5 nuns beatified at Bosnia ceremony

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_BOSNIA_BEATIFICATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-09-24-07-59-31

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Five nuns who died in the custody of Serb extremists during World War II have been beatified at a ceremony that attracted thousands in Bosnia - the last formal step before possible sainthood.

Jula Ivanisevic, Berchmana Leidenix, Krizina Bojanc, Antonija Fabjan and Bernadeta Banja helped the poor regardless of religion in the majority Serb village of Pale. Serb soldiers burned their convent in late 1941.

The nuns were held in military barracks near the east Bosnian town of Gorazde. The soldiers beat and tried to rape them. The women jumped out of the second-floor windows, and soldiers later stabbed to death those still alive.

[jberryhill]

1. I hope they catch whoever did it /nt

[ButterflyBlood]

2. It'd be odd if they were still alive

It's been 70 years since. Even if still alive like the few ex-Nazis still on the loose they'd be so old they'd be barely worth prosecuting at this point.

[jberryhill]

4. Oh... I thought they were recently beatified

Nuns or not, if someone was beatified in my community, I'd be concerned.

[brendan120678]

14. Uhh...I think you misunderstand the meaning...

of the word "beatified."

Don't know if that's intentional or not.

Yes, they were recently beatified. By the Pope.
They were murdered by Serbian extremists over 70 years ago.

[jberryhill]

15. I got beatified once in elementary school by my vocabulary teacher

She beatified the crap out of me.

I'm not surprised the Pope would beatify a couple of nuns.

[moobu2]

3. The lord works in mysterious ways

The Catholic Ustashi killed 300,000 - 1,000,000 maybe more mostly civilian men women and children and forced converted who knows how many Orthodox under threat of death and they want to reach back there and make saints of these 5 women? Sounds like a recipe for more religious conflict but that is what they do best isn't it.

[patrice]

5. Beatifying those who "helped the poor regardless of religion" would seem to sanctify ecumenism. nt

[moobu2]

7. The Catholic Pope beatifies people for political reasons (in every case)

so I would take their claims with grain of salt. The entire story, including the claim that these women helped the poor regardless of religion, might be an elaborate propaganda lie for religious political reasons. It wouldn't be the first time.

[patrice]

8. Opinion. Conjecture. Speculation is as probable or improbable as ANY other perspective.

[patrice]

6. BTW, based on your last sentence . . . pot, kettle. nt

[Kurmudgeon]

9. The Ustase "was a Croatian fascist,anti-Yugoslav separatist movement" and Nazi..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e
"The movement functioned as a terrorist organization before World War II,<8> but in April 1941, they were appointed to rule a part of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state<9><10><11> of Nazi Germany."

Kind of convenient how you completely omitted the Nazi connection, eh?
Definitely not main stream Catholicism, no matter how hard you try to imply otherwise.
No, I'm not Catholic either.

[moobu2]

10. Hey, since you're so interested in the Nazi connection, check this out

This is a portion of what the Nazi's reported to supiriors about the Catholic Ustaše atrocities and crimes against humanity and so forth.. You can tell that the behavior of these Catholic Ustaše forces were so outrageous that it even disturbed the Nazi's. Oh yeah, The Ustaše Identified with the Nazi's because they were both Right Wing Christian Corporatists. They were Catholic Fascists Nationalists basically. Anyway....

Our troops have to be mute witnesses of such events; it does not reflect well on their otherwise high reputation... I am frequently told that German occupation troops would finally have to intervene against Ustaše crimes. This may happen eventually. Right now, with the available forces, I could not ask for such action. Ad hoc intervention in individual cases could make the German Army look responsible for countless crimes which it could not prevent in the past.<46>

A Gestapo report to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, dated February 17, 1942, stated that:

Increased activity of the bands is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustaše units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustaše committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand.

link

As far as these 5 women the Pope is making a political point with are concerned...I wouldn't believe the details about the story without plenty of independent (non Catholic) verification. There were to many Priests, and I assume nuns as well, who participated in the forced conversions and killings of masses of men women and children... often forcing them to convert to Catholicism and killing them afterwords while they were still in church.

[onager]

11. Pavelic called Hitler "lenient" - and met with the Pope

(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

[moobu2]

12. I screwed my link up but I got the quote from that page Kurmudgeon posted above me

about halfway down that page there's a photo on the left side with Hitler shaking hands with Pavelic
...the quote I posted is directly to the right of that photo. the paragraph above what I quoted is interesting also.

here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usta%C5%A1e


also interesting is this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_clergy_involvement_with_the_Usta%C5%A1e">Catholic clergy involvement with the Ustaše. A priest actually ran one of the worst concentration camps.

[Kurmudgeon]

13. Hitler had a god, it was himself.

As for the Ustase again, is every Catholic Yugoslavian?
Apply the guilt to the guilty, just don't apply it to later generations and people who were not there unless they stand up and claim it for themselves, like Trent Lott as an example.

[laconicsax]

16. That's heresy you're preaching there.

"Apply the guilt to the guilty, just don't apply it to later generations and people who were not there."

Ever hear of "original sin?" Were the guilt of original sin not applied to later generations, your messiah's "sacrifice" was in vain.

[onager]

17. Define "main stream Catholicism."

Definitely not main stream Catholicism, no matter how hard you try to imply otherwise.

Nice dodge. So OK, enlighten us, since you seem to have some special knowledge of this topic.

Exactly how did Catholic members of the Ustashi differ from "main stream Catholics?"

I'm assuming that Catholics who joined the Ustashi were raised Catholic, then joined the Ustashi as adults...just like the good Catholic altar boy Adolf Hiter went to Mass for years in Austria before he got into politics.

So what special kind of non-mainstream Catholics were they?

[laconicsax]

18. Presumably the kind who put sugar on their porridge. n/t