CROATIA IS OPENING AN EXHIBITION ON ALOJZIJE STEPINAC AT EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

"Croatians are the bravest nation in the World, not because they have no fear, but because they have no shame!"

[Jovan Ducic, Serb's poet]

All the same, all the same ..... Their membership in EU, Croatians are using very "productively". To plant a cuckoo's egg to European welcoming nest and to wash their dirty laundry. They do have a full basket of very dirty laundry!

Let's see Croatian sources, firstly:

***

An exhibition on the life and work of the Blessed Alojzije Stepinac, organised by Croatian member of the European Parliament Marijana Petir, the Zagreb Archdiocese and the Croatian Catholic University, was opened at the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday evening. The exhibition was opened by European Parliament Vice President Mairead McGuinness, a MEP from Ireland, and the opening ceremony was attended, among others, by representatives of the Zagreb Archdiocese. Bishop Ivan Sasko said that Stepinac was "an example of a European who lived the values of the culture of Christianity that has largely shaped Europe's identity." "His service made him permanently exposed... not only to the public but to the blows of three fatal ideologies - fascism, Nazism and communism, which marked a large part of the 20th century in Europe," said Sasko. "At the time of communism, his good deeds were not spoken about and were covered up... the evidence of his exposure did not disappear despite its having been terribly distorted and manipulated," Sasko said, adding that after communism one could freely talk about Stepinac but that decades of propaganda had caused damage. The exhibition will be open until June 17. On Wednesday, a conference on Stepinac's humanitarian work will be held. The Blessed Alojzije Stepinac became Zagreb Archbishop in 1937. He was named a cardinal in 1953 and Pope John Paul II beatified him in the Croatian shrine of Marija Bistrica on 3 October 1998. He is expected to be canonised soon. [AboutCroatia]

....  and the Serb's reaction:

EXHIBITION OF STEPINAC IN EP DEEPENS DIVISIONS BELGRADE

Ante Pavelić (July 14, 1889 – December 28, 1959)
 was the Head (Poglavnik) and founding member of
 the Croatian fascist Ustaše movement in the 1930s
 and later the leader of the Independent State of Croatia,
 a puppet state of Nazi Germany during WWII.

Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said today that the exhibition and conference of Aloysius Stepinac in the European Parliament is an attempt to remove responsibility from the Croatian cardinal and rehabilitate the Ustasha movement. Dacic said that the exhibition and conference “Croatian saint Cardinal Stepinac” are not “a step towards reconciliation nor to the truth, but only deepen divisions,” conveyed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia. “It is incomprehensible that the EU opens in its center exhibition about someone who participated in the pogrom of thousands of Serbs, Jews and other non-Croat population and who was sentenced in his country to 16 years in prison and deprivation of all civil rights for a period of three years,” said Dacic. According to him, we are witnesses that the world today faces “with an attempt of revision of history and relativization of victories and defeats, crimes and punishments”. “Serbia, as a victim of such efforts at the international level, has an obligation to fight against the revision of history and relativizaion of historical facts,” said Dacic.

"Blessed" Alojzije (Aloysius) Viktor Cardinal Stepinac

 (May 8, 1898 – February 10, 1960) was a Croatian

 Catholic Prelate. He was Archbishop of Zagreb from

 1937 to 1960. In 1946, in a verdict that polarised public

 opinion both in Yugoslavia and beyond, a Zagreb court

 found him guilty of collaborating with the Ustaše and

 complicity in allowing the forced conversion of Orthodox

 Serbs to Catholicism. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison,

 but after five years was released and confined to his home 

parish of Krašić. He was appointed a Cardinal in 1952 by 

Pope Pius XII. In 1998 Pope John Paul II declared him

 a martyr and beatified him, which again polarised public

 opinion.

