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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 352
revised copies of the scriptures to be written.
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Laws were enacted to enforce the changes in
God's commandments. Eventually, the Catholic Church persecuted all who would not submit to
her authority. Those who remained true to the original teachings of the Bible were persecuted,
tortured, sentenced to death and killed as heretics. Pagans and other false religions who did not
submit to the authority of the Catholic Church were also killed as heretics.
It is estimated that the Catholic Church killed well over 50 million for their faith in
Europe over the centuries known as the Dark Ages.
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Foxe's Book of Martyrs, first published in
Latin in 1554, chronicles the torture and death of tens of thousands at the hands of priests and
monks often under orders from the pope. Christians were tortured and killed in the most evil,
grotesque ways imaginable and many went to their deaths singing praises to their savior, making
confessions of faith, praying for loved ones being left behind or even praying for their
executioners. These countless murders are a matter of historical fact.
Many Catholics choose to differ with history. Some claim these deaths are a matter of
protestant fiction. Some claim the murders were all justified and some stand with Pope John Paul
II who led several Cardinals and Bishops, on March 12, 2000, in a prayer of confession seeking
forgiveness for past church “errors committed by the church's members”.
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Because of John
Paul II's meager, non-specific act of confession which placed all blame on the church members
rather than the church leaders, many Catholics branded him a heretic. This was not because his
confession was not genuine enough but because they believe the Catholic Church cannot error,
which is to say they believe all the murders done at the hands of the church were justified.
Patrick John Pollock is one Catholic who believes the Pope is a heretic and he exposes what he
believes to be heretical teachings of John Paul II in “101 Heresies of Anti-Pope John Paul II”. To
support his belief that the Catholic Church can't error, Pollock quotes Pope Pius XI, who said:
“The Modernists say: the Church has erred.”
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The Modernist are regarded as heretics and
therefore Pollock concludes that anyone who believes the church has erred is a heretic.
Unfortunately, while John Paul II made a meager act of confession, he also canonized
(declared to be a saint which Catholics can pray to) Jan Sarkander, a 17-century Jesuit priest who
“was the notorious persecutor and murderer of Protestants in the time of the counter-reformation,
an Eastern Europe version of the inquisition against Protestants held in western Europe.
Sarkander was known for his cruelty and had personally murdered many Protestants.”
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Another notorious member of the Church to be bestowed with great honor by John Paul
II was Cardinal Alojsije Stepinac, who was beautified. Beautification is one step below
sainthood. During World War II (WW II), Stepinac was Archbishop of Zagreb in Croatia. After
the war he was convicted of war crimes. Croatia, under the leadership of the Ustashi, was
responsible for the murder of 250,000 to 1,000,000 Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and Communists in
concentration camps. “Stepinac sat in the Ustashi Parliament which approved the policy of
extermination”. In the concentration camps over one million were forcibly converted to the
Catholic Church using torture and threat of death. Stepinac went as far as to declare, “Hitler is an
envoy of God”; this quote appeared in the Croatian Sentinel on January 1, 1942.
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When the Nazi's invaded Croatia, Stepinac blessed the newly arrived Ustashi leadership
at his cathedral. Later in that same month, in his Easter address, “he compared the creation of the
new fascist state to the resurrection of Christ. In his pastoral letter of April 28
th
he ordered the
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