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Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Saturday, February 17, 2018
Catholic Inquisition and The Torture Tools by Former Priest Richard Bennett
Catholic Inquisition and The Torture Tools by Former Priest Richard Bennett
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals
A Vatican City priest baptized Nazi who were hiding in seminaries and then they were able to secure International Red Cross passports to allow them to flee to Argentina.
http://www.pbs.org/programs/elusive-j...
Most people have some knowledge of the holocaust. The 6 years of torture and atrocities that the Jews suffered under Hitler and the Nazis during the Second World War. While in no way downplaying the terrible events of the holocaust, such a massacre does not compare to the severity to the torture and murder that took place under Papal authority during the 605 years of the Inquisition. From the beginning of the Papacy, until the present time, it is estimated by credible historians that more than 50,000,000, men and women have been slaughtered for the crime of heresy charged against them by Papal Rome. This Video contains actual photographs of some of the instruments of torture that were used. Since we consider this Video on the Inquisition one of the more important message that we have given, please make it known to others, and if possible post the link on your own website.
Sunday, July 02, 2017
Pope Francis Appoints Spanish Jesuit Ladaria to Succeed Cardinal Müller
Pope Francis Appoints Spanish Jesuit Ladaria to Succeed Cardinal Müller:
Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer, currently Secretary to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, takes over as prefect of the important dicastery, replacing Cardinal Gerhard Müller whose five-year mandate was unusually not renewed.
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
The Secret Catholic Sex Cult
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast
Lecherous Nuns And Priests, Murder Plots and Coverups: Meet The Mother Superior of Catholic Scandals
In the 19th century, a scandal involving sex and murder at a Rome convent ensnared practically every major player in the Catholic Church hierarchy.
Nuns using visions of God to persuade novices to have sex, threesomes with priests, the poisoning of a fat German princess, a prominent theologian shacking up with a vicaress, young nuns murdered, fetuses removed from an abbess, and cardinals, the Jesuit superior general, and the pope all enthralled by a beautiful and charismatic fraudulent saint—it’s enough to put The Decameron to shame.
The hard-to-believe story that contains all of these juicy nuggets—the 1858 scandal at the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome—is the subject of Hubert Wolf’s rigorous and stunning new book, The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal. Translated by Ruth Martin, it is a hybrid of high and low perfect for the modern reader—racy and yet simultaneously erudite.
The level of intrigue and the variety of scandal are at some points so bewildering that it’s hard to keep things straight. So, perhaps it’s best to start with the woman who triggered the whole mess—the twice-widowed, famously corpulent Princess Katharina von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
Despite health issues, Katharina was determined to join a convent. After one failed attempt, her adviser, Cardinal Reisach, suggested she join the convent at Sant’Ambrogio.
However, after a mere 15 months, in 1859 Katharina would be rescued from the convent by her cousin, the Archbishop Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, and rushed to recuperate at his estate, Villa d’Este.
What pushed the princess to flee? According to her denunciation to the Holy Tribunal of the Sanctum Officium (the Roman Inquisition), she had discovered the convent to be a cult venerating a false saint, a hotbed of sexual intrigue, and broken confessional seals. And she hysterically claimed there had been an attempt to poison her.
Maria Luisa was a monster who used her supposed visions to entice novices into her bed, embezzle convent funds, and poison opponents.
The book then follows the determined and detailed investigation by judge Vincenzo Leone Sallua, who worked from 1859 to 1860 to determine what exactly went on at the convent so that Pope Pius IX could determine whether a trial should be opened. The story he uncovered was far more dramatic than the princess could have imagined, and implicated some of the most powerful cardinals of the day, the Jesuit general, and multiple popes. It was the kind of scandal opponents of the church joked about—libidinous nuns and priests run amok behind the closed doors of the convent.
via Amazon
This was not the first scandal for the convent. Its founder, Maria Agnese Firrao, had once been the toast of the Catholic world for her visions and healing powers. The former pope, Leo XII, considered her a close spiritual adviser, as did numerous cardinals and the king of Sardinia. She was later found out to have fraudulently claimed to have performed miracles, had an affair with her confessor, had two abortions by the church when she got pregnant by clerical officials, engaged in a threesome with her confessor and another nun, and encouraged her novices to venerate her as a living saint. The Vatican publicly denounced her for her actions, and stripped her of her abbess title. However, that same Leo XII issued a brief in 1829 largely exonerating Firrao from the 1816 Inquisition verdict.
One of the sins the princess charged the convent with was that the nuns were venerating Firrao, a false saint. She was right, Sallua discovered to his horror, but there was also a rival for the nuns’ adoration.