Serbian Ministry of Labour will address the European Parliament and strongly protest about the exhibition dedicated to the Archbishop of Zagreb during World War II, Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, and seek to provide the space to show the truth about the victims of the Ustasha regime, said today the relevant Minister in the Technical Government Aleksandar Vulin. “It is shocking that an attempt is made in a European institution to rehabilitate convicted war criminal. Aloysius Stepinac was convicted by the competent court for war crimes and I can not imagine that any of the other convicted by the court for war crimes could get a space for rehabilitation in some European institution,” Vulin told reporters at the Foundation of the Monastery Hilandar in Belgrade. He said that this is a terrible insult to all the victims of the Ustasha regime. “If there is room for rehabilitation of the Ustasha vicar, I wonder where victims of the Ustasha army belong to. Where the victims of the Ustasha state belong to? If there is room for an attempt of rehabilitation of the vicar of the Ustasha army, then there has to be room for the truth about the victims of the Ustasha regime,” said Vulin. The exhibition about Aloysius Stepinac was organized by Marijana Petir, an MP of the Croatian Peasant Party, in cooperation with the Croatian Catholic University, Office of Cultural Goods of the Zagreb Archdiocese and the Working Group of EPP for intercultural and religious dialogue. Aloysius Viktor Stepinac was the Croatian Catholic Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937 until his death in 1960, including the genocidal rule of the Ustaše over the Axis puppet state the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from 1941 to 1945 during World War II. He was tried by the communist Yugoslav government after the war and convicted of treason and collaboration with the Ustaše regime. During World War II, on 6 April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany, who established the Ustaše-led NDH. As archbishop of the puppet state’s capital, Stepinac had close associations with the Ustaše leaders during the Nazi occupation, issued proclamations celebrating the NDH, and welcomed the Ustaše leaders. In 1998 he was declared a martyr and beatified by Pope John Paul II. His record during World War II and his subsequent martyrdom and beatification remain controversial. [InSerbia]

... and finally the historic facts, from reliable, and not bias, sources:

VATICAN'S HOLOKAUST

Mass grave of history: Vatican's WWII identity crisis. Catholic Church, looking for a bulwark against communism, supported what became genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.

he contraversy over the canonization of Pope Pius XII concerns whether he spoke out enough against the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But that question is a red herring when trying to grasp the big picture of the Vatican's role during the war.

The real question is whether the Vatican supported the world order, or at least aspects of it, that the Third Reich promised to bring, a world order in which dead Jews were collateral damage - which Pius indeed regretted. The answer can be found in a region of Europe that is generally ignored despite being the nexus of world wars: the Balkans.

The Catholic Church was looking for a bulwark against expanding, ruthless, church-destroying communism, but in doing so it supported a Croatian movement called Ustasha, which rose to become the genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.

Croatian concentration camp 311. (photo credit:Courtesy of Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

American historian Jared Israel points to a February 17, 1941 New York Times article which reported that the archbishop of Zagreb (Croatia's capital), Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac, was holding conferences in Vatican City "seeking the freedom of Catholic priests detained in [pre-Nazi] Croatia in connection with the circulation of... 'Free Croatia!' pamphlets, attributed to Ante Pavelic." Pavelic, who once criticized Hitler for originally being too soft on the Jews, was the founder of the fascist Ustashas, who were engaging in terrorism all over Europe to "liberate" Croatia from Yugoslavia. He famously said, "A good Ustasha is one who can use a knife to cut a child from the womb of its mother."

Israel explains the significance of the understated Times article: "The arrested priests were agitating for a fascist coup d'etat," and if these had been rogue priests, "the Vatican would have disciplined them and perhaps issued a statement condemning them; it certainly would not have [held] top-level conferences to manage their defense."

At the time, Pavelic was being harbored in Mussolini's Italy - where his Ustasha soldiers were being trained - after France sentenced him to death for masterminding the 1934 double assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander I and French foreign minister Louis Barthou. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pavelic was activated and became fuehrer, or "Poglavnik," of the new, clerical-fascist Croatia.

Archbishop Stepinac held a banquet for Pavelic, blessed the Ustasha leader and regime, calling them "God's hand at work," and the following month had Pavelic received by Pius XII. This was four days after the massacre in the town of Glina, where the Ustashas locked hundreds of Serbian Orthodox inside their church and burned it down, as became standard practice in Pavelic's Independent State of Croatia (known by its Croatian acronym NDH). Pius XII received Pavelic despite a Yugoslav envoy's request that he not do so, given the atrocities taking place.

