Reply #11: Pavelic called Hitler "lenient" - and met with the Pope

[onager]

(BTW - I couldn't get your link to work.)

I like to mention this stuff whenever anyone tries to play the tattered old "Hitler was an atheist" card. Most of his allies were certainly practicing and publicly devout Xians...from Franco in Spain to Szalasi in Hungary.

Although a puppet of Hitler, Ante Pavelic, the dictator of Catholic Croatia, once chided Hitler on a visit to Berlin about his `lenient' treatment of German Jews, boasting that in comparison he had completely solved the Jewish question in Croatia, while some Jews remained alive in Hitler's Third Reich.

http://catholicarrogance.org/Catholic/RC_scandal-2.html

In April 1941, Pius XII granted a private audience to Ante Pavelic, the leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state...Pius was criticised for his reception of Pavelic: an unattributed British Foreign Office memo on the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII#World_War_II

Then there was the strange case of the Croatian Interior Minister during WWII, Andrija Artukovic...who personally WROTE some of the anti-Jewish laws in Croatia. He illegally entered the US in 1948, probably with help from the Vatican "rat line." Artukovic fought extradition for nearly 40 years, thanks to his right-wing/Catholic buddies. He finally got deported in 1986 and died in a prison cell, awaiting execution as a war criminal.

Quote from Artukovic: "I was guided by the moral principles of the Catholic Church."

http://catholicarrogance.org/CroatianHolocaust.html

Even the Cardinal of the Los Angeles Archdiocese in 1985, Timothy Manning, got dragged into the Artukovic case. Manning wrote a letter defending Artukovic, then had to "clarify" (i.e., weasel out of) the whole thing when the infuriated Los Angeles Jewish community heard about the letter:

http://articles.latimes.com/1985-01-24/news/mn-11228_1_manning-letter