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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (2482)	10/25/2000 12:28:44 AM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

I quoted, as I said, an article in the March, 1997 issue of Freethought Today titled Religion and the Holocaust. It says, The Catholic church was willingly blackmailed by Nazi Germany in the Concordat of 1933. In the document signed by the Pope and Hitler, the church agreed not to interfere with the state as long as the state collected a religious tax from all church memebers. This tax remains in effect today. [that was 1997 -- E] It is 9 percent of the base income. I put Concordat of 1933 into Google, and found a lot of material, which I won't comb. I'll bet a law library would have the actual text of the Concordat itself, though. That would specifically mention the religious tax collection arrangement. So would a German tax code. That is surely something one could find the detail of on the net. What would it mean to you, I wonder, if it is exactly as stated above? Here's an article from the Atlantic: theatlantic.com Oh, look, I found the Freethought article. I could have pasted instead of typing!: ffrf.org This appears to be the most subtle, interesting piece, though it's short, only a review of a book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell . I will print it out and read it when I can: thewag.net Oh, I found a Lutheran site that also discusses the above book. It mentions another Concordat: The Reich Concordat of 1933, agreed to by Pacelli and Hitler, was another quid pro quo agreement in which each man received something of what he wanted. The Roman Catholic Church received the German state’s permission to govern its internal affairs on its own terms; and Hitler obtained the disestablishment of the Catholic Center Party (the Roman Catholic political party in Germany), the withdrawal of the Roman Catholic Church from political activity, and ostensible moral sanction of his program. Another remark from this site about Pacelli (who became Pius XII): Although Pius XI made attempts to publicly condemn the Nazi persecution of the Jews in the late 1930s, Pacelli, in his powerful position as the Vatican secretary of state, consistently undermined him. goodshepherd-lutheran.org