RE: Damned Catholics
May 3, 2017 at 4:50 am
(This post was last modified: May 3, 2017 at 4:50 am by Fake Messiah.)
(May 2, 2017 at 4:47 pm)Tazzycorn Wrote: It happened in Slovakia (admittedly not a Balkan state) where Fr Jozef Tiso became head of state and governement in a Nazi puppet state. The country you're probably thinking of is Croatia which was set up by the Nazi group the Ustase under the patronage of Fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. While country wasn't officially run by the rcc, there were deep links between church and state in Croatia, with many senior church men being senior party leaders (so much so that the leader of the rcc in Croatia Aloysius Stepinac, archbishop of Zagreb and later saint of the rcc was definitely in cahoots with and probably a member of the Ustase), and the mass murder of Serbs, Bosnians and Jews in Croatia were endorsed and often commenced by the church in the country.
Well it was not just Croatia. For instance Sarajevo's (which is in Bosnia) archbishop Ivan Šarić - later dubbed the "Hangman of the Serbs" - told the faithful that the elimination of Jews was a "renewal of human dignity." and wrote love letters to Nazi leaders (and his body is still preserved in catholic church in Sarajevo).
When it comes to archbishop Stepinac, which you mention, he was a complicated figure. He was actually working very actively with Nazi army you mention, the Ustase, to whom he actually served as main vicar, but he did regret it and actually there are some documents that he personally helped some Jews. But nevertheless he did seem mentally ill person. You must keep in mind that while there were Nazis in charge with catholic church in Croatia there were also large amount of people that were working against them as a guerrilla army and ultimately won the war and established an atheist and communist country. No doubt out of disgust toward what they saw Catholic church was doing to Jews.
After the war when Commies took over the mental issues of Sepinac surfaced, because he seemed to lead war against them because he was speaking against teaching evolution in schools, he was against young people partying on weekends, against mixed gender swimming in pools, punishing people for saying swear words, against secular marriages and so on.
And he also didn't want to open diplomacy relations between commies and Vatican which all made him an easy target and they held some trial where they were accusing him of stuff he did not actually commit, which again Church is now using to show itself as a victim.
There is an interesting book about it by historian Stella Alexander called "The Triple Myth"
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"