And how did the British people, millions of whom followed the papal events on the BBC’s live feed on the internet and on television, react to the pope? “They listened,” said Fr. Hugh Allan, the superior of a community of priests, called Norbertine canons, in Chelmsford, Essex, who attended some of the events.
“They really wanted to hear him, and that is going to make the difference. I’ve heard it from so many people.”
On the phone today, Fr. Allan confirmed that the anti-pope crowd have badly lost the argument, and the sympathy of the British public with their months of shrill, fever-pitch attacks. The British people, he said, wanted to hear what the pope had to say.
“One of the most beautiful things has been to see an eighty-three year old man completely taking the wind out of the sails of the Peter Tatchells and the rest of the crowd,” Fr. Allan said.
The pope’s addresses, delivered barely above a whisper, made his detractors look “ridiculous, like children throwing their toys out of the pram because they couldn’t have their own way.” And today the pope’s opponents are left with little to say. “They’re nonplussed and confused” Fr. Allan said, “astonished.” “They didn’t expect people to respond as they have done.”
One of the biggest toy throwing fits was the atheist's pique at having atheism linked to Nazism by Pope Benedict. Yet the Pope grew up with Nazism in his country. He was there. He would know their underlying belief systems. While as Dawkins and his ilk have just read about them, yet apparently they know better.
Related links: We Told You So: Britain Gobsmacked by Pope Benedict ~ LifeSite News
Yes, the visit was a success, but some muslims were very unhappy.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if the latter lot swept any streets though.
So, if I understand this correctly, the Pope got up on his hind legs and linked atheism to the Nazis in a speech, but the clown writing this piece for LifeSite wants to talk about the Pope's opponents engaging in "shrill, fever-pitch attacks" and looking "ridiculous, like children throwing their toys out of the pram because they couldn’t have their own way." That's really rich.
ReplyDeleteAlso no surprise that the News of the World, favourite read of England's stupidest right-wingers (and believe me, it's a hard-fought field), was the most sychophantic publicist for the visit.
Psycho,
ReplyDeleteYou must have missed all the atheist protests where they held up signs, blew whistles, gave interviews to anyone who would listen as to how evil the pope was and tried to get the police to arrest him at one of his events ... You weren't there. Neither was I, but I have been keeping track. You just like to believe the atheists acted decently.
Meanwhile,
saying "Pope got up on his hind legs", making him out to be some sort of animal or demon, is extremely offensive. This is a warning as any other comments of that nature will be deleted.
"...got up on his hind legs and said..." is just a figure of speech indicating offence taken at what was said. It's not heard that often these days, and I can't now remember whether I heard it originally from English or NZ speakers, but it's certainly not meant to suggest the speaker is some kind of animal or demon. I've gotten up on my hind legs and offended people myself on occasion.
ReplyDeleteI watched that Dawkins rant PM - it was linked all over by the usual suspects.
ReplyDeleteBoy was he shrill. Truth is Mr Dawkins was going to parse every word spoken by the Pope in order to find some (imagined) offense upon which to base his diatribe.
But at the end of the day 80,000 odd went to the Papal Mass in Edinburgh and nothing like that number - even with the benefit of Youtube ever heard Richard Dawkins' rant.
Well then, I will reiterate what I said in the post:
ReplyDeleteYet the Pope grew up with Nazism in his country. He was there. He would know their underlying belief systems. While as Dawkins and his ilk have just read about them, yet apparently they know better.
Your offence at the Holy Father's words have no basis. He grew up in Nazi Germany - you did not.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteAll comments containing outright lies will be deleted.
ReplyDeleteLucia, your blog, your rules, but since you have insinuated I lied (buy deleting my post), how about pointing out what was a lie?
ReplyDeleteDo you deny that the young Ratzinger was in the German military? It is a verifiable fact.
Do you deny that Pope Pius XII turned a blind eye to nazi crimes? My words were an almost direct quote from Tony Judt, one of the world's foremost historians, from "Postwar", page 48 of the paperback version. So if you think that's a lie, take it up with him. Except he died recently.
LRO,
ReplyDeleteGive me an email address and I will point out the lie.
And now you bring up Pius XII.
Do you believe everything you read? Obviously not, as you choose to believe that Pius "turned a blind eye to nazi crimes".
