Zagreb, Croatia, Nov 22, 2019 / 04:00 am (CNA).- When Esther Gitman proposed a topic for a Fulbright Fellowship, the administrator taking proposals was incredulous.
In her 50s at the time, Gitman was already well past the age of most applicants to the prestigious fellowship. But what shocked the representative was not Gitman’s age, but her story.
“I’ll write about the rescue of Jews in the independent state of Croatia (during World War II),” Gitman said.
“Why in the world would you like to write such a thing?” the representative asked. “Don’t you know that all the Jews and many of the Serbs and Gypsies were murdered there?”
But Gitman was living proof that this was not the full story. She, her mother, and all the Jews she had known in her childhood, had been spared – protected in Italian-occupied territory while the Ustase, the facist puppet-state of the Nazis, controlled Croatia and the surrounding region.
Gitman could barely finish her story of survival before the Fulbright representative blurted out: “Look, I have never heard this story. This is an amazing story. Write a good proposal and then you can even send it to me for a review.”
The proposal was approved. But even when she arrived in Croatia to begin the project, Gitman faced serious doubts from her Croatian collaborators that the research would be fruitful at all. Gitman said she promised to write whatever she found, and if she found nothing, she would describe how she came to find nothing.
It wasn’t until Gitman was well into her research for her Fulbright fellowship in Zagreb, Croatia that she learned the name of the man to whom she and thousands of others owed their rescue: Archbishop Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac.
Learning of Archbishop Stepanic
When Gitman began her application for a Fulbright, she knew little about her own rescue as a Jew from Bosnia-Herzegovina (in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia) other than that she and all the other Jews she knew during her childhood were spared.
She was spurred to learn more not, initially, out of her own curiosity, but her daughter’s.
“I really never asked my mother and my stepfather about it. I wasn’t interested in it,” Gitman told CNA. Moreover, her family, like most others in the region, didn’t speak of their rescuers out of fear of retaliation from the Communist regime that took control of the region after the war.
“I remember that after the war my family had an expression, ‘the walls have ears,’” Gitman wrote in her book “Alojzije Stepinac: Pillar of Human Rights.”
But her daughter’s questions sent her down a road of research that led her back to school to earn her Ph.D. and a Fulbright fellowship to study those very questions.
Gitman’s Fulbright research included combing through thousands of pages of documents – including 5,000 specifically related to rescues during the war – and interviewing 67 Croatian survivors and rescuers from the war.
As she amassed page after page on Jewish rescue in the region, Gitman’s husband encouraged her to narrow down her work by selecting a common denominator among the documents on which to focus.
One name, in particular, kept popping up: Archbishop Stepinac.
“When I started to hear the name of Stepinac, I, in my own biased mind, thought: it cannot be that a priest and still an archbishop would save Jews,” Gitman said.
But as she searched through the archives of the Catholic cathedral in Zagreb, where Stepinac was assigned during the war, “I couldn’t believe what this man has done. I had a few hundred documents and I started to interview people and I just collected hundreds and hundreds of them and I saw…what an amazing thing this man has done.”
In total, and through various strategies, Stepinac directly and indirectly rescued more than 6,000 Jews from the Holocaust.
Who was Archbishop Stepinac?
Aloysius Stepinac was born on May 8, 1898 to a farming family in the village of Brezaric, some 30 miles south and west of the capital of Zagreb.
In 1916, he graduated high school and soon after was drafted to fight in World War I as an Austrian officer on the Italian front, where he was taken as an Italian prisoner of war from July-December of 1918. After the war, he briefly enrolled in a university to study agronomy, but soon returned home to work on the farm and further discern his vocation, and he found himself torn between the priesthood and farming.
“If I were a child again…I would still choose as my vocation either to be a priest or a farmer. A man is somehow closest to God there. Look at the peasant: he works and toils, but he sees how, in everything, he depends on God. He finds Him in nature. He observes His traces,” Stepinac once said. In 1924, Stepinac entered seminary and was sent to study in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University. His ordination to the priesthood took place on October 26, 1930.
