Would the "Reverend" Ray rather slander Pius XII than save Jewish lives?

This is the face of a very ill-informed person calling himself the "Reverend" Ray Dubuque whose aim in life seems to be to slander the Catholic Church and particularly the late and saintly Pope Pius XII.

He asks what it was that Pope Pius XII saved the Jews from.

He then claims that numerous Nazi and extremist leaders in Europe were Roman Catholics, including Hitler himself.

He likens the Nazi inner circle to a Catholic men’s movement like the Knights of Columbus.

Yes, really! I am not making this up.

Let me spell it out for the "Reverend": according to Israeli diplomat and Jewish Rabbi, Dr Pinchas a Lapide, Pope Pius XII saved 860,000 Jews from the Nazi Death camps.

Let me repeat: 860,000 Jewish lives saved.

From a horrible death in the Nazi death camps.

Is that clear enough, now?

And Lapide says that this Pope did far and away more than all other agencies put together during World War II to save Jews.

That’s the Roman Catholic Pope saving all those Jewish lives – according to a Jewish Rabbi and Diplomat.

The Roman Catholic called Pope Pius XII.

Pope Pius XII - saviour of 860,000 Jews according to Jewish Diplomat and historian, Pinchas a Lapide.

I repeat.

Roman Catholic.

Pope.

Pius XII.

Saved 860,000 Jews from death.

Got that now, sir?

And I suspect that is rather more Jewish lives saved than ever the “Reverend” Mr Ray Dubuque saved!

And for this monumental act of humanity, the "Reverend" slanders this pope in the most vile, malignant and bigoted way imaginable by pretending he was a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator.

Yes, really! That is the extent of the Christian "charity" of this "Reverend" gentleman!

I doubt that the mendacious Mr Dubuque has ever even come close to being forced to live under a totalitarian regime. I suspect that he is pontificating, condemning and slandering the Pope from the complacent comfort of his armchair.

He clearly has no idea what an apostate is. It means one who has fallen away from the faith in which he was raised or chose.

Every one of the Nazis who was raised Catholic was an apostate and, in order to rise in the Nazi Party, openly repudiated their Catholicism in favour of the new "German" religion of the racist, Nazi state.

In short, they broke with the Roman Catholic Church utterly.

The 16th century Protestants also broke with the Roman Catholic Church but by the twisted illogicality of the “Reverend” he would also have to describe as “Roman Catholics” the following:

Martin Luther
John Calvin
John Wycliffe
Peter Waldo
Jan Hus
Huldrych Zwingli
Heinrich Bullinger
John Knox
Philipp Melancthon
Michael Servetus
Balthasar Hubmaier
King Henry VIII of England
Queen Elizabeth I of England

and everyone of the founders of Protestantism since they were all born, baptised and brought up Roman Catholics! Indeed, he would have to call half of them Roman Catholic clergy because that is what men like Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, Zwingli and Knox originally were!

Yes, folks! They were all Roman Catholic clerics. The very founders of the religion the “Reverend” Mr Dubuque claims to follow were nearly all Roman Catholic clergy.

Martin Luther in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest of the 16th Century. He repudiated the Catholic Church and started the Protestant Revolt. In later life, he published violently anti-Semitic works which, later still, were quoted, approvingly, by the Nazis. Most Protestants, however, now repudiate Luther's anti-Semitism.

But, by his own reasoning (if one can call it that), the "Reverend" would also have to describe the following Nazis as Protestants since that was the faith in which they were brought up:

Gunter d'Alquen – Chief Editor of the SS official newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps ("The Black Corps"), and commander of the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers.

Ludolf von Alvensleben – SS-Gruppenfuehrer and Major-General of police in Crimea, commander of the Selbstschutz (self-defence) of the Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and responsible for the mass murder of thousands of Roman Catholic Poles and Jews.

Max Amann – SS-Obergruppenfuehrer and Head of Nazi publishing house Eher-Verlag and later convicted as one of the leading guilty men.

Heinz Auerswald – Nazi Commissioner for the Jewish residential district in Warsaw from April 1941 to November 1942.

Hans Aumeier - Deputy Commandant at Auschwitz and mass-murderer who was later hanged.

Artur Axmann - Chief of the Social Office of the Reich Youth Leadership. Responsible for organization and activities of the Hitler Youth.

Herbert Backe - Minister of Food (appointed 1942) and Minister of Agriculture (appointed 1943) and responsible for the “Hunger Plan” to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady supplies to the German people and troops. He later hanged himself in his prison cell.

Richard Baer - Commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to February 1945.

Alfred Baeumler - Philosopher who interpreted the works of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to legitimize Nazism.

Gottlob Berger - Chief of Staff for military SS and head of the SS's main leadership office and responsible for the forced death marches of POWs.

Werner Best - Civilian administrator of Nazi occupied France and Denmark.

