RC in TRP WAS RE: Hitler's Pope

[calbert at pop.tiac.net]

> > TRP is rather rough on the Catholic church in M&D -- the Jesuits are
> > bad guys, aren't they?

> My take was that the Jesuit passages were [1] send-ups of the then-contemporary
> Protestant paranoid conspiracy mongering aimed at that order, and [2] meant to
> amuse because we tend to assume that paranoid conspiracy mongering is a new
> phenomenon.

...but the conspiratorial "nature" of the Jesuits was not an illusion 
to the Pope who ran them out, or was it. My guess is that the Jesuits 
were developing an autonomy, and all the means to maintain such in a 
manner which threatened the central authority of the Vatican. They 
also represent an early supra-national entity of the kind P likes to 
amuse us with, not unlike the jews and the T&T.

But more importantly, Mr Coffey's analysis points us in a direction 
with respect to the holocaust questions. In a post last week, it 
seemed that rj ws arguing that P intent was to show that a holocasut 
is a holocaust, is a ......, but I'm not sure that's it at all. I 
think its more along the lines of illustrating Arendt's "banality of 
evil" concept.

love,
cfa