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Justin_Swanton
Guest
:nope:
I would put money on it the Houston country club was not run by Catholics.
Christians should apologize for helping to marginalize gays, pope says
- Status
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
Sorry. This is a topic to which I have dedicated too many decades of my life and of my priesthood to not give a very definitive response. Years were spent analyzing this issue after the Council and the work continues with another generation.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
The Shoah was the culmination of centuries of horrific behaviour that the Church looks back on with profoundest sorrow, regret and repentance
Augustin Cardinal Bea is, for all who knew him and those who will only meet him in Heaven, unexcelled in this re-evaluation
To know the mind of the Church, the literature is extensive. I would suggest beginning with WE REMEMBER: A REFLECTION ON THE SHOAH. Saint John Paul II wrote:
- On numerous occasions during my Pontificate I have recalled with a sense of deep sorrow the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Second World War. The crime which has become known as the Shoah remains an indelible stain on the history of the century
*
The document specifies:*
The very magnitude of the crime raises many questions … about the reality of the Shoah and its causes. Much scholarly study still remains to be done /…/ It calls for a “moral and religious memory” and, particularly among Christians, a very serious reflection on what gave rise to it
The fact that the Shoah took place in Europe, that is, in **countries of long-standing Christian civilization, raises the question of the relation between the Nazi persecution and the attitudes down the centuries of Christians towards the Jews
The history of relations between Jews and Christians is a tormented one. His Holiness Pope John Paul II has recognized this fact in his repeated appeals to Catholics to see where we stand with regard to our relations with the Jewish people. In effect, the balance of these relations over two thousand years has been quite negative**
/…/ But Christian mobs who attacked /…/ synagogues, not without being influenced by certain interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people as a whole. **“In the Christian world—I do not say on the part of the Church as such—erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility towards this people”. Such interpretations of the New Testament have been totally and definitively rejected by the Second Vatican Council
Despite the Christian preaching of love for all, even for one’s enemies, the prevailing mentality down the centuries penalized minorities and those who were in any way “different”. Sentiments of anti-Judaism in some Christian quarters, and the gap which existed between the Church and the Jewish people, led to a generalized discrimination, which ended at times in expulsions or attempts at forced conversions /…/ In times of crisis such as famine, war, pestilence or social tensions, the Jewish minority was sometimes taken as a scapegoat and became the victim of violence, looting, even massacres
/…/ But it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecutions launched against the Jews by National Socialism when it reached power?** /…/
At first the leaders of the Third Reich sought to expel the Jews. Unfortunately, the governments of some Western countries of Christian tradition, including some in North and South America, were more than hesitant to open their borders to the persecuted Jews. /…/ [T]he leaders of those nations were aware of the hardships and dangers to which Jews living in the territories of the Third Reich were exposed. The closing of borders to Jewish emigration in those circumstances, whether due to anti-Jewish hostility or suspicion, political cowardice or shortsightedness, or national selfishness, lays a heavy burden of conscience on the authorities in question
In the lands where the Nazis undertook mass deportations, the brutality which surrounded these forced movements of helpless people should have led to suspect the worst. Did Christians give every possible assistance to those being persecuted, and in particular to the persecuted Jews? /…/
[A]s Pope John Paul II has recognized, alongside such courageous men and women, the spiritual resistance and concrete action of other Christians was not that which might have been expected from Christ’s followers. We cannot know how many Christians in countries occupied or ruled by the Nazi powers or their allies were horrified at the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours and yet were not strong enough to raise their voices in protest. For Christians, this heavy burden of conscience of their brothers and sisters during the Second World War must be a call to penitence
We deeply regret the errors and failures of those sons and daughters of the Church. We make our own what is said in the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate, which unequivocally affirms: “The Church … mindful of her common patrimony with the Jews, and motivated by the Gospel’s spiritual love and by no political considerations, deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source”
We recall and abide by what Pope John Paul II, addressing the leaders of the Jewish community in Strasbourg in 1988, stated: “I repeat again with you the strongest condemnation of anti-Semitism and racism, which are opposed to the principles of Christianity”*
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SecretCatholic
Guest
I believe your suspicions to be correct also. That’s why we need to educate and evangelize all people, including those with same-sex attraction to show them the logical contradictions of “gay marriage”, adoption by homosexual couples, and rejecting celibacy as an option. If people understand that these things are contradictory to God’s will and goodness and that they have terrible consequences spiritually and socially, they may get the Good News of the Gospel.
Marc, let me also extend a sincere apology on behalf of Catholics and Christians everywhere if you have been treated uncharitably or unjustly by any follower of Jesus.
