Ghetto - 1939.

The thing that gets me is how broom-clean that street looks.

It looks Disneyland clean.

https://youtu.be/ln886k57kYM

History Stuff - Tudor England Division.

Archeologists find bones of Richard III under a parking lot...

...deny Mafia involvement.

Here's the story:

A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III, successfully ending a search that sparked a modern-day debate about the legacy of the reputed tyrant.

Details of the findings were released hours after DNA tests came in late Sunday. The 500-year-old remains were discovered five months ago, using ancient maps and records to uncover the ruins of the old friary where Richard III was laid to rest.

And:

Richard III’s grave, which was found underneath the Leicester site in the remains of Greyfriars friary, had been lost during the religious reforms of Henry VIII. Richard, the last king of England to fall on the battlefield, was slain in the 1485 Battle of Bosworth Field while defending his crown against the raiding upstart, Henry VII. He was famously depicted in Shakespeare’s “Richard III” crying out before his death: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

And:

From the time the bones were found, there was strong evidence to suggest the remains belonged to the monarch. The skeleton indicated a personage who was well nourished, who had suffered cranial trauma during battle and who exhibited spine damage from scoliosis, a type of curvature of the spine — all signs that pointed to Richard III. 

Making History - Was the Cronkite Moment an invention?

According to W. Joseph Campbell at Media Myth Alert, it was:

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, “version variability” of such dimension “signals implausibility.
“It is a marker of a media-driven myth.”

Indeed, if anyone’s words should be captured with precision, they should be the president’s. Especially on matters as important as shifting popular support for war policy.

It is quite interesting that Cronkite never spoke with Johnson about the purported “Cronkite Moment” and, as Brinkley notes, the president had nothing to say about it in his memoir.

There’s little contemporaneous evidence that the “Cronkite Moment” was profoundly shocking or moving. Or seismic. But there are plenty of claims to its significance, years after the fact.
The “Cronkite Moment” took on importance not in 1968 but by 1979, when David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be that Cronkite’s report “was the first time in American history a war had been declared over by an anchorman.” Which was nonsense, of course.

But Halberstam’s over-the-top characterization signaled how the “Cronkite Moment” was becoming a memorable and supposedly revealing example about how journalists can have powerful and immediate effects, how they can bring to bear decisive impacts on major issues facing the country.

Even Cronkite embraced the presumptive power of the “Cronkite Moment.” It took him a while, though.

In his 1997 memoir, Cronkite characterized the program in modest terms, saying that his “stalemate” assessment was, for Johnson, “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” He repeated the analogy in the years immediately afterward, saying on a CNN program in 1999, for example:
“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel.”

But in the years before his death in 2009, Cronkite claimed greater significance for the program. For example, he told Esquire magazine in an interview in 2006:

“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

Since I just finished Robert Spencer's "Did Muhammed Exist?," this has some passing interest to me as a matter of how history is made.

Spencer's thesis is that the person of Muhammed is a wholesale fabrication.  In that regard, he is in the same position, making largely the same kinds of arguments, as made by "Jesus mythers."

I'm not generally impressed with those arguments.  The amount of conspiratorial shenanigans that has to occur to make mythicist theories work is outside the realm of human experience, particularly since it requires that the people making the myth have to dupe themselves into believing that the story they forged for particular and obviously momentary reasons was in fact always true.  Moreover, the conspiracy is so good that although the forgery occurs in the context of fabricating support for one side or the other in an ongoing dispute, no one ever mentions that "geez, who is this Muhammed/Christ guy?"

The "Cronkite moment" is a case in point.  Apparently, over time, the significance of Cronkite's report grew over time in the minds of people who were looking for a reason to explain the loss of the Vietnam War.  Singling out Cronkite in the late-70s made sense in that the media's reputation was never higher, and Cronkite was enjoying a long period of favorability in the minds of most Americans.

Nonetheless, notice that although the meaning and significance of Cronkite's report on Vietnam was "understood" in an exaggerated way long after the fact - in keeping with the dictum that we live our life going forward but we understand it looking back - the essential facts were not invented: there was a war, Cronkite made a report, public opinion did turn against the war, etc.  Admittedly, Johnson's putative statement about losing public opinion does look fabricated, in which case one lesson is that those elements which really "sell" the argument are probably the places to look for invention.

A different view of the Marines at Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

Father Z posts this picture and this comment:

The great Roman Fabrizio sent me a photo of Marines on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi at Mass, His commentary follows.

My first thought looking at these brave Marines was for the Angels who saw this happening and how they must have celebrated around the Throne. Admittedly we’re just human beings and everything we do for the Lord looks pathetic if compared to His Glory. And yet, I can’t think of many other things that must appeal to the Heart of Jesus as much as a man like that, in the middle of a veritable hell, possibly a few minutes from death, kneeling on the scorched ground of Mount Suribachi because that’s how you receive your Savior! The Holy Angels must have thought “maybe that’s why He loves them so much, why he said to them:

si fuerint peccata vestra ut coccinum...”

The latin phrase seems to be from Isaiah

18. Venite, agedum, et disceptemus, dixit Dominus: si fuerint peccata vestra ut coccinum, quasi nix dealbabuntur: si rubicunda fuerint instar purpurae, quasi lana erunt.

or

18. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

The past is a different country.