I know you've been reading this blog for a very long time and so you would know that we have refuted this allegation multiple times. Yet you choose not to believe the refutations and instead bring this up.
I suppose I could give you the benefit of the doubt (again), but really, I expect better of you. To be such a long-time reader and still believe outright crap.
Oh look, the very first post I look for on Pius XII on this site has comments on it from you: Soviet KGB falsly linked WW2 Pope with Nazis.
Why do you keep coming back here?
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAnd now you pretend to be someone else. I wasn't 100% sure at first, but now I am.
ReplyDeleteCan't we stop fighting the battles of 60-odd years ago.
ReplyDeleteAs a tabloid-reading Brit, I would much prefer we focus on the battles of today, such as growing Islamism.
I have forgiven the Germans.
What the Nazis did then is past, but what the EUSSR does today for example is also valid.
Despite the much coverage of the opponents like Dawkins and Peter Tatchell, I think the Pope came out of it quite well and perhaps far better than many might have expected.
Maybe someone was playing an expectations game but we were led to believe that an agressively secularist Britain might have seen many empty seats at the papal rallies.
Judging by the BBC's extensive coverage, they were full.
I of all people am not a shill for the Catholic church but the visit has been deemed a success.
The church still has many issues to deal with but progress has been made.
Whether Holy Father's visit was a success remains to be seen. I will say it was once Catholic charities in the UK will be again free to act in line with Church's teaching - like for example when Catholic adoption agencies won't be forced to close down for their refusal to hurt orphans further by giving them to perverts who will ruin their lives. Or when nurses won't be fired for wearing a cross or offering to pray for a patient.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I don't see this happening anytime soon. The UK is marching swiftly down the abyss of the culture of death and unless God will have mercy on people there UK seems determined to follow this path down to hell.
As a side note - widely publicized travels of John Paul II had very little lasting effect as can be seen now, years after his pontificate ended. Despite the crowds that attended his appearances and supposedly listened to what he had to say countries he visited didn't turn back from secularism and towards God. On the contrary, Europe is in fact mostly de-christianized by now. Whether this trend can be reversed I don't know - what I do know is that Benedict XVI is doing much in that direction, through mostly not through his public appearances but rather through his discrete actions in the background.
The Holy Mother Church needs to recover from the wounds she inflicted on herself during the infamous Vatican II council. Poisonous fruits of that unfortunate event can be clearly seen now and our Holy Father is definitely aware of it. He has the daunting task now of changing the course of Peter's boat away from rocks without rocking it too much to avoid souls falling from it. That's a huge responsibility and a huge task. Let's pray for him.
Lucia, you asked for an email address to point out my lie(s) - leftrightout@mail.com.
ReplyDeleteYou also seem to be convinced I am Paul and I assure you I am not.
Let's face it, as lies go attempting to make a connection between nazis and atheists, to attempt to blame atheists for the evils of Hitler, is one hell of a big stretch of the truth. The vast majority of Nazis and their enablers were christians of one stripe or another, catholic, lutheran, etc. The German churches were not empty on Sunday, Hitler did not imprison the priests and ministers and close the churches.
Yet the Pope grew up with Nazism in his country. He was there. He would know their underlying belief systems.
ReplyDeleteI grew up with the Kirk, Rowling and Muldoon govts in my country. This makes me in no sense whatsoever an expert on the period.
"Let's face it, as lies go attempting to make a connection between nazis and atheists, to attempt to blame atheists for the evils of Hitler, is one hell of a big stretch of the truth."
ReplyDeleteActually it isn't, but only if you know your German philosophy and the history of intellectual thought. There was a form of German atheism advanced by such figures as Hegel which paved the way for the facist ideal of the Übermensch (Superman). There is a strong relationship between the atheist humanism of German thought and the rise of both facism and communism.
I would also like to point out this - Father Gerhard Hirschfelder denounced the excesses and violence of the Nazi period. The Gestapo reacted to this and arrested him in 1941, during a meeting of young people. He was taken to Dachau on Dec. 15, 1941, where he died of hunger and acute pneumonia on Aug. 1, 1942. He was 35. He was beatified on the 19 of September in Munster, Germany.
muerk, simply because the Nazis misappropriated and misused a few terms from Nietzsche does not make nazism an atheist organisation.
