Originally posted by adama1
reply to post by EricD

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Ok that is another side of the coin. Can you explain those picture i googled and posted because i think they are genuine and tell me if all the information on these sites are fabricated. When i googled it hundreds of links showing the Catholic Church in cahoots appeared. Their was even Catholic Priests that were Clergy by day and Nazi soldiers by night killing Non Catholics ie Orthodox Christians. Their was a Nazi Catholic Killer by the name of Stepinac that the vatican wanted to beatify why would the vatican reward a killer in such a way?

Thanks in advance.

Nazi-Era Victims Want UN to Investigate Vatican
By Patrick Goodenough
CNS London Bureau Chief
29 June, 2000

(CNSNews.com) - The Vatican, with its permanent observer status at the
United Nations under fire, may now face a challenge from survivors of
Nazi-era war crimes in the Balkans.

Serb and Jewish survivors of atrocities committed by the Nazi-installed
puppet regime in wartime Croatia have asked U.N. secretary-general Kofi
Annan to investigate their claims that the Vatican and a Roman Catholic
monastic order collaborated with the perpetrators.

In an open letter issued through their lawyers, the victims - who are
bringing a class action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank and the
Franciscan order - urged Annan to persuade the Vatican to open its
wartime archives, or face "appropriate action" to encourage them to do so.

The Vatican enjoys permanent observer status at the U.N., while
Franciscans International is a recognized non-governmental organization
at the U.N.

The Vatican's status is currently under fire from a coalition of
pro-abortion, feminist and other organizations, spearheaded by a
Catholic "pro-choice" group, campaigning to have it revoked, charging
that the Holy See's statehood is legally questionable.

The groups are incensed at the Vatican's consistent opposition in U.N.
forums to measures that would liberalize abortion and contraception,
particularly in developing countries.

The group of victims and relatives of victims who are bringing the
lawsuit in a San Francisco district court currently number 25. They come
from the United States, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, said their attorney,
Jonathan Levy.

Papers have been served on the Vatican Bank, the Franciscans, and were
soon to be served on the Croatian Liberation Movement, which Levy said
was understood to be the "direct successors to the Ustashe" - the
wartime fascist organization which ruled Croatia.

The suit alleges that gold and other assets worth about $170 million
today, not including interest, were looted by the Ustashe and
safeguarded by the Vatican after World War II.

In their letter to Annan, the victims charge that some members of the
Franciscan order collaborated with the Ustashe, were actively involved
in atrocities, and knowingly helped wanted Ustashe war criminals,
including its notorious leader Ante Pavelic, to escape justice after the
war.

They say the Vatican organized and financed the "rat line" which enabled
leading Nazis and Ustashe members to escape to Latin America. The escape
route was allegedly partly funded by assets stolen from concentration
camp and other victims, looted by the Ustashe, and removed to the Vatican.

The Vatican and Franciscans have consistently denied involvement in
these activities.

Pope Pius XII's alleged silence in the face of Nazi genocide has long
sparked controversy. His defenders say he spoke out in Christmas Eve
homilies during 1941 and 1942 against the extermination of Jews.

Many European Christians, Catholics and Protestant, took a stance
against the Nazis during the war. Thousands of Catholics, including
clergymen, were murdered by the Nazis because of their opposition to Hitler.

The Nazis installed the Ustashe in power in Croatia after Yugoslavia
fell to the Nazis in April 1941. More than 600,000 people - Serbs, Jews
and Roma (gypsies) - were killed in the Balkans by the fascist regime.

Those bringing the lawsuit say family and community members were subject
to "mass rape, beheadings, torture, mutilations, burnings, establishment
of concentration and forced labor camps, destruction of Orthodox
Churches and Jewish Synagogues, and looting of assets valued in the
hundreds of millions by the Ustashe and Franciscans."

They wrote to Annan: "Unlike every other civilized nation the Vatican
has refused to acknowledge its complicity in genocide and has refused
repeated requests by the United States government, Jewish and Roma
organizations to open its World War II archives to public scrutiny."

Levy said the plaintiffs were seeking access to more than 250 U.S. Army
Intelligence documents on one Krunoslav Draganavich, believed to have
been the head of the Vatican operation which laundered Ustashe funds and
smuggled Nazis out of Europe.

Some "heavily sanitized" documents had been released to the attorneys,
he said, but Army Intelligence withheld over 250 documents on grounds of
"national security."

"We are appealing this decision through an administrative process and if
unsuccessful will go to Federal Court."

A 1998 State Department report entitled "The Fate of the Wartime Ustasha
Treasury" implicated the Vatican and Franciscans is a number of postwar
crimes now being cited by the lawsuit plaintiffs.

Wartime documents raise questions

Recently a London newspaper published previously undiscovered documents
which showed that Britain's wartime leader, Winston Churchill asked a
prominent British Catholic family in 1940 to lobby the Vatican at the
time to denounce the Nazis and support the Allied cause.

The Sunday Telegraph said the discovery of the 1940 papers "undermine
the arguments of papal apologists who claim that the Allies understood
the reasons for the Pope's silence because they appreciated he was in an
impossible position."

One letter, from former Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, warned that Pope
Pius XII's stance left Catholics with the impression that a Europe
dominated by Hitler was the Pope's preferred outcome to the war.

"If the Catholics of, say, Belgium, Holland and France could be
persuaded that somehow Nazism was reconcilable with their religious
faith and moral outlook, then a potentially powerful center of
resistance to Nazi plans of domination would be removed," Halifax wrote
to Lord Fitzalan, a leading Catholic and former Conservative lawmaker.

One Foreign Office telegram questioned the wisdom of the Vatican's stance.

"What in the day of triumph for justice and fair-dealing will be the
feeling of Catholics the world over towards the church if it can be said
of it that after at first standing against Nazi paganism it eventually
agreed by its silence to assist in discrediting the principles upon
which it is founded?"

The London Times last month cited newly-found documents showing that
Britain's Minister to the Holy See, Francis D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne,
had given the Vatican a daily report of Nazi atrocities, starting in 1940.

Last April, Stuart Eizenstat, U.S. special representative and secretary
of state for Holocaust issues, told the Senate foreign relations
committee that the Vatican had "authorized a group of Jewish and
Catholic scholars to thoroughly review its collection of published
documents from the Nazi era."

He welcomed the step and expressed the hope that it would "lead to
additional measures for archival openness."

But it is unpublished records that Jewish scholars would like to see,
rather than an 11-volume work commissioned by the Vatican and published
by four Jesuit priests in the 1980s.

Israeli government minister Natan Sharansky urged Pope John Paul II
earlier this year to open the wartime records.

"As long as the Vatican archives are off-limits to historians and
survivors, the full truth will remain elusive, thereby casting a shadow
over efforts toward Jewish-Catholic rapprochement," he wrote.