Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

This priest is so happy to have this dirty old sock worn by a dead Nazi archbishop.



Did you know that there is a Catholic high school in White Plains, New York, dedicated to the original owner of this sock? It's the Archbishop Stepinac High School.



But why is there a school in the US dedicated to a Nazi from Europe, you may ask? Well...

When Congress Helped Free a Fascist Archbishop

Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac collaborated with the fascist regime in Croatia, whose atrocities shocked even the Nazis. The US Congress then spent years attempting to free him in the name of anti-communism.

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The Croatian Catholic Church — led by Stepinac — was deeply entangled with the NDH regime. However, after it was overthrown by the communist partisans in 1945 and Stepinac was imprisoned for treason and wartime collaboration, anti-communists in the United States rebranded him as an innocent and courageous martyr. The US government soon fought for his release and began a wide, long-term campaign across the Western world on behalf of clerical fascism in the Balkans.

Stepinac was detained by the Communist authorities who took over Yugoslavia in 1945. Their leader, Josip Broz Tito, did not want to make a martyr of Stepinac and was willing to let him go free so long as he left the country. Stepinac — encouraged by the Vatican — instead chose to stay in Yugoslavia and stand trial in 1946, after which he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for treason and collaboration.

Abroad, anti-communists wasted no time in whitewashing Stepinac’s history of fascist collaboration to recast him as a victim a repression. In Ireland, the Count of Thomond, Anthony Henry O’Brien, wrote a short biography of Stepinac in 1947 arguing that he was a Christ-like victim of communist persecution. In the United States, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, embedded O’Brien’s book in the foundation stone of a new Stepinac Institute and sponsored the creation of the Archbishop Stepinac High School, which still provides secondary education in White Plains, New York.

Spellman and his allies in the US Congress began a campaign for Stepinac’s release. Subtly but forcefully, the State Department and the US embassy in Belgrade gave this campaign concrete support.

The Stepinac campaign was an early and successful example of American apologia for crimes against humanity in the Balkans; but it was far from the last.

The Irish essayist Hubert Butler, one of the few Western commentators who criticized the myth of Stepinac’s martyrdom from the beginning, warned, in 1956, that fervent anti-communism was morphing into apologia for fascism. Butler observed how NDH head Ante Pavelić, who had mysteriously escaped to Argentina via British-occupied Austria and Rome after the war, had “cashed in very effectively on the Stepinac legend,” transforming his own image in the West from “a monster of iniquity” into something “more respectable, and if he was wanted again in a campaign against Communism in the Balkans it is possible that he and his friends would be used.”

The wider Stepinac myth endures today. The man who welcomed a Nazi-installed government as a gift from God was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Stepinac, the pope proclaimed, was “one of the outstanding figures of the Catholic Church, having endured in his own body and his own spirit the atrocities of the Communist system.”

The more diplomatic and sensitive Pope Francis has so far resisted calls for Stepinac to be made a saint.

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/aloysius-ste...yugoslavia

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