My friend Sister Toldjah has a long post up arguing that it is muddle-headed for the political Left to defend Barack Obama's cozy relationship with an anti-Semitic racialist conspiracy theorist on the grounds that there are kooky pastors on the Right as well. In that thesis, I agree with her completely. From a logical and rhetorical point of view "So's your mother" and "everybody does it" are bankrupt defenses.
I take issue with other parts of her post, however, because I think she's too fine a person to carry water for the ignorant likes of megachurch pastor John Hagee. Any man who believes as Hagee does that "the Roman Catholic Church...plunged the world into the Dark Ages," and thinks Pope Piux XII "never, ever slightly criticized" Adolph Hitler is a bigoted maroon of the first order.
As Dinesh D'Souza and a multitude of others have shown, it was a combination of Roman decadence and barbarian pillage that initiated the so-called "Dark Ages," and the church that kept that underrated epoch from being as dark as it might otherwise have been (hey, "Dark Ages" acolytes, who started the first universities, and when did they start, or does the twelfth century not count as dark enough for ya?).
As to whether the Catholic church could have done more to stop Hitler in the twentieth century, the debate continues, but only an ignoramus like Hagee would contend that the pope never criticized Hitler, or overlook the fact that the Nazis targeted not just Jews but also Catholics, many priests among them. Rabbi David Dalin is among many Jews who have tried to set part of that record straight by pointing to what the wartime pope did do (here, for example, is what an editorial in the New York Times said on Dec. 25, 1941: "The voice of Pius Xll is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas... he is about the only ruler left on the Continent of Europe who dares to raise his voice at all. ")
When you remember that Hitler's armies overran several countries, the fact that a Polish Martyrology for 1939-45 lists six bishops, 2,030 priests, 127 seminarians, 173 lay brothers and 243 nuns murdered by the Nazis is even more shocking. That's a gruesome total of Catholic victims from just one country.
You will by now have gathered that I'm not impressed by Hagee's position as a senior pastor, or his support for Senator John McCain's presidential ambitions. Begging Sister Toldjah's pardon, and as one "traditional Christian" to another, I contend that what Hagee says about Catholics is no more defensible than what Louis Farrakhan says about Jews. One is in the habit of calling other Christians apostates and worse, while the other implies that God's chosen people are verminous. That each of these idiots can play "six degrees of separation" with a presidential candidate ought to nauseate thoughtful voters. Neither man would be a welcome dinner guest around the Paragraph Farm. McCain doesn't have Obama's "pastor problem" only because McCain didn't make the mistake of spending 20 years at the feet of people like Hagee.
It saddens me to see Sister Toldjah debunking Farrakhan's stupid claim that Judaism is a "gutter religion" by contrasting that with the allegedly more credible claim that Catholicism is the "Whore of Babylon" mentioned in Revelations 17:1. That ST makes the comparison knowing that popular Catholic websites have pages "trying to disprove the assertion" is even more disheartening.
Sweet Sister T, I hope you read this, because I'll stand shoulder to shoulder with you in almost any argument, and I consider myself blessed by your friendship. I believe you when you say you're not anti-Catholic. You're an inspiration to me and an asset to the great state we share. I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I know your judgment is better than that. Accordingly, you may want to re-read the weakest part of your otherwise strong post.
Those Catholic websites? They're not "trying" to disprove that "whore of Babylon" assertion; they've blown it out of the water six ways from Sunday. If you don't believe me, read the page to which you linked. Short answer: the weight of scriptural evidence suggests that the line in question has a first century "sell by" date and refers either to pagan Rome or apostate Jerusalem. In neither case would the description fit the Catholic Church. You won't get that from Hagee, but that's hardly surprising, given his biases. He mischaracterizes the motivation for the Crusades, as well.
Okay. Deep breath. In the ordinary course of things, I'd consider Hagee and his "arguments" unworthy of my steel. I must do him left-handed, as Inigo explained in The Princess Bride, because if I attack with my right, "it's over too quickly." I don't have a pastorate or a degree in theology, but to answer the likes of Hagee, I don't need those things.
Understand that it's not Hagee's blunt speech that bothers me, it's his apparent willingness to forego any serious research before yammering on about the shortcomings of Catholicism. "Scholarship" of the kind Hagee seems to prefer would suggest that the American band fronted by Deborah Harry and known for songs like "Heart of Glass" and "The Tide is High" was named for Hitler's dog-- which of course it was not.
I've donned the blue face paint and gone to pick a fight because Hagee's ignorant bigotry reflects poorly on a woman whom I respect, and I want very much to rescue Sister Toldjah from that mistake if she's amenable to it. Fezzik fetched some horses for us.
Moreover, it's after sundown on the 16th as I write this, which means that it's Saint Patrick's Day, and I like to think my "Dark Ages" namesake used more than a shamrock to set the druids straight. I must at least try to emulate his intrepid example, especially in a year when Patrick is remembered at the start of Holy Week.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Patrick, you expressed your ire gently but sternly, as a good citizen, Christian and father should do. And it seems the American people do need some history lessons. I am amazed at how few high schools teach Western Civilization in any kind of depth.
We need the likes of you getting your back up a bit because the spin the dems are trying to give all of this is shameful. This morning on Imus, I heard John Kerry explain that the kind of rhetoric we hear from Mr. Obama's trusted pastor is indicative of the older generation of African Americans who experienced the struggle in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. He then went on to speak about the segregated armed forces in WWII and the Tuskegee Airmen. However says Kerry, the young upwardly mobile professional African Americans, of which there are so many today, have never had this struggle and are not a part of it, therefore they don't see things this way and don't speak this way. He rightly went on to say, this proved how far we had come as a nation. Then that mouth.
"It will be up to the SOPHISTICATION of the American people to recognise this distinction (this fact?)..."
Here we go again, the dems are all about 'sophistication' and if we, average Joe Americans, don't want to look like ignoramouses, we better get sophisticated quick,in other words, jump on the bandwagon! Not educated mind you, sophisticated.
Hagee is uneducated AND ignorant. He doesn't know and doesn't care to know the history of his faith or of his civilization, but the hate speech of the so called Pastor Wright, is not just rhetoric, it is incendiary. It is exactly what we have come to think of as 'terrorist speak'.
If Kerry is right, we unsophisticated Americans ought to lobby to add all African American churches to the list of mosques that must be monitored for incendiary teaching and rhetoric.
I am not advocating this, I don't believe Wright is indicative of the African American church in this country, but Kerry said it not I, and not being a democrat I am by default unsophisticated. It would be appropriate in my estimation to revoke the tax exempt status of ANY church that allows a political candidate to speak to its congregation, period. That would put a big crimp in the dems 'sophisticated' style.
I'm willing to bet, Patrick that you've read Thomas Cahill's lovely book, "How the Irish Saved Civilization." I haven't read it in many years, but my memory is that it was the Christian Church, as it washed up on Irish shores after the barbarian depredations destroyed it in Europe, that became the repository for our modern Western culture.
Looking back from modern times, there are things that we can't like about the Dark Ages and Medieval church (the burnings, for one thing), but we in the modern era stupidly forget that you cannot measure institutions against our times. Instead, you have to measure them against their own times. In that light, much as people would like to praise Druids and other pagan religions, Christianity was light years ahead of the competition if one for one reason: it stopped human sacrifice. To me, that's a biggie.
I'm going to link to your post, because I think it's important and it feeds in nicely with some lunacy in the New York Times.
You'd win that bet, friend Bookworm, because I did read Cahill's book.
Post a Comment