[Nate]The purpose of this article, was that I appreciated Pope John Paul II for taken the right step toward making peace with those people who the Church had caused harmed to them in the last 2000 yrs. Clay, many people can read the past history of the Catholic Church these days on books, internet, etc..
[Clay] If that truly was your purpose, I would have expected you to say something on your website like, "I appreciate Pope John Paul II for taken [sic] the right step......." However, instead you chose to address what you call the Church's "virtual silence" on the Holocaust, etc. As a Catholic, I fully acknowledge that there have been sinful actions on the part of Catholics throughout history; however, where is your concern for those Catholics who died in the Holocaust, Nate? I don't recall you saying anything about them - did your "extensive" research (which apparently only consists of a Time Magazine article) mention the fact that millions of Catholics died in the Holocaust? If so, you once again did not bother to say anything about it on your site, which is full of pathetically false assertions.
[Nate] Even Pope John Paul II admitted many cruelties the church had done in the past 2000 yrs. There are lots of informations [sic] out there to confirm what is on our website is true about the Catholic Church history the last 2000 yrs. The readers can do more digging for themselves and let them draw their own conclusion on what to believe. The choice is up to the readers...They can believe it or not to believe it...
[Clay] I believe that if you're going to publish a website, you have a responsibility to present the truth from all sides. It is my opinion that you failed miserably in this arena, which is why I'm calling you on it. If you like, I can bury you under a mountain of examples of Catholic martyrs and Catholic victims of persecution throughout the 2000 years of Christianity. What does it prove? Only that people do bad things to each other, regardless of ideology - it has nothing to do with Catholic theology. (Please refer to Lockwood's review article Constantine's Sword for a reasoned discussion of the Holocaust)
Furthermore, my main purpose was to point out the insufferable mistruths in your website regarding the Catholic Church's "virtual silence" during W.W. II. What did your 2x2 "church" do or say about Jewish persecution W.W.II, Nate? I'll hazard a guess that they didn't do much of anything, especially compared to the efforts of Pius XII, who is estimated to have saved some 800,000 Jews from the Nazis. How ironic that the only "virtual silence" is coming from you in response to my showing that Pius XII did speak out against Nazism. (Click HERE for proof)
It is very true that people can, and should, do more digging in order to decide for themselves. It is my opinion that you should do some more digging yourself.....**
St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, pray for us!
Clay
P.S. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross was also named Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was assimilated into the Nazi death machine and died in Auschwitz - because not only was she Catholic, but also because she was a Jewish convert.
Actually, I understand what Nate is trying to do. I suspect that at least somewhere in his mind, he realizes that the "Truth" has no legitimate historical precedent; there is no evidence of apostolic succession in the 2x2's, so the next logical step is to try to discredit the one religious group that has the best claim to apostolic succession - the Catholic Church. This logic revolves around the belief that if one can point out enough "bad things" done by any particular group that this proves that the group is "false". I suspect this line of reasoning based on the amount of energy Nate spends on the Catholic Church on his website.
The fact remains that Catholics have been persecuted just as much as any other Christian group out there: as early as the Christian martyrs under Diocletian, to those slaughtered by the Muslims over centuries, to the Irish Catholics starving to death because they would not renounce their faith, to the English Catholics who died, or had to practice their faith in secret for fear of death, to the millions of Catholics killed in Communist China and Soviet Union, to Japanese and Korean/Viet Namese martyrs, to those killed in Uganda and other places in Africa, to the Middle East where in some places it is still a crime punishable by death to be any sort of Christian, to the nativism of the early U.S.A, the Know Nothing party in the colonies, the KKK (who persecuted Catholics as well as blacks), and so on, ad nauseum...............We quickly see that this ridiculous argument is ultimately self-refuting, and therefore pointless.
If you actually read what the earliest Christians wrote about, you will not find them talking about "workers", or "meetings in the home" or any other such 2x2 distinctives. Instead, they refer to the sacred Tradition handed down to them by the Apostles from Christ, a Tradition that for the first 400 years was not part of a "Bible" that the workers use to justify their "teachings". Furthermore, the claim that the "Truth" was "dormant" until the late 19th Century is flatly unbiblical, because Jesus promised that there would be no total apostasy, and that he would be with us for "ALL generations"
So, faced with the insurmountable task of establishing a true historical and apostolic lineage for the 2x2s, Nate thinks he can accomplish at least something toward this effect by misrepresenting the Catholic Church. Not only does he do so with questionable scholarship, he does very little toward proving the very basis of his thesis.
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