Sarah Hoyt has a nice rant about several things, not the least of which is the wrong-headedness of people who think that they can judge what was best for people who lived in a different time and place.

This means that women who thought – at the time – about other women getting the vote and shuddered might have had a point. They foresaw disaster if women got the vote, and – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT – though we know they weren’t right (the minor thing with prohibition excepted) THEY HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING THAT. Anyone who’s been through college should be self-aware enough to realize that. The past is determined, the future isn’t. We are their future. They had no way of being sure how things would go. They were entitled to their doubts and their second thoughts and by having them they showed NOT that they were puppets of the establishment, but that they were thinking human beings. Even if they were wrong. Hindsight is twenty twenty.

"Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy," says Robert Louis Wilken.

Obama gets four "Pinocchios" for dissing Rutherford B. Hayes...

...from the Washington Post:

It’s bad enough for one president to knock another one for not being on Mt. Rushmore, but it’s particularly egregious to do so based on incorrect information.

We went back and forth over whether this error was worth three or four Pinocchios. We nearly decided on three Pinocchios because Obama used the phrase “reportedly” and because others have said this before him. The Encyclopeadia Brittanica reference especially gave us pause. That’s a legitimate, but not infallible, source. But then we remembered it took only a phone call to a real historian to find out the truth.

Our final ruling was swayed in the end by this: The president in particular has a responsiblity to get historical facts correct, and in this case he got them completely backwards. Obama mocked Hayes for “looking backwards...not looking forwards.” In reality, Hayes embraced the new technology. He should be an Obama hero, not a skunk.

Hayes is dead and buried, but he deserves an apology.

Don't mess with "His Fraudulency."

Fan Mail.

I wrote a fan letter to Mack P. Holt, the author of "The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (New Approaches to European History)."

I really liked Holt's book, which I found to be a crisply written presentation about an era that deserves a mini-series.

Professor Holt kindly responded.

Here's the exchange:

I recently read and reviewed for Amazon your book on the French Wars of Religion.

I really enjoyed your book. I was looking for a book that outlined the history of the French Wars of Religion and yours was perfect for that purpose, and compelling to read in its who's up and who's down this year storyline.

Thanks for writing it.

My review is here if you are interested in seeing it - http://www.amazon.com/review/R2JK7RRJZF3746/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Ignore the negative "helpful" ranking; it seems that I have a troll who is trying to hurt my ranking at Amazon for some reason.

And here is Professor Holt's response:

Dear Mr. Bradley,

Thanks so much for the kind review. I am just grateful that the book is still useful and being read nearly twenty years after having written it. Since so many of the popular views of the religious wars both in France and abroad are based on propaganda from biased sources, it is a pleasure and a privilege to be able to make one small step toward correcting that narrative. Thanks for all your comments and for spending the time to do so.

Best wishes,

Mack Holt

Here is my Amazon review.  I'd ask you to kindly go to this review and give me a "helpful" vote.  It seems that ever since I broke 10,000 in reviewer rankings I'm getting spammed with negative votes by trolls.

Or better still, order a copy of Professor Holt's entertaining and educational book.

Liberal Fascism.

Anne Althouse takes on Jeff Rosen's argument that a majority of the Supreme Court would support the authority of the President to borrow money, even though the text of the Constitution says that only the Congress has that authority:

[Quoting Rosen]Of these five justices, Thomas is the only one whose judicial philosophy might lead him to side with Congress over Obama. As someone who believes that Congressional power over the purse should be construed strictly, Thomas might conclude that Article I gives Congress, and not the president, the power “to borrow money on the credit of the United States”—a power that it has exercised by establishing a debt ceiling. The debt ceiling doesn’t repudiate the debt or question its validity, Thomas might hold; it simply threatens default by prohibiting the president from assuming extra debt beyond what Congress has authorized. According to this argument, Obama’s unilateral decision to take on additional debt to avoid a government default would not represent debt “authorized by law,” as the Fourteenth Amendment requires, and therefore wouldn’t be justified by the Amendment.

Isn't it funny how this "tea party" philosophy just sounds like a fair reading of the text? But only Clarence Thomas is crackpot enough to do that! I added the boldface to highlight what to me seems like the obvious interpretation: No one is talking about questioning the validity of the debt! When you fail to pay debts, you're not claiming they aren't valid. Why wouldn't all the Justices say that? Why would that inapt clause take precedence over the specific and clear clause in Article I, listing among Congress's powers the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States"?

Forget for a moment the plain text of the Constitution, how about separation of powers?  The Congress has the power of the purse.  That's all it has to control the President.  It can't arrest the President since the executive powers are located in the Executive branch, but it can vote to withhold money from the executive.

Unless Rosen is right and the President can just borrow money without Congressional approval.

How does Rosen not recognize his argument as an argument for fascism?

The principles of the Constitution grew out of the conflict between Parliament and the Monarchy out of this very issue.  King Charles thought that he could govern without the Parliament, so he dissolved Parliament and he found all kinds of unusual ways to raise money for himself (See "Ship Money Controversy," 1634 - 1639), until he learned that he really needed Parliament.  Parliament decided not to allow itself to be dissolved again, particulalry after Charles attempted to prorogue it (See "The Long Parliament," 1640 - 1666).  From there it was off to the races as the legislature fought the English Civil War against the King, and eventually executed King Charles.

