.

The author claims that Jews were not the largest group to be murdered at Auschwitz. Obviously he has not done his homework.
According to figures provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the overall number of victims of Auschwitz in the years 1940-1945 is estimated at between 1,100,000 and 1,500,000 people. The majority of them, and above all the mass transports of Jews who arrived beginning in 1942, died in the gas chambers. (Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, Eds. Auschwitz 1940-1945. Central Issues in the History of the Camp. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000, 5 vols., 1799 pp., ISBN 83-85047-87-5)

Jews were not the only victims of this Nazi German killing machine - historians estimate that among the people sent to Auschwitz there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly political prisoners), approximately 20,000 Gypsies from several European countries, over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and over 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities.

Italian Catholic Priest Welcomes Believers with Swastika On His Right Arm

A priest has shocked parishioners by welcoming them to church wearing a swastika armband.

Fascist Father Angelo Idi, 51 – who once saw off a charity box thief with a truncheon at his church in Vigevano, Italy – confessed: “I am proud of my right wing beliefs. But people shouldn’t care about my politics, they should care about how good a priest I am.”

In northern Italy where former dictator Benito Mussolini comes from the far right Italian LEGA NORD (Northern League) have their political stronghold – and there have been several instances of priests with far right views that have embarrassed the Catholic Church.

Last month a right wing Italian priest who is a member of Richard Williamson’s Pius fraternity was caught giving the Hitler salute at a neo-fascist rally – but claimed he was just trying to bless his flock.

Catholic priest Giulio Tam, well known for his extremist right views, raised his right arm when speaking at a rally of the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party in Bergamo, northern Italy.

The ultra-conservative Pius fraternity hit the headlines recently as British Catholic bishop and Holocaust denier Richard Williamson is a member.

After a picture revealed Tam raising his right hand, he argued: “The young people of the Forza Nuova wanted me to bless them. I’ll always be on their side.”

Tam regards Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as a martyr and has in the past held masses at Mussolini’s grave.

http://news.ronatvan.com/2009/05/02/italian-catholic-priest-welcomes-believers-with-swastika-on-his-right-arm/

Tied up in the Rat Lines
By Yossi Melman

It is possible that within a short time a court in the United States will prohibit the publication of the account before us. In the meantime, Haaretz has obtained the testimony given last month by William Gowen, a former intelligence officer in the United States Army, at a federal court in San Francisco. The testimony contains historical and political explosives. It links Giovanni Battista Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI, to the theft of property of Jewish, Serb, Russian, Ukrainian and Roma victims during World War II in Yugoslavia. Many studies and stories have already been written about the thundering silence of Pope Pius XII, who reigned in the Vatican during World War II. Now the former intelligence officer's testimony has revealed that after the war, Montini, who during the war served as the Vatican's deputy secretary of state under the pope, helped hide and launder property that had been stolen from, among others, Jews and was involved in the sheltering and smuggling of Croatian war criminals, such as the leader of the Ustashe movement, Ante Pavelic.

The smuggling and hiding of Croatian war criminals was part of the extensive network known as the Rat Lines. Senior officials at the Vatican were involved in hiding and smuggling Nazi war criminals and their collaborators so they would not be arrested and tried. Hundreds of war criminals were provided with church and Red Cross papers that enabled them to hide in safe houses and then flee from Europe, mainly to the Middle East and South America. Among them were Klaus Barbie ("the butcher of Lyon"), Adolf Eichmann, Dr. Josef Mengele and Franz Stengel, the commander of the Treblinka death camp.

The Vatican network was also used by leaders of the Ustashe - the nationalist Croatian Catholic movement that was active in Croatia and collaborated with the Nazi occupation. "The Reverend Dr. Prof. Krunoslav Draganovic seemed to be in cooperation with the Ustasha network. And he was given a Vatican assignment as the apostolic visitator for Croatians, which meant he reported directly to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini," states an American document based on a report from the Italian police; the document was recently placed in evidence at the court in San Francisco where Gowen testified.

The leaders of the Ustashe headed by Pavelic are the ones who stole the victims' property: art and jewelry - silver and mostly gold. After the war they fled with the treasure and laundered it with the help of Vatican institutions. According to Gowen's testimony, Montini, who in 1964 became the first pope to visit the State of Israel, was also involved in the Vatican's help in laundering the wealth.

