The Nazi Party Before Adolf Hitler

"Hitler is a good Catholic." — Rudolf Hess, May 17, 1921

Adolf Hitler became "Party Comrade No. 55" in the fall of 1919 in the city of Munich in province of Bavaria in Germany. The Armistice that had ended World War I had been signed on November 11, 1918, while Hitler was in a hospital, recovering from poison gas used by the Allies against German soldiers. If you no anything about history at all, you probably know that Hitler went on to become the Chancellor of Germany and is generally considered the baddest of bad guys of the 20th century.

The party that Hitler joined, and quickly became the leader of, was not yet known as the Nazi Party. It was the German Workers Party (Deutsche Arbeiter Partei or DAP). At that time its members were all in Munich. The DAP was part of a broader trend of mostly small parties and clubs that were trying to combine nationalism with socialism. This trend was a spontaneous response to the combination of national sentiment with socialist thinking that was global in scope. The main line of development that led to the DAP originated in Austria, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the empire broke up at the end of World War I.

In Austria Roman Catholicism was the only legal religion. "In the face of the dual threat posed by socialism and capitalism, the Christian Social Party succeeded in attracting workers, shopkeepers, and white collar workers with national-social and anti-semitic catchphrases." [Bracher p. 51]

By origin Adolf Hitler was Austrian, not German. Yet the dividing line between Austria and Germany was an artificial consequence of politics. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, on the Bavarian-Austrian border. The Austrian Empire had many ethnic groups, but the key rivalry that led to national socialist ideology was between ethnic Germans and ethnic Czechs. Despite the Marxist idea that class divisions were more important than ethnic divisions, within the Empire many labor unions ending up splitting along ethnic lines. Union workers wanted a party that fought the capitalist bosses, but they did not want to work with other ethnic groups.

The Roman Catholic Church contributed three critical components to the national socialist mix: anti-Semitism, the leadership principle, and corporatism. It should be noted that is was not the only source of these practices. Leninism, in particular, contributed strongly to the idea that an authoritarian party organization was necessary to seize power.

People and ideas moved freely from the German ethnic areas of the Austrian Empire to Bavaria. The first German Workers Party had been founded in Bohemia in 1904, but was centered in Linz, where Adolf Hitler went to school. As a young adult Hitler lived in Vienna (painting postcards but mostly living off money sent by his family) and read pamphlets written by German nationalist-socialist and Catholic anti-semitic groups, but did not join any.

The Bavarian version of the German Workers Party, or DAP, was founded at a conference held between January 2 and 5, 1919, at the Furstenfelder Hof. The founders were Anton Drexler and twenty-five of his coworkers from his railroad shop. At the time Munich had just passed through an attempted seizure of power by leftists that had been put down by the German military, police, and their right-wing allies. The DAP was just one of many such groups and conspiracies.

Hitler was in the employ of the military when he first contacted the DAP. Essentially, he was their military liaison. He was 30 years old. He already was anti-semitic, a German nationalist, and anti-capitalist, though he had never been a worker receiving a wage from a capitalist boss. As an soldier he was angry at Germany's loss of the war. The signing of the peace treaty at Versailles on June 28, 1919 gave a strong impetus to all right-wing groups in Germany. It was grossly unfair to Germany and did not keep the promises U.S. President Woodrow Wilson made to induce Germany to stop fighting. [Wilson tried to keep his promises, but was overruled by the British and French Empires.]

Within a few months Hitler became the most important person in the DAP, mainly because he devoted himself to it full time, whereas Drexler continued to work at the railroad shop. Hitler focused his recruiting on former soldiers, rather than the factory workers the DAP had been founded on.

On February 24, 1920, the Party had its first mass meeting. There Hitler introduced a new name, the National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP, which connected it ideologically to nationalist socialist groups in Austria. He also introduced the revised party program of 25 points.

When thinking about the Nazis and World War II, there is a critical point that is always left out of the American and Vatican propaganda versions of Nazi history. It is best to just quote the point, number 24: "The Party as such advocates the standpoint of positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination."

Apologists for the Catholic Church later tried to (and still try to) use the adjective "positive" to deny that the Nazi party, like the Italian, French, Austrian, Polish and Spanish fascist parties, was aligned with the Roman Catholic Church. Hitler, an astute politician, talked almost constantly. By selecting carefully, a propagandist can make him sound like an atheist, a good Roman Catholic, or a pagan.

It was ultimately the Pope and the German military that together selected Hitler to be Chancellor of Germany. The explicitly Roman Catholic parliamentary party in Germany confirmed that selection.

Hitler was not just the head of the National Socialists in Germany. The National Socialists of Austria quickly accepted him as their leader as well. The Austrian national socialists were almost exclusively good Roman Catholics. The Austrian Roman Catholic Church was particularly anti-semitic.

The most reasonable interpretation of the phrase "without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination" was to leave room to recruit Lutherans, not just Catholics. In Bavaria almost everyone (except leftist atheists) was a Catholic. But Hitler wanted to rule Germany, which was majority Lutheran. Not a particular problem for Hitler, since Lutherans had been anti-semitic going back to Martin Luther himself.

Betrothed: Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI

How love of a Romantic Novel led to global human misery

Perhaps excepting the rare graduate student of Italian Literature, few Americans have heard of Alessandro Manzoni or his novel The Betrothed. I read it only because it was mentioned as the favorite book of Pope Pius XI in David I. Kertzer's The Pope and Mussolini.

The Betrothed was written in the 1820s and was set in and near Milan (Milano) in 1628. It is largely an old-fashioned adventure story centered on the romance of a young peasant couple who are prevented from consummating their planned marriage by an evil local member of the nobility. It is quite readable and modern. As literature it is notable in the way it develops a wide variety of complex characters, from a simple peasant girl to the powerful movers and shakers of the nobility and Roman Catholic Church.

Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, would have found it easy to identify with several of the characters. Achille was born in 1857 to a silk factory supervisor and his wife in a town just north of Milan. He became a priest early in life and quickly rose to the position of director of the Ambrosiana Library. Thus he could relate to Renzi, the silk worker who is in love with Lucy, as well as with the monk and priest characters up to Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, who founded the Ambrosiana Library. Achille became Cardinal Ratti, archbishop of Milan, in 1921, around the time Benito Mussolini was developing his Fascist Party.

Benito Mussolini was born in a small town in Romagna, northern Italy, in 1883, to a socialist blacksmith and a Roman Catholic schoolteacher. Benito was not baptized, but was sent to a Catholic boarding school. As a young man he was influenced by a variety of writers in the socialist camp, notably Georges Sorel, and was attracted to violent tendencies within the socialist camp. The world would likely be different if he had remained a school teacher, but in 1904 he joined the Italian Army for two years. After another teaching stint he became a Socialist Party functionary. Still attracted to violence, he nevertheless opposed the Italian war against Libya in 1911 [part of a series of preludes to World War I in which European nations began dismembering the Turkish empire].

After initially opposing Italy's entry into World War I, Mussolini switched positions, rejoined the the Italian army, declared himself a nationalist, and began to develop what would come to be called fascism. It was an anti-establishment, nationalist, anti-clerical, violent movement with socialist tinges. It appealed to young men, and to local gangsters. Italy's democratic national government was weak and corrupt, and Benito was elected to it. In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini to be Prime Minister.

And now we are in The Betrothed, at least as far as Cardinal Ratti was concerned. Pope Benedict XV had died in January 1922. A flock of cardinals divided between an ultra-conservative faction and a conservative faction settled on Ratti as the next Pope. He took the name Pope Pius XI. It was all perfectly clear to him. He was the equivalent of Federigo Borromeo, and Benito Mussolini was the equivalent of the character in Betrothed only referred to as The Unknown.

In the novel The Unknown was the leader of bad men, and a threat to all that was good. Yet, through his encounter with the virtuous Lucy and then with Cardinal Borromeo, The Unknown turned his back on evil and becomes a force for good.

Mussolini is now thought of as a dictator with absolute power, but that is a caricature of the real situation. The Pope too, while powerful, depended on a bureaucratic machine to rule. Mussolini had changed his ideology many times prior to becoming Prime Minister, and now made a strategic decision that fed into the Pope's delusion. He decided to embrace the Roman Catholic Church. He eventually made it the only legal religion of Italy.

The Pope liked that the Fascists beat Protestants and atheists into line. But he did not want to take orders from Mussolini. Benito liked that the Catholic Church solidified his rule and enabled him to control some of his own rabid-dog fascists, as well as to destroy his main political rival, the Socialist Party. But he did not want to take orders from the Pope. See The Pope and Mussolini for the gory details.

