Jack is back!

A priest in Tennessee has discovered Jack Chick tracts:

Father Jay Flaherty, of Holy Cross Catholic Church, said he first learned about the pamphlets when one of his youth brought one to him.

"There's two of them that really upset me because I knew it would upset the children," Father Flaherty said. "One's called the 'Death Cookie,' which claims that our communion is from the devil."

The other pamphlet, titled "Last Rites," shows cartoon drawings of a Roman Catholic man who isn't saved because he didn't accept Christ.

I think Fr. Flaherty goes just a wee bit overboard later in the article in suggesting that distributing Chick tracts might lead to another Columbine. His bishop makes a much better statement:

In a statement release Friday by the Diocese of Knoxville, Bishop Richard F. Stika called the pamphlets "reprehensible acts of prejudice and hatred of a few souls."

"The rationale one Baptist pastor gave in support of distributing these reprehensible, discriminatory, and bigoted tracts was that he was trying to point out the primary difference his church has with Catholics: the belief that a person does not and cannot work his or her way to salvation," Bishop Stika said in the statement. "Unfortunately, this pastor does not have a correct understanding of what the Catholic faith teaches in this regard."

New info--

I found another news article which gives more information about the situation. I hadn't realized these pamphlets had been passed out at a local public high school. I think the article indicates that it was students from this Baptist church passing them out. Some choice quotes from the article.

Despite admitting he knew little about the Catholic Faith, Conner Heighs Baptist Pastor Jonathan Hatcher felt confident that publisher Chick Publications was spreading the gospel . . .

Pastor Hatcher says he's not trying to target Catholics specifically, just the belief that the eucharist will save one's soul.

In fact, he says he doesn't even really know much about the Catholic faith.

"I'm obviously not schooled in the Catholic religion, I've not read the Catholic canons. I study the King James Bible and that's what I preach from, what I study from," Pastor Hatcher said.

When asked if he's concerned about passing out literature targetting a religion about which he admits he doesn't know much, Pastor Hatcher says he trusts the publishers of the material.

"The people who distribute these tracts, or put them on the market, say they are schooled in it," Pastor Hatcher said. "Our goal is not to spread not to start violence, not to spread hatred, but to share the Gospel."

Yes, let us trust Jack Chick on the subject of Catholicism.

The Islam/Catholic Connection

While Candy seems quite addicted to YouTube, I admit that I skip over the videos that she posts. I stay busy, and I can't sit and watch TV on the computer for an hour simply to point out flaws in the video.

Candy says that the videos point out the connection between Catholicism and Islam. While I can't respond to whatever evidence the videos allegedly provide because I didn't watch them, I can point you to what we have already written. I assume that the videos are related to the claim of Jack Chick that the Catholic Church founded Islam as a way of drawing more Christians to Satan.

For more information see our previous entry on Jack Chick.

Catholic Atrocities

Many people accuse the Catholic Church of countless atrocities. There were the inquisitions, the Crusades, we killed Jews, we killed protestants. Some claim that Catholics are only enjoying their newfound acceptance by other Christians, and will soon rise up again to kill more multitudes.

Many of these accusations come from Jack Chick and Dave Hunt. Click on their names to learn the false nature of their claims.

What you must remember, is that the Catholic Church has been around for 2000 years. During much of that time, killing someone who disagreed with you theologically was perfectly acceptable. This was not contained to Catholicism. Let me provide some examples:

• The followers of John Hus, known as the Hussites, were quite a force in their day.As Zwingli spread protestantism in Switzerland, protestant forces declared war on the Catholic cantons.

• The factions of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli all killed Anabaptists.

• Saintly Queen Elizabeth killed Catholics for not converting to Anglicanism.

• Witch trials encompassed all forms of Christianity, in Europe and America. Lutheran Germany had the highest execution rate.

• The Thirty Years War, one of the bloodiest in Europe, was primary one of religion. It began when Calvinists threw two Catholic members of the Bohemian royal council from a window.

• The Know-Nothings incited riots which were responsible for a number of church burnings, the burning of an Ursaline convent, and the death of dozens of Catholics.