That's the history our founders were working against, and why they devised a separation of powers.

Is Rosen entirely ignorant?  If not, why would he want to recreate that bit of history?

Jefferson or Franklin or Whoever would probably have given a face palm at learning that ABC had to define "perspicacious" for its viewers.

Mediaite has caught a pop-up graphic on ABC pointing to the dumbing down of American democracy:

This is either unintentionally hilarious or merely bizarre, but either way it seemed worthy of some attention. On This Week, during an extremely sophisticated and insightful debate on the importance of the Constitution, Christiane Amanpour apparently attempted to keep the conversation at an elevated level of intelligence by showcasing an SAT-worthy word in the middle of her statement. Amanpour casually said “perspicacious,” yet dropping such a big word apparently served as a bat signal for the ABC graphics department to go into emergency action!


Amanpour’s guest mentioned Benjamin Franklin wrote that he wouldn’t mind being preserved in a “vat of Madeira wine” in order to see if the Constitution held up 200 years later. Amanpour responded, “he was amazingly perspicacious when this Constitution was signed.” Some viewers might want to roll their eyes in response to Amanpour’s use of such “elite” language, while others might appreciate that she doesn’t dumb down her thoughts for television. Either way, what was truly peculiar was the on-screen graphic. Were producers worried that the word would fly so far over their audience’s head that they needed to intervene as a public service? And if so, why not define “vat” and “Madeira wine” while you’re at it? Or is This Week now like Pop-Up Video with explanatory details and interesting facts popping up to complement what’s happening on screen?

"There be Dragons."

The movie is apparently about Josemaria Escriva and the Spanish Civil War.

Looks intriguing.

There Be Dragons is an upcoming historical epic written and directed by Roland Joffé, a British filmmaker well known for directing The Mission, Captivity and The Killing Fields. It is a drama set during the Spanish Civil War which features themes such as betrayal, love and hatred, forgiveness, friendship, and finding meaning in everyday life. The film, scheduled to be released on May 6, 2011, includes the story of revolutionary soldiers, a journalist, his father, and a real life priest, St. Josemaría Escrivá, a recent Roman Catholic saint and founder of Opus Dei, who has been called the saint of ordinary life.

There Be Dragons is a drama which explores themes such as betrayal, forgiveness, friendship, and finding the meaning of life in everyday life. According to Joffé, they are "making a film about love, human love and divine love, about hate, about betrayal, about war, about mistakes, about everything it is to be a human being."[4]


Joffé, a self described "wobbly agnostic" who was nominated for the Academy Award for his film The Mission which deals with a Jesuit mission in South America, said that he is "very interested in the idea of embarking on a piece of work that took religion seriously on its own terms and didn't play a game where one approached religion denying its validity."[6]

"Reconciliation matters" is the main take away message that Joffe expects from the viewers. Life, he said, is an opportunity to love: "It’s a choice, and in making that decision you become free. You do not become free when you hate. The weird thing is when you really love, you feel it like a breath of freedom, you think ‘Oh my God, I’ve chosen this, and it’s beautiful’.”[7] He emphasized that Christianity is about love and the teaching of St. Josemaria "encourages a spiritual relationship with God in 'very simple things,' in cooking a meal, being with one’s family, or even having a fight."[7] Joffé states that this is “a film about what it means to be a saint in this day and age."[8]

Living History.

Interviews with highest ranking surviving SS officer.

Religious Identity and the Rise of National Socialism.


Pseudo-history is very popular these days. Pseudo-history is a species of pseudo-knowledge, i.e., things that everyone knows is true but which are not. Dan Brown has sold millions of copies of “The Da Vinci Code” by satisfying a pre-existing popular belief that original, pure Christianity was corrupted by Constantine as a cynical effort to shore up the faltering Roman Empire. Most Americans have no idea about the situation of Christianity prior to Constantine, but they do have a cultural sense that Constantine did something wrong in making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire and any story that fits that preconception gets fitted into the store of pseudo-knowledge that people carry around with them, such as the “pseudo-fact” that Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, which he never did. That honor would belong to Theodosius approximately 70 years after Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

Another area prone to pseudo-history involves the religious identity of the Nazis. There has been a constant drum-beat during the last fifty years that the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII, in particular, have some special relationship with or responsibility for Hitler and National Socialism. The New Atheist militant Christopher Hitchens, for example, makes it a point of explaining to audiences that Fascism was simply “right wing Catholicism” and that “Hitler was, of course, a Catholic.” Likewise, there has been a cottage industry of books that argue that Pius was “Hitler’s Pope” that cash in a meme which originated as part of a Communist disinformation campaign.

Pseudo-history is popular because it is easy. It appeals to the vanity of people who want to think they are smart by being told that they things they know only vaguely is right. It also appeals to the desire that people have for a simple story with a clear line between “right” and “wrong.” If we pin Fascism on Catholicism, we have a story that is easy to remember, and one which feels right to the American psyche, which has been nurtured on stories of Catholic conspiracies going back to the Jesuit infiltration of England under “Good Queen Bess.”