Reality contradicted The Betrothed. Both Mussolini and the Pope became more evil as the years passed. Hitler rose to power in Germany and added his own evil to the mix. At a crucial time Pius XI helped Hitler become Chancellor of Germany. Probably he again saw Adolf Hitler as a useful tool against atheism and communism, and another The Unknown. It helped that Hitler was Roman Catholic (he thought the small percent of Nazis who were pagan or atheist were nuts).

Pius died in 1939, of natural causes, before the final terrible results of his sponsorship of Mussolini, Hitler, and General Franco became obvious to all. Mussolini died in 1945, shot by communists.

Pius XII, who followed Pius XI, danced with both Hitler and Mussolini, and hoped that they would destroy communism and atheism. Islam, Budhism, and Protestant sects could be mopped up later. But when it became obvious the Allies would defeat the Axis, Pius XII switched sides, thus becoming a cold war ally of the capitalist block.

Charlemagne, Hitler, and the Holy Roman Empire 2.0

I have written a number of articles that mention how Adolf Hitler's differences with the Pope were similar in nature to prior differences between Holy Roman Emperors [who were almost always German] and Popes. [See my Adolf Hitler page for a list of articles]

Here I want to go into more detail, expanding the thesis that Adolf Hitler was Holy Roman Emperor 2.0. This is not a trivial exercise. Hitler's armies came perilously close to winning World War II. If they had, there would only be one official religion today: Roman Catholicism. It would likely be a Nazi-modified, Catholicism. The extent of modification would depend on how the power struggle between the Pope (who had engineered Hitler's rise to power) worked out. Then, there would have been the power-struggles between their successors.

Nor are we today free of the prospect of another attempt to revive the Holy Roman Empire. There are also parallels with other religious zealots, such as militant Islam and, in the United States, militant Protestantism.

I also think that it is important to closely associate Hitler with Roman Catholicism in the public mind. I have yet to meet a Roman Catholic in the United States who even knew, before I told them, that Hitler was a Roman Catholic. And they pretty much go into denial after they are informed of the fact.

As in the analysis of all things complex, historians differ somewhat on where they place the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire. All distinguish the Holy Roman Empire from the older Roman Empire, although there was a chain of continuity between them. The old Roman Empire had become Christian as it fell into decline after the capital was moved from Rome to Constantinople. The Bishop of Rome was, in the era between about 200 A.D. and 600 A.D., prestigious but not widely considered to be the head of the Church. While various legends were concocted to increase the power of the Roman bishop (including the idea that the Apostle Peter started a chain of succession of universal church dictators in Rome) over the centuries, what really resulted in the assumption of power was the destruction of the more-ancient African and Middle Eastern churches during the Islamic conquests of the 7th century.

[for details of the evolution from the old Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire see The Holy Roman Empire by James Brice]

The creation of the Holy Roman Empire was marked by the crowning of its first Emperor, Charles the Great a.k.a. Charlemagne, by Pope Leo III. There are two points about this that are missed by modern commentators. First, Charlemagne, leader of the Franks, was a German, and a very successful militarist German at that. Second, Leo III was the first Bishop of Rome to be able to assert, with Charles's army at his back, that he was the supreme leader of all Christians, thus making the term catholic factual. Needless to say the bishops of the more-ancient Orthodox churches like Constantinople and Antioch did not accept this assertion. They had their own, better-documented, stories of apostolic succession.

The Holy Roman Empire is also called the First Reich. It is generally accepted to have ended in 1806. It was always Roman Catholic. Its history was punctuated by often bitter disputes between the Emperor and the Pope, sometimes involving clashing armies.

The Second Reich, or German Empire, was not officially Catholic, was more clearly German, and lasted just a few decades, from 1871 to 1918. There was less pretense to the right to global domination, although the Germans had defeated France in 1870 and did build up a set of colonies, though they were dwarfed by the British Empire.

Adolf Hitler was born near the German border in Austria in 1889, in a Roman Catholic family. After trying his hand as an artist, he volunteered to join the German army during World War I, and became a German citizen.

Hitler's focus was on restoring Germany to power through the National Socialist, or Nazi, party. The two largest religions in Germany at the time were the Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic Church, with northern Germany tending to the Lutheran and southern Germany tending to the Catholic. Conveniently described after his defeat as an atheist, in fact Hitler was the champion of most people opposed to atheist Socialism and Communism.

Although the Nazis became the largest electoral party in Germany, the one thing the other political parties could agree on, until 1933, was that the Nazis should be excluded from power. But Pope Pius XI, along with the future Pope Pius XII (who was then the papal representative in Germany), thought otherwise. They needed a new Holy Roman Emperor to fight modern ideas like atheism, socialism, and even Protestantism. Mussolini did not seem to be up to the task. They cut a deal, through the Catholic electoral party in Germany and one of its leaders, Franz von Papen, who was a Papal Chamberlain and had been Chancellor of Germany in 1932. Under the agreement Hitler became Chancellor with Papen as his Vice-Chancellor. As part of the deal Hitler quickly agreed to Papal demands for a Reichskonkordat.

Hence the Third Reich. But Charlemagne had not been made Holy Roman Emperor just for inheriting the Frankish throne and being a good Christian (if, like most Christians, you think war and your religion are compatible). No, Charlemagne defeated a bunch of weaker tribes and kingdoms, and then defeated a specific enemy of Leo III, the Lombards, before he was worthy of the imperial crown.

Hitler had some work to do first. He got Germany's economy back on track (this was during the Great Depression), the real reason Germans were so fond of him. He built up an army and air force. Then he used diplomacy and the threat of force to get back areas taken from Germany at the end of World War I.

Meanwhile, General Franco seized Spain in a bloody civil war, leaving France as the only basically Roman Catholic, but non-fascist, nation in Europe. A generation of Popes had schemed to re-Catholicize Europe, and the dream seemed to be coming true.

Later, Catholic propagandists would point to arguments between Hitler and some Catholics, including Pius XI and Pius XII. But these were arguments within the budding new Holy Roman Empire; not really different (and in some cases remarkably identical) to arguments between earlier Emperors and Popes. Either pope could have tried to order Hitler around by threatening excommunication. But neither did. Hitler remained officially Catholic until the day he died. The Pope certainly did not object when Hitler forced the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches in Germany to unite.

Hitler frequently said things critical of the Church or specifically of some of her clergy. Again, later apologists would say that he was not really Catholic, whatever his official status. But go back to Charlemagne and you will find the same details. In fact, Charlemagne bossed around the Catholic clergy, and even the Pope, far more than Hitler ever did. And yet no historian today would say Charlemagne was not Catholic. In fact, he was made a Catholic saint.

The reason Hitler is not a Catholic Saint today is because the communist-atheists defeated him, with surprisingly little help from the British Empire. The United States only fought enough in Europe to grab what it could towards the end of the war.

The ideal of the Roman Empire was the rule of law under one man, the Emperor. The idea of a Universal religion was added to create the Holy Roman Empire. What Hitler and Pius worked out was a plan to globalize the church-state combo.

If you don't know enough about Adolf Hitler to judge the validity of my argument here, I would encourage you to start with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Then read about the close relation of the fascist movement to the Roman Catholic Church.

Pray for Freedom in the Vatican

The New York Time's Christmas day edition (Web edition) has a front page headline: Pope Prays for Freedom in China and Peace in Syria.

I always wonder: is this just another NYT contribution to corporate security state propaganda, or does someone there really think it is news? Do they believe the Pope's hypocrisy is so blatant they don't need to point it out to their readers?

In the accompanying picture Pope Benedict XVI looks like a horror story cutout from the 1930's, which the former Hitler Youth member pretty much is. He is flanked by two very fruity looking middle aged men I would not trust to leave alone with a child under any circumstance.

Focus on China. Religion is not illegal in China. The only real limits on religion are sensible: it can't be used for fraud or to foment rebellion or to conduct criminal activities. Pretty much every religion in the world has people living and worshipping in China, no problem. That is possible because the vast majority of people in China are reasonably Modern atheists or agnostics who don't mind some lost souls playing make believe, as long as they don't use it as an excuse for criminal behavior.

Contrast the Vatican City state. What religions are tolerated there? Only one.

The Vatican does not even tolerate dissent in its own ranks. For the past 30 years it has purged priests and bishops for crimes like sympathizing with the poor, pointing out there is little or no Biblical authority for much of Roman Catholic doctrine (including the dictatorship of the Pope), and suggesting that women and homosexuals should be treated as equals. At the same time it has protected priests and bishops who sexually assaulted children.

The same article notes the Benedict has excommunicated Chinese Catholic bishops who were elected by their fellow bishops, rather than appointed by dictator Benedict himself. Talk about tyranny and attacking freedom of religion.

The Pope tries to cover a lot of his global criminal activity by publicly praying for peace. Apparently either God does not listen to the Pope, or does not have the power of peace, or does not exist. Peace, like war, is a human endeavor, and the gods help those who help themselves.

