#Cardinal Pacelli

[semioticapocalypse]

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Cardinal Pacelli, Later Pope Pius XII. Montmartre, Paris. 1938

I Am Collective Memories   •    Follow me, — says Visual Ratatosk

[disgruntledexplainer]

not-so-friendly reminder to so-called “catholic nazis”, that Hitler literally executed approximately 3,000 polish catholic priests over the course of the war for the crime of existing, 1,800 of which were executed in the concentration camps themselves, with the stated goal of squeezing the religion out of poland. He stated in his letters that he despised the teachings of the Church, and wanted it out of his territory. He established the Hexenkartothek, a sub-division of the SS explicitly founded to produce anti-catholic pro-pagan propaganda and promote witchcraft, which was overseen by Heinrich Himmler. He was an apostate who worked with pagans and heretics to murder millions of innocent people in the name of a blatantly secular regime, and he should have been burned at the stake.

oh yeah, not to mention that nazism was effectively condemned in Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge by Pope Piux XI and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII, meaning nazism was actually condemned by two popes in a row), meaning that if you are a “catholic nazi” you are every bit as heretical as a “pro-abortion catholic” or a “catholic communist”.

[cruger2984]

THE DESCRIPTION OF OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE The Queen of Mexico, the Patroness of the Americas, the Patroness of the Unborn and the Celestial Patroness of the Philippines Feast Day: December 12

"¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre?" ("Am I not here, I who am your mother?")

Guadalupe (La Villa de Guadalupe Hidalgo) is a locality in Mexico where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in December 12, 1531. At dawn on the ninth of December, on his way to the church, he heard a lovely sound of birds and a gentle woman's voice calling him: 'Juan Diego… Juanito!'

Looking up the Tepeyac hill, he saw Mary shining like the sun and stepping over precious stones. She said to him: 'It is my earnest wish that a church be built here, where I could show all my love, compassion, help and protection.'

Immediately, Juan Diego reported the message to the bishop (Don Juan de Zumárraga y Arrazola), who did not believe. In his distress, Juan Diego went back to the hill of the apparition and said to the Blessed Mother: 'My sweet lady, please, give this task to an important person, that he might believe, because I am so little and poor.' Mary replied: 'My little child, tomorrow, go again to the bishop, and tell him that it was I who sent you.'

Juan Diego obeyed, and this time, the bishop asked for a sign.

Again, Mary appeared to Juan Diego, and told him to wrap all the roses he could find on the hill in a mantle (tilmàtli or tilmà), and to present them to the bishop. Then, as he opened the mantle to show the roses to the bishop, the miraculous image of the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared on it. Thus, the bishop decided to build a church in the place of the apparitions, where he installed the miraculous mantle with great honor.

Our Lady of Guadalupe became so popular that she was declared the Patroness of the Americas. Pope Pius XI declared Our Lady of Guadalupe as the 'Heavenly Patroness of the Philippines' on July 16, 1935, signed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later rescinded).

Due to Mary's appearance as a pregnant mother and her claims as mother of all in the apparition, the Blessed Virgin Mary, under this title is popularly invoked as the 'Patroness of the Unborn' and a common image for the Pro-Life movement.

Context made by yours truly.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.2 (after 1910)

1917 – The enactment of the Jones–Shafroth Act grants Puerto Ricans United States citizenship. 1919 – The first Communist International meets in Moscow. 1932 – Finnish president P. E. Svinhufvud gives a radio speech, which four days later finally ends the Mäntsälä Rebellion and the far-right Lapua Movement that started it. 1937 – The Steel Workers Organizing Committee signs a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel, leading to unionization of the United States steel industry. 1939 – Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII. 1941 – World War II: First German military units enter Bulgaria after it joins the Axis Pact. 1943 – World War II: During the Battle of the Bismarck Sea Allied aircraft defeated a Japanese attempt to ship troops to New Guinea. 1949 – Captain James Gallagher lands his B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II in Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop around-the-world airplane flight in 94 hours and one minute. 1955 – Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia, abdicates the throne in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit. 1962 – In Burma, the army led by General Ne Win seizes power in a coup d'état. 1962 – Wilt Chamberlain sets the single-game scoring record in the National Basketball Association by scoring 100 points. 1965 – The US and Republic of Vietnam Air Force begin Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. 1968 – Baggeridge Colliery closes marking the end of over 300 years of coal mining in the Black Country. 1969 – In Toulouse, France, the first test flight of the Anglo-French Concorde is conducted. 1970 – Rhodesia declares itself a republic, breaking its last links with the British crown. 1972 – The Pioneer 10 space probe is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with a mission to explore the outer planets. 1977 – Libya becomes the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya as the General People's Congress adopted the "Declaration on the Establishment of the Authority of the People". 1978 – Czech Vladimír Remek becomes the first non-Russian or non-American to go into space, when he is launched aboard Soyuz 28. 1978 – The late iconic actor Charlie Chaplin's coffin is stolen from his grave in Switzerland. 1983 – Compact discs and players are released for the first time in the United States and other markets. They had previously been available only in Japan. 1989 – Twelve European Community nations agree to ban the production of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the century. 1990 – Nelson Mandela is elected deputy president of the African National Congress. 1991 – Establishment of Kuwait Democratic Forum, center-left political organization in Kuwait. 1991 – Battle at Rumaila oil field brings an end to the 1991 Gulf War. 1992 – Start of the war in Transnistria. 1992 – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, San Marino, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which (except San Marino) were former Soviet republics, join the United Nations. 1995 – Researchers at Fermilab announce the discovery of the top quark. 1998 – Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice. 2002 – U.S. invasion of Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda begins, (ending on March 19 after killing 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, with 11 Western troop fatalities). 2004 – War in Iraq: Al-Qaeda carries out the Ashoura Massacre in Iraq, killing 170 and wounding over 500. 2012 – A tornado outbreak occurs over a large section of the Southern United States and into the Ohio Valley region, resulting in 40 tornado-related fatalities. 2017 – The elements Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson are officially added to the periodic table at a conference in Moscow, Russia. 2022 – Russian forces capture the city of Kherson during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which subsequently began the start of the Russian occupation and military-civilian administration in Kherson. Kherson is the only regional capital in Ukraine that Russia captured.

[wausaupilot]

Newman Catholic boys basketball snags road win over White Lake in WIAA Division 5 regional quarterfinal

Newman will play a D-5 regional semifinal at Stevens Point Pacelli on Friday.

Wausau Pilot & Review WHITE LAKE – The No. 11 seed Newman Catholic boys basketball team went on the road and picked up a playoff win on Tuesday night, downing No. 6 seed White Lake 44-29 in a WIAA Division 5 regional quarterfinal at White Lake High School. Quincy Pfender scored 19 points and Lucas Pfiffner added nine in the win for the Cardinals. Newman Catholic (5-20) will play a D-5 regional…

[shamsaddinmegalommatis]

Benedict XVI and today's Muslims opposite Manuel II Palaeologus and his Turkic Interlocutor

Or why I defended Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 against the thoughtlessly irascible Muslims 

When a Muslim writes an Obituary for the Catholic Church's sole Pope Emeritus…

Table of Contents

I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI

II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope

III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars

IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies

V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored

VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI's lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title 'Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections'

VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI's lecture

VIII. Benedict XVI's biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations

IX. The lecture's most controversial point

X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today's Muslim states

Of all the Roman popes who resigned the only to be called 'Pope Emeritus' was Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI (also known in German as Prof. Dr. Papst), who passed away on 31st December 2022, thus sealing the circle of world figures and heads of states whose life ended last year. As a matter of fact, although being a head state, a pope does not abdicate; he renounces to his ministry (renuntiatio).

Due to lack of documentation, conflicting sources or confusing circumstances, we do not have conclusive evidence as regards the purported resignations of the popes St. Pontian (235), Marcellinus (304), Liberius (366), John XVIII (1009) and Sylvester (105). That is why historical certainty exists only with respect to the 'papal renunciation' of six pontiffs; three of them bore the papal name of 'Benedict'. The brief list includes therefore the following bishops of Rome: Benedict V (964), Benedict IX (deposed in 1044, bribed to resign in 1045, and resigned in 1048), Gregory VI (1046), St Celestine (1294), Gregory XII (1415) and Benedict XVI (2013).

