Under 'conservative' Pope Benedict, Revolution is now "irreversible"

Taking responsibility for Catholic-Jewish reconciliation 

By Rabbi Eugene Korn  

January 25, 2010 NEW YORK (JTA) -- Pope Benedict XVI's recent visit to the Great Synagogue in Rome was by far his most effective gesture to the Jewish people. After misreading his audience during his trip to Israel, Benedict spoke to Jewish hearts and minds at the Rome synagogue.

The move came none too soon. Jewish-Catholic relations have had a rocky ride under Benedict's papacy, leaving Jews and Catholics alike to doubt the future of Catholic-Jewish relations. In July 2007, the Vatican authorized the wider use of the Tridentine Mass with its Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews. In January 2009, the pope lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson, and three other bishops of the Society of Pope Pius X. The renegade group rejects the Second Vatican Council's salutary changes in Catholic teaching toward Jews and Judaism, and its Web site featured repugnant anti-Semitic canards.

Last June, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement -- later retracted -- that Catholics in interfaith dialogue should evangelize to Jews and extend to them an implicit invitation to the Church. And several weeks ago, Benedict issued a decree advancing sainthood for the Holocaust-era pope, Pius XII, whose record during the Holocaust remains a legitimate historical question and is the subject of a deep emotional disagreement between some in the Vatican and Jewish leaders.

Vatican II's official document, Nostra Aetate, proclaimed that the Church deplores all forms of anti-Semitism, that the living covenant between God and the Jewish people is irrevocable, and that the charge of deicide is utterly baseless. Yet the recent steps taken by Benedict had led some professionals in Jewish-Catholic dialogue to question whether these breathtaking teachings are still operative Catholic theology. Benedict addressed most of these concerns at the Great Synagogue. His visit affirmed -- in word and in deed -- that he wishes to continue the policy of warm relations with the Jewish people established by his saintly predecessor, John Paul II.

He stressed that the Second Vatican Council marked a significant and irreversible transformation in the Church's attitude to the Jewish people and signaled the Church's irrevocable commitment to a dialogue of brotherhood and mutual understanding with Jews. Reflecting on the terrible history of Jewish-Catholic relations that culminated in the Holocaust, Benedict repeated John Paul's poignant prayer asking for forgiveness for Catholics who caused Jewish suffering. He also reiterated what he said at Auschwitz in 2006: Because the Jewish people remain witnesses to God's presence and to divine revelation at Sinai, Hitler knew that to destroy God and God's moral law, he needed to murder the Jewish people first.  This is an enormously significant theological statement, acknowledging that Jews and Judaism continue to play an essential role in the unfolding of God's plan for humanity.

Yet serious pitfalls remain between the Church and the Jewish people. It seems that Benedict still will be forced to choose at times between appealing to arch-traditionalists among the Catholic faithful and strengthening the Church's new relationship with the Jewish people. Moreover, pursuing Pius XII's sainthood before the historical record is clarified is certain to cause public disagreement between the Vatican and the Jewish people, and inflict pain on Jews whose loved ones were murdered in the Holocaust.

One continuing disappointment for informed Jews and Catholics over the past 50 years has been that the wonderful teachings of Nostra Aetate and post-conciliar documents relating to Catholic-Jewish relations have not filtered down sufficiently to priests and worshipers in the pews. Too many Catholics are still unaware of the depth and beauty of Nostra Aetate. Nor are Jews as aware as they should be about post-Vatican II teachings about Judaism.


In light of Benedict's reaffirmation of the irrevocable validity of these teachings, now would be the perfect time for the Vatican to take positive steps to permanently root the new Catholic-Jewish relationship in the minds of all Catholics. This could be done in a number of ways, such as rigorously implementing the existing mandate to teach Nostra Aetate to all Catholic worshipers and seminarians, promoting the study of Pope John Paul II's teachings about the Jewish people and Judaism, and perhaps instituting a non-conversionary prayer for today's Jewish people and for the Jewish state on the Feast of St. James, the patron saint of Jerusalem. Jewish leaders also must teach Jews of the significance and content of Nostra Aetate and later Vatican documents about Catholic-Jewish relations if Jews are to understand Catholics and their faith.