The Pope and his archbishop henchmen should stop and read the New Testament before running down the more enlightened leaders of our world. Mathew 7:3, "And why beholdest thou the the mote that is in they brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" I quote from the King James Version of the Bible, the possession of which in Catholic Spain during the reign of Francisco Franco resulted in imprisonment. And yet Benedict wants to make many of Franco's minions into new Catholic saints.

When the Pope opens his mouth, evil has a voice. A dictatorial voice.

Saint Adolf Hitler

The creation of saints has been one of the Vatican's best propaganda tools. Saints encourage national or ethnic affiliation with the Roman Catholic faith, and they may also represent vocations or other attributes people can identify with.

It takes a while for a dead person to achieve sainthood. partly this is because Rome requires three "miracles" to be attributed to a person. In ancient times the miracles usually occurred before death. In our times the miracles are almost always cures that sick people achieve after praying to the potential saint. The Vatican has rules for what is a medical miracle and what is not, and they seem to follow the rules, so it may take quite a few decades of pretty many sick people praying to someone to build up the case for sainthood.

Right now Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day is being promoted as a potential saint. She would have been appalled at such nonsense. She would have had a thing or two to say about Spanish-Civil War era Catholic fascists priests who are in line for sainthood, too.

A rather large number of miracles have been unofficially attributed to Adolf Hitler, the former Chancellor of Germany. The Vatican is keeping them under wraps for purely political reasons. Hitler was the boy wonder of the Catholic Church in the 1920's and 1930's. When the Catholics lost World War II they had to do an abrupt about-face on Hitler. Most Americans think Adolf was a pagan, so effective has the re-write of history been effected.

You have to understand the Hitler, the American political establishment, and the Pope all had a common enemy back then: atheistic communism. Their epitome of evil was Joseph Stalin, leader of the openly communist Soviet Union (USSR, essentially Russia). But people were falling away from Catholicism in droves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The system of simply killing Protestants, agnostics and atheists had broken down even in Spain and Italy. Fascism, Pope Pius XI realized, could be made into the ideal tool to insure that only one religion was allowed in the world.

Benito Mussolini only converted to the Roman Catholic faith after he had achieved power in Italy, but most of his supporters were Catholic and the Pope was willing to work with anyone who could crush the secularist and socialist movements after World War II. Mussolini and the Pope were willing partners.

Adolf Hitler was raised Catholic and first rose to prominence after World War I in Bavaria, which had (and still has) a Catholic majority. His first miracle might be said to be surviving World War I unscathed, despite constantly being on the frontline, except for a leg wound and later temporary blindness from poison gas used by the British near the end of the war. His party, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party was just one of many tiny parties created in the chaos after World War I, and it used Socialist in a sense opposite to its common meaning..

The Nazi Party was not officially Catholic: its membership also admitted Lutherans, a few pagans who wanted to restore the worship of pre-christian German gods, and even modern, non-religious members. The Catholic Center Party was the main Catholic party, but the Pope did not feel it was aggressive enough and in the end pushed to have Hitler as German Chancellor. So perhaps it was not a miracle that Hitler, the leader of the largest party legally elected to the German Reichstag, was given the position of Chancellor on January 30, 1933. The Pope did not feel that his friend Franz von Papen was sufficiently iron-willed enough to destroy socialism and atheism, but as second in command von Papen was supposed to watch out for the Pope's interest.

Hitler's next miracle was a pretty impressive one: helping General Franco establish a purely Roman Catholic, fascist regime in Spain by killing everyone who believed in religious freedom and democracy, even including a large number of Catholics. The Pope was very happy with Hitler and Mussolini about that. Priests killed in the fighting on Hitler's side of Spain's Civil War have been nominated for sainthood. Priests killed on the pro-democracy side have been ignored, but then maybe no one prays to them, and hence they are unable to show their miraculous healing powers.

Hitler and the Pope did quarrel quite a bit from time to time. Each wanted to be top dog. But the Pope was more than happy that Hitler forced German Lutherans into a "unity church" with Catholics. He was thrilled when Hitler's armies defeated the French Republic and replaced it with the Roman Catholic, Fascist, Vichy Government. Most of all, the Pope was thrilled when Hitler's bombers and tanks went for the heart of the Russia.

What was president-for-life Franklin Delano Roosevelt doing about Saint Hitler? At first not much, because he needed American Catholic votes to stay in power. While Catholics were, and still are, a religious minority in the United States, they had power beyond their numbers because of their political and geographic concentration. They were almost all in the Democratic Party, and they were almost all in the northeastern states. The Democrats needed them as badly as they needed white segregationists in the southern states. Thus President Roosevelt refused to allow the Republican (democratically elected) side in the Spanish Civil war to buy arms from the United States.

Roosevelt may have shed a tear for France, but he actually did nothing because he knew the French empire would be up for grabs. He planned for the British Empire, Soviet Union, and Germany to chew up each other in Europe, and for Japan and China to chew up each other in Asia, so that in the end he could conquer the world. Roosevelt was smarter and more patient than your average dictator.

American Catholics would probably have kept this nation out of World War II if it had not been for the war between the Japanese and China, which had much to do with colonialism but nothing to do with religion. When Japan and Germany declared war on the U.S.A., suddenly Catholics here put aside their religion in favor of American nationalism.

The atheists in Russia, while losing about 20 million dead (see Atheist Holocaust), defeated Hitler, and apparently would have even if the U.S. had stayed out of the war. When Stalin's soldiers started marching towards Berlin, the Pope began to hedge his bets. He flipped when U.S. troops invaded Italy. Suddenly he could only remember the fights he had had with Hitler, not their love affair. When Hitler was no longer producing miracles, the Pope needed a more practical basis for the long-term survival of his church in Europe. America made a natural ally because at its core it was anti-communist and pro-capitalist. While the Pope preferred the fascist economic system (with God's blessing, as enshrined in Papal encyclicals that they don't want you reading anymore), given the choice between communism and capitalism, the Pope went with the U.S. and Britain. The Cold War started before Hitler had even died.

Hitler died on April 30, 1945. On his death certificate his religion was marked Roman Catholic. He had run out of miracles.

But he fought the good fight, doubtless went to Catholic heaven, and is due for a revival. Now may not be the time. But be assured, the Vatican is keeping a list, and when the time is ready, the miracles of Saint Hitler will be revealed.

Kateri Tekakwitha, New Patron Saint of Suicide

Saints have not been hard for the Roman Catholic Church to come by even in this modern era of fact checkers and scientific scrutiny. Pope Benedict XVI announced seven new, official saints on Sunday October 21, 2012, all of them with a pedigree of the minimum of three official miracles. None of the miracles seem very miraculous to me, but that is not the point. The point is to keep the Faith alive in communities that had been sadly lacking in recognized saints.

Top of the list, as far as Americans are concerned, is Kateri Tekakwitha, "Lily of the Mohawks." She is the new Patron Saint of Suicide, with a minor in self-flagellation. She is the first American Indian to become a saint (fact checkers: no Mexican or South American Indian saints? Or are we using American in the narrow, Indians almost whipped out by Anglos and French sense?)[Fact checker reply: you are right. 3 Mexican Indians were already saints.]

Benedict XVI said: "Saint Kateri, protectress of Canada and the first American Indian saint, we entrust you to the renewal of the faith in the first nations and in all of North America." That is a pretty heavy load to dump on a long-dead 24-year old suicidal virgin.

I would think the story of Kateri would repulse American Indians, or anyone else. Kateri Tekakwitha was born when the Mohawk nation was still substantial, in 1656. Her mother had been converted to Catholicism and then captured by a Mohawk chief. After a smallpox epidemic killed her parents and the French defeated the Dutch, Jesuit missionaries came recruiting. In 1675 Kateri began the conversion process and she was baptized the next year. Spurned by her unconverted village, she moved to Kahnawake, south of Montreal, under Jesuit supervision.

Along with other converted women Saint Kateri decided to practice "mortification of the flesh." She claimed Jesus as a husband. She inflicted so many wounds up herself that she died on April 17, 1680, on the Wednesday before Easter. Allegedly her skin turned white and her smallpox scars disappeared when she died, which was her first official miracle.

That sounds like suicide to me. Sounds like Child Protective Services should have rounded up Kateri and turned over the Jesuits to the police to be hanged.

Her miracles were that friends, shocked by her death, imagined she appeared to them and told them she was going to heaven, and later the usual people recovering from diseases (that people sometimes recover from) after praying to her. You can find better miracles in any psych ward.

Here is the miracle I am looking for: and end to this plague of crazy people. Crazy Catholics and Protestants, crazy Islamics and Buddhists and Jews and what-have-you.