But note that I was also “bullied” in school though I was not gay. It is a common experience in school.- One where you learn to stand up for yourself and even throw a few punches, at least in the old days, before school children were tazered and put in handcuffs for acting their age. That said, I can see how further differentiation in school could have caused you to be more aggressively targeted. Children and adolescents pick more on those more easily picked on by virtue of their differences.You see, it’s not any particular trait that causes the bullying, but the fact that that trait is sufficiently different to be pointed and laughed at. Nobody laughs at our strangely protruding human ears- because everybody has them!- unless they are different enough to be made fun of. This is just basic human psychology.
There certainly is a large-scale agenda being pushed on society. The “gay agenda” is merely a subset of it. The end goal is to destabilize the family and further subdue and remake a weakened society in the image that many powerful forces wish. The issue with “gay marriage” is not that I don’t want you to be happy or to have rights. The issue with gay marriage is that it will ultimately destabilize the entire institution of marriage.
I don’t think you’re trying to make evil in the world, I believe you are trying to be happy, but unfortunately you are on the wrong path if you are living a homosexual lifestyle- as you are not meant for another man, but maybe for a woman, maybe for celibacy, and ultimately for God.
You may not be able to see past your situation, which I can sympathize with, but it will not satisfy you and it is absolutely detrimental to the family, and in turn, to our society.
You are free to make your life decisions, as we all are. If you wish to live with a man, and make vows to him and even live in a monogamous relationship with him (which is rare in men, but not absolutely impossible) I won’t try to stop you any further than evangelizing to you. If you want most of the legal benefits of marriage, like a pension plan, that’s fine too. But it is the official un-definition of marriage which I will fight against, because of the reasons stated above.
The number of people who accept or reject something does not reflect on its morality, but on its popularity. Most people today reject chastity, yet it does not make sex before marriage any more moral than it was a hundred years ago. The same goes for masturbation, contraception and abortion, for instance. If you’re right you’re right- you don’t need the public’s approval for that! But if you’re wrong, you’re wrong- No matter how much the public approves.
I urge you to reflect on whether you are truly following your conscience or your will, perhaps out of the fears we all have- the fear of missing out on the world’s pleasures or of being alone. One day soon, all of us on this forum and in all of current society will have died, as is the way of nature, and it won’t matter what society said or didn’t say or approved of or didn’t approve of. It will only matter what we did and why we did it and we will all be accountable for our actions, in accordance to our understanding and intention. If you ask and insist on God’s guidance, he will provide it. I say all this in full charity and love.
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SecretCatholic
Guest
Forgive me Father, but the Church is in the state is in large part because its priests and bishops have NOT obeyed the Pope or the Magesterium on important matters for decades, preferring to do things as they see fit and often as the world sees fit.
So now Christianity is also responsible for the Holocaust, where many Christians were also slaughtered? Never mind all that the Church and the Pope personally did to SAVE as many Jews as possible during WWII.
We’re all sinners, but I get very suspicious when all or most sin is attributed to one group, whether it be the Jews or the Christians.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
Pope Benedict said it very well when he directed the gaze upon ourselves…the utter failure of the leaders and members of the Catholic Church to have done what they could. His Holiness wrote to the Catholic Bishops of the world in July 2007:
Looking back over the past, to the divisions which in the course of the centuries have rent the Body of Christ, one continually has the impression that, at critical moments when divisions were coming about, not enough was done by the Church’s leaders to maintain or regain reconciliation and unity. One has the impression that omissions on the part of the Church have had their share of blame for the fact that these divisions were able to harden. This glance at the past imposes an obligation on us today
It is one of those things which His Holiness wrote which I have always close at hand, to reflect upon.
meltzerboy
New member
Of course there were valiant Christians who protected and sheltered Jews from the Nazis, as well as Christian countries such as Denmark. And there has been much research by both Christian and Jewish historians to affirm the positive role and efforts by the Pope during World War II and the Holocaust. Still, there was, at the same time, a history of Jewish discrimination and persecution which predated the Holocaust, a history which cannot easily be overlooked despite the relatively recent research concerning the Inquisition, which places more blame on the State than the Church. It is true that the whole matter of Jewish persecution in Europe during ages past is not as simple an issue as was once believed; nonetheless, to completely erase such injustices of the past as a potent precursor of the Holocaust would be a terrible example of reconstructive history, almost equal to the efforts by some to minimize the direct role played by the Nazis in the attempted extermination of the Jewish people.
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zamyrabyrd
Guest
Absolutely brilliant post.
Fear lurks in the back of so much destructive, anti-social, self-harming behavior. I am now reading the book, “Betrayal Bond”, so what you wrote chimes right in.
The mechanism of fear is neurologically hard-wired to the extent that trauma controls us. It is worse when it happens early on in childhood. It becomes difficult to impossible to untangle the mess. Meanwhile people go on acting out like poisoned automatons, not knowing why they are behaving the way they do.
Hopefully we do get judged according to our understanding and intention, or at least such extenuating circumstances can be considered in part.