While his heart was that of a parish priest, Stepanic was brought to serve as a master of ceremonies at the archdiocesan chancery by Archbishop Antun Bauer in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. While there, Stepanic established the Zagreb branch of the Catholic charity Caritas, and founded the Caritas magazine, in which he advocated for better economic policies for the poor and urged the wealthy to donate generously to those in need.
In 1934, Pope Pius XI named Stepanic as the coadjutor to Bauer, effectively naming him as his successor. At the age of 37, Stepinac reluctantly became the youngest bishop in the world at the time, after begging Archbishop Bauer to change his mind.
“It shocked me so much that at first I thought that the old man had lost his reason…on the occasion of the consecration everyone cheered and rejoiced. But my heart bled,” Stepinac would later recall.
Not long after being made a bishop, as early as 1936, Stepanic knew of the threat facing Jewish people in Europe and sought to raise funds to help those who were fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria.
He appealed to wealthy Croatian Catholics for their help: “Dear Sir, due to violent and inhumane persecution, a large number of people have had to leave their homeland. Left without means for a normal life, they wander throughout the world…Every day, a large number of emigrants contact us asking for intervention…It is our Christian duty to help them…I am free to address you, as a member of our Church, to ask for support for our fund in favor of emigrants. I ask you to write your free monthly allotment on the enclosed leaflet,” he wrote to them.
In an address to students in 1938, Stepanic condemned the racist ideologies of the Third Reich: “Love toward one’s nation cannot turn a man into a wild animal, which destroys everything and calls for reprisal, but it must ennoble him, so that his own nation secures respect and love of other nations.”
In 1939, he launched another fundraising campaign to help Jews and other persecuted migrants fleeing their countries because of the war, again emphasizing the Christian’s duty to help those in need regardless of their race or creed.
Stepinac and the rescue of Jews during World War II
War officially came to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (which was comprised of modern-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) on April 6, 1941, when German forces invaded the region.
During the occupation, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was divided by the Axis powers, who thought that they could control the region better with divided countries that could be pitted against each other, Gitman said. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a puppet state of the Nazis, with Ante Pavelić at the head of the Ustase – the Croatian fascists loyal to Hitler.
Stepanic, as head of the Catholic Church in the majority-Catholic Croatia, had the difficult task of opposing the Ustase’s violent and inhumane policies while still attempting to maintain peace and order in his country.
“His duty as the head of such a big group (as) the Catholics was to go and establish a working relationship (with Pavelic),” Gitman said, a move that angered many Croatians at the time.
“They hated each other, but he had to establish a working relationship for the sake of peace and order,” she added.
Stepinac found subtle and not-so-subtle ways to oppose Pavelic and the Ustase regime. Gitman said that, for instance, there were two priests and five nuns in the archdiocese who were of Jewish ethnicity, and therefore had to wear the Jewish star.
At one point, Pavelic decided it was embarrassing to the regime to have priests and nuns wearing the star, and so he absolved them of the obligation. But Stepanic urged the priests and nuns to continue wearing the star, as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people. It humiliated Pavelic.
“This was an embarrassment to Pavelic that, Stepinac is telling them to wear the sign when they got permission not to wear (it),” Gitman said.
Gitman also learned that the Jewish rabbi in Zagreb came to rely on the friendship and help of Stepinac during the war. Unlike the rabbi, Stepanic was granted what were known as “Aryan rights” under the Ustase regime, which meant he was free to roam around the city like a normal citizen, while Jews were forced to wear a yellow star to identify themselves, and their movements were curtailed and monitored. Stepanic used this right to help those without such privileges.
“So whenever (the rabbi) needed something, he would send a request to Stepinac, and he always did whatever he could,” Gitman said.
Privately, Stepanic organized hiding places for an unknown number of Jews using Croatian Catholic connections he had throughout the country, or raised funds to help them escape to a safer place. When Stepanic’s own life was in danger, he warned all those that he had helped hide, and told them to find a different hiding place so that they would not be found out.
Stepinac also told his priests in no uncertain terms that they were to accept any requests from people who wanted to convert to the Catholic Church in order to try to save their lives – whether they were Jewish, Serbian, Gypsies, or other persecuted groups.
“He had a policy: when you (a priest) are approached by a Jew or a Serb whose life is in danger and they wished to convert, convert them, because the Christian duty is in the first place to save (their) life,” Gitman said.
