Lots of Jewish News

[Guest guest]

Lots of Jewish News

 

First off Happy Passover or Pesach!! Passover commemorates the

freedom of the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt.

Passover in 2005 will commence at sundown on Saturday evening April

23rd, 2005 and will last eight days (seven days for most Reform

Jews, some Conservative Jews, and Jews in Israel), concluding on

Sunday evening May 1st, 2005, or in the Hebrew calendar, from 15

Nissan 5765 to 22 Nissan 5765.

 

 

NJ JEWISH SINGLES NETWORK seeks to bring Jewish Singles who are over

21 and under 60 in New Jersey together via the net and in real life.

We hope that members will share information about themselves

and about events that are coming up. If anyone wishes to

have a house party, a movies and dinner group, or other

activity let us share that information too. If you are

single, Jewish, in New Jersey over 21 and under 60

you have come to the right place to meet other single

Jews. Welcome! Please state that you are Jewish, if you are Jewish,

when you apply to join this group and when you post your

introductions and when you reply to other posts. This is a Jewish

Singles Group.

NJ-JEWISH-SINGLES-NETWORK-21-to-59/

Post message: NJ-JEWISH-SINGLES-NETWORK-21-to-59

Subscribe: NJ-JEWISH-SINGLES-NETWORK-21-to-59-

 

 

Please also join our other fine Jewish Singles Groups:

 

Post message: Pro-IsraelJewishSinglesofNJ

Subscribe: Pro-IsraelJewishSinglesofNJ-

Pro-IsraelJewishSinglesofNJ/

 

jewishmatch for Jewish Singles from everywhere 21 or older

jewishmatch

Post message: jewishmatch

Subscribe: jewishmatch-

 

Please also join

ProjectCSPAN/

Post message: ProjectCSPAN

Subscribe: ProjectCSPAN-

Please Help to counter anti-Israel, anti-Semitic callers to

CSPAN programs such as Washington Journal, by making your own pro-

Israel, pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist, calls to those same CSPAN programs.

JEWISH SINGLES OUT OF THIS WORLD PARTY

 

Please join us for lunch at 1 p.m. on Sunday May 22nd, 2005 c.e.

at Veggie Heaven, a Kosher Chinese totally vegetarian restaurant, in

Parsippany,

New Jersey for our JEWISH SINGLES OUT OF THIS WORLD PARTY. You do

not have to be

a member of any or all of our groups to attend. Please,however, be

both Jewish,

and Single.

 

If you do decide to join any or all of our groups there is no charge

to join or

to belong to any or all of our groups.

 

There is no charge for this or any of our other events. When we go

to a

restaurant you pay only for what you order plus tax

and tip. Reservations are NOT required for this event.

 

After our lunch party we will go on to see the new Star Wars movie

at a local

movie theater. Buy your own movie ticket from the movie theater.We

have checked

and the movie theater below, which is very close to the restaurant,

not walking

distance, but a short distance away by car, will be showing the new

Star Wars

movie.

 

For more information about the movie click on

http://www.starwars.com/episode-iii/

 

For directions to the movie theater click on

http://www.clearviewcinemas.com/

 

Parsippany Cinema 12 3165 Route 46 East Parsippany, NJ 07054 973-335-

7466- #509

Go to

http://clearview.moviefone.com/showtimes/theater.adp?

page=map & date=20050414 & theat\

erid=509 & uid=11650 click on Map/Directions

 

We are not sure which showing of Star Wars we will go to as we do

not yet have the movie schedule for Sunday May 22nd, 2005 c.e.

so you need to join us for lunch at Veggie Heaven at 1 p.m.

on Sunday May 22nd, 2005 c.e. as we will be going from the lunch

to the movie theater. Buy your own ticket for the movie when you

get to it.

 

We do not charge anything for any of our events.

 

When we go to a restaurant you pay only for what you order plus tax

and tip. Reservations are NOT required for this event. The restaurant

is a 100% non-smoking restaurant, is moderately priced, has brown

rice, does not use MSG or animal products,is Kosher and totally

vegetarian, has plenty of free parking and is easy to reach from

nearby highways.

 

Here are the directions to Veggie Heaven

It is a Vegan Chinese Totally

Vegetarian Kosher Restaurant. The

restaurant is located in

Parsippany, New Jersey at 1119 Route 46

East #8A Parsippany, New Jersey,

in a shopping center which has plenty

of parking and is near

Route 80. The telephone numbers of the

restaurant are 973 335-9876

and 973 263-8331 the zip code, if you are using Mapquest, is 07054.

From the West (I-80)Take I-80 East and exit at the

Lake Hiawatha/Whippany exit. Make a left at

the light at the exit go past the entrance ramp which would put you

back onto Route 80 going west and make a left turn into the shopping

center. From the South (I-287) Take I-287 North to the exit for I-80

EASTBOUND / Route 46 EAST BOUND. Bear to the left when exiting I-287.

You will be on the I-80 service Rd. Continue to the first exit which

is the Lake Hiawatha/Whippany exit then follow directions above. FROM

THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY TAKE EXIT 145 TO ROUTE 280 WEST THEN Take

the

NEW RD exit- exit number 1. 0.15 miles Keep RIGHT at the fork in the

ramp.

0.07 miles Stay straight to go onto NEW RD. 0.63 miles

Turn LEFT onto US-46 W. DRIVING WEST ON ROUTE 46 Continue for two

traffic lights

(second light is Parsippany-Troy Hills Shopping Center)

which is at the INTERSECTION of Route 46 and Beverwyck Road AT

WHICH YOU COULD TURN RIGHT TOWARDS LAKE HIAWATHA, INSTEAD OF TURNING

RIGHT

HOWEVER TURN LEFT AT THAT INTERSECTION ONTO SOUTH BEVERWYCK

ROAD,THEN TURN RIGHT

INTO THE SHOPPING CENTER ITSELF WHICH IS BEFORE THE WEST BOUND RAMP

TO ANOTHER

HIGHWAY DO NOT TURN RIGHT INTO THE BANK BUT TURN RIGHT BEYOND THE

BANK AND INTO

THE SHOPPING CENTER, VEGGIE HEAVEN IS NEAR THE HEALTH FOOD STORE AND

IS IN THE

MIDDLE OF THE SHOPPING CENTER, WHICH HAS PLENTY OF PARKING IF YOU

GET LOST CALL

THE RESTAURANT FOR DIRECTIONS The telephone numbers of the

restaurant are 973

335-9876 and 973 263-8331 the zip code, if you are using Mapquest,

is 07054. The

restaurant is a non-smoking

restaurant and moderately priced. The restaurant states that it does

not use MSG and does not use any animal products at all. It is

certified Kosher

by

United Kosher Supervision

P.O. Box 317

Monsey, NY 10952

Phone: (845) 352-1010

Fax: (845) 352-0316

Rabbinic Administrator: Rabbi Yaakov Spivak

 

Next,we are concerned about events in Rome and in Washington.

 

Make no mistake about it John Bolton is a friend of Israel and

of the Jewish people. We strongly urge you to contact every US

Senator to demand that he be confirmed as US Ambassador to the UN.

Please also contact President Bush at http://www.whitehouse.gov

to urge him to stand by his nomination of John Bolton.

While you are at it please tell every US Senator and President Bush

that you are totally opposed now and forever to the creation of a so-

called " palestinian " state. The world does not need any more

terrorist states. Israel does not need a terrorist state armed with

the latest weapons of mass destruction literally across the street.

 

We are also concerned about the election as Pope of someone who

was a member of The Hitler Youth and the German Army and who

ran a Roman Catholic Church group which traced its origins to the

Inquisition. We feel that the new Pope is also someone who might

seek to create a Catholic Europe, witness his antipathy to Israel's

sometime sole semi-ally in the Islamic world: Turkey, which, for

reasons of its own, has sided with Israel against the Syrian regime,

which armed and trained Turkish Kurds whose anti-Turkish terrorism

cost some 30,000 Turkish lives.

 

We fear that the new Pope might seek to create a Catholic Europe

that might persecute Jews and expel French Moslems to Syria and

Lebanon, which could come under the control of a nuclear-armed

France that would be on Israel's doorstep. While both Syria and

Lebanon should indeed be liberated trading the Syrian regime in for

a nuclear-armed France in power in Beirut and Damascus might be

the equivalent of going from the frying-pan to the fire.

 

There is no guarantee that a nuclear-armed France with troops on

Israel's border would be friendly to Israel.

 

" Repeal UN " Zionism is racism " resolution

By: John R Bolton

Type: English : Book : Non-fiction

Publisher: Washington, D.C. : U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of Public

Affairs, Office of Public Communication, [1990] "

 

" Bolton and the U.N.

 

 

By Pedro A. Sanjuan

 

 

In all the excitement about John Bolton's nomination for permanent

U.S. representative to the United Nations, some important facts seem

to have been overlooked. Since I am intimately acquainted with the

period when Mr. Bolton was U.S. assistant secretary of state for

international affairs, let me explain what I mean, for the sake of

fairness.

When Jeane J. Kirkpatrick left the U.N. as America's ambassador in

1985, an interesting interpretation of her departure raced through

the halls of the U.N. Secretariat and among delegates of the other

U.N. member states. Mrs. Kirkpatrick had been fervently advocated

repeal of the U.N. General Assembly Resolution that identified

Zionism as a form of racism. Now everyone said the U.S. would turn

off the pressure attributed to Mrs. Kirkpatrick's pro-Jewish hang-

up, and the U.N. would return to its normal anti-Semitic state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The toxin of anti-Semitism has been present at the United Nations

for many years. Not too long ago at the U.N. Durban conference on

racism, Israel was the prime target.

Upon his appointment as State Department assistant secretary for

international organizations (i.e. the U.N.), John Bolton took this

particular issue in hand. In hearings before the U.S. Senate and the

House of Representatives, John Bolton's powerful voice established

once more, without doubt, that the primary U.S. policy at the United

Nations was repeal of the Zionism-equals- racism resolution and

eradication of anti-Semitism at the U.N.

Mr. Bolton not only exerted his considerable influence publicly at

congressional hearings but made certain the U.S. delegation to the

United Nations understood that repeal of the obnoxious U.N.

resolution was our principal objective.

The point was made without any of the usual diplomatic

circumlocutions that muddy human communications at the United

Nations. Mr. Bolton was blunt, categorical, unequivocal. He got the

point across that the U.S. would not tolerate anti-Semitism under

any guise at the U.N. or anywhere else.

As a result of John Bolton's forceful and courageous efforts, the

obnoxious Zionism-equals-racism document was finally repealed by the

U.N. General Assembly, a milestone in an environment where half-

truths and circumlocutions normally hold sway. Mr. Bolton's

achievement was all the more commendable since it became a fixed

norm of U.S. foreign policy no longer attributable to the personal

preferences of one or another U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

The United Nations has suffered and still suffers from many

contradictions and subversions of its original purpose. Everyone

agrees reform is the organizations main objective at present, when

so many of its blemishes have come to the surface.

One of the most successful reformers of the United Nations has been

John Bolton.

 

Pedro A. Sanjuan is former political affairs director in the United

Nations Secretariat and author of the forthcoming book, " U.N. Gang, "

to be published by Doubleday. "

 

 

The first item below appeared during the run-up to the liberation

of Iraq.

 

" In a meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton

yesterday, Sharon said that Israel was concerned about the security

threat posed by Iran, and stressed that it was important to deal

with Iran even while American attention was focused on Iraq.

 

Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials that he had no doubt

America would attack Iraq, and that it would be necessary thereafter

to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea.

 

Bolton, who is undersecretary for arms control and international

security, is in Israel for meetings on preventing the proliferation

of weapons of mass destruction. "

 

" New Pope was member of Hitler Youth in World War II

 

BERLIN: Pope Benedict XVI, the German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was

a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II, but an expert said

on Wednesday that any man of his age in Germany would have been

forced to join the movement. Ratzinger has repeatedly said he was an

unwilling participant in the Hitler Youth, which he joined at the

age of 14 in 1941. In his book " Memoirs: Milestones 1927-1997 " ,

Ratzinger recalls that the Hitler Youth and the girls' equivalent,

the German Girls' League, " were closely linked to the school, so my

brother and sister also had to take part in the activities " .

Ratzinger himself had entered a seminary in 1939 to begin his

training as a priest, but recalled in an interview with German

journalist Peter Seewald that " as soon as I left the seminary, I did

not go straight into the Hitler Youth " . " And that was difficult

because in order to qualify for the reduction in schooling fees that

I needed, you had to prove you had paid a visit to the Hitler

Youth. " So he joined, along with most of his seminary class. "

 

So the new Pope claims that it was not anti-Semitism on his part,

but rather money, which prompted him to join the Hitler Youth.

