Saturday, April 20, AD 2024 12:47am

Other Than That Whole Killing a Hundred Million People Thing, Communism in Europe Had Its Points

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Kurt Cardinal Koch puts hoof in mouth:

 

 

The end of communist rule in Europe, which began 25 years ago this month, was not all positive for Christianity because it brought tensions between Rome and Russia back to the surface, a senior Vatican official said on Monday.

Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Roman Catholic official for inter-church relations, said the re-emergence of Eastern Catholic churches in Ukraine and Romania after decades of suppression had created major tensions with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian Orthodox leaders have accused the Vatican-aligned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of trying to take back churches and woo away believers from the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate. The Ukrainian church and the Vatican deny this.

Moscow prelates cite this as a hurdle to closer ties between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church, which for decades prayed for the conversion of the Soviet Union only to see the newly resurgent Russian Orthodox Church become a difficult partner.

“The changes in 1989 were not advantageous for ecumenical relations,” Koch told Vatican Radio. “The Eastern Catholic churches banned by Stalin re-emerged, especially in Ukraine and Romania, and from the Orthodox came the old accusation about Uniate churches and proselytism.”

 

Go here to read the rest.  I think this is bizarre.  Ecumenicalism is more important than the ending of a tyranny that prevented Catholics from worshiping as they pleased?  I am beginning to believe that getting a red hat can be detrimental to the mental health of some of the recipients.  At best the statement of Koch was fuzzy;  at worst it betrays a mindset that ill serves the Church.

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Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 8:05am

Seems fitting here to post this image.

And this article (which I think I had sent to Don) which, combined with this note, strengthens my belief that christianity has been more severely infected than we first thought.

Stephen E. Dalton
Stephen E. Dalton
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 8:10am

The ROC is a state controlled institution. Most of it’s top clergy are doubling as KGB/FSB agents. If the Catholic Church is going to cozy up to the ROC, we have better take this into account.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 8:13am

Christopher Ferrara in The Great Façade and various writers in The Latin Mass have been building a case that oecumenism has had a malignant effect on the life of the Church. This statement would be an example.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 8:31am

“the Catholic Church, which for decades prayed for the conversion of the Soviet Union.”

As I recall, the Loonine Prayers were for the conversion of Russia, not the Soviet Union. That, too, was a bone of contention, especially with the russian Orthodox Church in Exile

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 8:34am

Communism is another name for atheism. One cannot serve two masters as Koch is pretending to do. Sympathizing with atheism is hardly the way of Catholicism, and reason enough to return the red hat.
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Communism operates by causing chaos and war between peoples and nations, between the Eastern Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox congregations…God is not allowed to be a party member. Communism incites and injects problems where there is no problem. It is interesting to note that communism rejects God. Communism creates war.
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Communism regards the party, the state, as the only participant in the life of the nation. The individual person has no civil, moral or natural right to be, to exist as an individual person outside of “the party”. In communism, there is no acknowledgement of the Sovereign Persons of God and, therefore, there is no acknowledgement of the individual sovereign person composed of human body and soul created by God.
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The rational soul ensouled at fertilization of the newly begotten human person makes man unique in creation. Man can reason. Man has intellect. Man can name creation. Man “knows” and acknowledges others. Man can procreate, invent and love. Man can worship and acknowledge God in thought, word and deed, enumerated in our First Amendment as freedom of religion, speech, press and peaceable assembly.
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The human being is endowed with unalienable rights and according to the Ninth Amendment, human rights not enumerated in the U. S. Constitution.
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Sovereign personhood, legal and moral innocence , free will, conscience and the freedom to give informed consent upon which is based the whole of mankind in procreating, commerce and in constituting the government.

Tito Edwards
Admin
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 10:21am

It’s beginning to look that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is the anomaly amongst German prelates. As one cardinal said about the German cardinals, ‘they’re off their rocker!’

Jay Anderson
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 11:01am

Finally. Someone named “Koch” that the left can fall in love with.

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 11:41am

Look at what is happening here. Two institutions fighting over membership as though their members had no say in their choice to become members, no rational soul nor intellect, as though their members had no right to choose to belong , as though their members had no informed consent, as though their members were to be herded like beasts of burden.
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Denying individual human rights and bringing chaos into the world. This is pure communism.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 5:54pm

I have never heard of Cardinal Koch. I wish I still had not heard of him.

At times I am amazed at the gross stupidity of some Catholic clergy. I’m 51 and should not be so amazed at it anymore, but still it is amazing to hear such things. One of the things I have read about the Second Vatican Council is that the Church decided/agreed/was coerced into not being vocally anti-Communist (kind of like the drippy comment about Muslims made to pacify the Melkite Catholic Church).

Communists in Spain, the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, Communist China, Vietnam and Cuba confiscated Church property, imprisoned, tortured and murdered Catholic clergy, religious and lay faithful, restricted or suppressed worship and are otherwise guilty of numerous crimes against humanity…..and this German idiot bemoans the existence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church as an impediment to relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Vatican is filled with a bunch of wimps with spines of overcooked spaghetti when it comes to dealing with Islam, Communism, ecumenism, socialism, atheism, abortion, homosexuality…almost everything plaguing the world. Only those nasty, mean Traditionalists get threats of excommunication. Cardinal Koch makes the SSPX look like the real Church and whatever Koch is in looks like the Anglican
Communion.

The Holy See should tell the ROC to shut up about the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Stalin sought to exterminate the UGCC and only through the determination and faith of the Ukrainian Catholics has it been reborn in Ukraine today.

Barbara Gordon
Barbara Gordon
Tuesday, November 18, AD 2014 9:36pm

“At times I am amazed at the gross stupidity of some Catholic clergy.”

As US Representative Trey Gowdy, a Republican from South Carolina, once said of former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s comments–they are “mind numbingly stupid.”

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Wednesday, November 19, AD 2014 3:45am

“At times I am amazed at the gross stupidity of some Catholic clergy.”

Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Looking back on my own (distant) schooldays at a Catholic boarding school, the brighter boys were crammed for careers in medicine, law or teaching; the dullards, if they were athletic, went into the army and, if not, they usually discovered a vocation.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, November 19, AD 2014 7:32am

This is one Koch that lying liberal sacs of excrement don’t hate.
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The holocaust within the Spanish Civil War has been denied far too long. Almost no American knows that during the 1930’s Spanish “Civil” War the “republicans” massacred tens of thousands of Roman Catholic religious and lay people. For decades, the MSM, publishers, and the academy have viciously sold the lie that Franco and his government (World War II neutrals) were merely fascists. The MSM, et al, egregiously deny the mass murders of Spanish Catholic religious and lay persons committed by Soviet-led Spanish and international brigands such as Hemingway, Robeson and the so-called Abraham Lincoln brigade.

Clinton
Clinton
Wednesday, November 19, AD 2014 9:14am

Fortunately for Cardinal Koch, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty could not be
reached for comment…

Pinky
Pinky
Wednesday, November 19, AD 2014 2:03pm

It seems to me that his statement was correct. It’s not the whole picture, but it wasn’t meant to be. A lead salesman can point out that his business was hurt by lead paint regulation, and that wouldn’t mean he’s in favor of lead poisoning. (Not the greatest example, but you know what I mean.) There’s no doubt that the reconversion of the FSU has been rocky, partly due to the bad relationship between the Orthodox and Catholic.

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