Maria Luisa, at just 27 years of age, was the convent’s alluring novice mistress and vicaress. It turns out that Maria Luisa, who Katharina accused of the poisoning, was seen as an upstart fraud by the founder Firrao. She claimed to have visions from Mary and Jesus, and the nuns at the convent—including the abbess—believed she had miraculous powers. However, as Sallua discovered, she was a monster who used her supposed visions to entice novices into her bed, embezzle convent funds, and poison opponents.
One nun, who was luckily exiled and not killed by Maria Luisa, told Sallua that Maria Luisa claimed the Lord told her in a vision she needed to treat a sickness in the nun’s private parts. She claimed that another vision had told her that a liquid that came from the Lord “flowed over my whole body, collecting in the lower part of my body, as in a little hollow where it then remained,” and that they should share in this liquid.
Another nun confessed that Maria Luisa was “keen” on something she called “giving,” which involved asking “me to lie in a certain position, with my legs raised, while she “entwined” herself with me … she then made movements and a sound such as I cannot express in words, and she instructed me to position myself so that I could receive her bodily fluids into me.” Or, continued the nun, “she wanted me positioned above her, so that we were body to body and mouth to mouth.” Maria Luisa told this nun that her bodily fluid was a gift from God to heal the nun’s sickness. She also created an initiation rite in which novices had to sleep with Maria Luisa the night before they were made nuns, made to “lay face-to-face and breast-to-breast.”
However, in a twist of events that will be unsurprising to modern audiences, when Maria Luisa confessed to these actions, she also disclosed that she had once been a victim, and that Firrao herself had once done the whole this-liquid-in-my-privates-is-from-God routine to her when she was a novice.
Maria Luisa also admitted to trying to poison the princess, who had figured out that Maria Luisa was less than saintly. She gave the princess gruel with ground glass, tartar emetic, and opium in an attempt to kill her. While Katharina would suffer (she passed what Wolf believes was stomach lining in her excrement), the portly princess survived. So Maria Luisa went about killing off her accomplices. One of them survived. Three others—one 21, one 22, and an elder nun—were not so lucky.
Wolf’s book, and the story of Sant’Ambrogio, are not merely concerned with tales of lurid sexual escapades. Sant’Ambrogio was also at the center of a significant theological war within the Catholic Church, as influential players in that war were ensnared in its drama. The scandal and its aftermath also highlighted a degree of unfathomable leniency when it comes to grave crimes committed by members of the church—again, something all too familiar to modern readers.
As Sallua finished his investigation into the nuns, he turned to the two Jesuit confessors, Giuseppe Leziroli and Giuseppe Peters, who Katharina accused of being in league with Maria Luisa and of breaking the confessional seal.
The investigation into Leziroli revealed that he had continued to venerate Firrao in spite of the Inquisition’s decision that she was a fraud. However, the investigation into Peters proved far more rewarding, and problematic.
Maria Luisa had admitted to a full-blown sexual affair with Peters, as well as confirming his role in supporting her manipulation of the rest of the convent via the confessional. But Peters was in fact not his only name—he was actually Joseph Kleutgen, one of Rome’s more prominent theologians, whose writings influenced everyone from the Jesuit Superior General to conservative cardinals to the pope himself.
Kleutgen hailed from the wing of the Church most determined to reinforce papal authority through theological dogma in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (the notion of papal infallibility, for instance, originated in this time period). Kleutgen and his allies, which included the aforementioned Cardinal Reisach, were opposed within the Curia by none other than Katharina’s cousin, the Archbishop Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst. Kleutgen had also used Maria Luisa’s visions, which were believed by the Jesuit Superior General, to expose the homosexual relationship of two theological rivals within the order.
Now Kleutgen and his work were being undercut by his own deeds. In one honest to goodness laugh-out-loud section of the book, Kleutgen defends his sexual affair with Maria Luisa with the theological argument that the sex he had with her was without lust and so therefore was not a sin.
Maria Luisa, quite simply, was guilty of embezzlement, sexual abuse, and murder. This was explicitly aided and abetted by her Jesuit confessor Peters (the theologian Kleutgen). But their guilt also undermined the authority of the papacy just as it was trying to consolidate it. When it came time for their sentencing, they were each to be “imprisoned” in a monastery or convent. While Maria Luisa might have faced the death penalty and Kleutgen a heavy sentence in most secular societies, Pope Pius IX actually reduced their already lenient sentences. After much debate, Kleutgen was “imprisoned” for three years, which Pius reduced to two—which Kleutgen served at a house of retreat on Lake Nemi. One of the cardinals involved had actually wanted no punishment for him. Maria Luisa was sentenced to 20 years, and Pius reduced it to 18. This came after multiple attempts by Pius to suppress or avert a full-blown investigation into the convent.