As Nostra Aetate teaches, Jews and Catholics share a common spiritual patrimony. Catholic-Jewish reconciliation is one of God's great blessings, one that inspires all people around the world. Because if the Church and the Jewish people can make peace with each other after nearly 2,000 years of enmity, then peace is possible between any two peoples anywhere. It is too important for Jews, for Catholics and for the world to allow to lapse, and too important to be spoken about only on special occasions. Jews and Catholics both have responsibility to do what they can to ensure that future obstacles to mutual understanding and respect are overcome, and that the Church and the Jewish people remain living witnesses to hope for a more peaceful future for all God's children.  (Emphasis supplied).

(Rabbi Korn is the North American director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation.)

Hoffman's Afterword: "Then I heard another voice from heaven saying,'Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues" (Revelation 18:4)


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Correspondence from Google related to censorship of our videos

The US government in the person of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is pressuring China to end Internet censorship. This is inspired by China's alleged repression against "freedom-loving" Google.

Be aware that the US Department of State has partnered with the Israeli government and various thought police NGOs to "monitor" exposure of the truth about Judaism and Zionism online. Both the Israeli government and elite Zionists around the world advocate Internet censorship of World War II revisionism ("Holocaust denial").  Elie Wiesel recently urged the government of Hungary to improve its image by jailing revisionist historians. Germany, the close ally of the US and the Israelis, jails revisionists and censors the Internet. The US is complicit in the German repression. Obama has met with German jailer Angela Merkel and praised her "democratic values."

Google acts as the enforcement arm of the religion of Holocaustianity, protecting it from scrutiny, skepticism and exposure. We are reproducing here correspondence from Google related to Google Inc.'s 2006 censorship of two of our revisionist videos from the Internet. What does Mrs. Clinton have to say about Google's censorship?

From Google Inc.

Google has been notified that your videos violate our Program Policies
The titles of the videos are listed at the end of this message.

According to our policy, we are removing the following videos:

World War Two Revisionist Charles Provan
Deborah Lipstadt, "Amalek" and David Irving

To review our Program Policies please visit:
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27737&topic=1490

If you believe this removal was done in error, please respond to this
email. (End quote)

Feb. 22, 2006

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The Google corporation defines "Holocaust" revisionism as "hate speech," and on that basis withdrew the Lipstadt and Provan videos from broadcast. The censored Lipstadt video demonstrated how "Holocaust" High Priestess Lipstadt had labeled historian David Irving "Amalek," which is incitement that could possibly lead to his death. The censored Charles Provan video consisted of an interview with a researcher who believes in the gas chambers and differs with mainstream historians only on certain details. Hence, even belief in the gas chambers, when it is not total belief, in every single detail of the "Holocaust" story, now constitutes "hate speech." If this is not totalitarianism, what is?  Google initially approved these two videos and broadcast them for approximately one month. The videos were removed only due to outside pressure.

Deborah Lipstadt has publicly labeled my "Amalek" video about her, "revolting."

In 2006 in the Washington Post, William Bennett and Alan Dershowitz chastised the American media for having failed to publish the cartoons against Muhammad which first appeared in Denmark: "...radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists..."

Radical Judaics are also winning a war of intimidation. They have cowed Google into censoring a video critical of Deborah Lipstadt, and another video which maintains that the execution gas chambers existed, but that they were operated mainly by Judaics. Are "intimidation" and "capitulation" only wrong when they emanate from Islamic coercion? What about Judaic intimidation of the media? It must be at a higher level of power and control, because unlike the Islamic version, Judaic intimidation is not publicized in the US media. It is perpetrated largely without the knowledge of the public.

We protested Google's censorship. Here is Google's rejoinder:

FROM: GOOGLE VIDEO SUPPORT

To: Michael A. Hoffman II

Date: Wed Feb 22, 2006 08:00:17 PM PST

Subject: Re: [#47515979] Re: Google Video Policy Violation

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your email. We received complaints that your content violates our posted policy against hate speech.

