Introduction:
Many of the critics of the Roman Catholic Church fault it for being too strict. But the real problem with those at the helm of the Catholic Church is that – while often very strict where its perception of the wrongdoing of others is concerned – they are extremely lenient, when it comes to their own wrongdoing..
Millions of American Catholics are still reeling from the discovery that, over the years they have had a 4% chance of being assigned a priest who might use their church's sacristy or rectory to sexually molest their children, and pretty close to a 100% chance that when their celibate, childless bishop found out about such crimes, he would do everything in his power to defend the reputation of the "One, Holy, Catholic Church", rather than the dignity of their innocent children.
The principal reason that Catholics are dumbfounded by such behavior on the part of their priests,
bishops and pope, is that they are as much in the dark about the history of this church of their as they were about the pedophilia scandals that were going on all around them for decades until lawyers and courts succeeded in uncovering what the Church and a very compliant news media had kept hidden from them all those years.
The more educated Catholics are, the more certain they seem to be that they know all they need to know about the history of their Church. However, what more educated Catholics usually have in greater abundance than their peers is not more knowledge, but more Catholic indoctrination. They didn't know any more than anyone else about the recent scandals, and they know as little as the rest about the much greater scandals that are uncovered in the pages that follow.
When asked how one can be sure to live on forever after our life on earth, Jesus said that there were two indispensable obligations that needed to be met, and when asked to elaborate on the second of these, namely "that one love one's neighbors as oneself", Jesus replied with a dramatic story and explained that we need to model our lives on the non-believing "Good Samaritan" in this story, who showed extensive pity on an unfortunate Jew who had been attacked by highway bandits and left for dead :
One day an expert on Moses' laws came to test Jesus' orthodoxy by asking him
this question: "Teacher, what does a man need to do to live forever in heaven?"
Jesus replied, "What does Moses' law say about it?" "It says," he replied, "that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you must love your neighbor just as much as you love yourself." "Right!" Jesus told him. "Do this and you shall live!"
But, wanting to justify himself, the man asked, "Which neighbors must I love?" And Jesus replied with an illustration: "A Jew going on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes and money, and beat him up and
left him lying half dead beside the road. By chance a priest
came along; and when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other
side of the road and passed him by. A temple-assistant
walked over and looked at him lying there, but then went on.
But a despised Samaritan* (a heretic) came along, and when he saw him, he felt deep pity. Kneeling beside him the Samaritan soothed
his wounds with medicine and bandaged them. Then he put the man
on his donkey and walked along beside him till they came to an inn, where
he nursed him through the night. The next day he handed the
innkeeper two silver coins and told him to take care of the man.
"If his bill runs higher than that," he said, " I'll pay the difference
the next time I am here."
"Now which of these three," Jesus asked, "would you say was a neighbor
to the bandit's victim?" The man replied, "The one who showed him some pity."
Then Jesus said, "Yes, now go and do the same."
* The Jewish leaders showed just how much they despised Samaritans when they called Jesus one in { John 8:48 } :The Jews answered him, "Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?"
Now, whoever called this the parable of "the Good Samaritan" (and it wasn't Jesus himself) may have missed the point, because Jesus didn't just highlight the genuineness of the compassion of the non-believer. He contrasted it to the phoniness of the two religious leaders. This might just as well be called "the parable of Phoney Men of God"?
When, in the course of time, not one or two Jews, but ten million or more of them were set upon, not by bandits, but by mass-murderers, intent on taking not just their possessions, but the lives of every last Jew on their continent, how did the Christian clergy of the time respond?
Now the clergy had been reading this important parable for centuries, both privately, and to the faithful who looked to them for the imparting of "God's Word". They had done the same with many similar passages in which Jesus and many other great prophets of the Bible stress the importance of love and compassion for those most in need of help. You would think that of all people,, when the occasion arose, these "men of God" would have been ready to be "Good Samaritans" themselves, and ready to urge the faithful to be such as well. But sadly, that is not what happened. If the clergy had acted like the priest and the levite of the parable, and simply "crossed over to the other side" in order to avoid seeing and helping the millions of Jews being persecuted and killed, that would have been bad enough. However, the truth, which I strive to confess in the pages which follow, is that the Christian clergy didn't just ignore horrendous crimes committed by others. Rather, they fostered a terrible unjustified contempt for Jews over the course of many centuries, and when a few madmen dreamed up a "final solution of the Jewish problem", there were millions of willing Catholic and Lutheran hands ready to carry out those plans!
What a contrast there is between one period of history when the whole Jewish population was persecuted by a powerful ruler of the time, the Pharoah of Egypt, and God prompted Moses and Aaron to lead them all out of Egypt, and twentieth century Europe, when the whole Jewish population was being hunted down and killed at the very heart of Christendom, and not one of those who claimed to represent God arose to lead them out of harm's way.
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This web site has been created :
- as a loving memorial for the millions of Jews who were criminally deprived of their lives, (by "Christians" for the most part).
- as a loving memorial for the millions of Christians who lost their own souls, because of the moral bankruptcy of their spiritual leaders, who proved unable to offer their flocks any better advice than "obey your nation's immoral leaders".
- as a plea to the Christian leaders of our day to begin by confessing the tragic sins of this period and to avoid making similar mistakes in times and places not far from Nazi Germany or from Catholic Croatia.
The Scandal of Catholic Church's Role in the Holocaust
is divided into the Introduction (this page), and these four Sections (on subsequent pages):
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