Wolf largely avoids a direct comparison between the 19th century scandal at the convent, the leniency of punishments, and subsequent attempts to keep it under wraps and the 20th century priest abuse scandals. However, it’s hard to read the book without that hovering in the mind. Maintenance of the Church’s image and preservation of those in power took precedence over justice for murdered nuns and sexually abused novices. The decision by the Jesuit order, even its own historians, to downplay or erase the affair from works about Kleutgen or this time period is especially disheartening. “This damaging picture—the father of new scholasticism as a criminal and seducer, and the Jesuits and their friends in the Curia as a society of gullible bigots—should on no account be allowed to enter the public imagination,” writes Wolf, when taking stock of why the Jesuits were not open about it.
After Pope Pius IX reduced the sentences, Wolf makes his views clear, writing, “Was two years really an appropriate punishment for the serious offenses Kleutgen had committed? It’s clear where the pope’s sympathies lay in this trial … the padre was part of his Jesuit network. Kleutgen and the Jesuits shored up the pope’s sovereignty—this called for care and leniency.”
Wolf manages to check so many boxes for anti-Catholic Church fans that the book could be mistaken for a complete indictment of the Church. But that would miss one of the greatest ironies of the book—that of the refreshing dedication of the Inquisition’s investigating judges. While popular history associates it with gruesome torture, the Inquisition in Wolf’s telling treats issues of faith with such exacting skepticism that it feels like watching an atheist at work. And with a book filled with a scandal this explosive about an institution so important to so many people, that kind of balance that Wolf provides is reassuring.
Source
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
Quoting the Pope and Missing the Point
by SAM SAWYER, SJ on June 16, 2013
The New York Times went for the obvious headline — about the Pope talking about a “gay lobby” — and missed the chance to run this one: “Pope Says Don’t Worry About the Inquisition.” Confused? Let me explain.
Wait for it, wait for it…
A Pope who’s very comfortable going off-script and improvising — jazz-style, as Ryan Duns has observed — has been keeping the media on their toes. Most recently, there’s discussion of a set of private remarks from the Pope’s meeting with representatives from the confederation of Latin American religious orders, via a set of notes leaked from the conversation. Aside from raising the question of who leaked the notes (a couple of months back, we would have said the butler did it) this story also illustrates what drives news coverage: if the words “gay” and “Pope” are anywhere in the same story, then — bang! — there’s your headline.
But that story gets the emphasis wrong on a number of fronts. In the first place, it’s unlikely that the Pope, even in a private meeting, was staking out a general position on homosexuality within the Church — he was speaking about the issue of corruption within the Curia, and acknowledged that the speculation about a “gay lobby” was part of this larger issue that must be addressed in order for the Curia to serve its proper role. The issue isn’t homosexuality per se, but rather the fact that secrecy and hypocrisy lead to unfreedom, as Ryan Duns, SJ discusses on his own blog.
Further, the Pavlovian over-reaction to a story involving the church and sex has buried a much more sensational quote. If all you’re reading is the New York Times, you’d walk away thinking that the Pope had a meeting with Latin American religious orders in order to talk about homosexuality. In fact, Pope Francis was encouraging them to be bold in pursuing their ministry — and especially not to be fearful about the challenges they may face from within the church, even including concern from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (i.e., the Vatican department charged with maintaining orthodoxy, formerly known as “the Inquisition”). He’s reported as saying, “Maybe you’ll receive a letter from the Congregation for Doctrine [sic], saying that they were told this or that thing…. But don’t let it bother you. Explain what you have to explain, but keep going forward.” Don’t let doctrinal controversies bother you — explain yourselves and keep going forward: that’s the real news from this meeting.
In addition to dealing with leaked private remarks, the media and the Vatican press offices have also had to deal with the unprecedented practice of daily short papal homilies at Masses in the Domus Santa Marta where Francis has continued to live since his election. Even though the Vatican has stopped publishing the text of the Pope’s daily homilies to avoid suggesting that they are formal teaching statements, they’re still being widely reported and discussed, especially when he said that even atheists are redeemed.
As with the “gay lobby” story, a single word in that homily — “redemption” — got the press off on the wrong foot, and the coverage ended up tying itself up in knots on the specifics of who can get into heaven. We talked about it here at TJP, too. However, if you actually read what the Pope said (go ahead, it’s right here) that’s exactly the question he’s rejecting. In his homily, he pleads for Catholics to recognize, in a “culture of encounter,” their commonality with all who do good. And then he imagines someone — someone who’s missing the point — objecting “But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.” And to this person, Francis replies that our common identity as children of God and the one redemptive sacrifice of Christ on the cross for all means that we can, and must, “meet one another doing good.” The real message? Stop arguing about who’s being saved, and start doing good.