Fear of loneliness has a way of blinding people to pursue unhealthy relationships. I have seen this happen time and again, to take the now at the expense of the future. It has been reported by gays themselves and also told to me personally that lacking a healthy role modelling or bonding with one’s father was the deciding factor to enter this lifestyle.
Right and healthy go together. There cannot be a separation between the two.
Again, this has nothing to do with social approval. Advertising has a lot to do with convincing people that foodless foods are good for you as they did smoking several decades ago. The powers that be push counterintuitive lifestyles such as same sex marriage on the public who know in their hearts (even if they are not educated) that this is a contradiction in terms and ultimately destructive for society.
This would have never passed without ceaseless marketing maneuvers and plenty of money to push the agenda through.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
The character limit of this post would not allow me even to begin to simply list the offenses perpetrated against the Jewish Community in the Roman Jewish Ghetto alone over the span of a matter of a short few years, let alone the centuries.
You are correct that the Roman ghetto, actually, was marginally less horrible than the nightmare the Jewish people confronting in other parts of Catholic Europe.
Actually, as I sit here, I could still pick out in my mind most any building in the Jewish Quarter of Rome and even then I would exceed the 6000 character limit in telling you just about the horror associated with that building.
You ask “How bad, really, was it?” Well, restrictions on the ghetto and on the lives of the people who lived there ended only when the papacy was defeated as a temporal power and the House of Savoy consolidated its power over Rome – apart from Vatican City – in 1870. The relief, in other words, was NOT due to the Church but to the King. And the Church in Italy, but above all Rome, carries that tragic and doleful memory. As does the Jewish Community in Rome. As do many politically minded of Lazio…to this very day.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
We had wonderful individuals…all too few of them, alas…Catholic and non-Catholic who were engaged in World War II in an effort that is almost unimaginable by young people today to try to save lives. There were those who died doing so and there were those who risked everything to do so. We just celebrated at the beginning of the month the canonisation of one of these latter. One of the most extraordinary women of the 20th century. And there will be more, please God, raised to the altar.
But, yes, the Church has arrived a very severe judgment about itself and about people who belonged to it in that era…in a way it could only do under first a Polish Pope and then a German Pope who lived through that era and knew it with an intimacy that not even an Italian does.
The Shoah and the second world war completely altered how Roman Catholicism in Europe looked at itself, looked at non-Catholic Christians, and looked at Jewish people…and in less than 20 years, the Second Vatican Council emerged from the generation who had lived through the war and its aftermath. I hope that vision is never forgotten by the generations that have come, and will come, subsequently.
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zamyrabyrd
Guest
First of all, I am ashamed of Christian treatment of the Jews for two millennia. If they had stopped to check, persecution was a violation of a moral code, rather than fulfillment, the same argument I use when people say Christians waged wars.
Hatred of the Jews by the Nazis had much to do with their hatred of anyone who would restrict their acting out or make them feel guilty, namely, Jesus. So if they could get a watered down version of Christianity like the German Church, they could self-absolve.
Xenophobia or racial superiority was rife at the end of the 19th century while Europeans were ravaging the African continent. I read that the first real holocaust of the 20th century was not the Armenians but a wholesale slaughter of West Africans by Germans. (I can look up the link, really horrific, working and starving tribes to death just like they did in the concentration camps a few decades later.)
I had an interesting conversation with a Jewish therapist many years ago. She said the Jews had to band together as an endangered species. This meant they were more protective of themselves and children (the Ghettos because of better hygiene escaped the ravages of the Black Death), more aware of the need for education, therefore more literate and rational, not liable to superstition or succumbing to rumors, in short, a very functional society within a society. So in a way being marginalized had its advantages. Above all, if they were accepted into the larger society may have ceased to exist as Jews. A hitherto unforeseen problem is becoming a majority in their own country. But discussing that would be off topic.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
x
Charity is a magnanimous gift on the one hand…but there are moments when one is not to spare people from confronting what they should be forced to look upon with un-shielded eye so that they may thereafter raise their eyes to Heaven to plead in intercessory prayer for what had been and which they cannot in any way deny. And be shaken to the very core of their being by what they are forced to confront.
There is, for very good reason, a different attitude in Europe after the war about squarely confronting the historical past and coming to terms with it…it is not as fulsome yet as it needs to be but much better than in a time I can yet distantly, but distinctly, recall.
Actually…if I may say, as a priest who lived in a certain moment in time and in a certain place, you have glossed over much and even too much…and been far too charitable; justice has its own demands.
Charity is a magnanimous gift on the one hand…but there are moments when one is not to spare people from confronting what they should be forced to look upon with un-shielded eye so that they may thereafter raise their eyes to Heaven to plead in intercessory prayer for what had been and which they cannot in any way deny. And be shaken to the very core of their being by what they are forced to confront.
