Our Church in Singapore

Our Church: How the Good News of Jesus came to Singapore

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This is the video story of how the missionaries brought the Good News of Jesus Christ to Singapore.

Here are the slides from today

Answers to your questions in the chat

Our Relationship with the Jewish people: Past, Present, Future

The Jewish people may seem to us a non-relation, but in reality we are related to them. The Jews are the original chosen people of God, the roots of all Christianity. And we are, in this sense, the Gentiles. In other words, we are foreigners, brought into the salvation plan through Christ, especially through His Crucifixion, Death and Resurrection.
So the Jews are a reminder of our heritage. Even though a lot of Jews do not believe in Jesus, God has not cut them off from His Covenant. In fact, Jesus himself was a Jew, and all the Apostles were Jews too. And our first Christians too, were Jews.
So let us see the Jews as people whom God has chosen. In the document Nostra Aetate, (which means “Our Age” in Latin) drafted and approved during the Second Vatican Council in 1965, it first re-affirms our Jewish roots and the covenant made on Mount Sinai with Moses, declares anti-Semitism as a sin against God, calls for greater respect and understanding between Catholics and Jews, and rejects the false deicide (killing of a God) claim that all Jews are responsible for Jesus's Death, yet acknowledging that it was the Jewish Authorities and the crowd that was instigated.
Ever since this document, the popes that followed built upon it’s foundations, in particular St Pope John Paul II, who himself was an eyewitness to the Holocaust in WWII, where millions of Jews were slaughtered for one crime: they were Jews. He established diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, and coined the term “Beloved Elder Brother” in application to the Jews, amongst others.
Today, 55 years on, our relationship with the Jews continue to be developed and strengthened through dialogue and trust. Let us continue to bridge the gap that had set us apart for centuries, and let no selfish desires drive us apart again
References

• http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/how-we-teach/catechesis/catechetical-sunday/human-dignity/nostra-aetate-greenberg.cfm
• http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

(Thanks to Nicholas for the research)

Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust

Some sources:

• https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/adolf-hitler-1
• https://www.biography.com/dictator/adolf-hitler

Overview:
Adolf Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, serving as dictator and leader of the Nazi Party, or National Socialist German Workers Party, for the bulk of his time in power. He was one of the most powerful and notorious dictators of the 20th century. His virulent anti-Semitism (hostility and prejudice against Jewish people) and obsessive pursuit of Aryan supremacy (Aryan = Caucasian, Northern Europeans) led to World War II and the genocide known as the Holocaust, which resulted in the deaths of some six million Jews and another five million noncombatants. After the tide of war turned against him, Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker in April 1945.
Aryan Supremacy & Anti-Semitic:
Hitler was obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic “purity”. He saw a natural order that placed the so-called “Aryan race” (ie. Germans) at the top. To Hitler, Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and community.

Persecution of Jews:
Because of Hilter’s anti-Semitism views, the Jews were persecuted from the beginning when Hitler was put into power. At the start, they were deprived of German citizenship and barred from marrying or having relations with persons of “German or related blood”. Slowly, their political and civil rights were taken away. Then came the Holocaust under the cover of World War II.

The Holocaust:
This refers to the ideological and systematic state-sponsored prosecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews by the German Nazi regime between 1933-1945.
Beginning in 1933, the Nazi operated a network of concentration camps to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime. After WWII broke out in 1936, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Mobile death squads executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion while the existing concentration camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz in occupied Poland. In addition to forced labour and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments, which exposed 3000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews—some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war’s end.

(Thanks to Belinda for the research)

Communism vs Catholicism

Reference : http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html

Quotes from DIVINI REDEMPTORIS, the ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS XI ON ATHEISTIC COMMUNISM:

• With reference to Communism, Our Venerable Predecessor, Pius IX, of holy memory, as early as 1846 pronounced a solemn condemnation, which he confirmed in the words of the Syllabus directed against "that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property and possessions of all men, and even society itself."
• 8. The Communism of today, more emphatically than similar movements in the past, conceals in itself a false messianic idea. A pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism
•  According to this doctrine there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man. ... there is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life.
• Where Communism has been able to assert its power...  to destroy Christian civilization and the Christian religion by banishing every remembrance of them from the hearts of men, especially of the young. Bishops and priests were exiled, condemned to forced labor, shot and done to death in inhuman fashion; laymen suspected of defending their religion were vexed, persecuted, dragged off to trial and thrown into prison. 
• Communism is by its nature anti-religious. It considers religion as "the opiate of the people" because the principles of religion which speak of a life beyond the grave dissuade the proletariat from the dream of a Soviet paradise which is of this world.