Dear Friends,
Εὐλογία Κυρίου!
The video below was sent to me this morning by a spiritual son. It
depicts a memorial held by Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church at the
sight of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, where, during WW
II, the German Nazi-sponsored State of Croatia
(the Ustaše régime) exterminated Orthodox Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and dissident Croats and Bosnians
(anti-fascist activists).
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,
"Some six hundred thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly
Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and political opponents of the Ustaše regime. The
number of Jewish victims was between twenty thousand and twenty-five
thousand, most of whom were murdered there up to August 1942, when
deportation of the Croatian Jews to Auschwitz for extermination began.”
In the obscene world
of political attempts to downplay the Nazi atrocities during the Second
World War by silly claims that the numbers of those exterminated have
been exaggerated (as though even one such
death were not unthinkable), some say that “only” 100,000 people were
killed in the camp. Such numbers are absurd and are contradicted even by
the admissions of criminality at the time. Some statistics, in fact,
place the number of deaths at well over 1 million
and as high as one 1,700, 000 victims.
Sadly, the Ustaše régime was
de facto recognized by the Vatican, and the Croatian Catholic Church clergy were closely aligned with the Nazi régime.
Pope Pius XII was
also criticized for not condemning the Croatian state, which he called
an “outpost" of his church’s influence. The atrocities were accompanied
by the forced conversion of many Orthodox
Christians.
Fortunately, a number of
Roman Catholic clergy and leaders have condemned the involvement of the
Catholic Church in Nazi Croatia and its support by the Vatican, whether
directly or indirectly. Others, however,
have sided with historical revisionists, who downplay the extent of the
Nazi atrocities.
Certainly violence between religions is not one-sided, and shameful
persecutions between and within various religions are part of the
flawed history of an imperfect world and many imperfect religious
believers. This must be cured by mutual forgiveness.
But that forgiveness is meaningless if we do not remember those who were
exterminated for their religious beliefs or ethnicity and commemorate
them in our religious ceremonies.
May the memory of the Orthodox and other victims of the perverse Ustaše régime be eternal!
Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη!
Least Among Monks, † Bp. Chrysostomos
Click on photograph:
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Anniversary marked in Jasenovac of Vatican-Ustashe genocide against the ...
Orthodox Church has again commemorated persecution by Vatican-Croat-NAZI persecution of Serbian Orthodox Christi...
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