Help! Keepers of the faith on the attack

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…cont’d, ended]
I expect that you did not know that the church supported Hitler until it became evident that he would probably not win.

Was the Holocaust what Jesus taught?

I am partially of Serbian descent. My father converted from Eastern Orthodox to Catholicism after marrying my mother. It is difficult for me to understand why. During the war, Croatian Ustasi troops, led by Catholic priests in uniform, murdered over a million Serbian civilians for no other reason than they were not Catholic. A favorite method was to bind pregnant women hand and foot and allow them to be killed by their own birthing process. Is this how Jesus taught? This is the distinguishing behavior of the Catholic church through the ages and through this century.
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I don’t think He hanged Quakers or lynched negroes either - there is quite enough religious hatred in the world without Catholics and Protestants raking over the cruelties of the past. The less said of the sins of either, the better. Bringing up these things does nothing to spread the Love of Christ, and plenty to exasperate and embitter. Which builds up neither Protestant nor Catholic.​

 
People like this make me ill, I have found it is like feeding pearls to swine to try and dialogue with them. I can’t stand hate and lies spewed out from a wholly ignorant person. He obviously knows nothing about the Catholic Church and is repeating soundbites. People like this spread evil and lies… is that what Jesus would want… slandar and hatred? :nope:

What is the obsession with Tolkein, that he would base a psudo-intellectual argument on a writer of fiction who happened to be Catholic? Does he think we consider Tolkein a theologian or something? At first I thought the debate was a critique of Tolkein’s work, I was taken aback when I realized this fellow was using Tolkein’s work in an attack on the Catholic Church…very odd.
 
Scott Waddell:
Scott

P.S. Dave Armstrong received a similar email. I wonder if anti-Catholics have launched some kind of coordinated pestering mission. :confused:
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Did he get one of these recently?

I should have explained this email but I was so shocked to get it, my mind was circling big time.

He has a question and answer section on his website and someone asked why he didn’t carry Tolkian’s works and his reply was that Catholics are not Christian claiming to be an ex-catholic. I knew he wasn’t an ex-catholic but didn’t realize he was into the extreme nutty stuff until he cited Alberto Rivara. Even the protestants won’t claim him.

It bothers me that he uses a commercial website to lie about the Church but at the same time is it worth a debate with someone who obviously can’t discern fact and fiction.
 
Hi Brandon,

You’ll have to visit the Keepers of the Faith website to address Jeff. I posted his email.

Kathy
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SDA2RC:
Hi Jeff,

I appreciate the thought and time you have put into your post. It covered a lot of topics, and you made some interesting points and conclusion.

However, because it is so broad, I would be suprised if it will get a lot of attention on this board. So let me ask you… you obviously came here because you are concerned about us and about the state of the Church. Maybe it would help if you started with one point that you feel we need to change, and explain what it is and why, then we can have a focused and lively dialog on the doctrine of your choice?

In Christ,

Brandon
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jimmytoes:
Correct me if I’m wrong… It looks as if he replied to a defense of Tolkien on your part and then cut and pasted a bunch of paragraphs to point out the “errors” of the Church.

First off, I believe JRR was avidly into Mythology, not the same thing as paganism. Beyond that, I would go with the one thing at a time approach. IF he is truely “open-minded”

And yes, 65 million, 95 million, 20 million? If you have a copy of Karl Keating’s “Catholicism and Fundamentalism”, there’s a chapter on the inquisition, in fact, there’s probablly a chapter on each of his paragraphs… They are pretty standard.

His personal sharing about the bad catholic croatians and the good orthodox serbs is meaningless in the 500+ years of blood and hatred between these two groups, but you may want to remind him that there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Good luck.
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Yes, replied to a comment I made on his website about a month ago concerning Tolkian. I explained it in another post. I am reading Karl’s book now but am not too sure if a back and forth battle is worth it with him. If it took him a month to collect what he did in the email, then all he’s doing is searching for the lies that have been spread. He doesn’t know anything first hand, that’s obvious. He’s using lies about the the church to make money.
 
Thank you Jennifer and Deb and everyone for all the great information and suggestions.
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Jennifer123:
Where do you begin? I’m not sure it would be fruitful to try to discuss these things with him, but you may want to give it a shot. But let him know that you intend to stay Catholic, you would like to share why and ask that he discuss one thing at a time.
I guess you could start with the first misconception, the inquisition, and go from there. Search these forums for information or go to some of these sites that may help:
catholic.com/
cuf.org/
scripturecatholic.com/
envoymagazine.com/

Good luck!
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KDoerr!