At the same time, modern scholarship is uncovering how much of the Catholic "atrocities" in history were based on anti-Catholic bias. Read the truth about the Spanish Inquisition.

Philip Jenkins, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University (non-Catholic), writes in his book, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice:

"There never was such a thing as a Church-wide inquisition, a terrifying monolith comparable to the NKVD or the Gestapo. It is more accurate to think of inquisitions that operated extensively in some areas in a highly decentralized way, although they notionally acted under papal authority. Inquisitions were important at certain times and places but never existed in other areas."

"The main problem about speaking of 'the Inquisition' is that it suggests that religious repression of this sort was a Catholic prerogative. In fact, before the Enlightenment, virtually all religious traditions on occasion acted similarly when they had the power to do so..This indictment of religious savagery and intolerance applies to.all the Protestant nations, even relatively liberal ones such as England and the Netherlands..Equally blameworthy would be Muslims, Hindus, and even Buddhists. After all, in the seventeenth century, when Catholic inquisitions were at their height, the Buddhist/Shinto nation of Japan was engaged in a ferocious attempt to stamp out the deviant faith of Christianity through torture and massacre. In just forty years, these Japanese religious persecutions killed far more victims than the Spanish Inquisition would in all the centuries of its existence."

You can easily find similar information about the Crusades and Catholic involvement, or lack of it, in World War II.

While it turns my stomach to quote it, here is what Candy wrote in a recent comment:

This makes this quite an enigma, then doesn't it? Why would someone claiming to be Christian, defend a cult that has killed MILLIONS of Christians? A cult that still says in their cannon that anyone who believes they are saved by Christ alone are anethama?

Why would you stand up for a church that in the 1940s had it's priests in Serbia take off their preist garb, and TORTURE millions of those people to death, because they were protestant. They were sick! They ripped babies from their mother's wombs while making the fathers watch. They cut nursing women's breasts off. They made keepsake necklaces out of human eyeballs, they peeled people's skin OFF. They collected human heads that they had decaptiated. They smiled for photos while they were chopping off heads.

They waved the protestant's head in the air in victory and smiled for more pictures.

Look back through history - the REAL history, not the revised history... You'll see that each time the Roman Catholic church started being ecumenical and nice nice to Christians, it was up until the large number of Christians trusted Roman Catholics, and then the slaughter began. If you didn't convert, you were tortured to death. Why torture? Because their cannon teaches that the more pain a person suffers before dying, the less time they'll have to spend in "purgatory." :-( Those priests tortured people to death out of love??? :-(

Look back in Ireland and France. The Catholics made nice nice with the protestants, and then they went in for the KILL.

After a bit of research, I found that Candy is probably referring to a Croatian death camp called Jasenovac. You can read more about it here:

From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed there range from 300,000 to 700,000. And yet, despite the scale of the crimes committed there, most of the world has never heard of Jasenovac.

Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by Nazism and extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On coming to power, the Ustashe Party dictatorship in Croatia quickly commenced on a systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Romas living within its borders.

I suppose one might as easily point a finger at the Nazis, which were based in Lutheran Germany, and killed many, many Catholics. Dachau had a special "priest block" which held over 2500 Catholic priests. Clearly, Jasenovac was not targeted at just protestants, as Jews and Gypsies (or Roma) were killed as well.

While Catholicism is mixed in with the atrocities in Croatia, it is not the cause. The constant struggles between Croatia and Serbia are ethnic in origin, and have been in existence for centuries. If they all became born-again fundamentalists tomorrow, I think that they would still try to kill each other, because their deep-rooted hated means more to them than their religion.

As I have written before, violence in the name of religion is not restrained to Catholicism. Even protestants have, on occasion, persecuted and killed Catholics in the name of religion.

I find this one of Candy's more disturbing posts. It is very sad that she feels that one day, all Catholics will rise up and torture all non-Catholics to death. No wonder she feels we are Satanic. Truly, the church which she describes IS a Satanic one. However, it is not the Catholic Church.

