Its been a love-hate relationship for a long time, with the latter doing some serious destructive damage. Perhaps if we go back to Maimonides, he can be looked at as an igniter of sparks, and sparks lead to fires. Maimonides believed that Christianity had a messianic role to play, serving to clear the way for the King Messiah; but he also said, from his twelfth century perch, that it was heretical and suffered from idolatry and propounded he opposite of his thesis which involved the de-sanctifying of religious objects, and assumed instrinsically superior qualities of people and other objective measures. A de-romanticizing and de-mystification that Judaism clung to and the Church used. But, he did say it was permissible to teach the Commandments, the Torah to Christians but not possible to Muslims, since the former accepted the divine origins of the Torah. Of some solace to Christians, jews also burnt Maimonides books….
One thing Maimonides noticed, was that in the context of time and space, these off-shoot religions of Judaism seemed to gravitate towards the Jewish search for truth. In space there is and was a dispute over Jerusalem, as originator of the material used to create Adam, and in the meaning of time, that both Islam and Christianity, flanked the Jewish Sabbath as if to brush against its sanctity, even to draw it out. Whether Maimonides thought this draining process of Judaism was in effect a case of vampiring the religion and creating its own blood libel seems possible….
Agriculture in Israel. 1920′s. —Read More:http://livefromjerusalem.tumblr.com/page/24
With regard to Kabbalah, the main Jewish line seems to be that Jesus knew of it but used forbidden methods, and his motives to this day are still not fully comprehended, though he was a son of Jews and has completed all the stages of repentance in the other world. Its hard to konw what Maimonides would have thought of the fairly recent construction, somewhat artificial of “judeo-christian ethics” as a current in contemporary thought. A bit like “religious-zionism” it seems an anomaly, but maybe the definitions are changing and its part of the messianic era, the end of days. In the past, popularizers of the ideas of Torah and Kabbalah within Christianity have not had sterling results as spilled jewish blood and those of “heretics” have been more commonplace than not. The Maimonides view that the heresies of Christianity worked its way down the food chain directly to Islam remains a biting reproach….
The Maimonidean position on Judaism as a rational faith whose central goal is to facilitate the perfection of the human intellect seems significantly at odds with most subsequent traditional understandings of the meaning and purpose of the Torah which have been intensively informed by their more romantic and mystical interpreters, an overindulgence by the Vatican and possibly the source of the Reformation. Or, Maimonides recognized their existence, but saw they should remain unrevealed and may be part of a more complex series of phenomena that could not be articulated….
(see link at end)…More simply, the gassing of Jews was not on the the Vatican’s list of priorities.
During the war the Pope always spoke, and wrote, in generic phrases, in allusions, with judgments marked by indirectness, naming no names and no country. Not once did Pope Pius mention the Jews publicly during the war or in his dealings with Hitler. It is true that in late 1943 and early 1944, he undertook private initiatives to aid Jews, but by that time 4.5 million Jews had been murdered and Germany was clearly on the road to defeat….
—Mr. Goldhagen declined to comment on the reactions. He told the Forward that the article was the foundation for his upcoming book, “A Moral Reckoning, the Catholic Church During the Holocaust and Today,” to be published in the fall.
His article comes at a time of renewed tensions between Jews and Catholics over the proposed beatification of Pius XII. For years, Jewish groups have protested the Vatican’s intention to beatify a pope who, they claim, maintained a guilty silence during the Holocaust. Last summer, the work of a joint historical commission formed to study the wartime archives of the Vatican stalled over the refusal of Vatican officials to give historians full access to the archives, prompting acrimonious exchanges between Jewish and Catholic officials.
However, Seymour Reich, chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, the official Jewish liaison with the Vatican, praised the Goldhagen article….Read More:http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Goldhagen/Goldhagen5.html image:http://www.danse-macabre.net/22-danse-macabre.htm
We also know that hundreds of Jews found refuge in Rome’s convents and the in Vatican itself. We are also familiar with some individual acts of heroism of very few Catholics who saved Jews.