“When you are visited by people of the Jewish or Eastern Orthodox faith, whose lives are in danger and who express the wish to convert to Catholicism, accept them in order to save human lives. Do not require any special religious knowledge from them, because the Eastern Orthodox are Christians like us, and the Jewish faith is the faith from which Christianity draws its roots. The role and duty of Christians is in the first place to save people. When this time of madness and savagery has passed, those who would convert out of conviction will remain in our church, while others, after the danger passes, will return to their church,” read a note distributed to parishes in Zagreb during the war.
Stepanic also stood up to the Ustase to protect Jewish people in mixed marriages with Christians. Stepanic told the Ustase that if they started sending Jews in mixed marriages to the concentration camps, that he would close his churches indefinitely and their bells would not stop ringing. He was able to save roughly 1,000 Jews in mixed marriages.
A 1943 letter from Nazi agent Hubner to Hans Helms the Nazi police attaché in Zagreb, later reviewed by Gitman, shows that the Nazi’s were aware of Stepinac’s tactic to protect the Jews:
“…the Archbishop promised protection and that he sent a letter to the Pope in Rome. According to the ‘dogmas’ of the Catholic Church, a couple in a mixed marriage cannot be separated. And if the Croat government undertakes action against mixed marriages, then in protest against such acts, the Archbishop will close all the Catholic Churches for a certain period. Such acts he [Stepinac] considers interference in the internal affairs of the church. Furthermore, the rumors circulating in Zagreb are that the Pope turned personally to the Fuehrer to obtain assurances that no actions would be taken against mixed marriages. For the time being, verification of this information cannot be obtained. But it is probable that this information is accurate because it is acknowledged that Stepinac is a protector of the Jews.”
The act of Stepinac that saved the most Jews – roughly 5,000 – from the Holocaust was his appeal to the Vatican to protect the Jewish refugees from Yugoslavia living in Italian-controlled territory.
When the war came to Yugoslavia, Gitman and her mother, along with thousands of other Jews, flocked to the Dalmatian coast, which was controlled by the Italians. Originally from Sarajevo in the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gitman’s mother had heard that Jews would be safe in Italian territory, because they didn’t have the same mentality toward Jewish people as Nazi Germany did. (Gitman’s father died before the war came to Yugoslavia.)
But by 1942, just a year after the start of the war, the governor of this Italian region, Giuseppe Bastionini, “decided that he cannot have so many people unemployed, roaming around his territory and so he will collect all of them and ship them off back to the Ustase, to the Croatian fascists,” Gitman said.
When Stepinac heard this, he knew it would be certain death if the Jews were sent back to the Ustase. Together with the apostolic visitor to Croatia, Benedictine abbot Dom Giuseppe Ramiro Marcone, Stepinac pleaded with the Vatican to help them negotiate permissions for the Yugoslav Jews to remain in Italian territory. According to Gitman, the men emphasized the terrible conditions for Jews under the Ustase, as well as the fact that many of the Jews living in Italian territory were actually Catholic converts.
“Many were (Catholics),” Gitman said, “but not by a large measure. But it helped, and they received the permit to stay and the Italian second army protected them until the capitulation of Italy in 1943.”
In 1943, when Italy surrendered to the Allied powers, the status of the Jews in Italian territory was once again thrown into question. Germans were now invading Italy, and most of the Jews in Italian territory had to be transferred to other regions to stay safe, if they didn’t leave to fight on the Partisan front (comprised of Jewish resistance and local resistance groups).
Gitman and her mother, along with some of the other Jews, were transferred from Korcula (a Croatian island occupied by Italians) to Bari, Italy on the coast of the Adriatic by some fishermen. They remained there until the war ended in 1945.
Stepanic also saved a group of 58 elderly Jews who were living in “Lavoslav Schwarz,” a nursing home in Zagreb. In 1943, German authorities ordered the elderly people to evacuate the building or face deportation to Auschwitz. Stepinac relocated the group to nearby Church property, secured humanitarian aid for them from Switzerland, and frequently visited the home. The elderly Jews lived in the Church-owned building until 1947, and only five of them died during the war of natural causes, Gitman wrote.