Continued:

Still terrified

In 1999 a suit was filed at a court in San Franciso against the Vatican Bank (Institute for Religious Works) and against the Franciscan order, the Croatian Liberation Movement (the Ustashe), the National Bank of Switzerland and others. The suit was filed by Jewish, Ukrainian, Serb and Roma survivors, as well as relatives of victims and various organizations that together represent 300,000 World War II victims. The plaintiffs demanded accounting and restitution.

One of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs is Jonathan Levy. "Many of the plaintiffs have been reluctant to be pictured, after all these years," says Levy. "Many are still terrified of the Ustashe, the Serbs particularly. Unlike the Nazi Party, the Ustashe still exist and have a party headquarters in Zagreb."

The Ustashe was founded in 1929 as a Croatian nationalist movement with a deep connection to Catholicism. From the day it was founded the movement made its aim the establishment of an independent Croatian state and declared to fight the monarchy in Yugoslavia. The movement was banned and its founders, Pavelic and Gustav Percec (who was later murdered at Pavelic's orders) were condemned to death in their absence. The Ustashe was linked to the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander and French foreign minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles in 1934.

Upon the occupation of Yugoslavia, the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists formed an "independent" state in Croatia, which was basically a Nazi puppet state. Pavelic was appointed poglovnik, the leader of the country. He hastened to meet with Hitler and allied himself with the Fuehrer. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Pavelic sent Ustashe units to fight alongside the Nazis and then joined the declaration of war against the United States. Ustashe leaders declared they would slaughter a third of the Serb population in Croatia, deport a third and convert the remaining third from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. Anyone who refused to convert was murdered.

Immediately upon the establishment of its puppet government, the Ustashe set up militias and gangs that slaughtered Serbs, Jews, Romas and their political foes. Catholic priests, some of them Franciscans, also participated in the acts of slaughter. The cruelty of the Ustashe was so great that even the commander of the German army in Yugoslavia complained.

Continued:

Himmler of the Balkans

Under the leadership of Pavelic's right-hand man Andrija Artukovic, who earned the nickname "the Himmler of the Balkans," the Ustashe set up concentration camps, most notably at Jasenovac. According to various estimates, about 100,000 people were murdered at the camp, among them tens of thousands of Jews (it is interesting to note that some of the heads of the Ustashe were married to Jewish women). Throughout Croatia about 700,000 people were murdered. The partisans, led by the Croat Communist Josip Broz Tito, and the Chetniks - Nationalist Serb royalists - fought the Ustashe.

After the war, Pavelic and other Ustashe heads fled to Austria and, with the help of the British intelligence and their friends in the Vatican, found refuge in Italy. They hid in Vatican monasteries and were provided with false documents that gave them a new identity. Secret documents that were disclosed at the court in San Francisco show that at the end of the war, British intelligence took Pavelic under its wing and allowed him and a convoy of 10 trucks that carried the stolen treasure to travel to the British occupation zone in Austria. The British did this with the intention of using him as a counterweight to the Communist takeover in Yugoslavia.

The Ustashe brought the treasure convoy to Rome, where they put it into the hands of the Croatian ambassador to the Vatican, Rev. Krunoslav Draganovic. Draganovic also saw to hiding Pavelic and his aides in Vatican institutions and safe houses in Rome. American military intelligence located Pavelic's hiding place. But according to a secret document Gowen wrote in July 1947, that was submitted to the court, Gowen's unit received the instruction: "Hands off" Pavelic.

This was an order from the American Embassy, stressed Gowen in his testimony. It is also stated in the document, which is classified as top secret, that Pavelic, via his contacts with Draganovic, was receiving Vatican protection. From Italy, Pavelic was smuggled on the Rat Lines to Argentina, where he served as a security adviser to president Juan Peron (Peron granted entry visas to 34,000 Croats, many of them associated with the Ustashe and Nazi supporters).

In 1957 there was an attempt to assassinate him, in which he was wounded. The operation was attributed to Tito's Yugoslav intelligence, although the possibility that this was an attempt at revenge by a Chetnik activist was not dismissed. Pavelic had to leave Argentina and found refuge with the Spanish dictator Franco. Two years later, in 1959, he died as a result of complications caused by the wound. The Ustashe has continued to exist over the years and until the 1980s its operatives were involved in acts of terror against diplomats and other Yugoslav targets abroad.