I. From Joseph Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict XVI (18 April 1927 – 31 December 2022) was seven (7) years younger than his predecessor John Paul II (1920-2005), but passed away seventeen (17) years after the Polish pope's death; already on the 4th September 2020, Benedict XVI would have been declared as the oldest pope in history, had he not resigned seven (7) years earlier. Only Leo XIII died 93, back in 1903. As a matter of fact, Benedict XVI outlived all the people who were elected to the Roman See.

Benedict XVI's papacy lasted slightly less than eight (8) years (19 April 2005 – 28 February 2013). Before being elected as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was for almost a quarter century (1981-2005) the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was the formal continuation of the Office of the Holy Inquisition, and therefore one of the most important sections ('dicasteries'; from the Ancient Greek term 'dikasterion', i.e. 'court of law') of the Roman administration ('Curia').

A major step toward this position was his appointment as archbishop of Munich for four years (1977-1981); Bavaria has always been a Catholic heavyweight, and in this regard, it is easy to recall the earlier example of Eugenio Pacelli (the later pope Pius XII), who was nuncio to Bavaria (and therefore to the German Empire), in Munich, from 1917 to 1920, and then to Germany, before being elected to the Roman See (in 1939). Before having a meteoric rise in the Catholic hierarchy, Ratzinger made an excellent scholar and a distinct professor of dogmatic theology, while also being a priest. His philosophical dissertation was about St. Augustine and his habilitation concerned Bonaventure, a Franciscan scholastic theologian and cardinal of the 13th c.

II. The theoretical concerns of an intellectual Pope

During his ministry, very early, Benedict XVI stood up and showed his teeth; when I noticed his formidable outburst against the 'dictatorship of relativism', I realized that the German pope would be essentially superior to his Polish predecessor. Only in June 2005, so just two months after his election, he defined relativism as "the main obstacle to the task of education", directing a tremendous attack against the evilness of ego and portraying selfishness as a "self-limitation of reason".

In fact, there cannot be more devastating attack from a supreme religious authority against the evilness of Anglo-Zionism and the rotten, putrefied society that these criminals diffuse worldwide by means of infiltration, corruption, mendacity, and simulation. Soon afterwards, while speaking in Marienfeld (Cologne), Benedict XVI attacked ferociously all the pathetic ideologies which indiscriminately enslave humans from all spiritual and cultural backgrounds. He said: "absolutizing what is not absolute but relative is called totalitarianism". This is a detrimental rejection of Talmudic Judaism, Zohar Kabbalah, and Anglo-Zionism.

It was in the summer 2005 that I first realized that I should study closer the pre-papal past of the Roman Pontiff whom St Malachy's illustrious Prophecy of the Popes (12th c.) described as 'Gloria olivae' (the Glory of the olive). I contacted several friends in Germany, who extensively updated me as regards his academic publications, also dispatching to me some of them. At the time, I noticed that my Christian friends already used to question a certain number of Cardinal Ratzinger's positions.

But, contrarily to them, I personally found his prediction about the eventuality of Buddhism becoming the principal 'enemy' of the Catholic Church as quite plausible. My friends were absolutely astounded, and then I had to narrate and explain to them the deliberately concealed story of the Christian-Islamic-Confucian alliance against the Buddhist terrorism of the Dzungar Khanate (1634-1755); actually, it took many Kazakh-Dzungar wars (1643-1756), successive wars between Qing China and the Dzungar Khanate (1687-1757), and even an alliance with the Russian Empire in order to successfully oppose the ferocious Buddhist extremist threat.

Finally, the extraordinary ordeal of North Asia {a vast area comprising lands of today's Eastern Kazakhstan, Russia (Central Siberia), Northwestern and Western China (Eastern Turkestan/Xinjiang and Tibet) and Western Mongolia} ended up with the systematic genocide of the extremist Buddhist Dzungars (1755-1758) that the Chinese had to undertake because there was no other way to terminate once forever the most fanatic regime that ever existed in Asia.

Disoriented, ignorant, confused and gullible, most of the people today fail to clearly understand how easily Buddhism can turn a peaceful society into a fanatic realm of lunatic extremists. The hypothetically innocent adhesion of several fake Freemasonic lodges of the West to Buddhism and the seemingly harmless acceptance of Buddhist principles and values by these ignorant fools can end up in the formation of vicious and terrorist organizations that will give to their members and initiates the absurd order and task to indiscriminately kill all of their opponents. But Cardinal Ratzinger had prudently discerned the existence of a dangerous source of spiritual narcissism in Buddhism.

III. Benedict XVI: A Pope against violence and wars

To me, this foresight was a convincing proof that Benedict XVI was truly 'Gloria olivae'; but this would be troublesome news! In a period of proxy wars, unrestrained iniquity, and outrageous inhumanity, a perspicacious, cordial, and benevolent pope in Rome would surely be an encumbering person to many villainous rascals, i.e. the likes of Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy, and many others so-called 'leaders'. The reason for this assessment of the situation is simple: no one wants a powerful pacifier at a time more wars are planned.

At the time, it was ostensible to all that a fake confrontation between the world's Muslims and Christians was underway (notably after the notorious 9/11 events); for this reason, I expected Benedict XVI to make a rather benevolent statement that evil forces would immediately misinterpret, while also falsely accusing the pacifist Pope and absurdly turning the uneducated and ignorant mob of many countries against the Catholic Church.

This is the foolish plan of the Anglo-Zionist lobby, which has long served as puppets of the Jesuits, corrupting the entire Muslim world over the past 250 years by means of intellectual, educational, academic, scientific, cultural, economic, military and political colonialism. These idiotic puppets, which have no idea who their true and real masters are, imagine that, by creating an unprecedented havoc in Europe, they harm the worldwide interests of the Jesuits; but they fail to properly realize that this evil society, which early turned against Benedict XVI, has already shifted its focus onto China. Why the apostate Anglo-Zionist Freemasonic lodge would act in this manner against Benedict XVI is easy to assess; the Roman pontiff whose episcopal motto was 'Cooperatores Veritatis' ('Co-workers of the Truth') would apparently try to prevent the long-prepared fake war between the Muslims and the Christians.

IV. Manuel II Palaeologus and the Eastern Roman Empire between the Muslim Ottoman brethren and the Anti-Christian Roman enemies

And this is what truly happened in the middle of September 2006; on the 12th September, Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany; the title was 'Glaube, Vernunft und Universität – Erinnerungen und Reflexionen' ('Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections'). In the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Dr. Ratzinger eclipsed Pope Benedict XVI, as the one-time professor persisted on his concept of 'faith', "which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole", as he said. In a most rationalistic approach (for which he had been known for several decades as a renowned Catholic theologian), in an argumentation reflecting views certainly typical of Francis of Assisi and of Aristotle but emphatically alien to Jesus, Benedict XVI attempted to portray an ahistorical Christianity and to describe the Catholic faith as the religion of the Reason.

At an early point of the lecture, Benedict XVI referred to a discussion that the Eastern Roman Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (or Palaiologos; Μανουήλ Παλαιολόγος; 1350-1425; reigned after 1391) had with an erudite Turkic scholar (indiscriminately but mistakenly called by all Eastern Roman authors at the time as 'Persian') most probably around the end of 1390 or the first months of 1391, when he was hostage at the Ottoman court of Bayezid I. In the historical text, it is stated that the location was 'Ancyra of Galatia' (i.e. Ankara).  

This Eastern Roman Emperor was indeed a very controversial historical figure; although undeniably an erudite ruler, a bold diplomat, and a reputable soldier, he first made agreements with the Ottomans and delivered to them the last Eastern Roman city in Anatolia (Philadelphia; today's Alaşehir, ca. 140 km east of Izmir / Smyrna) and then, after he took control of his ailing kingdom thanks to the sultan, he escaped the protracted siege of Constantinople (1391-1402) only to travel to various Western European kingdoms and ask the help of those rather reluctant monarchs (1399-1403).

At the time, all the Christian Orthodox populations, either living in the Ottoman sultanate or residing in the declined Eastern Roman Empire, were deeply divided into two groups, namely those who preferred to be ruled by Muslims (because they rejected the pseudo-Christian fallacy, evilness and iniquity of the Roman pope) and the fervent supporters of a Latin (: Western European) control over Constantinople (viewed as the only way for them to prevent the Ottoman rule); the former formed the majority and were called Anthenotikoi, i.e. 'against the union' (: of the Orthodox Church with the Catholics), whereas the latter constituted a minority group and were named 'Enotikoi' ('those in favor of the union of the two churches').