There must have been other sources of funds available. This clearly

leads us to believe that the statement by the new Pope is a lie on

its face. We are also saddened not only by the horrors of much of

the history of the Roman Catholic Church, from the Crusades, to the

Inquisition ,to the Holocaust, but by the modern Church's embrace of

murderers like arafat, who followed in the footsteps of his nazi

uncle just as, sadly, but we must say truly, the the former, now

deceased Pope followed in the footsteps of one of his predecessors

World War II's Pope Plus XII.

 

" Ratzinger as pope raises questions: Independent

 

22 April 2005

 

LONDON - Britain's left-liberal Independent newspaper said on Friday

the election of Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope raised serious

questions about the role of the Catholic Church under Nazism.

 

" A burden of history that needs to be lifted " , said the headline of

the Independent's commentary.

 

British media have generally given an unfavourable welcome to Pope

Benedict XVI, focusing their attention on the young Ratzinger's

obligatory spell in the Hitler Youth.

 

This, in turn, has provoked angry comment in Germany, where

newspapers condemned the British " obsession " with the Nazi regime

and World War Two.

 

" The world celebrates the new Pope and the British make a

 

stink " , wrote the mass circulation Bild newspaper.

 

The news magazine Der Spiegel accused the British tabloid press

of " stunning meanness " at a time when Germans had something to

celebrate.

 

But the Independent insisted that while no one was suggesting that

the young Ratzinger was a Nazi, there remained " good reasons for

profound unease " over his new role.

 

" The election of a German who lived through the era of Nazism to

this supreme spiritual seat will inevitably raise questions not only

about the present state of the Catholic Church, but also about its

past. "

 

To underline its call, the Independent sent its correspondent to the

local town library in Traunstein, Bavaria, where Ratzinger went to

school and attended a Catholic seminary in 1940.

 

In his book, local author Friedbert Muehldorfer gives a disturbing

and detailed account of atrocities, the expulsion of Jews and the

use of slave labour in a camp on the outskirts of Traunstein.

 

Muehldorfer records that the people of Traunstein were ordered to

close streets to traffic as " a column of emaciated prisoners was

herded through by SS guards " .

 

While some locals showed sympathy and gave the prisoners food, there

were also those " who looked away in shame to avoid the cruel truth

and past those who laughed at them cynically " , he added.

 

Making the link to Ratzinger, the Independent said it was " somewhat

remarkable " that none of these events " appear to have been

mentioned " in the pope's autobiography, 'Milestones', which was

published in 1997.

 

" It would have been difficult for anyone in the area not to be aware

of the concentration camp on the edge of Traunstein " , said the

Independent.

 

In his autobiography, the pope, who was in an anti-aircraft unit at

the end of the war, records that he deserted in late April 1945 and

fled to Traunstein.

 

There he hid from the SS, wearing civilian clothes, and was found by

the Americans who sent him briefly to an American prisoner of war

camp. "

 

 

 

" The Trial of German Major War Criminals

Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany

14th May to 24th May, 1946

One Hundred and Thirty-Seventh Day: Thursday, 23rd May, 1946

(Part 4 of 10)

 

 

[Page 331]

 

Q. Witness, at first you were Reich Leader of the NSDAP; that was a

Party office. Then after the seizure of power, you then became Youth

Leader of the German Reich; that was a State office. On the basis of

this State or national office, did you also have competence and

responsibility for the school system for the elementary schools?

[Page 332]

 

A. For the school system in Germany, the Reich Minister for Science,

Education, and Culture was the only authority. My competence was the

education outside the schools, along with the home and the school,

as it says in the law of 1st December, 1936. However, I had some

schools of my own, the so-called Adolf Hitler Schools, which were

not under national supervision. They were the creation of a later

period. And during the war, when children were sent into the

country - that is, through the organization which took care of

evacuating the young people from the big cities, from the areas

endangered by bombing - I had, within the camps where these children

were housed, a competence for education. But on the whole I have to

answer the question about my competence for the school system in

Germany in the negative.

Q. This youth which one had to educate outside the schools was

called the Hitler Youth, the HJ. Was membership in the Hitler Youth

compulsory or voluntary?

 

A. The membership in the Hitler Youth was voluntary until 1936. In

1936, the law already mentioned concerning the HJ was issued which

made all the German youth members of the HJ. The stipulations for

the carrying out of that law, however, were issued only in March

1939, and only during the war, in May 1940, was the thought of

carrying out a German youth order considered within the Reich Youth

Leadership and discussed publicly. May I point out that my then

deputy, Lauterbacher, at the time when I was at the front, stated in

a public meeting - I believe at Frankfurt in 1940 - that now, after

ninety-seven per cent of the youngest age group of youth had

volunteered for the Hitler Youth, it would be necessary to draft the

remaining three per cent by a youth order.

 

DR. SAUTER: In this connection, Mr. President, may I refer to two

documents of the Document Book Schirach. No. 51 -

 

THE PRESIDENT: I did not quite understand what the defendant said.

He said that the membership was voluntary until 1936, that the HJ

Law was then passed, and something to the effect that the execution

of the law was not published until 1939. Was that what he said?

 

DR. SAUTER: Yes, that is correct. Until 1936 - if I may explain

that, Mr. President - membership in the Hitler Youth was absolutely

voluntary. Then in 1936 the HJ Law was issued, which provided that

boys and girls had to belong to the Hitler Youth. But the

stipulations for its execution were issued by the defendant only in

1939 so that, in practice, until 1959 the membership was

nevertheless on a voluntary basis.

 

THE PRESIDENT: Is that right, defendant?

 

THE WITNESS: Yes, that is right.

 

DR. SAUTER: And these facts which I have just presented, Mr.

President, can also be seen from two documents of the Document Book

Schirach, No. 51, on Page 91, and No. 52, on Page 92. In the latter

document -

 

THE PRESIDENT: Very well, Dr. Sauter, I accept it from you and from

the defendant. I only wanted to understand it. You can go on.

 

DR. SAUTER: And in the second document, mention is also made of the

ninety-seven per cent which the defendant has said had voluntarily

joined the HJ, so that now there were only three per cent missing.

May I continue?

 

BY DR. SAUTER:

 

Q. Witness, what was the attitude of the parents of the children on

the question of whether the children should join the HJ or not? What

did the parents say?

 

A. There were, of course, parents who did not like to have their

children join the HJ. Whenever I made one of my radio speeches to

the parents or to the youth, many hundreds of parents sent me

letters. Among these letters, and

 

[Page 333]

 

very frequently, there were some in which the parents voiced their

objections to the HJ, or expressed their dislike of it. I always

considered that a special proof of the confidence which the parents

had in me. I should like to say here that never, when parents

restrained their children from joining, have I exerted any

compulsion or put them under pressure of any kind. In doing that I

would have lost all the confidence placed in me by the parents of

Germany. That confidence was the basis of my entire educational

work.

I believe that on this occasion I have to say also that the concept

that any youth organization can be established and carried on, and

successfully carried on, by coercing youth, is absolutely false.

 

Q. Witness, did youngsters who did not join the Hitler Youth suffer

any disadvantage for that reason?

 

A. Youngsters who did not join the Hitler Youth were at a

disadvantage in that they could not take part in our camping, in our

trips, in our sports meetings. They were in a certain sense

outsiders, and there a was a danger that they might become

hypochondriacs.

 

Q. But were there not certain professions in which membership in the

HJ was a prerequisite for working in those professions?

 

A. Of course.

 

Q. What were the professions?

 

A. For instance, the profession of teacher. It is quite clear that a

teacher cannot educate youth unless he himself knows the life of

that youth, and so we demanded that the young teachers, that is

those in training to teach, should go through the HJ. The junior

teacher had to be familiar with the ways of life of the pupils who

were under his supervision.

 

Q. But there were only a few such professions, whereas for other

professions membership in the HJ was not a prerequisite for

admission. Or what was the situation?

 

A. I cannot answer that in detail. I believe that a discussion about

that is not even possible, because the entire youth was in the

Hitler Youth.

 

Q. Witness, you know that the prosecution has also accused the

defendants of having advocated the Fuehrer principle. Therefore, I

ask you: Was the Fuehrer principle also valid in the HJ, and in what

form was it carried out in the HJ? I should like to remind you, in

connection with this question, of that kind of Fuehrer principle of

which we have heard in the testimony.

 

A. Of course, the HJ was founded on the Fuehrer principle; only the

entire form of leadership of youth differed basically from that of

other National Socialist organizations. For instance, we had the

custom in youth leadership of discussing frankly all questions of

interest to us. There were lively debates at our district leader

meetings. I myself educated my assistants in a spirit even of

contradiction. Of course, once we had debated a measure and I had

then given an order or a directive, that ended the debate. The youth

leaders - that is the young boy and girl leaders - through years of

working together and serving the common purpose, had become a unit

of many thousands. They had become friends. It is evident that in a

group of that kind the carrying out of orders and directives takes

place in ways entirely different from those in a military

organization or in any other political organization.

 

Q. Witness -

 

A. (Interposing) May I just add one more thing?

 

A leadership based on natural authority such as we had in the youth

organization is something which is not alien to youth at all. Such

leadership in the youth organization never degenerates into

dictatorship.

 

Q. Witness, you have been accused of training youth in a military

way, and in that connection, the fact has been pointed out that your

HJ wore a uniform. Is that correct, and why did the HJ wear a

uniform?

 

A. I have stated my opinion about that in many instances. I believe

there are also documents to illustrate it. I have always described

the uniform of the

 

[Page 334]

 

HJ as the dress of comradeship. The uniform was the symbol of a

community without class distinctions. The worker's boy wore the same

garb as the son of the university professor. The girl from the

wealthy family wore the same garb as the child of the labourer.

Hence the uniform. This uniform did not have any military

significance whatsoever.

DR. SAUTER: In that connection, Mr. President, may I ask you to take

judicial notice of Document No. 55 of the Document Book Schirach,

then of Nos. 55 and 117, where the defendant von Schirach, many

years ago, expressed in writing the same trends of thought which he

is expressing today.

 

I should only like to ask, Mr. President, for permission to correct

an error in Document 55, on Page 98. Rather far down, under the

heading, " Page 77, " is a quotation from a book by Schirach. There it

says: " Even the son of the millionaire has no other power - "

 

I do not know whether you have found the passage. It is on Page 77

of the book quoted, and Page 98 of the Document Book, No 55. There

is a quotation near the bottom of the page: " Even the son of the

millionaire has no other power. " It should read, " dress, "

not " power. " The German word, " Macht, " is an error, and should be

the word, " Tracht. "

 

So I ask now to have the word, " Macht, " " power, " changed to the

word " Tracht, " " dress. "

 

BY DR. SAUTER:

 

Q. Witness, I shall continue with the interrogation. You have been

accused of having prepared youth for the war, psychologically and

educationally. You are alleged to have participated in a conspiracy

for that purpose, a conspiracy by which the National Socialist

movement acquired total power in Germany, and finally planned and

carried out aggressive wars.

 

What can you say about that?

 

A. I did not participate in any conspiracy. I cannot consider it

participation in a conspiracy if I joined the National Socialist

Party. The programme of that party had been approved; it had been

published. The Party was authorized to take part in elections.

Hitler had not said - he had not said nor had any of his

assistants: " I want to assume power by a coup d'etat. " Again and

again in public he had stated, not once, but a hundred times: " I

want to overcome that parliamentary system by legal means, because

it is leading us, year by year, deeper into misery. " And I myself as

the youngest representative of the Reichstag of the Republic told my

60,000 constituents similar things in electoral campaigns.

 

There was nothing there which could have proved the fact of a

conspiracy, nothing which was discussed behind closed doors. What we

wanted we acknowledged frankly before the nation, and so far as the

printed word is read around the globe, everyone abroad also could

have been informed about our aims and purposes.

 

As far as preparation for war is concerned, I have to state that I

did not take part in any conferences or issuing of orders which

would indicate preparation for an aggressive war. I believe that can

be seen from the proceedings in this Court up to now.

 

I can only state that I did not participate in a conspiracy. I do

not believe either that there was a conspiracy; the thought of

conspiracy is in contradiction to the idea of dictatorship. A

dictatorship does not conspire; a dictatorship commands.

 

Q. Witness, what did the leadership of the Hitler Youth do to

prepare the youth for war and to train it for warlike purposes?

 

A. Before I answer that question, I believe I will have to explain

briefly the difference between military and pre-military training.

 

Military training, in my opinion, is training with weapons of war,

and training which is conducted by military personnel, that is, by

officers, with and

 

[Page 335]

 

without weapons of war. Pre-military education - pre-military

training - is, in the widest sense, training which comes before the

time of military service, a special preparation for military

service. We, in the Hitler Youth, were opponents of any military

drills for youth. We disliked such drills as opposed to youth. I am

not giving my personal opinion here, but the opinion of thousands of

my co-workers.

