If this is a journalist...

[ironmonk]

-----Original Message-----
From: Max
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 11:11 PM
To: speaker.info@goldhagen.com; bgoldhagen@REDTOP.COM
Subject: If this is a journalist...

Imagine a person writing an negative article about a method he saw used on someone and thought it was wrong. The writer doesn't stop to ask what the method was or how it's going to help, he just attacks the person who uses the method. Many people read his article and then hate and pass judgment on the man using this method on other people. After the writer publishes his ignorant and half thought out article, people who could have used this life saving method die. It's unknown if the writer ever will learn that the method he condemned was a cure that worked for cancer and AIDS.

That writer would have unknowingly done a great evil. It's a shame that such writers exist, but the world is full of geniuses that will believe anything they read without proper research from all sides of the topic, and logical reasoning applied to that research.


God is not just my God or the Pope's God... if you want to believe in Him or not, He is a fact. Just as you cannot change the fact that 2+2=4, God is a fact of life.

God comes before man.

God's Church is the Catholic Church. It is the wisest and oldest organization in the world.... It has lasted because God has been protecting it from ignorant judgmental bigots such as yourself.

You might be asking, what prompted this email.... Your attack on Pope Pius XII.

Just as the courts have authority over the welfare of the child and the child can be taken from their parents to protect the child, once baptized into the Church, the Church has a right and obligation to protect that child. Nothing is more vital than our soul. It is irrelevant what the terrorist judges have done to this once great country by trying to destroy God anywhere He is spoken of... woe to them.

One who hasn't studied and/or is low in intelligence may not be able to comprehend that God is more real than you or me. Too many proofs exist. A few major ones... the miracles of Fatima (70,000 witnesses don't lie) and St. Pio (Padre Pio of Italy). All of the little facts that add up in the Scriptures to scientifically verified proofs today. Only a fool would dismiss these... Google them and read up about them on Catholic sites - such as www.EWTN.com then look them up on www.Britannica.com - then find the skeptics... then and only then should you try to debate these points...
Also, look up and meditate on Pascal's Wager.

For the sake of your own soul, I suggest you listen to both sides for a change instead of going off half-cocked and half-loaded.

You did a grave injustice to everyone who reads your little and unstudied article.

You can make up for it. Get educated....

Here are a few links:
[url="http://www.PeterKreeft.com"]http://www.PeterKreeft.com[/url]
[url="http://www.Catholic.com"]http://www.Catholic.com[/url]
[url="http://www.Catholic-Convert.com"]http://www.Catholic-Convert.com[/url]
[url="http://www.USCCB.org"]http://www.USCCB.org[/url]
[url="http://www.Catholic-Pages.com"]http://www.Catholic-Pages.com[/url]


God Bless.
max

_______________________________________________________________


[b]If This Is a Saint...[/b]
By DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN
January 7, 2005
[url="http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?id=2512"]http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?id=2512[/url]

Imagine that a person, at some risk to himself, saves an infant from a burning car in a rural area. The parents are dead. We would call him a hero.

But then he decides to keep the child and raise her in his god's way. The man does not inform the authorities. When the desperate child's relatives come looking for her, even knocking on his door, he denies any knowledge of the child's whereabouts. The man's initial good deed has become a crime. He is a kidnapper.

A document from the archives of the French Catholic Church has just been published that shows Pope Pius XII to have been like this man when Jewish relatives — and parents — came frantically knocking demanding their children. In October 1946, a letter containing papal instructions was sent to the papal nuncio in France, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, a man of known compassion for Jews, who was working to reunite Jewish children hidden in Catholic institutions during the Holocaust with their parents, relatives and Jewish institutions. The letter ordered Roncalli to desist and to hold on to the Jewish children: "Those children who have been baptized cannot be entrusted to institutions that are unable to ensure a Christian education."

Pius XII's intent to deprive Jewish parents of their children was made unequivocal: "If the children have been entrusted [to the church] by their parents, and if the parents now claim them back, they can be returned, provided the children themselves have not been baptized. It should be noted that this decision of the Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father."

Because not returning baptized Jewish children was presented as a general church principle and policy — decided upon by the church's authoritative Congregation of the Holy Office (to which popes had, in the words of the HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, granted "unlimited competency in matters of faith and morals") and personally approved by Pope Pius XII — it stands to reason that this kidnapping policy was transmitted and meant to be implemented across Europe. Still not known is the extent to which Roncalli or other church officials actually implemented the Vatican directive. The documents relevant to the church's policy (including those pertaining to this letter to Roncalli) remain sequestered in the archives of the Vatican and in the archives of the national churches.