V. The unknown (?) Turkic mystic interlocutor and the Islamic centers of science and reason that Benedict XVI ignored

Manuel II Palaeologus' text has little theological value in itself; however, its historical value is great. It reveals how weak both interlocutors were at the intellectual, cultural and spiritual levels, how little they knew one another, and how poorly informed they were about their own and their interlocutor's past, heritage, religion and spirituality. If we have even a brief look at it, we will immediately realize that the level is far lower than that attested during similar encounters in 8th- 9th c. Baghdad, 10th c. Umayyad Andalusia, Fatimid Cairo, 13th c. Maragheh (where the world's leading observatory was built) or 14th c. Samarqand, the Timurid capital.

It was absolutely clear at the time of Manuel II Palaeologus and Bayezid I that neither Constantinople nor Bursa (Προύσα / Prousa; not anymore the Ottoman capital after 1363, but still the most important city of the sultanate) could compete with the great centers of Islamic science civilization which were located in Iran and Central Asia. That's why Gregory Chioniades, the illustrious Eastern Roman bishop, astronomer, and erudite scholar who was the head of the Orthodox diocese of Tabriz, studied in Maragheh under the guidance of his tutor and mentor, Shamsaddin al Bukhari (one of the most illustrious students of Nasir el-Din al Tusi, who was the founder of the Maragheh Observatory), before building an observatory in Trabzon (Trebizond) and becoming the teacher of Manuel Bryennios, another famous Eastern Roman scholar.  

The text of the Dialogues must have been written several years after the conversation took place, most probably when the traveling emperor and diplomat spent four years in Western Europe. For reasons unknown to us, the erudite emperor did not mention the name of his interlocutor, although this was certainly known to him; if we take into consideration that he was traveling to other kingdoms, we can somehow guess a plausible reason. His courtiers and royal scribes may have translated the text partly into Latin and given copies of the 'dialogues' to various kings, marshals, chroniclers, and other dignitaries. If this was the case, the traveling emperor would not probably want to offer insights into the Ottoman court and the influential religious authorities around the sultan.

Alternatively, the 'unknown' interlocutor may well have been Amir Sultan (born as Mohamed bin Ali; also known as Shamsuddin Al-Bukhari; 1368-1429) himself, i.e. none else than an important Turanian mystic from Vobkent (near Bukhara in today's Uzbekistan), who got married with Bayezid I's daughter Hundi Fatema Sultan Hatun. Amir Sultan had advised the sultan not to turn against Timur; had the foolish sultan heeded to his son-in-law's wise advice, he would not have been defeated so shamefully.

Benedict XVI made a very biased use of the historical text; he selected an excerpt of Manuel II Palaeologus' response to his interlocutor in order to differentiate between Christianity as the religion of Reason and Islam as the religion of Violence. Even worse, he referred to a controversial, biased and rancorous historian of Lebanese origin, the notorious Prof. Theodore Khoury (born in 1930), who spent his useless life to write sophisticated diatribes, mildly formulated forgeries, and deliberate distortions of the historical truth in order to satisfy his rancor and depict the historical past according to his absurd political analysis. Almost every sentence written Prof. Khoury about the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate is maliciously false.

All the same, it was certainly Benedict XVI's absolute right to be academically, intellectually and historically wrong. The main problem was that the paranoid reaction against him was not expressed at the academic and intellectual levels, but at the profane ground of international politics. Even worse, it was not started by Muslims but by the criminal Anglo-Zionist mafia and the disreputable mainstream mass media, the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera (Qatari is only the façade of it), etc.

I will now republish (in bold and italics) a sizeable (600-word) excerpt of the papal lecture that contains the contentious excerpt, also adding the notes to the text. The link to the Vatican's website page is available below. I will comment first on the lecture and the selected part of Manuel II Palaeologus' text and then on the absurd Muslim reaction.

VI. Excerpt from Benedict XVI's lecture given on the 12th September at the University of Regensburg under title 'Faith, Reason and the University–Memories and Reflections'

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4]

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.[7]

Notes 1 to 7 (out of 13)

[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition;  the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation:  “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman.  7e Controverse”,  Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966.  In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca  ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary:  “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996.  As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien.  I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.

[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29;  extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.

[3] Controversy VII, 2 c:  Khoury, pp. 142-143;  Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241.  In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation.  I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion.  In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason.  On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.

[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c:  Khoury, pp. 144-145;  Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.

[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor.  In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.

[6] Cf. Khoury, p. 144, n. 1.

[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13;  cf. Khoury, p. 144.  The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.

VII. The problems of the academic-theological background of Benedict XVI's lecture

It is my conviction that Benedict XVI fell victim to the quite typical theological assumptions that Prof. Dr. Ratzinger had studied and taught for decades. However, the problem is not limited to the circle of the faculties of Theology and to Christian Theology as a modern discipline; it is far wider. The same troublesome situation permeates all the disciplines of Humanities and, even worse, the quasi-totality of the modern sciences as they started in Renaissance. The problem goes well beyond the limits of academic research and intellectual consideration; it has to do with the degenerate, rotten and useless mental abilities and capacities of the Western so-called scholars, researchers and academics. The description of the problem is rather brief, but its nature is truly ominous.

Instead of perceiving, understanding, analyzing and representing the 'Other' in its own terms, conditions and essence and as per its own values, virtues and world conceptualization, the modern Western European scholars, researchers, explorers and specialists view, perceive, attempt to understand, and seek to analyze the 'Other' in their own terms, conditions and essence and as per their own values, virtues and world conceptualization. Due to this sick effort and unprecedented aberration, the Western so-called scholars and researchers view the 'Other' through their eyes, thus projecting onto the 'Other' their view of it. Consequently, they do not and actually they cannot learn it, let alone know, understand and represent it. Their attitude is inane, autistic and degenerate. It is however quite interesting and truly bizarre that the Western European natural scientists do not proceed in this manner, but fully assess the condition of the object of their study in a rather objective manner.

In fact, the Western disciplines of the Humanities, despite the enormous collection and publication of study materials, sources and overall documentation, are a useless distortion. Considered objectively, the Western scientific endeavor in its entirety is a monumental nothingness; it is not only a preconceived conclusion. It is a resolute determination not to 'see' the 'Other' as it truly exists, as its constituent parts obviously encapsulate its contents, and as the available documentation reveals it. In other words, it consists in a premeditated and resolute rejection of the Truth; it is intellectually barren, morally evil, and spiritually nihilist. The topic obviously exceeds by far the limits of the present obituary, but I had to mention it in order to offer the proper context.  

It is therefore difficult to identify the real reason for the magnitude of the Western scholarly endeavor, since the conclusions existed in the minds of the explorers and the academics already before the documentation was gathered, analyzed, studied, and represented. How important is it therefore to publish the unpublished material (totaling more than 100000 manuscripts of Islamic times and more than one million of cuneiform tablets from Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Canaan and Anatolia – only to give an idea to the non-specialized readers), if the evil Western scholars and the gullible foreign students enrolled in Western institutions (to the detriment of their own countries and nations) are going to repeat and reproduce the same absurd Western mentality of viewing an Ancient Sumerian, an Ancient Assyrian, an Ancient Egyptian or a Muslim author through their own eyes and of projecting onto the ancient author the invalid and useless measures, values, terms and world views of the modern Western world?

As it can be easily understood, the problem is not with Christian Theology, but with all the disciplines of the Humanities. So, the problem is not only that a great Muslim scholar and erudite mystic like Ibn Hazm was viewed by Benedict XVI and Western theologians through the distorting lenses of their 'science', being not evaluated as per the correct measures, values and terms of his own Islamic environment, background and civilization. The same problem appears in an even worse form, when Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Hittite, Iranian and other high priests, spiritual masters, transcendental potentates, sacerdotal writers, and unequaled scientists are again evaluated as per the invalid and useless criteria of Benedict XVI, of all the Western theologians, and of all the modern European and American academics.

What post-Renaissance popes, theologians, academics, scholars and intellectuals fail to understand is very simple; their 'world' ( i.e. the world of the Western Intellect and Science, which was first fabricated in the 15th and the 16th c. and later enhanced progressively down to our days) in not Christian, is not human, and is not real. It is their own delusion, their own invalid abstraction, their abject paranoia, and their own sin for which first they will atrociously disappear from the surface of the Earth (like every anomalous entity) and then flagrantly perish in Hell.