It is a fact that I rejected the " Wehrjugend, " the Youth Defence

Groups, which had existed in Germany, and did not allow any

continuation of " Wehrjugend " work within the HJ. I had always been

strongly opposed to any militarism in a youth organization. With all

nay high esteem for the profession of an officer, I still do not

consider an officer capable of leading youth, because always, in

some form or other, he will apply the tone of the barrack square and

the forms of military leadership to youth.

 

That is the reason why I did not have any officers as my assistants

in the Hitler Youth. Because of my attitude against using officers

as youth leaders, I was severely criticized by the Wehrmacht on

occasion. I should like to stress that that criticism did not come

from the OKW; Field-Marshal Keitel, especially, had a great deal of

understanding for my ideas. However, in the Wehrmacht, now and

again, criticism was heard on account of the general attitude of

opposition of the Youth Leadership Corps towards having officers

used as leaders of a youth organization. The principle of " youth

leading youth " was never broken in Germany.

 

If I am now to answer definitively the question of whether the youth

was prepared for the war and whether it was trained in a military

sense, I shall have to say, in conclusion, that the main emphasis of

all youth work in Germany was on the preparation for life in a

competitive world, in the professional schools, in camping, and

competitive sports. The physical training, which perhaps in some way

could be considered a preparation for military service, took up only

a very small part of our time.

 

I should like to give an example here. A " Gebiet " or district of the

Hitler Youth, for instance the " Gebiet " of Hessen-Nassau, which is

about the same as a " Gau " in the Party, contributed from its funds

in 1939 as follows: For hikes and camping, nine-twentieths; for

cultural work, three-twentieths; for sports and physical training,

three-twentieths; for the Land Service (Landdienst) and other tasks

and for the offices, five-twentieths.

 

The same area spent, in 1944 - that is, one year before the end of

the war - for cultural work, four-twentieths; for sports and defence

training, five-twentieths; for " Landdienst " and other tasks, six-

twentieths; and for the evacuation of children to the country, five-

twentieths.

 

In that connection I should like to mention briefly that the same

area, from 1936 until 1943, made no expenditures for racial-

political education; in 1944 there was an entry of twenty marks

under the heading of racial-political education for the acquisition

of a picture book about hereditary and social diseases. However, in

that same district, in one single town, during the same time,

200,000 marks were allowed for visits to the theatres.

 

The question concerning pre-military or military education cannot be

answered by me without describing small calibre shooting practice.

Small calibre firing was a sport among the German youth. It was

carried out according to the international rules for sport shooting.

Small calibre shooting, according to Article 177 of the Treaty of

Versailles, was not prohibited. It states expressly in that article

of the treaty that hunting, sporting and hiking organizations are

forbidden to train their members in the handling and use of war

weapons. The small calibre rifle, however, is not a war weapon. For

our sport shooting we used a rifle similar to the American 22-

calibre. It was used with the 22-calibre Flobert cartridge, short or

long.

 

I should like to say here that our entire marksmanship training and

other so-called pre-military training can be found in a manual

entitled HJ in the Service. That book was printed and sold not only

in Germany, but also was available abroad.

 

[Page 336]

 

The British Board of Education in 1938 passed a judgement on that

book, which was in the Educational Pamphlet, Number 109 With the

permission of the Tribunal I should like to quote briefly what was

said about it in this educational pamphlet. I quote in English:

" It cannot fairly be said to be in essence a more militaristic work

than any exhaustive and comprehensive manual of boy scout training

would be. Some forty pages are, to be sure; devoted to the theory

and practice of shooting small calibre rifles and air guns, but

there is nothing in them to which exception can reasonably be taken,

and the worst that one can say of them is that they may be

confidently recommended to the notice of any boy scout wishing to

qualify for his marksmanship badge. "

As to the intellectual attitude of the Hitler Youth, I can only say

that it was definitely not militaristic. "

 

Please see

also Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis, and The Swiss Banks by

Mark

Aarons, John Loftus

ISBN: 031218199X

ARAFAT'S

UNCLE, HITLER'S ALLY, THE GRAND MUFTI OF JERUSALEM

http://notendur.centrum.is/~snorrigb/muftism.htm

http://www.flamemag.dircon.co.uk/yugoslavia_collaboration.htm

http://www.flamemag.dircon.co.uk/nazis_postwar_egypt.htm

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/handzar/handzar.htm

Hitler's Pope : The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell

ISBN: 0670886939

" HITLER'S POPE

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

Long-buried Vatican files reveal a new and shocking indictment of

World War II's Pope Plus XII: that in pursuit of absolute power he

helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition,

betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a

20th-century devil.

BY JOHN CORNWELL

One evening several years ago when I was having dinner with a group

of

students, the topic of the papacy was broached, and the discussion

quickly boiled over. A young woman asserted that Eugenio Pacelli,

Pope

Pius XII, the Pope during World War II, had brought lasting shame on

thc Catholic Church by failing to denounce the Final Solution. A

young

man, a practicing Catholic, insisted that the case had never been

proved.

Raised as a Catholic during the papacy of Pius Xll - his picture

gazed

down from the wall of every classroom during my childhood - I was

only

too familiar with the allegation. It started in 1963 with a play by a

young German author named Rolf Hochhuth, Der Stellvertreter (Thc

Deputy) which was staged on Broadway in 1964. It depicted Pacelli as

a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican's stockholdings than

in the fate of the Jews. Most Catholics dismissed Hochhuth's thesis

as

implausible, but the play sparked a controversy which has raged to

this day.

Disturbed by the anger brought out in that dinner altercation, and

convinced, as I had always been, of Pius XII's innocence, I decided

to

write a new defense of his reputation for a younger generation. I

believed that Pacelli's evident holiness was proof of his good faith.

How could such a saintly pope have betrayed the Jews? But was it

possible to find a new and conclusive approach to the issue? The

arguments had so far focused mainly on his wartime conduct; however,

Pacelli's Vatican career had started 40 years earlier. It seemed to

me

that a proper investigation into Pacelli's record would require a

more

extensive chronicle than any attempted in the past. So I applied for

access to archival material in the Vatican, reassuring those who had

charge of crucial documents that I was on the side of my subject. Six

years earlier, in a book entitled A Thief in the Night, I had

defended

the Vatican against charges that Pope John Paul I had been murdered

by

his own aides.

Two key officials granted me access to secret material: depositions

under oath gathered 30 years ago to support the process for Pacelli's

canonization, and the archive of the Vatican Secretariat of State,

the

foreign office of the Holy See. I also drew on German sources

relating

to Pacelli's activities in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s,

including his dealings with AdoIf Hitler in 1933. For months on end I

ransacked Pacelli's files, which dated back to 1912, in a windowless

dungeon beneath the Borgia Tower in Vatican City. Later I sat for

several weeks in a dusty office in the Jesuit headquarters, close to

St. Peter's Square in Rome, mulling over a thousand pages of

transcribed testimony given under oath by those who had known Pacelli

well during his lifetime, including his critics. By the middle of

1997, 1 was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered

amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment more scandalous

than Hochhuth's. The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first

time that PaceIli was patently, and by the proof of his own words,

anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at

the

same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It

showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust,

despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse,

that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively

taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazi

persecution of the Jews.

In the " Holy Year " of 1950, a year in which many millions of pilgrims

flocked to Rome to catch a glimpse of Pacelli, he was at the zenith

of

his papacy. This was the Pius people now in their mid-50s and older

remember from newsreels and newspaper photographs. He was 74 years

old

and still vigorous. Six feet tall, stick thin at 125 pounds, light on

his feet, regular in habits, he had hardly altered physically from

the

day of his coronation 11 years earlier. He had beautiful tapering

hands, a plaintive voice, large dark eyes and an aura of holiness. It

was his extreme pallor that first arrested those who met him. His

skin

" had surprisingly transparent effect, " observed the writer Gerrado

Pallenberg, " as if reflecting from the inside a cold, white flame. "

His charisma was stunning. " His presence radiated a benignity, calm

and sanctity that I have certainly never before sensed in any human

being. " recorded the English writer James Lees-Milne. " I immediately

fell head over heels in love with him. I was so affected I could

scarcely speak without tears and was conscious that my legs were

trembling. "

But there was another side to his character, little known to the

faithful. Although he was a man of selfless, monklike habits of

prayer

and simplicity, he was a believer in the absolute leadership

principle. More than any other Vatican official of the century, he

had promoted the modern ideology of autocratic papal control, the

highly centralized, dictatoria1 authority he himself assumed on March

2, 1939, and maintained until his death in October 1958. There was a

time before the advent of modern communications when Catholic

authority was widely distributed, in the collective decisions of the

church's councils and in collegial power-sharing between the Pope and

the bishops. The absolutism of the modern papacy is largely an

invention of the late 19th century It developed rapidly in the first

decades of this century in response to the perception of the

centrifugal breakup of the church under an array of contemporary

pressures: materialism, increasing sexual freedom, religious

skepticism, and social and political liberties. From his young

manhood

on, Pacelli played a leading role in shaping the conditions and scope

of modern papal power.

Eugenio Pacelli was born in Rome in 1876, into a family of church

lawyers who served the Vatican. He had an older sister and brother

and

a younger sister. His parents, devout Catholics, shared an apartment

in central Rome with his grandfather, who had been a legal adviser to

Pius IX, the longest-serving Pope in history. There was only one

small

brazier to supply heat for the whole family, even in the depths of

winter. Eugenio was a modest youth, who never appeared before his

siblings unless he was fully dressed in a jacket and tie. He would

always come to the table with a book, which he would read after

having

asked the family's permission. From an early age he acted out the

ritual of the Mass, dressed in robes supplied by his mother. He had a

gift for languages and a prodigious memory. He was spindly and

suffered from a " fastidious stomach. " He retained a youthful piety

all

his life. Politically and legally, however, he was capable of great

subtlety and cunning. The Pacelli's were fiercely loyal to the

injured merit of the papacy. From 1848, the Popes had progressively

lost to the emerging nation-state of Italy their dominions, which had

formed, since time immemorial, the midriff of the Italian peninsula.

Six years before Eugenio's birth, the city of Rome itself had been

seized, leaving the papacy in crisis. How could the Popes regard

themselves as independent now that they were mere citizens of an

upstart kingdom? Eugenio's grandfather and father believed

passionately that the Popes could once again exert a powerful

unifying

authority over the church by the application of ecclesiastical and

international law. In 1870, at a gathering in Rome of a preponderance

of the world's bishops, known as the First Vatican Council, the Pope

was dogmatically declared infallible in matters of faith and morals.

He was also declared the unchallenged primate of the faithful. The

Pope may have lost his temporal dominion, but spiritually he was

solely in charge of his universal church.

During the first two decades of this century, papal primacy and

infallibility began to creep even beyond the ample boundaries set by

the First Vatican Council. A powerful legal instrument transformed

the

1870 primacy dogma into an unprecedented principle of papal power.

Eugenio Pacelli, by then a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, had a

major

part in the drafting of that instrument, which was known as the Code

of Canon Law.

Pacelli had been recruited into the Vatican in 1901, at the age of

24,

to specialize in international affairs and church law. Pious,

slender,

with dark luminous eyes, he was an instant favorite. He was invited

to

collaborate on the reformulation of church law with his immediate

superior, Pietro Gaspam, a world-famous canon lawyer. Packaged in a

single manual, the Code of Canon Law was distributed in 1917 to

Catholic bishops and clergy throughout the world. According to this

code, in the future all bishops would be nominated by the Pope;

doctrinal error would be tantamount to heresy; priests would be

subjected to strict censorship in their writings; papal letters to

the

faithful would be regarded as infallible (in practice if not in

principle}: and an oath would be taken by all candidates for the

priesthood to submit to the sense as well as the strict wording of

doctrine as laid down by the Pope.

But there was a problem. The church had historically granted the

dioceses in the provincial states of Germany a large measure of local

discretion and independence from Rome. Germany had one of the largest

Catholic populations in the world, and its congregation was well

educated and sophisticated, with hundreds of Catholic associations

and

newspapers and many Catholic universities and publishing houses. The

historic autonomy of Germany's Catholic Church was enshrined in

ancient church-state treaties known as concordats.

Aged 41 and already an archbishop, PaceIli was dispatched to Munich

as

papal nuncio, or ambassador, to start the process of eliminating all

existing legal challenges to the new papal autocracy. At the same

time, he was to pursue a Reich Concordat, a treaty between the papacy

and Germany as a whole which would supersede all local agreements and

become a model of Catholic church-state relations. A Reich Concordat

would mean formal recognition by the German government of the Pope's

right to impose the new Code of Canon Law on Germany's Catholics.