Here’s a quick rule of thumb for interpreting pope quotes. First, he’s almost certainly not inventing new Church teaching on the fly, and he’s also not working from talking points designed to serve up soundbites. What he’s actually doing is preaching — that is, trying to say something to encourage and support people in their faith. The standard for that communication is not what will sound good when it’s reported, but what people really need to hear about the love of God and God’s will for them. What’s been consistent across everything he’s said — and can be found both in the homily touching on atheism and the leaked private remarks — is that Francis focuses on doing good first, and trusts that we can sort out the theological details later. The message isn’t just “practice what you preach” — it’s that the only message you can preach is the one you’re already practicing. That’s the real story.
Source
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Saturday, June 22, 2013
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Pope taps German theologian to head orthodoxy post
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Vatican crisis highlights pope failure to reform Curia
The Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele …
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict in 2005, epithets like "God's Rottweiler" and "Panzerkardinal" suggested he would bring some German efficiency to the opaque Vatican bureaucracy, the Curia.
Instead, as the "Vatileaks" scandal has revealed, the head of the Roman Catholic Church can't even keep his own private mail secret. His hand-picked deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, faces a "monsignors' mutiny" by prelates in the halls of power.
Benedict's papacy has been marked until now by controversies over things he has said and done, such as his criticism of Islam at Regensburg in 2006 or his 2009 decision to readmit four excommunicated ultra-traditionalist bishops to the Church.
Now a goal he has failed to achieve -- gain control over the Curia -- has come back to haunt him. Leaks of confidential documents on everything from Vatican finances to private papal audiences make his papacy look weak and disorganized.
"We've almost forgotten that reform of the Curia was part of Benedict's program at the start," recalled Isabelle de Gaulmyn, who was Vatican correspondent for the French Catholic daily La Croix at the time.
"Seven years later, the Curia has never seemed as opaque, ineffective, closed and badly governed as it is today."
The "Vatileaks" scandal has revealed, among other issues, the infighting behind the sacking of the Vatican bank president. The pope's own butler has been arrested on suspicion of stealing documents that have since been leaked to the media.
The target seems to be Italian Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state (prime minister), whose critics accuse him of playing politics and blocking their efforts to stamp out corruption and cronyism in Vatican management.
THROWBACK TO RENAISSANCE MONARCHY
The Curia, a centuries-old bureaucracy dominated by Italian clerics, is essential to the success or failure of a papacy because it can effectively cancel or water down papal decisions if they go against long-standing interests or traditions.
Its name comes from the Latin word for a royal court and its jumble of overlapping departments, commissions and tribunals seems more suited to an intrigue-filled Renaissance monarchy than a modern and transparent democratic government.
The institution that gave the world the word "nepotism" is not always a model meritocracy either. Some officials are talented and dynamic while others are bureaucrats who seem to owe their posts more to connections than capabilities.
Each department has an advisory board of cardinals and bishops and those who sit on several boards can create powerful links that cut across department lines to influence policy.
Pressure for reform grew during the long reign of Pope John Paul. He announced changes in the 1980s to give local bishops more say in central policy-making, but focused more on his travel and preaching and did not really implement it.
Benedict was seen as the best man to reform it since he had been a Curia member since 1981 and reportedly knew it inside out. Now the task looks set to be handed on to his successor.
"I'm not sure anyone has ever really controlled it, or can control it," Thomas F.X. Noble, history professor at Notre Dame University in Indiana, said of the bureaucracy housed on the Vatican grounds and in office buildings nearby.
The Curia has held its own in Church power terms despite two non-Italian popes and the growing majority of Catholics from the developing world.
In February, the last time Benedict named new cardinals, 10 of the 18 who can vote for the next pope were Curia officials. That boosted their faction to 35 percent of the votes in the next conclave, meaning they will play an important role in the election and could try to win the papacy back for Italy.
Supporters of the tradition of Italian popes say only they know the culture well enough to control the Curia.
A SCHOLAR, NOT A SUPERVISOR
The crisis, which hurts Benedict's image as a leader just as he drives an increasingly conservative line in Church policy, is as much a result of the pope's diffident management style as of the institutional dysfunction of the Curia itself.
"He's a solitary scholar and he's not interested in the bureaucracy," said Chester Gillis, professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington. "His real ambition seems to be to finish the third volume of his book."
Benedict, a leading Catholic theologian in his own right, has devoted considerable time in office to writing a major study entitled "Jesus of Nazareth" rather than administering the Church. The first two volumes appeared in 2007 and 2011.
His stern reputation stems from his long tenure as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), where he cracked down on liberal trends such as liberation theology.
But his CDF work focused on his own specialty, theology. "It was not about managing the Church," Gillis noted.