Their dangling system does not hold; they produced it in blood and in blood it will end. Modern sciences constitute a counter-productive endeavor and an aberration that will terminally absorb the entire world into the absolute nothingness, because these evil systems were instituted out of arbitrary bogus-interpretations of the past, peremptory self-identification, deliberate and prejudicial ignorance, as well as an unprecedented ulcerous hatred of the 'Other', i.e. of every 'Other'.

The foolish Western European academic-intellectual establishment failed to realize that it is absolutely preposterous to extrapolate later and corrupt standards to earlier and superior civilizations; in fact, it is impossible. By trying to do it, you depart from the real world only to live in your delusion, which sooner or later will inevitably have a tragic end. Consequently, the Western European scholars' 'classics' are not classics; their reason is an obsession; their language and jargon are hallucinatory, whereas their notions are conjectural. Their abstract concepts are the manifestation of Non-Being.

VIII. Benedict XVI's biased approach, theological mistakes, intellectual oversights and historical misinterpretations

Benedict XVI's understanding of the Eastern Roman Empire was fictional. When examining the sources, he retained what he liked, what pleased him, and what was beneficial to his preconceived ideas and thoughts. In fact, Prof. Dr. Papst did not truly understand what Manuel II Palaeologus said to his Turkic interlocutor, and even worse, he failed to assess the enormous distance that separated the early 15th c. Eastern Roman (not 'Byzantine': this is a fake appellation too) Emperor from his illustrious predecessors before 800 or 900 years (the likes of Heraclius and Justinian I) in terms of Christian Roman imperial ideology, theological acumen, jurisprudential perspicacity, intellectual resourcefulness, and spiritual forcefulness. Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Christian doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.

What was Ratzinger's mistake? First, he erroneously viewed Manuel II Palaeologus as 'his' (as identical with the papal doctrine), by projecting his modern Catholic mindset and convictions onto the Christian Orthodox Eastern Roman Emperor's mind, mentality and faith. He took the 'Dialogues' at face value whereas the text may have been written not as a declaration of faith but as a diplomatic document in order to convince the rather uneducated Western European monarchs that the traveling 'basileus' (βασιλεύς) visited during the period 1399-1403.

Second, he distorted the 'dialogue', presenting it in a polarized form. Benedict XVI actually depicted a fraternal conversation as a frontal opposition; unfortunately, there is nothing in the historical text to insinuate this possibility. As I already said, it is quite possible that the moderate, wise, but desperate Eastern Roman Emperor may have discussed with someone married to a female descendant of the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (namely Bayezid's son-in-law, adviser and mystic Emir Sultan). Why on Earth did the renowned theologian Ratzinger attempt to stage manage a theological conflict in the place of a most peaceful, friendly and fraternal exchange of ideas?

This is easy to explain; it has to do with the absolutely Manichaean structure of thought that was first diffused among the Western Fathers of the Christian Church by St Augustine (in the early 5th c.). As method of theological argumentation, it was first effectively contained, and it remained rather marginal within the Roman Church as long as the practice introduced by Justinian I (537) lasted (until 752) and all the popes of Rome had to be selected and approved personally by the Eastern Roman Emperor. After this moment and, more particularly, after the two Schisms (867 and 1054), the Manichaean system of thinking prevailed in Rome; finally, it culminated after the Renaissance.

Third, Benedict XVI tried to depict the early 15th c. erudite interlocutor of the then hostage Manuel II Palaeologus as a modern Muslim and a Jihadist. This is the repetition of the same mistakes that he made as regards the intellectual Eastern Roman Emperor. In other words, he projected onto the 'unknown', 15th c. Muslim mystic his own personal view of an Islamist or Islamic fundamentalist. Similarly, by bulldozing time in order to impose his wrong perception of Islam, he fully misled the audience. As a matter of fact, Islam constitutes a vast universe that Prof. Dr. Papst never studied, never understood, and never fathomed in its true dimensions.

In fact, as it happened in the case of the Eastern Roman Emperor, his interlocutor was intellectually weaker and spiritually lower than the great figures of Islamic spirituality, science, wisdom, literature and intuition, the likes of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Al Qurtubi, Mohyi el-Din Ibn Arabi, Ahmed Yasawi, Al Biruni, Ferdowsi, Al Farabi, Tabari, etc., who preceded him by 150 to 500 years. But Benedict XVI did not want to accept that with time the Islamic doctrine, theology and spirituality had weakened.

The reason for this distortion is easy to grasp; the Manichaean system of thinking needs terminal, crystallized forms of items that do not change; then, it is convenient for the Western European abusers of the Manichaean spirit to fully implement the deceitful setting of fake contrasts and false dilemmas. But the 15th c. decayed Eastern Roman Orthodoxy and decadent Islam are real historical entities that enable every explorer to encounter the multitude of forms, the ups and downs, the evolution of cults, the transformation of faiths, and the gradual loss of the initially genuine Moral and vibrant Spirituality. This reality is very embarrassing to those who want to teach their unfortunate students on a calamitous black & white background (or floor).

All the books and articles of his friend, Prof. Theodore Khoury, proved to be totally useless and worthless for the Catholic theologian Ratzinger, exactly because the Lebanese specialist never wrote a sentence in order to truly represent the historical truth about Islam, but he always elaborated his texts in a way to justify and confirm his preconceived ideas. Prof. Khoury's Islam is a delusional entity, something like the artificial humans of our times. Unfortunately, not one Western Islamologist realized that Islam, at the antipodes of the Roman Catholic doctrine, has an extremely limited dogmatic part, a minimal cult, and no heresies. Any opposite opinion belongs to liars, forgers and falsifiers. As a matter of fact, today's distorted representation of Islam is simply the result of Western colonialism. All over the world, whatever people hear or believe about the religion preached by Prophet Muhammad is not the true, historical, religion of Islam, but the colonially, academically-intellectually, produced Christianization of Islam.  

Fourth, in striking contrast to what the theologian Ratzinger pretended through use of this example or case study (i.e. the 'discussion'), if Benedict XVI shifted his focus to the East, he would find Maragheh in NW Iran (Iranian Azerbaijan) and Samarqand in Central Asia. In those locations (and always for the period concerned), he would certainly find great centers of learning, universities, vast libraries, and enormous observatories, which could make every 15th c. Western European astronomer and mathematician dream. But there he would also find, as I already said, many Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and other scholars working one next to the other without caring about their religious (theological) differences. This situation is very well known to modern Western scholarship, but they viciously and criminally try to permanently conceal it.

This situation was due to the cultural, intellectual, academic, mental and spiritual unity that prevailed among all those erudite scholars. Numerous Western European scholars have published much about Nasir el-Din al Tusi (about whom I already spoke briefly) and also about Ulugh Beg, the world's greatest astronomer of his time (middle of the 15th c.), who was the grandson of Timur (Tamerlane) and, at the same time, the World History's most erudite emperor of the last 2500 years. However, post-Renaissance Catholic sectarianism and Western European/North American racism prevented the German pope from being truthful at least once, and also from choosing the right paradigm.

IX. The lecture's most controversial point

Fifth, if we now go straight to the lecture's most controversial point and to the quotation's most fascinating sentence, we will find the question addressed by Manuel II Palaeologus to his erudite Turkic interlocutor; actually, it is rather an exclamation:

- «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached»!

This interesting excerpt provides indeed the complete confirmation of my earlier assessments as regards the intellectual decay of both, Christian Orthodoxy and Islam, at the time. Apparently, it was not theological acumen what both interlocutors were lacking at the time; it was historical knowledge. Furthermore, historical continuity, religious consciousness, and moral command were also absent in the discussion.

The first series of points that Manuel II Palaeologus' Muslim interlocutor could have made answering the aforementioned statement would be that Prophet Muhammad, before his death, summoned Ali ibn Abu Taleb and asked him to promise that he would never diffuse the true faith by undertaking wars; furthermore, Islam was diffused peacefully in many lands outside Arabia (Hejaz), notably Yemen, Oman, Somalia, and the Eastern Coast of Africa. In addition, there were many Muslims, who rejected the absurd idea of the Islamic conquests launched by Umar ibn al-Khattab and actually did not participate.

We have also to take into consideration the fact that, in spite of the undeniable reality of the early spread of Islam through invasions, there has always been well-known and sufficient documentation to clearly prove that the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Copts of Egypt, and the Berbers of Africa, although fully preserving their Christian faith, preferred to live under the rule of the Caliphates and overwhelmingly rejected the Eastern Roman imperial administration, because they had been long persecuted by the Constantinopolitan guards due to their Miaphysite (Monophysitic) and/or Nestorian faiths.