It is not surprising that Pope Benedict XVI would encourage young Catholic women to commit suicide. He has rejected them as potential priests. His anti-female program within the Catholic Church is probably inherited from his volunteering for Hitler Youth when he was a child.

We have enough problems with troubled children in these United States without the Catholic Church glorifying self-mutilation and suicide.

See also: Kateri Tekakwitha at Wikipedia
Pope Canonizes 7 Saints at New York Times

Cuba, Democracy, and the Catholic Church

Pope Benedict XVI wants the government of Cuba to reform. The Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said the Pope's upcoming visit will "help the process of development towards democracy" in Cuba.

Despite the Catholic Church's oppression of Cubans and cooperation with the corrupt, murderous, but Catholic Fulgencio Batista and his followers before the Revolution, Cubans have enjoyed far more religious freedom under the Communist regime than under its predecessors. They enjoyed the right to not be Roman Catholic: to be atheists, agnostics, or Protestant Christians, or whatever. Generally speaking, when Catholics have been jailed, it has not been for their religious beliefs, but because they were working against the regime. The regime has promoted atheism of the Marxist sort, but that is simply modernizing and educating people.

That said, the Cuban regime, popular or not (more popular after the revolution when the sting of Batista's whips was still on people's backs), is not a democracy. It should become one. The repression of political dissenters is wrong, although all governments, including that of the United States, have always punished rebels, whatever the pretext for rebellion.

I know of no instance in history when Catholics have not imposed their religion on others when they have had the power. The Catholic Church is officially against democracy, as shown in a series of Papal Bulls over the last two centuries, which have never been retracted. The Catholic Church brought us Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, and Philippe Petain, the great Catholic dictators of the 20th century.

Having lost World War II, the Vatican had to pull in its horns, and decided to cooperate with the British and American empires against socialism and communism. That was one of the great scams of history, one few Americans want to acknowledge.

The only thing that Pope Benedict has to offer the Cuban people is the usual lies. Some Cubans may want to believe them, but they are still lies. Jesus was not god, and even if he was there is no specific New Testament support for the idea that the Bishop of Rome should be the global Catholic dictator.

In England, usually depicted as the birthplace of our beloved American personal freedoms, the barons and people forced the evil King John to sign the Magna Charta in 1215 A.D. Later, naturally, King John tried to renege. "John was assisted by the Pope, who, as overlord of England, annulled the Charter and excommunicated all who sustained it." [A Manual of English History, Edward M. Lancaster, p. 63]

The Pope's repression of freedom in the Middle Ages in England was no fluke. The Church has consistently demanded to reach deep into our personal affairs, as Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and allies advocate even in these United States.

By all accounts most Cuban Catholics are nominal, much like most American Catholics. They treat the Catholic Church as some sort of ethnic group they belong to. They don't believe the Pope should be a global dictator. They don't go to church on Sunday, not because they can't, but because they know in their hearts it is a waste of time.

Let's not be fooled again. The Pope might use the term "democracy" as a crowbar to re-invigorate his power base in Cuba, but he and his cardinals are deeply devoted to tyrannical rule over their fellow human beings. If Castro had forced people to go to mass (and shot those who failed to attend, as General Franco did in Spain), the Pope would not be talking democracy. There would be hugging, kissing, and making mutual congratulations.

Rick Santorum for Pope?

Republican Party presidential hopeful Rick Santorum clearly believes that he has a good chance to beat out Mitt Romney for the nomination. Then, presumably, he plans to rally American voters around him to defeat the incumbent, Barack Obama. Mr. Santorum is now polling well among Republicans, despite being almost unknown 6 months ago, before other rivals of Mr. Romney imploded.

Aside from knowing he was not all that popular in his home state of Pennsylvania, where he lost a re-election bid to the U.S. Senate in 2006, and knowing he was "conservative," like most of the public I paid little attention to his positions or record until lately.

Rick Santorum is not conservative: he is reactionary. Conservatives may argue against same-sex marriage (which is an innovation) and abortion (which is an ethical dilemma). They may deny the reality of global warming, which after all as a science theory is less than 100 years old. Santorum goes further. He wants to prohibit birth control, and abolish the public education system. Given his public agenda, it is fairly easy to surmise what his hidden agenda is: to restructure the United States of America to resemble European nations during the Dark Ages.

I hope that shining the light on Santorum's unstable mental world will insure that his campaign implodes like Herman Cain's, Michelle Bachman's and others before him. On the other hand, the issue may not be decided by the time of California's presidential primary this June 5th. It is time for California Republicans to consider whether they really want an to undermine what remains of American industry and military might by destroying public education.

Do California Republicans really want to risk a socialist revolution by making it impossible, rather than merely unlikely, for our working class children to have decent economic opportunities?

People used to say that Santorum was looking for the Vice President slot. I think, given the age of Pope Benedict XVI, who is 85, that Mr. Santorum would do us all a favor by declaring he is a candidate for Pope. If successful, he would be the first American Pope.

Whereas in America even our Founding Fathers would have found Rick Santorum to be an unenlightened reactionary, in the Vatican he would fit right in. Benedict XVI has been a staunch advocate of taking the Roman Catholic Church back to the Dark Ages, with Latin as the language of choice and burning scientists as good moral instruction and monarchy as the only practical form of government.

Rick Santorum does not even seem to realize he is unbalanced in a way that even most Tea Party activists should find disturbing. Rick Santorum's program is not within the American tradition of freedom (and liberty, and justice) for all.

Adolf Hitler (who was a Roman Catholic) used his power to force (while he was alive) the Lutheran Church in Germany into a unified organization with the Catholic Church. That one-religion-fits-all view really is the inevitable end of the line of logic Santorum espouses. There is only one way to think, and that is Santorum's way, the Roman Catholic way.

Protestant Christians beware. You may think that Santorum is an ally against secularism, and for a while he may be. But you will find that if he defeats the modern, secular Americans with his crusade, he will not be satisfied. He will put pressure on Protestants to submit to the authority of the Pope. With five Roman Catholic judges already forming a majority on the Supreme Court, in a nation where only 1 in 5 citizens is even nominally Roman Catholic, you may wish you had worked harder to preserve the separation of church and state, rather than trying to bring it to an end.

Saint Peter Died in Beijing

Chinese scholars announced that Saint Peter, the leader of the 12 Disciples of Jesus Christ, ended his life in Beijing. A tomb containing his bones and a manuscript with the story of his life was unearthed during an excavation for a new skyscraper near the old royal palace. "It dated to approximately 85 A.D., when Beijing would have been the stronghold of a local warlord."

Christian scholars have always suspected that the idea that Saint Peter died in Rome was a 3rd century fabrication by the bishops of Rome. There is no record in the New Testament of the apostle Peter ever visiting Rome. The only letters in the Bible purported to be written by Peter were written from Babylon, which is a few days journey from Jerusalem. Acts of the Apostles has Peter living in Jerusalem long after the Christian religion had spread to other cities in the Roman Empire.

The Life of Peter, now being prepared for publication, appears to have been partly written in his own hand and partly written by an assistant who joined him in his trip. It records his three years with Jesus, then several decades of living in or near Jerusalem. Finally Peter decided to take the word of Jesus East. He stayed for two years in Babylon, then traveled through India, stopping and founding Christian communities which later disappeared. Finally he sailed to southern China, then worked his way up the coast to Beijing, where he died of natural causes. His assistant arranged with the local rulers for his tomb.

The Vatican immediately called the Chinese scientists and scholars, "A bunch of liars. The timing of this hoax, when the Church is trying to exert control over Chinese Catholic bishops, is particularly suspicious."

The Catholic Bishop of Beijing said it is too early to declare himself Pope. "We will need further confirmation by a wider team of archeologists and specialists in ancient languages. However, if God puts this responsibility on my shoulders, I will accept His burden."

Hillary Clinton reacted strongly to the news. "It's as if someone claimed Jesus, after he rose from the dead and departed Jerusalem, came to the Americas and preached among the Indians. If is just a fabrication to assert Chinese Communist power in the religious sphere."

Professor Moriarty, speaking for the Southern Baptist Convention, said "of course our scholars would be interested in anything that sheds light on the early Church. However, it has always been the position of Protestants that the Church should be governed by its members, not whichever anti-Christ happens to be Bishop of Rome at any given moment."