Hans Biebow - Chief of Administration of the Łódź Ghetto.

Paul Blobel - SS commander primarily responsible for the Babi Yar massacre at Kiev.

Werner von Blomberg - Generalfeldmarshall of the German army between 1936 and 1938 and one of Hitler’s most devoted followers.

Hans-Friedrich Blunck - Propagandist and head of the Reich Literature Chamber between 1933 and 1935.

Ernst Wilhelm Bohle - leader of the Foreign Organization of the German Nazi Party from 1933 until 1945.

Martin Bormann - Head of the Party Chancellery (Parteikanzlei) and private secretary to Adolf Hitler.

Viktor Brack - Organiser of the Euthanasia Programme, Operation T4 and one of the men responsible for the gassing of Jews in the extermination camps.

Otto Bradfisch - Commander of the Security Police in Łódź and Potsdam.

Karl Brandt - Personal physician of Adolf Hitler in August 1944 and head of the administration of the Nazi T-4 euthanasia program from 1939. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged as one of the many Nazi doctors convicted in the “Doctors’ trial”.

Walther von Brauchitsch - Commander of the German Army during the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Walter Buch - Jurist and supreme magistrate of the Nazi party. He committed suicide after arrest.

Werner Catel - Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig, considered an expert on the programme of euthanasia for children and participated in the T-4 Program which was later exported to the East for the murder of Jews.

Carl Clauberg - Doctor who conducted medical experiments on human beings in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Kurt Daluege - Responsible for the personal protection of Hitler and other party leaders. Also commanded the Ordnungspolizei throughout World War II and served as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Hanged for war crimes.

Richard Walther Darré - Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942 and Nazi ideologist.

Otto Dietrich - Press Chief of the Third Reich. Later convicted of crimes against humanity.

Irmfried Eberl - Commandant of Treblinka, July to September 1942. Physician and mass-murderer who hanged himself after arrest.

Dietrich Eckart - Important early member of the National-Socialist German Workers' Party and a participant of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Introduced Rosenberg to Hitler.

Theodor Eicke - Leading figure in the establishment of concentration camps.

Richard Euringer - Writer who selected 18,000 "unsuitable" books which did not conform to Nazi ideology and were publicly burned.

Roland Freisler - Becoming a fanatical Communist, he later did a "flip" and joined the Nazi Party becoming State Secretary of Adolf Hitler's Reich Ministry of Justice and President of the Volksgerichtshof where he brutally presided over the show trials of anti-Nazis, ranting and tormenting them before ordering them to be brutally executed.

Wilhelm Frick - Minister without Portfolio until August 1943, later appointed to the ceremonial post of Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He formulated the Enabling Act, the Nuremberg Laws and controlled numerous concentration camps. He was hanged in 1946.

Hans Fritzsche - Senior official at the Ministry for Propaganda.

Walther Funk - Minister for Economic Affairs from 1937 to 1945. Tried at Nuremberg.

Karl Gebhardt - Personal physician of Heinrich Himmler and one of the main perpetrators of surgical experiments performed on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Convicted at the Nuremberg "Doctors' trial" and hanged.

Achim Gercke - Expert of racial matters at the Ministry of the Interior. Devised the system of "racial prophylaxis" forbidding the intermarriage between Jews and Aryans.

Hermann Göring - Second in Command of the Third Reich and commander of the Luftwaffe. Convicted at Nuremberg but committed suicide.

Arthur Greiser - Chief of Civil Administration and Gauleiter in the military district of Greater Poland. A brutal and ardent Nazi, racist and "ethnic cleanser", he was convicted after the war and hanged.

Walter Groß - Head of the Racial Policy office ardent racist and contributor to the "Final Solution" i.e. the extermination of European Jewry.

Kurt Gruber - First chairman of the Hitler Youth (1926-1931) and Nazi Gauleiter.

Karl Hanke - Governor and Gauleiter of Lower Silesia from 1940 to 1945.

Fritz Hartjenstein - Concentration camp commandant at Birkenau, Natzweiler and Flossenbürg. Sentenced to death after the war.

Paul Hausser - Prominent leader of the Waffen-SS and lieutenant-general.

August Heißmeyer - SS-Gruppenfuehrer and in charge of numerous concentration camps.

Rudolf Hess - Hitler's deputy and an ardent Nazi.

Werner Heyde - Psychiatrist and one of the main organizers of the T-4 Euthanasia Program that was the model used later for the extermination of European Jews. Committed suicide before the start of his trial in 1964.

August Hirt - Chairman at the Reich University in Strasbourg during World War II and had victims gassed so that he could experiment on them.

Karl Jäger - SD-Einsatzkommando leader and SS member whose "Jäger Report" detailing his responsibility for organising the mass murder of the Jews in Lithuania between July and December 1941 became a by-word for Nazi atrocity.

