"Love the Jewish People" claims that the Catholic Church is the sworn enemy of the Jews. The tract states that "Catholic Germany, serving the Vatican, launched a 20th-century inquisition, murdering 6 million Jews." It's a conversion tract calling on Jews to join Jack Chick's strange brand of fundamentalism while attacking the Catholic Church.
In other tracts, tapes and comic books, Chick charges that the Holocaust was created by the Catholic Church, as were Communism, Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan and the Russian Revolution. The church, through the Jesuits, also assassinated Abraham Lincoln and had John F. Kennedy killed. Just about any horror in history is ascribed to the machinations of the Catholic Church.
While the material may be way outside mainstream Protestant circles, Chick Publications claims to have sold more than 750 million tracts and other material throughout the world. And apparently in Pittsburgh.
Where did all this hate literature come from? It is from the fevered brain of John T. Chick, the 90-year-old founder of Chick Publications. Chick is an independent Baptist looking for the End Times momentarily who condemns any biblical translation other than the original King James Version in 1611. He is also a virtual recluse.
Little is known about Chick outside of company propaganda. Some have even speculated that Jack Chick could be a pen name for a pool of writers pumping out the stuff.
The stuff is not just ridiculous in its charges — a popular Chick tract claims that the Vatican has a super computer containing the names of every Protestant worldwide for a new inquisition — but also lurid in its presentation. The Chick comic books, complete with art of gruesome torture and curvaceous temptresses, have been called "born-again" pornography.
Chick first came to Catholic awareness with the publication of the "Alberto" comic books in the 1970s and early 1980s. These comics described the alleged revelations of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be a former Jesuit priest and bishop. He painted a portrait of a Catholic Church founded by Satan that is a "political monster with a religious front."
It was mainstream Protestant organizations that went after Chick. He resigned from the Christian Booksellers Association when it became clear that the organization was going to expel him because of his anti-Catholic hate literature. Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, published the investigative reports showing that Rivera was neither a priest nor a bishop, but rather a fraud and a con man.