Nazi Pope Blasts Islam, False Gods

The man called Benedict XVI, legal A.K.A. Joseph Alois Ratzinger, continues to prove he is the third in a line of fascist, and more specifically Nazi, Popes. According to accounts in the the Associated Press dated October 11, 2010, Pope Benedict recently "denounced terrorist ideologies that spur violence in God's name," adding that "these ideologies are based on false gods." [See Pope Denounces Terrorist Ideas]

Wow. Of course, Roman Catholics have been self-selecting and inbreeding for gullibility for 17 centuries now. The Catholic Church so cultivates ignorance of history and religion that it discourages its communicants from reading the Bible. Sadly, because of the nature of politics, even many Protestant Americans don't know we had to fight the Catholics in World War II because of the first two fascist popes, Pius XI and Pius XII. They used their servants Benito Mussolini, Philippe Petain, General Francisco Franco and, most useful servant of all, Adolf Hitler, to try to eliminate all rival religions from the earth. In the process they murdered roughly 20 million atheists, 6 million Jews, and about 1 million Protestant Christians between 1936 and their defeat in 1945.

Joseph Alois Ratzinger was just a child then, but he became a member of Hitler Youth. Later, trying to clean up his resume a bit, he claimed he was forced into Nazi Youth and actually opposed Hitler. But we know what happened to even middle class Catholic Germans who opposed Hitler, or failed to attend Hitler Youth meetings. They were put in concentration camps. So the opposing Hitler bit is just a bald lie.

The Catholic Church's idea that its God is the true god and all other Gods are false goes back to pre-Catholic Christianity. Christians essentially invented the idea of there being only one God, and that has brought the world untold grief. Recounting how many non-Catholics have been murdered over the centuries by Catholics in their God's name would take an encyclopedia. Even Google would pale at the thought of the cost of building a datacenter to hold all the data of the victims of the Catholic Church.

Islam is the original Protestant sect. There were lots of non-Catholic sects before Islam, but the Catholics wiped them out. Mohammed and his Moslem followers were the first to put forward a different theology and live to tell about it. In fact, they beat the Catholics at their own game of "conversion or death" for about a millenia. The Catholic Church looked ready for total defeat around 1500 A.D., but the discovery of America, and the working of Mexican and Peruvian natives to death in gold and silver mines, allowed the Catholics, led by Spain, to turn the tide. Catholic mercenary armies inspired not so much be faith as by payment in silver stopped and then turned back the advance of the Turkish, Islamic empire in Europe.

This weakness of the Catholic Church around 1500 also enabled the survival of what we now no as Protestant Christian churches. There were christian protestants before Martin Luther. Martin Luther was the just the first to call out the Popes on their bull and live to tell about. This allowed,over time, ever larger numbers of people to engage in rational thought, religous choice, and ethical behavior, a process that I hope will continue to grow.

The internal stuggles of the Catholic Church during the past 2 decades look like war preparations to me. Tolerant, pro-democracy persons within the Church have been systematically deprived of power. The Church's assaults on women's rights have become stident, including the recent announcement that it is heresy punishable by excommunication to even think about making women priests. The Church has become a right-wing dictatorship, just as it did before it engineered the rise of the fascist dictators to power during the 1930s.

Affirming its intent to restore fascist governments wherever possible, and ultimately make a bid for global domination again, is Benedict XVI's ongoing efforts to make saints of thousands of General Franco's supporters [See fascist saints]. General Franco was the Catholic dictator of Spain, highly praised and blessed by Pope Pius XII, who murdered millions of non-Catholics in Spain during his reign of terror, which lasted until his death in 1975.

False Gods indeed. The idea of One True God would seem to me to imply that the worst mistake a person could make is getting a poor signal from God. Like God is AT&T, and has never quite figured out how to make cell phones work right.

I denounce the use of violence to spread religion or philosophy of any kind. I admit to being anti-religion, preferring my Natural Liberation Philosophy. But the way to convert people is by example and argument, not force. Both Catholicism and Islam have also used, at time, economic policy to encourage conversions. Right now the Catholic Church is bankrupt. It's main weapon against Islam is the United States government, which it influences through Catholic voter blocks and lobbying. Americans should not allow the Pope to use our tax dollars to further his agenda of ignorance, superstition, and centralised dictorial governance.

Further reading:
Hitler's Pope: Pius XII by John Cornwell

The Vatican in World Politics by Avro Manhattan

Pius XII, Croatia, and the Eastern Orthodox Holocaust

The Roman Catholic Church has nominated Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli) for sainthood. There are a few flies in that sacred ointment.

Apologists for Pius XII (should you have to apologize for the behavior of a saint) portray him as a brave, good man who just happened to become Pope in Fascist Europe just before the outbreak of World War II. The Jewish Holocaust has been the center of controversy: did Pius do all he could to save the Jews from burning in Hitler's ovens?

Before forming a conclusion, you might want to consider how others fared, because the Holocaust was not just the work of Hitler, and Jews were not its only victims. There was the largest holocaust of all, the atheist holocaust, which Pius XII lobbied for, and which Catholics simply will not discuss. Perhaps crucial to the saint debate was the holocaust in Croatia.

Croatia has had an on-again, off-again history as a state. After World War I it was made part of the new superstate of Yugoslavia. During World War II it enjoyed a brief period (1941 to 1945) of independence, then was absorbed back into (newly socialist) Yugoslavia.

Without excusing bad human behavior, let's just admit that the Balkans is a rough neighborhood and has been since pre-Roman times. In particular, Orthodox Christian Serbs, Moslems, and Roman Catholic Croats had been living and fighting with each other long before Pius XII was born. It is possible the tragic mass murders in Croatia during World War II would have happened even if he did not encourage them. But he did encourage them.

First as a child of Vatican lawyers, then as an up and coming lawyer, bureaucrat and diplomat for the Vatican, Eugenio Pacelli had always favored the ideas that the Pope should have absolute power within the Roman Catholic Church, and that all governments should acknowledge the Pope as a sort of global emperor and direct representative of God. Yes, he was crazy, but then he never got out much; he was feeding on the ever-present alternative reality kept up inside the Vatican.

Pius XII hated communism and atheism and even liberalism and democracy (until his side lost World War II, then he changed his tune a bit). He wanted all governments to be monarchies or dictatorships, run just as the Church was run, with absolute obedience and no room for deviation or individualism. He hated Jews (lots of evidence of that is available; ignore it at your soul's peril), thought Protestants should be forced back into his church, and believed atheists should be shot if they refused to convert. You would think he might go easy on Eastern Orthodox Christians, who are usually lumped in as being very close to the Roman Catholic Church. You would be wrong. They refused to accept the authority of the Pope, and several of their diocese had set up by Saint Paul himself.

In 1941, with the war going full tilt, people in Yugoslavia, as elsewhere, had some difficulty picking sides. The Croats (not all of them, of course ...) sided with the Fascists; there was a large, pre-existing fascist organization, the Ustashe. Like almost all the fascists [see Fascism], the Ustashe was mainly Catholic. Led by Franciscan priests, the Ustashe started slaughtering Eastern Orthodox church members, who were mainly ethnic Serbs. The Ustashe killed Jews too, but, strange to us, did not attack the substantial Moslem minority.

You can read some details in Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell (pages 248-267), including what is known about the extensive reports sent to Pius XII about the slaughters, and his encouragement of the Catholic leaders of fascist Croatia.

When you put it all in context, you begin to wonder what a Catholic saint is. I attended Catholic School in the U.S. (where I was taught to hate Jews, Protestants, and atheists), and I got a different view of the saints. They were either victims (martyrs) who gave up their lives to spread the glorious gospel of Jesus, or they very kindly people who helped others who were in need.

I am sure that Pius XII did some good things in his life. But look at his associates. He loved Petain and General Franco. He was in bed with Hitler: his struggles with him were over who would be top dog. He did not speak out clearly against the Nazi attacks on, well, anyone, not even German Catholics. He viciously attacked Catholics who did not agree with him, using his power as Pope to silence anyone who deviated from his insane approach to theology and Church governance.

If that makes the man a saint, I'm glad to be numbered with the sinners.

Pope Pius XII and the Hitler Enabling Act

I think I first learned about the Nazis as a child from old movies and the TV serial Combat!. In my simple child world, Americans were good and Germans, at least Nazi Germans, were evil. Apparently the world shares my fascination with these paragons of evil because they are the bad guys, a half century after their demise, in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Growing up in the 1960s I eventually heard the good guys, Americans, and in particular President Richard Nixon, called Nazi by leftist agitators. Although I was far better at math and science than at languages and human relations, in college I majored in Political Science because I did not like science being used to do evil, like dropping bombs on Vietnamese peasants. A considerable amount of my course work covered the Adolf Hitler's German National Socialist (Nazi) regime. Since that time I have read and even written a fair amount about the Nazis, trying to understand their particular brand of evil, and how it relates to evil in general. Most notably I have focused on how the National Socialist Party came to power. And I have related that to another major area of interest, the Catholic Church. I am the only modern writer I know of who emphasizes the fact that Adolf Hitler was born a Catholic, was a member of the Catholic Church in good standing throughout his lifetime, and died a Catholic [See Hitler's Catholicism]. Although factually true, this is considered heresy in the United States where the Catholic Church remains powerful enough within the Democratic Party and where that Party has dominated American society since 1932.

