Pope Slams ‘Great Powers’ Over Mass Deaths in 20th Century

[bemildred]

Last edited Sun Jun 21, 2015, 05:00 PM - Edit history (3)

Source: AP

(TURIN, Italy) — Pope Francis on Sunday denounced what he calls the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.

He also decried the deaths of Christians in gulags in Russia under the Stalin dictatorship, which followed the war.

The pope’s harsh assessments came in impromptu remarks during his visit to Turin, northern Italy, when he told young people he understands how they find it hard to trust the world.

“The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody,” Francis said, citing the death camp in Poland, and asked: “Why didn’t they bomb” those railroad routes?

Read more: http://time.com/3929582/pope-francis-great-powers-world-war-two-armenia/

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Edit: I think the Pope is just pointing out the obvious, an "Emperor has no clothes" kind of statement, made in passing.

[Bluenorthwest]

1. When the allies liberated the camps, they did not release the gay prisoners but transfered them

to serve out terms, and this was done, dear Francis, because the allies were Christians and Christian leaders command their followers to hate LGBT people, which is why, dear Francis, you should not be constantly associating us with Satan and demons and trash talking us to world wide audiences, nor should you be having conferences with other anti gay religious leaders to organize against LGBT equality.

This guy. He needs to take Michael Jackson's advice and start with the man in the mirror.

[Pooka Fey]

5. Can you post sources to support this claim that homosexuals were detained while others were freed?

I just searched and found nothing to support this claim. This is an extraordinary and disturbing assertion, and I wonder why I have never heard it before. I'm asking with all due respect.

[Bluenorthwest]

12. Sure.

There is much documentation. The Nazi era anti gay laws remained on the books in Germany. No social assistance or reparation was ever given to the gay victims and not one person was punished for their crimes against gay people.

"Homosexuals continued to suffer, even with the end of the war. Paragraph 175 of the German legal code stated that male homosexuality, but not female lesbianism, was punishable by imprisonment. After 1943, male homosexuals had been forced to wear a pink triangle and were sent to the death camps. After the liberation, the Americans did not repeal Paragraph 175 and sent homosexual inmates liberated from the camps to other prisons."
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/usarmy_holo.html

http://www.hardenet.com/homocaust/liberationforothers.htm

http://www.stop-homophobia.com/thegayholocaust.htm

[Pooka Fey]

21. According to the link you posted, Germany processed reparations to gays in 2000

and issued an apology and recognized officially that gays were victims. A memorial to gay victims was unveiled in 2008. German justice minister admitted that the government was over 50 years late with this acknowledgement and memorial.

Apology

However, it wasn't until December 2000 that an actual apology came. The German government issued an apology for the prosecution of homosexuals in Germany after 1949 & agreed to recognize gays as victims of the Third Reich. Survivors were finally encouraged to come forwards & claim compensation for their treatment during the Holocaust (although claims had to be registered before the end of 2001).

The Geneva-based aid agency, International Organization for Migration (IOM) was responsible for the introducing & handling the claims.
On May 17th 2002, the process was completed as thousands of homosexuals, who suffered under the Reich, were officially pardoned by the German government. About 50,000 gay men were included. German justice minister Hertha Daeubler-Gmelin told parliament, "We all know that our decisions today are more than 50 years late, they are necessary nonetheless. We owe it to the victims of wrongful Nazi justice." A memorial to the homosexuals who died in Nazi concentration camps was unveiled in May 2008 opposite the main Holocaust memorial for Jewish victims in Tiergarten Park in Berlin.

http://www.stop-homophobia.com/thegayholocaust.htm

The other two links post the same text. This subject deserves more study and attention.

[bananas]

33. Atheists and Atheist leaders weren't any better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_and_homosexuality

[Big Slim]

2. Next he will blame us atheists.

I've read that had the Allies diverted flights of bombers so as to destroy the rail lines:

Hitler would have returned to his Plan A: gassing people in the backs of trucks with hoses running to the tailpipe. And/or: machine gunning them.

Then, the entire war might have been prolonged because not enough bombers had been used to destroy purely military targets.

Also,

the Pope's church nurtured anti-Semitism for many a century.

Also,

Hitler was blackmailing the church leadership, as he had info on their sexual activity with children.

[Cal33]

10. Are you holding this Pope responsible for all the horrible acts committed by the Catholic Church

over the past 2,000 years? He is having his hands full right now dealing just with the
present-day events.

[roguevalley]

30. they are. if that is true, then they have to be personally responsible for the

atrocities committed by their countries and groups over the eons. Oh wait....

Very sad and disgusting, some things. Go, Pope. Anyone who calls the right wing nuts crazy and calls out everyone who has turned this world to shit and is prosecuting pedo enablers is okay by me. You don't build Rome in a day and you don't turn a monolithic whale like the church overnight.

[Cal33]

40. Right you are. And one man can only do so much. This Pope hit the ground

running, just like his predecessor, Pope John Paul I. And we know what happened
to Pope John Paul I. He died mysteriously within 6 weeks. There are
Conservative elements within the Church, just as there are conservative
elements within political parties -- and both can be literally deadly.