ReplyDeleteWas it necessary to be an atheist to be a Nazi? No.
Was it possible to be a christian and a Nazi? Yes.
Please point to the examples of Nazism that show it had an atheist motivation and was designed to advance atheism.
Hitler didn't even close the churches.
Father Gerhard Hirschfelder wasn't on his Pat Malone in denouncing Nazism and be killed for his stance. A large number of good men and women stood against the Nazis and lost their lives. And a lot of them were athesits.
Odd idea, I konw, but if every German who professed Christianity opposed the Nazis their reign would have been short lived indeed. Sadly, the vast majority of Germans went along with Hitler and continued their attendance at church, a lot of them as priests and pastors.
And that's the trouble with religion - it leads to conformity and being easily led.
"And that's the trouble with religion - it leads to conformity and being easily led."
ReplyDeleteI don't believe there is evidence for this.
The atheist underpinnings of fascism are based in the philosophy of atheist humanism. Just because you can point to individual members of the Nazi party who were ostensibly Christian means little as to the ideology of fascism.
An example of atheist motivation can be shown here in this article:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,661161,00.html
I completely agree with you that if every Christian German opposed fascism then the Nazi reign would have indeed been short. And yes, sadly there were definitely priests and pastors that supported the Nazi party.
Just for the record, I'm not leftrightout!!!
ReplyDeleteI've even e-mailed Lucia Maria with my return e-mail address, but have had no response as yet.
I also can't say anything else as the last time I commented my post was deleted, which is not the same as saying I don't have an opinion, I'm just not allowed to express it here.
I'll stick with M&M instead, at least they are willing to engage in debate!
...at least they are willing to engage in debate!
ReplyDeleteIt's debatable that you have had some comments deleted simply because you aren't "allowed" to express an opinion here.
I can think of several reasons why comments may be deleted that are beyond that assumption.
In a speech at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle on May 30, 1937, Joseph Goebbels stated in front of 25,000 people that the "criminal aberrations of the Catholic clergy threaten the physical and moral health of our young people." He declared that the "plague" would be "radically extirpated." The speech was spurred on by the crowd's repeated cries of "Hang them! Massacre them!" Florence Tamagne writes: "The anti-Catholic campaign continued until 1941. By 1936, all the Catholic youth organizations had been closed down." However, she also notes that, of approximately 20,000 German priests, "only 57 were convicted; of 4,000 members of the regular clergy, only 7 were convicted.
ReplyDeletesource
“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance.”
“Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it’s the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries.”
“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.”
source
In a speech at Berlin's Deutschlandhalle on May 30, 1937, Joseph Goebbels stated in front of 25,000 people that the "criminal aberrations of the Catholic clergy threaten the physical and moral health of our young people." He declared that the "plague" would be "radically extirpated." The speech was spurred on by the crowd's repeated cries of "Hang them! Massacre them!" Florence Tamagne writes: "The anti-Catholic campaign continued until 1941. By 1936, all the Catholic youth organizations had been closed down." However, she also notes that, of approximately 20,000 German priests, "only 57 were convicted; of 4,000 members of the regular clergy, only 7 were convicted.
ReplyDeletesource
“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance.”
“Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it’s the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries.”
“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.”
source
Are you sure that wasn't Dawkins?
ReplyDeleteThe Nazi regime also closed Catholic monasteries and had show trials of priests and monks accusing them of homosexuality and immorality in order to discredit them.
ReplyDeleteThere were also attacks on some atheists, but this was less about a lack of belief and more about them being left-wing/communists. Fascist atheism was perfectly acceptable, if not cultivated. Love of God was shifted to love of the German state in a very specific way. This nationalism came out of the idea that some races of people were superior to others, something the Christian Gospel directly disagrees with. This is not to say there can't be a nationalism that is both unhealthy and Christian in some way (I'm thinking of certain American expressions of nationalism here). However German nationalism wasn't about raising up founding fathers or documents, but more about a will to power and a brute force display of Teutonic physical and mental superiority.
Amazing how militant atheism usually goes hand in hand with loss of criticism and clear reasoning coupled with ignorance, all that seasoned with arrogant sense of superiority. We have clear examples above - people, who clearly know nothing about Nazi regime in Germany - beyond maybe what is being said in popular culture of today - voicing their opinions as if they were learned historians. It would be just laughable and pathetic if not for the fact that this kind of aggressive propaganda works because most casual readers/viewers don't bother to do research of their own and learn the truth.
