Thursday, August 02, 2012

The “Jews” Behind the Second Vatican Council

Jewish-Born Clerics Helped Push Vatican II Reforms

50 Years Ago: Vatican II changed the Vatican’s positions on key issues including the church’s teachings on Jews. Many of the intellectual forces behind the reforms were converts from Judaism

Forward (NY Zionist newspaper) July 30, 2012

With an Afterword by Michael Hoffman

Fifty years ago this fall, Catholic bishops gathered in Rome for a council that would bring the church “up to date” by making it speak more directly to the modern world. After three years of deliberation, the bishops voted on and accepted statements that permitted the faithful to attend mass in their own languages, encouraged lay reading of scripture and entreated Catholics to think of other religions as sources of truth and grace. The council referred to the church as “people of God” and suggested a more democratic ordering of relations between bishops and the pope. It also passed a statement on non-Christian religions, known by its Latin title, Nostra Aetate (“In our times”). Part four of this declaration, a statement on the Jews, proved most controversial, several times almost failing because of the opposition of conservative bishops.



The problem was, they had possessed no language of their own with which to break the silence. More than most academic disciplines, theology is a complex thicket with each branch guarded by a prickly coterie of experts. Those wanting to grasp the complexities of the church’s relations to Jews had to study eschatology, soteriology, patristics, Old and New Testament, and church history through all its periods. The bishops thus found themselves relying on tiny groups of experts who had cared enough to amass the unusual intellectual qualifications for this task.

As I discovered while researching my recently published book, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965, these experts did not begin their work in the 1960s. From outposts in Austria and Switzerland, several had tried to formulate Catholic arguments against anti-Semitism under the shadow of Nazism three decades earlier. They were as unrepresentative of Catholicism as one can imagine. Not only were they, Central Europeans, brave enough to stand up to Hitler when it counted, but they mostly had not been born Catholic. The Catholics who helped bring the church to recognition of the continuing sanctity of the Jewish people were converts, many of them from Jewish families.

Most important was Johannes Oesterreicher, born in 1904 into the home of the Jewish veterinarian Nathan and his wife, Ida, in Stadt-Liebau, a German-language community in northern Moravia. As a boy, he took part in Zionist scouting and acted as elected representative of the Jews in his high school, but then, for reasons that remain inexplicable (he later said he ”fell in love with Christ”), Oesterreicher took an interest in Christian writings (Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard and the Gospels themselves), and under the influence of a priest later martyred by the Nazis (Max Josef Metzger) he became a Catholic and then a priest. In the early 1930s he took over the initiative of the Diocese of Vienna for converting Jews, hoping to bring family and friends into the church. In this his success was limited. Where he had an impact was in gathering other Catholic thinkers to oppose Nazi racism.

To his shock, Oesterreicher found this racism entering the work of leading Catholic thinkers, who taught that Jews were racially damaged and therefore could not receive the grace of baptism. His friends in this endeavor included fellow converts like philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand and the theologian Karl Thieme and political philosopher Waldemar Gurian. In 1937, Gurian, Oesterreicher and Thieme penned a Catholic statement on the Jews, arguing, against the racists, that Jews carried a special holiness. Though it constituted orthodox teaching, not a single bishop (let alone the Vatican) signed on.

Oesterreicher escaped Austria when the Nazis entered, in 1938, and continued work from Paris, broadcasting German-language sermons into the Reich, informing Catholics that Hitler was an “unclean spirit” and the “antipode in human form,” and describing Nazi crimes committed against Jews and Poles. In the spring of 1940 he barely eluded an advance team of Gestapo agents, and via Marseille and Lisbon he made his way to New York City and ultimately Seton Hall University, where he became the leading expert on relations with Jews in America’s Catholic Church.

Oesterreicher gradually abandoned his “missionary” approach to the Jews and increasingly called his work ecumenical. He and like-minded Christians tried to figure out how to ground their belief in continued vocation of Jewish people in Christian scripture.

If the battle before the war was against the superficial assumptions of Nazi racism, after the war it took aim at the deeply rooted beliefs of Christian anti-Judaism. In the former period, the converts argued that, yes, Jews can be baptized. In the second period, even if they continued to believe that Jews must be baptized to escape the curse of rejecting Christ, these thinkers began pondering the nature of the supposed curse.