On another note, the Eastern Roman Emperor's Muslim interlocutor could have questioned the overall approach of Manuel II Palaeologus to the topic. In other words, he could have expressed the following objection:

- «What is it good for someone to pretend that he is a follower of Jesus and evoke his mildness, while at the same time violently imposing by the sword the faith that Jesus preached? And what is it more evil and more inhuman than the imposition of a faith in Jesus' name within the Roman Empire, after so much bloodshed and persecution took place and so many wars were undertaken»? 

Last, one must admit that the sentence «Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new!» would have been easily answered by an earlier Muslim mystic of the Golden Era of Islam. Actually, this statement is islamically correct and pertinent. The apparent absence of a spectacular response from the part of Manuel II Palaeologus' Muslim interlocutor rather generates doubts as regards the true nature of the text. This is so because he could have immediately replied to Bayezid I's hostage that not one prophet or messenger was sent by God with the purpose of 'bringing something new'; in fact, all the prophets from Noah to Jonah, from Abraham to Jonah, from Moses to Muhammad, and from Adam to Jesus were dispatched in order to deliver the same message to the humans, namely to return to the correct path and live according to the Will of God.

Related to this point is the following well-known verse of the Quran (ch. 3 - Al Imran, 67): "Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright (man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists". It is therefore odd that a response in this regard is missing at this point.

It is also strange that, at a time of major divisions within Christianity and more particularly among the Christian Orthodox Eastern Romans, the 'unknown' imperial interlocutor did not mention the existing divisions among Christians as already stated very clearly, explicitly and repeatedly in the Quran. Examples:

"You are the best community ever raised for humanity—you encourage good, forbid evil, and believe in Allah. Had the People of the Book believed, it would have been better for them. Some of them are faithful, but most are rebellious". (ch. 3 - Al Imran, 110)

"Yet they are not all alike: there are some among the People of the Book who are upright, who recite Allah’s revelations throughout the night, prostrating in prayer".

(ch. 3 - Al Imran, 113):

To conclude I would add that elementary knowledge of Roman History, Late Antiquity, and Patristic Philology would be enough for Benedict XVI to know that

- in its effort to impose Christianity on the Roman Empire,

- in its determination to fully eradicate earlier religions, opposite religious sects like the Gnostics, and theological 'heresies' like Arianism,

- in its resolve to exterminate other Christian Churches such as the Nestorians and the Miaphysites (Monophysites),

- in its obsession to uproot Christian theological doctrines like Iconoclasm and Paulicianism, and

- in its witch hunt against Manichaeism, …

… the 'official' Roman and Constantinopolitan churches committed innumerable crimes and killed a far greater number of victims than those massacred by Muslim invaders on several occurrences during the early Islamic conquests.

So, when did the Christian Church encounter Reason and when did it cease to be 'unreasonable' according to the theologian Pope Ratzinger?

One must be very sarcastic to duly respond to those questions: most probably, the Roman Church discovered 'Reason' after having killed all of their opponents and the so-called 'heretics' whose sole sin was simply to consider and denounce the Roman Church as heretic!

If Benedict XVI forgot to find in the Quran the reason for the Turkic interlocutor's mild attitude toward the hostage Manuel II Palaeologus, this is a serious oversight for the professor of theology; he should have mentioned the excerpts. In the surah al-Ankabut ('the Spider'; ch. 29, verse 46), it is stated: "And do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in a most kindly manner".

Similarly, the German pope failed to delve in Assyriology and in Egyptology to better understand that the Hebrew Bible (just like the New Testament and the Quran) did not bring anything 'new' either; before Moses in Egypt and before Abraham in Mesopotamia, there were monotheistic and aniconic trends and traits in the respective religions. The concept of the Messiah is attested in Egypt, in Assyria, and among the Hittites many centuries or rather more than a millennium before Isaiah contextualized it within the small Hebrew kingdom. Both Egypt and Babylon were holy lands long before Moses promised South Canaan to the Ancient Hebrew tribes, whereas the Assyrians were the historically first Chosen People of the Only God and the Assyrian imperial ideology reflected this fact in detail. The Akkadian - Assyrian-Babylonian kings were 'emperors of the universe' and their rule reflected the 'kingdom of Heaven'.

If Etana and Ninurta reveal aspects of Assyrian eschatology, Horus was clearly the Egyptian Messiah, who would ultimately vanquish Seth (Satan/Antichrist) at the End of Time in an unprecedented cosmic battle that would usher the mankind into a new era which would be the reconstitution of the originally ideal world and Well-Being (Wser), i.e. Osiris. There is no Cosmogony without Eschatology or Soteriology, and nothing was invented and envisioned by the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans that had not previously been better and more solemnly formulated among the Sumerians, the Akkadians - Assyrian-Babylonians, and the Egyptians. There is no such thing as 'Greco-Roman' or 'Greco-Christian' or' Greco-Judaic' civilization. Both, Islam and Christianity are the children of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

And this concludes the case of today's Catholic theologians, i.e. the likes of Pope Benedict XVI or Theodore Khoury; they have to restart from scratch in order to duly assess the origins and the nature of Christianity before the serpent casts "forth out of his mouth water as a river after the woman, that he may cause her to be carried away by the river". All the same, it was certainly Prof. Ratzinger's full right to make as many mistakes as he wanted and to distort any textual reference he happened to mention.

X. The educational-academic-intellectual misery and the political ordeal of today's Muslim states

Quite contrarily, it was not the right of those who accused him of doing so, because they expanded rather at the political and not at the academic level; this was very hypocritical and shameful. If these politicians, statesmen and diplomats dared speak at the academic level, they would reveal their own ignorance, obscurantism, obsolete educational system, miserable universities, nonexistent intellectual life, and last but not least, disreputable scientific institutions.

The reason for this is simple: not one Muslim country has properly organized departments and faculties endowed with experts capable of reading historical sources in the original texts and specializing in the History of the Eastern Roman Empire, Orthodox Christianity, Christological disputes and Patristic Literature. If a Muslim country had an educational, academic and intellectual establishment similar to that of Spain or Poland, there would surely be serious academic-level objection to Benedict XVI's lecture. It would take a series of articles to reveal, refute and utterly denounce (not just the mistakes and the oversights but) the distorted approach which is not proper only to the defunct Pope Emeritus but to the entire Western academic establishment; these people would however be academics and intellectuals of a certain caliber. Unfortunately, such specialists do not exist in any Muslim country.

Then, the unrepresentative criminal crooks and gangsters, who rule all the countries of the Muslim world, reacted against Pope Benedict XVI at a very low, political level about a topic that was not political of nature and about which they knew absolutely nothing. In this manner, they humiliated all the Muslims, defamed Islam, ridiculed their own countries, and revealed that they rule failed states. Even worse, they made it very clear that they are the disreputable puppets of their colonial masters, who have systematically forced all the Muslim countries to exactly accept as theirs the fallacy that the Western Orientalists have produced and projected onto them (and in this case, the entirely fake representation of Islam that theologians like Ratzinger, Khoury and many others have fabricated).

If Ratzinger gave this lecture, this is also due to the fact that he knew that he would not face any academic or intellectual level opposition from the concerned countries. This is so because all the execrable puppets, who govern the Muslim world, were put in place by the representatives of the colonial powers. They do not defend their local interests but execute specific orders in order not to allow

- bold explorers, dynamic professors, and impulsive intellectuals to take the lead,

- proper secular education, unbiased scientific methodology, intellectual self-criticism, free judgment, and thinking out of the box to grow,

- faculties and research centers to be established as per the norms of educationally advanced states, and

- intellectual anti-colonial pioneers and anti-Western scholars to demolish the racist Greco-centric dogma that post-Renaissance European universities have intentionally diffused worldwide.

That is why for a Muslim today in Prof. Ratzinger's lecture the real problem is not his approach or his mistake, but the impermissible bogus academic life and pseudo-educational system of all the Muslim countries. In fact, before fully transforming and duly enhancing their educational and academic systems, Muslim heads of states, prime ministers, ministers and ambassadors have no right to speak. They must first go back to their countries and abolish the darkness of their ridiculous universities; their so-called professors are not professors.

