"Vicars of Christ" tortured and killed
innocent people by the thousands,
just because they were Jews, ( like Jesus
and most of the "Christians" of his day,)
and they did so in the name of Jesus of Nazareth !
When Jesus promised that the "gates of hell will not prevail against his church", surely he didn't have this institution in mind, with its "Vicars of Christ" who themselves directed and applauded the torture and killing of thousands of Jews , and created an atmosphere that led in recent years with an effort to exterminate the whole of the Jewish nation.
Catholic anti-semitism has a very long history. In the fourth-century, St. John Chrysostom, the "Golden-Mouthed" Doctor of the Church, said over and over, "I hate the Jews' . . . No pardon is possible for the odious assassinators of the Lord. "God hates the Jews and always did."
"In the year 1096 half of the Jews of Worms (in Germany) were slaughtered as a crusade passed through the town. The rest fled to the bishop's residence for protection. The Bishop agreed to save them, (but only) on condition that they ask to be baptized. The Jews retired to consider their decision. When the doors of the audience chamber were opened, all 800 Jews inside were dead. Some were decapitated; fathers had killed their babies before turning their knives on their wives and themselves: a groom had slain his bride. The first century tragedy of Masada was repeated everywhere in Germany and, later, throughout France. When the Crusade took the great prize, Jerusalem, one of their first acts was to set the synagogue on fire with all the Jews inside." (from pages 157-8)
"Pope Paul IV, who hated Jews, had worked on the document for hours at a time. . . Soon it was finished. On 17 July 1555, a mere two months after his election, he published Cum nimis absurdum, a Bull which never appears in pious anthologies of papal documents. For this was to prove a landmark in the history of anti-Semitism. . .
( It was said of him: ) 'His arm is dyed in blood to the elbow.' It is no surprise that during Paul's brief pontificate the population of Rome was almost halved. Jews, who had nowhere to run to, took the brunt of his bigotry.
He knew by heart all the church's edicts against Judaism. The onslaught on the Jews had begun very early.
In the Roman Empire, Jews had overcome initial hostility to win for themselves full citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in the year 212. A century later, when Constantine became a Christian, persecution of Jews began.
They were excluded from all civil and administrative posts, forbidden to employ Christians, or give to and receive from them medical aid. Intermarriage between Christians and Jews was classed as adultery and made a capital offence. In a lawsuit between Christians and Jews, only Christian witnesses were acceptable to the court. Fathers of the church, such as Ambrose in the West and Chrysostom in the East, provided a theological basis for despising Jews which has the power to shock even today.". . . (p.191)
"Innocent III and the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 took up the cause of anti-Semitism with a will. And Paul IV, who hated every form of dissent, was determined to carry on, with impeccable cruelty, the work of the great Innocent. Cum nimis absurdum stressed that the Christ-killers, the Jews, were by nature slaves and should be treated as such. For the first time in the Papal States, they were to be confined to a particular area called, after the Venetian Foundry, a 'ghetto'. Each ghetto was to have but one entrance. Jews were obliged to sell all their property to Christians at knockdown prices; at best they realized 20 per cent of value, at worst a house went for a donkey, a vineyard for a suit of clothes. Forbidden to engage in commercial activity or deal in corn, they could otherwise sell food and secondhand clothes (strazzaria); thus was their status reduced to that of rag- pickers. They were allowed one synagogue in each city. Seven out of eight in Rome were destroyed, and in the Campagna eighteen out of nineteen. They were already without books; when he was a cardinal, Paul IV had burned them all, including the Talmud. They were obliged to wear, as a distinguishing mark, a yellow hat in public. They were to use only Italian and Latin in speech, in their calendars and accounts. They were never to employ Christians in any capacity, even to light their Sabbath fires in winter." . . .
" A House for Catechumens, that is, for convert Jews, was to be built and paid for by Jews. Censors of Jewish books had to be paid for by Jews, as was the Gentile gate-keeper whose job it was to lock them in at night." . . . (p.192)
"Roman Jews suffered specially in that their ghetto was a stretch along the right bank of the Tiber, malarial and frequently as waterlogged as Venice. Within a circuit of five hundred yards were crammed four to five thousand people. According to one Jewish writer, they were 'clothed in rags, living on rags, thriving on rags'. . .
The impact of Paul's Bull was immediate. Within days, there was a ghetto in Venice, another in Bologna called the Inferno. Paul's aim was to convert Jews en masse. Many did cross over to Christianity; most did not. Atrocities resulted everywhere. . .
Paul died in 1559, but his Bull had set a pattern that was to last for three centuries. . . Everywhere, synagogues were closed for months on end on the pretext that a single unauthorized book had been found there". . . (p.193)
"One Christian superstition of the time was that whoever was responsible for baptizing an infidel gained free passage to Paradise. Ruffians roamed the city, pouncing on Jewish children and christening them with rainwater. In the eighteenth century, Benedict XIV decided that a child baptized against his or her parents' wishes and contrary to the procedures of canon law was none the less a Christian and had to live as one. If he did not, he was labelled a heretic, with the dire penalties that entailed. The ghettos were loud in mourning when such crimes occurred. They grieved, too, when a Jew, converted to Christianity, did as the priest told him and snatched his children from the ghetto. Once they were baptized, the mother was never allowed to see them again. . .
In the worst days of papal oppression in Rome, Jews lived in a space confined by high walls. Naturally, they had to build upwards. As a result, houses collapsed, sometimes during wedding celebrations. Fires spread rapidly. . .
The French Revolution ushered in the age of enlightenment. The light did not reach the Vatican. A succession of popes reinforced the ancient prejudices against Jews, treating them as lepers unworthy of the protection of the law. Pius VII was followed by Leo II, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX - all good pupils of Paul IV."
. . . (p.194)
" If a Christian doctor was called to treat a patient in the ghetto, he had first to try to convert him to Christ. If he failed, he was to leave as once. Three or four Jewish children were taken every Monday for baptism and turned into Christians. Whoever objected, even the parents, was hauled before the Inquisition. If two Christians testified that a Jew by word or deed had insulted a Catholic priest or the true religion, he was put to death.
Leo II (1823-9) decided Christians were getting lax. He again locked Jews inside ghettos. He also forbade vaccination against smallpox during an epidemic because it was 'against the natural law'. . .
In September 1870, Italian troops took Rome. They were greeted by scenes of jubilation only matched when the Allies recaptured the city after the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. Eleven days after Rome fell, on 2 October 1870, the Jews, by a royal decree, were given the freedom which the papacy had denied them for over fifteen hundred years. The last ghetto in Europe was dismantled. When that happened, Jews must have felt that their trials were over at last. How could they know that their darkest hour was still to come?" (p. 195) The role of the Catholic Church and in the Jewish Holocaust,of Pope Pius XII in particular, is so serious a matter that it has to be addressed in a page of its own: www.CatholicArrogance.Org/RCscandal
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