I hope Pope Francis will have a long life and contribute a great deal to the
betterment of life for everyone.

[JDPriestly]

11. Do you have a link or other reference to your statement that Hitler was blackmailing the church?

I have heard a lot about the obvious silence of the Vatican with regard to the Holocaust which it had to know a great deal about and very early on, but I had not heard that the church leadership might have been blackmailed.

[NotHardly]

14. see link for pics that might have been... still are embarrassing

See... [link:https://www.google.com/search?q=picture+catholic+bishops+saluting+hitler&client=firefox-a&hs=CQ8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US fficial&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jxyHVdDwLIOeyAT-k5-YDw&ved=0CB4QsAQ&biw=1536&bih=697|

[JDPriestly]

15. I know that the leadership of the Catholic Church supported Hitler, but I am asking about

any evidence that they did that because they were blackmailed. I have not heard that.

Do you have any specific evidence as to that point?

[NotHardly]

16. Try googling it ... research is our friend

[Kingofalldems]

20. Any evidence of that?

According to Wikipedia your statement about the Church supporting Hitler is totally false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany

Disgusting. And revealing.

[ColesCountyDem]

36. Hitler did receive support from a very prominent clergyman...

The clergyman who supported Hitler and every evil thing he did was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In contrast, Chaim Weitzman, Golda Meir and other prominent Israelis praised the Pope for saving as many as 850,000 Jewish lives. There is a national forest in Israel named in honor of Pius XII, and I rather doubt that would have happened, had any credible evidence existed that Pius XII supported Hitler.

[JDPriestly]

39. Very true about Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti.

Pope Pius XII could have done so much more -- like excommunicating Catholics who supported the violence against Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and others.

It was not until the late 1970s or even early 1980s that the last anti-Jewish shrine in Austria was finally closed and changed by the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church as well as Martin Luther and the early Lutheran Church were anti-Jewish for centuries. It is utterly shameful.

[PatrynXX]

22. face palm

seriously I'll take you to point. Your trying to provoke someone like me .. I'll just hold my tongue..

[roguevalley]

27. Americans systematically exterminated and marginalized native people putting them into

detention camps and forgetting about them. If we have to assign historical blame to this man who is trying to change the world then take your share, big slim. How about your share of Japanese internment? My mom lost her best friend to that. How about invading everywhere in our imperialistic zeal to shoulder the white man burden? Am I personally responsible for slavery too? If I am we all are. Go, POPE! America was as anti-semitic as anyone and Ford is mentioned in Mein Kampf. Are we responsible too for that if he's got to shoulder the historical shame of his organization?

[former9thward]

37. There were 2.3 million combat sorties in the period 1941-45.

And you are saying diverting a few of those 2.3 million "would have prolonged the war"? Towards the end of the war they had ran out of targets to bomb. They could have easily bombed those lines. And bombing them would have deprived the Nazis of a military asset. The people in those camps were being used as forced labor producing military items.

That said the church does not have clean hands in WW II, especially at the end. There was an underground railroad of priests and bishops which helped thousands of Nazis escape Europe.

[happyslug]

41. The Allies could have diverted a lot of those sorties....

In the post War analysis of the Allied bombing of Germany, made the point it benefited the German war effort more then it did harm to that effort. The Nazis had been trying all through the 1930s to get people to move out of their old inner city neighborhoods to the new suburbs where the new factories were. Unlike Americans, the Germans tends to stay in the neighborhood they were born in (This was more true of males then females, women tended to move in with their husbands, who tended to stay in the neighborhood they grew up in).

Nazis tried everything to get those males to move to new housing closer to the new factories, but they just refused to go TILL THE ALLIES STARTED TO BOMB THOSE INNER CITIES, then they started to move to the suburbs, and cut the cost of transporting such workers from their homes to the new factories. Over and over again you read about cities being bombed, but the factories NOT being hit, for their were dispersed in the suburbs and the bombers aim was the city centers. Thus the allied bombing helped the German war effort.

Now, the bombing in support of ground forces was extremely effective, the failure was the strategic bombing of Germany itself. during 1942 till the beginning of 1945 German war manufacturing kept increasing as the bombing increased, it only dropped as shortages developed as the Allied forces took over France, Poland and Romania then you saw a steep drop as Allied Armies entered Germany itself.

Just a comment that diverting some of those bombers may have done some good, the prisoners may have escaped and the Germans would have had a hard time rounding them back up.

[forest444]

3. Let's remember that he was also referring to Bush

Whose cravenly self-serving and treasonous invasion of Iraq is still causing great turmoil and bloodshed 12 years later - and probably for at least 12 more.

[MisterP]

24. JPII had President Peepants' number on that one

http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/43724:pope-to-bush-go-into-iraq-and-you-go-without-god

[Warren Stupidity]

4. His church failed to act, embraced mussolini

So what is he going on about?

[roguevalley]

28. he didn't. he's trying to make change. If he's got the historical guilt burden, get a history

of your country and read up on your own burden.

[Warren Stupidity]

31. He's lecturing others for their past behavior

while his church was complicit in the European genocides of wwII. That makes his lecture an act of hypocrisy.