When he was elected pope, Benedict brought along several trusted CDF colleagues, including Bertone.
Bertone's critics call him an autocratic power-broker, a role the Curia lends itself to because its structure suits a Renaissance monarchy more than modern democratic governance.
There are no cabinet meetings among heads of departments, or dicasteries, and information circulates mostly on a need-to-know basis. Decisions with major implications for the Church are not always discussed with other departments that might be affected.
"A TIN EAR PAPACY"
Benedict did start reforming the Curia in early 2006, downgrading its department for interfaith dialogue into a sub-department of the culture ministry and sending its experienced head away to be nuncio (ambassador) in Cairo.
But he restored it as a full department the following year after his Regensburg speech in September 2006, which suggested Islam was violent and irrational, sparked protests by Muslims in several Islamic countries.
Some Curia officials had vetted the speech but not warned him of its diplomatic dangers. At Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland earlier that year, Benedict added the word Holocaust to his speech after journalists saw an advance text and told his aides Jews would be offended if he did not clearly mention it.
Benedict's aides apparently did not prepare him for the wave of sharp protests from Catholics, Jews and even German Chancellor Angela Merkel to his surprise decision in 2009 to readmit four rebel bishops to the Church after a 21-year schism.
The shocked pope had to write a long letter explaining the step and admit nobody in the Curia had done an Internet search for him and seen one bishop was a notorious Holocaust denier.
The Vatican has also reacted slowly and defensively to the clerical sexual abuse scandal shaking national churches around the world, giving the impression it puts its institutional interests ahead of the children molested by priests.
The cumulative effect of such incidents over the years and revelations of Vatican mismanagement now has been to cast Benedict's as "a tin ear papacy," said Christopher Bellitto, a Catholic Church historian at Kean University in New Jersey.
"This all seems to be a power game that matters only to the power players," he said. "It seems to be a Church hierarchy further distancing itself from the people in the pews."
(This story corrects name and university in second to last paragraph)
(Reporting By Tom Heneghan; Editing by Jon Boyle)
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Tina Brown's Must-Reads: Dictators
Tina Brown, editor of The Daily Beast and Newsweek, tells us what she's been reading in a feature that Morning Editionlikes to call "Word of Mouth." This week, Brown selects three pieces of writing that relate to the lives of dictators — and those living, in one form or another, in totalitarian states.
A 'Son' Of North Korea
Brown's first pick is The Orphan Master's Son, a novel by Adam Johnson. Set in North Korea under Kim Jong Il's regime, Orphan explores what it means to live in the country through the eyes of its imagined hero, Pak Jun Do (a play on John Doe).
"[Johnson] vividly creates this strange, dark, twisted lifestyle of the people who are condemned to live there, who have no other way of seeing the world except through the prism of the distortions the regime has served up," Brown tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. "You never think about what it means to live in a world of lies, which is what you get through the consciousness of Pak Jun Do."
Raised in the rural orphanage Long Tomorrows, Jun Do goes on to serve the regime by abducting people from South Korea to work in the North. Later, he gets a job on a fishing ship as an intelligence officer. Brown says some of the book's most memorable moments come when Jun Do, working the ship's wireless radio, hears fragments of messages from the outside world.
"He becomes particularly obsessed with the nocturnal reports of a young female American rower who's engaged with her female friend in a kind of stunt of rowing all night in the ocean," Brown says.
Johnson writes that Jun Do wonders,
What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary? If Koreans spoke this way, maybe they'd make more sense to Jun Do. Maybe he'd understand why some people accepted their fates while others didn't.
Johnson suggests even in private, North Koreans cannot tell the truth — that everything in their lives is fictionalized to one degree or another — and Brown says that's part of why his book is so original.
"Their own biographies are captured and rewritten and made to be the thing that you imbibe and live through, and that's why the freedom of the rower becomes such a haunting thing to Jun Do," Brown says.
The Aesthetics Of Intimidation
Brown's next choice is an article by Peter York of the Financial Times called "Dictators of Taste."
"[York] writes about 'dictator chic,' which has now taken over as the fall of all these dictators from the Arab Spring brings all this flight money into Europe, and invades us with their taste," Brown says. According to York, 'despot decor' is increasing in certain spots around the world.
Jassim Mohammed/AP
Taken during a 1997 tour of one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, this photo shows a giant falcon made from Italian marble.
On what exactly a dictator's home looks like, York writes,
[They] are non-ironic zones. They are designed to reinforce the Dear Leader cult of personality, but at the same time they're very impersonal — no room for homey unposed photographs or the pram in the hall. They're places to plot and do deals, not real private spaces.
York says the classic dictator's home is designed to impress and intimidate — think an excess of gold — to tell whoever comes through the door this is a place of absolute power and resources.