But this is a “comic book” version of history; the interesting, and educational bits are in the details, which is why we are fortunate to have several new books that look at the religious identity of the Nazis and which disclose the complex relationship of National Socialism to Christianity, and, more importantly, of modernity to Christianity. Moreover, these books take a largely independent look at the religious identity of National Socialism for two period of time and come to overlapping and compatible conclusions.

The first book I read was “The Holy Reich: Nazi Conception of Christianity, 1919- 1945” by Richard Steigman-Gall. Over the course of his work, Steigman-Gall shows the movement of National Socialism from an attempt to incorporate a form of Protestant Christianity into the National Socialist movement to a decision to abandon Protestantism and Christianity altogether. Steigman-Gall begins with a description of the religious identity of National Socialism that is compatible with a thread of German Protestantism, but a thread that ultimately can’t pull all of Protestantism into the National Socialist orbit.

Steigman-Gall’s methodology is to look exhaustively at the personalities and groups that provided the interface between the Nazis and Christianity. The names and acronyms fly fast and furious, which is why I eventually started a list of names and the page numbers of their appearance so that I could keep strait who the DC, DBG, BK were and what side they were on.

According to Steigman-Gall, the Nazis positioned themselves religiously under the rubric of “Positive Christianity.” Under Steigman-Gall’s description, “Positive Christianity” was a Protestant German project. The leaders of the attempt to unify the division of Germany into often antagonistic Catholic and Protestant “confessions” under the heading of “Positive Christianity” were themselves Protestants who did not find a conflict between their Christianity and their German nationalism. Catholic contribution to this movement is essentially missing in that Catholic members of the National Socialist party were either “nominal Catholics,” such as Hitler and Goebbels (See “The Holy Reich”, p. xv) or openly apostate, such as Himmler. The “Catholic” Himmler expressed his hatred of the temporal power of the Catholic Church and stated his belief that “to be Protestant was to be German and to be German was to be Protestant.” (Id., at p. 234 – 235.) Protestant Nazis were prone to “display far less anticlericalism toward their church than did Catholics who regarded their confession its temporal message as innately antithetical to their politics.” (Id., at p. 27, 125.) Herman Goring remained a practicing Lutheran throughout his Nazi career. (Id., at p. 120.)

Positive Christianity had its roots in a theological movement that identified the nation and the race – the Volk and the state – as God-ordained. This movement was called the “theology of the orders of Creation (“Schopfungsglaube”) and was advocated by influential Lutheran theologians. (The Holy Reich, p. 34 – 36.) The “orders of creation” theology was a reason that eventually there was no Protestant active protest against the euthanasia of the disabled, despite the fact that there was such an active protest by Catholic clerics. Another movement that suggested a possible marriage of National Socialism and Protestant Christianity was “liberal Christianity.” Liberal Protestant theologians, including Adolf von Harnack, engaged in a hostile anti-semitic rhetoric which reached the point of arguing for the removal of the Old Testament from the Christian canon. (Ironically, this position has also been expressed by the New Atheist debater Christopher Hitchens.) With such scholarly cover, Nazis eventually appropriated Christ as the original anti-semite and socialist by appealing to Christ’s scourging of the money-lenders from the Temple as the laudable original act of anti-semitism.

Throughout his book, Steigman-Gall points out the disparately unfavorable treatment of Catholicism as compared to Protestantism. For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler opined that Protestantism was a better defender of the “interests of Germanism” because of Protestantism’s roots in German nationalism. Hitler was willing to recognize Martin Luther as a “volkish hero equaled only by Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great.” (The Holy Reich, p. 63.) Hitler’s attitude toward Catholicism was more ambiguous, but many in the National Socialist movement unambiguously equated Catholicism with Judaism as a “supranational power” that the Nazis were fighting against. (Id. P. 64.) Hitler was recorded in private moments as expressing his belief that Catholic allegiance to Rome was inimical to the independence of true German character; Nazi leaders publically expressed their belief that “ultramontanism” – Catholic allegiance to an authority “over the mountains”, i.e., the Pope – was a threat to German national interests. (Id., at p. 65 – 66, 70.) As Nazi entrenchment in power continued after the so-called “Seizure of Power” (“machtergreifung”) in 1933, Nazi antipathy to the ultramontane nature of the Catholic Church became more open. ( Id., at 119.) In 1934, Catholic civil servants were expelled from the government. (Id., at p. 120.)

Nazis attempted to court Protestants into joining a “national church” which would become the “established church” of Germany. However, despite the willingness of Protestant churches to accept much of the Nazi program, many Protestants found that attempt by Nazi sympathizers in the “German Church” to remove the Old Testament was a “bridge to far.” This attempt led to the formation of the Pastor’s Emergency League by Wilhelm Niemoller and others. (The Holy Reich, p. 164.) The Pastors’ Emergency League eventually became the “Confessing Church”, which gradually took a more oppositional stance toward the Nazis. Eventually, Hitler gave up on the idea of integrating Protestantism into the Nazi state, although he expressed his disappointment to Niemoller by saying “inwardly stood closer to the Protestant Church” and that he had expected a different attitude from Protestant pastors than from Catholics. (Id., at p. 168.)