"Serbian Family Tree". Posters that adorned a downtown of
Croatian capital Zagreb, few days ago. Croatia is a member
of EU, blocking Serbia's accession negotiations with EU
over their opposition to a Serbian war crimes law. Croatia
also wants Serbia to improve its treatment of the Croatian 
minority. 

In July of that year, Pavelic's minister of education, Mile Budak, publicly outlined the purification process, already being implemented against Serbs: Kill a third, expel a third, convert a third.

That August, more than a thousand Serbs had gathered inside another Glina church for conversion, after which Zagreb police chief Bozidar Corouski announced, "Now that you are all Roman Catholics, I guarantee you that I can save your souls, but I cannot save your bodies." In came Ustasha henchmen with bludgeons, knives and axes, killing all but one man - Ljuban Jednak - who played dead, then stole away from the mass grave he was dumped into.

Pius and Pavelic continued exchanging "cordial telegrams," as author Vladimir Dedijer - former cochairman of Bertrand Russell's International War Crimes Tribunal - wrote in his 1992 book The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican. The Croatian Catholic press consistently published approving articles about the regime.

In his forthcoming book The Krajina Chronicles: A Short History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic writes, "A part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy became de facto accomplices, as did a majority of the clergy. The leading NDH racial 'theorist' was a clergyman, Dr. Ivo Guberina... He urged Croatia's 'cleansing of foreign elements' by any means. His views were echoed by the influential head of the Ustasha Central Propaganda Office, Fr. Grga Peinovic.

"When the anti-Serb and anti-Jewish racial laws of April and May 1941 were enacted, the Catholic press welcomed them as vital for 'the survival and development of the Croatian nation'... Archbishop of Sarajevo [then part of Croatia] Ivan Saric declared... 'It is stupid and unworthy of Christ's disciples to think that the struggle against evil could be waged... with gloves on.'"

A special knife Croatian firer Anto Pavelic personaly
designed to speed up cutting Serb's and Jewish throats
in Croatian concentration camps. The knife was named
"srbosjek" or "serb-cutter" 

IN AN unusual move, Germany entrusted Croatia with running its own concentration camps, without oversight. Shamefully, clergy members took a voracious dive into the bloodbath, serving as guards, commanders and executioners at the 40 camps, most famously Jasenovac, the Holocaust's third-largest yet least spoken-of camp. There, they killed Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats. On August 29, 1942, a friar from the monastery of Siroki Brijeg, named Petar Brzica, won first place for killing the most Serbs in the shortest time, boasting 1,350 throats slit in one night.

Historian Carl Savich quotes an AP report stating that "a priest from Petricevac led Croat fascists, armed with hatchets and knives, to a nearby village. In the 1942 attack, they butchered 2,300 Serbs." Testimony from a survivor of that February 7 massacre, Selo Drakulic, reads: "Prior to killing the adults, unborn children were violently cut from their mothers' womb[s] and slaughtered. Of the remaining children in the village, all under the age of 12, the Ustashas brutally removed arms, legs, noses, ears and genitals. Young girls were raped and killed, while their families were forced to witness the violation and carnage. The most grotesque torture of all was the decapitation of children, their heads thrown into the laps of their mothers, who were themselves then killed."

Archive photos of sadism that would make horror filmmakers blush survive today: Ustashas displaying an Orthodox priest's head; an eyeless peasant woman; Serbs and Jews being pushed off a cliff; a Serb with a saw to his neck; and a smiling Ustasha holding the still-beating heart of prominent industrialist Milos Teslitch, who had been castrated, disemboweled and his ears and lips cut off.

Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his 1944 book Kaputt offers this detail: "While [Pavelic] spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's desk [which] seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters... 'Are they Dalmatian oysters?' I asked. [Pavelic] said smiling, 'It is a present from my loyal Ustashas... Forty pounds of human eyes.'"

In their 1991 book Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks, reporter Mark Aarons and former Justice Department attorney John Loftus corroborate the grisly Croatian crimes, as does Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941-1945 by Edmond Paris: "The Italians photographed an Ustasha wearing two chains of human tongues and ears around his neck."