Continued:

Montini complains

The suit filed at the court in San Francisco is based on earlier investigations and reports from American government agencies, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and committees of historians who researched the matter of the Jewish property in Swiss banks. The case was preceded by successful legal battles by attorney Levy and his colleagues against the CIA and the American Army to obtain secret documents. The defendants, on their part, led by the Vatican Bank and the Franciscan order and others, deny the charges against them and made every effort to have the charges dismissed. So far, the court has rejected these efforts outright and determined that the deliberations would continue. But the defendants are tenacious and now they are demanding that publication of Gowen's testimony be prohibited.

After the end of the war Gowen served as a special agent, meaning an investigations officer in the Rome detachment of American counter-intelligence. This unit's role was to track down, among others, Italian Fascists, Nazi war criminals and their collaborators, including the Ustashe leaders (Gowen said another mission included, at the request of British intelligence, surveillance of Irgun and Lehi activists). The code name for the unit's actions was "Operation Circle."

Parallel to the counterintelligence unit, other American army intelligence units, and mainly the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, from which the CIA developed) and British intelligence were engaged in contradictory actions. They made contact with Nazis and with the Ustashe people and enlisted them in their service as agents, collaborators and informers, with the intention of forming a front against the Soviet spread into Eastern Europe and the Balkans. "To try and find Pavelic you had to discover how the Ustashe network in Italy was constituted, how it operated, what were its bases," testified Gowen.

A key person in the Pontifical Croatian college was Rev. Draganovic, the Croatian ambassador to the Vatican. Draganovic and the college issued false papers to Croatian war criminals, among them Pavelic and Artukovic. "I personally investigated Draganovic - who told me he was reporting to Montini," emphasized Gowen.

Gowen related that at a certain stage Montini learned, apparently from the head of the OSS unit in Rome, James Angleton, who nurtured relations with Montini and the Vatican, of the investigation Gowen's unit was conducting. Montini complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation.

In his testimony, Gowen also stated that Draganovic helped the Ustashe launder the stolen treasure with the help of the Vatican Bank: This money was used to fund its religious activities, but also to fund the escape of Ustashe leaders on the Rat Line.

And still remorseless

http://www.reformation.org/holoc4.html

The differences between the Park51 Mosque and the Carmelite nunnery are huge. First, the nunnery was on the site itself, not out of view, as is the Park51 Mosque. Second, the nunnery was intended in part to memorialize a Catholic killed by the Nazis. Third, and most vital, there was Cardinal Glemp.

Some important quotes by Cardinal Glemp:

The comments by Cardinal Glemp, who is Archbishop of Warsaw, were the harshest denunciation of Jewish protests so far, even implying that some protesters had sought to kill the nuns. Referring to an incident last month in which several American Jews climbed over the fence around the convent and were doused with water and beaten by Polish workers, he said, ''Recently, a squad of seven Jews from New York launched attacks on the convent.''

''In fact, it did not happen that the sisters were killed or the convent destroyed, because they were apprehended,'' he said. ''But do not call the attackers heroes.''

Addressing Jews, Cardinal Glemp said: ''Your power lies in the mass media that are easily at your disposal in many countries. Let them not serve to spread anti-Polish feeling.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/29/world/poland-s-primate-denounces-jews-in-dispute-on-auschwitz-convent.html

The writer of this article is a poor example of a commentator. In one paragraph he states that "the solution was to construct-- not a convent--but the Center..." The next paragraph states the Rabbi Weiss invaded the convent. This occurred in 1989, The "Center" was not formed until 1992. The Catholic Church had agreed in Geneva, 1987 to move the "convent" in 2 years, this was not being done and hence the demonstration. It was not until 1993 that Pope John II stepped in to order the moving of the convent to a new site further away. Seven of the fourteen nuns choose not to move to the new site. As to the unpardonable sin of Rabbi Weiss and the other males violating the "no males" in the Cloister, were all the workmen female? The workMEN poured paint as well as water on the demonstrators.
Pope John II did not issue his order primarily to prevent violence but to do what was right. A center for understanding was later built but it is not a Convent.

"I am Catholic."
--Franz Stangel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Stangl

More to come.

Bishop Hudal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alois_Hudal

So climacus, the canons which prohibit entry are the same as allowing entry into the cloister? What a bunch of backward nonsense! The canons clearly prohibit bishops, cardinals, etc. from entering the cloister. That is the reason for the law - to stop entry and keep the nuns from outside interference. Canon 664 #4 explicitly requires that the permission of the nun's superior be obtained before entry is permitted. Otherwise the pain of sin in incurred. What kind of Catholic is so ignorant of the long history of cloister as to think it meaningless as you suggest.

