Italy is a country where JWs have done particularly well in spreading their message. JWs are the largest Christian religion in Italy outside of Catholicism so they probably do pay some attention to them. I remember when Ratzinger was elected pope there was some media interest in the fact that his cousin was a JW. I think she lived in Australia, if I remember correctly, and some journalists asked her for comment and she gave some very general statements.
slimboyfat
JoinedPosts by slimboyfat
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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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the pope has died
by stan livedeath inmost people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
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slimboyfat
Sea Breeze I’ve just finished reading a book about the development of the trinity doctrine by the Catholic historian Franz Dünzl. It’s a very candid account of the long and winding road to the orthodox formulation of the trinity. He argues that full orthodoxy was not achieved until the Cappadocian fathers in the late forty century. Dünzl does not shy away, but describes in detail the part that politics, intrigue and personalities played in the development of the trinity doctrine. He argues this doesn’t negate the trinity doctrine but that God allowed politics to play out in a way that resulted in orthodoxy.
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the pope has died
by stan livedeath inmost people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
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slimboyfat
Thanks for the response, vienne, I didn’t realise that Russell himself rarely used the name Jehovah. Yes Rutherford definitely had his own style (to wit, and so on). I find it quite difficult to read. I wonder if Franz did have some input on some of the later books that got into the weeds of typology and so on, and perhaps had a more dense writing style characteristic of Franz.
Out of interest I compiled a graph of the frequency of the name Jehovah in the Watchtower magazine per decade. There was a dramatic increase after the 1940s.
(As you say, if I wish to pursue this topic further I should start another thread.)
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the pope has died
by stan livedeath inmost people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
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slimboyfat
Catholic doctrine ossified long before our era but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t shaped by individuals at crucial junctures, it’s just that the crucial pivots where politics shaped doctrine in the case of the Catholic Church occurred much earlier, in decades such as the 360s (when the Trinity doctrine took shape), rather than the 1960s when Franz promoted 1975.
If you ask ChatGPT a more open question such as “was Catholic doctrine shaped by politics and influential individuals in the history of the church” you’ll get a different answer than, say, a prompt that says, “give me a cogent refutation of these points from a Catholic perspective” along with pasting others’ posts into the machine.
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the pope has died
by stan livedeath inmost people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
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slimboyfat
vienne I’d be interested to hear more about Rutherford being behind the increased emphasis on Jehovah’s name.
As I understand it Franz was influential in the writing department from as early as 1928. Franz authored the preface to the 1950 NWT and was presumably responsible for the adoption of Jehovah in the NT and for making the argument for its originality in the NT documents.
He was into music and was presumably supportive of the restoration of music to JW meetings shortly after Rutherford died.
He wrote a large proportion of WT books in the middle of the 20th century, including in all likelihood Babylon the Great Has Fallen, Let You Name Be Sanctified, Life Everlasting in the Freedom of the Sons of God, among others. He promoted typology, political neutrality, the blood doctrine, as well as other niche interpretive obsessions.
Altogether I reckon Franz had a huge impact on the history and development of JWs. 1975 was obviously a huge mistake and whether that clouds everything else is a judgement call. A JW might argue that there were kings in Israel who did a lot of bad things but are also remembered for their good deeds and their part in the working out of God’s purpose. Even taking 1975 into account, I think a good case could be made that JWs are unlikely to be as numerous as they are in 2025 had it not been for the intellectual and organisational energy of the Franz/Knorr team in middle decades of the 20th century. And if you think JWs are in some sense being used by God then his impact was net positive.
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2025**04**April**21**Announcement!
by Atlantis in2025**04**april**21**announcement.
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https://app.filemail.com/d/qpxvufhubdjrdoy .
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slimboyfat
Thanks Atlantis, you are doing a great job 👍
Many of these announcements are pretty boring but now an then something interesting gets thrown up
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the pope has died
by stan livedeath inmost people on the planet have heard of the pope.. most people on the planet have never heard of the governing body..
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slimboyfat
But he [Fred Franz] led the Witness faith into false expectations. If not a member of the Governing Body, he'd have been brought before a committee and left in disgrace.
Without Fred Franz there probably wouldn’t have been 1975. But there probably wouldn’t have been the NWT or emphasis on the divine name either. He supported Nathan Knorr who was the genius behind JW literature production, methods of preaching and their impressive postwar growth. I don’t know WT would be half the size without him or what direction they would have gone.
Witnesses come close to worship when he's mentioned.
A few older ones perhaps still feel this way, but I suspect the many JWs wouldn’t even recognise the name these days. Around three quarters of current JWs have been baptised since Franz died and many have probably missed the few references to him in magazines and videos and not appreciated his significance.
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Narcissist challenges culture ingrained with the concept of “saving face” to perform humiliating retreat
by slimboyfat inoh yeah, this is going to end well.
hold on to your seats, folks, we’re on the front row of history for, as the chinese might say, “interesting times”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rgkkl7v8lo.
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Narcissist challenges culture ingrained with the concept of “saving face” to perform humiliating retreat
by slimboyfat inoh yeah, this is going to end well.
hold on to your seats, folks, we’re on the front row of history for, as the chinese might say, “interesting times”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rgkkl7v8lo.
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Our (JW) genetic mutation
by Jalisco inthe spiritual dna of our faith was "protestant" for over 100 years, until 1985, after which it changed to a catholic sense.
for example, for decades we were presented with the example of the bereans who "were more noble-minded than those of thessalonica" because they went to see in the scriptures if what paul preached to them was really like that.
and then a second to the bereans?
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slimboyfat
Interesting post. The change in wording of the baptismal questions you highlight is significant, but I don’t know it can bear the weight of an entire pivot from Protestant to Catholic ethos you outline. For example, the phrase “the Society” rose to prominence already under Rutherford, and functioned somewhat like a Catholic appeal to authority. This linguistic process is documented, and much lamented, in Timothy White’s book A People for his Name. A similarity in structure between the Watchtower organisation and the Catholic Church, especially following the restructuring in the early 1970s, was also already noted in graphic form by Penton and others in the 1980s.
From a certain perspective, especially for anyone familiar with the Christadelphian tradition, and to a certain extent Brethren and Presbyterian traditions, one of the remarkable aspects of Watchtower history, especially since the 1930s, has been the striking lack of divisions and splits that chronically plague those other groups. How do we account for that? Surely lots of factors are involved but the centralisation of authority and the “faithful and discreet slave” teaching are surely essential ingredients.
I very much agree with you (I think) that it would be great if JWs could move to a position of accepting differences of opinion and interpretation to a (far) greater extent than they currently do. Whether this sweet spot can be achieved that you hint at, whereby a Catholic approach to diversity may allow differences to flourish without the Protestant penchant for it resulting in divisions and splits, I do not know. I do know that when divisions on matters of doctrine and policy begin to take hold among a faith group it can become chronic, debilitating, and exhausting for all involved. That is something JWs have never had to contend with, indeed it’s so far outside the JW experience that complacency may make it appear in some sense impossible. But if you open the door to greater variability of belief and practice it might open a door to something that is both unfamiliar and not easy to contend with. I don’t say this makes it not worth doing, but if so it would preferably be with eyes wide open to the challenges and possible consequences.