After the turn from Protestantism, Hitler and the National Socialists began a movement against Christianity. (The Holy Reich, p. 259.) The chief architect of this movement was Martin Borman. Under Bormann, there was a mass exodus of Nazis from the churches and expulsion of clergy – which meant Protestant clergy – from the Nazi party. (Id.) With respect to Hitler, Stegman-Gall concludes that “even though he never converted to paganism, Hitler nonetheless became increasingly opposed to Christian institutions, and on the face of it, to the Christian religion as well.” Interestingly, Stegman-Gall notes that Hitler never turned against “Jesus,” or at least his conception of Jesus as the “original anti-semite.” In this regard, Hitler remained to a form of liberal Christianity that permitted Christ to be removed from history.

The second book is chronologically prior to Stegman-Gall’s “The Holy Reich.” The book is “Catholicism and the Roots of Nazis: Religious Identity and National Socialism” by Derek Hastings. Hastings’ book covers the period prior to that covered by Stegman-Gall. Like Stegman-Gall’s approach, Hastings is an in-depth analysis of the personalities and movements that supported or gave rise to National Socialism.

Hastings covers the little known time period between approximately 1918 and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. According to Hastings, the National Socialist party during that time period was an essentially, and quintessentially, a movement that appealed to a particular strand of Catholicism found in Bavaria. That strand might be called “liberal Catholicism” or “reform Catholicism.” The essence of this form of Catholicism was “nationalistic and non-ultramontane.” In other words, it appealed to Catholics who wanted to minimize their allegiance to the Pope in Rome in favor of their German identity.

Bavaria had long had a tradition of anti-ultramontanism. German Catholic theologians such as Ignaz von Dollinger, who was excommunicated after Vatican I,” had urged German Catholics to shed the “yoke of ultramontanism.” (Catholicism and the Roots of the Nazis (“CRN”), p. 20 – 21.) Bavaria had a tradition of “political Catholicism” whereby various political parties sought to represent the interests of the Catholic Church. Countering such political Catholicism were anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane parties. The founding members of the National Socialist party came out of the anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane tradition.

After Hitler joined the National Socialist party, the membership expanded by appealing to this tradition and offering Catholics an opportunity to participate in a movement that seemed to combine patriotism with Catholic piety. The nascent National Socialist party wrapped itself up in the traditions of Catholicism, including having its members attend Mass in uniform and having Nazi standards blessed by Catholic priests. However, running through the early Catholic version of National Socialism was an opposition to “ultramontane internationalism” while maintaining “the purity of both their Catholic faith and their German nationality.” (CRN, p. 95.) In 1922, as part of this movement, Hitler gave a speech describing his own religious convictions at the time. Hitler offered his view of Jesus Christ as the original anti-semite who was a warrior when he “seized the whip to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and serpents.” (CRN, p. 103.) Hitler’s view was that Christ shed his blood on the cross as an act of anti-semitism. (Id.)

This phase of National Socialism ended with the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Prior to the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had formed an alliance with the virulently anti-Catholic former German General Erich Ludendorff. After his imprisonment for the failed putsch, Hitler repositioned the National Socialist party away from its Catholic roots in favor of a broader Protestant orientation. After this repositioning, many of the original Catholic supporters, including various priests who had provided some respectability to the movement, found themselves excluded from the National Socialist party, and the Catholics who remained either became nominal Catholics or fell into open apostasy.

These two books are useful for pointing out the salient fact that a political reality confronting German politicians was the confessional divide between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants comprised more than half of the German population; Catholics comprised around 30 to 40 per cent. These populations had a history of segregation and antagonism. Any German political leader who wanted to lead a mass movement had to find some way to negotiate this fact.

The religious twists and turns that Hitler made in his rise to the top demonstrate that Hitler’s religious commitment was ultimately to himself. Perhaps his phenomenal success derived from his unlikely position as leader of a minority position in a minority confession. Although there was a continuing strand of anti-papal, or ultramontane, Catholicism in Bavaria, the ultramontane was going to be necessarily the “orthodox” position in Catholic Bavaria. On the other hand, Bavarian Catholics also wanted to be good Germans as well as good Catholics, and a movement that promised both was going to be attractive. Moreover, as a minority position, Hitler wasn’t going to face the same level of competition he would have faced if he had been competing for leadership in a party that had a real shot at political power. It was Hitler’s good luck to find himself in a position where could exploit these factors into becoming the big nationalist fish in a Catholic ultramontane pond.

On the other hand, being the head of the largest Volkisch Catholic party in Bavaria was a lot like being the best hockey player in San Diego; there’s not a lot of competition, but not a lot of upward mobility either. Hitler had exploited the Catholic position as far as it could go in making the National Socialists one of the biggest regional Volksich parties in Germany, but if Hitler wanted to transition to the national scene, he couldn’t get there by identifying the Nazis as a Catholic party. His alliance with Ludendorff gave him the opportunity to reposition the Nazis as a national, non-confessional party.

However, this meant jettisoning the Catholic roots of the Nazis. It seems that it was obvious to Hitler that Catholicism was never going to provide a stable base for a nationalist party. Catholicism is inherently international because of its allegiance to a non-German entity. Protestantism, on the other hand, can be nationalistic in a way that Catholicism can never be. After 1923, Hitler and the Nazis made the shift by favoring Protestantism and becoming hostile to Catholicism.