Friedrich Jeckeln - Leader of one of the largest collection of Einsatzgruppen and personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other "undesirables".

Alfred Jodl - Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during World War II, acting as deputy to Wilhelm Keitel. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Hans Jüttner - Head of the SS Main Leadership Office and also an SS-Obergruppenführer.

Emil Kaschub - Doctor who conducted experiments on Nazi concentration camp prisoners.

Karl Kaufmann - Founding member of the Nazi party and Gauleiter of Hamburg.

Wilhelm Keitel - Field marshal (Generalfeldmarschall) and senior military leader during World War II. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Hanns Kerrl - Reichsminister of Church Affairs for the Third Reich who tried to marry the ideas of Protestant Christianity and Nazism.

Helmut Knochen - Senior commander of the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. Sentenced to death after the war.

Erich Koch - Gauleiter of the NSDAP in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945, and Reichskomissar in Ukraine from 1941 until 1944.

Ilse Koch - Wife of Karl Otto Koch and an overseer at Buchenwald. Infamous for her sadistic cruelty, for using the skin from murdered prisoners as souvenirs and keeping shrunken heads on her dinner table. She was dubbed "the Witch of Buchenwald". Committed suicide in prison.

Karl Otto Koch - Commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald (from 1937 to 1941), and later at Lublin (Majdanek camp). Married to Ilse Koch.

Bernhard Krüger - Leader of the VI F 4a Unit in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt responsible for, among other things, falsifying passports and documents.

Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach - Ran the Friedrich Krupp AG heavy industry conglomerate from 1909 until 1941 and was financier of the Nazi party.

Herbert Lange - SS officer and commandant of Chełmno extermination camp, where he was implicated in thousands of gassings. Also led the execution of 1,558 mental patients at the Soldau concentration camp.

Robert Ley - Head of the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945. Sentenced to death but committed suicide.

Arthur Liebehenschel - Commandant of Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps during World War II.

Wilhelm Loeper - Gauleiter in the Gau of Magdeburg-Anhalt.

Hinrich Lohse - Gauleiter for Schleswig-Holstein and Reich Commissar for the Ostland.

Werner Lorenz - Waffen-SS general and a leader of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, an organization charged with settling ethnic Germans in the Reich from other parts of Europe.

Hanns Ludin - SA-Obergruppenfuehrer, diplomat and ambassador to Slovakia implicated in slave-labour deportations. Executed after the war.

Martin Luther - advisor to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and participant in the infamous Wannsee Conference on the "Final Solution" i.e. extermination of Jews.

Viktor Lutze - SA officer and important participant in the "Night of the Long Knives".

Alfred Meyer - Deputy Reichsminister in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Kurt Meyer - Waffen-SS officer noted for his command of various tank and artillery divisions but convicted of war crimes in shooting prisoners.

Wilhelm Mohnke - Founder member of the SS-Staff Guard and one of Hitler's last remaining SS-generals.

Hermann Muhs - SS-Oberfuehrer and Minister responsible for church and religious affairs.

Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath - Foreign Minister of Germany (1932-1938) and Reichsprotektor (Governor) of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939-1941). Convicted at Nuremberg.

Otto Ohlendorf - SS-Gruppenführer and head of the interior division of the SD. Sentenced to death for crimes against humanity and hanged.

Joachim Peiper - Senior Waffen-SS officer and personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler from April 1938 to August 1941. Convicted in the Malmedy massacre trial.

Paul Pleiger - State adviser and Reich Commissioner for the Economy of the East which included the use of forced slave labour.

Oswald Pohl - Organizer and administrator of concentration camps.

Erich Priebke - Participant in the Ardeatine massacre in Rome on 24 March 1944.

Hans-Adolf Prützmann - Superior SS and Police Leader, and an SS-Obergruppenführer, who participated in the Holocaust in the Baltic States.

Joachim von Ribbentrop - Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938-1945. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Leni Riefenstahl - Film director, dancer and actress and documentary propagandist for the Nazi Party and favourite of Hitler.

Alfred Rosenberg - chief ideologist of the Nazi Party and a committed racist advocate of mass-murder. Convicted at Nuremberg and hanged.

Erwin Rösener - SS-Obergruppenführer, Higher SS and Police Leader, Commander SS Upper Division Alpenland (1941-1945) convicted at Nuremberg for ordering the execution of prisoners of war.

Ernst Rudin - pyschiatrist, social Darwinist, racist and one of the fathers of the Nazi race doctrines.

Baldur von Schirach - Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Reich Governor") of Vienna.

Franz Schlegelberger - State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice (RMJ) and served a while as Justice Minister during the Third Reich. He was the highest-ranking defendant at the Nuremberg Judges' Trial.

Albert Speer - architect, author and high-ranking Nazi German government official, sometimes called "the first architect of the Third Reich".

Jürgen Stroop - SS and police general who oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes and hanged.

