and the Weimar Constitution that followed WW I enshrined in law the anti-Catholic sentiment of Bismark.
Fast forward to 1930. The Holy See was represented in Germany by a Cardinal named Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli — the future Pope Pius XII — who was the Vatican’s Secretary of State at the time. He was determined to strike a deal and achieve what he called the “great goal.” He made multiple unsuccessful attempts to obtain an agreement with Germany for a treaty like the eventual Concordat of July 1933, but was rebuffed repeatedly, by first one government and then another. Finally, in 1933, Catholic politicians from the Centre Party who represented the heavily-Catholic regions in the southern region of the country and Bavaria began repeatedly pushing for a concordat with the Holy See, and Hitler agreed. The deal was done and the archives hold the real truth and the real history.
And do you know how I know this, off the top of my head and without teh Google or Wikipedia?
I went to Catholic school in the post-Vatican II era and my History teacher was a brutally honest nun named Sister Herman Joseph.
Now that I think about it, it’s no wonder the current Nazi Pope wants to silence the American Women Religious.
myself back into the “family.” If they’re really interested in welcoming us back, they’ll have to do lots better than reinstituting the inquisition by targeting the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Seems that the Pope thinks they’re inculcating “radical feminism.” But what else should we expect from a Pope who in his Grand Inquisitor days (as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) went after liberation theology – which was sooooo inconvenient to Latin American dictators – and tried to silence priests like Leonardo Boff (suspended) and Tissa Balasuriya (excommunicated) who actually practiced the “preferential option for the poor.”
I felt some satisfaction and was inclined to be gentler with the Church when I read about a few Bishops rebuking Paul Ryan over the cruelties his proposed budget. But, as I said in an earlier post, until the Church, as an institution, make as much or more noise about how the GOP is trashing the preferential option than they do about indirectly funding contraception – especially when all they have to do to satisfy their conscience is just refuse federal funds – all I feel is disgust.
…and it tested my diplomatic skills to decline without offending a colleague.