Praise the Lord and pass the amunition!

Dear Friends: Your long suffering writer saw a story this morning that I found quite interesting, and I think you might as well.

One summer evening in 1858, the police showed up at the home of a Jewish family in Bologna, Italy, and took their six-year-old child. Authorities had discovered that the child, Edgardo Mortara, had been secretly baptized when he was a baby. (Edgardo had fallen gravely ill and his Catholic nanny baptized him for fear that he would die a Jew and be locked out of heaven.)

But Edgardo survived—and, in the eyes of the Church, he was now a Catholic. Papal law mandated that all Catholic children must receive a Catholic education, and so he was separated from his Jewish family, with Pope Pius IX personally overseeing his religious education.

 The “Mortara case” spurred a wave of protests, with activists and intellectuals from Europe and the U.S. petitioning Pius IX to return the child to his parents.

The pope refused. 

Edgardo eventually became a priest, and in 1940 he died in a Belgian monastery. The Vatican never apologized for his kidnapping specifically. But in 2000, John Paul II issued an apology for the persecution of Jews. 

Today, the dominant Catholic attitude toward the Mortara case is one of regret: “It’s not one of the episodes that the Church is very proud of,” said Massimo Faggioli, a Church historian at Villanova University. 

Now don't get me wrong folks, this is not a condemnation of Catholics! (My wife is Catholic and I've got to keep her happy. You know what they say: "Happy wife, happy life!)

It is  rather, an example of how no religion is innocent of wrongdoing in some areas while possibly  doing great good in others.

With this in mind we might want to take a look at our own attitude toward people of other faiths and employ some good ol' Christian tolerance and forgiveness for people who decide to get a little too extreme in the observance of their own particular belief system. 

This goes for Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu's, Wicca, Taoists and anything else making the rounds lately. 

Except Scientology, their whole premise is based on deceit and ripping people off for profit. (Which is what a lot of the other religions were based on too, but at least they had an up-side as well, which Scientology doesn't!)

The way I see it anyway!

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