If history was a series of trials sent to punish the Jews for failing to accept Christ, then what meaning did Auschwitz have? Were the Nazis instruments of God’s will, meant to make the Jews finally turn to Christ? To answer yes to this question was obscene, but it was the only answer Catholic theology provided as of 1945. In the years that followed, the converts had to stage a revolution in a church that claimed to be unchanging. They did so by shifting church teaching to Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 9–11, where the Apostle, without speaking of baptism or conversion, proclaims that the Jews remain “beloved of God” and that “all Israel will be saved.”

Like Oesterreicher, the thinkers who did the intellectual work that prepared this revolution were overwhelmingly converts. Soon after the war, Thieme joined with concentration camp survivor Gertrud Luckner to publish the Freiburger Rundbrief in southwest Germany, where they made crucial theological breakthroughs on the path to conciliation with the Jews. In Paris, the Rev. Paul Démann, a converted Hungarian Jew, began publishing the review Cahiers Sioniens and, with the help of fellow converts Geza Vermes and Renée Bloch, refuted the anti-Judaism in Catholic school catechisms.

In 1961, Oesterreicher was summoned for work in the Vatican II committee tasked with the “Jewish question,” which became the most difficult issue to face the bishops. At one critical moment in October 1964, priests Gregory Baum and Bruno Hussar joined Oesterreicher in assembling what became the final text of the council’s decree on the Jews, voted on by the bishops a year later. Like Oesterreicher, Baum and Hussar were converts of Jewish background.

They were continuing a trend going back to the First Vatican Council in 1870, when the brothers Lémann — Jews who had become Catholics and priests — presented a draft declaration on relations between the church and Jews, stating that Jews “are always very dear to God” because of their fathers and because Christ has issued from them “according to the flesh.” Without converts to Catholicism, it seems, the Catholic Church would never have “thought its way” out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism.

The high percentage of Jewish converts like Oesterreicher among Catholics who were opposed to anti-Semitism makes sense: In the 1930s they were targets of Nazi racism who could not avoid the racism that had entered the church. In their opposition, they were simply holding their church to its own universalism. But by turning to long-neglected passages in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, they also opened the mind of the church to a new appreciation of the Jewish people.

What were the impulses behind their engagement after the war? In a generous review of my book in The New Republic, Peter Gordon suggests that the converts’ willingness to advocate for the other was driven by a concern for the self. They had retained a sense of themselves as Jews even in the Catholic Church. 

Gordon reminds us of Sigmund Freud’s skepticism about the possibility of love of other. True love, Freud believed, “was always entangled with narcissism: it is not the other whom I love but myself, or at least it is only that quality in the other which resembles me or resembles the person I once was.” Yet in Oesterreicher we see an enduring solidarity with the community that once was his, most immediately his family. In 1946 he pondered the fate of his father, who had died of pneumonia in Theresienstadt (his mother was later murdered at Auschwitz). Contrary to the ancient Christian idea that there is no salvation outside the church, Oesterreicher did not despair for his father. Nathan Oesterreicher had been a just man, to whom the “beatitude of the peacemakers applied.” If Oesterreicher, the son, had been a true narcissist, he might have rested content in the belief that he was saved through baptism. Yet intense love and longing for his Jewish father began opening Oesterreicher’s mind to the possibility that Jews could be saved as Jews.

The lasting gift of the converts who helped rewrite Catholic teaching on the Jews was to extend their familial sense of solidarity to us, to Jews and Christians. In 1964, Oesterreicher personally crafted that part of Nostra Aetate according to which the church no longer speaks of mission to the Jews, but looks forward to the day when all “peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’” (The last phrase is taken from Zephaniah 3:9.) With this new teaching, the church gave up the attempt to turn the other into the self, and after this point Catholics involved in Christian-Jewish dialogue tend not to be converts. They live out of the new understanding that Jews and Christians are brothers. The converts crossed a border to the other while in some deep sense remaining themselves, but by recognizing the legitimacy, indeed the blessing, of our differences, they helped bring down a wall separating Jews and Christians.

(Emphasis supplied
John Connelly is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Afterword by Michael Hoffman

This essay by Mr. Connelly is based on a flagrant misrepresentation of the doctrine of St. Paul. Clearly Catholics will only be absolved of the charge of “anti-semitism” when they have completely abandoned the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and adhere to a false Christ and a false Gospel in the name of Christ.

There are a few lines toward the end of Romans 11 (not Romans 9 and 10), that when taken out of context can be used to support the Talmudic racial pride of persons who describe themselves as “Jews.”

Romans 11: 26-27: And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob, for this is my covenant unto them when I shall take way their sins.