Because the videos appear to promote Holocaust Revisionism, in violation of our policy against hate speech, we have removed the videos.

We appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely, The Google Video Team  (end quote)

If you'd like to view the videos Google censored, they are available for purchase on DVD:

Deborah Lipstdt, "Amalek" and David Irving (DVD)

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?p_id=10017

World War II Revisionist Charles Provan (DVD)

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/cgi-bin/store/agora.cgi?p_id=10018

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For further reference: Hoffman's Letter to China regarding Google and censorship
http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2010/01/hoffmans-letter-to-china-concerning.html

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Support Michael Hoffman's Truth Mission 

http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/page2/paypal.html

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Hoffman's Letter to China concerning Google and censorship

Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong
Embassy of China
2201 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20007

Jan. 13, 2010

Dear Ambassador Wenzhong

Re: Google vs. China

In today's news we read what appears to be the stirring stand of Google, the Internet search engine giant, in defying "Chinese censorship." The U.S. media is complicit in disseminating the farcical myth about Google's alleged stand against censorship.

The fact is, Google itself practices censorship of dissident history and scholarship. Scientists, historians and journalists in the West who investigate and subsequently dissent from any aspect of the vast corpus of World War II history classified under the neologism "The Holocaust," are denied access to the public by various forms of censorship and repression. Dissident investigative research by scholars and journalists in this field is called by the pejorative and highly inaccurate quasi-theological term, "Holocaust denial."

At Google this takes the form of refusing advertisements for "Holocaust denial" books and other media and censoring any form of expression dubbed "Holocaust denial."

In 2006 Google censored videos produced by this writer that pertained to Auschwitz, Deborah Lipstadt and the Protestant historian Charles Provan. In the case of Mr. Provan, the video interview with him was censored by Google because Provan, who accepts the claims of homicidal gas chambers allegedly used by the Nazis, dared to state in the course of his videotaped interview, that Judaic inmates were the ones who operated the killing gas chambers in the concentration camp at Treblinka.

After receiving numerous complaints and protests over the removal of my history videos from "Google Video," the Google corporation never responded to a single complainant. Google's arrogance and hypocrisy truly knows no bounds.

The history videos censored by Google contained no racial invective of any kind. Neither did they contain any sexual pornography. They were censored by Google strictly on the basis that they contradicted the official American version of what transpired during World War II.

I am writing to inform you and the Chinese people that Google's attempt to pose as a champion of freedom of speech against China, is a sham. They are censors and what is more, they are dishonest censors in that they pretend to be advocates of freedom of speech when they are in fact guilty of the very thing for which they accuse the government of China.

Sincerely,
Michael Hoffman

Former reporter, New York Bureau of the Associated Press

Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 USA

E-mail: hoffman@revisionisthistory.org

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Christians who refused to engage in warfare

God of War?

by Jeff Taylor

Jacksonville, Alabama --  Just as professing Christians cannot follow Christ while serving Mammon, they are not being faithful to the Prince of Peace while glorifying Mars.  It’s nothing new.  The worldly principles of violence and war entered the church within its first three centuries of existence.

The invasion was largely triggered by Constantine’s supposed vision of a Chi-Rho cross in the sky encouraging him, in Greek, with the words “In this Sign, Conquer.”  (ἐν τούτῳ νίκα or, translated into Latin, In hoc signo vinces.)  He then proceeded to win the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312).  Emperor Constantine may have been a sincere believer, but the vision sounds apocryphal.  The accounts of the vision or dream by church fathers Lactantius and Eusebius are contradictory.  In addition to being church leaders, the two were court historians who had a tendency to flatter Constantine.

If the story is not apocryphal, it was either wishful thinking or satanic deception.  To borrow an analogy from an earlier Greek tale, Constantine went on to serve as a Trojan Horse inside Christianity.  The linking of Christ and Caesar brought some short-term benefits but the long-term harm has been immense.  The facilitation of war by the chaplains of power has been one sad effect.

