Tag Archives: War

Polemics

What did Pope Pius XII do to protect the Jewish people in Nazi Germany?

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Here’s an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

During the war, the pope was far from silent: In numerous speeches and encyclicals, he championed human rights for all people and called on the belligerent nations to respect the rights of all civilians and prisoners of war. Unlike many of the pope’s latter-day detractors, the Nazis understood him very well. After studying Pius XII’s 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office concluded: “In a manner never known before the pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order … Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals.” (Pick up any book that criticizes Pius XII, and you won’t find any mention of this important report.)

In early 1940, the pope acted as an intermediary between a group of German generals who wanted to overthrow Hitler and the British government. Although the conspiracy never went forward, Pius XII kept in close contact with the German resistance and heard about two other plots against Hitler. In the fall of 1941, through diplomatic channels, the pope agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt that America’s Catholics could support the president’s plans to extend military aid to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by the Nazis. On behalf of the Vatican, John T. McNicholas, the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, delivered a well-publicized address that explained that the extension of assistance to the Soviets could be morally justified because it helped the Russian people, who were the innocent victims of German aggression.

Throughout the war, the pope’s deputies frequently ordered the Vatican’s diplomatic representatives in many Nazi-occupied and Axis countries to intervene on behalf of endangered Jews. Up until Pius XII’s death in 1958, many Jewish organizations, newspapers and leaders lauded his efforts. To cite one of many examples, in his April 7, 1944, letter to the papal nuncio in Romania, Alexander Shafran, chief rabbi of Bucharest, wrote: “It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews … The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance.”

Lots more about the preceding Pope (Pius XI) at the main article.

Just for the record, I’m an evangelical Protestant, not a Roman Catholic.

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Videos

Michele Bachmann analyzes Obama’s latest foreign policy blunders

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Democrats do not understand foreign policy.

She’s very intense in this video. She’s not happy with the way the country is being run. She’s concerned. But on the upside, she’s speaking on these issues very naturally – lots and lots of details fit within a structured argument.

Recent Michele Bachmann stuff

Commentary

Did Christians believe in a flat earth during the Middle Ages?

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Consider this post from Matt Flanagan of MandM. (H/T Thinking Matters New Zealand)

Flanagan cites Jeffrey Burton Russell’s book “Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians”. Dr. Bussell is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Russell writes:

[W]ith extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters—Leukippos and Demokritos for example–by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.

Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few—at least two and at most five—early Christian fathers denied the spherically of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

So where did this myth come from? And why has it persisted so long in school textbooks?

Click through and read the rest of Matt’s post to find the surprising answers.

My view is that stories like global warming and evolution are really just the latest round of flat-earth myths which have no basis in fact but are believed solely because they are useful for powerful people who want to undermine traditional moral values by misleading children in government-run schools. The elites want to act sinfully, but they don’t want anyone to judge them. They think that if they can trick enough people to believe lies about God, that God might cease to exist because we voted him out. Unfortunately for them, building a consensus of people who are mistaken doesn’t change objective reality. And God doesn’t grade on a curve.

Those who reject Christianity need to be careful about letting their feelings determine what they believe.

What should atheists be doing instead of believing myths?

Instead of just calling people names and making jokes, they should investigating the actual scientific evidence:

Then, perhaps a philosophical investigation on some common objections to belief in God:

But for most atheists, the purpose of life isn’t to find the truth.

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