Josef Terboven - Nazi leader, best known as the Reichskommissar (commissioner) during the German military occupation of Norway.

Fritz Todt - engineer and senior Nazi figure, the founder of Organisation Todt for forced labour.

Horst Wessel - posthumous hero of the Nazi movement following his violent death in 1930. He was the author of the lyrics to the song "Die Fahne hoch" ("The Flag on High"), usually known as Horst-Wessel-Lied ("the Horst Wessel Song"), which became the Nazi Party anthem, and which was also part of Germany's national anthem from 1933 to 1945.

Christian Wirth - senior SS officer during the program to exterminate the Jewish people of occupied Poland during the Second World War, known as Aktion Reinhard. He was a top aide of Odilo Globocnik, the overall director of Operation Reinhard, and his responsibility was scaling up the T-4 Euthanasia Program, in which disabled people were murdered by gassing or lethal injection, to the development of extermination camps for mass murder.

Karl Wolff - high-ranking member of the Nazi SS. He held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen-SS and was convicted of deporting 300,000 Jews to Treblinka death camp.

Adolf Ziegler - tasked by the Nazi party to oversee the purging of Degenerate art by artists such as Franz Marc and Emil Nolde. He was the favoured painter of Hitler.


...and that is just a few of them!

Famously, it was a Protestant who agreed to be appointed by Hitler the Reich Bishop of the Nazi Reich, namely Ludwig Muller. You can see a picture of him in the previous post giving the Nazi salute.

The Roman Catholic Church, on the other hand, always opposed Hitler and the Nazis and some were brave enough openly to preach against him, like Bishop Count Clemens August von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster.

Count Clemens August von Galen, Bishop of Munster. He was called "the Lion of Munster" because of his outspoken criticism of the Nazi euthanasia policy. He knew that the Nazis would find it hard to arrest someone from so famous a family. Even so, his life was in constant danger.

Other priests were not so lucky. Many hundreds were arrested and sent to Dachau or executed like the Jesuits of Munich such as Fr Alfred Delp SJ.

Rev Alfred Delp SJ before the Nazi People's Court presided over by Protestant-born but Communist-turned-Nazi, Dr Roland Freisler, who sentenced Delp and other Catholic priests to a brutal death for daring to criticise Nazi brutality and murder of Jews.

The lesson that the unfortunate "Reverend" needs to learn is that it is in the interest of society that men remain true to historic Christianity and not abandon it for odious and murderous heathen creeds like Nazism.

The full absurdity of the views of the "Reverend" are revealed when one realises that he was, himself, raised a Roman Catholic so that, by his own classification, he is still one!

But is the "Reverend" listening?

Is he even thinking?

Over to you "Reverend"!

Those wanting to know more about the "Reverend" might care to try this:

http://www.patrioticthunder.com/whackjoboftheweek22.html

...

Pride and Prejudice: "Anglo-Catholic" fantasies

Here is evidence that the more remote and indefensible of "Anglo-Catholic" historical fantasies can still find a home in the bosom of at least some Anglicans, even today when there is simply no excuse for anyone to believe such unhistorical nonsense.

Here is a post I received from one such correspondent:

"The Anglican Church is one of the three great Catholic faiths: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican. A study of the history of the time demonstrates that the Church of England did not leave Catholicism, it only left the authority of popes and the Vatican political apparatus. There was no effort to "reform" the faith, only to reform the political machinations which taxed the English people (rents paid to monastic foundations), then gave the money to the rulers of France and Spain so they could make war on England. Henry VIII closed the monasteries to stop that practice.

The simplistic reason often given for the break with Rome is that the pope wouldn't give Henry a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The more complicated reason is that England had suffered terribly through civil war, and without an heir (Catherine did not bear a son), more civil war was a very real threat. (It is quite true that Henry became every woman's worst nightmare husband, and a glutton and a tyrant. That doesn't change the history of the Church of England.)

The beginnings of education of the common people led to and was furthered by translating the Bible and the liturgy into the vulgate -- the common language. This had its precedent when Scripture was translated from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, culminating with Saint Jerome's Vulgate translation.

Anglican priests are ordained in the apostolic succession. Anglican religious orders include Benedictines, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Claretians and many others. See: http://orders.anglican.org/arcyb/communities.html.

Since its inception, Anglicanism has been influenced by "dissenters," who wanted to eliminate any traces of Roman Catholicism from their liturgy and doctrines. This has led to "the Church with an identity problem," in which there are Protestant-leaning parishes and Catholic-leaning parishes. But in its pure form, Anglicanism is correctly referred to as Anglo-Catholic".




I had to correct such nonsense even if it meant bursting this correspondent's particular fantasies.

"Your particular fantasies have been so completely, so utterly and so thoroughly demolished by better scholars than I (Newman, for one) that it is hardly necessary for me even to comment.

