Call for pope to step down over Holocaust denier

Call for pope to step down over Holocaust denier

www.breitbart.com

Attacks on Pope Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denier escalated Monday, with one theologian calling on him to step down as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
Criticism following the pope's January 24 announcement has been particularly cutting in Germany, where denying the Holocaust is a crime punishable with a jail sentence.

"If the pope wants to do some good for the Church, he should leave his job," eminent liberal Catholic theologian Hermann Haering told the German daily Tageszeitung.

(visit the link for the full news article)

German theologian, Hermann Haering, and others have now called for the Pope of Rome, Benedict XVI, to step down according the German daily Tageszeitung.

Outrage in Germany has been escalating since the rehabilitation, or rescension of the state of excommunication of Venezualian bishop Richard Williamson and three of his colleagues, also bishops.

The issue is Willaimson's public statements denying that 6-million Jews were deliberately killed in German concentration camps during WWII. Willaimson puts the number at closer to 300,000 and says none died in gas chambers.


www.breitbart.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Wit wait, were the words liberal and catholic used in the same sentance? That doesn't exist.

Let the funny hat wearing hitler youth survivor stay as pope. who cares. supposedly he "Talks to god" more than anyone else so i guess "God" being the forgiving individual that he is has no problem with holocaust deniers.

reply to post by visible_villain


Can we call for Olmert, Livni et al to also step down for denying the genocide in Palestine? Oh wait holocaust, victim and denier are only appropriate when used by the jewish nation.

Let's forget the fact that 5.4 million people have died in the past 15 years in the Congo? The world has tacitly denied this ever happened by turning a blind eye.

[edit on 3-2-2009 by Mynaeris]

IMO Williamson is fearlessly intelligent on this issue...
Haering on the other hand, just the opposite:

It's this type of belief that makes faith in the Catholic Church falter, or at least in some of the members belonging to it.

The pope IS EXECUTING the main belief behind Jesus Christ: Forgiveness

Myna, Holocaust Survivors themselves are trying to make more people aware of the atrocities in Africa. Please stop being ignorant. The people who deny what's going on in Africa today are either racist or stupid, not Jewish. Jews themselves are using the word "Genocide" and "Holocaust" to describe what is STILL happening in the world today, even after so many people died with the hope that it would never happen after WW2.

I don't understand this denying gas chamber nonsense. Thousands and thousands of survivors have seen them. And probably more people who were involved in the building and destruction of them. That just floors me. Just because you don't think it's good, and just because you think that it is nightmarish, doesn't mean it's not real.

I should just not go to these Holocaust related threads anymore. I always end up sad afterwards.

N1zzzn, I think it's great to forgive. But I don't think it's okay to just be ignorant and not apologize for saying things that could be taken as insulting.

Originally posted by The All Seeing I
IMO Williamson is fearlessly intelligent on this issue...
Haering on the other hand, just the opposite:

Well, to be honest, he is making sense.

If you truly wish to deny ignorance look into what he is talking about for yourself.

Revisionist Research

If you are truly objective, you are in for a shock to your system.

EDIT TO ADD:
WARNING: Even looking at this material may now be illegal in your country

[edit on 3-2-2009 by MoonMine]

Originally posted by Mynaeris

Can we call for Olmert, Livni et al to also step down for denying the genocide in Palestine? Oh wait holocaust, victim and denier are only appropriate when used by the jewish nation.

I wondered how long it would take for one of these to appear, not so long as it turns out.

Just 2 simple points for you to consider:

1. The Jews weren't firing rockets at the Nazis.

2. 500 dead "civilians" is an Irish bar fight, 6 million dead civilians is a holocaust.

Originally posted by ravenshadow13
N1zzzn, I think it's great to forgive. But I don't think it's okay to just be ignorant and not apologize for saying things that could be taken as insulting.

I don't agree with this guy.

I do agree with the forgiveness aspect. It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong or my opinion it to even further.
Realize that in Catholic structure anyone that is excommunicated is incapable of entering Heaven. Now I don't believe this personally but from their standpoint it's a HUGE gesture and I agree with it.

When will this madness end?
This censorship is the denial of the right to free thought and to free speech.

"Do I "deny the Holocaust"? No! No indeed, I hope the holocaust is not denied and never forgotten. I hope the holocaust is remembered as the greatest propaganda effort and hate campaign ever waged against a civilized people. We must never forget. We must look at the despoliation of our people and our culture and ask: Why do the heavens not darken? We have lost the will and courage to defend ourselves. The time has come to commit the new blasphemy. It is time to deny the gods of the New World Order. " Tom Blair. "The New Blasphemy"

Yes indeed, the Gods of the New World Order.

