Pope’s Nazi atheist speech fallout
As the Pope descends to the level of sub-standard internet forum debate in his first speech as honoured guest in the UK, the responses to the visit come in.
The British Humanist Association calls the Pope’s speech “surreal”:
Addressing the Queen and other guests at the Palace of Holyrood House, the Pontiff praised Britain’s fight against Hitler’s “atheist extremism”.
“Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.
“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.”
The British Humanist Association (BHA) expressed its disappointment at the remarks.
“The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that it somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.
“The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal.”
The Pope’s speech follows controversial comments by one of his top aides in an interview with German magazine Focus.
Sky News on Pope atheist slur speech
Stephen Fry is hated by the Daily Mail (but by no one else, fortunately).
Sometimes, I must confess, I can get a little hurt when that shrieky weaselly little bourgeois tabloid is mean to me, which I believe is very often. I don’t read it of course: like anyone of education or sense or moral decency I wouldn’t have such a purulent creepy production in the house. Nonetheless, by the osmosis of twitter and well-intentioned cabbies I sometimes get to hear of some spiteful snide remark or other and naturally I can be upset.
Today’s headline ["AN UNHOLY WELCOME TO BRITAIN"] and the leader inside however actually made me genuinely guffaw and wriggle with delight. It is the final proof, if proof were needed, that the Daily Mail is not just actually wicked (intentionally, knowingly lying) but actually now quite, quite mad. In the name (it must suppose) of morality, spirituality, goodness, kindness, sweetness and honesty it intentionally, knowingly twists, distorts, misrepresents, smears and calumniates. Will their editor and subeditors go to heaven? Is god pleased with them? Have they done a good deed? Is this their advertisement for the religious way? To lie?
I can always be certain that I have done a good thing when out of all the descriptions they can choose, their leader writers select “quizmaster”. “What has this country come to,” they want to know, “when an egregious, self-satisfied quizmaster presumes to make moral pronouncements on a two thousand year old institution etc etc.”
As it happens I have spent many many more hours of my life as a writer and a journalist than as a “quizmaster”, yet, oddly enough, we don’t read the Mail coming up with: “What has this country come to when a journalist presumes to make moral pronouncements on a two thousand year old etc.?”
Perhaps the Mail leader writer would be kind enough to explain to the world what qualifications are needed to allow one to express an opinion, or write a letter to a newspaper? What profession should one belong to and can we have a list of those which in fact disbar us from expressing one’s views?
I was one of 50 signatories to a letter that called into question the official state nature of the papal visit. I didn’t write the letter, but am proud to stand behind it and with my fellow signatories. Otherwise my “hate campaign”, as they well know, begins with the words, “I’ve no objection to the Pope coming to visit Britain, he is welcome to do so…” it is, as I go on to say, none of my business. I go out of my way to make it clear that I fully respect the desire of the pious, the faithful and the devout to welcome their spiritual father, their supreme Pontiff.
My only objection is that this be a State Visit. It hasn’t happened before and the Vatican is in no real sense a nation state. Visit the place: it takes fifty minutes to walk round. You don’t need a passport or visa to enter. It is a curlicue of history that makes this “absolute monarchy” (to quote the Holy See’s own website) a “country”. Under no reasonable or worthwhile definition does the Vatican match up to the old-established and widely accepted Montevideo protocols on statehood. So by all means come, but please don’t ask the British taxpayer (a figure whom the Daily Mail is usually so zealous to protect) to help foot the bill.
Believe me, there is no hate there. None whatever. The Mail knows this perfectly well.
Continues: http://www.stephenfry.com/2010/09/16/dailymailhate/
Abuse survivors network SNAP describes the Pope’s limited regrets about child sex abuse and paedophile priests as ”disingenuous”.
On his plane shortly before landing in Britain for a historic visit, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his “great sadness” over revelations of widespread abuse of children by Catholic priests, saying that “authorities in the church have not been vigilant enough” in combating the problem.