[heaven05]

6. this guy is on the case!!!!

Thinking Catholics with a conscience, integrity and principle should be proud of their Pope.

[forest444]

7. Bingo (no pun intended).

Which is why I trust and pray Pope Francis will alway keep his food and tea in trusted hands.

[heaven05]

9. I do understand

that sentiment.

[JDPriestly]

8. The Catholic Church also knew of the Holocaust and did very little if anything to discourage

it.

In fact, the Vatican was a great power in Austria and Germany at the time, and some Catholics were swept up in the Holocaust. But the Vatican did not excommunicate those who supported the Holocaust.

[Bluenorthwest]

13. So when the Pope uses denigrating speech about LGBT people and claims fighting our rights is God's

own war and our rights the idea of Satan, he does this knowing full well the fruition of that sort of invective.
Perhaps he could issue an Encyclical explaining the safe metrics of denigrating language toward minority groups, establish some rules of behavior. So far we know he approves of raging sermons saying minorities are associated with the Devil, but also that he thinks the Nazis went too far. Lots of wiggle room in that rhetoric, and he needs to clarify. Why exactly is it ok to denigrate minorities in public for the advancement of one's own group and agenda? If it is not ok, why does Francis do so habitually?

I have rarely seen a person who seems so unaware of his own acts and deeds as this Francis.

[Joe Chi Minh]

17. Why on earth do you think Francis is under constant attack from the traditionalists?

He seems to have managed to slough off the mafia's nexus with the Vatican. He's already moving as fast as he can, but it's way to fast for the conservatives and not as far as the heretics would like.

[NYC Liberal]

18. Francis IS a traditionalist conservative.

His views on economics (capitalism, poverty, wealth inequality), the environment (including climate change), abortion, women's rights, LGBT rights — they are all identical to those of his predecessors.

He believes that same-sex marriage is evil.
He believe thats adoption by same-sex couples is tantamount to child abuse.
He opposes women's rights, including abortion rights.
He believes contraception is immoral.
He blamed a "gay lobby" for the resignation of the previous pope.
He compared advocating for equal rights for LGBT people to Nazi propaganda.

[Joe Chi Minh]

25. You wanted him to change 2000 years of church history; and Benedict before him.

It's all about sex, isn't it? When he talks about the Church's social policy, he is not talking about sexual orientation, but that is not right-wing, it's conventional terminology. You transmute every issue into sexual issues.

You also seem to know zero about Francis' and Benedict's views on economics, but I know it's futile arguing against your priorities.

[NYC Liberal]

34. He doesn't WANT to change it. That's the point.

LGBT and women's rights are not about "sex". How incredibly disgusting and offensive. Francis is an active crusader against equal rights.

Equal rights are intrinsically tied to economic improvement; they go hand in hand. The availability of contraception is very much an economic issue, for example.

I am extremely well versed in both popes' economic views. Tell me where they differ. Benedict spoke often about the ills of capitalism, about wealth inequality and criticized the rich for not doing more to help the poor. He even wrote a whole book about it. Francis spouts the same rhetoric.

[restorefreedom]

19. he has already begun to embrace people

who have been traditionally shunned by the church: atheists and lgbt and other marginalized groups. he is taking on income inequality, the obscene greed and gluttony of the 0.01%, and climate change for starters. considering the church is 2000 yrs old i think he has made some significant headway. just the fact that he is pissing off the gop conservative "christians" is proof enough for me that he is speaking a different message. is it perfect? no. is it leaps and bounds beyond what people have come to expect from christian church leaders? imo, yes it is.

[NYC Liberal]

35. He's "embraced" us by calling our relationships "evil"

and calling us child abusers when we adopt.

[restorefreedom]

38. he said all people need to be treated with love and charity

and that he is not here to judge. he cannot singlehandedly change the position of the church, papal infallability notwithstanding. he has taken some of these issues farther than any of his predecessors. unfortunately in the catholic church,progress moves at a glacial pace.

[PatrynXX]

23. yes I do think he should slam himself

Pope Pius I have a book on this relationship between the Pope and Hitler........ naturally my righties say it's a work of fiction

[Joe Chi Minh]

26. Well, I don't. I think Pius XII was derelict, to say the least, but alas that Tridentine

Last edited Sun Jun 21, 2015, 08:14 PM - Edit history (1)

dispensation was a shocker. That institutional Church was utterly legalistic and violent, a mirror image of the Synagogue in Christ's day, and a close reflection of the crypto-fascist West at that time - instead of being a lamp on a lamp-stand for the enlightenment of the world. Even Hitler despised Pius' supine diplomatic wriggling.

[roguevalley]

29. then tell me your country and I will tell you what shame you need to work on

that your country did 50-200 years ago. Since when is the crimes of the fathers visited upon the generations? When was the last time you heard ANYONE in power call the wing nuts crazy? Go, Pope.

[Warren Stupidity]

32. Wonder pope is lecturing other institutions

for their past crimes while ignoring the complicity of his institution for its complicity in those same crimes. What part of that is unclear to you?