This is very different from the spin Connelly has applied. Israel is going to be saved by the Messiah Jesus Christ (“the Deliverer”). Saved from what? Saved from their sins by turning away from their ungodliness. Does Prof. Connelly even once mention the sins of ancient Jews and modern Judiacs, or their ungodliness? No, he is too busy aggrandizing their racial pride. For this reason he is an enemy, not a friend, of the Judaic people. Encouraging self worship is a grave transgression of God’s grace and plan of salvation, and a sure path to destruction for any people.

Notice what Connelly has omitted. The Apostle Paul does not say that all the Jews of every age would be saved. He showed that a majority of them in his time were lost to sin. Connelly in his fabrication of a Pauline Jewish utopia dare not mention why St. Paul is hated by Orthodox rabbis. It was Paul who said that the Jews killed the Lord Jesus Christ and are contrary to all men (I Thessalonians 2:15). The basis of Nostra Aetate just went out the window in one fell swoop of St. Paul’s pen. Paul wasn’t speaking racially, but spiritually/ideologically. He himself was a Jew as were all the apostles of the earliest days of the Church. But when a person converts to the Gospel of Jesus Christ he is no longer of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam or Judaism. He is a new person and a new identity in Christ. The supposed “converts” from Judaism to Catholicism who are the subject of the preceding essay never abandoned their Judaic race pride. Connelly approves of a reviewer's statement that, "They had retained a sense of themselves as Jews even in the Catholic Church.”

Romans 11: 28-31: As far as the gospel is concerned, they are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are beloved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable. Just as you who were at one time disobedient to God have now received mercy as a result of their disobedience, so they too have now become disobedient in order that they too may now receive mercy as a result of God's mercy to you.

How has the Church from its inception, publicly interpreted this passage, until the revolution of the 20th century? “Beloved” — this signifies that God still looks up on them with interest and intends to do them good. Nothing here implies that God approves of their conduct or their disobedience. What is the mercy of God toward them? That Israelites alive some time in the future will be converted to Christ.

Connelly the Jew-hater tries to give “the Jews” security in their sins, as all diabolically inclined ecumenicists do. He is encouraging them to continue in their disobedience and refusal of Christ. Why not, since they are saved by their race. Authentic Christians know from the words of Jesus Christ and John the Baptist that this cannot be true, and that this is a new and false Gospel.

Connelly doesn’t even take all of Paul in context, much less Jesus and John the Baptist. In Romans 2: 5-7 and 8-10, St. Paul declares: “In the rigid obstinancy of your heart you are laying up for yourself a store of retribution for the day of retribution, when God’s just judgment will be revealed and he will pay every man for what he has done...Those who are governed by selfish ambition, who refuse obedience to the truth and take the wrong for their guide, there will be the fury of retribution. There will be grinding misery for every human being who is an evil-doer, for the Jew first and for the Greek also.

Romans 2:11: For God has no favorites. Romans 3:9: Are Jews any better off? No, not at all!

Throughout his essay, Prof. Connelly encourages Judaics in their racial self-worship and attempts to make gentiles guilty for not encouraging this destructive pride. Is this of Christ? Connelly writes: “Jews carried a special holiness...Jews are always very dear to God...because Christ has issued from them according to the flesh...intense love and longing for his Jewish father began opening Oesterreicher's mind to the possibility that Jews could be saved as Jews.”

In other words, they don’t need Jesus Christ to be saved. We ask Mr. Connelly if it is true that race is the basis of their salvation and not the Messiah of Israel, why was Jesus' first mission of conversion “to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”? Was He mistaken and confused? (These are negative characteristics attributed to Him by the Babylonian Talmud). Or did Jesus know what He was talking about when He said to the Jews who bragged of being Abraham’s progeny: “If you were Abraham’s children you would do the works Abraham did, but now you seek to kill me, a man who who has told you the truth that I heard from God” ((John 8: 39-40).

St. Paul is not God. We don’t filter the words of Jesus Christ through the apostle Paul. Paul’s words must be understood in conformity to the light of the doctrine of Jesus Christ, who told the Jewish braggarts who were boasting of their racial status that they were Abraham’s children only if they did the works of Abraham. By this Jesus was referring to the faith of Abraham. These Jews had no faith in Jesus and hence they were not Abraham’s children.