Besides the Jews he rescued, Stepanic also spoke out against the Ustase and Nazi ideology in his sermons, which were banned by the Ustase from being printed and redistributed. But that does not mean the people of Croatia listened.
Stepanic’s defense lawyer wrote in 1946: “His sermons were attended in masses, not only by the Catholics but even by those who otherwise did not go to Church. Those sermons were spread, recounted, copied and propagated in thousands and thousands of copies among the people and even penetrated to the liberated territory. They became an underground press, a means of successful propaganda against the Ustase, a substitute for an opposition press.”
Glaise von Horstenau, a German general in Zagreb, said of the sermons: “If any bishop in Germany spoke this way in public, he would not come down alive from his pulpit!”
Stepinac’s activities earned him the ire of the Nazis and the Ustase, who called him and his collaborators “judenfreundlich (friends of the Jews) and therefore enemies of National Socialism.”
Angered by his sermons on the human dignity of all, including Serbs and Jews and Gypsies, a group of Ustase youth wrote to Stepinac: “You have to know that you are ‘Our greatest enemy’, but we are letting you know that if you go on speaking against us as you have been doing till now, and despite your red Roman belt, we will kill you in the street like a dog.”
In 1943, during a visit to the Vatican, Stepanic was informed that he had officially been labeled a traitor by the Nazis and that his life was therefore in danger. He had “no illusions” about the consequences of his words and actions, Gitman wrote, but stood by them, prepared to die. While in Rome, he met a famous Croatian sculptor, and told him he expected to be killed either by the Nazis or by the communist regime that would follow: “With God (a farewell), it is most likely that we will not see each other again. My life is threatened, either the Nazis will kill me now, or the Communists will kill me later.”
Trial and legacy of Cardinal Stepinac
Less than a month after the end of World War II, on June 2, 1945, the communist regime of Josip Broz Tito came to power and once again united Yugoslavia.
Threatened by the influential Stepinac, who also opposed communism, Tito tried to force Stepinac and other Catholic leaders in the country to cut ties with Rome and form an independent Catholic Church in Croatia – one that could be more easily contained and controlled.
Stepinac did not show up to the meetings where such negotiations were taking place, and instead continued to speak out against the regime, including against their imprisoning of priests, prohibition of religious marriages, and the confiscation of Church property, Gitman wrote.
Because of his obstinance towards the regime, and his popularity, Stepinac was seen as an obstacle to the regime’s success. Tito and his official launched a campaign to smear Stepinac’s reputation by trying to paint him as the main Catholic supporter of the Ustase during World War II.
Stepinac was first placed under house arrest, and then under actual arrest in on September 18, 1946, for the charges. After what many considered to be a “bogus” trial, Stepinac was found guilty on all charges and was sentenced to 16 years of hard labor on October 11, 1946.
At the time, Tito said: “It is not true that we persecute the church, we simply do not tolerate that certain people serve with impunity foreign interests instead of the interests of their own people.”
Gitman wrote that even many officials in Tito’s government recognized the trial and verdict as a sham, “because the Ustase had violated every precept of the church, and…Stepinac was not their supporter.”
Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former secretary of media and propaganda, later admitted as much.
“To tell you truthfully, I think, and not only me, that Stepinac is a man of integrity, a strong and unbreakable character. Although really innocent he was convicted; but then history frequently tells of innocent people being convicted for political necessity.”
A dispatch from the American embassy in Belgrade to the U.S. State Department noted on November 9, 1946 – before the trial’s conclusion – that it had been “fixed.”
“Everybody in Yugoslavia knows that Archbishop Stepinac was arrested and condemned by the Communist Party, and that his sentence was fixed outside the court and long before the trial itself took place. While the trial was still in progress, a highly placed Communist in the executive branch of the government said: ‘We can’t shoot him as we should like to do, because he is an archbishop;he will get a term in prison.’”
In 1950, American senators tried to negotiate for Stepinac’s freedom by making it a condition of American aid to Yugoslavia. Tito agreed to the deal but said that once freed, Stepinac must leave Yugoslavia.