All that can be seen from your pompous prattle is that you agree with the unwarranted invasion of the cloister by Jewish demonstrators and are so undereducated as not to see the logic that Catholics forgive and compromise because it is the teaching of Jesus.

Stay with the letter of the law and St. Paul tells you clearly where you headed.

So lighten up. Canon law prohibits the entry of males, including clerics into the cloister. That is the plain and simple truth. The commentary on Canon Law you cite makes that clear. Anyone familiar with legal codes recognizes that "just cause" is only a step below "grave cause" and in both cases badly motivated judgements are sinful.

More I read about Ms. Khan's lamentations, the more I am convinced that there is no place for their project. Please read the article hyper-linked below:

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/08/malaysia_-_is_it_moderate_and_is_it_modern.html

I want to dare any of the sympathizer of the project to defend this type of moderation, that Ms Khan and her husband bring. It is not enough to mouth moderating homilies in the US, where theye are clearly a minority. What does this couple do with their so called influence n the islamic world. If you ask me, my guess is when they go to the OIC countries nobody give two hoots for them. If they espouse anything condemning what is happening in places like Malaysia, there will be fatwas against them. They are poser in the west and couple of spineless "chicken littles" over there. When we people like me stand up against the so called moderates and label them as enablers of extremists all the sympathizers come out of the wood works. Unless these, they take the stand and condemn these atrocities I have no sympathy for their causes. Their causes are only furthering the interests of islam towards world domination. Unless these US muslims willingly adopt the policy that they will boycott all these countries, including their Haj trips I say they are supporting apartheid. They are no different than teh Afrikaaner governments of south africa before FW De Klerk

How dare she claim that "... the "failure" of the project could hurt Muslims in the United States and overseas". What hurts muslims all over is the apartheid practices of their religion being assiduously being followed in 21st century.

Elohist,

Canon 667 #4 applies to all monasteries of nuns whether they are under papal cloister or not. This should be clear to you upon rereading the text, but just in case it is not, see the relevant commentary in the New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, p. 834.

Also, see the specific norms for papal cloister contained in the instruction Venite Seorsum (#8), which likewise indicate that the local bishop can enter papal cloister at a female monastery for just cause (as well certain other potentially male visitors for various reasons, without papal permission).

Hopefully this will make you feel a bit better, since you claim to find ignorance so offensive.

Archbishop Offers Mediation for Islamic Center
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
Published: August 18, 2010

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, said Wednesday that he would gladly help mediate between the proponents and critics of an Islamic center and mosque planned for a site two blocks from ground zero.

The archbishop said that it was his “major prayer” that a compromise could be reached, and that while he had no strong feelings about the project, he might support finding a new location for the center.

Speaking during an impromptu news conference at Covenant House, a Catholic shelter in Manhattan for homeless youth, Archbishop Dolan invoked the example of Pope John Paul II, who in 1993 ordered Catholic nuns to move from their convent at the former Auschwitz death camp after protests from Jewish leaders.

“He’s the one who said, ‘Let’s keep the idea, and maybe move the address,’ ” the archbishop said. “It worked there; might work here.”

Archbishop Dolan is the most prominent New York religious leader to weigh in on the Islamic center, which has spurred a fierce national debate over freedom of religion and the legacy of 9/11 that has even drawn in President Obama.

READ the REST here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/nyregion/19dolan.html?_r=2

More to come.

The Ratlines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_%28World_War_II%29

Climacus:

Didn't you know that Carmelite nuns are under Papal cloister? (Canon 667 #3). Stevens-Arroyo is right. In fact, the pope had to intervene because the local bishop had no authority to do so.

You thought you were wiseass in citing 667 #4, which is not for nuns who are entirely devoted to the contemplative life. Your ignorance is offensive, but of course no one takes your posts seriously anymore.

Mr. Stevens-Arroyo himself "might be better off avoiding Catholic theology, about which he knows demonstrably little." This is pointed out to him on these pages after nearly every column.

At any rate, nothing in the column seems to establish that Mr. Krauthammer drew an invalid lesson from JPII.

By the way, Mr. Stevens-Arroyo is wrong about not a bishop not being able to enter a nun's cloister (see Canon 667). That's purely for the edification of Mr. Stevens-Arroyo, of course, as no one else will be interested.

More to come.

http://www.pavelicpapers.com/

More to follow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_clergy_involvement_with_the_Usta%C5%A1e