They were indeed Abraham’s children according to the flesh. By rejecting their Messiah and committing their accursed oral traditions of Babylon and Egypt to writing after the crucifixion of Israel’s Messiah, they created a “Synagogue of Satan”consisting of the religion of carnal, counterfeit Israel, as was foretold in Rev. 2:9 and 3:9.

The Pharisees also bragged to John the Baptist concerning their presumed status as The Holy People. This race pride is the very hallmark of the Pharisee, then as now. The Pharisees told St. John, “We have Abraham for Our Father.” If John the Baptist had been a Second Vatican Council modernist, he would have replied, “I know that. Your racial status absolves you of your sins and of any obligation to believe on Jesus Christ to be saved.”

Unfortunately for con-artists like Professor John Connelly of the University of California at Berkeley, St. John replied, “Do not presume to say to yourselves ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children from Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the tree. Every tree that does not bring forth good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 3: 9-10).

Jesus said the children of Abraham are defined as those who do the works of Abraham. St. John the Baptist stated that the children of Abraham are identified as those who bear good fruit. For this reason St. Peter declared that it was the Christians of whatever nationality who "are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” No racial qualification applied, but people like Connelly and a host of other illusionists are trying to inject racism back into the Church in the double-crossing name of combating racism: "Oesterreicher and Thieme penned a Catholic statement on the Jews, arguing, against the racists, that Jews carried a special holiness.”

Do you see the diabolic double-mind being pushed on Catholics, and by extension, all people? We’re not holy, as St. Peter declared, but those who reject Jesus Christ are specially holy and confirming this exalted, Christless racial status is a means of being “against the racists.”

Zionist and Talmudic racists are not an issue. Why doesn't Prof. Connelly refer to the racists among the rabbis who declare that a thousand Arabs are not worth one Jewish finger nail? Or that Jewish blood is worth more than gentile blood? Or that Arab babies can be murdered as a form of preventive warfare, and Palestinians should be exterminated?

And what of the people today who imagine they are the genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and in fact are not? Are these Christ-denying gentiles saved by claiming to be Jews? Are descendants of the Khazars who say they are Jews saved by — what? Race? Which race? This is the type of ambiguity, confusion and uncertainty sown by any race-based theology of salvation.

Connelly is so ignorant of the beliefs of key 20th century rabbis that he writes, "If history was a series of trials sent to punish the Jews for failing to accept Christ, then what meaning did Auschwitz have? Were the Nazis instruments of God's will, meant to make the Jews finally turn to Christ? To answer yes to this question was obscene...”

Well, Prof. Connelly, you just condemned as “obscene" Shas Grand Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, as well as Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late messiah of Chabad-Lubavitch, both of whom taught that Hitler was God’s avenging angel on masses of  “Jews” who had abandoned the study of the Talmud. (Cf. Judaism’s Strange Gods [2011 edition], pp. 37-39).

In spite of his ignorance, Connelly accuses the Church of being ignorant of the basics of the New Testament, having taught in public for 1900 years contrary to the Second Vatican Council: "In the years that followed, the converts had to stage a revolution in a church that claimed to be unchanging. They did so by shifting church teaching to Paul's letter to the Romans, chapters 9–11.”

Connelly wants us to believe that until Judaic converts to Catholicism got to work in the late 19th and 20th centuries, all of the early Church Fathers, Councils, popes, theologians and saints were ignorant of the true meaning of Paul’s letter to the Romans! This kind of absurd hyperbole robs Connelly of any chance of being taken seriously by anyone conversant with historic Christianity.

Another diabolic dimension to Connelly’s subtle Jew-hate consists in him putting the onus for the revolution almost entirely on the backs of Judaic converts, repeatedly apportioning to them alone the falsification of the Gospel. Here’s a bulletin for you, professor: the modernist movement at work inside the bowels of the Church was led and directed by gentiles throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The men most responsible for the revolution were four popes: Roncalli (John XXIII), Montini (Paul VI), Wojtyla (John Paul II) and Ratzinger (Benedict XVI); gentiles everyone, along with a legion of their cardinals, bishops and periti; again almost exclusively gentiles.

Is it not somewhat strange that Connelly seek to stigmatize Judaic converts generally as subversive of tradition, without offering any countering examples of loyal Catholic Judaics? He makes no mention in his essay in Forward newspaper of the fact that the Catholic Church was well-served by many illustrious Judaic converts who left their ethnic identity behind them when they took up Christ’s Cross. St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross (in whose writings one will find not an iota of Talmudic mentality), were descended of such Judaic converts. In the 1950s, Catholic convert David Gordon, father of author Mary Gordon, carried a heavy wooden cross through Harvard Square at noon in repentance for his sins in his past life as a Judaic. Gordon, and thousands of other unsung converts like him, were loyal sons of the Church, untainted by any revolution. Many converted under the unreconstructed papacy of the much maligned Pope Pius XII.