I have read the two first posts on this thread now! I dont’ think there is much we can do about people like that. To give information about thrue catholisism to such unpolite and vocal aggressive people seems like water off a duck’s back. They WILL NOT understand! :rolleyes:

I think that answers shall be given with the thougth of people that still are inside Church, but are bad trained in faith. They might be helped from falling in the snares of the devil by be given good referances to strengthen their Catholic faith. http://bestsmileys.com/buttons/1.gif

Well after reading that long letter it is not easy to know if one shall laugh or cry. I have gone a bit imune to all the anticatholic stuff. I have found many webpages about The Whore of Babylon, the Beast of the Revealtion and so on. It’s a pity how people let themselves be fooled to believe that the Catholic Church is the problem. But with so many people looking at the wrong place for the devil, thinking it is the catholic church, Satan sure will be left to work undisturbed other places!
http://bestsmileys.com/dead/2.gif

:coffee: :coffee::bible1: :gopray: ❤️
 
I think that what angers me most, is that the guy is obviously lieing. He must have very little actual faith in his own beliefs if he has to fabricate some education in Catholic theology. Is he that afraid of us?
 
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cestusdei:
This guy doesn’t know Catholicism. For example there weren’t 65 million people in Europe at the time of the Inquisition. He didn’t pay attention in class for 10 years.
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The Black Death is usually believed to have killed somewhere between 20 million and 40 million European people within approximately 3 years in the 1400’s–which in turn is estimated to have been approximately one quarter to one-third of the population of Europe. There were certainly 65 million people in Europe-- most estimates are there were close to 100 million inhabitants of Europe by 1600, despite the encroachments of plague.

The Inquisition–using the term loosely to refer to ALL religious persecution inspired by Roman Catholicism–was an 800-year project–from circa the political ascendancy of the Papacy in the 800’s through the late 1600’s. Plenty of time to kill 65 million people, and plenty of people around to have allowed such a massive extermination. Bear in mind that Protestant historians do not generally feel obliged to make the fine distinctions which some Catholic historians do about what was and was not done ‘officially’ by the Church. So far as they are concerned, executions for theological reasons, due to ‘crimes’ of religious dissent, done at the behest of the Catholic Church and with it’s blessing were ever so much a part of the Inquisition as anything ‘officially’ perpetuated by Church officials personally.

None of which proves that the Catholic Church did in fact countenance the killing of 65 millions of peoples. It may not have been near so many, but this would not have been for lack of potential victims.
 
The Inquisition they speak of was in Spain. There were not that many in Spain. The Inquisition lasted about 300 years. The first century was where most of the executions took place. According to what records there are available over the 3 centuries around 3000 people were put to death. Not a good thing, but considering how many Catholics were executed in Protestant Inquisitions it wasn’t that much. In fact there were few Protestants in Spain, so very few were executed. Most Protestants refuse to even consider the fate of the English Martyrs. Their blinders are on to tight.
 
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cestusdei:
The Inquisition they speak of was in Spain. There were not that many in Spain. The Inquisition lasted about 300 years. The first century was where most of the executions took place. According to what records there are available over the 3 centuries around 3000 people were put to death. Not a good thing, but considering how many Catholics were executed in Protestant Inquisitions it wasn’t that much. In fact there were few Protestants in Spain, so very few were executed. Most Protestants refuse to even consider the fate of the English Martyrs. Their blinders are on to tight.
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OTOH, how many Catholics know anything much about the Puritans ? 🙂​

We can know only what we hear.

A good book on the Spanish Inquisition and those dependent on it - such as that in Sicily - is “Frontiers of Heresy” by William Monter. He doesn’t have an axe to grind, which is even better. He covers the period up to 1630 or so.

http://bestsmileys.com/aliens/12.gif
 
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KDoerr:
Yes, replied to a comment I made on his website about a month ago concerning Tolkian. I explained it in another post. I am reading Karl’s book now but am not too sure if a back and forth battle is worth it with him. If it took him a month to collect what he did in the email, then all he’s doing is searching for the lies that have been spread. He doesn’t know anything first hand, that’s obvious. He’s using lies about the the church to make money.
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It loooks very much as though he has consulted one single source: Chick.com​

Almost everything he says can be found in Chick’s publications - the single difference is that Chick’s estimate for those killed by the Inquisition is 68 million, not 65.

http://bestsmileys.com/aliens/5.gif ##
 
Wow! I looked at Jeff Zakula’s web site and found that he railed against the liberal left for their revisionist history and teachings, and in the same breath he writes this e-mail that is filled with revisionist and fantasy history about the Roman Catholic Church. Their is no historical data to back up one iota of what he said. I would really like to know what source the “Lincoln assasination Catholic conspiracy” came from. I don’t recall any grassy knowles used in the set of the play. I don’t believe Catholicism was very popular with the confederacy, considering it was anti-slavery, pro-abolitionist at the time. The only other thing that I could say about this subject is “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show.”