It has been 60 years, and the world still doesn't know the story of wartime Croatia, where not only did the Vatican not speak out against crimes, not only was it complicit in the genocide of a million people, but it subsequently never expressed remorse for the spilled Orthodox blood as it's done for Jewish blood. Because the world never demanded it. Which points to the same apprehensions that have dogged Jewish groups about the Vatican's genuineness, especially with its reluctance to open archives about Pius's World War II conduct.

ONE CAN'T help wondering whether the Vatican as an institution was silently cheering the decimation of its Orthodox rival. Stepinac, who was photographed blessing the Ustashas before an upcoming battle or slaughter, reported in May 1944 the good news about 244,000 forced conversions to Pius. (Pius himself might have caught BBC broadcasts such as on February 16, 1942: "The Orthodox are being forcibly converted to Catholicism and we do not hear the archbishop's voice preaching revolt. Instead it is reported that he is taking part in Nazi and fascist parades.") Observing the liquidation of Croatia's Orthodox, Heinrich Himmler's second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, wrote a February 17, 1942, letter to Himmler stating, "It is clear that the Croat-Serbian state of tension is not least of all a struggle of the Catholic Church against the Orthodox Church."

It is not Jews to whom the Church owes the biggest apology over World War II, but Serbs. If by not speaking out about Europe's Jews Pius hoped to avoid endangering millions of Catholics, what could have been the reason for not speaking out about Croatia, which itself horrified the Nazis to the point that German and Italian soldiers started shielding Serbs from Ustashas? And what would have been the risk to the faithful inside Croatia?

Ustasa movement is still existing in Croatia. However that
was not a requested condition for Croatian accession to EU.

A July 5, 1994, Washington Times article attempted to get to the bottom of why so little is known of the Croatia chapter of World War II, and why Jasenovac is so rarely spoken of: "For years the gruesome details... remained officially taboo. Although documents and eyewitness accounts were at first ignored, and then mysteriously removed from international archives... [i]t now appears that a vast international conspiracy involving Marshal Josip Broz Tito... [and] the United Nations, some Vatican officials and even Jewish organizations strove to keep the Jasenovac story buried forever... Tito's watchwords were 'brotherhood and unity,' and to pursue these high goals he tried to erase the chapter of Jasenovac. The West generally went along, particularly after Tito broke with Stalin in 1948. The Vatican wanted to protect Roman Catholic Croats, who had been willing Nazi proxies in the Balkans.

"The silence of Jewish organizations is less easily explained... [The late Milan Bulajic, of Belgrade's Genocide Museum, met] officials of the Holocaust Museum [in Washington to] find out why no one mentions the Yugoslav Jews who died there. He did not seem to get a clear-cut answer... When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991... troops of newly independent Croatia briefly captured the site and, according to Serbian sources, blew up whatever was left of the camp and destroyed all remaining records."

An apology is also owed to Catholic clergy whose appeals the Church ignored. Archbishop Misic of Mostar, Herzegovina, asked Stepinac to use his influence with authorities to prevent the massacres. And Bulajic wrote of a group of Slovenian Catholic priests who were "sent to the Jasenovac camp because they refused to serve a mass of thanksgiving to Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic... One of the imprisoned Slovenian priests, Anton Rantasa, managed to escape... On 10 November 1942, he informed [Stepinac and the papal legate Ramiro Marcone]... on the crimes of genocide being perpetrated at Jasenovac. He was told to keep silent."

Similarly, historian Savich writes, "It bears noting that Stepinac was tried and convicted... by Roman Catholic Croats... under the regime of a Roman Catholic Croatian... Many of the historians who documented the Ustasha NDH genocide were Roman Catholic Croats, such as Viktor Novak."

In his 1950 book Behind the Purple Curtain, Walter Montano wrote of the Stepinac trial: "A parade of prosecution witnesses testified at Zagreb, on October 5, 1946, that Catholic priests armed with pistols went out to convert Orthodox Serbs and massacred them... Most of the witnesses were Croat Catholic peasants and laborers."

