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The New Popeby Miriam Ben-Yaacov Bad News for Israel? |
On April 19, 2005 the identity of the new pope was announced to the rld--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He is known to the world as Pope Benedict XVI. But who is this man, and what was his claim to fame before this?
Cardinal Ratzinger, very close to the former pope, was the head of two powerful Catholic bodies: The Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, consisting of a dozen or more cardinals, was created in 1902 by Pope Leo XIII to monitor and supervise Catholic scriptural scholarship. It was their responsibility was to safeguard interpretation of scriptures in accordance with Church doctrine. According to the authors of “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception,” from 1956 every director of the Ecole Biblique has been a member of this Commission. Therefore, any conclusions reached in their research on the Dead Sea Scrolls are subject to the Commission’s scrutiny. The executive head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was known in earlier times as the Grand Inquisitor. Historically, this was the office responsible for defending the Faith against heresy. The first General Inquisitor was Thomas de Torquemada, famous for his role in the Spanish Inquisition after Queen Isabella requested that the Church purify Spain of heretics. While this scrutiny was aimed at anyone, it was particularly aimed at those suspected of “Judaising.” An estimated 200,000 Spanish Jews fled the country in the expulsion of 1492. Others were forced to convert or die. Even after converting, there was an unshakable suspicion that sent many to torture and/or death.
That dark period began in Spain in 1478 and was not officially ended until 1808! During that period of over than three hundred years, more than 300,000 died at the stake in what was then known as the auto de fe (act of faith). It is interesting to note that Hitler studied documents on the Spanish Inquisition before implementing the Holocaust. Like the Inquisition of the past, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is a tribunal with its own judges. They mainly investigate charges of breaches of doctrine among the clerics in their function to preserve the unity of the Faith. On June 27, 1971, Pope Paul VI decided to consolidate the two offices, which overlapped each other in many respects anyway, under the directorship of one cardinal. Joseph Ratzinger became that cardinal on November 29, 1981. According to a commentator quoted in “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception,” Ratzinger’s agenda would be “a return to Catholic fundamentalism and reasserting the literal truth of papally-defined dogma.”
The new Catechism, proclaiming the “Universal Authority of the Catholic Church,” declares that “the task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of G--d…has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone.” Any dissent is categorized as sin. The disturbed concern of the authors of “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception” is that this attitude flows over to the Ecole Biblique’s work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, treating them in the same manner as Catholic articles of faith. “…if Cardinal Ratzinger has his way, everything we ever lean about the Qumran texts will be subject to the censorship machinery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—will be, in effect, filtered and edited for us by the Inquisition.” Now the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the first Germanic pope in nearly 1000 years, is Pope Benedict XVI.
Cardinal Ratzinger, very close to the former pope, was the head of two powerful Catholic bodies: The Pontifical Biblical Commission and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, consisting of a dozen or more cardinals, was created in 1902 by Pope Leo XIII to monitor and supervise Catholic scriptural scholarship. It was their responsibility was to safeguard interpretation of scriptures in accordance with Church doctrine. According to the authors of “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception,” from 1956 every director of the Ecole Biblique has been a member of this Commission. Therefore, any conclusions reached in their research on the Dead Sea Scrolls are subject to the Commission’s scrutiny. The executive head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was known in earlier times as the Grand Inquisitor. Historically, this was the office responsible for defending the Faith against heresy. The first General Inquisitor was Thomas de Torquemada, famous for his role in the Spanish Inquisition after Queen Isabella requested that the Church purify Spain of heretics. While this scrutiny was aimed at anyone, it was particularly aimed at those suspected of “Judaising.” An estimated 200,000 Spanish Jews fled the country in the expulsion of 1492. Others were forced to convert or die. Even after converting, there was an unshakable suspicion that sent many to torture and/or death.
That dark period began in Spain in 1478 and was not officially ended until 1808! During that period of over than three hundred years, more than 300,000 died at the stake in what was then known as the auto de fe (act of faith). It is interesting to note that Hitler studied documents on the Spanish Inquisition before implementing the Holocaust. Like the Inquisition of the past, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is a tribunal with its own judges. They mainly investigate charges of breaches of doctrine among the clerics in their function to preserve the unity of the Faith. On June 27, 1971, Pope Paul VI decided to consolidate the two offices, which overlapped each other in many respects anyway, under the directorship of one cardinal. Joseph Ratzinger became that cardinal on November 29, 1981. According to a commentator quoted in “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception,” Ratzinger’s agenda would be “a return to Catholic fundamentalism and reasserting the literal truth of papally-defined dogma.”
The new Catechism, proclaiming the “Universal Authority of the Catholic Church,” declares that “the task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of G--d…has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone.” Any dissent is categorized as sin. The disturbed concern of the authors of “The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception” is that this attitude flows over to the Ecole Biblique’s work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, treating them in the same manner as Catholic articles of faith. “…if Cardinal Ratzinger has his way, everything we ever lean about the Qumran texts will be subject to the censorship machinery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—will be, in effect, filtered and edited for us by the Inquisition.” Now the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the first Germanic pope in nearly 1000 years, is Pope Benedict XVI.