During the Holocaust unknown thousands of Jewish children gained refuge in Catholic monasteries, convents and schools — though not at the behest of this antisemitic pope. They were saved by local heroes, priests and nuns (who have been justly celebrated by Yad Vashem and others), who also baptized an unknown number of the children under their care. It is well known that Jewish survivors or their relatives and heirs, in many though not all cases, had great difficulty retrieving their children. It was suspected that the church had a policy to steal these Jewish children for Jesus. A survivor of Auschwitz, persecuted because she was Jewish, was, according to Pius XII, not supposed to get her own child back because she was Jewish.

Now we have a smoking gun: this chilling document. It reveals that the pope's and the church's policy was, in effect, to kidnap Jewish children, perhaps by the thousands. It exhibits Pius XII's striking callousness towards Jews' suffering. Its plain purpose was to implement a plan that would cruelly victimize the Jews a second time by depriving these bodily and spiritually wounded survivors of the Nazi hell of their own children.

The document cannot surprise anyone familiar with the antisemitic Catholic Church during this period or with Pope Pius IX's infamous precursor kidnapping in 1858 of the 6-year-old Jewish child Edgardo Mortara of Bologna, which led to a European-wide revulsion and protests against the church. But this recently published document does remove what Pius XII has, until now, enjoyed: plausible deniability. For 60 years, the church and its officials have worked hard to deny the many crimes and other outrages against Jews before, during and after the Holocaust committed by Pius XII, bishops and priests.

Pope Pius XII, by ordering a criminal deed — that children illegally and permanently be separated from parents, relatives or their legal or spiritual guardians — made himself into a criminal. So did any bishops, priests and nuns who might have promoted or participated in the kidnapping of Jewish children. No person is above the law. A religious leader or head of government today who would engineer a criminal conspiracy of this kind would be put in jail. (When Bologna, a short while after the Mortara kidnapping, passed from papal control to the Italian state, one of the Italian government's first acts was to arrest and jail the church's inquisitor, a priest, who had kidnapped the Mortara boy on the orders of Pius IX.)

Many crimes, today and in the past, have been committed in the name of religion. Pius XII and the church kept this religious policy of denying Jewish parents their children secret from the world, precisely because they knew that it would be seen as outrageous and criminal. Religious robes should not cloak a person and his deeds from being called plainly what they are. The recent priestly sex abuse scandals have taught us this. They have also taught us that transparency is necessary for this most secretive of churches, which has habitually concealed its officials' crimes and misdeeds.

If the church is the moral institution it claims to be, then it must take measures to redress its crimes: The Vatican should establish and fund a fully independent blue-ribbon, international commission of outside historical, ecclesiastical and forensic experts, led by a person of great international stature, to determine how many Jewish children the church kidnapped across Europe and the precise role that Pius XII and other cardinals and bishops played. The commission should be granted full access to all church institutions, personnel and documents. Pope John Paul II, who in critical ways has worked hard to improve the church's bearing toward Jews, should publicly instruct all national European Catholic churches to cooperate fully with the investigators and to unearth on their own what happened in their parishes. Most of the records are probably easily accessible. The church is an institution that records and preserves one thing above all else faithfully: baptisms. Upon identification, all Jewish victims or their survivors should be located by the church and notified. The commission should also publish detailed historical reports of its findings.

If Switzerland could do this with its Bergier Commission for the theft of Jewish assets during the war (publishing 26 volumes), and if Australia can do this for the children its government stole from Aborigines during the same period, then the Catholic Church can do this regarding Pius XII's policy to steal Jewish children.

The Vatican should finally stop the decades-long stalling and obfuscating about fully opening its and its national churches' archives during the Holocaust to scholars and journalists. It should stop pretending that its sole transgression was not having done more to save Jews, and that its sole act of public penitence need be issuing wan apologies for its acts of omission. Surely this papal letter to Roncalli, which dribbled out, is not the only incriminating document in the church's vast secret archives. Moreover, isn't it now indisputably clear that the church should stop its henchmen from vilifying Jews and others who have rightly called for the church to be open and truthful about its and its officials' past and recent crimes?

Finally, it should now be clear that the church should cease efforts to canonize Pius XII. He oversaw a church that, during the war, continued and even stepped up centuries-old practices of antisemitic agitation, knowing full well that the Jews were being persecuted and slaughtered. A church that applauded anti-Jewish race legislation, which was the foundation for persecuting Jews. That used its genealogical records to help the Nazi regime determine whom to persecute as a Jew. That legitimized and participated in the deportation of more than 50,000 Jews of Slovakia to their deaths in Auschwitz and elsewhere. And that officially continued for more than a decade after the Holocaust to teach its faithful that all Jews for all time are guilty as Christ-killers.