Such

an arrangement was fraught with significance for a largely Protestant

Germany. Nearly 400 years earlier, in Wittenberg, Martin Luther had

publicly burned a copy of Canon Law in defiance of the centralized

authority of the church. It was one of the defining moments of the

Reformation, which was to divide Western Christendom into Catholics

and Protestants. In May 1917, Pacelli set off for Germany via

Switzerland in a private railway compartment, with an additional

wagon

containing 60 cases of special foods for his delicate stomach. The

Pope at that time, Benedict XV, was shocked at this extravagance, but

PaceIli had favored status as the Vatican's best diplomat. Shortly

after he settled in Munich, he acquired a reputation as a vigorous

relief worker. He traveled through war-weary Germany extending

charity

to people of all religions and none. In an early letter to the

Vatican, however he revealed himself to be less than enamored of

Germany's Jews. On September 4, 1917. PaceIli informed Pietro Gaspam,

who had become cardinal secretary of state in the Vatican-the

equivalent of foreign minister and prime minister-that a Dr. Werner,

the chief rabbi of Munich, had approached the nunciature begging a

favor. In order to celebrate the festival of Tabernacles, beginning

on

October 1, the Jews needed palm fronds, which normally came from

Italy. But the Italian government had forbidden the exportation, via

Switzerland, of a stock of palms which the Jews had purchased and

which were being held up in Como. " The Israelite Community, "

continued

Pacelli, " are seeking the intervention of the Pope in the hope that

he

will plead on behalf of the thousands of German Jews. " The favor in

question was no more problematic than the transportation of Pacelli's

60 cases of food-stuffs had been a few months earlier.

Pacelli informed Gaspam that he had warned the rabbi that " wartime

delays in communication " would make things difficult. He also told

Gaspam that he did not think it appropriate for the Vatican " to

assist

them in the exercise of their Jewish cult. " His letter went by the

slow route overland in the diplomatic bag. Gaspatti replied by

telegram on September 18 that he entirely trusted Pacelli's

" shrewdness, " agreeing that it would not be appropriate to help Rabbi

Werner. PaceIli wrote back on September 28, 1917, informing Gasparri

that he had again seen the Rabbi, who " was perfectly convinced of the

reasons I had given him and thanked me warmly for all that I had done

on his behalf. " Pacelli had done nothing except thwart the rabbi's

request. The episode, small in itself, belies subsequent claims that

Pacelli had a great love of the Jewish religion and was always

motivated by its best interests.

Eighteen months later he revealed his antipathy toward the Jews in a

more blatantly anti-Semitic fashion when he found himself at the

center of a local revolution as Bolshevik groups struggled to take

advantage of the chaos in postwar Munich. Writing to Gasparri,

Pacelli

described the revolutionaries and their chief, Eugen Levien in their

headquarters in the former royal palace. The letter has lain in the

Vatican secret archive like a time bomb until now:

" The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The

confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating; soldiers

and armed workers coming and going; the building, once the home of a

king, resounding with screams, vile language, profanities. Absolute

hell. An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out

orders,

waving bits of paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young

women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging

around in all the offices with provocative demeanor and suggestive

smiles. The boss of this female gang was Levien's mistress, a young

Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge. And it was to

her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to

proceed.

This Levien is a young man, about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew.

Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with

a

face that is both intelligent and sly. "

This association of Jewishness with Bolshevism confirms that Pacelli,

from his early 40s, nourished a suspicion of and contempt for the

Jews

for political reasons. But the repeated references to the Jewishness

of these individuals, along with the catalogue of stereotypical

epithets deploring their physical and moral repulsiveness, betray a

scorn and revulsion consistent with anti-Semitism. Not long after

this, Pacelli campaigned to have black French troops removed from the

Rhineland, convinced that they were raping women and abusing children

- even though an independent inquiry sponsored by the U.S. Congress,

of which Pacelli was aware, proved this allegation false. Twenty-

three

years later, when the Allies were about to enter Rome, he asked the

British envoy to the Vatican to request of the British Foreign Office

that no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that

might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.

Pacelli spent 13 years in Germany attempting to rewrite the state

Concordats one by one in favor of the power of the Holy See and

routinely employing diplomatic blackmail. Germany was caught up in

many territorial disputes following the redrawing of the map of

Central Europe after thc First World War. Pacelli repeatedly traded

promises of Vatican support for German control of disputed regions in

return for obtaining terms advantageous to the Vatican in Concordats.

The German government's official in charge of Vatican affairs at one

point recorded the " ill feeling " prompted by Pacelli's " excessive

demands. " Both Catholics and Protestants in Germany resisted reaching

an agreement with Pacelli on a Reich Concordat because the nuncio's

concept of a church-state relationship was too authoritarian. In his

negotiations, Pacelli was not concerned about the fate of non-

Catholic

religious communities or institutions, or about human rights. He was

principally preoccupied with the interests of the Holy See. Nothing

could have been better designed to deliver Pacelli into the hands of

Hitler later, when the future dictator made his move in 1933.

In June 1920, Pacelli became nuncio to all of Germany, with

headquarters in Berlin as well as in Munich, and immediately acquired

a glittering reputation in diplomatic circles. He was a favorite at

dinner parties and receptions, and he was known to ride horses on the

estate of a wealthy German family. His household was run by a pretty

young nun from southern Germany named Sister Pasqualina Lehnert.

Pacelli's sister Elisabetta, who battled with the nun for Pacelli's

affections, described Pasqualina as " scaltrissima " -extremely cunning.

In Munich it had been rumored that he cast more than priestly eyes on

this religious housekeeper. Pacelli insisted that a Vatican

investigation into this " horrible calumny " be conducted at the

highest

level, and his reputation emerged unbesmirched. Meanwhile, he had

formed a close relationship with an individual named Ludwig Kaas.

Kaas

was a representative of the solidly Catholic German Center Party, one

of the largest and most powerful democratic parties in Germany.

Though

it was unusual for a full-time politician, he was also a Roman

Catholic priest. Five years Pacelli's junior, dapper, bespectacled,

and invariably carrying a smart walking stick, Kaas, known as " the

prelate, " became an intimate collaborator of Pacelli's on every

aspect

of Vatican diplomacy in Germany. With Pacelli's encouragement, Kaas

eventually became the chairman of the Center Party, the first priest

to do so in the party's 60-year history. Yet while Kaas was

officially

a representative of a major democratic party, he was increasingly

devoted to Pacelli to the point of becoming his alter ego. Sister

Pasqualina stated after Pacelli's death that Kaas, who " regularly

accompanied Pacelli on holiday " was linked to him in " adoration,

honest love and unconditional loyalty. " There were stories of acute

jealousy and high emotion when Kaas became conscious of a rival

affection in Pacelli's secretary, the Jesuit Robert Leiber, who was

also German.

Kaas was a profound believer in the benefits of a Reich Concordat,

seeing a parallel between papal absolutism and the FÜHRER-PRINZIP,

the

Fascist leadership principle. His views coincided perfectly with

Pacelli's on church-state politics, and their aspirations for

centralized papal power were identical. Kaas's adulation of PaceIli,

whom he put before his party, became a crucial element in the

betrayal

of Catholic democratic politics in Germany. In 1929, Pacelli was

recalled to Rome to take over the most important role under the Pope,

Cardinal Secretary of State. Sister Pasqualina arrived uninvited and

cunningly, according to Pacelli's sister, and along with two German

nuns to assist her, took over the management of his Vatican

residence.

Almost immediately Kaas, although he was still head of the German

Center Party, started to spend long periods-months at a time-in

Pacelli's Vatican apartments Shortly before Pacelli's return to Rome,

his brother, Francesco had successfully negotiated on behalf of Pius

Xl, the current Pope, a concordat with Mussolini as part of an

agreement known as the Lateran Treaty. The rancor between the Vatican

and the state of Italy was officially at an end. A precondition of

the

negotiations had involved the destruction of the parliamentary

Catholic Italian Popular Party. Pius XI disliked political

Catholicism

because he could not control it. Like his predecessors, he believed

that Catholic party politics brought democracy into the church by the

back door. The result of the demise of the Popular Party was the

wholesale shift of Catholics into the Fascist Party and the collapse

of democracy in Italy. Pius XI and his new secretary of state,

Pacelli, were determined that no accommodation be reached with

Communists anywhere in the world - this was the time of persecution

of

the church in Russia, Mexico, and later Spain -but totalitarian

movements and regimes of the right were a different matter. Hitler,

who had enjoyed his first great success in the elections of September

1930, was determined to seek a treaty with the Vatican similar to

that

struck by Mussolini, which would lead to the disbanding of the German

Center Party. In his political testament, Mein Kampf, he had

recollected that his fear of Catholicism went back to his vagabond

days in Vienna. The fact that German Catholics, politically united by

the Center Party, had defeated Bismarck's Kulturkampf- the " culture

struggle " against the Catholic Church in the 1870s-constantly worried

him. He was convinced that his movement could succeed only if

political Catholicism and its democratic networks were eliminated.

Hitler's fear of the Catholic Church was well grounded. Into the

early

1930s the German Center Party, the German Catholic bishops, and the

Catholic media had been mainly solid in their rejection of National

Socialism. They denied Nazis the sacraments and church burials, and

Catholic journalists excoriated National Socialism daily in Germany's

400 Catholic ewspapers. The hierarchy instructed priests to combat

National Socialism at a local level whenever it attacked

Christianity.

The Munich-based weekly Der Gerade Weg The Straight Path) told its

readers, " Adolf Hitler preaches the law of lies. You who have fallen

victim to the deceptions of one obsessed with despotism, wake up! "

The vehement front of the Catholic Church in Germany against Hitler,

however, was not at one with the view from inside the Vatican-a view

that was now being shaped and promoted by Eugenio Pacelli.

In 1930 the influential Catholic politician Heinrich Briining, a

First

World War Veteran, became the leader of a brief new government

coalition, dominated by the majority Socialists and the Center Party.

The country was reeling from successive economic crises against the

background of the world slump and reparations payments to the Allies.

In August 1931, Briining visited Pacelli in the Vatican, and the two

men quarreled. Brüning tells in his memoirs how Pacelli lectured him,

the German chancellor, on how he should reach an understanding with

the Nazis to " form a right-wing administration " in order to help

achieve a Reich Concordat favorable to the Vatican. When Brüning

advised him not to interfere in German politics, Pacelli threw a

tantrum. Brüning parting shot that day was the ironic observation-

chilling in hindsight-that he trusted that " the Vatican would fare

better at the hands of Hitler ... than with himself, a devout

Catholic. "

Briining was right on one score. Hitler proved to be the only

chancellor prepared to grant Pacelli the sort of authoritarian

concordat he was seeking. But the price was to be catastrophic for

Catholic Germany and for Germany as a whole. After Hitler came to

power in January 1933, he made the concordat negotiations with

Pacelli

a priority. The negotiations proceeded over six months with constant

shuttle diplomacy between the Vatican and Berlin. Hitler spent more

time on this treaty than on any other item of foreign diplomacy

during

his dictatorship. The Reich Concordat granted Pacelli the right to

impose the new Code of Canon Law on Catholics in Germany and promised

a number of measures favorable to Catholic education, including new

schools. In exchange, Pacelli collaborated in the withdrawal of

Catholics from political and social activity. The negotiations were

conducted in secret by Pacelli, Kaas, and Hitler's deputy chancellor,

Franz von Papen, over the heads of German bishops and the faithful.

The Catholic Church in Germany had no say in setting the conditions.