If a certain belief passes the tests of evideence, deduction and logic, it should be kept. If it doesn't the beliefe should not only be discarded, but the thinker must also then question why he was led to believe the erroneous information in the first place.

Why do you worship these Gods of the New World Order.
Have you noticed what they have done to you?

reply to post by Retseh


Human tragedy is human tragedy despite the numbers involved, and Africa is the silent holocaust.The one we close our eyes to. Nobody jumps up and down when people say "Well those africans are like that'"

The African holocaust is the equivalent of the hispanic illegals doing the work we won't do, it's a major focus of americans attention. Yet we don't seem to care about the rights of millions of children working in sweat shops in the east so that we can have cheap clothes, shoes and nik naks. We don't really care about their rights.

I believe it is totally everybodies right to be ignorant and even stupid. I don't think there is even one Einstein or Gandhi posting on this or any other thread. It is wrong to show compassion for one group because it is your tribe, yet feel none for others because they are your enemy.

reply to post by OhZone

My biggest problem with the current state of political correctness is probably best expressed by the follow citation -

Further, the "fact" that everyone who has ever expressed doubts about the Israeli explanation is an anti-Semite is sufficient reason to forgo all further inquiries. The case is closed because the Israelis have explained it and if you can't accept that, you are an anti-Semite. If one does question their explanation, then those who do are both "anti-Semites" and "conspiracy theorists."

Source article.

There are many, many more out there expressing essentially the same sentiment. My own experience has been exactly the same.

So, the lesson becomes for all thinking people, especially for those who prefer not to rock the boat, we learn to just keep our mouths shut and say nothing.

One can see very well what happens to those who do not remain silent by keeping their criticisms of Israel to themselves.

It's really enough to make an everage person flip-flop from being a mere don't-rock-the-boat coincidence theorist to becoming one of the most villified of all, the dreaded conspiracy theorist ...

Mynaeris, what do you propose should be done about the killing Africa and the child labor in China?

Do we send our sons to die in an effort to change the situation?

reply to post by OhZone


Did we do it in the second world war? I have relatives that died in WW2, but even so the point is we can't have a SPECIAL holocaust and a not so special one. We need to focus the attention on human suffering around the world, not just on the major tragedy that took place 60 years ago.

Having said that - I must have missed the part where the Pope himself denied the holocaust?



[edit on 3-2-2009 by Mynaeris]

the catholic church supported the nazi's...they will do anything to wipe the jews of the planet and claim jesus\god as theres....they see nothing wrong in anti jew propaganda...you would be amazing at how many fathers\bishops etc have been involved in acts of terrorism...

reply to post by fatdad


I guess anti-catholic or anti-christian or anti-islam propaganda is okay then? From where I am standing you are pointing but merely in the mirror.

Originally posted by fatdad
...you would be amazing at how many fathers\bishops etc have been involved in acts of terrorism...

ok you have my attention... please provide a list

[edit on 3-2-2009 by The All Seeing I]

Originally posted by Mynaeris
reply to post by OhZone

 

Did we do it in the second world war? I have relatives that died in WW2, but even so the point is we can't have a SPECIAL holocaust and a not so special one. We need to focus the attention on human suffering around the world, not just on the major tragedy that took place 60 years ago.

[edit on 3-2-2009 by Mynaeris]

We didn't fight World War 2 over the Holocaust. Most of the nations back then didn't really care about the plight of the Jews.

We fought World War 2 to stop megalomaniacal demogogues who were destabilizing world order.

reply to post by fatdad


On June 16, 1942, Harold Tittmann, the U.S. representative to the Vatican, told Washington that Pacelli was diverting himself, ostrichlike, into purely religious concerns and that the moral authority won for the papacy by Pius XI was being eroded. At the end of that month, the London Daily Telegraph announced that more than a million Jews had been killed in Europe and that it was the aim of the Nazis "to wipe the race from the European continent." The article was re-printed in The New York Times. On July 21 there was a protest rally on behalf of Europe's Jews in New York's Madison Square Garden. In the following weeks the British, American, and Brazilian representatives to the Vatican tried to persuade Pacelli to speak out against the Nazi atrocities. But still he said nothing. In September 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt sent his personal representative, the former head of U.S. Steel, Myron Taylor, to plead with PaceIli to make a statement about the extermination of the Jews. Taylor traveled hazardously through enemy territory to reach the Vatican. Still Pacelli refused to speak. Pacelli's excuse was that he must rise above the belligerent parties. As late as December 18, Francis d'Arcy Osborne, Britain's envoy in the Vatican, handed Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Pacelli's deputy secretary of state, a dossier replete with information on the Jewish deportations and mass killings in hopes that the Pope would denounce the Nazi regime in a Christmas message.