And yet today I learned something new and revealing. I will start with what I knew yesterday, that Adolf Hitler came to have dictatorial powers even though the National Socialists were not elected to hold a majority in the Reichstag (German equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives). The Reichstag voted to give away its powers to the Chancellor, who happened to be Hitler. This happened on March 23, 1933.[Coincidently, President Franklin Roosevelt became President of the United States (later President for Life) on March 4, 1933.] You can find this in the most standard of works on Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer on page 199:

"Monsignor Kaas, the [Catholic Center Party] leader, had demanded a written promise from Hitler that he would respect the President's power of veto. But though promised before the voting, it was never given. Nevertheless the Center leader rose to announce that his party would vote for the bill. Bruening remained silent. The vote was soon taken: 441 for, and 84 (all Social Democrats) against. The Nazi deputies sprang to their feet shouting and stamping deliriously ..."

So the Enabling Act passed, and Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany. Recall that this was in the midst of the Great Depression.

Given that you now know that Hitler was Catholic, and that the crucial votes that made him dictator came from the Catholic Center Party, you might think that you now understand what happened. But the Catholic Center Party was not actually fond of Hitler. There were more conservative, smaller Catholic parties in Germany that did like Hitler, but the Center Party actually believed in the democratic process. They were in their own struggle with the Vatican during this period. They were influenced by modern ideas. And a series of popes, up to then pope Pius XI, hated modern ideas, hated democracy, and in particular hated any grass roots control, or even bishop level control, of the Catholic Church.

Pius XI's man on the spot was Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII. He had been the Vatican's ambassador to Germany, or papal nuncio, from shortly after World War I until 1930, when he became Pius XI's Secretary of State. He had always been in charge of negotiating a treaty, or concordat, between the Roman Catholic Church and the German State. For the Popes the concordat was about imposing the relatively novel idea that the Pope had dictatorial powers within the Church, including appointing all bishops, but reaching down even to the parish level. Because Germany had been the center of the Holy Roman Empire, the Church in Germany was used to a great deal of autonomy, and still remembered when it had the right to appoint Popes.

Pacelli made a deal with Hitler on behalf of the Pope. Hitler would be allowed to become the political dictator of Germany, if Hitler would allow the Pope to become the spiritual dictator of Germany, or at least of Catholics in Germany (Hitler and the Pope planned to merge the Lutheran Church into the Catholic Church).

So the Pope, through Pacelli, ordered the Center Party to vote for the Nazi dictatorship. This would in effect dissolve the Center Party, which was something the Vatican had been seeking since at least 1920. The Center Party itself probably would not have signed the concordat without revisions, because it thought the church should have a more democratic internal structure than was being advocated by Pacelli and Pius XI.

The negotiation of the Nazi concordat is a major theme of John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. The Enabling Act specifically is covered on pages 92 and 133-137.

Books cited (used copies of these are usually cheap):

On Good Works

In the arguments between Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians there are a number of big issues. One is whether the Pope, or whoever happens to be Bishop of Rome, was ever meant by Jesus Christ to be the dictator of the Christian faithful [see Was Peter the First Pope?]. Another is whether during the ritual of Communion the bread and wine are simply symbols, or are actually tranformed into the body and blood of Christ. Today, this year's Easter Sunday, I want to take on the Faith v. Works issue. Protestants, starting with Martin Luther, hold that man can enter Heaven by Faith alone. Catholics hold that people must have faith, but must also perform good works to go to heaven.

The controversy is a good example of people overreacting to a historical situation, and then setting their beliefs in cement. Martin Luther was not the first Protestant (or heretic, if you take the Catholic view); he was the first to live to tell about it. He did not like the Roman Catholic version of good works, which insisted that they consisted of cash payments to the Church. This took a variety of forms, including selling indulgences [see also Catholic defense of indulgences] but the money for all this seldom went to charity. Rather it supported the rather lavish life styles of bishops, cardinals, and the Pope.

Luther reacted by saying that Faith alone determined whether people were in God's grace and got into heaven. On the one hand this was an act of self-denial, for Luther was (or had been) a beneficiary of the heaven-for-sale system.

But Luther had misidentified the problem. The problem was not good works; the problem was the substitution of a system of extortion for a system of good works. And not only did Luther and his Lutherans fail to correct this initial reaction, it became worse with John Calvin and his followers. Protestant sects in the 1500's (most of them) adopted, as a theological position, that people with money had no obligation to give to charity. This, of course, appealed to certain people with money. It was the basis of the Protestant work ethic: work or starve, for there will be no charity for the unfortunate. In the most extreme Calvinist interpretation a man could behave rather badly and still get into heaven solely because he held the correct faith.

While the Catholic Church did little in the way of reforming its theology, during its internal reformation in the 1500's, in response to Protestant criticism, the Church did make an effort to do more genuine charitable work, and has continued supporting its charitable arms to this day. In the United States, Catholic Charities is a big organization.

Many modern Protestant churches have their own interpretation of the good works issue: good works may not be necessary to get into heaven, but they are a basic part of being good humans.

Islam, more than any other religion I know of, emphasizes the donation of money to charity by its wealthier members. This is one reason it is so popular in poorer communities around the world.

For those of us who know there is no heaven and no hell, the question is how we should act here in everyday reality. Most of us see a value in charity. Sometimes it is rationalized in social terms: feed the hungry, and they don't need to steal food. Modern economies have shown us that economic tragedy can happen to almost anyone. Feeding economic unfortunates creates a culture where, if you become unfortunate yourself, you can depend on others to feed you. But most of all, it just feels good to help other people. It makes you feel competent and useful. It is a basic human function; to not be charitable is to not be fully human.

I have met vitriolic American "Christians" who believe that they should not give to charity. The idea that God and Jesus Christ actually prohibit Christians from doing good works is bizarre and must reflect an underlying social or mental pathology.

Spring Equinox Thoughts: Philosophy, and the Pope

Today is the spring equinox, a day all we warm-blooded animals in the northern hemisphere should celebrate. Things seem to be getting warm for the Pope (Benedict XVI), who is being linked closely, for the first time, to the failure of the Roman Catholic Church to protect its own children from its own priests. The increased web traffic to this site from my censorship by the Alpine School Board has worn off. The censorship was partly because of my summer solstice essay musing that it makes more sense to worship the Sun than to worship the Son. Apparently there are limits to compare-and-contrast essay topics in schools in the state of Utah.

By way of contributing to sanity on earth, yesterday I copies two brief articles on Common Sense philosophy from an old (copyright expired) encyclopedia. Apparently some of the arguments used by the Common Sense school (in Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries) against ultra-skeptical and illusionist philosophies are similar to those I am using in Natural Liberation philosophy. However, I have not yet been able to get their original publications, much less read them. Curiously, in my technical work I am working on a model for the human brain that demonstrates, on a computer, how accurate knowledge of material things and causes can be constructed out of noisy, fragmented sensory information (see in particular Hierarchical Temporal Memory, Part 8, Specific Memories). Even more curiously, last night, viewing an episode of Numb3rs, they talked about obscure notions I have been studying recently: Bayesian probability and Markov chains. They even wrote out an equation for conditional probabilities that I recognized.

So on the one hand we have the Pope and the majority of the Catholic Church hierarchy trying to send the earth back to the Middle Ages (the technology of which would only support perhaps one-tenth of today's human population). The problem is not just Catholic child abuse of the newsworthy sort. The Catholic Church abuses the minds of children, filling their heads with lies, punishing them for any challenge to church authorities. Most organized religions do the same, but I am not looking for kindler, gentler religions peddling the same basic lies about Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses and their lot.

An equinox is a tipping point. Hopefully the trend away from ill-founded religions and philosophies will lead to a world where people understand their relationship to nature and behave appropriately. More likely we are just headed towards an ecological apocalypse, which the religious crazies will fit into their scheme of things as best they can.

The Atheist Holocaust

Tired of Jewish Holocaust stories? I think it important to a take on people and institutions that deny the grim facts of history. But denial also sometimes comes from selectivity. Concentrating on the slaughter of the Jews by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party overlooks the many other victims of the fascists, including the regimes run by Franco in Spain, Petain in France, and Mussolini in Italy.

