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There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia. In January 1999, Pope John Paul II, without changing Catholic teaching, appealed for a consensus to end the death penalty on the ground that it was "both cruel and unnecessary".
Hell in Catholicism is the "state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed" [1] which occurs by the refusal to repent of mortal sin before one's death, since mortal sin deprives one of sanctifying grace. [2]
Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father, Alois Hitler, was a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz , Austria , where the family lived. [ 8 ]
The Catholic Church had technically banned the practice of selling indulgences as long ago as 1567. As the Times points out, a monetary donation wouldn't go amiss toward earning an indulgence.
Catholic politician Eugen Bolz at the People's Court. Staatspräsident of Württemberg in 1933, he was overthrown by the Nazis. Later arrested for his role in the 20 July Plot to overthrow Hitler, he was beheaded in January 1945. Catholic Centre Party politician Josef Wirmer (far right) in the People's Court, 1944.
Catholics fought on both sides during the Second World War, and Hitler's invasion of predominantly-Catholic Poland ignited the conflict in 1939. In the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany , as in the annexed regions of Slovenia and Austria , Nazi persecution of the church was intense; many Polish clergy were targeted for extermination.
The moral liceity of the death penalty had support from early Catholic theologians, though some of them such as Saint Ambrose encouraged members of the clergy not to pronounce or carry out capital punishment. Saint Augustine answered objections to capital punishment rooted in the first commandment in The City of God. [2]
In the United States, the National Catholic Welfare Conference reported that the German Catholic bishops jointly expressed their "horror" at the policy in their 1942 Pastoral Letter: [25] Every man has the natural right to life and the goods essential for living. The living God, the Creator of all life, is sole master over life and death.