And with this authoritative Catholic Church document from its own archives, we know that Pius XII, commanding his subordinates to steal Jewish children from their parents and relatives, made himself into at least one of the most rampant would-be-kidnappers of modern times — not to mention a person bereft of fundamental human empathy for broken Jewish parents in search, after years of suffering, for their children.

Primo Levi's original title for "Survival in Auschwitz," his famous memoir and commentary on the character of humanity, was "If This Is a Man." How can we not ask: If this is a saint, then what kind of church is this?

[i]Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of "A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair" (Knopf, 2002) and "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust"(Knopf, 1996), is completing a book on genocide in our time.[/i]

[ironmonk]

I also sent this....


-----Original Message-----
From: Max
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 11:16 PM
To: speaker.info@goldhagen.com; bgoldhagen@REDTOP.COM
Subject: Pius XII Saved More Jews Than Schindler, Rabbi Says
Importance: High

Pius XII Saved More Jews Than Schindler, Rabbi Says by Zenit.org-Avvenire

In an interview with historian and Rabbi David Dalin, of New York, he sets the record straight on Pope Pius XII.


September 5, 2001 / RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2001 - What does New York Rabbi
David Dalin think of Pope Pius XII?

"The Jewish people had no greater friend in the 20th century," says the
historian.

According to Rabbi Dalin, who last Wednesday addressed the meeting organized
by the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, "during the Second World
War, Pius XII saved more Jewish lives than any other person, including Raoul
Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler."

Q: You have labeled historians who have criticized Pope Pius XII as
revisionists. Why?

Rabbi Dalin: Today there is a new generation of journalists and experts
determined to discredit the documented efforts of Pius XII to save the Jews
during the Holocaust. This generation is inspired by Rolf Hochhuth´s play
"The Vicar," which has no historical value, but levels controversial
accusations against this Pope. However, Eugenio Pacelli´s detractors ignore
or neglect Pinchas Lapide´s enlightening study.

[Lapide] was consul general of Israel in Milan and met with many Italian
Jews who survived the Holocaust. In his work, Lapide documents how Pius XII
worked for the salvation of at least 700,000 from the hands of the Nazis.
However, according to another estimate, this figure rises to 860,000.

Q: Why, then, has there been this change in appreciation?

Rabbi Dalin: I call today´s critics revisionists because they reverse the
judgment of history, namely, the recognition given to Pius XII by his
contemporaries, among whom is Nobel Prize [winner] Albert Einstein, Chief
Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Israel, Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Moshe Sharett;
and, in Italy, people like Raffaele Cantoni, who at the time was president
of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities. But many articles published at
different times in Boston´s Jewish Advocate, The Times of London, and The
New York Times can also be perused.

Q: What did Pope Pacelli do for the Jews?

Rabbi Dalin: We have much documentation, which shows that in no way did he
remain silent. What is more, he spoke out loudly against Hitler and almost
everyone saw him as an opponent of the Nazi regime. During the German
occupation of Rome, Pius XII secretly instructed the Catholic clergy to use
all means to save as many human lives as possible.

In this way, he saved thousands of Italian Jews from deportation. While 80%
of European Jews died in those years, 80% of Italian Jews were saved. In
Rome alone, 155 convents and monasteries gave refuge to some 5,000 Jews. At
any given moment, at least 3,000 were saved in the papal residence of Castel
Gandolfo, being freed from deportation to German concentration camps.

For nine months, 60 Jews lived with the Jesuits at the Pontifical Gregorian
University, and many others were hidden in the basement of the Biblical
Institute. Following Pius XII´s instructions, risking their own lives, many
priests and monks made possible the salvation of hundreds of Jewish lives.

Q: But the Pope never publicly denounced the anti-Semitic laws and
persecution of the Jews.

Rabbi Dalin: His silence was an effective strategy directed to protecting
the greatest possible number of Jews from deportation. An explicit and
severe denunciation of the Nazis by the Pope would have been an invitation
to reprisals, and would have worsened attitudes toward Jews throughout
Europe.

Of course one can ask: What could be worse than the extermination of 6
million Jews? The answer is simple and terribly honest: the killing of
hundreds of thousands of other Jews. The revisionist critics of Pius XII
know that both Jewish leaders as well as Catholic bishops, who came from
occupied countries, advised Pacelli not to protest publicly against the
atrocities committed by the Nazis.