"The whole thing sort of has an ersatz feeling because, in the end, it's a fake impetus, this phony inflation of ego and power," Brown says. "It's purely about intimidation, about making a stunt that makes ... the visitor feel like the worm that [dictator] feels you are."
'Heresy' Through The Ages
Finally, Brown recommends an article by Cullen Murphy from The Humanist called "Inside the Heresy Files."
"There's been a huge flood of very interesting documents from the Inquisition archives in the Vatican, which now enables us to read about the Inquisition in a very different way," Brown says.
Brown distinguishes Murphy's topic from the particular moment of the Spanish Inquisition launched in 1478, noting that the article looks at the idea of the Inquisition broadly.
"It has existed in multiple different forms, multiple different places, multiple different eras over the centuries," Brown says.
Murphy writes that an inquisition really is,
a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organised systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power and justified by a vision of the one truth.
Murphy suggests that the Inquisition, rather than being a relic of the past, is a harbinger of modern times. Brown says that the sustained ability to create a system of fear, to maintain records, and to monitor people through communication systems and law reminds her of more modern examples.
"I recently went to Berlin and saw the Stasi Museum there," Brown says, referencing the secret police of the former East Germany. "It absolutely applies to the way the Stasi ran their intimidation and terror."
Even more recent examples of inquisition through organized oppression could be found in the countries that saw revolts in the Arab Spring.
Brown says in those examples, the people themselves were resistant to the system, but she remains skeptical.
"The question is, can you really dismantle it, because it only dismantles if the people themselves absolutely militate against it renewing itself," Brown says. "The fear of that in places like Egypt and Tunisia is, are we going to really have a sustained freedom, or are these terrifying systems somehow going to [be] quietly put back into place?"
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
The Inquisition: Alive And Well After 800 Years
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God's Jury
The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
by Cullen Murphy
Hardcover, 310 pages
January 15, 2012
When we talk of inquisition it is usually prefaced with a definite article — as in, The Inquisition. But, as Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy points out in his new book, God's Jury, the Inquisition wasn't a single event but rather a decentralized, centuries-long process.
Murphy says the "inquisitorial impulse" is alive and well today — despite its humble origins with the Cathars in France, where it was initially designed to deal with Christian heretics.
"The temptation, I think, is to think of the Inquisition as a kind of throwback," Murphy tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "Nothing quite says 'medieval' the way the word 'inquisition' does. And my view is that you should actually adjust the lens fairly substantially."
When you look at the Inquisition, he says, what you really see is the beginning of the modern world.
"There's always been persecution, there's always been hatred," Murphy says. The Inquisition, however, was such an enormous, sustained effort that it required an infrastructure to collect and retrieve information — over centuries.
It was this institutionalizing of the Inquisition that revolutionized record-keeping and surveillance techniques, Murphy says.
Modern Day Parallels
If you open a modern day interrogation manual for the police force or the military and place an interrogation manual from the Spanish Inquisition by its side, Murphy says, you'd be shocked by the similarities.
"There isn't a trick that is used nowadays that wasn't in use by the Inquisition. The psychology of interrogation, the ruses that people would use when you're questioning, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to interrogation," he says.
"The Inquisition tried to put restraints on torture. The problem was that in the moment, when people are trying to get information, those boundaries keep being pushed," he says. "People think, 'You know, one more turn of the screw will get us one more little piece of information' ... and torture creeps and creeps and creeps."
Are We In Danger?
Murphy says the key ingredients for a modern day inquisition exist today.
In order for an inquisition to succeed, he says, there must be an individual or a group of people who believe they are in the right and want everyone else to toe the line.
"But that moral certainty isn't enough," Murphy says. There must also be a bureaucracy and methods of surveillance to sustain the persecution.
"All of those things are much more advanced right now by an order of magnitude than they were centuries ago," Murphy says. "Nowadays [surveillance] is done almost automatically — every time you hit the keyboard on your computer or every time you walk by a camera on the street."
Murphy fears what could happen if that moral certainty meets the kinds of monitoring tools that exist today.
"In the wrong hands, the tools of repression are just more available and dangerous than they have been in a long time," he says.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Noise of Thunder Will Not Be Silent
Noise of Thunder Will Not Be Silent
Chris Pinto Article Turned Away Due To Subject Matter
Unfortunately, we went to send out the article included in this email and (it) was turned down due to the subject matter: "Is the Vatican Behind Concentration Camps in America?". Over the last few days, Chris has been discussing the roles of Rome, the Vatican, and the Pope during and after World War II. Now see the connections Chris has been able to make with those same roles in America today.
Without further ado.
Is the Vatican Behind Concentration Camps in America?
