JTF has many great Catholic members, and we have always supported the concept of Jews and Catholics working together against our common Islamic enemy.
However, that does not mean that Jews should ignore or forget the long history of Vatican anti-Semitism.
While Hitler and the Nazis were murdering 6 million innocent Jews, the Vatican had full diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany throughout the holocaust. This is the same Vatican that refused to establish diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1990s. In other words, Hitler's Germany was acceptable, but the Jewish survivors of Hitler's Germany in Israel were not.
Many of the Nazi mass murderers were Catholics - Germany was one third Catholic, Austria was 95% Catholic, Poland was 90% Catholic. Every Sunday, Catholic priests would come to Auschwitz and the other death camps to perform mass for the Catholic concentration camp guards who were shoving Jewish babies into ovens. While the ovens were burning Jews alive in the background, the priests were performing mass.
When a Catholic is born, he is supposed to be baptised. The Church then sends the name of the baptised baby to Rome to be placed in the Vatican's baptismal records. A baptised Catholic remains a Catholic all of his life unless he is excommunicated by the Church. If he is excommunicated, his record is removed from the baptismal list in Rome. Many times in history, the Catholic Church excommunicated Catholics for disagreeing with some aspect of Church doctrine or policy.
But one baptised Catholic, Adolf Hitler, was never excommunicated by the church. To this day, his name remains in the baptismal records as a full member of the Church.
In fact, not a single Nazi mass murderer or war criminal was ever excommunicated by the Catholic Church. The murderers of 6 million Jews all remain full members of the church in the Roman baptismal records.
This is just a little of the history of the Church in regard to the holocaust. The Church also shielded thousands of Nazi war criminals after the holocaust.
I am not even going to go into the history of the crusades, the inquisitions and the pogroms which were ordered by the Vatican. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered with a brutality that defies human imagination.
Now this same Vatican has the gall to give moral lectures to Israel about how to treat the Arab Muslim Nazis who surround the tiny Jewish state. The Vatican demands that Israel surrender everything, including her capital city of Jerusalem.
I am a strong advocate of Jews, Catholics, evangelical Christians, Orthodox, Hindus, Buddhists and all decent human beings working together to make this a better world. That means working against Islamic jihad and also against the self-hating leftists in Western countries.
But given the history of what the Vatican has done to my people, and continues to try to do, I cannot support the Pope visiting the Land of Israel.
Now that our members have expressed their views on this subject, I think we can close this thread.