We have evidence that, when the bishop of Munster wished to pronounce
himself against the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the leaders of the
Jewish communities of his diocese begged him not to do so, as it would have
caused a harsher repression against them.

Q: Don´t you think that the excommunication of Nazis would have helped?

Rabbi Dalin: Yes, I would like to think so and deep down I think that at
least there should have been an attempt to pronounce a papal
excommunication. However, despite these sentiments, the documents suggest
that the excommunication of Hitler would have been a merely symbolic
gesture.

Q: Would it not have been better than silence?

Rabbi Dalin: On the contrary. History teaches that a formal excommunication
could have achieved the opposite result. Father Luigi Sturzo and the former
chief rabbi of Denmark, for example, were specifically afraid of this. The
Nazis themselves interpreted Pius XII´s Christmas 1942 address as a clear
condemnation of their regime and a demand in favor of Europe´s Jews. The
anger among the Nazis could have elicited catastrophic reactions for the
security and fortune of the papacy itself in the years following the War.

A papal condemnation of the Nazis implied the well-founded and diffused
suspicion at the time that Hitler would have sought vengeance in the person
of the Pope himself, by attacking the Vatican. Rudolph Rahn, the Nazi
ambassador in Rome, confirmed the existence of these plans, which he himself
helped to forestall.

Q: In your writings, you propose a new historiography written by Jews on the
"Pius XII case." What do you mean?

Rabbi Dalin: I think the time has arrived on the Jewish side to get to work
on a new reconstruction of the relation between Pius XII and the Holocaust.
This reconstruction, closer to the facts, namely, of what Pius XII really
did for the Jews, would arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions to the
gratuitous ones of John Cornwell´s book, "Hitler´s Pope."

Pius XII was not Hitler´s Pope, but the greatest defender that we Jews have
ever had, and precisely at the time when we needed it.

This new work of historiography should be based in the judgment that his
contemporaries made of the efforts, successes and failures of Pius XII, as
well as of the way in which the Jews who survived the Holocaust evaluated
(or revaluated) his life and influence in the succeeding decades.

Pope Pacelli was righteous among the nations, who must be recognized for
having protected and saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. It is difficult to
imagine that so many world Jewish leaders, in such different continents,
could have been mistaken or confused when it came to praising the Pope´s
conduct during the War. Their gratitude to Pius XII lasted a long time, and
it was genuine and profound.

[XIX]

Uterly beautiful on your part and Rabbi Dalin's. Disgusting what Goldhagen wrote.

[Good Friday]

Okay. And what do you think of the fact that Pope Pius XII ordered that Jewish children who had been baptized should not be returned to their Jewish families? Your responses are good ones, but they do not touch on the story itself -- was it wrong for Pope Pius XII to keep Jewish children away from their parents?

Yes or no?

[Don John of Austria]

It was not wrong, nor is it ever wrong to try and make sure that all baptized Catholics are raised in a Catholic home where they can recieve the sacraments and have a reasonable hope of heaven.

[ironmonk]

[quote name='Good Friday' date='Jan 7 2005, 02:48 AM'] Okay. And what do you think of the fact that Pope Pius XII ordered that Jewish children who had been baptized should not be returned to their Jewish families? Your responses are good ones, but they do not touch on the story itself -- was it wrong for Pope Pius XII to keep Jewish children away from their parents?

Yes or no? [/quote]
Bro...

Look up at my analogy... The method I speak of would be the Pope keeping the baptized Catholics from their biological parents for the sake of their souls so that they could be properly raised. The analogy I used was because of his story, it was a parady. Another point I was making is that God is real, it doesn't matter if people do not believe in Him, He is still real... Since He is real, there are definite and proper ways to worship Him... and the One True way is the Catholic way. And if this guy wanted to argue the point that "oh that's just what you believe" - then he would be wrong because there is just too much evidence that the Catholic Church is 100% right. I thought I was clear that I totally support Pope Pius XII choice in the matter. Just as the court system has a right to protect a child from physcial harm, God's Church has a right to protect a child of hers - a baptized Catholic - from spiritual harm.


God Bless,
ironmonk

[thessalonian]

Your analogy is right on Max. Let us know if you get a response.

[Guest JeffCR07]

[quote name='Good Friday' date='Jan 7 2005, 12:48 AM'] Okay. And what do you think of the fact that Pope Pius XII ordered that Jewish children who had been baptized should not be returned to their Jewish families? Your responses are good ones, but they do not touch on the story itself -- was it wrong for Pope Pius XII to keep Jewish children away from their parents?