ReplyDeleteSo, consensus on the thread is that Ratzinger is correct about atheism leading to fascism? Seriously?
ReplyDeletePM - Not all forms of atheism no. But there is a strain of intellectual atheism that does lead to totalitarianism as we see in fascism and communism.
ReplyDeleteThere is something inherently atheistic about fascism and communism - they are ideologies that seek to create a utopia, a heaven on earth. To do this the otherworldly Kingdom Of Heaven must be dismantled and abandoned. Rather than God being the subject of love, something human as expressed by the ideology (usually the State) becomes the object of devotion. Please note the difference here between the concepts of "subject" and "object".
This has little to do with the individual atheist who is a moral being living well with his neighbor. Instead it is about an ideology that seeks to claim that God is Dead. Which is why we see that there were Christians who were fascists and atheists who were not.
Firstly, I thought I’d share a quote from Hitler taken from the same source that Ropata used for his quote that he posted earlier.
ReplyDeleteHitler was opposed to atheism because he was a spiritual man: “atheism… is a return to the state of the animal…” (Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 59).
Now I thought I’d share a link to the following site:
http://www.nobeliefs.com/Hitler1.htm
Now, to put the contents of this site in perspective, it uses material from the following sources and more, including “Hitler’s Table Talk” where the initial quote came from.
My post may be deleted, again, but I’m only attempting to show the evidence that actually exists.
I realise, that people may not like the evidence, but if you choose to ignore it, I do feel that it shows a similar attitude to that displayed by “Holocaust Deniers”.
List of some of the sources used on the site:
Steigmann-Gall, Richard “The Holy Reich: Nazi Conception of Christianity, 1919-1945”, Cambridge University Press, 2003
Carroll, James, “Constantantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews”, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
Goldhagen, Daniel Johah , “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, Alfred A. Knoph, NY, 1996
Wollenberg, Jorg, Ed., “The German Public and the Persecution of the Jews 1933-1945: No One Participated, No One Knew”, (Chapter: When the Witnesses Were Silent, The Confessing Church and the Jews, by Wolfgang Gerlach), Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1996
Neumann, Johann, “1945: The German Churches Before and Afterwards”, 1995
Snyder, Louis L., “Hitler’s Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich’s Most Notorious Henchmen”, " Berkley Books, 1990
Helmreich, Ernst Christian, “The German Churches Under Hitler”, Wayne State University Press, 1979
Toland, John, “Adolf Hitler”, Anchor Books Doubleday, 1976
Hitler, Adolf, “Mein Kampf”, translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971
Dear Paul, you are not showing evidence but only your own ignorance. Hitler was not a Christian, but he wasn't an atheist either - he was "spiritual but not religious", like so many people now. Part of what he said, especially early on, was myth-building and propaganda - later he started to believe it himself.
ReplyDeleteBut what he said is not as important as it may seem. The very nature of regimes like the Nazi regime is that they say one thing and do another. To really understand them we have to look not at the public speeches or private table talk but actions. And those actions speak for themselves, not only in the case of Nazis.
Do you know, for example, that the Soviet constitution guaranteed all kinds of freedoms to Soviet citizens including freedom of religion - but nevertheless the priests were killed, faithful sent to concentration camps and churches converted into warehouses.
In Germany, however, it went more gradually - probably they didn't have time to completely eradicate religion and were more clever taking the path of gradually diluting Christianity's influence on Germans rather than attacking it upfront. Still, priests were killed, sent to concentration camps or just harassed when they dared to denounce regime's evil nature.
Recommended reading:
http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Persecution-Churches-J-Conway/dp/1573830801
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism#Nazi_Germany
http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=2857&CFID=51925879&CFTOKEN=92504986
To answer an earlier question - no, atheism doesn't necessarily lead to Nazism. However, atheism basically means that humans are just another kind of animal and if this view becomes dominant it leads inevitably to a society where humans are treated (and formed to treat each other) just like the animals. This in turn necessarily leads to some form of totalitarian and oppressive regime - whether it is nazism, communism or something else depends on circumstances but the essence is the same.