The Nazis started executing their enemies shortly after they came to power in 1933, but that hardly distinguished them from the typical world government. The numbers were not large, at first. The first big numbers were racked up by the Spanish fascists led by General Francisco Franco in the civil war that began in 1936. Again, at the time it was not clear this was the beginning of the Holocaust; soldiers kill each other, and often civilians, in civil wars. But Franco's troops, when they took a town, got lists of local atheist and Protestant men from Catholic priests, and shot them without trial. The roundups and executions continued even after the the Republican side surrendered. Franco's side was Catholic. Thus the shootings were an extension of the Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic wars against Islam in Spain (and against pagans in the Americas). Amazingly, except for some arms supplied by the Soviet Union, none of the democracies offered help to the elected government of Spain. In fact, the United States and Great Britain refused to sell arms to the Spanish Republic. They said that was neutral (they did not sell arms to Franco either), even as Germany and Italy supplied the fascist rebels with arms and trained soldiers.

Usually this lack of support for the elected government of Spain is attributed to the fact that democratic socialists (as opposed to anarchist socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) and communists) were the largest party elected. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, had other reasons for neutrality. He, and the Democratic Party, depended on two large voting blocks: Catholics, mainly living in northern urban centers; and racists in the southern states. The Catholic Church in the United States supported Franco, and Roosevelt decided he could not risk alienating Catholic voters for a cause so far from most American's concerns during the Great Depression.

It is generally agreed that the failure of the democracies (the United States of America, Great Britain, and France) to respond to the fascist takeover of Spain that convinced Hitler and Mussolini that they could start grabbing bits of the world. Regarding the Holocaust, it also convinced Hitler that he could execute large numbers of his enemies without interference from the outside world. Kristallnacht, which did not involve mass executions, did not take place in Germany until 1938. However, even before the fascist win in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler already had a model, the Turkish genocide against Armenians [See Franz von Papen, Hitler, and Two Popes].

While he and the two fascist popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, disagreed on some things, they agreed that it was important to exterminate non-Catholics, particularly Communist non-Catholics. Hitler, of course, put a higher value on exterminating Jews than the Popes, and both were willing to give Protestant Christians, who did not otherwise cause too much trouble, time to convert to Catholicism. [In case you have not been reading this blog, Hitler was Catholic. So were Mussolini, Franco, and Petain].

You know about the six million Jews. Who else did Hitler kill, with the Pope's blessing? I use generally accepted numbers here (there is much debate, largely due to attempts by various groups to whitewash their own deeds and demonize those of their enemies).

The Romani ("Gypsies") lost in the vicinity of 1 million. Non-Jewish Poles lost 2 million. Disabled Germans killed numbered a quarter million. Some 5000 Jehovah's Witnesses were killed.

But the really, really big number of victims can be classified as Atheists; most were Communists, though only fraction of them were members of the elite Communist Party. Hitler murdered Germany's Communists early on [though many of them converted to being Nazis], and even murdered some leaders of the more atheist, socialist wing of his own party. But the really big numbers came from deaths of citizens of the U.S.S.R. Some of these people may have been Orthodox Christians, but the vast majority were atheists. An estimated 7 million died fighting the German army. Perhaps two million soviet POWs were executed. And probably about 12 million civilians died in collateral damage or from starvation in German-held areas. [See World War II casualties of the Soviet Union for details]

That is a lot of dead atheists. This atheist holocaust was planned for decades by the leaders of the Catholic Church [See my series of articles on Pope Pius XI].

But Hollywood is based in the United States, and heroic Russian war movies, or pitiful atheist-civilians-killed-by-Catholics movies would not go over big here.

I think the atheist holocaust deserves some serious study. We still have a large Catholic Church, now led by an "ex" Nazi who seems to be trying to push the Church and world back to the Dark Ages. We still have religious leaders of all sorts who encourage their followers to hate people of other faiths. I might mention the record of atheists is not clean either, especially when atheism has been combined with authoritarian political trends like Leninism.

In my Natural Liberation philosophy war is always a war crime. Killing civilians (and pushing them off their lands into refugee camps) is always a crime against humanity. Religion may be wrong-headed, but it is up to the upright to persuade the religious to align themselves with Nature. I do believe people have a right to use violence for self-defense, but that is a very limited right because all too often people claim they are defending themselves when they are really attacking others or perpetuating a pointless feud.

The Holy Roman Empire, Hitler, and Benedict XVI

In Roman Catholic mythology, Jesus Christ appointed the Apostle Peter to lead the Church he established. Peter, in his old age, went to Rome, where he was martyred. In the meantime he had appointed a second in command in Rome to be the head of the Church. This bishop of Rome became known as the Pope, and has been the rightful spiritual (and some say temporal) leader of Christendom ever since.

Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and non-Christian academics, and the more honest Catholic historians, agree on a different story. The early church did not have a centralized structure. An astonishingly brutal Roman emperor, Constantine, reformed the Christian churches. A common creed was agreed upon at councils (Council of Nicaea) to which the bishop of Rome sent representatives like everyone else. Church and state worked together while the Empire lasted, and all non-Christians were persecuted. During a period of turmoil, the Dark Ages, after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the bishops of Rome, now called Popes (Pontiffs) worked to create a new religious and governmental order we now call the Roman Catholic Church.

The the Holy Roman Empire was born as a successor to the Western Roman Empire. The bishops of the Eastern Roman Empire did not recognize their Roman colleague's self-elevation. Islam almost overran both of them, and the pagan Vikings cut into the Christian domains for a while too.

I want to focus here on one aspect of the Holy Roman Empire during its long history (roughly 800 to 1800 A.D.): the struggle for supremacy between Popes and Emperors. Occasionally Popes were selected by the Emperors and were subservient, and some Emperors admitted to the supremacy of the Pope. They always agreed that Catholicism would be the only tolerated religion, with rare exception.

The Holy Roman Emperor had the additional problems of having rival Catholic Kings to deal with in France, Britain, and Spain; having invaders (usually, but not always, Islamic) pressuring them from the East; and having trouble gaining absolute power in their feudal kingdoms. When the Pope was unhappy with an Emperor, he could call in the French. It Italy itself there was a long feud between the imperial party and the papal party; every city had adherents to each. The Popes gained control of the regular governments of central Italy. Then, in worst case scenarios, the troops of the Pope fought the troops of the Emperor. If you want a good example of the conflict, check out the history of the Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa.

The Catholic Church was in great turmoil, and in many ways at a low ebb, between 1800 and 1900. Between Protestant Christianity and modern rationalist culture, even in nations where it was the dominant religion it was unable to eliminate the opposition by its classic methods (murder and intimidation). Still, it remained the dominant religion in Latin America and southern Europe. Popes and the hierarchy sometimes allowed for reforms, but they also worked hard to restore monarchies and to maintain a privileged position for the Catholic Church in nations where it was dominant.

There was a qualitative change in the Church's politics after World War I. The emergence of Russia, or the U.S.S.R., as an atheist bastion drove the Church to work overtime. Democracy was equated with atheism. Monarchies, while still looked upon kindly, fell second fiddle to a new strategy: the modern Catholic dictatorship. The Church wanted dictators who would not recognize the human rights of atheists, Marxists, anarchists, or even run of the mill middle of the road democrats or republicans. Under the reign of Pius XI various authoritarian politicians and movements, that we now call fascist, were encouraged in their desires. It is important to recognize that the Roman Catholic Church had a long term strategy to restore Catholicism and Papal supremacy. In the short run they could tolerate dictators who were not subservient to the Pope if those dictators would create the conditions (by creating authoritarian states and exterminating non-Catholics) that would allow the Popes to end up at the top of the hierarchy.

Thus Europeans found themselves subject to Benito Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany, General Petain in France, General Francisco Franco in Spain, and a host of lesser Catholic dictators.

In retrospect the Catholic Church lost its great gamble for control of the world. The Protestants (if you include atheists as Protestants) of Great Britain, the United States, and Russia defeated Pius XII (successor to Pius XI), Hitler and crew.

And then the great whitewash began. Pius XII and most Catholics announced they never really liked dictatorships, especially that Hitler fellow. To prove it they produced reams of documents showing how they had argued with Hitler, Petain, and Mussolini over a variety of issues (they never had any arguments with General Franco).

The important thing to remember is the context of the arguments. Hitler wanted to boss the Pope around; the Pope wanted to boss Hitler around.

In effect the Church had tried to create a new Holy Roman Empire. If Hitler had defeated Russia and then Britain, they would have succeeded. Hitler wanted only one state religion. He was Catholic and had no interest in the only other viable German option, the Lutheran Church. Over the decades the Church would have used its traditional techniques of brainwashing to gain control of Hitler's successors. But while Petain and Franco worked closely with the Pope, there would be friction as long as Hitler was alive. Just as during much of the old Holy Roman Empire period.

Why do most people not know this? Because after World War II we went straight into the Cold War between Capitalism and Communism. The leading capitalist nations, Britain and the United States, wanted allies against Communism. So they went along with the Pope's re-interpretation of the fascist era. The Pope was an ally; even General Franco was now an ally. Support for fascism was forgiven in return for support against Communism. And since Fascism was largely invented by the Church to counter godless Communism, it was a good deal for the Pope.

