Pope Francis Pushes for Global Destruction through Overpopulation

"Countries are frequently pressured to adopt policies typical of the culture of waste, like those aimed at lowering the birthrate."
— Pope Francis in Nairobi, November 27, 2015

Pope Francis has excited the left-to-liberal spectrum of Americans with his "progressive" statements. Progressive, at least, compared to his predecessor, the neo-Nazi Pope Benedict (who was an actual Nazi as a teenager).

But while he talks of social justice, protecting the environment, and allowing divorced Catholics to receive Communion, he harbors the traditional destructive, anti-environmental and anti-woman culture of his predecessors.

If there is one thing that causes more global warming and environmental destruction, it is more people in the world. They go hand in hand. Apparently Pope Francis does not feel that the current population of over 7 billion is high enough. He is against lowering the birthrate, and against contraception and abortion.

Which means that in practice he is for global warming, for war (over resources), for the oppression of women, and for trying to keep the Roman Catholic religion alive by out-breeding religious and social rivals.

But what else could we expect from an organization that was founded by two masterminds of evil? Christianity was a loose confederation before it was given a top down structure by Constantine the Great, a mass-murderer and Roman Emperor fro 306 to 337, and Sylvester I, Pope from 314 to 335. Over time the bishops of Rome, styling themselves Popes, set themselves up as supreme leaders, in the process re-writing history and editing Scripture to support their claims.

The suppression of secular knowledge and freedom of religion were key to the success of Roman Catholicism. Violence was used to convert many nations to Catholicism, including Poland, Mexico, and the nations of South America. In many other cases a King converted to Catholicism and enforced the religion on his subjects as a means of tightening control on them.

After about 1500 the Catholic Church gradually lost its ability to kill everyone who disagreed with it in Europe. In the 1930's it made one last grasp at world dominion, promoting the dictators Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and eventually Philippe Petain in their attempt to crush Protestant Christianity (including the planned conquest of the U. K.) and atheism (including the failed conquest of the U.S.S.R.).

Preventing people from having access to birth control creates poverty and lack of education, two keys to substituting Catholic bullshit for a modern outlook based on science and reason. It leads to environmental destruction.

As Catholic Popes to, Francis seems reasonable in contrast to Benedict. Where points of agreement can be reached, there is reason to work with him, just like it is with any political or religious leader. But beware of buying the package. The Roman Catholic package is a lie will continue causing environmental and human destruction until it is dead and buried for good.

Many American and European Catholics believe the church should change its doctrine on birth control, or even abortion. Instead of accepting this enlightened view, Francis is pushing a Dark Ages view, which is still favored by the bishops of Africa. He deserves thorough criticism for this mistaken and cowardly view.

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.

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.

The Problem with Atheism

From my point of view the problem with atheism is partly simply a matter of vocabulary (or semantics, for those of you who like Greek roots), which in turn masks deeper problems.

As we were reminded of recently by Pope Benedict XVI's statement that non-Catholics worship false gods, a variety of religious groups treat all outsiders as atheists or unbelievers. I believe the terms God and god have many definitions (sometime multiple ones even within a single religion); they are ambiguous. A lot of religious argumentation (and mass murder) hides behind the ambiguities. [For more detail see: God, A Confusing Concept] Since atheism is defined as not believing in God, that begs the question of exactly what you don't believe in, and what you do believe in.

Define God in this way: that which encompasses all that is real. In effect this equates god with Nature (in the sense of all of the natural universe), and suddenly you might say I am not an atheist, but a theist of the 18th century enlightenment sort. But define God in the way any major religion defines it today, and I am back in the atheist category. For shallow people that may be all they need to know about me, but in fact atheists vary greatly (which I suppose makes us susceptible to natural selection, and evolution).

Take Joseph Stalin, a major 20th century atheist. Uncle Joe is a big embarrassment to most modern atheists, but in the 1930's most of the world's atheists were also Marxists-Leninists and loved Stalin. Then we all found out how he killed lots of people, mostly people who belonged to his own Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. He may even have killed more atheists than that most Catholic of dictators, Adolf Hitler did; it depends on who you let do the counting.

So some atheists have tried to exclude Stalin from our fold by saying that Marxism-Leninism with its philosophy of Dialectical Materialism is actually a religion. I can't buy that argument. There is nothing about atheism in itself that makes a person good. Religions are systems of false beliefs, but simply rejecting certain false beliefs does not make you a good person. Stalin was paranoid and cruel, two human traits that are a bad combination no matter what your theological or philosophical beliefs. For factual confirmation, note that there are plenty of other cold blooded mass murders who were atheists. The common denominator of mass murder is usually political or military power, not religion or philosophy.

Many atheists have worked on the issue of an ethical basis for atheism. I think a wise human is ethical, and can develop or subscribe to an ethical system, but I think any such system should work for any human being. To some extent major religions have caught on precisely because they promote ethical behavior. Societies with a high percentage of people trying to behave ethically tend to do better than societies lacking a culture of ethics. That is why if you convene a committee of atheists, Christians, Buddhists, and Moslems (or any other religions) and stick to ethical questions, it is not that hard to come to agreements.

The same is true of atheism. To the extent that atheists are known to be strong on ethics, our reputation will rise. To the extent atheism becomes an excuse for unethical behavior, it will be condemned.

Ethics is part of my Natural Liberation Philosophy project. That is one reason I comment a great deal upon politics and governance. Ethical questions get trickier when you start trying to apply them to real world situations involving large numbers of diverse people. Systems of law may encode ethics, but they more often encode power relationships. Studying them, discussing them, a student can learn much about ethics in the real world.

If you were raised religious and are in the process of realizing you are an atheist and there are a lot of us alive in the world today, congratulations. Clarify the ethical views you were taught by your religion. Don't throw them out, build them better.

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

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 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.