On December 24, 1942, having made draft after draft, Pacelli at last said something. In his Christmas Eve broadcast to the world on Vatican Radio, he said that men of goodwill owed a vow to bring society "back to its immovable center of gravity in divine law." He went on: "Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality and race, are marked for death or gradual extinction."

That was the strongest public denunciation of the Final Solution that Pacelli would make in the whole course of the war.

It was not merely a paltry statement. The chasm between the enormity of the liquidation of the Jewish people and this form of evasive language was profoundly scandalous. He might have been referring to many categories of victims at the hands of various belligerents in the conflict. Clearly the choice of ambiguous wording was intended to placate those who urged him to protest, while avoiding offense to the Nazi regime. But these considerations are over-shadowed by the implicit denial and trivialization. He had scaled down the doomed millions to "hundreds of thousands" without uttering the word "Jews," while making the pointed qualification "sometimes only by reason of their nationality or race." Nowhere was the term "Nazi'' mentioned. Hitler himself could not have wished for a more convoluted and innocuous reaction from
the Vicar of Christ to the greatest crime in history.

But what was Pacelli's principal motivation for this trivialization and denial? The Allies' diplomats in the Vatican believed that he was remaining impartial in order to earn a crucial role in future peace negotiations. In this there was clearly a degree of truth. But a recapitulation of new evidence I have gathered shows that Pacelli saw the Jews as alien and undeserving of his respect and compassion. He felt no sense of moral outrage at their plight. The documents show that:

1. He had nourished a striking antipathy toward the Jews as early as 1917 in Germany, which contradicts later claims that his omissions were performed in good faith and that he "loved" the Jews and respected their religion.

2. From the end of the First World War to the lost encyclical of 1938, Pacelli betrayed a fear and contempt of Judaism based on his belief that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom.

3. Pacelli acknowledged to representatives of the Third Reich that the regime's anti-Semitic policies were a matter of Germany's internal politics. The Reich Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican, as Hitler was quick to grasp, created an ideal climate for Jewish persecution.

4. Pacelli failed to sanction protest by German Catholic bishops against anti-Semitism, and he did not attempt to intervene in the process by which Catholic clergy collaborated in racial certification to identify Jews.

5. After Pius XI's Mit Brennender Sorge, denouncing the Nazi regime (although not by name), Pacelli attempted to mitigate the effect of the encyclical by giving private diplomatic reassurances to Berlin despite his awareness of widespread Nazi persecution of Jews.

6. Pacelli was convinced that the Jews had brought misfortune on their own heads: intervention on their behalf could only draw the church into alliances with forces inimical to Catholicism. Pacelli's failure to utter a candid word on the Final Solution proclaimed to the world that the Vicar of Christ was not roused to pity or anger. From this point of view, he was the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable plan. His denial and minimization of the Holocaust were all the more scandalous in that they were uttered from a seemingly impartial moral high ground.

There was another, more immediate indication of Pacelli's moral dislocation. It occurred before the liberation of Rome, when he was the sole Italian authority in the city. On October 16, 1943, SS troops entered the Roman ghetto area and rounded up more than 1,000 Jews, imprisoning them in the very shadow of the Vatican.

How did Pacelli acquit himself'?

On the morning of the roundup, which had been prompted by AdoIf Eichmann, who was in charge of the organization of the Final Solution from his headquarters in Berlin, the German ambassador in Rome pleaded with the Vatican to issue a public protest. By this stage of the war, Mussolini had been deposed and rescued by AdoIf Hitler to run the puppet regime in the North of Italy. The German authorities in Rome, both diplomats and military commanders, fearing a backlash of the Italian populace, hoped that an immediate and vigorous papal denunciation might stop the SS in their tracks and prevent further arrests. Pacelli refused. In the end, the German diplomats drafted a letter of protest on the Pope's behalf and prevailed on a resident German bishop to sign it for Berlin's benefit. Meanwhile, the deportation of the imprisoned Jews went ahead on October 18.

When U.S. chargé d 'affaires Harold Tittmann visited Pacelli that day, he found the pontiff anxious that the "Communist" Partisans would take advantage of a cycle of papal protest, followed by SS reprisals, followed by a civilian backlash. As a consequence, he was not inclined to lift a finger for the Jewish deportees, who were now traveling in cattle cars to the Austrian border bound for Auschwitz. Church officials reported on the desperate plight of the deportees as they passed slowly through city after city. Still Pacelli refused to intervene.