The apologists, including some Jewish historians, exonerate Pius X
y saying that he did not understand the meaning of the Holocaust. They are wrong. The Pope knew everything about the Holocaust.
As brave historian Daniel Goldhagen wrote, “It is not that Pius XII did not understand but that he understood only too well”. Pius was given daily briefings of Nazi atrocities by the British envoy to the Vatican.
The pontiff resisted calls from Roosevelt’s representative to the Holy See, the president of the Polish government in exile, the bishop of Berlin, and the chief rabbi of Palestine to speak out specifically and forcefully on behalf of the Jews.
The Pope could have done much to stop the Zyklon B gas. He did little or nothing….
—The latest scandal to rock the Catholic Church, causing a storm in Italy and elsewhere, follows a familiar pattern: first the crime, then the cover-up. It concerns whether the Church kidnapped Jewish children after the Holocaust and has at its center, yet again, Pius XII, the pope that the Church appears determined to make into a saint despite his criminal role during the Holocaust and, we now learn, quite probably afterward. A Church document of October 23, 1946, recently disclosed in Corriere della Sera, contains papal orders for the French Church forbidding the return of entire classes of Jewish children entrusted to Church institutions during the Holocaust.
The authorship of the directive remains in question. It may have been written at the behest of Bishop Angelo Roncalli, Pope Pius XII’s representative in France (and later Pope John XXIII) to record instructions he had received from Rome. But the document emerged from the French Catholic Church’s archives, and its authenticity, after some hedging, has been acknowledged by Church officials. It forbids all Jewish children (whose parents had been slaughtered) from being returned to Jewish institutions–which would obviously be in the best position to reunite them with relatives.
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/01/The-Churchs-Kidnapping-Policy.aspx#ixzz20ervuMyM
image:http://iteadthomam.blogspot.ca/2011_10_01_archive.html
The gas was purchased by Obersturmfuehrer Kurt Gerstein, the “chief disinfection officer” in the hygiene department of the Waffen SS. Gerstein’s connection with Zyklon B is fascinating and enigmatic. Born in 1904, he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 but was expelled for his activities on behalf of the dissident Professing Church. As an engineer, Gerstein became an expert in the Zyklon B. He was sent to the Treblinka and Belzec camps in order to substitute the Zyklon B for the gasoline exhaust fumes in use until then.
On his return to Berlin, Gerstein tried to stop the murders. He told the Vatican what he had seen, but encountered only disbelief and indifference (in 1963, the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth cast Gerstein as one of the central figures in his play “The Deputy” which attacked Pope Pius XII for his failure to condemn Hitler’s persecution of the Jews)
How many Roman Catholic SS men and Nazi functionaries would have had, at the very least, second thoughts about their work had the Pope, for example, ordered Vatican Radio to broadcast round-the-clock denunciation of the Shoah, condemning it ex cathedra, and excommunicating the perpetrators? And how many Jews hearing such broadcasts from the voice of the Vatican would have learned that “resettlement” was a euphemism for death by gas, like insects? Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11890#.UAIzBPVb76Ma
—Goldhagen’s efforts to trivialize and diminish Pope Pius XII’s famous 1942 Christmas statement and its clear denunciation of Nazi ideology are representative of the one-sided, biased approach that permeates his work. In the 1942 statement, Pius said that the world was “plunged into the gloom of tragic error” and that “the Church would be untrue to herself, she would have ceased to be a mother, if she were deaf to the cries of suffering children which reach her ears from every class of the human family.” He spoke of the need for mankind to make “a solemn vow never to rest until valiant souls of every people and every nation of the earth arise in their legions, resolved to bring society and to devote themselves to the services of the human person and of a divinely ennobled human society.” He said that mankind owed this vow to all victims of the war, including “the hundreds of thousands who, through no fault of their own, and solely because of their nation or race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction” —Read More:http://catholiceducation.org/articles/facts/fm0015.html image:http://rational-buddhism.blogspot.ca/2012/01/metameme.html
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