Popping the Pope
Earlier I said that Pope John Paul II was no friend of the Jews, and promised a post to support this claim. As you can imagine, the finished post was long, too long for this blog anyway.
So instead, I've decided to use lists and hyperlinks. Below are my two primary arguments, with some supporting cases, and helpful links.
First argument:
We can call into question John Paul's character, because he has never repudiated the anti-Semitic policies, practices or proclamations of his predecessors, including:
* Urban II's crusade of 1095
* Egenius III's promise in 1145 to absolve debts owed to Jews by anyone who joined his Crusade
* Innocent III's declaration (at the fourth Lateran of 1215) that Jews must wear yellow badges
* Gregory IX's (1231) establishment of the Inquisition
* Gregory IX's (1241) call for an investigation of the Talmud that leads to the burning of 24 cartloads of Jewish manuscripts, in France by King Louis.
* Paul II's (1464) introduction of the Palio, humiliating forced races of near naked Jews through the streets of Rome during carnival time.
* Julius III's burning of the Talmud in 1553, with Cardinal Carrafe (later Pope Paul IV) presiding.
* Cum Nimis Absurdum, a bull published in 1555 by Paul IV, established the Roman ghetto, forces Jews to wear a special cap and forbids them to own real estate or practice medicine on Christians.
* Pius V's (1569) expuslsion of the Jews from the Papal States
* Gregory XIII's (1557) demand that the Jews hear weekly forced sermons
* The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by Pius IX in 1848
* The canonization in 1867 of Peter Arbues, a 15th-century inquisitor famed for forcible conversion of Jews, by Piux IX, who said in the canonization document, ''The divine wisdom has arranged that in these sad days, when Jews help the enemies of the church with their books and money, this decree of sanctity has been brought to fulfillment."
* The Vatican's endorsement of things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus and the charge that Jews regularly commit ritual murders of Christian children.
* Leo XIII's refusal to denounce La Croix's vicious demonization of Alfred Dryfus, though he criticized the paper for other reasons. [La Croix has since apologized]
* Pius X refusal to intervene in the 20th century's most famous trial of a Jew on the ritual murder charge, a trial conducted in Kiev in 1913. After a Catholic priest testified to the court that such murders were an established fact of history, British Jews requested from the pope a denial of the libel (based on a bull published by a Clement VI in 1348) . Pius X's secretary of state acknowledgedthe existenceof the bull in writing to the British Jews, but he would not send information about it directly to the presiding judge.
* Pius XII's refusal to speak out against Nazism, or the extermination of Jews (even after 1943 when Rome was in Allied hands, and remember: this is the Pope who, in 1948, had the courage, to excommunicate every single communist in the world.)
Second argument:
John Paul's own policies, practices and proclamations demonstrate contempt for Jews and Jewish sensibilities.
* The beatification (and continued efforts to canonize) Pius IX and Pius XII, the Joker and the Riddler in the rogue gallery of anti-semitic popes.
* The canonization of Edith Stein [A cold-blooded attempt to claim victimhood for the Church in the Holocaust]
*"We Remember" [Proclaimed that the Catholic church in the past objected to Jews only on theological grounds, not racial ones, and suggested that Catholism did nothing to pave the way for Nazism. Both are easily destroyed falsehoods.]
*The "apology" of March 2000
More later, perhaps.