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by Free Market Duck

Grand Inquisitor visits Auschwitz
(May 31, 2006)

Auschwitz, Poland – Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp last Sunday and asked, “Why, Lord, did you remain silent?  How could you tolerate all this?”

   Probably for the same reason that God remained silent during the Inquisition of the Catholic Church which lasted for several hundred years and during which hundreds of thousands of women throughout Europe were officially classified as “witches” and burned at the stake.

   While the major news media played it up RE the irony of today’s German-born Pope (real name Joseph Ratzinger) visiting the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, no one mentioned that Ratzinger, until elected Pope in April 2005, was the previous Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church’s own historical concentration camps called The Inquisition.  The current Grand Inquisitor is California-born Monsignor William Levada, formerly the Archbishop of San Francisco.

   Historically, the Inquisition was founded by a cruel and fanatical Spanish monk, Dominic de Guzman and formally established by the pope in 1216 as the Order of the Dominicans.  The goal of the Dominicans was to destroy heresy (which meant whatever The Inquisitor said it meant) by whatever means proved necessary.  Dominic died in 1221 and was anointed as a Saint but the Inquisition qua Official Church Torturer lived on for several centuries, methodically torturing hundreds of thousands of victims until they confessed.  So methodical were the Inquisitors that they duly recorded the names and “crimes” of their victims in hand-written databases for later retrieval.  So organized were the Dominican Inquisitors that, in 1486, two German Dominicans created an official torture manual, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), in which The Church characterized women as the source of all evil and then went on to describe exactly, step-by-step, how the heretic “witches” were to be tortured to extract confessions and then burned at the stake.

   The Malleus Maleficarum surpassed in its cruelty and official sanctioning, anything concocted by the Nazi concentration camps during Hitler’s Third Reich.  The Hammer of the Witches was founded upon the perverted sexual views of those men who ran The Church in medieval Europe.  That view, in a slightly moderated form that some researchers call lies or a big fraud to retain the power of The Church, still carries on today.  Sex is deemed bad.  Sex is the original sin.  Naked bodies are sinful.  Women are automatically guilty at birth.  Women cannot become priests.  Priests cannot marry.  Jesus’ mother must have been a virgin because sex is bad.  Jesus did not marry.  The person next to Jesus in Da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, is John, not Mary Magdalene.  Until 1965, Mary Magdalene was, according to official Church doctrine, a prostitute.  And Jesus and Mary did not participate in conjugal endearment to produce one or more children, says The Church.  The Holy Grail is supposedly a nonexistent wooden cup at The Last Supper (hey, where is it?) not The Sang Real, the Holy Bloodline of Jesus and Mary.  And on and on, says The Church.

   The Dominican Order exists even today, albeit in a more sanitized form.  In 1908, The Inquisition, the Order of the Dominicans, was renamed the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.  In 1965, it was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  The head honcho Inquisitor is called the “Prefect” or the Grand Inquisitor.  Until Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope in April 2005, he was the Grand Inquisitor and while its methods have changed, no more burning of “witches” at the stake, The Inquisition’s basic moral philosophy has not changed: clean up and protect the power of The Church.

   So the real irony of Pope Joseph Ratzinger, who took the name Benedict XVI, and who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp last Sunday is not that he is German, but rather that Ratzinger was the previous Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church whose official doctrine and Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of the Witches, was itself responsible for the torturing and burning of hundreds of thousands of women at the stake for centuries.

   This begs the question:  what is the fundamental difference between the moral-epistemology that brought about the atrocities of the national socialist Third Reich and the moral-epistemology that brought about the atrocities of The Inquisition of the Catholic Church?  Zero.  Both moralities are based upon the same idea of self-sacrifice of the individual to the collective, whether it’s The Church or The State.  The major religions and governments of today are both operating on the same bankrupt ideas of anti-reason, anti-individualism, and, ultimately, anti-life for rationally thinking human beings. – FM Duck

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