INDEED, JUST as blame for tacit approval of a genocide and subsequent escape for the perpetrators can't fall merely on "a few individuals," it's more than a few individuals who deserve credit for the opposite. For example, Jews were saved by the entire Catholic nation of Italy (in its sovereign pre-1943 form), including the commandant of the Ferramonti concentration camp, who "said his job was to protect the inmates, not kill them," as UPI reported in 2003. Not surprisingly, Italian soldiers also intervened in the slaughter of Serbs by Croats and Axis-aligned Albanians in Kosovo.

Unfortunately, rather than distancing the Church from Aloysius Stepinac, the Vatican-centered newspaper L'Osservatore Romano responded that the "trial was a trial against the Catholic Church." New York cardinal Francis Spellman outrageously named a parochial school in White Plains after Stepinac, and in 1952 Pius XII made him cardinal. Then, despite requests by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hold off until the cardinal's wartime role could be better assessed, Pope John Paul II beatified Stepinac in 1998.

Croatian groups (and some Croatian Jews) even appealed to Yad Vashem to give Stepinac the Righteous Gentile title, since he saved some Jews on condition of conversion. To which Yad Vashem had to reply in almost absurd terms: "Persons who assisted Jews but simultaneously collaborated or were linked with a fascist regime which took part in the Nazi-orchestrated persecution of Jews, may be disqualified for the Righteous title."

The same should be said to Pope Benedict about his efforts to canonize Pius XII. Even as it denied Stepinac's well known association with the Ustasha, Pius's Vatican served as the conduit for smuggling the Ustashas out after the war. According to declassified US documents introduced in a recent class-action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank for laundering Ustasha loot - used to finance the Ustashas' escapes and postwar sustenance - Pavelic was hidden in a Croatian Catholic monastery in Rome, where the office of the American Counterintelligence Corps on September 12, 1947, reported that "Pavelic's contacts are so high, and his present position is so compromising to the Vatican, that any extradition of subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church." From Rome, Pavelic fled to Argentina, where he became a security adviser to Juan Peron, who issued thousands of visas to fleeing Ustashas.

Haaretz in 2006 reported that Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, Pius's undersecretary of state and later Pope Paul VI, learned of "the investigation [that US Army counterintelligence agent William] Gowen's unit was conducting. Montini complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the Vatican's immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation."

A May 2007 press release from plaintiffs' attorney Jonathan Levy in the Vatican Bank case states, "To date, the Vatican attorneys... [are] insisting that the Vatican Bank's money laundering scheme for Axis plunder violated no international law, since the Ustasha's victims, mainly Orthodox Christian Serbs, were technically citizens of 'Independent' Croatia. The unrepentant tone of the Vatican bodes poorly for Pius XII and the current controversy involving his elevation to sainthood."

A WWII poster calling Croatian volunteers
to join SS units. Germany has never forgotten
their allies from the WWII, and help them
greatly during their mutiny against SFRY,
in 1991, and to join EU in 2013. 

THE VATICAN'S ongoing World War II identity crisis was evident last September when, after prodding from Croatian leaders, Zagreb Archbishop Josip Bozanic paid a 60-year-late visit to the Jasenovac memorial site, the first official representative of the Croatian Church to attend the annual memorial ceremony. Instead of an apology, Bozanic defended Stepinac and the Church, and used the long-awaited moment to also mourn the massacre of fleeing Nazis by partisans in Bleiburg, Austria - where an annual, Croatian government-sponsored commemoration ceremony is well attended by Catholic dignitaries. Bozanic was not reproached by the Vatican, which also doesn't reproach the Croatian Church's tolerance of the ubiquitous pro-Nazi symbolism in that country, which reemerged as Croatian "culture" in the early 1990s.

President Stjepan Mesic himself, who just left office after 10 years, had to recently ask the Vatican to pay closer attention to a bishop and military chaplain who regularly recites a violent poem that ends with the Ustasha saying: "For the fatherland, ready."

This is the Balkan country that's on the fast-track for EU membership. That's where decades of evasion, deflection and cover-up get us, something that contributed to John Paul II's own neglect of Jasenovac - the Balkans' largest killing grounds - during his three trips to Croatia. It also leads us to last December's spectacle of Pope Benedict having a private audience with Marko Perkovic, lead singer of the notorious clerical-fascist Croatian pop band Thompson, which regularly invokes "For the fatherland, ready" and had odes to concentration camps on earlier albums. Many Thompson fans engage in Nazi salutes, and nuns and politicians attend the "patriotic" concerts.

