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 http://www.afrol.com/Countries/Rwanda/backgr_cross_genocide.htm

NAIROBI, Dec. 13 -- A Catholic priest was convicted Wednesday of taking part in Rwanda's 1994 genocide by ordering militiamen to set fire to a church and then bulldoze it while 2,000 people seeking safety were huddled inside.

The Rev. Athanase Seromba was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to 15 years in prison but will get credit for four years already served. The tribunal is based in Arusha, Tanzania.

Seromba was charged with directing a militia that "attacked with traditional arms and poured fuel through the roof of the church, while gendarmes and communal police launched grenades and killed the refugees."

After failing to kill all the people inside, Seromba ordered the demolition of the church, the charging document said.

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/13/AR2006121301948.html

Rome, the USA and the genocide

The events leading up to the genocide in April 1994 were, according to many experts, planned and co-ordinated by RC church leaders and politicians in conjunction with Hutu racial supremacists and United States Ambassador David Rawson. Rawson’s previous post had been in Somalia, where he had spent millions of dollars providing US military weapons to the discredited Barre regime. That was followed by an ignominious US exit from Somalia as that country descended into chaos.

A key US role in the Rwandan massacres was to deny that genocide was taking place, since under international law that would have ‘obliged’ the UN and the international community to intervene. Instead, they claimed there were merely ‘individual acts of genocide’. They also actively frustrated UN attempts to send troops to Rwanda.

In a 1999 Guardian article, Chris McGreal wrote of the failure of the RC church to prevent the bloodshed: “It failed because it claims four out of five Rwandans as adherents, yet it made little effort to influence the killers. That failure continues today through denial and evasion over its responsibility for the genocide”.

Rome, the ecumenists and the massacre

A number of RC priests actively participated in the genocide of the Tutsi, including Augustin Misago, charged in 1999 with dispatching children to serve in the Hutu militia. In one incident, dozens of unarmed Tutsis were slaughtered in a RC church. Misago said: “They brought it on themselves by hiding guns”. Two years later, a human rights group, who investigated RC participation in the massacres, wrote to the Pope saying: “One is stuck by the persistent wish to exonerate the RC hierarchy and the institution at any price”. It is sad to record that some compromising, ecumenical, once Protestant religious institutions also ‘turned a blind eye to the massacres.

The Pope is a generous man, he spreads Gods message and love for mankind. Those that refuse to accept it are simply deluded sinners who'll pay for their misgivings in Hell.

Those that don't believe? You mean all of the 4-5 billion who don't believe? All of those people will go to hell? And what about those born before catholicism or christianity? Will they go to hell too? And all of the child molesting priests will go to heaven with the poor 1 billion catholics? I wonder where is safest to end up.

If you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour and repent for past sins and blasphemy you too will be spared being cast asunder far away from Gods love.

It's easy to say you'd rather end up in hell, but ultimately for 70 years of pleasure and sin you pay for it with eternity cast away from God's love in hell. 70 years of faith and you'll be rewarded with all the answers you've ever wanted and spend eternity in the loving embrace of our Father in Heaven.

Choice is yours. But ultimately on the day of your judgement you cannot say that you were not aware of the teachings of Christ, they are there to be read plain as day in the Bible.

The Price of Compromise

Guenter Lewy writes in his book The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany: “Had German Catholicism from the start adhered to a policy of resolute opposition to the Nazi regime, world history might well have taken a different course. Even if this struggle had ultimately failed to defeat Hitler and prevent all of his many crimes, it would in this view have raised the moral prestige of the Church immeasurably. The human cost of such resistance would undeniably have been great, but these sacrifices would have been made for the greatest of all causes. With the home front unreliable, Hitler might not have dared going to war and literally millions of lives would have been saved. . . . When thousands of German anti-Nazis were tortured to death in Hitler’s concentration camps, when the Polish intelligentsia was slaughtered, when hundreds of thousands of Russians died as a result of being treated as Slavic Untermenschen [subhumans], and when 6,000,000 human beings
were murdered for being ‘non-Aryan,’ Catholic Church officials in Germany bolstered the regime perpetrating these crimes. The Pope in Rome, the spiritual head and supreme moral teacher of the Roman Catholic Church, remained silent.”—Pages 320, 341.