With the Polish Pope and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, we have seen the Catholic Church shed its fake liberalism of the post war period. Liberal Catholics have been mercilessly purged from the Church hierarchy. Medieval styles of thought have begun to be promoted again. The Church has not openly advocated a return to monarchical government yet, but it has supported a number of right wing Catholic governments in Latin America and authoritarian politicians in Europe.

Hopefully the Church's time has passed. Hopefully no amount of attempted manipulation will restore the dark ages of Catholic monarchies and dictatorships. But we must be vigilant, because the Church is still large, influential, and well funded on a global scale. It still pushes for favored religion status in nations such as France, Spain, and Italy.

The best way to deal with the Church, for now, is to shed light upon it. Protestants need to calmly explain to Catholics why the authority of the Pope is not legitimate or based on scripture. Religious freedom has to include the separation of church and state that we have enjoyed in these United States. Thin the grass roots of the Church and its hierarchy will become irrelevant.

Saint Peter Denied Jesus; Pope Denies Holocaust

"Saint" Peter famously denied knowing Jesus three times just prior to the Crucifixion [Bible, Mark 14:66-72], yet according to Roman Catholic lore he went on to become the first bishop of Rome, or Pope. The Catholic Church maintains that God made Peter and his successors His representative and Monarch on earth.

This week Benedict XVI, who was a teenage Hitler Youth, "healed a schism" in the Catholic Church by welcoming back four Bishops who are part of an ultra-conservative group that split from the Church in 1970 with archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Pope Benedict has not offered to reconcile with "liberal" Catholics that he and his predecessors expelled from the Church for the heresy of Liberation Theology, or even milder advocacy of reforms such as allowing female priests.

In the news media, the controversy is centered on Bishop Richard Williamson, who basically denied that the Holocaust was a purposeful attempt to exterminate Jews.

What is wrong with this picture?

Saint Peter denied Christ thrice. Apparently God forgave him and made him Pope. But ever since the Christians (later to split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divisions) obtained state power (became the sole church of the later Roman Empire) they have not been forgiving. They have killed everyone who disagreed with them that they could get their hands on. That is how the old Pagan religions were exterminated in the late Roman empire. You could even believe that Jesus was God, and just split a theological hair or two, and the Catholic Church would burn you at the stake if they did not kill you in war. They exterminated the Christians known as Arians (not related to the aryan racial concept), the Cathars (See also Albigensian Crusade), Hussites, and Wycliff's followers in England. They tried to exterminate the Lutherans and failed, thus giving rise to the modern forms of Christianity known as Protestants.

Maybe the Jews killed Jesus, maybe not, but the Christians recorded only a handful of the followers of Jesus were killed by Jews. Christians, and Roman Catholics, have killed tens of millions of Christians over the last 2 thousand years. Of course, they have also slaughtered millions of non-Christians.

This pattern did not cease in the 20th century. In Spain the Catholic Church's loyal son General Franco killed some 2 million non-Catholics in the late 1930's. Then the Catholic fascists Adolf Hitler and Mussolini started World War II. The Catholic Church was more than happy when Hitler improved on Mussolini by exterminating atheists instead of just beating them up. Many minority groups were exterminated or slated for extermination by Hitler besides the Jews, including Gypsies and Poles.

The insane horror of all that is what is really brought back by bringing Bishop Richard Williamson back into the Catholic Church. In the 1960's the Church did not admit its past wrong doing, but at least it tried to reform itself. In contrast John Paul II and Benedict XVI are evil men who are trying to bring back the fanatical terrorist church of the Dark Ages.

Look deeper at the Holocaust and Fascism and you find the true engineers: Popes Pius XI and Pius XII. A look at the facts (See series Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism) compels any reasonable person to see that Fascism, World War II, and the Holocaust were purposeful creations of the Church.

But Roman Catholics will deny that. After all, their sect was founded by the king of denial.

Israel, Pope Pius XII, and the Holocaust

There is currently a controversy, or renewal of a controversy, about the role of Pope Pius XII and the Jews in during World War II. It is usually posed by mainstream accounts as: did Pius XII do all he could to save the Jews from the Holocaust? Since the current Pope, Benedict XVI, was a member of the Nazi youth organization and is trying to get Pius XII qualified as a saint, now is a good time to get the facts about Pius XII.

"Politics makes strange bedfellows." Here I find myself siding with the State of Israel, whereas I am usually pro-Palestinian (the Palestinians have nothing to do with this particular controversy). Israel, and doubtless many Jewish organizations, don't want Pius XII canonized.

Pius XII, before he became Pope, was the Vatican Secretary of State. Born Eugenio Pacelli, as Cardinal Pacelli he was the right-hand man to Pius XI. To understand Pius XII you have to understand Pius XI, who chose to promote Pacelli to the second highest rank in the Roman Catholic Church.

I think it is fair to say that Pius XI, who became pope in 1922, was the architect of fascism. Of course this is a controversial hypothesis, and can be argued against on a number of fronts. Benito Mussolini would be the other candidate for the title. But it was Pius XI who made anti-Communism the first priority of the Catholic Church. Under the banner of Anti-Communism (and the Church was also openly against democratic forms of socialism, and even capitalist forms of democratic government), Pius helped first Mussolini, then other fascist leaders come to power. I know that is a shocking assertion to most people, but it is not difficult to paint that picture once the facts are at hand. First, however, I want to relate this to antisemitism and thus the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler is usually portrayed as the architect of the Holocaust. His own antisemitism, in the consensus histories, is attributed to anti-semitic cults that he encountered as a young man living in Vienna. However, this does not hold up under analysis.

Hitler was born a Catholic (See Hitler's Catholicism) and was raised as a Catholic in a Catholic state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Antisemitism in Austria was rooted in the Catholic Church. There was a close alliance between the Hapsburg emperors and the Church, which ran the education system under the tender mercies of the Jesuits. When modern ideas began to penetrate the empire in the 19th century and some representative government was allowed, an Austrian Catholic Party (Later the Christian Social Party) was formed, with the Church's blessing. Because the Church itself was be abandoned by so many citizens in the empire, the party's leader, Karl Lueger, hit upon antisemitism as the primary selling point.

The antisemitism of the Holocaust grew out of the antisemitism promoted by the Catholic Church throughout its history. It became enshrined as a principle of fascist government because the Church wanted its prejudices to be backed by the power of the state.

To consider the idea that Pius XI was the architect of modern fascism, see the following essays (they are in linear order):

Pius XI and the Rise of Benito Mussolini
Pius XI and the Rise of Adolph Hitler
Pius XI and the Rise of General Franco
Pius XI, the Rise of Petain, and Fascist Vichy France

Pius XI and his Secretary of State were deeply involved in promoting fascism in other nations, notably Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria as well.

So when Cardinal Pacelli became Pope on March 2, 1939, he had been part of setting up a series of fascist regimes in Europe. Fascist movements, mostly but not exclusively Catholic, existed in many more nations of the world, including in the United States. He was a gung-ho anti-communist who believed that fascist dictators were the best bulwark against atheist communism, and against all rival creeds. Better still, except for Hitler, who had a large Protestant Christian population to deal with, all the dictators made the Catholic Church their exclusive religious partner. Cardinal Pacelli had never spoken out against anti-Semitism. He did not even speak out against mass-murder of non-Catholics, which had just been carried out by the Spanish fascists under General Francisco Franco. Here's what he said:

"With great joy we address you, dearest sons of Catholic Spain, to express our paternal congratulations for the gift of peace and victory, with which God has chosen to crown the Christian heroism of your faith and charity ... As a pledge of the bountiful grace which you will receive from the Immaculate Virgin and the Apostle James, patrons of Spain ... we give to you, our dear sons of Catholic Spain, to the Head of State and his illustrious Government, to the zealous Episcopate and its self-denying clergy, to the heroic combatants and to all the faithful, our apostolic benediction."

That said, I don't think that Pius XII agreed with the technical details of Hitler's extermination of the Jews. Hitler saw the Jews as not just a religion, but as a race of people. Pius XII and the Catholic Church had a long history of giving Jews (and other non-Catholics) the choice of conversion or death. I believe that if Pius XII had run Hitler's concentration camps for Jews he would have gone to great lengths to convert them to Catholicism. Hitler did not give the Jews that opportunity.

You might say that Pius XII does not sound like much of a saint, but you are using your own definition of a Saint, not that of the Roman Catholic Church. There are many Saints who were mass murderers. As long as they killed non-Catholics, with the idea in mind of converting the survivors to Catholicism, they are considered to be heroes of the church.