A movement has been growing among independent evangelical Christians, who have begun to recognize the pervasive influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. One radio host asks: is Rome setting up concentration camps in the United States? Stories of detention camps in the U.S. have permeated the conspiracy community for decades. But could the Vatican’s involvement actually make sense of it all?
“Rome carried on the Great Inquisition throughout Europe for six hundred years,” says Chris Pinto, host of the Noise of Thunder Radio broadcast. “But with the Revolutionary era, her persecutions went underground. She continued her programs of extermination of heretics, but did so secretly, by manipulating world governments from behind the scenes.”
The Vatican’s involvement in genocidal programs through the 20th century is the subject of Pinto’s broadcasts this week. He begins by exposing the Vatican Ratlines just after World War II, when the Church of Rome helped thousands of Nazi war criminals to escape justice, smuggling them out of Europe and into Argentina.
“The United States and Great Britain were involved,” says Pinto, referring to a 1994 episode of Prime Time Live with Sam Donaldson, titled The Last Refuge. But why would they help Nazis escape? According to Pinto, “Because the Nazi Holocaust was a 20th century version of the Great Inquisition. Rome was doing through Hitler what she had been doing for nearly a thousand years. When Hitler died,” Pinto says, “the Vatican called him a son of the Catholic Church, who died while defending Christianity.”
“In 1888, the Protestant Missions of London warned that the Vatican and her Jesuit priests were working to dominate the world through England and America,” he continues. “The fact that they are still pursuing this tactic becomes more evident as world events unfold.”
Pinto says, “Britain’s Tony Blair has now teamed up with America’s Rick Warren, to drag Christians into a world wide interfaith movement designed by Rome to erect the kingdom of Antichrist. My concern is that pastors and churches will be used by the Vatican to carry out what may be an American massacre in the future. This is the tactic Rome used in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, where some 800,000 Tutsi Christians were murdered by the mostly Catholic Hutus. Roman Catholic priests and nuns took part in the murders, and have been sheltered by the Vatican afterwards, just as they did with the Nazis.”
The "tactic" Pinto refers to is that the Vatican involved Protestant churches that were given over to Ecumenism in the bloodletting.
While Pinto’s claims might seem extreme, he points out that our current Supreme Court is dominated by Roman Catholics, the new chaplain for the House of Representatives is a Jesuit priest, and that our last two presidents (Bush and Obama) have both bowed to the Pope in Rome.
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Saturday, October 23, 2010
Catholic Inquisition and The Torture Tools
BereanBeacon March 07, 2007
Most people have some knowledge of the holocaust. The 6 years of torture and atrocities that the Jews suffered under Hitler and the Nazis during the Second World War. While in no way downplaying the terrible events of the holocaust, such a massacre does not compare to the severity to the torture and murder that took place under Papal authority during the 605 years of the Inquisition. From the beginning of the Papacy, until the present time, it is estimated by credible historians that more than 50,000,000, men and women have been slaughtered for the crime of heresy charged against them by Papal Rome. This Video contains actual photographs of some of the instruments of torture that were used. Since we consider this Video on the Inquisition one of the more important message that we have given, please make it known to others, and if possible post the link on your own website.
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Quotes from Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy
http://adishakti.org/_/peter_de_rosa_...
"Impeccable Catholic sources, papal documents, letters of reforming saints, all paint the same depressing picture. Monasteries full of women; every friar had his 'Martha', every nun her lover. Bishops, in every sense the fathers of their people, kept harems."
"Young men who spent their youth in rape and adultery were rising in the ranks of the clergy. They were spending their nights with four or five women, then getting up in the morning — in what state, he leaves to the imagination — to celebrate mass."
" ... many monasteries were the haunts of homosexuals, many converts were brothels."
"As to the sex-starved secular clergy, they were so often accused of incest that they were at length forbidden even to have mothers, aunts or sisters living in their house."
"Promiscuity was rife in monasteries and convents. The great Ivo of Chartres (1040-1115) tells of whole convents with inmates who were nuns only in name. They had often been abandoned by their families and were really prostitutes."
"There also crept in the infamous cullagium, a charge for keeping concubines... bishops and archdeacons themselves benefited from this sex-tax; in Rome, it was the pope."
"In the year 1250, Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln wrote to Pope Innocent IV. Of priests he said: 'They are in truth teachers of heresy, inasmuch as the word of action is mightier than the word of speech.' "
"In the year 1414, King Henry V asked the University of Oxford to prepare articles for the reform of the church. Article 39 began: 'Because the carnal and sinful life of priests today scandalizes the entire church and their public fornication goes completely unpunished ...' "
"In the parish of St John Zachary in London, there was a church service of a very remarkable kind. It provided a brothel exclusively for priests and nuns ..."