Here you have all the articles that I published at the time in favor of Benedict XVI; the first article was published on the 16th September 2006, only four days after the notorious lecture and only one day after the notorious BBC report, which called the Muslim ambassadors to shout loud:

-----------------------------

Download the obituary in PDF:

[urbanhermit]

‘The Pope & Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI & The Rise of Fascism in Europe’ (2014) by David I Kertzer is a much easier book to read emotionally than his ‘The Popes Against the Jews’. Kertzer says Pope Pius cooperated closely with Mussolini for more than a decade, lending his regime organizational strength & moral legitimacy. It was a particularly curious alliance, he notes, since Mussolini himself was a committed anti-cleric. But both sides benefited from the bargain. When Pius XI - Achille Ratti was a young priest, he quickly got involved as a librarian, head of the Ambrosiana library in Milan when he was chosen by the then-pope to become head of the Vatican Library. Then, Benedict XV, called on him at the end of WW I to be his personal emissary to Poland. He went to Poland, the Bolshevik troops (Communists), were about to try to invade Warsaw. They were repelled, but it made a big impact on Monsignor Ratti. Chosen in 1921 to become archbishop of Milan, & was named a cardinal. Barely becoming cardinal when Benedict XV, died in early 1922. He was the rather surprising compromise choice to become pope in February 1922. The British Envoy to the Vatican in 1922 in his annual report to London wrote: ‘Everything in the Vatican is dominated by the Pope’s fear of Russian Communism.’ What is new in Kertzer, is how fascists & churchmen alike were forced into intellectual contortions as they struggled to justify the new laws. “Racism” was good. “Exaggerated racism” was bad. “Antisemitism” was good, as long as it was Italian. “German antisemitism” was another thing entirely. Pius XI drew back from this casuistry. Kertzer describes Pius XI on his deathbed, praying for just a few more days so that he could deliver a speech with the message that “all the nations, all the races” (Jews included) could be united by faith. He dies. Cardinal Pacelli clears Pius XI's desk, suppresses his notes & persuades the Vatican’s printer, who has the speech’s text ready for distribution, to destroy it so that “not a comma” remains. He also suppresses what is now known as the ‘Secret Encyclical’ [Humani generis unitas] by Pius XI. Eighteen days later Pacelli becomes Pope Pius XII. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cjov8XzLQnE/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[eternal-echoes]

Seventy-five years ago today, Bishop of Münster Clemens August Graf von Galen, condemned from his Cathedral’s pulpit the Nazi euthanasia program: “If you establish and apply the principle that you can ‘kill’ unproductive human beings, then woe betide us all when we become old and frail!. . . . Do you, do I have the right to live only as long as we are productive?. . . .Nobody would be safe anymore. Who could trust his physician? It is inconceivable what depraved conduct, what suspicion could enter family life if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, adopted, carried out.”

Having witnessed the rise of Nazism and its brutal tactics, von Galen went on the offensive shortly after Hitler became chancellor. In his 1934 Lenten pastoral letter, he warned his flock about godless Nazi ideology. Two years later, he noted anti-Christian persecution: “There are in Germany new graves which contain the ashes of those upon whom the German people look as martyrs.”

An outspoken defender of Catholic liberty, he supported petitions demanding the right of children to be educated in Catholic institutions. He also assembled a group of Catholic scientists to refute the anti-Christian and anti-Semitic racial doctrines formulated in Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century.

Pius XI summoned von Galen to Rome in 1937 to assist him and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pius XII) in writing the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, which condemned Nazism’s “myth of race and blood.”

Bishop von Galen, however, is best remembered for battling the regime’s efforts to eliminate the “unfit.” The German medical profession largely embraced National Socialism – for them, Nazi racism was “applied biology” – and provided the ideas and techniques that led to unparalleled slaughter.

...

Von Galen’s episcopal motto was, Nec Laudibus, Nec Timore – “Unconcerned about praise, or fear.” If today’s Church needs a role model, it has a splendid example in Cardinal von Galen’s unwavering public defense of Christian liberties and truths, in the very face of the most murderous regime in modern times.

[pope-francis-quotes]

20th February >> (@ZenitEnglish By Deborah Castellano Lubov) #PopeFrancis #Pope Francis. Historic Vatican Actions to Save the Roman Jewish Community Revealed Through Documents to Pope Francis

‘Historical evidence shows that the Catholic Church, under the Pontificate of Pius XII, saved an estimated 847,000 Jews during WWII’

‘Historical evidence shows that the Catholic Church, under the Pontificate of Pius XII, saved an estimated 847,000 Jews during WWII.’

To show the Pope primary source documents evidencing Vatican intervention to save the Jews of Rome during WWII, a special delegation, organized by Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF), a US based nonsectarian organization, greeted Pope Francis on February 20, 2019, following his Wednesday General Audience in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall. Leading the PTWF delegation was PTWF Director, Mr. John Drexel IV the great-grandnephew of Saint Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia. Mr. Drexel presented the Pope with a signed book and letter from Sr. Donna Breslin, Mother Superior of The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, St. Katharine Drexel’s order.

Joining the delegation was NYS Assemblyman Anthony D’urso who, as a 7-year-old child from Formia, Italy, would look out for any Nazis. His family is credited with saving the Jewish Sinigallia family. Assemblyman Durso presented the Holy Father with his family diary citing the actions of the Vatican to rescue the Jewish families of Formia. Michael Weinstock is representing the Sinigallia family.

The family of Anthony Durso has been nominated to Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem to be bestowed the honor of “Righteous Among Nations,” which is the highest honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jewish people. Joining this esteemed delegation, honoring the efforts of Assemblymen Anthony D’urso, is the Comptroller of the State of New York State, Hon. Thomas DiNapoli.

PTWF Director, Dr. Bennett Solberg, presented the Pope with original documents revealing how Pope Pius XII acted directly to end the arrest of the Roman Jewish community on October 16, 1943. Through his nephew, Carlo Pacelli, Bishop Alois Hudal, Fr. Pancratius Pfeiffer, and Nazi Governor of Rome, General Reiner Stahel enabled the Pope to successfully force the end of the arrests at 2pm the day they began.

Dr. Solberg presented the pope with a copy of a hand-written diary entry in 1943, wherein the community of Augustinian Nuns wrote “today we were asked by the Holy Father to protect the Roman Jews and named those they sheltered.”

Pope Pius XII lifted the ban of Cloister, to enable monasteries to house women, and convents to house men, and requested shelter for the innocent Jews by Italian Catholics, and other ecclesiastical structures throughout Italy.

In addition, the Holy Father received the sworn testimony (in German) of the Commandant of Italy and deputy to Heinrich Himmler, General Karl Wolff. The document reveals the plans Wolff was ordered to initiate by Adolf Hitler to invade the Vatican, kill any Vatican officials they encountered, and then they “rescue” Pope Pius XII by taking him to Lichtenstein, where he would be assassinated.

This plan was revealed to the Pope in September 1943, one month before the arrest of the Roman Jews. Mindful of this imminent planned invasion, Pope Pius XII penned his resignation where he stated that were the Vatican to be invaded, the Nazis would arrest Eugenio Pacelli, not Pope Pius XII. He then ordered the Cardinals to leave Rome, elect a new pope, and form a government in exile in Portugal.

The name of Pope Pius XII was smeared by the Soviet Union’s KGB disinformation subversion, beginning five years after his death in 1963. Gary Krupp, President of PTWF, calls this the greatest character assassination of the 20th century. Historical evidence shows that the Catholic Church, under the Pontificate of Pius XII, saved an estimated 847,000 Jews during WWII. Mr. Krupp, who is Jewish, stated that “the worst character flaw a Jew can have is ingratitude. It is important for those who are alive today and who have been deceived by Soviet disinformation for five decades now be aware who it was who saved them.”

Luigi and Francesca Prudente presented Pope Francis with images of a beautiful blessing, written in 1751, in Latin and Hebrew, and presented to his predecessor, Pope Benedict XIV, from the Roman Jewish community. The Vatican acted to save the Roman Jewish community from the floods when the Tiber River over flowed its banks.

20th FEBRUARY 2019 14:52POPE AND HOLY SEE

[disgruntledexplainer]

operation valkyrie

fun fact: there was an assasination plot and coup against Hitler and the Nazi part called Operation Valkyrie, named as such because Hitler was a german pagan (thuul variant), and valkyrie’s were the “choosers of the slain” in norse and german paganism. the plot was organized by General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von Tresckow, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and facilitated by numerous members of the Catholic clergy. unfortunately the coup was a failure, though the members of the resistance movement have been memorialized in Berlin’s German Resistance Memorial.