In the end, Hitler insisted that his signature on the concordat would

depend on the Center Party's voting for the Enabling Act, the

legislation that was to give him dictatorial powers. It was Kaas,

chairman of the party but completely in thrall to Pacelli, who

bullied

the delegates into acceptance. Next, Hitler insisted on the

" voluntary " disbanding of the Center Party, the last truly

parliamentary force in Germany. Again, Pacelli was the prime mover in

this tragic Catholic surrender. The fact that the party voluntarily

disbanded itself, rather than go down fighting, had a profound

psychological effect, depriving Germany of the last democratic focus

of potential noncompliance and resistance: In the political vacuum

created by its surrender, Catholics in the millions joined the Nazi

Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope. The German

bishops capitulated to Pacelli's policy of centralization, and German

Catholic democrats found themselves politically leaderless. After the

Reich Concordat was signed, Pacelli declared it an unparalleled

triumph for the Holy See. In an article in L 'Osservatore Romano, the

Vatican-controlled newspaper, he announced that the treaty, indicated

the total recognition and acceptance of the church's law by the

German

state. But Hitler was the true victor and the Jews were the

concordat's first victims. On July 14, 1933, after the initialing of

the treaty, the Cabinet minutes record Hitler as saying that the

concordat had created an atmosphere of confidence that would be

" especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry. "

He was claiming that the Catholic Church had publicly given its

blessing, at home and abroad, to the policies of National Socialism,

including its anti-Semitic stand. At the same time, under the terms

of

the concordat, Catholic criticism of acts deemed political by the

Nazis, could now be regarded as " foreign interference. " The great

German Catholic Church, at the insistence of Rome, fell silent. In

the future all complaints against the Nazis would be channeled

through

Pacelli. There were some notable exceptions, for example the sermons

preached in 1933 by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of

Munich, in which he denounced the Nazis for their rejection of the

Old

Testament as a Jewish text. The concordat immediately drew the German

church into complicity with the Nazis. Even as Pacelli was granted

special advantages in the concordat for German Catholic education,

Hitler was trampling on the educational rights of Jews throughout the

country. At the same time, Catholic priests were being drawn into

Nazi

collaboration with the attestation bureaucracy, which established

Jewish ancestry. Pacelli, despite the immense centralized power he

now wielded through the Code of Canon Law, said and did nothing. The

attestation machinery would lead inexorably to the selection of

millions destined for the death camps.

As Nazi anti-Semitism mounted in Germany during the 1930's, Pacelli

failed to complain, even on behalf of Jews who had become Catholics,

acknowledging that the matter was a matter of German internal policy.

Eventually, in January 1937, three German cardinals and two

influential bishops arrived at the Vatican to plead for a vigorous

protest over Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church, which had been

deprived of all forms of activity beyond church services. Pins XI at

last decided to issue an encyclical, a letter addressed to all the

faithful of the world. Written under Pacelli's direction, it was

called Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), and it was a

forthright statement of the plight of the church in Germany. But

there

was no explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, even in relation to

Jews who had converted to Catholicism. Worse still, the subtext

against Nazism (National Socialism and Hitler were not mentioned by

name) was blunted by the publication five days later of an even more

condemnatory encyclical by Pins XI against Communism. The encyclical

Mit Brennender Sorge, though too little and too late, revealed that

the Catholic Church all along had the power to shake the regime. "

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

Hitler's Pope and Hitler's Mufti Reincarnated-Part Two

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

" A few days later, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's closest aides and

his commander of the Luffwaffe, delivered a two-hour harangue to a

Nazi assembly against the Catholic clergy. However, Roman

centralizing had paralyzed the German Catholic Church and its

powerful

web of associations. Unlike the courageous grass-roots activism that

had combated Bismarck's persecutions in the 1870s, German Catholicism

now looked obediently to Rome for guidance. Although Pacelli

collaborated in the writing and the distribution of the encyclical,

he

quickly undermined its effects by reassuring the Reich's ambassador

in

Rome. " Pacelli received me with decided friendliness, " the diplomat

reported back to Berlin, " and emphatically assured me during the

conversation that normal and friendly relations with us would be

restored as soon as possible. " In the summer of 1938, as Pius XI lay

dying, he became belatedly anxious about anti-Semitism throughout

Europe. He commissioned another encyclical, to be written exclusively

on the Jewish question. The text, which never saw the light of day,

has only recently been discovered. It was written by three Jesuit

scholars, but Pacelli presumably had charge of the project. It was to

be called Humani Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race). For

all

its good intentions and its repudiation of violent anti-Semitism, the

document is replete with the anti-Jewishness that Pacelli had

displayed in his early period in Germany. The Jews, the text claims,

were responsible for their own fate. God had chosen them to make way

for Christ's redemption, but they denied and killed him. And now,

" blinded by their dream of worldly gain and material success, " they

deserved the " worldly and spiritual ruin " that they had brought down

upon themselves.

The document warns that that to defend the Jews as " Christian

principles and humanity " demand could involve the unacceptable risk

of

being ensnared by secular politics-not least an association with

Bolshevism. The encyclical was delivered in the fall of 1938 to the

Jesuits in Rome, who sat on it. To this day we do not know why it was

not completed and handed to Pope Pius XI. For all its drawbacks, it

was a clear protest against Nazi attacks on Jews and so might have

done some good. But it appears likely that the Jesuits, and Pacelli,

whose influence as secretary of state of the Vatican was paramount

since the Pope was moribund, were reluctant to inflame the Nazis by

its publication. Pacelli, when he became pope, would bury the

document

deep in the secret archives.

On February 10, 1939, Pius XI died, at the age of 81. Pacelli, then

63, was elected Pope by the College of Cardinals in just three

ballots, on March 2. He was crowned on March 12, on the eve of

Hitler's march into Prague. Between his election and his coronation

he

held a crucial meeting with the German cardinals. Keen to affirm

Hitler publicly, he showed them a letter of good wishes which began,

" To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler. " Should he, he asked them,

style the Führer " Most Illustrious " ? He decided that that might be

going too far. He told the cardinals that Pius XI had said that

keeping a papal nuncio in Berlin " conflicts with our honor. " But his

predecessor, he said, had been mistaken. He was going to maintain

normal diplomatic relations with Hitler. The following month, at

Pacelli's express wish, Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the Berlin

nuncio,

hosted a gala reception in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday. A

birthday

greeting to the Führer from the bishops of Germany would become an

annual tradition until the war's end.

Pacelli's coronation was the most triumphant in a hundred years. His

style of papacy, for all his personal humility, was unprecedentedly

pompous. He always ate alone. Vatican bureaucrats were obliged to

take

phone calls from him on their knees. When he took his afternoon walk,

the gardeners had to hide in the bushes. Senior officials were not

allowed to ask him questions or present a point of view.

As Europe plunged toward war Pacelli cast himself in the role of

judge

of judges. But he continued to seek to appease Hitler by attempting

to

persuade the Poles to make concessions over Germany's territorial

claims. After Hitler's invasion of Poland, on September 1, 1939, he

declined to condemn Germany, to the bafflement of the Allies. His

first public statement, the encyclical known in the English-speaking

world as Darkness over the Earth, was full of papal rhetoric and

equivocations. Then something extraordinary occurred, revealing that

whatever had motivated Pacelli in his equivocal approach to the Nazi

onslaught in Poland did not betoken cowardice or a liking for Hitler.

In November 1939, in deepest secrecy, Pacelli became intimately and

dangerously involved In what was probably the most viable plot to

depose Hitler during the war.

The plot centered on a group of anti-Nazi generals, committed to

returning Germany to democracy. The coup might spark a civil war, and

they wanted assurances that the West would not take advantage of the

ensuing chaos. Pius XII agreed to act as go-between for the plotters

and the Allies. Had his complicity in the plot been discovered it

might have proved disastrous for the Vatican and for many thousands

of

German clergy. As it happened, leaders in London dragged their feet,

and the plotters eventually fell silent. The episode demonstrates

that, while Pacelli seemed weak to some, pusillanimity and

indecisiveness were hardly in his nature. Pacelli's first wartime act

of reticence in failing to speak out against Fascist brutality

occurred in the summer of 1941, following Hitler's invasion of

Yugoslavia and the formation of the Catholic and Fascist state of

Croatia. In a wave of appalling ethnic cleansing, the Croat Fascist

separatists, known as the Ustashe, under the leadership of Ante

Pavelic, the Croat Führer, embarked on a campaign of enforced

conversions, deportations, and mass extermination targeting a

population of 2.2 million Serb Orthodox Christians and a smaller

number of Jews and Gypsies.

According to the Italian writer Carlo Falconi, as early as April, in

a

typical act of atrocity, a band of Ustashe had rounded up 331 Serbs.

The victims were forced to dig their own graves before being hacked

to

death with axes. The local priest was forced to recite the prayers

for

the dying while his son was chopped to pieces before his eyes. Then

the priest was tortured. His hair and beard were torn off, his eves

were gouged out. Finally he was skinned alive. The very next month

Pacelli greeted Pavelic at the Vatican. Throughout the war, the Croat

atrocities continued By the most recent scholarly reckoning. 487,000

Orthodox Serbs and 27,000 Gypsies were massacred; in addition,

approximately 30,000 out of a population of 45,000 Jews were killed.

Despite a close relationship between the Ustashe regime and the

Catholic bishops, and a constant flow of information about the

massacres, Pacelli said and did nothing. In fact, he continued to

extend warm wishes to the Ustashe leadership. The only feasible

explanation for Pacelli's silence was his perception of Croatia as a

Catholic bridgehead into the East. The Vatican and the local bishops

approved of mass conversion in Croatia (even though it was the result

of fear rather than conviction), because they believed that this

could

spell the beginning of a return {?} of the Orthodox Christians there

to papal allegiance. Pacelli was not a man to condone mass murder,

but

he evidently chose to turn a blind eye on Ustashe atrocities rather

than hinder a unique opportunity to extend the power of the papacy.

{Note from emperors-clothes.com: This is a very generous

interpretation. In fact the Catholic Church, controlled the

Independent State of Croatia. At one point it was in fact directly

run

by Archbishop Stepinac who answered to Pius XII. Stepinac has, in

turn, been beatified by the current pope, in a Croatian ceremony

attended by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.} Pacelli came to learn

of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe shortly after

they

were laid in January 1942. The deportations to the death camps had

begun in December 1941 and would continue through 1944. All during

1942, Pacelli received reliable information on the details of the

Final Solution, much of it supplied by the British, French, and

American representatives resident in the Vatican. On March 17, 1942,

representatives of Jewish organizations assembled in Switzerland sent

a memorandum to Pacelli via the papal nuncio in Bern, cataloguing

violent anti-Semitic measures in Germany and in its allied and

conquered territories. Their plea focused attention on Slovakia,

Croatia, Hungary, and unoccupied France, where, they believed, the

Pope's intervention might yet be effective. Apart from an

intervention

in the case of Slovakia, where the president was Monsignor Josef

Tiso,

a Catholic priest, no papal initiatives resulted. During the same

month, a stream of dispatches describing the fate of some 90,000 Jews

reached the Vatican from various sources in Eastern Europe. The

Jewish

organizations' long memorandum would be excluded from the wartime

documents published by the Vatican between 1965 and 1981. On June 16,

1942, Harold Tittmann, the U.S. representative to the Vatican, told

Washington that Pacelli was diverting himself, ostrichlike, into

purely religious concerns and that the moral authority won for the

papacy by Pius XI was being eroded. At the end of that month, the

London Daily Telegraph announced that more than a million Jews had

been killed in Europe and that it was the aim of the Nazis " to wipe

the race from the European continent. " The article was re-printed in

The New York Times. On July 21 there was a protest rally on behalf of

Europe's Jews in New York's Madison Square Garden. In the following

weeks the British, American, and Brazilian representatives to the

Vatican tried to persuade Pacelli to speak out against the Nazi

atrocities. But still he said nothing. In September 1942, President

Franklin Roosevelt sent his personal representative, the former head

of U.S. Steel, Myron Taylor, to plead with PaceIli to make a

statement

about the extermination of the Jews. Taylor traveled hazardously

through enemy territory to reach the Vatican. Still Pacelli refused

to

speak. Pacelli's excuse was that he must rise above the belligerent

parties. As late as December 18, Francis d'Arcy Osborne, Britain's

envoy in the Vatican, handed Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Pacelli's

deputy secretary of state, a dossier replete with information on the

Jewish deportations and mass killings in hopes that the Pope would

denounce the Nazi regime in a Christmas message.

On December 24, 1942, having made draft after draft, Pacelli at last

said something. In his Christmas Eve broadcast to the world on

Vatican

Radio, he said that men of goodwill owed a vow to bring society " back

to its immovable center of gravity in divine law. " He went on:

" Humanity owes this vow to those hundreds of thousands who, without

any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their nationality

and race, are marked for death or gradual extinction. " That was the

strongest public denunciation of the Final Solution that Pacelli

would

make in the whole course of the war. It was not merely a paltry

statement. The chasm between the enormity of the liquidation of the

Jewish people and this form of evasive language was profoundly

scandalous. He might have been referring to many categories of

victims

at the hands of various belligerents in the conflict. Clearly the

choice of ambiguous wording was intended to placate those who urged

him to protest, while avoiding offense to the Nazi regime. But these

considerations are over-shadowed by the implicit denial and

trivialization. He had scaled down the doomed millions to " hundreds

of

thousands " without uttering the word " Jews, " while making the pointed

qualification " sometimes only by reason of their nationality or

race. "

Nowhere was the term " Nazi " mentioned. Hitler himself could not have

wished for a more convoluted and innocuous reaction from the Vicar of

Christ to the greatest crime in history.