THE POPE WAS A MEMBER OF HITLER YOUTH

Catholic professor of history at Vienna University, Friedrich Heer, admitted: “In the cold facts of German history, the Cross and the swastika came ever closer together, until the swastika proclaimed the message of victory from the towers of German cathedrals, swastika flags appeared round altars and Catholic and Protestant theologians, pastors, churchmen and statesmen welcomed the alliance with Hitler.”


THE POPE SUPPORTS FASCISTS WORLDWIDE

By The Associated Press The Associated Press – Wed Jul 7, 10:39 am ET

SANTIAGO, Chile – The Roman Catholic Church is petitioning Chile's government for prisoner pardons that would include people responsible for crimes against humanity.
The church is asking for the pardons as part of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Chile's independence on Sept. 18. The church proposes pardons for those older than 70, any with a terminal decease and women who are mothers.
The controversy centers on the inclusion of some convicted of committing crimes during the 1973-90 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. According to official statistics, 3,065 opponents of Pinochet's regime were killed and 1,200 more disappeared.
The Group of Families of Detainees and Missing People has asked President Sebastian Pinera not to pardon anyone accused of committing such crimes during Pinochet's dictatorship.

"The Pope is a generous man, he spreads Gods message and love for mankind"


He has love for the members of the death squads in Chile. He has tried to get them released on "humanatarian grounds".

He has love for little children. He has protected in every way possible the Priests who 'loved' them.

He has love for Holocaust deniers.

He has love for gays calling them 'worse than drugs dealers'.

He has love for those Priests and Nuns that burned people alive in Rwanda. Defending them with Vatican lawyers.

He has love for power and money.

Love? Your comment makes me sick.

Analysis: The pope and Hitler Youth

The mists of history swirl around Pope Benedict XVI's hometown in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps in Germany.

It was there that he came of age as Joseph Ratzinger and served in Hitler Youth during the rise of the Third Reich.

Shining a light on that history offers a glimpse of the context underpinning the Vatican's current crisis, which results from the pope's decision last month to rescind the excommunication of a renegade, ultra-conservative bishop who actively denies the Holocaust.

The decision unleashed a firestorm of controversy, with the German government weighing in last week, Israel's chief rabbinate severing ties with the Vatican, and Catholics and Jews worldwide feeling that decades of hard work and goodwill in improving relations between the two faiths had been undermined.

So can we draw a line from this oversight by the pope, this inability to see how much his decision would insult so many, back to his German past and a decision as a 14-year-old boy to join the Hitler Youth?

Most thoughtful Catholics and many Jewish historians I know would say, no, that is not a line that can be drawn, nor is it fair.

But one man who knows some of the hidden truths in the pope's hometown of Traunstein is Father Rupert Berger, and his story deserves telling.

Berger, now 81, was ordained a Catholic priest alongside Joseph Ratzinger and his brother, Georg, in 1951 in the beautiful church in the center of the town where they all grew up together.
But there was something that set their two families apart.

Berger's family sympathized with the Catholic resistance to Nazism in the town. Rupert was the same age as Joseph Ratzinger and at 14 years old he refused to join Hitler Youth. His family suffered as a result. He told me in an interview in 2005 that his father was sent to Dachau. He returned after the war and became the mayor.

Ratzinger's father was a policeman. The family was never affiliated with the Nazi party. But the Ratzingers chose to go with the vast majority of Germany and acquiesce to the regulations requiring 14 year olds to join Hitler Youth. They wanted to survive and allow their two sons to focus on academics in the seminary. So Ratzinger and his brother joined at 14 and went through with the parades and the salutes to the Fuehrer. Ratzinger also served briefly with a German army anti-aircraft unit just before the end of the war.

When I interviewed Berger in April 2005, just after Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy, he spoke well of Ratzinger's intellect and discipline as a young man. But he said he couldn't understand why Ratzinger had insisted for so long in so many public statements that no one had a choice but to join Hitler Youth.

''It was a hard time to live, and there were hard choices to make," Berger said.