The Anglican Church is not a church. It is a cautionary tale as to what happens when men try to invent a faith of their own after ignoring God's law.

A study of the history of the time demonstrates amply that the Church of England was the invention of men like Henry VIII and William Cecil to serve their own selfish and political ends.

It is a pure construct of men.

William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley, the effective consolidator of the Church of England - liar, cheat, robber, murderer and political villain of the first order, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent men and women for no other reason than their religion

Moreover, it could not have left 'the Vatican political apparatus' since there wasn't one.

The popes lived in the Lateran palace at that time, not the Vatican, and began to live in the Quirinal palace more and more after it was built by Pope Gregory XIII in 1573.

They continued to do so until the Italian revolutionaries seized the Papal States in 1870 and later forced the popes to live in the Vatican palace.

Whoops! Another historical boo boo by yet another ill-informed Anglican.

Anglicans make ridiculous statements about the Papacy and the popes without ever bothering to read and research the truth. There is simply no excuse for it.

Go and find out the truth instead of regurgitating prejudice and fiction!

There is, of course, no evidence that English monasteries gave all their rents and taxes to France and Spain, let alone to make war against England.

Henry VIII closed the monasteries in order to steal their property and income which, since they used their income to feed and clothe the poor, was effectively stealing from the poor.

Gin Lane by William Hogarth.
The Protestant Reformation reduced the common people of England to extreme poverty and, often enough, utter destitution and degradation as Hogarth so well illustrated.

You will see that Henry closed the small monasteries first precisely because they were easier prey to his greed.

Read Cobbett's History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, if you dare. You will get a true picture of what the syphlitic, wife-murdering, robber of the poor, Henry VIII, really did. And Cobbett was an Anglican, by the way.

There is nothing 'complicated' about the fact that Henry divorced Catherine and then took up with other women. Lechery was but one of his many vices.

There is nothing simplistic about condemning his destruction of the monastic system of welfare for the poor just to satisfy his own endless greed.

Ditto his odious murder of his mistresses and many others who got in his way.

The common people were never so persecuted, hunted, harried, down-trodden, ill-educated, starved, beaten and mercilessly oppressed as they were after the Protestant Reformation, as Cobbett amply proves.

St Jerome's vulgate translation was done by, with and through the express authority of the Holy See by whom St Jerome was made a prelate and, later, Doctor, of the Church.

Anglican priests are not ordained in the apostolic succession.

Anglican religious orders are a nice idea but they are outside the Church.

There is no 'pure' form of Anglicanism.

Anglicanism is incorrectly referred to as Anglo-Catholic or Catholic. It is Protestant and has no authority from the Holy Spirit to teach.

That does not mean that Anglicans won't be saved but they must take care to avoid knowingly turning away from what they know (or ought to know) is the truth.

The Anglican 'church' is a false 'church' but with some good people in it.

I encourage you to leave it, join the true Church and so save your soul.

If you wish me to recommend some good clergy to whom you might go for instruction in the true faith, I would be very happy to do so.

In the meantime, God guide and bless you and, above all, help you to instruct yourself accurately about historical truth".

And there is a great deal more one could write about the Anglican Church but that will do for the present, I think.

Queen Elizabeth I: one of the most odious of tyrants ever to mis-govern England

...

Many Protestants are good and decent people but some, sadly, prefer ill-informed bigotry

One of the latter, it seems, is Mr Fred Preuss.

I do not think he is in the same category as the fraudulent televangelist phoney and billionaire Jimmy Swaggart (pictured left) and his ilk.

However, he does seem to be just about as anti-Catholic as these Protestant Fundamentalist money-makers.

He seems to be ideologically-driven - even hard-wired - to hate the Catholic Church. No amount of information, evidence or fact will change his blinkered, ignorant bigotry against the Catholic Church.

So there is little point in pretending that he will take any cognizance of what I write below.

Nevertheless, I write it for the benefit of others, more open-minded, and to demonstrate that the Catholic Church can defend itself from all false charges.

I list his errors below, which were presented to me in a recent correspondence, and I rebut them seriatim.

1. Pope Pius IX did not have to deal with Fascism.

Wrong. Fascism arose from the Fasci movements of the 19th century whose members were the very anti-clericals who had overthrown the Papal States and imprisoned Pope Pius IX.

The word fascio came, in modern Italian political usage, to mean group, union, band or league. It was first used in this sense in the 1870s by groups of revolutionaries and socialists in Sicily to describe themselves. This made them a favourite with nationalists and anti-Catholic revolutionaries. The fasci they formed were scattered over Italy, and it was to one of these groups that Benito Mussolini belonged. They were war-mongers who wanted to force Italy into World War I. For example, on 18 August 1914, Alceste de Ambris, speaking at the Milanese Syndical Union, a labour union grouping, ferociously attacked neutrality and equated joining the war with the French Revolution. The Fascist movement, eventually united in 1915, came from Socialist revolutionary, labour union roots and was bitterly hostile to the Catholic Church.