But what was Pacelli's principal motivation for this trivialization

and denial? The Allies' diplomats in the Vatican believed that he was

remaining impartial in order to earn a crucial role in future peace

negotiations. In this there was clearly a degree of truth. But a

recapitulation of new evidence I have gathered shows that Pacelli saw

the Jews as alien and undeserving of his respect and compassion. He

felt no sense of moral outrage at their plight. The documents show

that:

1. He had nourished a striking antipathy toward the Jews as early

as 1917 in Germany, which contradicts later claims that his omissions

were performed in good faith and that he " loved " the Jews and

respected their religion.

2. From the end of the First World War to the lost encyclical of

1938, Pacelli betrayed a fear and contempt of Judaism based on his

belief

that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom.

3. Pacelli acknowledged to representatives of the Third Reich

that the regime's anti-Semitic policies were a matter of Germany's

internal politics. The Reich Concordat between Hitler and the

Vatican,

as Hitler was quick to grasp, created an ideal climate for Jewish

persecution.

4. Pacelli failed to sanction protest by German Catholic bishops

against anti-Semitism, and he did not attempt to intervene in the

process by which Catholic clergy collaborated in racial certification

to identify Jews.

5. After Pius XI's Mit Brennender Sorge, denouncing the Nazi

regime (although not by name), Pacelli attempted to mitigate the

effect of the

encyclical by giving private diplomatic reassurances to Berlin

despite

his awareness of widespread Nazi persecution of Jews.

6. Pacelli was convinced that the Jews had brought misfortune on

their own heads: intervention on their behalf could only draw the

church into alliances with forces inimical to Catholicism. Pacelli's

failure to utter a candid word on the Final Solution proclaimed to

the

world that the Vicar of Christ was not roused to pity or anger. From

this point of view, he was the ideal Pope for Hitler's unspeakable

plan. His denial and minimization of the Holocaust were all the more

scandalous in that they were uttered from a seemingly impartial moral

high ground.

There was another, more immediate indication of Pacelli's moral

dislocation. It occurred before the liberation of Rome, when he was

the sole Italian authority in the city. On October 16, 1943, SS

troops

entered the Roman ghetto area and rounded up more than 1,000 Jews,

imprisoning them in the very shadow of the Vatican.

How did Pacelli acquit himself'?

On the morning of the roundup, which had been prompted by AdoIf

Eichmann, who was in charge of the organization of the Final Solution

from his headquarters in Berlin, the German ambassador in Rome

pleaded

with the Vatican to issue a public protest. By this stage of the war,

Mussolini had been deposed and rescued by AdoIf Hitler to run the

puppet regime in the North of Italy. The German authorities in Rome,

both diplomats and military commanders, fearing a backlash of the

Italian populace, hoped that an immediate and vigorous papal

denunciation might stop the SS in their tracks and prevent further

arrests. Pacelli refused. In the end, the German diplomats drafted a

letter of protest on the Pope's behalf and prevailed on a resident

German bishop to sign it for Berlin's benefit. Meanwhile, the

deportation of the imprisoned Jews went ahead on October 18.

When U.S. chargé d 'affaires Harold Tittmann visited Pacelli that

day,

he found the pontiff anxious that the " Communist " Partisans would

take

advantage of a cycle of papal protest, followed by SS reprisals,

followed by a civilian backlash. As a consequence, he was not

inclined

to lift a finger for the Jewish deportees, who were now traveling in

cattle cars to the Austrian border bound for Auschwitz. Church

officials reported on the desperate plight of the deportees as they

passed slowly through city after city. Still Pacelli refused to

intervene.

In the Jesuit archives in Rome, I found a secret document sworn to

under oath by Karl Wolff, the SS commander in Italy. The text reveals

that Hitler had asked Wolff in the fall of 1943 to prepare a plan to

evacuate the Pope and the Vatican treasures to Liechtenstein.

After several weeks of investigation, Wolff concluded that an attempt

to invade the Vatican and its properties, or to seize the Pope in

response to a papal protest, would prompt a backlash throughout Italy

that would seriously hinder the Nazi war effort. Hitler therefore

dropped his plan to kidnap Pacelli, acknowledging what Pacelli

appeared to ignore, that the strongest social and political force in

Italy in late 1943 was the Catholic Church, and that its potential

for

thwarting the SS was immense.

Pacelli was concerned that a protest by him would benefit only the

Communists. His silence on the deportation of Rome's Jews, in other

words, was not an act of cowardice or fear of the Germans. He wanted

to maintain the Nazi-occupation status quo until such time as the

city

could be liberated by the Allies. But what of the deported Jews? Five

days after the train had set off from the Tiburtina station in Rome,

an estimated 1,060 had been gassed at Auschwitz and Birkenau - 149

men

and 47 women were detained for slave labor, but only 15 survived the

war, and only one of those was a woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who had

served as a human guinea pig of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi medical

doctor who performed atrocious experiments on human victims. After

the

liberation, she was found alive in a heap of corpses.

But there was a more profound failure than Pacelli's unwillingness to

help the Jews of Rome rounded up on October 16. Pacelli's reticence

was not just a diplomatic silence in response to the political

pressures of the moment, not just a failure to be morally outraged.

It

was a stunning religious and ritualistic silence. To my knowledge,

there is no record of a single public papal prayer, lit votive

candle,

psalm, lamentation, or Mass celebrated in solidarity with the Jews of

Rome either during their terrible ordeal or after their deaths. This

spiritual silence in the face of an atrocity committed at the heart

of

Christendom, in the shadow of the shrine of the first apostle,

persists to this day and implicates all Catholics. This silence

proclaims that Pacelli had no genuine spiritual sympathy even for the

Jews of Rome, who were members of the community of his birth. And

yet,

on learning of the death of AdoIf Hitler, Archbishop Adolf Bertram of

Berlin ordered all the priests of his archdiocese " to hold a solemn

Requiem in memory of the Führer. "

There were nevertheless Jews who gave Pacelli the benefit of the

doubt. On Thursday, November 29, 1945, Pacelli met some 80

representatives of Jewish refugees who expressed their thanks " for

his

generosity toward those persecuted during the Nazi-Fascist period. "

One must respect a tribute made by people who had suffered and

survived, and we cannot belittle Pacelli's efforts on the level of

charitable relief, notably his directive that enclosed religious

houses in Rome should take in Jews hiding from the SS. By the same

token, we must respect the voice of Settimia Spizzichino, the sole

Roman Jewish woman survivor from the death camps. Speaking in a BBC

interview in 1995 she said. " 1 came back from Auschwitz on my own. .

I

lost my mother, two sisters and one brother. Pius XII could have

warned us about what was going to happen. We might have escaped from

Rome and joined the partisans. He played right into the Germans'

hands. It all happened right under his nose. But he was an

anti-Semitic pope, a pro-German pope. He didn't take a single risk.

And when they say the Pope is like Jesus Christ, it is not true. He

did not save a single child. " We are obliged to accept these

contrasting views of Pacelli are not mutually exclusive. It gives a

Catholic no satisfaction to accuse a Pope of acquiescing in the plans

of Hitler. But one of the saddest ironies of Pacelli's papacy centers

on the implications of his own pastoral self-image. At the beginning

of a promotional film he commissioned about himself during the war,

called The Angelic Pastor, the camera frequently focuses on the

statue

of the Good Shepherd in the Vatican gardens. The parable of the good

shepherd tells of the pastor who so loves each of his sheep that he

will do all, risk all, go to any pains, to save one member of his

flock that is lost or in danger. To his everlasting shame, and to the

shame of the Catholic Church, Pacelli disdained to recognize the Jews

of Rome as members of his Roman flock, even though they had dwelled

in

the Eternal City since before the birth of Christ. And yet there was

still something worse. After the liberation of Rome, when every

perception of restraint on his freedom was lifted, he claimed

retrospective moral superiority for having spoken and acted on behalf

of the Jews. Addressing a Palestinian group on August 3, 1946, he

said, " We disapprove of all recourse to force...Just as we condemned

on various occasions in the past the persecutions that a fanatical

anti-Semitism inflicted on the Hebrew people. " His grandiloquent

self-exculpation a year after the war had ended showed him to be not

only an ideal pope for the Nazis Final Solution but also a hypocrite.

The postwar period of Pacelli's papacy, through the 1950s, saw the

apotheosis of the ideology of papal power as he presided over a

triumphant Catholic Church in open confrontation with Communism. But

it could not hold. The internal structures and morale of the church

in

Pacelli's final years began to show signs of fragmentation and decay,

leading to a yearning for reassessment and renewal. In old age he

became increasingly narrow-minded, eccentric. and hypochondriacal. He

experienced religious visions, suffered from chronic hiccups, and

received monkey-brain-cell injections for longevity. He had no love

for, or trust in those who had to follow him. He failed to replace

his secretary of state when lie died and for years he declined to

appoint a full complement of cardinals. He died at the age of 82 on

October 9,1958. His corpse decomposed rapidly in the autumnal Roman

heat. At his lying-in-state, a guard fainted from the stench. Later,

his nose turned black and fell off. Some saw in this sudden

corruption

of his mortal remains, a symbol of the absolute corruption of his

papacy.

The Second Vatican Council was called by John XXIII who succeeded

Pacelli, in 1958, precisely to reject Pacelli's monolith in

preference

for a collegial, decentralized, human, Christian community, the Holy

Spirit, and love. The guiding metaphor of the church of the future

was

of a " pilgrim people of God. " Expectations ran high, but there was no

lack of contention and anxiety as old habits and disciplines died

hard. There were signs from the very outset that papal and Vatican

hegemony would not easily acquiesce, that the Old Guard would attempt

a comeback. As we approach the end of this century, the hopeful

energy

of the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, as it came to be

called,

appears to many a spent force. The church of Pius XII is reasserting

itself in confirmation of a pyramidal church model: faith in the

primacy of the man in the white robe dictating in solitude from the

pinnacle. In the twilight years of John Paul II's long reign, the

Catholic Church gives a pervasive impression of dysfunction despite

his historic influence on the collapse of Communist tyranny in Poland

and the Vatican's enthusiasm for entering its third millennium with a

cleansed conscience.

As the theologian Professor Adrian Hastings comments, " The great

tide powered by Vatican II has, at least institutionally, spent its

force. The old landscape has once more emerged and Vatican II is

now being read in Rome far more in the spirit of the First Vatican

Council and within the context of Pius XII's model of Catholicism. " A

future titanic struggle between the progressives and the

traditionalists is in prospect, with the potential for a cataclysmic

schism, especially in North America, where a split has opened up

between bishops compliant with Rome and academic Catholicism,

which is increasingly independent and dissident. Pacelli, whose

canonization process is now well advanced, has become the icon, 40

years after his death, of those traditionalists who read and revise

the

provisions of the Second Vatican Council from the viewpoint of

Pacelli's ideology of papal power-an ideology that has proved

disastrous in the century's history. " Vanity Fair, 1999

http://www.tenc.net/analysis/hitlerspope.htm

 

 

 

Would the

Pope's Christmas or New Year's messages in St. Peter's Square in Rome

become a target for terrorists seeking to infect those huge crowds

with an airborne virus they might take back home with them? Would the

terrorists kill the Pope and then infect the gathering of the College

of Cardinals in Rome and the Vatican as a new Pope was chosen by the

College of Cardinals? " Men in papal plot termed close to bin Laden

August 21, 1998 By JOHN MINTZ The Washington Post WASHINGTON-Among

the

more surprising assertions in the list of terrorist plots attributed

by the Clinton administration to Osama bin Laden was that the

Saudi-born millionaire had planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

U.S. intelligence officials said that the reference, made by

President

Clinton and other officials, was to an aborted 1995 plan to blow up

the pope during a visit to the Philippines using a fragmentary bomb

and a timer inside a digital watch. Although they provided no direct

evidence tying the plans to bin Laden himself, they said the two men

blamed for the plot-Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Wali Khan Shah-had

financial, ideological and personal connections to the bin Laden

terrorism " network. " Bin Laden previously had been linked by U.S.

officials to many of the most notorious terrorist attacks or plots of

the 1990s, several of which Clinton cited in his Oval Office address

explaining the U.S. cruise missile attacks in Afghanistan and Sudan.

They included a 1993 assault on U.S. servicemen in Somalia that left

18 dead and the 1995 attempt on the life of Egyptian President Hosni

Mubarak in Ethiopia. In addition, Clinton said bin Laden was involved

in the suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan that

killed

15 people, and last year's attack on an Egyptian tourist site in

which

62 tourists were shot or stabbed to death. The description of links

between bin Laden and assassination attempts against the pope was

among the most surprising on the list. "

http://www.charlotte.com/clinton/terror/0822pope.htm

 

Oriana Fallaci on Anti-Semitism Today (one of Italy's best

known journalists) (April 12, 2002) I find it shameful that in Italy

there should be a procession of

individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel,

hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have

drawn the swasitka, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order

to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas

chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and

Bergen- Belsen et cetera, would sell their own mother to a harem.