Berkeley Professor of History John Connelly fairly gloats at the idea that, thanks to the revolution inside the highest levels of Catholicism, “the church no longer speaks of mission to the Jews.” With friends like him, Judaic people don’t need any enemies.

Michael Hoffman is the author of Judaism’s Strange Gods and the editor of Revisionist History newsletter.



Malleus Haereticorum said...

Thanks to the Second Vatican Council, Judeo-Masonry began to taste the fruits of its centuries-long effort to dechristianize the Church, to take Christ out of Christianity. John Connelly's article is smug and self-serving, but he's indisputably correct in observing that, with the willing and scandalous assistance and complicity of the conciliar and post-conciliar popes, and a host of modern-day Marranos, that objective is well-nigh met.

LaSalette153 said...

The afterword of Michael Hoffman on the piece written by Professor Connelly is too complex to be commentated on just a few lines. He is right. Essentially the Council of V2 was the hatching of a long period of underground works made by the particular Jews who have been corrupted by the Talmud. Those particular Jews, who trace their root since the captivity of Babylon, are ruling the world of finance, news-media, and politic through stooges. They are the ones who follow the diabolical Protocol of the Learned Elders of Zion. Their plan is to pave the way to "His Majesty" the Antichrist,in the destruction of the sole obstacle of this "coming" which is the Roman Catholic Church. The Freemasons had infiltrated the Church since the nineteenth century, they nearly had a Pope in the person of the Luciferian Cardinal Rampolla, and at last had their first Pope in the person of John XXIII. J23 was a Freemason, and started his work of sap the day after his election by changing the electoral rule for the next conclaves, thus assuring a near uninterrupted succession of apostate Pope (JP1 was an exception, and was assassinated after 33 days). Paul VI, a proven homosexual (see the Italian publication Chiesa Viva), was a hidden Jew, as well as a Freemason. John-Paul II (named Karol Woztila Katz), could have applied for Israeli citizenship, since his grand mother was a Jewesse. All those Popes, including our present Pope Benedict XVI, a proven Satanist (see "the Satanic Miter of Benedict" on Chiesa Viva, translated in English) have been instrumental to the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church. They were, and still are with B16, the stooges of the Talmudic Jews. Their work is, after the destruction of the Church, to replace it into a gentile church of Lucifer, thus becoming a satellite to the Jewish church of Lucifer that presently controls the Knesset of Israel.
The false teachings, the false liturgy, the trampling on the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church are a completion of a diabolical plan called the Alta Vendita document of the Permanent Instruction. A final consequence, will be the enthronement of the Antichrist, and then hell on earth!

farmer giles said...

you've got to be kidding, right? the Catholic Church is Babylon from the beginning, from the 1st Pope Simon Magus, yes the very same from the New Testament. How could a holy institution be in Rome, of all places? Rome?? Capital of all heathenry from the days of Noah? Celibate priests and nuns, straight from the old Roman-Babylonian mystery religion? Every abomination and filth, a "different Jesus" as warned.

The whole thing is the devils work from the beginning. the real Church, the 1st church, the destination of the Judean exiles, was in Glastonbury Britain. Galilee and Gaelic...

1st truth- catholics have nothing to do with Israel. If Judaism is the counterfeit Judah then Catholism is the counterfeit of gentile Israel. Notice the father from israelite or hebrew, the more catholic. it's a religion for mystified peasants and the sorcerers who rule them.

Michael Hoffman said...

Dear Farmer Giles

I will not endeavor to refute more than one of the wild and reckless charges you have leveled.

You say that celibacy is of the Roman-Babylonian mystery religion.

Were Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul also of that Roman-Babylonian paganism?


It is only because of the "temptation to immorality” (I Cor. 7:2) that Paul gives the teaching about each man and woman having a spouse and giving each other their "conjugal rights” (I Cor. 7:3). He states, "I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another” (I Cor. 7:6-7).


He who marries "does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (I Cor. 7:38).

In Matthew 19 concerning divorce and remarriage, the disciples responded, "If such is the case between a man and his wife, it is better not to marry" (Matthew 19:10). Jesus then took the opportunity to uphold celibacy:


Try to disabuse yourself of formulaic shorthand and actually do some serious study of the issues instead of thinking in sound bites.

farmer giles said...