Read a follow-up to this post, Non-Atrocious Catholics.

If you are new to our website, you can find links to some of our other posts about Catholicism here.

Jack Chick Collection

Although we never heard much about Dave Hunt, in the end, I see that Candy is now reading Smokescreens by Jack Chick. I thought I'd put up some Jack Chick links for reference.

Catholic Answers has an extremely in depth, six part article on Jack Chick publications.

Another article about Pius XII touches on Smokescreens specifically:

Jack Chick, infamous for his anti-Catholic comic books, tells us in Smokescreens, "When World War II ended, the Vatican had egg all over its face. Pope Pius XII, after building the Nazi war machine, saw Hitler losing his battle against Russia, and he immediately jumped to the other side when he saw the handwriting on the wall. . . . Pope Pius XII should have stood before the judges in Nuremberg. His war crimes were worthy of death."^[2]

One is tempted simply to dismiss these accusations, so wildly out of touch with reality, as the deluded ravings of persons with no sense of historical truth. This would underestimate the power of such erroneous charges to influence people: Many take these writers at their word.

Stepping out of the nightmare fantasyland of Hunt and Chick and back into sunlight of the real world, we discover that, not only was Pius XII no friend of the Nazis, but that his opposition to them began years before the War, before he was elected to the papacy, when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State.

Articles from non-Catholic publications Cornerstone and Christianity Today are available here.

Is Alberto's story true? No! Our intensive investigation reveals his police record, his investment schemes, his bad check-writing, his contradictory testimony, his fabricated educational record, and his reported family abuse . . . Alberto Rivera, also known as Alberto Romero, has a history of legal entanglements. He is currently involved in a court action in Southern California, accused of fraud.

Jack T. Chick has issued a three-page reply to Gary Metz's expose of Alberto Rivera . . . In his letter of March 25, 1981, co-signed by Rivera, Chick alleges that 'the systematic destruction of John Todd's ministry' is being repeated by the Vatican to destroy Alberto. (Todd claimed to have been one of the leaders of an international conspiracy of witches to set up Jimmy Carter as the Antichrist; Chick promoted Todd's story in earlier comic books.) Chick accuses Christianity Today and Cornerstone, both of whom ran exposes on John Todd, of furthering the cause of the 'antichrist in the Vatican.'

A typical example of Chick's defense of Alberto: the evidence for Alberto's degrees disappeared because the Vatican 'erased Dr. Rivera's name from all directories in schools, seminaries, and colleges'; Rivera's former associates and acquaintances contradict his story because they are Vatican spies; the women he was involved with were from 'the Legion of Mary or Catholic Youth.' So with the magic wand of Vatican conspiracy, Rivera is exonerated from any evidence that can possibly be adduced against him.

We feel that if Jack Chick really has a burden for Catholics, he needs to steer clear of fabrications and find a more reliable source of information.

Another non-Catholic organization, the Christian Research Institute weighs in on whether or not Catholicism is a cult. Jack Chick merits a mention, although more space is given to Dave Hunt.

Even with the significant areas of doctrinal agreement between Catholics and Protestants (see Part One), a notable number of Protestant fundamentalists insist that Catholicism is an anti-Christian cult. Organizations and individuals (some of them quite popular) who classify Catholicism as a cult include: Chick Publications, Alberto Rivera's Anti-Christ Information Center, Tony Alamo's Christian Foundation, Bill Jackson's Christians Evangelizing Catholics, Albert James Dager's Media Spotlight, and Dave Hunt's The Berean Call. (This is not to say that all of these people belong in the same category the latter three are more respectable than the former three.) Actually this is just a few of many individuals and organizations that classify Catholicism as an anti-Christian cult. Because their position receives a wide hearing in some evangelical circles, we must address their claim.