Yes or no? [/quote]
I have to agree with Don John on this one, GF. In the Order of Authority, the Church comes first, followed immediately by the family, then by civil authorities. Once a child is baptised, the Godparent is obligated by the Church to raise the child in the catholic faith and the child himself (or herself) is obligated to learn the faith and follow the Church.

Being a member of the Church through Baptism, it would be a greater evil for the Godparent to relinquish the child to a family that would not raise him/her Catholic than it would be to return the child to its family, for, as previously stated, one's obligation to the Church (once one is a member) is greater even than one's obligation to one's own family.

- Your Brother In Christ, Jeff

[ironmonk]

[quote name='JeffCR07' date='Jan 7 2005, 04:14 PM'] I have to agree with Don John on this one, GF. In the Order of Authority, the Church comes first, followed immediately by the family, then by civil authorities. Once a child is baptised, the Godparent is obligated by the Church to raise the child in the catholic faith and the child himself (or herself) is obligated to learn the faith and follow the Church.

Being a member of the Church through Baptism, it would be a greater evil for the Godparent to relinquish the child to a family that would not raise him/her Catholic than it would be to return the child to its family, for, as previously stated, one's obligation to the Church (once one is a member) is greater even than one's obligation to one's own family.

- Your Brother In Christ, Jeff [/quote]
Another note to add... he didn't keep Jewish people away from their biological family... he kept Catholics away from the wrong faith. If they were not baptized, then they could return to the care of their biological family.

The needs of the Spirit come before the needs of the body. This is one major reason so many people in the world are messed up in today's time. They put the needs and desires of the body first - fornication, material goods, ssa acts, etc... If people put their souls first these things would not be the horrible issues they are today.

God Bless,
ironmonk

[Guest JeffCR07]

[quote]he didn't keep Jewish people away from their biological family... he kept Catholics away from the wrong faith.[/quote]

That was wonderfully said, Max. It sums up the teaching of the Church on the matter simply, unequivocally, and clearly. Kudos

- Your Brother In Christ, Jeff

[Catalyst]

one point here that stuck out in the first email, was that one of this mans defenses was the longevity of the catholic church and stating God has a hand in it. I suppose this remains true to the length of time the roman empire had power, how long the british empire had power?

Edited January 10, 2005 by Catalyst

[Catalyst]

and the church comes first?

A relationship with God comes first!!!

the church is a means of edification.

[hyperdulia again]

the jewish children thing sounds like pius ix...back when holy church's temporal authority was still a real live force...he was entirely correct also.

[ironmonk]

[quote name='Catalyst']one point here that stuck out in the first email, was that one of this mans defenses was the longevity of the catholic church and stating God has a hand in it. I suppose this remains true to the length of time the roman empire had power, how long the british empire had power? [/quote]

It is the Church of the Living God. 1 Tim. 3:15. God does guide the Catholic Church in ALL truth - At least that's what Christ said, and I believe Christ. (St. John 14)

If you want to argue the Church; create another thread.



[quote name='Catalyst' date='Jan 10 2005, 03:39 AM'] and the church comes first?

A relationship with God comes first!!!

the church is a means of edification. [/quote]
It's obvious that you do not know what the Church is. The Church is the Body of Christ. The Church is the reason why we know God. The Church teaches us about God. By saying the Church comes first; the educated knows that I'm speaking about God.

Did you really pay attention to what you read?! Did you not see my statement "God comes before man."?!

This is just par for the course when dealing with bigoted anti-Catholics. Pick one thing and take it out of context. When are you going to open your heart to Christ and love what He left us?

If it wasn't for the Church you would NOT have the Bible.

[b]"We are compelled to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we should have no knowledge of it at all."[/b]
~ Martin Luther, Commentary on St. John

Edited January 10, 2005 by ironmonk

[Good Friday]

So let me get this straight: The consensus is that Jewish children during World War II should have been kidnapped (it is kidnapping) by the Church because the Church chose to baptize them?

Two things:

1) That's sick.

2) Were the baptisms even valid? The children were too young to make a decision, and their parents did not consent. Isn't parental consent required for baptisms of children below the age of reason? Otherwise, wouldn't it have been a forced baptism, not to mention a forced conversion, that would have been not only illicit but also invalid?

In any event, regardless of the "needs of the Spirit" and all that carp, I think it was wrong for Pope Pius XII to kidnap Jewish children and I hope that it prevents his beatification. It's sad enough that he is already Ven. Pope Pius XII.