1 Timothy comes to mind...

sound bites are more effective than long verbosity. all real christian temperment, the substantial inheritance of Western anything, is found in basically Protestant Europe and the outliers.

there is nothing remotely roman catholic in the lives or story of the early Church. Why is English the world language today? why is English the best modern language for the Bible?

the basic culture of catholic countries (i lived in Spain for many years) is decidedly remote from authentic Christian awareness, which is most found in latter-day Israel, of course. The Stone Kingdom in the "isles and coastlands far off" is not fascist Italy, it is or was Britain and all similars.

I should have written "priests at all", most of which have never been celibate, one way or another.

so i googled and found this

which puts the subject together well.

The Catholic Church is a very strange beast indeed; try putting on that 'geo-occult' hat and think simple: how could something holy ever be in Rome, of all places? Who has murdered more between catholics and protestants? who are the real persecutors? why have protestant peoples been so much more successful and abundant, grown so more numerous, more prosperous more powerful in the world, if not for the Almighty's exceptional blessings?

Michael Hoffman said...

You have not answered the Scriptures I cited. After announcing that celibacy was a pagan construct, and being countered with the words of Christ and Paul, you reply with a rant about the city of Rome being intrinsically forever evil. Perhaps you might go and stand at the Arco di Tito in Rome and perhaps you will obtain a sense of the prophetic fulfillment of Christ’s words about the Temple.

The rest of your bigotry is unworthy of comment, except to say that to continue the hatred and fratricide between Catholics and Protestants is repulsive.

LaSalette153 said...

Farmer Giles fired four questions that I, as a Catholic, must answer:
1. Rome was the center of the world during Christ. It was therefore logical for Christianity to establish its seat there. Eventually the Roman Empire was converted. How did this happened? The Romans had the Pax Romana, which was tolerant to all religions (even to the monotheist Judaism), as a result of this tolerance the Catholics had only problems from the Jews who do not recognize Jesus Christ, but Christianity was accepted in Rome at the begining. Rapidly the Christians started having problems with the gentiles, because each time the Catholics opened a church in a town, the gods of the pagans were disturbed, the pagans priests lost their power, and all temporal benefits due to spell or witchcraft disapeared among the pagans, which explains the persecutions of the Christians. The Catholics are peaceful, but the disturbances about temporal matters was too much for the tolerant Romans. The Pax Christiana was eventually established, and lasted 1000 years in spite of the assaults from the hordes of Atila and from the Muhamedans,... until the Reformation. "Rome" is only a location. The Roman Catholic Church has a generaly saintly clergy.
2. Who murdered more? The Protestants came after the Catholics; such numbers are hard to debate since they are inevitably given by the survivors, however the motives of the murders cannot be deleted. For example in America, the Pilgrims offered blankets infected with small-pox to the Indians, while at the same time the Franciscans Friars, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, converted and pacified the Indians, who, as the Romans were with the pagan gods, were under the spell of the Featheredsnake bloodthirsty god of the Aztecs.
3. Who is the real persecutor? Saul of Tarsus was a real persecutor, until becoming St. Paul the Apostle. The Roman pagans were until being converted to Catholicism, and apparently now the former Catholics who have separated from the Church are the real persecutors. Please look at the history of the Cristoceros war, and its atrocities conducted against the Catholics conducted by the regime of the (Freemason) Mexican President Calles. And please aknowledge the complicity in omition of the international medias of the moment. Learn also that at an other time, the original documents of the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe disapeared during the brief occupation of Mexico City by the Yankees. A blattant theft from the Protestant controlled USA.
4. The "properity" of the Protestant is from this world, and Jesus Christ the Son of God the Father and of the Virgin Mary was born in poverty; Mary gave away the gifts of the Magies; the Holy Family lived as fugitives shortly afterward in Egypt; Jesus Christ carried no money during His ministry; the one who carried the purse was the traitor Judas of Escariot. Perhaps this should be clear enought that the "prosperity of the Protestant" does not come from the true God. For this latest point of Farmer Giles who calls the "Almighty's exceptional blessings", he (as well as many other non-Catholics) seems to be calling the name of the Lord in vain: a mortal sin.

steve button said...

Superb afterwood and superb slapdown of some crude and ignorant attacks - well done, Mr. Hoffman.

God Bess You, sir....