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Meditation 1027
Archbishop Müller's "pogrom"

by: John Tyrrell - The Intolerant Agnostic

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pogrom: n. a planned campaign of persecution or extermination sanctioned by a government and directed against an ethnic group, especially against the Jewish people in tsarist Russia. Encarta, 1999 ed, p 1390

Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in an interview with the German newspaper, Die Welt, compared criticism of the Catholic Church to a pogrom.

Now please refer to that definition of a pogrom above. Does anyone see that happening to the Catholic church? Persecution? Extermination? Sanctioned by a government?

Now of course the the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith used to be known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (or Inquisition for short), and the organization is very familiar with the practice of government sanctioned persecution and extermination. One of the Inquisition's offshoots, the Spanish Inquisition, was set up by Isabella and Ferdinand with the Pope's approval expressly to stamp out Jewish practices among those Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism. And over 90% of those killed by the Spanish Inquisition were of Jewish origin. Certainly that could be described as a pogrom. People were persecuted; people were killed; and the government sanctioned it.

And that's in the background of the Vatican organization Müller runs. And he has the audacity to assert that criticism of his church - mere words - amounts to a pogrom.

But likening criticism to a pogrom isn't enough for Müller He continued by claiming that those attacking the Church use arguments previously used by totalitarian ideologies such as Communism and Nazism against Christianity.

Really! These are words from a spokesman for a church which run on an authoritarian basis by a supposedly infallible man who is the sole conduit for God's instructions to mankind. And he accuses those who criticize this position of using totalitarian arguments.

Unable to answer criticism of its attempts to impose its will on non-Catholics, the Vatican resorts to overexaggeration and misrepresentation. Once more, we see dishonesty and hypocrisy emanating from the Vatican. And unfortunately that is not news. It is a regular occurrence.

And the above is not persecution. It is not extermination. It is legitimate grounded criticism. And like it or not Archbishop Müller, you are going to have to live with it.

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