But the Vatican rejected the arrangement according to Stepinac’s own wishes, Gitman wrote. “They will never make me leave unless they put me on a place by force and take me over the frontier. It is my duty in these difficult times to stay with the people,” Stepanic had declared. It was a wish he expressed repeatedly – to not leave his people as long as his country was not free. In December 1951, Tito released Stepanic and placed him again under house arrest in his hometown of Krasic, where he died in 1960 from illnesses he had contracted while in prison, according to the Blessed Aloysius Stepinac Croatian Catholic Mission.
“Tito’s acts against Stepinac made him both a Croatian martyr and a Catholic icon,” Gitman wrote. In 1953, Pope Pius XII made Stepinac a cardinal. On October 3, 1998, Stepinac was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Nevertheless, to this day, there are many today who still oppose Stepinac and try to smear his reputation, Gitman said.
Beginning in the 1950s, many historians within Yugoslavia started arguing in their accounts that while Stepinac did some good during the war, he could have used his position to do much more, and that he dragged his feet in opposing the Ustase.
As an example Menachem Shelah, an Israeli historian from Zagreb, write of Stepinac that while it is true that he worked to save Jews “towards the middle of 1943” and saved Jews in mixed marriages, “Stepinac cannot be absolved because by his procrastination and public expressions he convinced the public that the Ustase were a lesser evil than the communists, because the Ustase crimes were a childhood malaise…Stepinac’s failure in taking action against dozens of priests who willingly took part in the murders.”
According to Gitman: “Historians who argued that Stepinac could have done much more are arguing in hindsight and on wishful thinking. Thus, such declarations are speculative because their claims could be neither evaluated nor substantiated by facts. Can any historian rightfully claim that if Stepinac had acted differently the outcome would have been substantially different and more Jews, Serbs and others would have survived? The answer clearly is no.”
Stepanic also continues to face criticism from many Serbians, in large part because of the propaganda promulgated against Stepinac in their country, and because of Croatia and Serbia’s hundreds of years of fraught history over border disputes, accusations of genocide against one another, and religious conflicts between the Catholic Croatia and the Orthodox Serbia.
“As I said, Stepinac is an icon. He represents in the Croatian psyche everything that is good, righteous and so on. And he believed that the Catholic church in this part of the world should remain and exist. He did everything to accomplish that,” Gitman said.
“Whereas the objective of King Alexander (a Serb), of Tito, and the communist regime…was always to annex Croatia and make a greater Serbia. And I think without the glue, which is Stepinac, that keeps the people so loyal to him – and no matter under what circumstances, they believe in him – without his image, without his persona, they would be able to achieve it because there were many communists in Croatia also,” Gitman added.
Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has long held that Stepinac was a holy man who acted to uphold human dignity in some of the most difficult times his country had seen. Upon Stepinac’s death in 1960, Pope Pius XII called Stepinac “a shepherd who is an example of Apostolic zeal and Christian fortitude.”
At his beatification, Pope John Paul II called Stepinac an “outstanding figure of the Catholic Church” who risked his own life to help others.
“In his human and spiritual journey Blessed Alojzije Stepinac gave his people a sort of compass to serve as an orientation. And these were its cardinal points: faith in God, respect for man, love towards all even to the offer of forgiveness, and unity with the Church guided by the Successor of Peter,” Pope John Paul II said.
“He knew well that no bargains can be made with truth, because truth is not negotiable. Thus he faced suffering rather than betray his conscience and not abide by the promise given to Christ and the Church.”
[…]
Perhaps revelatory for Cardinal Marx is that there are inclusions within the Catechism that are indeed set in stone. Doctrine belonging to the Deposit of Faith, some of which are elicited directly from the Decalogue, others Natural Law, others revealed by Christ to the Apostles.
Pansexualism, Queerdom, is not a whatever sex you believe you are Realm, when biologically you’re otherwise. Unless you mutilate what God gave you in defiance to the Almighty’s ordering of nature. That disfigurement doesn’t change the truth. Pan or Trans is a deviation from the truth. A most adversarial Antichrist proposal. “The value of love is shown in the relationship; in not making the other person an object, in not using or humiliating the other person, in being faithful and dependable to each other. The Catechism is not set in stone. One may also doubt what it says” (Wayward Anthropological theorist Cardinal Marx). Happy smiling faces holding hands blissfully does not spell sanctity. Good feelings don’t distinguish good from evil. Rather, similar to reprobate Aaron [until Moses returned him to his moral senses, God intended to rightfully destroy him] the engraver of the Golden Calf and its high priest of worship. Idolatry. Satanic. An egregious affront to the divinity.