I find it shameful that the Catholic Church should permit a bishop,

one with lodgings in the Vatican no less, a saintly man who was found

in Jerusalem with an arsenal of arms and explosives hidden in the

secret

compartments of his sacred Mercedes, to participate in that

procession

and plant himself in front of a microphone to thank in the name of

God

the suicide bombers who massacre the Jews in pizzerias and

supermarkets. To call them " martyrs who go to their deaths as to a

party. " I find it shameful that in France, the France of

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, they burn synagogues, terrorize Jews,

profane

their cemeteries. I find it shameful that the youth of Holland and

Germany and Denmark flaunt the kaffiah just as Mussolini's avant

garde

used to flaunt the club and the fascist badge. I find it shameful

that

in nearly all the universities of Europe Palestinian students sponsor

and nurture anti-Semitism. That in Sweden they asked that the Nobel

Peace Prize given to Shimon Peres in 1994 be taken back and conferred

on the dove with the olive branch in his mouth, that is on Arafat. I

find it shameful that the

distinguished members of the Committee, a Committee that (it would

appear) rewards political color rather than merit, should take this

request into consideration and even respond to it. In hell the Nobel

Prize honors he who does not receive it. I find it shameful (we're

back in Italy) that state-run television

stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over

Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over

them in unwilling tones. I find it shameful that in their debates

they

host with much deference the scoundrels with turban or kaffiah who

yesterday sang hymns to the slaughter at New York and today sing

hymns

to the slaughters at Jerusalem, at Haifa, at Netanya, at Tel Aviv. I

find it shameful that the press does the same, that it is indignant

because Israeli tanks surround the Church of the Nativity in

Bethlehem, that it is not indignant because inside that same church

two hundred Palestinian terrorists well armed with machine guns and

munitions and explosives (among them are various leaders of Hamas and

Al-Aqsa) are not unwelcome guests of the monks (who then accept

bottles of mineral water and jars of honey from the soldiers of those

tanks). I find it shameful that, in giving the number of Israelis

killed since the beginning of the Second Intifada (four hundred

twelve), a noted daily newspaper found it appropriate to underline in

capital letters that more people are killed in their traffic

accidents. (Six hundred a year). I find it shameful that the Roman

Observer, the newspaper of the Pope-a Pope who not long ago left in

the Wailing Wall a letter of apology for the Jews-accuses of

extermination a people who were exterminated in the millions by

Christians. By Europeans. I find it shameful that this newspaper

denies to the survivors of that people (survivors who still have

numbers tattooed on their arms) the right to react, to defend

themselves, to not be exterminated again. I find it shameful that in

the name of Jesus (a Jew without whom they would all be unemployed),

the priests of our parishes or Social Centers or whatever they are

flirt with the assassins of those in Jerusalem who cannot go to eat a

pizza or buy some eggs without being blown up. I find it shameful

that

they are on the side of the very ones who inaugurated terrorism,

killing us on airplanes, in airports, at the Olympics, and who today

entertain themselves by killing western journalists. By shooting

them,

abducting them, cutting their throats, decapitating them. (There's

someone in Italy who, since the appearance of Anger and Pride, would

like to do the same to me. Citing verses of the Koran he exorts his

" brothers " in the mosques and the Islamic Community to chastise me in

the name of Allah. To kill me. Or rather to die with me. I find it

shameful that almost all of the left, the left that twenty years ago

permitted one of its union processionals to deposit a coffin (as a

mafioso warning) in front of the synagogue of Rome, forgets the

contribution made by the Jews to the fight against fascism. Made by

Carlo and Nello Rossini, for example, by Leone Ginzburg, by Umberto

Terracini, by Leo Valiani, by Emilio Sereni, by women like my friend

Anna Maria Enriques Agnoletti who was shot at Florence on June 12,

1944, by seventy-five of the three-hundred-thirty-five people killed

at the Fosse Ardeatine, by the infinite others killed under torture

or

in combat or before firing squads. (The companions, the teachers, of

my infancy and my youth.) I find it shameful that in part through the

fault of the left-or rather, primarily through the fault of the left

(think of the left that inaugurates its congresses applauding the

representative of the PLO, leader in Italy of the Palestinians who

want the destruction of Israel)--Jews in Italian cities are once

again

afraid. And in French cities and Dutch cities and Danish cities and

German cities, it is the same. I find it shameful that Jews tremble

at

the passage of the scoundrels dressed like suicide bombers just as

they trembled during Krystallnacht, the night in which Hitler gave

free rein to the Hunt of the Jews. I find it shameful that in

obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for them extremely

advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual

opportunists-or better the usual parasites-exploit the word Peace.

That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than the

words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and

bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism)

delegated

to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot's feet

they incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated.

Trick

them, corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the

yellow star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the

Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at

all. I find it shameful that many Italians and many Europeans have

chosen as their standard-bearer the gentleman (or so it is polite to

say) Arafat. This nonentity who thanks to the money of the Saudi

Royal

Family plays the Mussolini ad perpetuum and in his megalomania

believes he will pass into History as the George Washington of

Palestine. This ungrammatical wretch who when I interviewed him was

unable even to put together a complete sentence, to make articulate

conversation. So that to put it all together, write it, publish it,

cost me a tremendous effort and I concluded that compared to him even

Ghaddafi sounds like Leonardo da Vinci. This false warrior who always

goes around in uniform like Pinochet, never putting on civilian garb,

and yet despite this has never participated in a battle. War is

something he sends, has always sent, others to do for him. That is,

the poor souls who believe in him. This pompous incompetent who

playing the part of Head of State caused the failure of the Camp

David

negotiations, Clinton's mediation.

No-no-I-want-Jerusalem-all-to-myself. This eternal liar who has a

flash of sincerity only when (in private) he denies Israel's right to

exist, and who as I say in my book contradicts himself every five

minutes. He always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him

what time it is, so that you can never trust him. Never! With him you

will always wind up systematically betrayed. This eternal terrorist

who knows only how to be a terrorist (while keeping himself safe) and

who during the Seventies, that is when I interviewed him, even

trained

the terrorists of Baader-Meinhof. With them, children ten years of

age. Poor children. (Now he trains them to become suicide bombers. A

hundred baby suicide bombers are in the works: a hundred!). This

weathercock who keeps his wife at Paris, served and revered like a

queen, and keeps his people down in the shit. He takes them out of

the

shit only to send them to die, to kill and to die, like the eighteen

year old girls who in order to earn equality with men have to strap

on

explosives and disintegrate with their victims. And yet many Italians

love him, yes. Just like they loved Mussolini. And many other

Europeans do the same. I find it shameful and see in all this the

rise

of a new fascism, a new nazism. A fascism, a nazism, that much more

grim and revolting because it is conducted and nourished by those who

hypocritically pose as do-gooders, progressives, communists,

pacifists, Catholics or rather Christians, and who have the gall to

label a warmonger anyone like me who screams the truth. I see it,

yes,

and I say *** I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews. I stand

just

as I stood as a young girl during the time when I fought with them,

and when the Anna Marias were shot. I defend their right to exist, to

defend themselves, to not let themselves be exterminated a second

time. And disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many

Europeans, I am ashamed of this shame that dishonors my Country and

Europe. At best, it is not a community of States, but a pit of

Pontius

Pilates. And even if all the inhabitants of this planet were to think

otherwise, I would continue to think so. " Polemic in Italy after

anti-Semitism article by top journalist ROME, April 12 (AFP) - An

article denouncing anti-Semitism by one of Italy's best known

journalists, Oriana Fallaci, caused a polemic on Friday after she

pointed the finger at the Roman Catholic church and the political

left

over the current Mideast crisis. A specialist in the Middle East,

Fallaci, 71, uses the world " I find shameful " at the head of a long

list of reasons she gives to attack inaction on anti-Semitism by the

church and left-wing political leaders. Among her targets are " the

presence of people disguised as Kamikazi's during a pro-Palestinian

protest in Rome, " anti-Semitic attacks in France, and moves to have

the Nobel Peace Prize taken back from Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon

Peres. She attacked the church saying, " I find it shameful that the

Catholic Church can allow a bishop housed at the Vatican ... to take

part in a protest in Rome during which he used a megaphone to thank

in

the name of God the Kamikazes who have massacred Jews, " she wrote.

The

incident refers to Bishop Hilarion Capucci, 77, a Syrian in charge of

helping Greek- Catholics in Europe, who took part in a pro-

Palestinian

protest. Fallaci's article was published in the form of a pamphlet by

the weekly Panorama magazine, owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio

Berlusconi. Reaction was led by the Palestinian Authority's

representative in Rome, Nemer Hammad, " It is a shame that Panorama

has

published an article like this one by Oriana Fallaci, " said Hammad.

*** " Support for the journalist, who now lives in the United States

came from the head of the Jewish community in Italy, Amos Luzzato and

by some members of the government. " I believe she has grounds (for

the

article) " said Defence Minister Antonio Martino. In the same edition

of the magazine a former spokesman for Berlusconi, Giuliano Ferrara

wrote an article strongly in favour of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel

Sharon. He has put forward the idea of a " day for Israel " after

having

being the inspiration behind Berlusconi's demonstration in favour of

the United States on September 11. Fallaci's book, " Rage and Pride "

strongly in favour of the United States, published two weeks after

the

September 11 attacks has topped the best seller lists in Italy

since. "

 

" EU Greets Ratzinger's Election, Turkey Concerned

 

Stefania Bianchi

 

 

BRUSSELS, Apr 20th,2005 (IPS) - Europe has cautiously welcomed the

election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new pope, but there are

also concerns over his view of Turkey's bid to join the European

Union.

 

Joy and jubilation were mixed with reactions of surprise and

disappointment when the 78-year-old Cardinal Ratzinger, the dean of

the College of Cardinals and defender of conservative orthodoxy for

24 years, was named Apr. 19 as Pope Jean Paul II's successor.

 

The new pope, who will be known as Benedict XVI, is reckoned as a

tough- minded enforcer of the 'true faith' and is firmly opposed to

birth control and the ordination of women.

 

By choosing German-born Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's 115

cardinals opted for a strong Catholic conservative insider, but also

a potentially controversial figure and an opponent of Turkey's

European Union (EU) membership bid.

 

Previously, Cardinal Ratzinger had stated that Turkey's membership

of the 25-nation bloc would cause a ''loss of wealth and culture'':

He advises Muslim Turkey to seek alliance with other Islamic nations

rather than the traditionally Christian EU.

 

European leaders and officials were swift to welcome Ratzinger's

appointment saying his election had a ''special significance'' for

Europe.

 

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said the nomination was ''a

great honour'' for his country, while European Commission President

Jose Manuel Barroso ''rejoiced " at his choice.

 

''Personally, I rejoice at the conclave's choice and remain

convinced that your Holiness will pursue with determination and

strength the work of (your) illustrious predecessor John Paul II in

favour of understanding and peace in the world,'' Barroso said

shortly after Ratzinger's election.

 

Wilfried Martens, president of the Christian Democrat European

People's Party in the European Parliament, said his group believed

Ratzinger's nomination would strengthen European unity.

 

''Your choice of the name Benedict is of very special significance

for those of us who are working for reconciliation and cooperation

among the peoples of Europe,'' Martens said in a statement

Wednesday.

 

''We see in your pontificate the potential to strengthen the

European Union as a zone for peace and solidarity radiating a light

of hope for the whole world'', he added.

 

However, reaction in Turkey has been far from warm as the country

fears that the new pope's opposition to Ankara joining the EU could

raise fresh obstacles to its membership.

 

Outspoken Ratzinger has argued in the past that allowing Turkey to

join the EU would be ''a huge mistake'' that would run ''counter to

history''.

 

''Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent

contrast to Europe,'' Ratzinger said during an interview with the

French newspaper Le Figaro last year.

 

Instead, he believes Turkey should seek its future in an association

of Islamic nations rather than the EU, which has Christian roots.

 

He also called demands for European ''multiculturalism''

as ''fleeing from what is one's own''.

 

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that he

hopes the new pope will soften his stiff opposition to Turkey's bid

to join the bloc. The Turkish media declared him a foe of this

predominantly Muslim nation.

 

''He has voiced such views (against Turkey's EU membership) as his

personal opinion in the past, but his rhetoric may change from now

on,'' Erdogan told reporters in Ankara.

 

''Responsibilities make for different situations. I hope to see such

a change in the future because this post, this responsibility

requires it,'' he added.

 

The Turkish press also gave a cold welcome to the new head of the

Catholic Church.

 

''The new pope is an opponent of Turkey, " the mass-selling daily

Sabah said on its front-page, while the liberal daily Radikal said

in a headline: ''He was Turkey's last choice.''