Fascism and Liberty crows this false motto.
The Fasces - a Roman symbol stolen by Fascism- a bundle of sticks and an axe originally carried by the Roman lictors to symbolise that what may be weak separately is strong tied together. Fascism began as a Socialist revolutionary, anti-Catholic, labour union movement. It was at first supported by many British and American Protestants but condemned by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical letter entitled Non Abbiamo Bisogno.

They were supported by many Anglo-American Protestants and secularists purely because they had opposed the Catholic Church and their members had been the "Pope's gaolers". That changed in 1929 when Mussolini signed a concordat with the Vatican to save his own political skin.

2. The "Communist Manifesto" had been published, but I don't think that any serious political forces were communist in the lifetime of Pius IX.

Wrong. Fred has plainly never heard of the Paris Commune, the Communards of 1870, nor the numerous other groups who took their inspiration from Marx and other 19th century Communists.

3. If your church has contributed so much to literacy, why was Puritan Massachusetts literate earlier than Catholic Spain, Portugal or Italy?

Wrong. Fred now descends into pure farce at this point. Anyone who believes this nonsense really does have a serious problem. Firstly, upon what objective evidence or statistics does he base his case? Certainly none are provided!

In reality, the history of the Catholic Church has seen one of the greatest contributions to education ever made by a single body. It is simply a commonplace fact of history that whole religious orders and communities of the Catholic Church, since the very beginning of Christianity, have been committed to educating the poor and not only in matters of Faith and culture but also for a trade or profession. Conversely, it is another simple fact of history that Protestantism destroyed these free education services for the poor and replaced them with schools for the new, rich, money-grabbing and selfish elite.

Fred, go and read A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland to see what damage was wrought by Protestants and Protestantism. It crushed the poor in all areas of life. And by the way - the book was written by William Cobbett who was a Protestant himself!

Read it - if you dare to have your prejudices demolished.

As for Massachusetts, so steeped in ignorance and superstition was that colony that it gave the world the Salem witch trials and, in 1625, the first legalization of the slave trade in all of the Americas. Puritan clergyman, Cotton Mather, even referred to the black races as "Adam's degenerate seed" saying that slavery was their just due, accordingly!

Puritan "literacy": the Salem witch Trials.
The appallingly superstitious Salem witch trials which took place between February 1692 and May 1693 in Puritan Massachusetts were a farcical and utterly bigoted set of proceedings with the most tragic consequences. Here a woman is publicly and shamefully stripped to demonstrate the supposed "mark of the Devil" on her body whilst two alleged victims and witnesses dishonestly writhe in false and perjured toils upon the floor. This was what passed for "literacy", religion and law in the bigoted, fanatical Puritan colony.

Puritan "justice": an innocent woman shamefully hanged.
Ann Bellingham Hibbens was shamefully executed as a supposed witch by fanatical, Puritan Massachusetts, despite her brother having been one-time Governor of the colony. Over 150 people were arrested and imprisoned during the Salem witch craze. The two courts convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged.



Puritan "tolerance": a man pressed to death by stones for refusing to plead.
Giles Corey was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to plead to charges he considered ridiculous and so as to avoid his family losing their farm to the state. So much for Protestant tolerance, liberty of conscience and private judgement!

How much literacy was there among the poor, the Negroes and the Indians living in Massachusetts compared with those in Catholic states? Even today the poor of once Protestant nations like the USA are often notoriously badly educated and semi-literate. Even today, many supposedly "literate" American citizens are often woefully ill-educated, ignorant and even semi-literate.

Catholic Jesuits, on the other hand, had taught Indians living in the Paraguayan forests not only to read but to make and play orchestral instruments, to play and sing great choral works, and even to compose themselves works of music, literature, poetry and art. Their musical instruments were so well made that they commanded higher prices in Europe than violins made by Stradivarius and Amati. Yet, a generation or two before, these Indians had been semi-naked tree-dwellers living a brutalised existence worshipping pagan gods and practising human sacrifice and cannibalism.

The Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay

This clip from the film The Mission of a Jesuit Superior, played by Jeremy Irons, follows his climbing a huge, steep, rushing cataract to re-start their mission to the human-sacrificing Indians in the certain knowledge that he may be crucified and send over the cataract, as his Jesuit brother was, is entirely based upon the truth.

Indeed, the film, if anything, under-states the monumental and astonishing achievement of the Jesuits in teaching the Indians to build a truly free and Christian civilisation. The Jesuits were later treacherously betrayed at the hands of greedy, grubby, venal, anti-Catholic Freemasons like the Marquis de Pombal, then Prime Minister of Portugal and a hater of both the Pope and the Jesuits.

