THE VATICAN’S HOLOCAUST

Few writers possess the sagacity, insight, and intellectual integrity to reveal the true workings of the Catholic Church as did Avro Manhattan.  He was the author of  numerous books on the subject and herein exposes the all-too-little-known role played by the Vatican in the bloodbath perpetrated in Croatia during World War II.

Manhattan (1914-1990) begins by explaining the situation in Yugoslavia after the first World War, when the Serbian Orthodox Church became the state Church.  The Vatican’s goal was to reestablish the supremacy of Catholicism there, and anywhere else in Europe that it could, in order to fight what it considered its greatest enemy, the new Soviet Union.

Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, was at the forefront of a huge diplomatic effort to achieve this.  He was able to push the important Catholic Centre Party in Germany far to the right of the political spectrum, thus paving the way for Hitler’s eventual ascension.  And in Italy in 1929, the Vatican signed a pact with Benito Mussolini (it should be noted in passing that Avro Manhattan was jailed during World War II for refusing to serve in Mussolini’s fascist army) . Catholicism was also aligned with fascism in Petain’s Vichy government in France as well as in Francisco Franco’s Spain.

In Croatia, a powerful political amalgamation arose when the Catholic hierarchy lent its support to an illegal nationalist organization called the Ustashi (also spelled Ustashe).  Manhattan describes the intrigue and assassinations that followed as this terrorist organization worked its way to the top.  By 1941 Croatia was under the complete control of the Ustashi government, which blended Croat nationalism, fascist ideology, and Catholic totalitarianism.

The Ustashi leader Ante Pavelic  worked side by side with the main Catholic official in Croatia, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac to create a totalitarian regime whose objective was the total annihilation of all persons non-Catholic or non-fascist.  In this, they were eminently successful: concentration camps soon sprang up, many of which were run by church officials such as the legendary Jasenovac camp, run by Father Miroslav Filipovic. Stepinac himself proudly proclaimed his Ustashi colors by wearing decorations, and attending all their official meetings. He also made speeches on the government’s behalf.  Stepinac wrote in the Croatian Sentinel on 1st January, 1942: “Hitler is an envoy of God.”

Over 700,000 people perished in this classic example of church/state union.  Countless people were tortured to death under unbelievably inhumane conditions.  The atrocities were so extreme that when Hitler’s own solders, temporarily stationed in Croatia, witnessed what was going on, they set up a special commission to look into the matter.

After the collapse of the Third Reich and of the Ustashi government a few months later, Pavelic fled to Austria, where he was captured.  However, before he could be tried as a war criminal, the Vatican intervened and he was unconditionally freed, to live out his remaining years in obscurity, dying in 1959.  Archbishop Stepinac, despite his collusion with the fascists, and despite the fact that he sat in the Ustashi Parliament when it approved the policy of exterminating the Jews, the Orthodox Church, and the all the gypsies and communists it could locate, was also tried as a war criminal and sentenced to imprisonment.  He served only a few years and in 1953 was elevated to Cardinal by Pope Pius XII.  Today, Stepinac has a high school in New York named after him where he is referred to as “the blessed Cardinal Stepinac.”  If this were not enough, this mass murderer was beatified, the first step to  sainthood, by the medievalist Pope John Paul II in 1998.  This brazenly immoral act was a slap in the face of all true moral sentiment, yet the news media took little note of John Paul’s act, referring to Stepinac as a “Croat nationalist.”

After the end of the war, the Ustashi went underground as guerrillas and called themselves The Crusaders, a more benign-sounding nom de guerre for political terrorism.  Manhattan describes their ongoing collusion with the Vatican and the United States in attempting to achieve a military coup against Yugoslavia.  The role played by key American officials, all Catholic, is revealed by Manhattan and includes Francis Mathews, who was Harry Truman’s Secretary of the Navy, and James Forrestal, Secretary of Defense.  The Dulles brothers also played key roles.

Manhattan also describes how the Church utilized the Fatima cult to its advantage during these years.  This cult began in 1917 when three illiterate Portuguese children allegedly saw the Virgin Mary, who told them that the Soviet union, unless annihilated, would bring about death and destruction to all nations.  This “vision” was accompanied by a vision of the sun jumping out of its orbit.  Although the rest of the inhabitants of planet earth somehow managed to miss this phenomenon, this was of little importance to church leaders.  They saw it as a perfect propaganda device and so upscaled its importance after World War II.  The church felt that by working with fascism, they would be able to eliminate the communists in Europe and then concentrate on those in the Soviet Union.

The genocide in Croatia was all but forgotten by the world at large, mainly because of the diplomatic efforts of the Vatican, still almost universally portrayed as a force for moral righteousness.  As Manhattan warns: “When a whole nation is deliberately kept in total ignorance of certain historical facts, that nation is endangered.”  When this truism encompasses all the world’s nations, the threat to our survival as a species becomes manifestly obvious to all those not blinded by religious faith.