 

''It would be bad news if Cardinal Ratzinger continues to hold his

views as Pope Benedict XVI,'' said commentator Selcuk Gultasli in

the pro- government Zaman daily.

 

However Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Centre for

European Policy Studies think-tank, said that as a Pope, Ratzinger's

views should not hamper Turkey's bid to join the bloc.

 

''Ratzinger's opposition to Turkey's membership of the EU should not

have an effect on the country's bid to join the bloc. As a German

cardinal he might have commented on such political issues. But as

Pope he should be even more distant from politics,'' he told IPS

Wednesday.

 

Talks on Turkey's membership of the EU are scheduled to start on

Oct. 3. Turkey hopes to join the EU in 10 to 15 years.

 

Turkey, with a population of some 70 million Muslims, first applied

for EU membership in 1963. Although it is widely acknowledged that

it has made huge progress in political reforms in recent years,

concerns remain about its commitment to implement laws banning

torture and ensuring freedom of religion, and about consequences for

the EU labour market. "

 

" CONGREGATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH

 

 

 

Founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III with the Constitution " Licet ab

initio, " the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was

originally called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal

Inquisition as its duty was to defend the Church from heresy. It is

the oldest of the Curia's nine congregations.

 

The only curial organism which is older is the Secretariat of State,

whose forerunner, the Apostolic Secretariat, was created by Innocent

VIII on December 31, 1487, with the Constitution " Non debet

reprehensibile. "

 

Pope St. Pius X in 1908 changed the name to the Sacred Congregation

of the Holy Office. It received its current name in 1965 with Pope

Paul VI. Today, according to Article 48 of the Apostolic

Constitution on the Roman Curia, " Pastor Bonus " , promulgated by the

Holy Father John Paul II on June 28, 1988, «the duty proper to the

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is to promote and

safeguard the doctrine on the faith and morals throughout the

Catholic world: for this reason everything which in any way touches

such matter falls within its competence.»

 

The congregation is now headed by Prefect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

It has a secretary, His Excellency Mgr. Angelo Amato, S.D.B., an

under-secretary, P. Joseph Augustine Di Noia, O.P., a Promotor of

Justice Mgr. Charles Scicluna, and a staff of 33, according to the

2002 " Annuario Pontificio " or " Pontifical Yearbook. " It also has 25

members - cardinals, archbishops and bishops - and 28 consulters.

Given the nature of its task, congregation work is divided into four

distinct sections: the doctrinal office, the disciplinary office,

the matrimonial office and that for priests.

 

The congregation, says the " Activity of the Holy See, " in conformity

with its raison d'etre, promotes in a collegial fashion encounters

and initiatives to «spread sound doctrine and defend those points of

Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and

unacceptable doctrines.»

 

For several years the congregation, together with the Vatican

Publishing House, has been issuing volumes containing the texts of

its single documents, as well as articles relative to its work which

appear in the daily edition of " L'Osservatore Romano " . Annually, it

holds plenary assemblies.

 

When bishops are in Rome for their quinquennial " ad limina " visit,

they call on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as they

do with other dicasteries of the Roman Curia, «for an exchange of

information and reciprocal concerns.»

 

There is also ample collaboration between the Pontifical Biblical

Commission and the International Theological Commission. each of

which has as president the cardinal prefect of Doctrine of the

Faith. Weekly congregation meetings are held, usually on Wednesday,

and are attended by officials and consultors. "

 

 

" They Didn't Hit the Vatican

by Charles Lamb

 

 

 

Whatever one thinks of an upcoming war on Iraq, one thing is

becoming abundantly clear: Vatican officials are curiously slouching

toward favoring a one-world government—a world that is ruled by the

United Nations.

 

As recently reported by a number of Catholic journals, in relation

to a possible war with Iraq, Cardinal Ratzinger opined that that a

unilateral military attack by the United States against Iraq would

not be justifiable. Ratzinger stated: " Decisions like this should be

made by the community of nations, by the UN, and not by an

individual power. " What the Catholic press has neglected to mention

is that Cardinal Ratzinger's comments do not even remotely reflect

classical Catholic just war theory.

 

A Question of Authority

 

Hidden in Ratzinger's comments is the fact that he does think that

military action might be justifiable, but that " unilateral " military

action would not be justifiable. Therefore, his statement goes right

to the issue of authority, which Ratzinger seems to deny outright.

 

In contrast to Cardinal Ratzinger, St. Thomas teaches that, for a

war to be just, " the authority of the sovereign by whose command the

war is to be waged " must be present. In other words, the one who

declares war must possess the authority of a leader.

 

Therefore, according to classical Catholic just war theory, the

United States has the authority to declare war on any country. That

does not mean that any war would be just—indeed, any war may fail

the Catholic " just war " litmus test for other reasons, but the

authority of the United States to declare war would never be

questioned by any serious student of Catholic war theory.

 

Furthermore, contrary to Cardinal Ratzinger's musings, the United

Nations does not have the authority to declare war on Iraq. From a

Catholic theological standpoint, the Secretary-General of the United

Nations, Kofi Annan, possesses no authority. His " authority " is a

legal fiction. From a Thomistic standpoint, he does not have the

power to declare war because he is neither a sovereign, nor does he

have care of any community.

 

The sad fact about Cardinal Ratzinger's comments is that not only

are they out of line with Catholic tradition, but they deny the

sovereignty of a single nation in favor of a group of nations. To

make matters worse, Ratzinger has essentially stated that the only

entity that possesses the power to declare war is the United

Nations.

 

United Nations: License to Kill

 

The fact that Cardinal Ratzinger has ruled out national sovereignty

in favor of a group of nations would be harmful enough, but to

recognize the United Nations over the United States is particularly

offensive, not only to Americans, but also to Catholics.

 

The agenda of the United Nations is unabashedly anti-Catholic, and

extremely pro-abortion. The fact that the United Nations promotes

genocidal abortion both in principle and in practice cannot be

denied. Literally hundreds of cases could be cited to prove this

point.

 

According to The New American, the United Nations Fund for

Population Activities gave an award to Communist China's Qian

Xinzhong for having " implemented population policies on a massive

scale. " No doubt he did. The hallmark of China's population policy

is one child per family. This includes, of course, forced

sterilization and abortion, the murder of children outside their

mother's wombs, including lethal injections, drowning, beating

babies to death, etc.

 

A short time ago, the United Nations sought emergency aid for

refugees in the Balkans. Flooding with fresh money, the United

Nations proceeded to send " aid " to the refugees. Most people would

consider " aid " to be in the form of medicine, food, and bandages.

 

That's probably what the refugees needed, but it's not what they

got.

 

The United Nations Population Fund sent " Emergency Reproductive

Health Kits " to Balkan refugee camps. These " care packages "

contained abortifacient pills, intrauterine abortive devices, and in

the case the woman didn't get the message from these items, the kits

also included " manual vacuum aspirators, " devices which literally

suck the lives out of babies.

 

It is commonly known that the United Nations sends medical personnel

to third world countries who vaccinate women against pregnancy,

under the guise of vaccinating them against disease. This is a human-

rights abuse par excellence.

 

Those in the womb aren't the only ones at whom the United Nations

would aim. In the Courier, a publication of the United Nations

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the

noted oceanographer Jacques Cousteau stated: " In order to stabilize

world population, it is necessary to eliminate 350,000 people a day.

It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it. "

 

" Eliminate 350,000 people a day " ? Not even Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler

had dreams that lofty.

 

Based purely on the human rights record of the United Nations, the

thought that Cardinal Ratzinger would endorse the United Nations as

the sole authority in determining whether a war is just defies

comment.

 

United Nations: Live and Let Die

 

In the same interview quoted above, Cardinal Ratzinger stated: " The

fact that the United Nations is seeking the way to avoid war, seems

to me to demonstrate with enough evidence that the damage would be

greater than the values one hopes to save. "

 

Cardinal Ratzinger's comment contains one essential thesis: if the

situation were really that bad, then the United Nations would get

involved. This comment would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.

When the Soviets marched their tanks into Hungary in 1956,

Afghanistan in 1979, and many other nations, setting up puppet

governments and murdering the citizens, the United Nations did

nothing.

 

When the Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a killing field, murdering

one million people over the course of a few weeks, the U.N. did

nothing. Sixty million people died at the hands of Mao, yet the U.N.

did nothing. The official response of the United Nations toward

Chinese aggression was to throw the country of Taiwan out of the

United Nations.

 

That is only the beginning. The United Nations has not only done

nothing to preserve peace, it has done just the opposite. It has

sponsored genocidal maniacs, and helped them remain in power.

 

Though cases abound, the story of Idi Amin is one of the foremost

examples of U.N. idiocy and depravity. Though circumstance prevented

him from being the greatest mass-murderer in history, Amin was

perhaps one of the most satanic rulers the twentieth century saw.

Amin, a militant Moslem who came to rule Uganda by force in 1971,

was a genocidal maniac, who murdered three-hundred-thousand Ugandans

in the eight years he was in power. He personally murdered many

Catholic priests; he murdered and dismembered his first wife. Amin

was perhaps the only major ruler in the twentieth century who was a

known ritual cannibal—his own son being one of his victims.

 

According to Paul Johnson's research in Modern Times, the refusal of

the United Nations to take action against his regime cost the lives

of 200,000 Ugandans. Not only did the United Nations refuse to take

action against Amin, but four years into his regime, Amin was

invited to speak at the United Nations, at which time he was given

standing ovations at the beginning and at the end of his speech. The

following day, the UN Secretary-General gave a dinner in Amin's

honor. All of this happened at a time when it was well-known that

Amin was guilty of genocide.

 

The fact that this incident doesn't even stand out is a testimony to

the evil nature of the United Nations. The United Nations is

constantly standing by those rulers who commit atrocities. Cardinal

Ratzinger's comment that the United Nations would take action if

they deemed it necessary is incomprehensible.

 

Cardinal Ratzinger's comments elevate the United Nations to a point

which should anger not only all Catholics, but also those who seek

to preserve Western culture everywhere. The United Nations is looked

upon as a greater political entity than any one country. Not only is

this legally incorrect, it is dangerous.

 

From Mecca with Love

 

I suspect that the current opinions of Cardinal Ratzinger have

relatively little to do with just war or unjust war, and very much

to do with coddling the disciples of Mohammed. Iraq is predominantly

Islamic, and, as the logic goes, we don't want to hurt the good

people over there.

 

In the real world, Christians are referred to by Moslems as infidels

and looked upon as potential notches in their AK-47's.

This " peaceful " religion of Islam does not view war as evil. In the

religion of Islam, war is evangelization by other means.

 

Before the horrific events of September 11, the Vatican's love

affair with Islam was merely nauseating—now it is maddening. It's as

if the Vatican has granted " Most Favored Religion " status to Islam.

Under the leadership of the Vatican, millions of Catholics have

defected to the religion of Islam, while the Vatican has applauded

itself and its " new evangelization. "

 

Even Pope John Paul II has repeatedly referred to Moslems as " our

brothers in the one true God. " He has apologized for

Christian " failings in understanding " Moslems, and, on at least one

occasion, kissed the Koran, calling it a " holy book. " The fact that

the Vatican has endorsed Islam and lost Catholics to that religion

is at least partially responsible for the violent political

situation in the world today.

 

Conclusion

 

Debating questions like whether America can declare a just war over

a glass of brandy is all fine and good when you're sitting at the

Vatican, but the real world is being attacked by Moslems. The fact

that Moslems murdered thousands of people in New York and Washington

D.C. pales in comparison to what Moslem regimes are doing in other

countries, such as Iraq and the Sudan. Sudanese Moslems are killing

Catholics in that country by the thousand.

 

No offense, your Eminence, but no one blew up the Vatican. Thousands

of innocent people were murdered in the attacks in New York and

Washington D.C. They died at the hands of Moslems (uh, I mean, " our

brothers in the one, true God " ). Imagine if the Vatican were blown

up by Islamic terrorists (an unlikely scenario, I'll grant you,

since the Vatican was a major contributor to the mosque in Rome, and

they wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds them).

 

There has been much written by columnists on both sides of the aisle

who decry the fact that the United States has made itself the

world's policeman. The fact that the United States has found itself

in this position is certainly unfortunate, but it is also undeniable

that many people benefit from the presence of a worldwide cop. This

applies to the Vatican as well.

 

Ultimately, the United States stands as the de facto protector of

the Vatican State. If the Vatican were ever actually attacked, is it

in a position to defend itself?

 

The Swiss Guard ain't exactly a commando unit.

 

Being that it could not defend itself, to whom would it appeal? It

would not appeal to Moslems; it would not appeal to the United

Nations—it would appeal to the United States.

 

Cardinal Ratzinger might do well to remind himself of that. "