Turning to the U.S.A.: With all of the clerical and pewful cheering on behalf of recent wars, the intertwining of cross and flag, and the blessings bestowed on every Commander in Chief by the leading evangelists of the day, it can be difficult to discern the testimony for peace by theologically conservative Christianity.

This testimony can be found primarily, but not only, among the historic peace churches: the Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, Schwenkfelders, Quakers, Moravians, and German Baptist Brethren.  Roman Catholicism places some limits on the martial spirit with its doctrine of just war, derived from Augustine and Aquinas.  Dispensationalism—one of two main sources for fundamentalism—was traditionally apolitical and encouraged neutrality in fallen, worldly activities such as warfare.  This influence can be seen in figures from A.C. Gaebelein to Watchman Nee.

As a young man, evangelist D.L. Moody refused to enlist in the Civil War because he was a conscientious objector.  He recalled, “There has never been a time in my life when I felt I could take a gun and shoot down a fellow human being.  In this respect I am a Quaker.”

Faced with the prospect of war between England and Russia, in 1885, William Booth publicly declared that every true soldier of The Salvation Army should “shut his ears to all the worldly, unscriptural, unchristian talk about war being a necessity.”  He warned, “Oh, what vice, what blasphemies, what cursing, what devilries of every kind accompany and follow in the train of war.”  In a subsequent War Cry editorial, Booth looked forward to the day when the Prince of Peace would abolish “this inhuman and fiendish system of wholesale murder.”  The focus of the conflict between the English and Russian empires?  Afghanistan.  Some things never change.

The Christian statesman William Jennings Bryan was directly influenced by the great writer Leo Tolstoy.  The two talked for twelve straight hours at Tolstoy’s home during Bryan’s international trip in 1903.  As a result of this visit, and earlier writings, Tolstoy’s nonviolent views were spread to American Christians who were far more culturally provincial, theologically conservative, and politically mainstream than the Russian anarcho-pacifist himself.  A decade later, when Secretary of State Bryan broke with Woodrow Wilson because the president was pushing the nation into World War I, he became the first holder of that high position to resign over a matter of political principle.  He was also the last.

In accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 1900, Bryan said, “If true Christianity consists in carrying out in our daily lives the teachings of Christ, who will say that we are commanded to civilize with dynamite and proselyte with the sword?  Imperialism finds no warrant in the Bible.  The command, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,’ has no Gatling gun attachment. . . . Compare, if you will, the swaggering, bullying, brutal doctrine of imperialism with the golden rule and the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”

On the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, in 1940, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution expressing its “utter abhorrence of war as an instrument of International policy.”  The nine-point statement concluded, “Because war is contrary to the mind and spirit of Christ, we believe that no war should be identified with the will of Christ.  Our churches should not be made agents of war propaganda or recruiting stations.  War thrives on and is perpetuated by hysteria, falsehood, and hate and the church has a solemn responsibility to make sure there is no black out of love in time of war.”

There was not a single resolution issued by the Southern Baptists during World War II or Vietnam expressing support for the president or the troops, but there were resolutions in support of conscientious objectors.  The bold 1940 resolution can be found even today on the SBC website but the Southern Baptists have changed their tune . . . and their lyrics . . . perhaps even their hymnal.

As late as 1970, Francis Schaeffer, an orthodox Presbyterian, was warning, “In the United States many churches display the American flag.  The Christian flag is usually put on one side and the American flag on the other.  Does having two flags in your church mean that Christianity and the American Establishment are equal?  If it does, you are really in trouble. . . . Equating of any other loyalty with our loyalty to God is sin.”  Ironically, Schaeffer’s later writings helped give rise to the Moral Majority, with its endorsement of Constantinianism and the Mush God of American civil religion.

To their credit, Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) condemned the Iraq War as unjust in 2002-03.  Unfortunately, there was no teeth to their pronouncements.  I am not a Roman Catholic, but if I were, I would want my pope armed with anathemas and bulls of excommunication.  What is the point of having an episcopal form of government headed by the vicar of Christ if he does not wield at least one of the two swords of Gelasius?
The supreme pontiff ought to have disciplined disobedient children like Senators Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Pete Dominici, Susan Collins, and Sam Brownback.