But the US-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said the Pope’s comments were “hurtful, not helpful”, and that any Vatican action on ridding the church of abusive priests or turning them over to law enforcement has been “virtually insignificant”.
“It’s disingenuous to say church officials have been slow and insufficiently vigilant in dealing with clergy sex crimes and cover-ups,” SNAP’s southwestern regional director Joelle Casteix said in a statement.
“On the contrary, they’ve been prompt and vigilant, but in concealing, not preventing, these horrors.”
The Catholic Church has been shaken by revelations that priests and Catholic teachers in Ireland, the United States and other countries had abused children in their care.
Casteix said papal claims of insufficient vigilance “imply that all’s well and that just a tad more attentiveness and promptness is needed. That’s patently false”.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/abuse-victims-group-blasts-pope-20100916-15eu6.html
And, this guy thinks you have thin skin if you object when someone tries to associate you with the Nazis.
Pope’s Nazi atheist speech fallout,
Yes, those atheistic Nazis – I remember them well, with their “Gott mit uns” buckles and speeches invoking their divine destiny. Why they’d fit right in at any meeting of humanists.
I remember the encyclical 1937 ‘Mit Brennender Sorge’ with its veiled references to Jews as the people who crucified Jesus, and its praise of the Old Testament for recording how Jews strayed from God.
‘But side by side with innumerable touches of greatness and nobleness, they also record the story of the chosen people, bearers of the Revelation and the Promise, repeatedly straying from God and turning to the world.’
‘….he denies his faith in the true Christ, such as He appeared in the flesh, the Christ who took His human nature from a people that was to crucify Him;’
Why does the media allow the Pope to get away with this outrageous rewriting of history?
Even the response of the BHA: “The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views …” seems to concede that Nazism was based on atheism, or that many Nazis were atheists, when the pronouncements of Hitler and his concord with the Pope of the time make his Christian motivations quite clear. It is true that Nazism also had origins in the mythology of the Nordic gods, but that is also theistic.
Well, Adolf Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf”:
“And so today I believe that my position is in accord with the will of the almighty Creator. By fighting the Jew, I defend God’s creation”.
Btw. Hitler was raised a Roman Catholic and never left the church. Although his faith later developed certain idiosyncrasies, the abrahamic god remained firmly in the center of his beliefs.
Frank doesn’t go far enough in his research. If he reads Ian Kershaw’s 2 Vol. ‘Hitler’ (Hubris and Nemesis) he will find Hitler’s true position on religion. It was far more than ‘idiosyncracies’. Just two examples:
“It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood.” His countrymen would have to choose: “One is either a Christian or a German. You can’t be both.”
And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: “Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished… but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves.”
Of course, competing quotes are always possible. Certainly he portrayed himself as Christian for political advantage (e.g. when he distnced himself from Ludendorf’s attack on the Church in 1924/5 because it would have been political suicide in Bavaria.)
But no rational person can argue that Hitler’s views and actions could in any sense be described as Christian: Aryan racial supremacy, Races such as Slavs being considered sub-human, murder of disabled, mentally ill, homosexuals, etc. total, unlimited warfare to achieve German world domination with the Germans being a Master Race – and so on…………
Frank, I think you have just copied these quotes from somewhere without checking their validity. There are a lot of Hitler quotes about for which there is little authenticated support. If you want your evidence that Hitler was anti-christian to be taken seriously, then please identify the sources of your material.
For a start, Hitler did not actually say “One is either a Christian or a German. You can’t be both.” That is a quote attributed to him by Hermann Rauschning. The quote “It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity” was not said by Hitler. It’s source is from a website publishing documents prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, a person (I cannot actually find the author’s name) defending himself against the charge of being a Nazi, saying he was revolted by Hitler’s anti-Nazi stance. There is so much allegedly quoted by Hitler that it would have been impossible for the author to remember even a fraction of it word by word. So we must be careful about this attribution.
Valid evidence of Hitler’s beliefs are words said by him which can be independently corroborated, such us:
In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: “National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!”