WWII CROATIAN GENOCIDE OVER ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN SERBS AND JEWS WOULDN’T BE POSSIBLE AT SUCH GRANDIOSE SCALE (over one million people) WITHOUT THE ACTIVE PARTICIPATION OF CATHOLIC CHURCH…

Clergy involved in Ustaše violence

WWII Croatian leadership- Ustasha (Nazi) government and Catholic Clergy- united in common strategy (as defined by the Ustasha ideology): “One Third of Serbs to be killed- One Third to be forcibly converted into Catholicism- One Third to be expelled from “Ustasha Country”…“

Mark Biondich notes that “[T]he younger generation of radical Catholics, particularly those of the crusader organisation, supported the Ustaša with considerable enthusiasm, while the older generation of Croat Populists [HSS] was more reserved and in some cases overtly hostile”.[9] This generational gap between conservative and radical Catholic priests was further reflected by region (urban vs rural), the geographical location of churches and bishoprics, and an individual priest’s relative place within the Church hierarchy. More senior clerics generally disassociated themselves from the NDH.[9] They were also divided by religious order. The Fransciscans, who had resisted for over fifty years Vatican efforts to turn over parishes to secular clergy,[10] were far more prominently associated with the Ustaša than were the Salesians.[9]

Mass murder occurred through the summer and autumn of 1941. The first Croatian concentration camp was opened at the end of April 1941, and in June a law was passed to establish a network across the country, in order to exterminate ethnic and religious minorities.[11] According to writer Richard Evans, atrocities at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp were “egged on by some Franciscan friars”.[11] Phayer wrote that it is well known that many Catholic clerics participated directly or indirectly in Ustaša campaigns of violence, as is attested in the work of Corrado Zoli (Italian) and Evelyn Waugh (British), both Catholics themselves.[12]

Croatian Ustasha found a special joy in inflicting the fear, torture and suffering into the helpless Serbian civilians before savagely murdering them…

A particularly notorious example was the Franciscan friar Tomislav Filipović, also known as Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, known as “Fra Sotona” (“Friar Satan”), “the devil of Jasenovac”, for running the Jasenovac concentration camp, where estimates of the number killed range between 49,600 and 600,000.[13][14][15] According to Evans, Filipović led murder squads at Jasenovac. According to the Jasenovac Memorial Site, “Because of his participation in the mass murders in February 1942 the church authorities excommunicated him from the Franciscan order, which was confirmed by the Holy See in July 1942.”[16] He was also required to relinquish the right to his religious name, Tomislav. When he was hanged for war crimes, however, he wore his clerical garb.[17]

Croatian Ustasha “contribution to mankind achievements”- they designed this special knife to make cutting human throats easier and more efficient…

Ivan Šarić, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vrhbosna in Sarajevo, supported the Ustaša, in particular the forcible conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Roman Catholicism. His diocesan newspaper wrote: “[T]here is a limit to love. The movement of liberation of the world from the Jews is a movement for the renewal of human dignity. Omniscient and omnipotent God stands behind this movement.”[18] Šarić appropriated Jewish property for his own use, but was never legally charged. Some priests served in the personal bodyguard of Pavelić, including Ivan Guberina, a leader of the Croatian Catholic movement, a form of Catholic Action. Another priest, Bozidas Bralo, served as chief of the security police in Sarajevo, who initiated many anti-Semitic actions.[13]

To consolidate Ustaša party power, much of the party work in Bosnia and Herzegovina was put in the hands of Catholic priests by Jure Francetić, an Ustaše Commissioner of this province.[19] One priest, Mate Mugos, wrote that clergy should put down the prayer book and take up the revolver. Another, Dionysius Juričev, wrote in the Novi list that to kill children at least seven years of age was not a sin.[13] Phayer argues that “establishing the fact of genocide in Croatia prior to the Holocaust carries great historical weight for our study because Catholics were the perpetrators and not, as in Poland, the victims.”[20]

https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Catholic_clergy_involvement_with…

Commandant of Jasenovac

Miroslav Filipović (5 June 1915 – 1946), also known as Tomislav Filipović and Tomislav Filipović-Majstorović, was a Bosnian Croat Franciscan friar and Ustashe military chaplain that participated in atrocities during World War II in Yugoslavia.[1] Convicted as a war criminal in a Yugoslav civil court, he was executed by hanging in 1946.
For the duration of the war, the Vatican kept full diplomatic relations with the Independent State of Croatia and was briefed on the efforts of the Ustaše to convert ethnic Serbs to Catholicism. Some former priests, mostly Franciscans, particularly in, but not limited to, Herzegovina and Bosnia, took part in the atrocities themselves. Filipović-Majstorović joined the Ustaše on 7 February 1942 in a brutal massacre of 2,730 Serbs of the nearby villages, including 500 children. He was reportedly subsequently dismissed from his order. He became the Chief Guard of the Jasenovac concentration camp where he was nicknamed “Fra Sotona” (“Brother Satan”) due to his sadism. When he was hanged for war crimes, he wore his clerical garb, although some claim he had been defrocked.[2]

After the war Filipović admitted that he had personally killed about 100 prisoners and had attended mass executions of many more. He estimated that under his command some 20-30,000 prisoners were murdered at the main Jasenovac camp. He said prisoners would often be made to stand in prepared trenches where each was then killed with a sledgehammer blow.[14] He went on to describe his tenure in command of Stara Gradiška, a prison camp primarily for women which was designated Camp V within the Jasenovac system:
“ I [was at] Stara Gradiška from the end of October 1942 until 27 March 1943. During that time mass liquidations were performed, usually outside the camp, for instance in Mlaka and Jablanac, but some were sent off to Jasenovac too. Such large transports for liquidations were carried out by the order of Matković Ivica (i.e. Ivica Matković), and in this way 2-3,000 people were sent away. On 16 April 1945 I returned to Jasenovac, where I stayed until the end. I know that at the time corpses of prisoners from Gradina were being exhumed and burned, in order to cover up traces of what had been done. I didn’t participate in the liquidation of the last prisoners, but only in exhumation.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miroslav_Filipovi%C4%87

Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac

Archbishop Stepinac was after WWII convicted by Yugoslav court for his participation in the genocide over Serbs and Jews- but that did not prevent Vatican from declaring him “a Saint”…

The Nazi collaborator Archbishop Stepinac (right) and the Vatican representative to fascist Croatia, Abbot Marcone (left). Croatia has recently renamed a village in Krajina after Stepinac. Marcone was Pavelic’s confessor and Stepinac was convicted of war crimes after the war. Several members of his clergy were involved in the genocide at Jasenovac – notably the Franciscan priest, Pater Miroslav Filipovic, who was one of the commandants of the camp.

During the Second World War in Yugoslavia, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics were willing accomplices in the genocide of the nations Serbian, Jewish and Roma population. From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens – 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, the Croatian Ustasha and Muslim fundamentalists were openly supported by the Vatican, the Archbishop of Zagreb Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac (1898-1960), and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Many of the victims of the Pavelic regime in Croatia were killed in the war’s third largest death camp – Jasenovac, where over 200,000 people – mainly Orthodox Serbs met their deaths. Some 240,000 were “rebaptized” into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist Clerics in “the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia” as part of the policy to “kill a third, deport a third, convert a third” of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, Jews and Roma in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag, Freiburg, Germany, 1988).

Stepinac, not only knew about Croatian Ustasha atrocities, he gave legitimacy to Nazi state and orchestrated the forcible conversion of Orthodox Christian Serbs into Catholicism. Everything was done by silent Vatican approval…

Stepinac himself declared:
“God, who directs the destiny of nations and controls the hearts of Kings, has given us Ante Pavelic and moved the leader of a friendly and allied people, Adolf Hitler, to use his victorious troops to disperse our oppressors… Glory be to God, our gratitude to Adolf Hitler and loyalty to our Poglavnik, Ante Pavelic.”

The involvement of Catholic clergy either in active participation or in blessing the Ustashi involvement in the Holocaust is well-documented. Stepinac himself headed the committee which was responsible for forcible “conversions” to Roman Catholicism under threat of death, and was also the Supreme Military Apostolic Vicar of the Ustashi Army, which effected the slaughter of those who failed to convert. Stepinac was known as the ‘Father Confessor’ to the Ustashi and continually bestowed the blessing of Catholic Church upon its members and actions.

Right from the very beginning, the Vatican knew what was happening in Croatia, and certainly known to Pius XII when he greeted Pavelic in Vatican – jus four days after the massacre at Glina. On this visit, Pavelic had a “devotional” audience with Pius XII, and the Vatican granted de-facto recognition of fascist Croatia as a “bastion against communism” – despite the fact that the Vatican still had diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia. Cornwell observes that right from the start it was known that Pavelic was a “totalitarian dictator”, a “puppet of Hitler and Mussolini”, that he had passed racist and anti-Semitic laws, and that he was “bent on enforced conversions from Orthodox to Catholic Christianity”. Effectively, on behalf of Hitler and Mussolini, the Pope was “holding Pavelic’s hand and bestowing his papal blessing” to the new puppet state of Croatia. Thus, it can argued, that the Catholic Cardinals in the Vatican were accomplices of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and the extermination of the countries Jews, Serbs and Roma citizens. Indeed, many of members of Croatian Catholic clergy took a “leading part” in the Holocaust.

Croatian “Fuhrer” Ante Pavelic and Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, running together the most brutal Nazi State in WWII…

One leading member of the Catholic church in Croatia was the Nazi collaborator Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac. When he met Pavelic on April 16th 1941, he later noted that he had promised that he would “not show tolerance” to the Orthodox Serbian church – which gave Stepinac the impression that Pavelic “was a sincere Catholic”. By June 1941, when German army units were reporting that the “Ustashe have gone raging mad” killing Serbs, Jews and Roma, Catholic priests, notably Franciscans took a leading part in the massacres, as pointed out by Cornwell:
“Priests, invariably Franciscans, took a leading part in the massacres. Many, went around routinely armed and performed their murderous acts with zeal. A Father Bozidar Bralow, known for the machine gun that was his constant companion, was accused of performing a dance around the bodies of 180 massacred Serbs at Alipasin-Most. Individual Franciscans killed, set fire to homes, sacked villages, and laid waste the Bosnian countryside at the head of Ustashe bands. In September of 1941, an Italian reporter wrote of a Franciscan he had witnessed south of Banja Luka urging on a band of Ustashe with his crucifix.” (p 254).

If the small Serbian children, previously brutally separated from parents (who were killed by Croats) were lucky- They would be “just” converted by Ustasha Catholic Clergy into Catholicism…

…If Croatian Ustasha Clergy decided not to convert Serbian children into Catholicism, than they (children) were brutally murdered, regardless of their age…

It is clear now, that other members of the Catholic Cardinals in Europe also knew about the massacres. On March 6th 1942, a French Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, a close confident of the Pope to the Croatian representative to the Vatican:
“I know for a fact, that it is the Franciscans themselves, as for example Father Simic of Knin, who have taken part in attacks against the Orthodox populations so as to destroy, the Orthodox Church. In the same way, you destroyed the Orthodox Church in Banja Luka. I know for sure that the Franciscans in Bosnia and Herzegovina have acted abominably, and this pains me. Such acts should not be committed by educated, cultured, civilized people, let alone by priests”. (p 259)

http://www.fantompowa.net/Fl…/yugoslavia_catholic_church.html