He and his like even forced the Pope to dissolve the whole Jesuit Order in 1773. It is doubtful that the world has ever seen a more heroic company of Christian men than the early Jesuits.

One of the many churches built, astonishingly, in the middle of the jungle, by the native Guarani Indians, who had been taught by Jesuits in the Reductions. They were destroyed by God-hating secularists.

What Protestant mission has produced anything like such magnificent results?

In the USA today, fully 58% of the population, after leaving school, never again read a book. Fred thinks this is "literacy", apparently.

The ignorance of some Americans has become a by-word in the rest of the world. One regularly sees some dumb-bunnies advertising their ignorance in the public media, some being so astonishingly badly educated as not even to know where the continent of Europe is.

Is this mass literacy? Or the kind of ignorance that even exceeds that of famed Yankee icon, doughnut-chomping Homer Simpson?

But who cares about the facts, eh?

4. Here in the US, we have immigrants from Portugal and Latin America who have trouble writing and reading their own native languages. There were schools, true, but they were for a small minority. Mass literacy was not a achieved until recently in these Catholic countries.

Wrong. There are far more immigrants to the US who can read and write better than many a bigoted, red-neck, trailer park dummy. These immigrants can speak not only their own language but also English and other languages. Mass literacy has still not been achieved in America, let alone mass education. A surprising number of Yanks do not read much more besides newspapers and comic books. They are, all too often, deeply ignorant even of their own country, let alone other countries. Fred, for example, demonstrates his own deep ignorance of Latin American history.

An increasingly common view of "Protestant" America

As we have demonstrated in this Blog on numerous occasions, ever since the infamous Monroe doctrine, US governments have been intent upon turning Latin America into a US economic colony, crushing its people under successive anti-Catholic tyrannies funded and supported by the US government and delivering them into deep poverty and servitude chiefly for the benefit of Yankee Capitalist exploiters. This system of tyranny and corruption Fred thinks is an example of Catholic government.

Well, folks, it's a point of view - just not a very literate one.

5. Indulgences are given for periods of time, people get out of Purgatory. If you pray for them after they've gone out of Purgatory, it's a waste of time. How does prayer for those who don't need it do anything useful? Again, it's like giving medicine to healthy people.

Wrong. Indulgences are no longer given for periods of time and, in any case, they never represented "periods of time" in the next life since there is no time in the next life. They represented reductions in the stipulated periods of time given by Church courts for doing penance for sins and offences. In that respect they were no different from modern courts who give time off for good behaviour. Indeed, that is precisely where courts got the idea from, Fred, which you might have known if only you were better informed. Penance given by such courts for malefactors and offenders is precisely the origin of the word "Penitentiary" which is now part of the US judicial and penal system.

Penance simply means making up for your sins and offences to others and to God by sincere sorrow and by trying to repair the harm done. There is no magic about it - every system of justice and fair play requires it.

No prayer or penance made in the right spirit is ever wasted. Prayer is not material like a bank full of money. Prayer that is directed for the benefit of a person already in heaven is made use of by that same soul, and accepted by God, for the benefit of other souls who need it. A soul in heaven lives in perfect charity and so will always strive to do good for others, especially by prayer. This is what the Catholic Church means by the Communion of Saints. Prayer is a spiritual lifting of the heart and mind to God and the saints and so is beyond time, matter and the purely material. To think of it as a bank of money or a chest of medicine is to miss the point utterly - which, true to form, Fred, is exactly what you do.

Go to the bottom of the class, again, Fred!

6. An anti-aristocratic ideology didn't stop duelling immediately in the USA, but officials in France, people with education and position, were still challenging each other to duels at the conference ending World War I; Americans visiting the conference found this bizarre.

Wrong. Whatever ideology has ruled in the USA has not, even today, stopped duelling. Fights over personal honour are fought in the streets of America more frequently now than ever. Some Yanks can be notoriously touchy over their supposed "honour" and are all too willing to fight over it. The fact that such fights are often done by those who think that some other person has slighted them (or, as they often put it, "dissed" them) proves this beyond a peradventure. As I have already pointed out to you, the Catholic Church has always , and still does, condemn this and any other sort of duelling whether in America or anywhere else. That is simply a matter of very clear record - a long stream of statements from the Holy See roundly condemns any form of duelling or honour-fighting, particularly so if any lethal force is likely to be used.

Gunfight at the OK Corral.
Anyone who thinks that Puritan America or anti-aristocratic and democratic America got rid of duelling is plainly living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Duelling flourished in America like almost nowhere else and was a national scandal.

Americans visiting the Versailles conference after WWI were in no position to condemn France for its duellers - if indeed there really were any - since the practice was still a common feature of life in America, whether in the Wild West or in the seedy streets of her cities. In France, on the other hand, it was illegal. That did not, it must be said, stop atheists, like George Clemenceau, from duelling (for which he was prosecuted and imprisoned for 2 weeks).

