Papal Fallibility

A Nazi asks for forgiveness.

From Hitler Youth to the Vatican

The visit, by the German-born pope, who was unwillingly enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager and later drafted into the German army, is fraught with significance for Catholic-Jewish relations.

Willing or unwilling it matters not He WAS a Nazi. Nazi Youth Ceremonies

God is Dead. Gott ist tot

Pope asks why God was silent at Auschwitz "The place where we are standing is a place of memory and at the same time, it is the place of the Shoah," he said. "In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God -- Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?""Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?"

Because the personal diety is dead. The pope has now admited to being fallible, to not having the ear of God. Or that God has no ears to hear the cries, pleas or prayers. As the great American shamanic poet Jim Morrison said; "You Cannot Petition The Lord With Prayer". And science has proved it.And now the Pope admits it.

The Soft Parade
When I was back there in seminary school There was a person there Who put forth the proposition That you can petition the Lord with prayer Petition the lord with prayer Petition the lord with prayer You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

If diety is distant, omniscient, omnipresent yet not here and now, then Gott ist Not.

Friedrich Nietzsche is notable for having declared that God is dead and for having written several of his works in the presumption that man must find a new mode of being given the demise of God. Perhaps the most interesting quote on this theme appears in his The Gay Science (aka Joyous Wisdom).

"Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him
- you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were
we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its
sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from
all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward,
in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying
as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty
space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming
on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not
hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying
God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too
decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How
shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which
was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed
has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?
With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of
atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the
greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become
gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed;
and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he
shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

Is God Still Dead? by Claire Berlinski- Policy Review, No. 129

theism, as theologian Alister McGrath understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and political history and may be mapped to particular historic events — the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint. The political and cultural institutions associated with it having come now to be objects of general revulsion, so too may atheism itself be observed in its twilight; thus the title of McGrath’s book, an allusion and rebuke to Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche’s “grand declaration of war” on religious faith.

McGrath locates the sources of the movement in the challenge posed by Revolutionary France to the Catholic Church and the rotten Bourbon monarchy, institutions viewed by many of that era as inseparable. Before the late eighteenth century there were almost no atheists in Europe. While the Revolution itself was swiftly followed by the restoration of Catholicism, the minds of alienated European intellectuals continued to roil: “Seeds were planted, mental horizons were expanded, and hopes for change ignited.” Thereafter, the giants of atheism emerged — Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. This was not because the existence of God was specifically disproved in the late eighteenth century; nor did any scientific or philosophic innovation of the era suggest anything like a comprehensive answer to the questions posed by religious inquiry. The rise of atheism, McGrath concludes, was above all a response to political events.

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