There is, for very good reason, a different attitude in Europe after the war about squarely confronting the historical past and coming to terms with it…it is not as fulsome yet as it needs to be but much better than in a time I can yet distantly, but distinctly, recall.
meltzerboy
New member
There is some truth to the notion that persecuted people become a more cohesive group due to the necessity of survival–physically, psychologically, and spiritually. There is also some truth to the idea that the Jewish people, no longer a persecuted group (at least not in the U.S.) must now forge its identity in a way other than being a victim (which I never could fully tolerate, understandable as it has been). On the other hand, given the opportunity, I am sure that most groups who have historically been victims–whether Jews, Blacks, Native Americans, or gays–would much prefer never to have been put in that position in the first place despite its unintentional “benefits.”
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JosieN
Guest
It poses an obligation on us today to do what? To say we are responsible because they failed? I do not mean to be rude or insulting. I just do not understand the Church’s reasons for worrying about past mistakes.
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SecretCatholic
Guest
We cannot turn to God but reject truth. I will accept the truth, if reasonable and convincing evidence is provided to me. I know there has been bad blood between Christians and Jews in the past. I have never personally experienced this, but I have read enough to see that this has been the case. And I cannot deny a possible influence of this on Germany in the 20th century. But there is a sharp distinction between this and blaming Christianity for the Holocaust.
Since, it is the topic on hand, by this reasoning, can’t we blame the decline of morality in the West partially on the gays? Indeed, homosexual behavior and support is a scandal and has probably caused many, many in our society to sin. So, why is it okay to assume a Christian influence or even cause for the Holocaust, but not a homosexual influence or cause for the decline of morality in the West?
What I see is an eager willingness and even enthusiasm to point fingers at some groups- mainly the previously or presently dominant groups in society, while carefully and forcefully avoiding pointing the finger at groups that are viewed as marginalized, even though they have also sinned lots in our human history. I would propose that the problem is not with any particular group of people (although certainly some ideologies are more problematic than others), but that the problem lies with our deformed human nature, which of course, come out in full force once this or that group becomes dominant.
And yes, we Catholics should say “by my own grievous fault” and truthfully and repentantly acknowledge our sins. But at the present time, we are feeling more and more attacked and socially persecuted in the West. So it hardly comes as a surprise that many Catholics would cry foul when, at this time of attacks, our Pope would ask us to apologize to our attackers and those who are furthering the moral degradation of our society.
Like I said- the Pope is making lemons out of lemonade, ultimately. We Christians do need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and suffer for Christ, always thinking of serving him and saving more souls- even if that does means asking our attackers for forgiveness, since “they know not what they do.” But the Pope’s words, while perhaps appropriate for the world, are far less “pastoral” for the faithful who already feel on the defensive from the attacks of the world.
zamyrabyrd: Thanks for the compliment.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
He called us to acknowledge that, had more been done that was actually pastorally responsive, the woundedness to the Body of Christ that occurred may in fact never have happened.
In this particular sentence about which you ask, the Holy Father was challenging those who received his letter to remember the mistakes of the bishops of the past and to be more compassionate and less narrow minded today…but, rather, to be broadminded in application of pastoral norms so that yet more crises are not precipitated within the Mystical Body of Christ in our own era for being overly legalistic.
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zamyrabyrd
Guest
While not being persecuted in the new country, my grandparents who came from Italy around the same time Jews were coming over from Russia to the US, were discriminated against. After a period of proving themselves, serving honorably in the armed services, (the same could be said about the Japanese), etc., they were accepted. They had to earn it.
Being marginalized could be said for any minority in almost any majority in the world. Who could imagine that Buddhists in Myanmar could be so cruel to a Moslem minority but it is only a fact of life, the same with Albinos in African tribes. Brute force and number rule in this world of ours. It doesn’t make it right but it is a fact. Maybe the difference in the West where Christianity still has a residual effect, is that minorities can eventually have a voice and equal treatment if they prove themselves. Dhimmi in Moslem countries don’t have that option.
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Don_Ruggero
Guest
Why would we not? Actually…how could we not?
A generation does not come into being and exist apart from and distinct from the continuity out of which it emerges. That would be absurd.
We live today in a Church which Jesus entrusted to the Eleven that has become divided through the ages.
- Divisions with the most ancient of the Churches of the East in the era of Chalcedon and beyond.
- Divisions between the Orthodox Communion and the Catholic Church.
- Divisions in Western Christianity.
Ontologically, they rend the Body of Christ, to use Pope Benedict’s already quoted words. They are events of the profoundest significance to our own moment in history and indeed our very lives.
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JosieN
Guest
I assume the fault of the crisis was because they were overly legalistic. What exactly does that mean? In what ways would that exist today? It seems like a broad statement.
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JosieN
Guest
Thank you for that reply.
I agree.- Status