The Catholic League also weighs in:

In mind-numbing detail are a host of traditional anti-Catholic cites. From rural churches and personal websites, to sites for fundamentalist publishing houses, the traditional anti-Catholicism that was said to have died with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 thrives on the Internet. A major website is for the Jack Chick Company.¹⁶ Jack Chick was one of the first to realize in the post-Kennedy years that old-fashioned anti-Catholicism could still make a buck. He released a series of traditional anti-Catholic "comic books" in the 1970s, the most popular being Alberto. Alberto is the story of a man who claims to have been a Jesuit priest who worked under assignment from the Vatican. Murder and assassination – as well as the usual priestly licentiousness -- are common tools for the Holy See, according to the Chick comic book. Chick followed this up with a few other comics, though none as successful as the original Alberto. Chick, who publishes today out of California, also produces a range of small black-and-white tracts that viciously attack Catholic practices and beliefs. Perhaps the most tasteless among the tasteless is the "Death Cookie," that portrays the Eucharist as a Satanic-inspired ritual rooted in pagan beliefs. Chick also has reproduced classic anti-Catholic works such as "Father" Chiniquy’s "Fifty Years in the Church of Rome."¹⁷

Chick’s website is primarily a tool for selling his materials. As his advertising is routinely rejected as offensive in mainstream Christian periodicals, he has limited vehicles in which to reach an audience. He proclaims – as do most of the church-based anti-Catholic Internet sites – that his only goal is the conversion of Catholics to "bible-based" beliefs. But Chick does not bother to engage in honest dialogue, or honest argument, over Catholic beliefs. Rather, the Chick website, like so many others, peddles bombastic charges against the Church as knowingly teaching false doctrine and purposely sending souls to hell. This is ugly stuff.

Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin actually met Jack Chick:

I moved to the seat next to him (well, technically, next to his jacket), and when the well wishers moved on, I said “Excuse me, sir. Are you Jack Chick?”

“I am he replied,” smiling warmly. “What’s your name?”

“Jimmy Akin,” I replied. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

We shook hands, and he asked me “What do you do?”

“I’m an evangelist.”

At this is face brightened. “Praise God!” But his eyes studied me a moment. Wearing a Stetson, cowboy boots, faded blue jeans, and a Texas belt buckle, I didn’t look like the typical suit-and-tie evangelist from Chick’s Fundamentalist world.

“I’ve read a lot of your comic tracts,” I said as he settled back into his seat.

While it isn't available to read online, Karl Keating's Catholicism and Fundamentalism discusses Jack Chick at length.

Ready to rinse that bad taste out of your mouth? Stop by the Curt Jester to read the parody Jack Chick-fil-A! Actually, I found plenty of parodies, but few that were clean enough to link to. This will have to suffice.

The Possible Priest

While we are talking about people who may or may not have been in the Catholic Church as a priest or nun, it seems a good time to address a comment made on Candy's blog by Swylv.

Swylv wrote:
back when I first moved to the area I live in now, some family let me borrow some comic book style publication that told of a man's ordeal on becoming a priest....I googled it just now and some of the comics I read are here http://www.chick.com/catalog/com...g/ comiclist.asp

the one's about alberto...Now I didn't read all of them but am glad to have finally but a name to something I read over 10 years ago...and they too talk of tunnels linking the priest quarters and the nuns housing and many dead baby bodies in between....

This is in reference to Alberto Rivera, who is featured prominently in several of Jack Chick's comics. Rivera claimed to be a former Jesuit, and makes many incredible claims about the Catholic Church. Because of the popularity of Chick tracts, I would guess that more people are familiar with Rivera's story than with the Maria Monk/Sister Charlotte tale.

I admit, I haven't bothered to read the comics in question. Catholic Answers says that Rivera claims the Catholic Church is responsible for "Islam, Communism, the Masons, and the Klan; that it controls the Illuminati, the Mafia, and the New Age movement; that it created the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, and is databasing the name of every Protestant church member for a future inquisition."

But you don't have to take the word of a Catholic source that Rivera was never a Jesuit. A protestant named Gary Metz wrote wrote articles in both Cornerstone and Christianity Today in 1981 exposing Rivera as a fraud. Sadly, these articles are not online, but you can read excerpts at Dave Armstrong's site.

Gary Dale Cearley has written an entire book called Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness about the subject.