However, atheism basically means that humans are just another kind of animal and if this view becomes dominant it leads inevitably to a society where humans are treated (and formed to treat each other) just like the animals.
ReplyDeleteSo, if religous thinking was dominant something like slavery just wouldn't happen? History suggests otherwise.
A culture and a society is more than it's religion. And 'religion' is a word that describes a huge variety of belief systems, so I'm not sure religion is the target you think it is in your example.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, PM, how is your comment about religion a rebuttal to the comment about atheism? Maybe certain forms of atheism and certain forms of religion both enable or condone immorality, for different reasons?
I am also reminded of the women put to death in the USA recently. She said she went to Church every Sunday, for many years but never really opened the book and tried to understand its contents. At least, not until she was condemned to death and could stop and reflect in a much deeper sense on how she had lived her life.
When even the religious aren't really religious, the convenience of blaming it for the world's ills may be misplaced.
Dawkins has the temerity to call all religion child abuse, and yet atheists freak out at the generalisations made around the extremes of atheistic thinking.
I do want to address Dawkins position in a post, sadly I have little time right now but no doubt it can wait.
Dawkins and his friend Hitchens are all over the place with their position, but ultimately, their position is one of entire negativity against religion and against Christianity. My point still stands.
ReplyDeleteAnd from Dawkins:
Only a minority of priests abuse the bodies of the children in their care. But how many priests abuse their minds? Why aren't Catholics and ex-Catholics lining up to sue the church into the ground, for a lifetime of psychological damage?
I am not advocating this course of action. Much as I would like to see the Roman Catholic Church ruined, I hate opportunistically retrospective litigation even more.
So Dawkins is rational I suppose in that he sees the problems of litigation.
Where he is irrational, is that he assumes all Catholics must suffer mental abuse for selected Church doctrines, in the same way presumably, people must suffer mental abuse for being told that running on to a busy road may result in violent and painful death.
As I said on another post, Dawkins has said -
ReplyDeleteWe are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA…It is every living object's sole reason for living’…fulfilling a purpose of propagating DNA…There is no purpose other than that. - Richard Dawkins, lecturing to children.
Now which view is the more damaging? Christianity? Or the view Dawkins is giving children? Let's compare....
1. Christian - you were created by God because he loves you. Atheist - you were created to carry on the race, nothing more; or created by accident.
2. C - God has a purpose and a plan for your life. A - there is no reason for your existence other than to replicate.
3. C - there is a universal Good and Evil. We must do good to each other and treat our neighbours as ourselves. A - the notions of good and evil are relative. Do what you yourself consider to be good.
4. C - there is a Heaven. A - there is nothing after you die, so live it up now because there are no consequences and when you die, all you are is dust.
I know which one I consider to be child abuse, and it isn't Christianity. No wonder so many kids commit suicide if they're told their lives have no meaning in the end, and that they have no inherent value and have been made for no purpose.
re: slavery - a website HERE makes a case for Biblical slavery, in that it was only criminals and enemies of the Jews who could be made slaves, and only for 6 years. Also, the slaves had to be treated well (eg, the Master would be punished for killing a slave). The site makes the case that it is no different from what we do to criminals in modern society - we lock them up and force them to work in labour gangs, or make license plates, or crack rocks - in other words, make slaves of them for a certain time - and that this isn't any different.
ReplyDeleteJust to be clear, what of the prinipal objections to Dawkins et al is that they don't take the time to understand the many different religuous positions out there? Right?
ReplyDeleteAnd then you take what you think is Dawkins' position, and then presume everyone that doesn't believe in gods thinks the way you think Dawkins thinks?
Just to be clear - no I don't.
ReplyDeleteWell my comment was more for Fletch but your's looks about the same.
ReplyDeleteDawkins has the temerity to call all religion child abuse, and yet atheists freak out
And your gets the bonus for fitting the objection to generalising in teh same sentence as your generalising
The difference is though David, my statement was deliberate. You get the bonus back for noting that irony is not lost on everyone.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it interesting that arguing with the same technique as Dawkins (and others on this thread) is just not on...
Generalizations are fine to a point, and that point is long gone when it descends into "all religion is child abuse" and the attendant suggestions from Dawkins and his fan club to "cure" this issue.