People bury history in order to repeat it. John Ranz, chairman of Buchenwald Survivors, in a 1996 letter to The New York Times, wrote: "Ironically, with US help, [1990s president] Franjo Tudjman was able to accomplish last year what the Nazis and their World War II collaborators could not, namely the uprooting of the entire Serbian Krajina population... The World War II fascist regime of Ante Pavelic is being officially rehabilitated in Croatia today. Streets and public buildings are being named after the architects of the Holocaust, Nazi-era currency revived, while the numbers and scope of the human carnage are being rewritten."

Had history not been dumped into a mass grave, Western publics might have been allowed a fuller understanding of the Balkan wars, given that by 1991 it was "normal to kill Serbs," as Zarko Puhovski, of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, put it. When Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in June 1991 - and the Vatican was the first to recognize it despite a UN resolution warning this could imperil a peaceful solution - survival dictated that the Serbs secede from the secessionists. "A few days after the Croatians declared war," writes historian Israel, Pope John Paul II "sent a letter to the Yugoslav government demanding it not suppress the rebellion." And so it was that in 1991 three Croatian soldiers saw "truckloads of bloated, stinking bodies, mothers and children blown up by bombs, and someone wearing a necklace made of ears," Reuters reported on January 28, 1998.

And so it was that president Tudjman was a prominent guest at the inauguration of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, despite saying that "900,000 died, not 6 million," and ranged from calling Jasenovac a "myth," to blaming Jews for the killings there, to offering a formal apology for the 20,000 Jews killed there - but not for the several hundred thousand Serbs. And so it was that in 1995, as Croatian soldiers with Ustasha insignia cleansed the Krajina of Serbs - under US air cover - the Glina massacre survivor Ljuban Jednak once again fled for his life, dying a refugee in 1997.

And so it was that in 2005, when then Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte learned that indicted 1990s war criminal Gen. Ante Gotovina was being sheltered in a Franciscan monastery in Croatia, the Roman Catholic lady found herself "'extremely disappointed' to encounter a wall of silence from the Vatican" which, she told the Daily Telegraph, "could probably pinpoint exactly which of Croatia's 80 monasteries was sheltering him 'in a few days.'"

And so it was that at the 2006 inauguration of the spruced-up Jasenovac memorial, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Efraim Zuroff observed "the absence of any identification of the individuals responsible for the crimes described... I was amazed that none of the speakers mentioned... Croatia's greatest achievement in facing its Ustasha past - the prosecution and conviction of Jasenovac commander Dinko Sakic... Could it be that the punishment of such a criminal... is so unpopular, even in today's Croatia...?"

And so it was that Sakic was buried last July in full Nazi uniform, with a Father Vjekoslav Lasic - one of many who hold masses in honor of Ante Pavelic - officiating. "Independent State of Croatia is the foundation of today's homeland of Croatia," Lasic said. "Every honorable Croat is proud of the name Dinko Sakic."

When no Croatian official of stature spoke out against the display, Zuroff called on the president to condemn the organizers and remind Croatian society that Sakic brought it shame, not pride.

In enshrining the Church's divided World War II loyalties by canonizing the ambivalent pope at the time, the Church would be announcing to the world what it's made of. But the Church is better than the sum of its nastier parts. Canonizing Pius XII would be unjust to Catholics who did more than he, and an insult to Catholics everywhere. Pius shouldn't be demonized, but he shouldn't be sanctified.

The writer specializes in the Balkans, and is an unpaid advisory board member of the American Council for Kosovo. [Source: The Jerusalem Post| Published on February 22, 2010.]

Related reading:
1. Vatican's Holocaust
2. Roman Catholicism's "Moral Relativism" Croatian Style
3. Catholics in Serbia under jurisdiction of Croatian bishops, serve mass for Stepinac who was involved in Holocaust!
4. Not a single Croatian bishop attended the International Remembrance Day of the Holocaust in Croatia
5. The Vatican Role in the Ustasha Genocide in the Independent State of Croatia
6. Genocide in Croatia 1941-1945