Here is a nice summation of what im refering to, specificly about the Roman Catholic church and their ties to the Papacy:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/italytime.html
*edits to add*
Just so you know, the three biggest groups who did this, two of which with strong ties to the Papicy, were the Roman Catholics, the Normans and the post conversion Saxons.
Thanks for the link, it's a great read. But you have to admit, some of this is just full of insinuation and paranoia. For example..
1948 — The last edition of the papal "Index liborum prohibitorum" includes Jewish publications.
Well duh. It has books from every major religion, including Catholics. It's a very long list. I agree, it's close-minded and stupid. But in a general sense, everyone is equally tarred and feathered. I don't think there's any evidence that it's specifically anti-semitic.
1937 — Pope Pius XI issues and encyclical, "With Burning Anxiety," which reflects the race-conscious myths of ‘race’ and ‘blood’ as contrary to Christian truth, but does not mention, nor directly criticize anti-semitism.
If you read that encyclical, it's incredibly general and doesn't specifically mention any race, because as a political entity the church had to be as ambiguous as possible. Besides, the next year the following happened:
1938- Pope Pius XI declares in an address to pilgrims, "It is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism." This statement is omitted from all Italian newspaper accounts of the address
And that's the fault of the church, and not the Italians, specifically the fascist leadership that was supposedly "in league" with the Catholic church?
My point here is that your original statement was
Christians,(especially roman catholics), used the jew's role in the death of Jesus to persecute them for a millenia.. If not for a certain short mastached man, that wouldnt have changed either.
In your last post you said you didn't mean all Christianity, rather a few denominations. Okay, I see what you mean, especially given your examples. But you also said it was for "a millenia" (which btw I think singular it's millenium, so I'm not sure if you meant one or two thousand years), and didn't change until Hitler, but I've given evidence of multiple cases (within the last two millenia) of the church directly condemning anti-semitism or racism. That was my point about the difference between "institutional" and "personal" bigotry, in that the institution didn't openly allow any of it to happen.
It's like blaming your company if your boss sexually harrasses you. If the company does nothing about it, they're to blame. But if their policy is for it not to happen and they enforce it, the liability is on your boss, who was breaking the rules to do so. The issue in the catholic church is that since the reformation, they didn't have the authority to enforce policy except by excommunication, but that's a whole different topic altogether. The catholic church doesn't have an army any more (and rightly so).
I'm not denying anti-semitism in members of christianity. I'm also not denying that Mel Gibson is a total freaking whack job. But I'm saying there's a difference between a national acceptance of a policy and people independently practicing it. Nazi Germany had a policy of exterminating people based on their religion, and catholics were included in that group. A large portion of the Polish prisoners were Catholic. If some Nazis were nice guys who didn't practice these policies, they were against the norm. If a catholic practised it, however, they were in direct violation of the recognized rules of their oganization, which to me is the exact opposite of what we're seeing there.