Nonetheless, there are limits to the ability of Protestant Christianity to accommodate an alien program, and for German Protestants – committed as they were to sola scriptura – that limit would be reached when altering the Word of God was put on the table.

Through it all, it seems that Hitler viewed religious organizations as legitimate expressions of Christianity so long as they were willing to embrace his view of Christ as the warrior anti-semite. Ultimately, Christianity for Hitler was essentially a warrior, nationalistic anti-semitism.

Does this mean that Hitler was Christian? Hitler wasn’t Christian in any orthodox meaning of the word. At best, Hitler’s approach to Christianity was the same approach as that adopted by modern “liberal Christianity” we see too often today where a theologian or social critic finds an all-encompassing-theory-of-everything which he uses to interpret the world. If one sees the world through feminist lenses, one reads the bible and finds a feminist Christ. If one is a Marxist, one finds a Marxist Christ. If one has a theory of “queer politics,” one finds a “gay Christ.” Hitler was an anti-semite, so he found that the Jewish Jesus was an anti-semitic Christ.

To those "Spiritual but not religious" Christians...

...you are missing the point of Christianity according to Christopher Dawson's The Formation of Christendom:

Now there are those who reject this mingling of religion and history, or Christianity and culture, since they believe that religion is concerned with God rather than man, and with the absolute and eternal rather than the historical and the transitory. We certainly need to recognize how important this aspect of religion is and how man has a natural sense of divine transcendence. And we know from the history of religious thought that we do actually find religious men of this kind--men who seek to transcend human nature by the flight of the Alone to the Alone, in the words of the Neo-Platonist philosopher, and who find the essence of religion in the contemplation of pure being or of that which is beyond being.


But this is not Christianity. Although Christianity does not deny the religious value of contemplation or mystical experience, its essential nature is different, it is a religion of Revelation, Incarnation and Communion; a religion which unites the human and the divine and sees in history the manifestation of the divine purpose towards the human race.

It is impossible to understand Christianity without studying the history of Christianity. And this, as I see it, involves a good deal more than the study of ecclesiastical history in the traditional sense. It involves the study of two different processes which act simultaneously on mankind in the course of time. On the one hand, there is the process of culture formation and change which is the subject of anthropology, history and the allied disciplines; and on the other there is the process of revelation and the action of divine grace which has created a spiritual society and a sacred history, though it can be studied only as a part of theology and in theological terms.

Calvin and the Development of Freedom of Conscience.

The usual narrative is that Americans owe their ideas of Freedom of Conscience to their Protestant heritage.  I think that there is a great deal of truth to this, inasmuch as Freedom of Conscience seems to be an implicit value in democracy and grass-roots democracy was nurtured in many ways in the tradition of electing pastors and self-government in the congregational and presbyterian ecclesiastical systems.

But sometimes the case gets overstated.  The Protestant Reformation was not about a universalized right of the average person to Freedom of Conscience.  Rather, it was about the right of some people - Luther, Calvin, etc. - to their Freedom of Conscience, with everyone else going along for the ride.

This is a very interesting essay at Called to Communion by Dr. David Anders about how learning about John Calvin made the author Catholic.  Dr. Anders writes:

Calvin’s most important contribution to Geneva was the establishment of the Consistory – a sort of ecclesiastical court- to judge the moral and theological purity of his parishioners. He also persuaded the council to enforce a set of “Ecclesiastical Ordinances” that defined the authority of the Church, stated the religious obligations of the laity, and imposed an official liturgy. Church attendance was mandatory. Contradicting the ministers was outlawed as blasphemy. Calvin’s Institutes would eventually be declared official doctrine.


Calvin’s lifelong goal was to gain the right to excommunicate “unworthy” Church members. The city council finally granted this power in 1555 when French immigration and local scandal tipped the electorate in his favor. Calvin wielded it frequently. According to historian William Monter, one in fifteen citizens was summoned before the Consistory between 1559 and 1569, and up to one in twenty five was actually excommunicated.1 Calvin used this power to enforce his single vision of Christianity and to punish dissent.

And:

Calvin took very seriously the obligation of the laity to submit and obey. “Contradicting the ministers” was one of the most common reasons to be called before the Consistory and penalties could be severe. One image in particular sticks in my mind. April, 1546. Pierre Ameaux, a citizen of Geneva, was forced to crawl to the door of the Bishop’s residence, with his head uncovered and a torch in his hand. He begged the forgiveness of God, of the ministers and of the city council. His crime? He contradicted the preaching of Calvin. The council, at Calvin’s urging, had decreed Ameaux’s public humiliation as punishment.


Ameaux was not alone. Throughout the 1540s and 1550s, Geneva’s city council repeatedly outlawed speaking against the ministers or their theology. Furthermore, when Calvin gained the right to excommunicate, he did not hesitate to use it against this “blasphemy.” Evangelicals today, unaccustomed to the use of excommunication, may underestimate the severity of the penalty, but Calvin understood it in the most severe terms. He repeatedly taught that the excommunicated were “estranged from the Church, and thus, from Christ.”4

It wasn't burning at the stake, but, then, neither was the Roman Inquisition for the most part.