With regards to the Hitler comment. I found that the most offensive statement considering 850 Polish Catholic Priest were used and murdered as guinea pigs for gang green and other medical expierements by the Nazis. From 1935 the Catholic Center Party in Germany was singled out and intimidated by the Nazis because they had more power and posed a threat to the Nazi movement. The Nazis continuously harrassed the Catholic Church out of fear that it could Politically destroy them and used all sorts of propoganda and SA, SS, and Gestapo thug tactics to intimidate Catholics.

Jeff Zakula’s entire ministry reeks of Jack T. Chicks Christian half truths. The best way to deal with people like this, in all different types of religions, is for us Catholics to help them get the whole truth that was given to St. Peter by Christ and passed down for 2000 years to Pope Benedict XVI. The reason we can truly defend our faith is because we use the Bible, Christs, the Apostles, their appointed Bishops, and History’s teachings and facts in their full context to aid our understanding of the fullness of the gospel. No other religion can claim that. Just my 2 cents.

God Bless,

ex-mo
 
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KDoerr:
First, I spent ten years in Catholic schools being trained in Catholic theology. I know what Catholic theology is and I know what God’s Word (yes, it is God’s Word) says a Christian is.
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This is one of the biggest fallacies of ex-Catholics (or ex-anythings). An education in Catholic schools does not mean that he understands Catholic theology. He shows clearly elsewhere that he doesn’t. (The same is true of ex-Protestants or any other converts. Converts may be reliable sources of information on their former churches/religions. But as likely as not they aren’t.)
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KDoerr:
Second, I reviewed Tolkien, not his works. A man’s works do not stray from his passions. His passions were self-admittedly centered avidly on paganism.
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Well, he assumes that this is bad. There’s probably no ground for argument here. Tolkien is not a Doctor of the Church. But I for one think that his attempt to write an epic about pre-Christian virtuous, non-idolatrous pagans (pagans in the sense that they did were not in the Abrahamic covenant in any of its forms) is a marvellous piece of theology as well as literature. There’s no way you’ll be able to argue that point with this guy, so don’t try.
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KDoerr:
The Catholic church, during its inquisition, slaughtered an estimated sixty-five million people who refused to become Catholics.
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Estimated by whom? No historian takes these figures seriously. They’re sheer propaganda. All the inquisitions together did kill a large number of people, but the number is in thousands, not millions (not even vast thousands either). And no one was killed for refusing to “become” Catholic. The only way you could come under the authority of the Inquisition was if you had been baptized Catholic but had fallen into heresy. (There were some serious abuses of this principle–the Spanish government for instance gave Jews and Muslims the choice of conversion or exile, which meant that many people pretended to convert and hence came under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.)
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KDoerr:
A great place to start in verifying this is a book called The Martyr’s Mirror.
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Which is a work of Anabaptist martyrology. It’s a good source for accounts of Anabaptists who died for their faith in the 16th century, and for descriptions of the vicious persecution of radicals by both Protestants and Catholics. But it’s hardly a reliable historical source for the Middle Ages.
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KDoerr:
Now, the church is doing all that its worldwide influence and its undercover Jesuit agents can do to rewrite history to erase this fact. Did Jesus teach this way?
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Jesus did not teach people to throw around unfounded and paranoid accusations. Modern scholars have concluded that some (by no means all) of the claims about Catholic persecution were false or exaggerated. Fundamentalists are unwilling to believe this, so they postulate Jesuit agents who are making stuff up, instead of accepting that much of what they have believed historically was British government propaganda. (I think that’s one reason they use the Martyrs’ Mirror now more often than Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. But Mennonites have their propaganda as well!)
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KDoerr:
The Catholic church’s tentacles are so widespread that you probably think that John Wilkes Booth acted alone in assassinating Lincoln, but a whole group of high-ranking Catholic operatives were hung for being co-conspirators and assisting him.
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Actually what I was taught in college (a Protestant college–but no doubt my professors were undercover Jesuit agents!) was that several people were hung on very flimsy evidence, simply because they were Catholics and acquaintances of Booth. In other words, he’s right that some people at the time thought that there was some kind of Catholic plot involved. But modern historians have found no evidence of such a thing.
 
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KDoerr:
(See Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by an ex-Jesuit who Lincoln defended against charges brought by the Jesuits, which cost him his life.
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He’s talking about Fr. Charles Chiniquy, but he can’t get his facts straight even here. Fr. Chiniquy was never a Jesuit. He was at one point a member of a missionary order called the “Oblates of Mary Immaculate,” but I believe he got released from his monastic vows and returned to being a diocesan priest. (He eventually left the Church, taking a bunch of French-Canadian colonists in the Midwest with him, and joined the Presbyterians.)