Members of the resistance movement were strongly influenced by encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (written by Pope Pius XI and Cardinal Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli who would later become Pope Pius XII), though the primary impetus for the movement seems to have been the general feelings of revulsion among the upper echelons of the german military at the bloody acts of violence and cruelty committed by the SS on the eastern front against eastern european Jews.

[cruger2984]

Uta no Prince-sama and its Saints: HE★VENS

The pride of Raging Entertainement, and they have rivaled ST☆RISH for their absolute ability. Here is HE★VENS! And course their corresponding birthdays and feast days!

September 1 - Eiichi Otori

St. Giles the Hermit: Greek hermit whose legend is centered in Provence and Septimania and founded the abbey in Saint-Gilles-du-Gard whose tomb became a place of pilgrimage. The Legenda Aurea links him with Arles, but finally he withdrew deep into the forest near Nîmes, where in the greatest solitude he spent many years, his sole companion being a deer, or red deer (one of the saint’s attributes), who in some stories sustained him on her milk. He is the patron of beggars, hermits, outcasts, breastfeeding and breast cancer. He is also one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers against mental illness and epilepsy.

May 5 - Kira Sumeragi

St. Aventinus of Tours: Honored by the Church, he was a hermit and a close friend of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Living the life as a hermit in Tours before being ordained a deacon and subsequently accompanied him to the Synod of Tours in 1163. He settled in Touraine after the archbishop’s martyrdom in 1170, where he remained and spend his final years until his death.

January 7 - Nagi Mikado

St. Raymond of Penyafort: Spanish Dominican friar who compiled the Decretals of Gregory IX, a body of medieval legislation that remained part of church law until the Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1917. The following year he revised and reissued his 'Summa de casibus', with an added part on the law of matrimony. Canonized by Pope Clement VIII in 1601, he is the patron saint of canon lawyers and his major shrine can be found in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

October 20 - Eiji Otori

St. Magdalene of Nagasaki: A Japanese Christian born in 1611 as the daughter of a Christian couple martyred about 1620. With the arrival of the Augustinian Order, she served as an Augustinian lay sister or tertiary, interpreter and catechist for Fathers Francis of Jesus Terrero and Vincent of St. Anthony Simoens. After the martyrdom of her counselors, she apprenticed herself to two other Augustinians, Fathers Melchior of Saint Augustine and Martin of Saint Nicholas. When these two friars were also put to death, she turned to Father Giordano Ansaloni de San Esteban, a Dominican. She died in 1634 after thirteen days of torture, suffocated to death and suspended upside down in a pit of offal on a gibbet (tsurushi). She is beatified in Manila, Philippines in 1981 and canonized as a saint six years later by Pope St. John Paul II.

December 12 - Van Kiryuin

Our Lady of Guadalupe (Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe): A Marian title that is associated with a venerated image (in the form of a tilma by St. Juan Diego) enshrined within the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. On October 1895, Pope Leo XIII granted the image a Canonical Coronation. Since then the Virgin of Guadalupe has been proclaimed 'Queen of Mexico', 'Patroness of the Americas', 'Empress of Latin America', and 'Protectress of Unborn Children'. On July 16th 1935, she was also proclaimed 'Heavenly Patroness of the Philippines' by Pope Pius XI both witnessed and signed by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a designation he later rescinded in 1942 upon becoming Pius XII.

March 30 - Yamato Hyuga

St. John Climacus (John of the Ladder): A monk from 6th-7th century at the monastery located on Mount Sinai. He is honored and revered as a saint by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches.

November 4 - Shion Amakusa

St. Charles Borromeo: Italian archbishop of Milan and later cardinal. Together with Ignatius of Loyola and Philip Neri, he was a leading figure of the Counter-Reformation combat against the Protestant Reformation. His uncle is Giovanni Angelo Medici, who is elected as Pope Pius IV. Canonized by Pope Paul V in 1610, he is the patron saint of bishops, cardinals, seminarians, and spiritual leaders.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.2

537 – Siege of Rome: The Ostrogoth army under king Vitiges begins the siege of the capital. Belisarius conducts a delaying action outside the Flaminian Gate; he and a detachment of his bucellarii are almost cut off. 986 – Louis V becomes the last Carolingian king of West Francia after the death of his father, Lothaire. 1331 – Fall of Nicaea to the Ottoman Turks after a siege. 1444 – Skanderbeg organizes a group of Albanian nobles to form the League of Lezhë. 1458 – George of Poděbrady is chosen as the king of Bohemia. 1476 – Burgundian Wars: The Old Swiss Confederacy hands Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, a major defeat in the Battle of Grandson in Canton of Neuchâtel. 1484 – The College of Arms is formally incorporated by Royal Charter signed by King Richard III of England. 1498 – Vasco da Gama's fleet visits the Island of Mozambique. 1657 – The Great Fire of Meireki begins in Edo (now Tokyo), Japan, causing more than 100,000 deaths before it exhausts itself three days later. 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Patriot militia units attempt to prevent capture of supply ships in and around the Savannah River by a small fleet of the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Rice Boats. 1791 – Claude Chappe demonstrates the first semaphore line near Paris. 1797 – The Bank of England issues the first one-pound and two-pound banknotes. 1807 – The U.S. Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, disallowing the importation of new slaves into the country. 1811 – Argentine War of Independence: A royalist fleet defeats a small flotilla of revolutionary ships in the Battle of San Nicolás on the River Plate. 1815 – Signing of the Kandyan Convention treaty by British invaders and the leaders of the Kingdom of Kandy. 1836 – Texas Revolution: The Declaration of independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico is adopted. 1855 – Alexander II becomes Tsar of Russia. 1859 – The two-day Great Slave Auction, the largest such auction in United States history, begins. 1865 – East Cape War: The Völkner Incident in New Zealand. 1867 – The U.S. Congress passes the first Reconstruction Act. 1877 – Just two days before inauguration, the U.S. Congress declares Rutherford B. Hayes the winner of the 1876 U.S. presidential election even though Samuel J. Tilden had won the popular vote. 1882 – Queen Victoria narrowly escapes an assassination attempt by Roderick Maclean in Windsor. 1901 – United States Steel Corporation is founded as a result of a merger between Carnegie Steel Company and Federal Steel Company which became the first corporation in the world with a market capital over $1 billion. 1901 – The U.S. Congress passes the Platt Amendment limiting the autonomy of Cuba, as a condition of the withdrawal of American troops. 1903 – In New York City the Martha Washington Hotel opens, becoming the first hotel exclusively for women. 1917 – The enactment of the Jones–Shafroth Act grants Puerto Ricans United States citizenship. 1919 – The first Communist International meets in Moscow. 1932 – Finnish president P. E. Svinhufvud gives a radio speech, which four days later finally ends the Mäntsälä Rebellion and the far-right Lapua Movement that started it. 1937 – The Steel Workers Organizing Committee signs a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel, leading to unionization of the United States steel industry. 1939 – Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII. 1941 – World War II: First German military units enter Bulgaria after it joins the Axis Pact. 1943 – World War II: During the Battle of the Bismarck Sea Allied aircraft defeated a Japanese attempt to ship troops to New Guinea. 1949 – Captain James Gallagher lands his B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II in Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first non-stop around-the-world airplane flight in 94 hours and one minute. 1955 – Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia, abdicates the throne in favor of his father, Norodom Suramarit. 1962 – In Burma, the army led by General Ne Win seizes power in a coup d'état. 1962 – Wilt Chamberlain sets the single-game scoring record in the National Basketball Association by scoring 100 points. 1965 – The US and Republic of Vietnam Air Force begin Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. 1968 – Baggeridge Colliery closes marking the end of over 300 years of coal mining in the Black Country. 1969 – In Toulouse, France, the first test flight of the Anglo-French Concorde is conducted. 1970 – Rhodesia declares itself a republic, breaking its last links with the British crown. 1972 – The Pioneer 10 space probe is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with a mission to explore the outer planets. 1977 – Libya becomes the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya as the General People's Congress adopted the "Declaration on the Establishment of the Authority of the People". 1978 – Czech Vladimír Remek becomes the first non-Russian or non-American to go into space, when he is launched aboard Soyuz 28. 1978 – The late iconic actor Charlie Chaplin's coffin is stolen from his grave in Switzerland. 1983 – Compact discs and players are released for the first time in the United States and other markets. They had previously been available only in Japan. 1989 – Twelve European Community nations agree to ban the production of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the century. 1990 – Nelson Mandela is elected deputy president of the African National Congress. 1991 – Establishment of Kuwait Democratic Forum, center-left political organization in Kuwait. 1991 – Battle at Rumaila oil field brings an end to the 1991 Gulf War. 1992 – Start of the war in Transnistria. 1992 – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, San Marino, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, all of which (except San Marino) were former Soviet republics, join the United Nations. 1995 – Researchers at Fermilab announce the discovery of the top quark. 1998 – Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice. 2002 – U.S. invasion of Afghanistan: Operation Anaconda begins, (ending on March 19 after killing 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, with 11 Western troop fatalities). 2004 – War in Iraq: Al-Qaeda carries out the Ashoura Massacre in Iraq, killing 170 and wounding over 500. 2012 – A tornado outbreak occurs over a large section of the Southern United States and into the Ohio Valley region, resulting in 40 tornado-related fatalities. 2017 – The elements Moscovium, Tennessine, and Oganesson are officially added to the periodic table at a conference in Moscow, Russia.

