It’s funny how desperately slimboyfat wants the anecdote to be true. It is entirely a story without evidence told by a JW lady. When pressed, the lady’s story was shown to be even more tenuous. She was hesitant at responding to any request for clarification of her story and contradictory about whether there were any arrangements for her to meet the Pope when he came to Australia in 2008. And in the end, even if she were his first… uh… sorry… second cousin, without any evidence of her in Ratzinger’s well documented genealogy, it still wouldn’t provide any evidence of how the Catholic Church views JWs.
Posts by Jeffro
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88What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
slimboyfat:
In other news, I think it’s a bit hasty to say Catholics have been nicer to JWs than JWs are to Catholics when in Canada, for example, the Catholic Church promoted the persecution of JWs. For all their rhetorical flourishes I don’t recall JWs lobbying governments to get the Catholic Church banned.
And they did the crusades and inquisition too. So obviously their current stance must still be evil now like it was in Canada 80 years ago. (Setting aside the fact that events in Canada were precipitated by JWs distributing literature denouncing the Catholic Church first.)
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
And the original statement you put out from ChatGPT and claimed to have verified is clearly false when you said: “There is no widely available documentation or media coverage to verify this story.”
You’re still completely wrong. The second report simply repeats claims in the first that remain unverified. Repeating a claim isn’t verification. It’s really sad that you don’t understand that.
Additionally, the Austrian article was published after the one in Il Giornale and incorrectly misrepresents editorial comments about dates, near-drowning etc, from Il Giornale as quotes from Brzakovic.
I have consistently and correctly stated that all sources talking about it, and there aren’t many, trace back to the story she told in 2005.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
The original article said she was a “cousin” of the pope, it didn’t say “first cousin”, to be accurate.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
Back to the original question, the Catholic Church’s official position organisationally is one of respectful dialog even with denominations such as JWs which they view as doctrinally heretical. (However, members of the Catholic Church are not encouraged to engage with JWs to avoid doctrinal confusion.) So the Catholic view of JWs is considerably better than the view JWs have of the Catholic Church.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
Note some other telling elements of the story.
Another interview was reported by Andrea Tornielli in Il Giornale of July 17, 2008.
Actually, very little of the article was ‘another interview’. Most of the quotes are copied from the Canberra Times article or practiced responses identical to that article. All of it repeats an unverified anecdote.
Steffie is a second cousin of Benedict XVI
The original article claimed she was a first cousin.
It is not easy to convince her to talk about her famous cousin … she almost seems to have regretted it. "Yes," she confirms, a little hesitant and surprised to have been contacted by Il Giornale. … It is not easy to get a few more details about that phone call. "What we talked about - is a private matter, it concerns me and him, it concerns two cousins who had not spoken for fifty years... “.
This smacks of someone who made up a story that has now spun out of control.
We ask her if a face-to-face meeting with Benedict XVI is planned in these days. "So far no, no one has called me, no one has invited me. I was supposed to come to Sydney, to meet him, but I can't move from Cooma, I'm not able to drive, I'm old."
So which is it? You weren’t invited or contacted, or you were supposed to go to Sydney to meet him but you can’t? It’s a contradictory panic response.
May I ask you what Benedict XVI was like as a child? "He was always where he shouldn't be... If I think about it today, it is a miracle that we are still alive," she adds
Her responses are lifted from the original story, or a rehearsed response, and remain as vague as the first time.
alluding to the liveliness of little Joseph, who one day, in Aschau am Inn, the town where the Ratzingers had moved in 1932 after leaving Tittmoning, one day fell into the pond where large carp were swimming. An episode that the pontiff himself recalls in his autobiography, published in 1997: "Once, while I was playing, I was there to drown."
These details are speculation added by Il Giornale rather than quoting Brzokovic, but could be known by anyone with access to his 1997 biography.
"At first I thought it was a joke. He told me he was 'Ratzinger-Pepi', using the nickname they called him as a child." Finally Steffie realizes that it is not a joke and that she is talking on the phone with him. "I said to him: 'Are you the Pope?' And he replied: 'Yes, but for you I am still Ratzinger-Pepi'".
More quotes lifted or rehearsed from the original story.
as the woman had already revealed to the Canberra Times three years ago
Direct confirmation from Il Giornale that the article is quoting material from the original Canberra Times piece.
"He told me: 'You are doing the work we should do'", referring to the missionary activity of Jehovah's Witnesses, who go from house to house to meet people. "He also told me: 'You have halls that are not so big, but they are full, we have cathedrals, churches and chapels, but they are often empty.'"
More comments lifted or rehearsed from the original article, and completely consistent with how a JW might embellish a story to give the appearance of interest.
PS… I see someone really doesn’t like rational analysis of unverified anecdotes. 😂 I hope I can cope with the ‘dislike’.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
I am aware of the renewed interest in the Canberra Times' (Brzakovic's local regional newspaper) story that arose when Ratzinger visited Australia in 2008, which elicited some interest from a few regional European newspapers. The story still all hinges on the claimed conversation reported only by the lady, without any independent verification, and with the relationship changing from ‘first cousin’ to ‘second cousin’, an even more tenuous connection. The story was never verified by the Vatican or by Ratzinger.
(It is amusing, though, watching people 'finding' these other sources that I already found on my initial verification.)
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
People’s standards of evidence are truly abysmal, I’m sorry that some people can’t make the distinction between the existence of a story and whether the story is actually true (though it’s not surprising to find a higher proportion of such people on a forum related to religion). There’s no evidence that the lady’s story is actually true. There is no verified record of the phone call, no transcript of the conversation, no established relationship between the two people, it’s just a story a lady told. And even if she really was his cousin and that he phoned her (tracking her down to a small town on the other side of the planet after decades without contact), it only means Ratzinger thought about his cousin, not that he thought much about JWs..
As the initial GPT response correctly indicated, there is no indication that this anecdote was widely reported, and the story that was reported contains no verifiable details.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
We can't be certain the photo in the newspaper was real
This is irrelevant misdirection. the fact that a lady exists is entirely mundane. It adds nothing to the veracity of her tenuous story about the pope ringing a ‘cousin’ he hadn’t seen in decades to talk to her about JWs. 🤨
whether the Catholic church thinks much about JWs
Even if we assume the lady’s story is true, without any verifiable evidence, it only establishes that Ratzinger thought about his ‘cousin’, not that he thought a lot specifically of JWs (shifting the goal posts) or that his alleged understanding of JWs (based only on the lady’s version of an alleged private conversation) meant anything about the Catholic Church’s position on JWs (a false equivalence). It also wouldn’t be without precedent for a JW to embellish a story to make someone sound more interested in their religion than was actually the case.
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88
What does the Catholic church think of JW?
by Halcon inon a trip to rome a few years ago i asked my friend (who is roman and jw) what the catholic faith thinks of jw.
he simply stated that jw is tolerated by the church but that really not much thought is given to them.
is there an official stance on jw by the catholics?
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Jeffro
Oh no… someone… disliked my comments. How will I go on.