Mussolini Executed.

More historical newsreel material.

Consider the joy expressed by the narrator in describing the death of Mussolini and the end of his corrupt regime.

Could you imagine a newsman working up that kind of emotion over the death of Saddam Hussein.   Quite to the contrary as I recall.

It is good that American believe in forgiveness and don't take joy in the suffering of others, but there is a virtue in being properly angry at evil.  It is not as if liberals don't understand this.  The joy expressed by Rick Santorum's children crying after his loss certainly exceeded anything in this newsreel.

1945 - Japan Signs Unconditional Surrender

This is historically fascinating newsreel footage.

That Puzzling Erasmus.

Erasmus is invariably cited as someone with the opinion that the "deuterocanonical books" - i.e., the books that were contained in the Greek Septuagint, but not contained in the Hebrew canon formulated after the destruction of Jerusalem, such as Maccabees, Wisdom, Judith, Tobit, etc - were or should not be part of the Christian canon.

That statement has puzzled me ever since I read Erasmus' Diatribe on Free Will which was written to rebut Luther's doctrine of predestination. In the Diatribe, Erasmus offers as a "proof text" a quotation from Ecclesiasticus - one of the books subseqently removed from the canon by Luther. Erasmus has a throw-away line about how he assumes that Luther will accept Ecclesiasticus as authoritative because it has been recognized by the Church for so long. Luther, of course, does no such thing in his "On the Bondage of the Will, and his kerfuffle with Erasmus might be the point where his attitude to defining his own canon begins to really take shape. (OK, I'm really speculating about that idea.)

Erasmus wrote a rebuttal to "On the Bondage of the Will" called the Hyperaspistes. Although "On the Bondage of the Will" is considered to be one of Luther's three most important books, the Hyperaspistes gets very little notice. For example, it cannot be found on-line.

So, I ordered it.

On page 344 is this passage:

But when Luther says that he has a right to take exception to the authority of htis book, which goes under the title of Ecclesiasticus, because in the past it was not in the canon of the Jews, either he is inconsistent or he gives little credit to the authority of the Catholic church. For previously he had said that the book of Esther, which is in the canon of the Jews, is especially worthy of being removed from the canon; and here he attributes such great authority to their canon that he proclaims he is free to reject a book that the Catholic church accepts as a holy source of its public liturgy, often beginning mass with a text from this book instead of a psalm or taking something from it to be read as an Epistle. Even St. Augustine himself borrows weapons from this book to transfix heretics, and when they in turn aimed at him arguments from it, he does not have recourse to rejecting it but rather to interpreting it soundly.

It seems that Erasmus should not be cited as a reason for believing that the Old Testament canon was uncertain prior to Luther.

Ethnic Cleansing

Bosnia's Catholics Nearly Gone:

The Muslim population is growing in Bosnia to such an extent that Sarajevo is a "practically Muslim city," according to Cardinal Franc Rodé.

The prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life affirmed this when he spoke with Vatican Radio about his June 19-21 trip to the Balkans.

The prelate stated that Catholics were the main victims of the war and many fled the country, heading to Croatia or far-away nations like Australia, Canada and New Zealand. He explained that many had their houses burned and others fled for their lives. Many priests and religious were killed, and churches and monasteries destroyed.

"Numerically, they have diminished a lot," he said after his visit at the invitation of Cardinal Vinko Puljic. There are only 17,000 Catholics in Sarajevo, he noted, a city of 600,000. "In the Diocese of Banja Luka, before the war between 1991 and 1995, there were 150,000 Catholics; now there are only 35,000."

This is actually part of an ancient human phenomenon. According to Rodney Stark, whenever conflict flares up between two faiths, pressure increases against religious minorities, whether it is Jews in medieval Europe or Catholics in modern Bosnia, who are perceived as potential "fifth columnists."

Practical Time-travel

Go here and find the link to a recording of an English gas shell bombardment from October of 1918.

The story about the man who recorded it, Will Gaisberg, is fascinating.

Scholarly Malpractice

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on how the National Geographic's carefully selected team of Bible scholars managed to "screw the pootch" when it came time to translate and explain the Gospel of Judas.

As you recall, the Gospel of Judas was touted as a document that would cause Christians to radically change their understanding of Jesus, Judas and the teachings of Christianity. According to the National Geographic - in a television broadcast to millions - Judas had a most special relationship with Jesus and he didn't betray Jesus so much as carry out His command. We were told that if only this Gospel hadn't been suppressed by the Church (*boo, hiss*), Europe could have avoided the taint of anti-Semitism.

Well, apparently, not so much:

One of the seven million people who watched the National Geographic documentary was April D. DeConick. Admittedly, DeConick, a professor of biblical studies at Rice University, was not your average viewer. As a Coptologist, she had long been aware of the existence of the Gospel of Judas and was friends with several of those who had worked on the so-called dream team. It's fair to say she watched the documentary with special interest.

As soon as the show ended, she went to her computer and downloaded the English translation from the National Geographic Web site. Almost immediately she began to have concerns. From her reading, even in translation, it seemed obvious that Judas was not turning in Jesus as a friendly gesture, but rather sacrificing him to a demon god named Saklas. This alone would suggest, strongly, that Judas was not acting with Jesus' best interests in mind — which would undercut the thesis of the National Geographic team. She turned to her husband, Wade, and said: "Oh no. Something is really wrong."