[wausaupilot]

Pacelli outlasts Newman Catholic boys basketball

The Cardinals head to Wisconsin Rapids Assumption for their next game on Thursday.

Wausau Pilot & Review STEVENS POINT – Camden Schurk scored 20 points to lead Stevens Point Pacelli to a 68-52 win over Newman Catholic in a nonconference boys basketball game Tuesday at Pacelli High School. Quincy Pfender had 24 points for Newman Catholic, which drops to 4-18 this season. Andrew VanOrder added 11 points for Pacelli (15-6). Newman Catholic returns to Marawood Conference South…

[piusppxii]

Pio XII nemico giurato di Hitler. Le prove ci sono

Pio XII nemico giurato di Hitler. Le prove ci sono

Pier Luigi Guiducci, docente di storia della Chiesa, per ricostruire i rapporti da Pio XII ed il Terzo Reich ripercorre gli anni precedenti lo scoppio della seconda guerra mondiale. Già allora l’allora cardinal Pacelli era considerato un nemico della Germania nazista. Il saggio ripropone anche una serie di vignette satiriche che indicano l’ampiezza della campagna scatenata da Goebbels contro il…

[ehyeh-joshua]

@dracorinismoi:

The reply got way too long to do as a reply...

Orginal statement:

“Well, if you look at Christians in Nazi Germany and the Roman Catholic Church history you should see that at some points in history, our ancestors had been on the same level as Islam. Catholics, Arians and Calvinists all had their share of bloody history. Just because it’s not happening now doesn’t mean we can just deny it happened. Yes, Islam has always been evil but that’s NOT my point.”

Ok, let’s start with Nazi Germany. This is going to get long, I can write volumes on the Third Reich. I will try to be concise.

First of all - the definition of Jew under Nazi law was anyone who had three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew. Under that definition, the overwhelming majority of the other 5+ million victims of the Holocaust were Christian, and most of them being Catholic.

Which leads to the second point; Protestant Christianity had a schism with faithful Christians denouncing the “German Christians”, while Catholic Bishops were banning Catholics from joining the Nazi party in the lead-up to the 1933 elections, Catholic leadership were warning about them from the 20s onwards, Catholics were near banned from holding civil service offices and thousands of Catholics were put into concentration camps in 1933, Catholic schools were forced to take down iconography and put up pictures of Hitler,  Hitler Youth events were timetabled to coincide with church services and therefore force children to stop attending church, and only signed the 1933 concordat because of Bishop’s fears for the safety of the church in Germany (Cardinal Pacelli - future Pius XII - stated that he signed the concordat with a pistol to his head) Hitler forced Bishops to swear oaths of fealty, and stated publicly in 1942 that the concordat had never meant anything and that he intended to abolish it after the war, and did absolutely nothing about the 70 violations of the concordat that Pacelli brought up. At Dachau a dedicated barracks for the internment of Catholic Priests was set up, Cardinal Faulhaber had an assassination attempt made on his life, Goebbels banned the Church from using paper in 1941, in 1936 Hitler authorised children being removed from Church schools to be forced into sun-worship rituals, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen declared in 1937 that Hitler was conducting a war against the Church, at the outbreak of war in Poland church meetings were banned temporarily, over three hundred monasteries, convents and church buildings were ransacked throughout Nazi government, Rosenberg - a neo-pagan, noted for his hatred of Christianity, Hitler placed as leader of culture and education envisioned the obliteration of Christianity, with the Bible and crucifixes being banned, all churches in Germany to be controlled directly by the Reich, and the cross to be replaced by the swastika.

Contrast this with the Nazi position on Islam, which is best archtyped by examining the SS (NOTE: SS, not Wermacht) formations set up specifically to be Islamic, after Himmler, who was fascinated by Islam and used some Islamic theories in SS methodology modified Nazi racial theory to include the totally non-Ayran Turkish background Muslims of former Ottoman Empire territories in the Balkans.

1st, 13 Waffen-Gebirgs-Division der SS 'Handschar' - a division-strength unit composed purely of Croatian Muslims, and 2nd, the Skanderbeg 21st Waffen SS division - another division composed of Albanian Muslims. Both of these were instrumental in prosecuting the Holocaust in the Balkans, responsible for the deaths of 90% of Yugoslavian Jews.

Next, Hitler personally invited the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to meet him several times, and he was recognised as Fuhrer of the Islamic world, sharing in common the conviction that Jews were the most dangerous threat, and spent much time on Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts to the Arab world supporting the Nazis (the price being the liquidation of Jews in Israel) and when Adolf Eichman tried to negotiate the transfer of 5000 Jewish children with the British government in exchange for prisoners of war, the Mufti personally intervened requesting the SS kill them, and they were murdered in Poland, and he personally admonished the camp guards at Auschwitz to work more efficiently, proclaiming he wanted all the Jews killed.

I could go on. Christians were persecuted by the Nazis from 1933 onwards, with tens of thousands imprisoned in the pre-war era, churches destroyed and the Catholics blackmailed into signing a piece of paper that, just like most treaties Hitler signed, wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. By contrast, Islam had the support of the Nazis as fellow haters of Jews (and Christianity by extension) and had Nazi ideologies redefined, even up to allowing the racially pure Ayran SS to be extended to include Muslims.

This pattern holds - religious conflicts? Christian internal conflicts are small, and mostly put to agree-to-disagree and strongly worded letters, with only rare bloodshed. (mostly used by the state with the Church being caught and used as a tool) By contrast, Islam is inherently divisive, and such divisions turn almost immediately to violence, and have done so since Mohammed. On average, at least one Muslim will kill at least one Muslim every single day because of religious divisions. Most of the time the casualty rate is far higher, given the propensity to commit suicide attacks with explosives.

Slavery? Slavery is something practiced almost universally - the only groups to totally reject it have been disproportionately white, male and Christian. By contrast, the Quran supports slavery - men are told they may capture slaves, and have sex with them if women, more times than they are told to pray five times a day. (a belief found in the Hadiths) To this day, Islam uses slaves, and treats them brutally often working slaves to death. And, if you have male and female slaves, you may force them to copulate to suit goals as you see fit. By contrast, the Torah’s commands on slaves is most easily summarised as treat them as your own family; I estimate that at least a fifth of people in the Modern West would be better off as slaves to a Torah observant person than they are now.

Sex? no group within mainstream Christianity has ever endorsed polygamy, while the few non-Christian heretics who did support it quietly hide it now; on the basis of numerous references from throughout the Scriptures and biology, I maintain that the chief purposes of sex are female pleasure, uniting the couple and procreation, pretty much in that order. (I’ll grant that is a somewhat controversial view) Judaism has maintained for thousands of years that a wife is allowed to divorce her husband for not pleasuring her enough sexually, and that the right to sex belongs to the woman, not the man. By contrast, Mohammed maintained that Allah said he could have as many wives, and fuck them however he wished, while normal Muslims are limited to 4 wives, with domestic abuse commanded as a response to disobedience. Oh, and you can rape a woman in front of her husband if you beat him in battle.

It annoys me exceedingly greatly that people maintain the lie that Christianity is as bad as Islam. The greatest lament about Christianity is not enough people are like Jesus, while the thing I am most grateful for about Islam is that most Muslims are not as evil as Mohammed.

And that’s all I can be bothered to do, since my analysis indicates the probability of this being futile nears 1.