"St Alban's Abbey, for instance, was nothing but a den of prostitutes serving the local monks. Nuns were regularly raped therein and the entire place, in a phrase worth of Shakespeare, was 'a riot of seed and blood'..."
"The overall report (in England) said that 144 religious houses were equal in viciousness to Sodom; countless convents, served by 'lewd confessors', were full of children; clergy — abbots, monks and friars — were carrying on not merely with whores but with married women..."
"After six centuries of strenuous efforts to impose celibacy, the clergy were a menace to the wives and young women of parishes to which they were sent."
"Across the border lived Henry, Bishop of Liege. The man was a legend beyond his lifetime. Henry was finally deposed by Gregory X at the Council of Lyons in 1274 'for deflowering virgins and other mighty deeds'... He ended murdered by a Flemish knight who was outraged at what the bishop had done to his daughter."
"During Borgia's reign, the Florentine friar Savonarola said the nuns were worse than harlots. As to the clergy, 'one priest spends the night with his concubine, another with a little boy, and in the morning they proceed to the altar to celebrate Mass. What do you think of that? What do you make of such a Mass?' "
"The evil was too deeply rooted; the last opportunities for reform long lost... A proverb passes from mouth to mouth: 'The profession of the priest is the surest road to hell.' "
Lord Acton
(1834-1902)
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Bio...
Down load Inquisition video at http://www.warnlive.com/. File size is 3.65gb and may take 24 hours.
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Friday, October 08, 2010
North Americans to participate in Synod of Bishops for Middle East
North Americans to participate in Synod of Bishops for Middle East
By Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Of the 185 voting members of the special Synod of Bishops for the Middle East, 12 are bishops who minister in the United States and Canada.
Like the synod membership as a whole, most of the North American participants are bishops of the Eastern Catholic churches: Melkite, Maronite, Chaldean, Syrian, Armenian or Coptic.
The full list of participants in the Oct. 10-24 synod was released at the Vatican Oct. 8 during a press briefing by Archbishop Nikola Eterovic, secretary general of the Synod of Bishops.
Pope Benedict XVI named Msgr. Robert L. Stern, general secretary of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association, to be a voting member of the synod.
And three Latin-rite bishops from North America are participating: Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit, and Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto.
More North American participants are involved because of their ministry in Rome. Cardinal William J. Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a synod member, as are Cardinal John P. Foley, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, and Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, prefect of the Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature.
The other North American members of the synod are:
-- Syrian Bishop Yousif Habash of Our Lady of Deliverance of Newark, N.J.
-- Melkite Bishop Ibrahim M. Ibrahim of Saint-Sauveur of Montreal.
-- Melkite Bishop Cyrille S. Bustros of Newton, Mass.
-- Maronite Bishop Joseph Khoury of Saint-Maron of Montreal.
-- Maronite Bishop Robert J. Shaheen of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles.
-- Maronite Bishop Gregory J. Mansour of St. Maron of Brooklyn, N.Y.
-- Chaldean Bishop Sarhad Y. Jammo of St. Peter the Apostle of San Diego.
-- Chaldean Bishop Ibrahim N. Ibrahim of St. Thomas the Apostle of Detroit.
-- Armenian Bishop Manuel Batakian of Our Lady of Nareg in New York.
Benedictine Father Mark Sheridan, a U.S. member of the International Association for Coptic Studies, was named an expert at the synod.
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Monday, September 13, 2010
They shall deceive the very elect - if it were possible
5For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.
6And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
7For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8All these are the beginning of sorrows.
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11And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
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23Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
24For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
25Behold, I have told you before.
26Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.
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42Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
Matthew 24
Monday, August 09, 2010
Working Within The Etablishment Church Or Outside Of It: What Should We Do?
Written By S. R. Shearer
The Bible says that the church is -
"... the PILLAR and GROUND of the TRUTH" (1 Tim. 3:15)
But if the church no longer "abides in that truth" (I John 2:27) can it really be called the church any longer? The answer is obviously, No! Just because people who call themselves Christians meet together does not in itself mean that they meet as the church. The Mormons, the Moonies, the Jehovah Witnesses and countless other similar sects call themselves Christian - but does that mean that when they meet together, they meet as (or constitute) the church? - No, of course not! Why? - because they do not meet on the "ground of truth," despite the fact that they call themselves Christians. The Bible says:
"... God is a Spirit: and they that worship him MUST worship him in spirit and in truth. (John 4:24)
We repeat, the church is more than the assembly of those who call themselves "Christian" - it is the assembly of those who -
call themselves Christian
AND
meet on the "ground of truth."
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Read entire article @: http://www.antipasministries.com/html/file0000084.htm
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