[BigF]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door CUFI

Ga eens geschiedenis doen? De zorg, onderwijs was van de katholieken waar ge zo op bashed.

Als de katholieken dan toch zo'n zegen waren voor de wereld, waarom kwamen ze in 2000 dan met een gigantische lijst verontschuldigingen?

Kruistochten, inquisitie, de vervolging van Joden, onrechtvaardig behandelen van vrouwen, gedwongen bekeringen, excuses aan Galileo (in 1992!!), slavenhandel,....

Kijk (en vooral luister) hier even naar.

Of lees een deel van de transcriptie:

If you’re going to be a serious, grown-up person and appear to defend the Catholic Church in public, in front of an educated and literate audience, you simply have to start by making a great number of heartfelt apologies and requests for contrition and forgiveness. You might ask, “Who am I to say that?” Well, in the Jubilee Millennium year of 2000, the Vatican spokesman, Bishop Piorlo Marini, said, explaining a whole sermon of apology given by His Holiness the Pope that was supposed to cover the entire history of the church in its Jubilee year, that, “Given the number of sins we’ve committed in the course of 20th centuries, reference to them must necessarily be rather summary.” When I think Bishop Marini had that just about right, I’ll have to be summary too. But I think he said just about the least of it. His Holiness, on that occasion, March 12th, 2000, if you wish to look it up, begged forgiveness for, among some other things, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jewish people, injustice towards women (that’s half the human race right there), and the forced conversion of indigenous peoples, especially in South America.

That followed a whole series of preceding apologies, or apologies, I would say, of a kind, made by the late Pope John Paul, who, it troubles me not at all to say, was a very impressive and serious human being. It followed no less than 94 public recognitions on his part of appalling crime and error and cruelty and stupidity and offences to the free intelligence, ranging from the African slave trade apologized for in 1995, the admission that Galileo was right about the relationship between the Sun and the Earth and other orbs, which came in 1992 (one might add, “better late than never” here), said it to violence and torture. Legalized torture was legalized and institutionalized by the Roman pontiff during the counter-reformation, that came in 1995. For silence during Hitler’s final solution or shower, as well as in 1999, coming in just under the Millennium Jubilee wire, an apology for the burning alive in the main square of Prague of the great Czech Protestant Janhurst.

Since that big fiesta of forgiveness that began in, well, culminated, I might say, in 2000, the papacy has also asked to be forgiven for the sack of Constantinople and the massacre of Byzantine Christianity in April 1204. As part of The Fourth Crusade, the anathema on all Eastern Orthodox Christians as unbelievers, heretics, and people dwelling outside the health of the church was lifted only in 1964. I call your attention to that. He also expressed sorrow about the murder and forced conversion of Serbian Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during the Second World War. And it doesn’t end there. There are smaller but significant, equally significant, vowels of a very bad conscience. These have included regret for the rape and torture of orphans and other children in church-run schools in almost every country on Earth, from Ireland to Australia. And I’m pleased to see that reconsideration is now being given, and may, in fact, have been given to the hellish (I’ll choose the word carefully) doctrine of limbo. Saint Augustine’s cruel and stupid disposal problem solution to a non-existent problem, that is to say, the destination of the souls of unbaptized children. Up until now, Catholic parents have been taught that’s where their unbaptized children went, a form of torture that’s sometimes worse than the physical. Now, it seems that this piece of Augustinian sadism is undergoing reconsideration as well.