After leaving the Church, Chiniquy allegedly had conversations with Lincoln in which the President told him that he was convinced the Jesuits were going to kill him. No one else, as far as I know, has corroborated Chiniquy’s claim as to Lincoln’s belief. Chiniquy himself presents no evidence, as far as I can remember, except Lincoln’s alleged belief. (In other words, Lincoln may possibly have shared in the anti-Catholic paranoia of his time, but that doesn’t prove that his fears were real.) Finally, even Chiniquy doesn’t claim that Lincoln was killed on his account–he claims that the Catholic Church supported the Confederacy and therefore engineered Lincoln’s death. (The Pope did write to Jefferson Davis in terms that were construed as a tacit recognition of the Confederacy’s independence. This strained U.S. relations with the Vatican but didn’t amount to the total support Chiniquy claims.)
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KDoerr:
There are also enlightening accounts
of more current activities by Jesuit covert operatives in the writings by Alberto Rivera, another ex-Jesuit who turned from Catholicism to Christ.)
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Rivera has been exposed as a fraud by Protestant apologists. I believe others here can give you the details on that.
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KDoerr:
The Inquisition did not value life at all.
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That’s not true. The Inquisition was brutal, but it did have methods to safeguard the innocent. They weren’t adequate, and the whole premise of executing people for heresy is horribly wrong. But the Inquisition was actually more just and even-handed than many other courts of the Middle Ages and early modern era. For instance, witch-hunts were kept to a minimum in areas where the Inquisition dominated, because the Inquisition followed Roman legal procedure and didn’t get swept away by hysteria. Modern historians have estimated that only a very small number (less than 1% by one estimate I’ve seen; more like 2.5% by another) of the trials conducted by the Inquisition resulted in the death penalty (administered by the secular government, not directly by the Church, precisely because at its most brutal the Church had at least a nominal regard for life). This is still a brutal and horrifying record, but it hardly shows a lack of all regard for life.
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KDoerr:
Nor did the Catholic church
during World War II. Hitler received the very highest award that the Catholic church bestows upon a “defender of the faith.â€
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I know of absolutely no evidence whatsoever for this. I did a Google search and found the claim made on several websites (including a Nazi site, which left me feeling as if I need to get my computer exorcised!). But none of them gave any evidence whatsoever.

I suspect that this is a distortion of the fact that the Church signed a Concordat with Hitler’s government. I have also heard it claimed that some wealthy right-wing Catholics in the U.S. sent Hitler some kind of honor. But I would be willing to stake a good deal that the Church never named Hitler defender of the faith.
 
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KDoerr:
I expect that you did not know that the church supported Hitler until it became evident that he would probably not win.
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It is impossible for anyone to know this, because it’s blatantly false. The Vatican never supported Hitler, although many would claim that it did too little to oppose him. Pope Pius XI condemned Nazism unequivocally in his encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge.” I believe that the succeeding Pope, Pius XII, helped draft this document. Certainly no reputable historian (even Cornwell, in his misleadingly titled Hitler’s Pope) claims that Pius supported Hitler. The worst that is claimed is that he saw Hitler as the lesser of two evils (the other being Stalinist Communism) and thus did little to oppose him. Even this is highly unfair. Many Jews were hidden in the Vatican during WWII, and Nazi leaders frequently expressed hatred and contempt for Catholicism because of Catholicism’s condemnation of Nazi racial policies.

He’s right about the horrifying atrocities committed by the Croatian government. He’s also right that some Catholic priests supported this genocidal program, which took the form of forced conversions. The archbishop of Croatia supported the fascist government and initially was at least partially supportive of the policy of pressuring the Orthodox to convert. BUT he very clearly condemned the atrocities that were committed in the course of this program, and he frequently rebuked the government for its brutal methods (even though he continued to see them as a basically pro-Catholic regime, and tried to defend them to Pius XII). His position was ambivalent, and I’m not happy with the fact that he’s been beatified. But he hardly condoned atrocities.
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KDoerr:
However, if you read your papal encyclicals, you will see that it still takes the position that all of those “brethren†are going to hell.
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This is where he shows that he doesn’t know Catholic theology. Even the document “Dominus Iesus” which was characterized by many as “hard-line” clearly states that you don’t have to be Catholic to go to heaven. The Catechism and the documents of Vatican II are clear on this point. Fundamentalists continue to reiterate (and believe) this blatant falsehood because they simply cannot give up the image of brutal, intolerant Catholicism.
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KDoerr:
In fact, the Jesuits still take the same oath to annihilate such Christian “brethren†as heretics if they should find such opportunity.
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No one has ever provided any evidence whatever that this oath has ever been taken by any Jesuit. As far as we can tell, it is a 19th-century American forgery. Again, fundamentalists show a blatant disregard for truth by repeating this calumny without a shred of evidence.

In Christ,

Edwin
 
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