Hmm...sacrificing Jesus to the demon god Saklas...that can't be good.

Although it kind of sounds important...at least if we want the real story instead of some wifty New Age indictment of the Church (*boo, hiss*).

Likewise:

She started the next day on her own translation of the Coptic transcription, also posted on the National Geographic Web site. That's when she came across what she considered a major, almost unbelievable error. It had to do with the translation of the word "daimon," which Jesus uses to address Judas. The National Geographic team translates this as "spirit," an unusual choice and inconsistent with translations of other early Christian texts, where it is usually rendered as "demon." In this passage, however, Jesus' calling Judas a demon would completely alter the meaning. "O 13th spirit, why do you try so hard?" becomes "O 13th demon, why do you try so hard?" A gentle inquiry turns into a vicious rebuke.

Then there's the number 13. The Gospel of Judas is thought to have been written by a sect of Gnostics known as Sethians, for whom the number 13 would indicate a realm ruled by the demon Ialdabaoth. Calling someone a demon from the 13th realm would not be a compliment. In another passage, the National Geographic translation says that Judas "would ascend to the holy generation." But DeConick says it's clear from the transcription that a negative has been left out and that Judas will not ascend to the holy generation (this error has been corrected in the second edition). DeConick also objected to a phrase that says Judas has been "set apart for the holy generation." She argues it should be translated "set apart from the holy generation" — again, the opposite meaning. In the later critical edition, the National Geographic translators offer both as legitimate possibilities.

Judas is a demon???? He won't ascend to the holy generation????

Hey, that's not very flattering.

And it doesn't sound like much of an antidote to anti-Semitism, which makes sense because the Gnostics were deeply anti-Semitic, which is something known to amateurs like myself.

The essay offers an explanation for this screw-up:

For example, in the documentary, there is a scene in which Meyer is standing in a burial cave in Egypt, explaining the likely story of how the codex was found. The director, according to Meyer, wanted him to say that that very cave was the cave where the codex was found. But, of course, no one knows that, and there are a lot of burial caves in Egypt. In the end, Meyer says on camera that it was probably found in a cave like the one he's standing in. The pressure to sacrifice truth for drama, he says, was constant.

I think that there was "pressure" to "sacrifice truth for drama" is a partial explanation, but hardly gets us back to a first cause. Why, after all, is it dramatic to present a picture of the Gospel of Judas that was so diametrically opposed to orthodox Christianity? Couldn't it have been equally dramatic to confirm Christian orthodoxy?

Well, no, because there is drama and then there is drama.

The nice thing is that this episode helps to separate the sheep from the goats. Unfortunately, one of the goats appears to be Bart Ehrman, whose lectures and early books I thought were basically objective scholarship, but over time I have come to doubt as being dependable [Fn.1]:

In the second edition of National Geographic's Judas book, Meyer tries out a new argument to counter those who have attacked his translation and interpretation. His defense centers on the meanings of "13th aeon," which refers to an eternal realm, and "daimon." A later Gnostic text, called Pistis Sofia, uses some of the same language, and the character of Sofia is neither wholly evil nor wholly good. He posits a connection between the character of Sofia and the character of Judas. Ehrman, in a footnote to his own essay, asserts that Meyer "has effectively refuted" the thesis of DeConick's book.

It's tough to find anyone else who agrees. In an essay presented at the Rice conference, John D. Turner, a professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, insists that Meyer's use of a much later text to justify his interpretation of Judas "raises fundamental methodological questions." In an interview, he is less courtly. "That's a bunch of crap," he says, part of last-ditch attempt to salvage an utterly discredited view.

My intuition - from working with experts - is that the main translator, Marvin Meyers, succumbed to pressure from National Geographic to come up with the "right kind" of drama, and he made the very human decision to favor on a case by case basis a particular interpretation that might be arguable and satisfied his employer, but in the end was fundamentally askew.

That kind of thing is not unheard of when it comes to expert witnesses.

_________
1. A case in point is Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus." Ehrman makes some superficially startling claims - such as that there are more translation "errors" in the Bible than the number of words in the Bible, but this claim turn out to be "immaterial" for the most part. For example, Ehrman concedes that most of the translation errors - something like 90%+ are the putting the words in a different order, but word order does not change the meaning of a sentence in an inflected language like Greek and unlike English, something which most English speakers might not be aware of.

Likewise, the more substantial differences in meanings found in different textual versions, end up making no real difference in Christian theology.

Finally, Ehrman claims that the pericope of the Woman taken in Adultery was unknown until the "Middle Ages", but this is clearly wrong since Eusebius writing circa 350 knows about the story. (Perhaps Ehrman includes the 4th Century in the "Middle Ages"?)

I can understand that these differences might seem significant and faith-shattering to a former fundamentalist whose faith is underpinned by trust in the inerrant written text. But I have only a finite amount of time to spend on reading, and I can't afford to spend on writers who seem to be willing to abuse the trust I place in them when I invest my time - and, to a lesser extent, money - in their book.