When it comes to peace, the Catholic hierarchy if often politely correct, but it is no Erasmus of Rotterdam, Dorothy Day, or Thomas Merton in denouncing militarism and the perfidy of its practitioners.  Too much diffidence and compromise.  That’s one of the fruit of the spirit of Constantine and a corollary of cultural synthesis.  A huge bureaucracy enmeshed with worldly wealth and power is not in a position to be too radical in its opposition to the world, even when the opposition is sincere.

Without jargon or hedging, the French Catholic mathematician-scientist-philosopher-mystic Blaise Pascal put it simply centuries ago: “[Q:] Why do you kill me?  [A:] What!  Do you not live on the other side of the water?  If you lived on this side, my friend, I should be an assassin, and it would be unjust to slay you in this manner.  But since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just. . . . Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?” (Pensées, V: 293-94)

Still, the peace rhetoric of the papacy is much to be preferred to the refined war mongering of Richard Land, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.  As Congress was preparing to give President Bush a blank check to wage war against Iraq, in October 2002, Land organized an open letter to Bush, signed by prominent evangelical Protestants, that began, “In this decisive hour of our nation’s history we are writing to express our deep appreciation for your bold, courageous, and visionary leadership. Americans everywhere have been inspired by your eloquent and clear articulation of our nation’s highest ideals of freedom and of our resolve to defend that freedom both here and across the globe.  We believe that your policies concerning the ongoing international terrorist campaign against America are both right and just.”

Specifically, the planned attack on Iraq was sanctified as a just war.  After the bombing and invasion, Land remained confident of God’s blessing on the undertaking, writing, “I believe we are seeing in Iraq an illustration of waging a war of defense and liberation according to the criteria of just war.”

Recently, I wrote about Christmas presents for children.  The fine book by Laurence M. Vance entitled Christianity and War, and Other Essays Against the Warfare State (Vance Publications, 2nd ed., 2008) would be a good Christmas present for adults.  Vance writes regularly for LewRockwell.com.

You may be a Christian—or non-Christian—who does not embrace pacifism.  That’s okay.  The perfect need not be the enemy of the good.  Most of us can agree that most of the wars in which we have been involved during the past century have been unjustified wars of aggression and greed, having more to do with empire and monopoly than with national defense or humanitarian crusades.

In 1761, William Law, the Anglican divine who helped lead John Wesley to evangelicalism and eventually flowered as a Christian mystic, wrote about war in his final book, An Address to the Clergy.  He did so with truth and eloquence.  Sadly, but predictably, his condemnation of Christian war was deleted when the book was reprinted by evangelical publishers in the 1890s and 1970s.  Not uplifting, too discomforting, I suppose.

 Law wrote, “Look now at warring Christendom, what smallest drop of pity towards sinners is to be found in it?  Or how could a spirit all hellish more fully contrive and hasten their destruction?  It stirs up and kindles every passion of fallen nature that is contrary to the all-humble, all-meek, all-loving, all-forgiving, all-saving Spirit of Christ.  It unites, it drives and compels nameless numbers of unconverted sinners to fall, murdering and murdered among flashes of fire with the wrath and swiftness of lightning, into a fire infinitely worse than that in which they died. . . . Here, my pen trembles in my hand.  But when, O when, will one single Christian Church, people, or language, tremble at the share they have in this death of sinners?”

“. . . Again, would you further see the fall of the universal Church, from being led by the Spirit of Christ to be guided by the inspiration of the great fiery Dragon, look at all European Christendom sailing round the globe with fire and sword and every murdering art of war, to seize the possessions and kill the inhabitants of both the Indies. . . . To this day what wars of Christians against Christians, blended with scalping heathens, still keep staining the earth and the seas with human blood, for a miserable share in the spoils of a plundered heathen world! — a world, which should have heard or seen or felt nothing from the followers of Christ, but a divine love, that had forced them from distant lands and through the perils of long seas to visit strangers with those glad tidings of peace and salvation to all the world, which angels from heaven and shepherds on earth proclaimed at the birth of Christ.”

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