He was too modest or polite, or perhaps uncertain about what to tell a reporter who landed on his doorstep, to state his opinion about the new pope's choices any more clearly.

But what I took away from the interview and my research in the town was that the pope's repeated assertion that he had no choice but to join Hitler Youth was simply not true.

In fact, the statement is an insult to the memory and the lives of those who did resist Nazism and those who did refuse to join the organizations that were formed to perpetuate its power.
The pope's poorly-thought-out edict to reinstate the Holocaust-denying bishop — from which the Vatican is now vigorously back peddling — was also an insult to those who resisted Nazism and to Jews and Catholics alike around the world.

At the end of the day, it shouldn't surprise us that this pope overlooked — or failed to adequately investigate — the dangerous and virulent strains of anti-Semitism that ran through British Bishop Richard Williamson's research that denied the Holocaust.

Nor should it surprise us that the pope failed to give careful enough consideration to what lies behind the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, which refuses to adhere to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, including an important theological rejection of the idea of collective guilt on the part of Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Pope John Paul II had excommunicated Williamson and three other bishops from the Society of St. Pius X in 1988. On Jan. 21, Pope Benedict rescinded that excommunication and later claimed he was not aware of Williamson's Holocaust denial.

It shouldn't surprise us that this pope rescinded the excommunication without sufficient attention to how such an act would be received, because it fits in with a lack of transparency and communication that is turning out to be a hallmark of Benedict's papacy.

Even Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who worked closely with Ratzinger and who was a very strong supporter of the conclave that elected Benedict, said: "There must be also a certain criticism of the Vatican's staff practice, which obviously did not examine the matter carefully."

John Allen, a columnist for National Catholic Reporter and the author of a biography of the pope, said that Schonborn's statement was significant because "even papal loyalists are coming to see that the meltdown illustrates a twin failure in transparency: One within the Vatican itself, in the sense that the proper people were not consulted, and the other in communication with the outside world."

To deny the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, and yesterday German Chancelor Angela Merkel discussed the issue with the pope directly.

After the German government demanded on Feb. 3 that the Vatican reconsider its position, the Vatican issued a statement Feb. 4 that Williamson must recant his denial of the Holocaust before he can be admitted into the Roman Catholic Church as a bishop. Williamson has refused to do that and now remains in limbo and leaves the Vatican in a moral twilight on the issue.

Jason Berry, an author of several books on the Catholic church and the producer of the acclaimed documentary Vows of Silence, believes it is unfair to think Ratzinger as a young boy could have resisted joining the Hitler Youth.

He believes the current crisis points more to a lack of leadership, saying, "Ratzinger is not being true to his position as a moral fundamentalist; he should have excommunicated Williamson when this news broke. Instead this lame response of asking him to retract is a day late and a dollar short."

There's wide agreement that this much is true.

But there is still the larger question as to whether this failure of judgment on some level mirrors the way in which this pope as a young man and his family found a way to shut out the enormity of the evil of Nazism and instead focus on his own internal world of intellectual intensity and the passion that he holds for the well being of his church.

When I interviewed Father Berger in 2005, it was just days after the white puff of smoke emanated from the Vatican and confirmed that Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy.

When he came to the door, he was holding a broom. Father Berger stood in the doorway and occasionally dragged the broom back and forth while we stood there talking. He remembered much of the detail of those early teenage years when he and Joseph Ratzinger were confirmed as Catholics and when he rejected Hitler Youth and he saw his classmate accept membership.

When I asked him why he thought Ratzinger obeyed the rules and joined the Hitler Youth, Berger replied: ''You could ask the majority of Germans this question. There was such high pressure on everyone. He was too young to do a conscious resistance."

That was certainly true then, but it is certainly not true now.

And for this German pope, a more clear act of "conscious resistance" to denying the Holocaust is now required. He should immediately excommunicate Williamson again and end the ambiguity.

This pope has a unique teaching moment in which he can openly discuss how he feels about his own moral failings as a young man in not challenging the enormity of evil that was Nazism. And he can speak out about the need to remember accurately just how evil Nazism and the Holocaust was, and remind us all of the need to reject anyone who wants to deny the historical record that documents that evil.