However, the real problem Fred has is simply that he cannot comprehend the historical fact that France, save for a brief period under King Charles X in the 1830s, has not been a Catholic country for some 200 years.

Frenchmen still duelling in 1918 - if indeed there were any - would not have had the slightest regard for the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and would be much more likely to have been Protestant-born atheists like Georges Clemenceau or secularists like the majority of men in public office at that time.

Ridiculously Fred overlooks the fact that the very French politicians who settled the Versailles treaty had, for a large part, been those who had passed the laws at the turn of the century which had suppressed all the Catholic contemplative religious orders in France and exiled their members at the point of a gun.

Not very Catholic, then, hey Freddy?

7. People can certainly think of mid-18th century Spain, Portugal and Italy as Catholic. Compare literacy rates in those places with literacy rates in Protestant England, Scotland, New England and Holland and see what the differences were.

Wrong. Yes, let's do that! The Catholic countries win hands down. And that is even given the fact that during the mid-18th century the governments and Prime Ministers of Spain, France, Portugal, the Empire and much of Italy were anti-clerical, anti-papal secularists and/or Freemasons just as the future leaders of the United States were. Moreover, Europe was locked in a series of wars. Nevertheless, religious orders like the Jesuits were able to build an highly successful system of Catholic education for rich and poor alike.

Go and read Cobbett and your whole world outlook will be radically challenged. That's if you dare...

8. As soon as transportation became cheap enough, people started leaving these Catholic places for wealthier Protestant ones by the tens of thousands. A nation that can't feed what it breeds is a failure; a faith that condemns them to overpopulation and ignorance is contemptible.

Wrong. The era of mass emigration was in the 19th century when political revolution was rife across Europe. This was caused almost exclusively by anti-Catholic terrorists and revolutionaries - often supported by Protestant money from America and Britain. Not surprisingly many wished to escape it. Poverty was the result of anti-Catholic wars and revolutions fomented and run by anti-Catholics, revolutionaries and Protestants often with foreign money - in short, the very gangsters you would have us salute and approve.

One of the best-known examples of emigration was from places like Ireland where Roman Catholics were brutally and grotesquely persecuted by Protestant bullies and thugs and a Protestant government. Roman Catholics became poor in Ireland by virtue of a deliberate policy of persecution and starvation. A similar policy was followed in other parts of Europe thereby also impoverishing the Catholic poor. This was a policy invariably supported by the Protestant American governments you tell us were so great. These mercilessly corrupt policies were not put in place by Catholic governments but by anti-Catholic governments made up of Protestants, Liberal revolutionaries and Pope-haters.

In short, Freddy, the people you want us to be like.

You are, however, right in your last sentences. A nation and faith that cannot feed their people, and condemns them to over-population and ignorance - or indeed to any other vices - is contemptible and a failure. But since those nations and that faith were anti-Catholic, not least the Protestant and secularist nations and faiths, what, then, you are clearly saying is that Protestant and anti-Catholic nations and the Protestant faith and anti-Catholicism are contemptible and a failure.

Own goal, perhaps, Fred?

The dire poverty, ignorance, superstition and misery created by the greed, stupidity and bigotry permitted by Protestant England, for example, has been well-documented by Protestant author, Charles Dickens. Truly and rightly did G K Chesterton call the Protestant Reformation the "Revolt of the Rich" for so it was - and at the expense of the poor, the dispossessed and the marginalised.

The dire and grinding poverty which is the legacy of the Protestant Reformation is one of the blackest marks upon humanity in all of history. It was a foul disgrace and every Protestant should hang his head in shame at the memory of it.

What a blight upon mankind has been the Protestant Revolt! A diabolical rebellion against God and neighbour by the greedy, the selfish and the cruel.

It allowed the return of slavery and slave-trading (long after the Catholic Church had finally persuaded men to end them), the oppression of the poor, peculation, corruption and swindling on a grand scale and a freedom for cruel and evil men to flourish. One is reminded of some of the odiously evil characters depicted by Charles Dickens in his novels - they were based upon real-life models in a supposedly "tolerant" and "literate" Protestant society.

Wackford Squeers and Mrs Sliderskew conspire, unaware that they are observed.
The odious Wackford Squeers of Dotheboys (i.e. Do-the-boys) Hall and his even more odious wife terrorise their pupils and administer brimstone to them, all for filthy lucre, in Dickens' novel Nicholas Nickleby. Even worse is Nicholas' uncle, Ralph, who initially sends poor Nicholas to Dotheboys to get him out of the way and is revealed as a monster of iniquity. Such evil men all too often flourished in Protestant countries.

As I said in my post to you: it is really the views you ask us to champion that are a failure and are contemptible. They are predicated upon prejudice, bigotry, superstition, ignorance, and contempt for the truth, for decency and for ordinary humanity.

I hope with time, reading and reflection, you may perhaps revisit them.

....