We’re facing a very similar serious dilemma that continues to infect Catholicism now being supported by the German Synodal Way and tacitly by the inaction [a word of disparagement now and then a quoting of scripture is equivalent to a wink and a nod] of the Roman Pontiff. Impossible? It’s occurring before our eyes. At least those of us who haven’t yet become blind.
Hello Father Peter. Cdl Marx is a Liar. I believe he is a gay marxist who wants to create schism, to protestantize our One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Em and I are in our mid-70’s and, with the time we have left, we will stay and fight for our Church. We will do our best to stop these evil-doers from winning. God Bless.
Another Luther from Germany ! Deceiving demons have got him. Sad. !
So the trads were right? Using the Cardinals’s logic, it seems we CAN question the teachings of Vatican 2 as described in Catechism. Cool. Thanks Cardinal Marx!
Of course, Marx doesn’t mean to be intellectually consistent. He only makes this argument because it serves his agenda. These guys get very clerical and demand obedience the minute you question them. The double standard is glaring. It really is hard to take them seriously anymore.
PS: notice the teachings that Marx and his ilk never question are the ones surrounding their power as a bishop?
I want to know, why do I have to listen to Marx if he himself can question and be disobedient to Church teaching?
A perfect observation!
We read: “Sure, there are people who want to see sexuality limited to procreation…”
The cardinal babbles (as in Babel) from a FALSE PREMISE. Fully human (and therefore Catholic) morality already affirms both the procreational and the truly unitive aspects of sexual intercourse. Out of step are contradictory (!) actions (not predispositions) that preclude procreation altogether.
The cardinal, apparently incapable and unwilling to entertain more than one idea or fact at a time, humiliates such integral truth and relational richness. And elementary logic. He would bury these truths in order to embed his deluded fantasy into the Mystical Body of Christ.
ST. AUGUSTINE had an expression for this—”fantastica fornicatio” (the prostitution of the mind to its own fancies). And barely yesterday, ST. JOHN PAUL II said it this way: “As Teacher, she [the Church] never tires of proclaiming the moral norm…. The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this norm” (Veritatis Splendor, , n.95). Butt, bring it on, says MARX, homosexual tunnel vision, with superficial editing of the Catechism as his end game, so to speak!
And then, from a broadened perspective, we have this:
“Late marriages and small families became the rule, and men satisfied their sexual instincts by homosexuality [!] or by relations with slaves and prostitutes. This aversion to marriage [easily redefined!] and the deliberate restriction of the family by the practice of infanticide and abortion was undoubtedly the main cause of the decline of ancient Greece, as Polybius pointed out in the second century B.C. And the same factors were equally powerful in the society of the Empire….[and now today].” (Christopher Dawson, “The Patriarchal Family in History,” The Dynamics of World History, 1962, p. 163).
Simply unbelievable.
Marx eliminates the unitive aspect of the sexual act in marriage…on purpose. What better way to promote a biological sexuality only and to throw Christianity under the bus.
Depends on what he means by “set in stone.” If he means that there might be human errors in the text that need correcting, of course; that is a problem with any human effort. If he means that certain applications of doctrine can change over time to adapt to new conditions, that is also a given. As Pope Benedict XV reminded us back in 1914, we must be prepared to do “old things in new ways.” If he means that doctrine can change, he is mistaken.
Granted the homosexually inclined [in all its forms] require our care. That is, spiritual care that is Christocentric. Therein is the faith issue that’s leading both homosexual and priest or bishop who follow Cardinal Marx’s accommodation of a disorder rather than spiritual healing centered on Christ, the perennial doctrines of Catholic Christianity on the path to perdition.
If we truly loved the sexually disordered person, we would restore them to Christ. Cardinals Marx, Hummes, Farrell, Cupich, Grech, Hollerich et al prelates closely attached to Francis, practice a nominal Catholicism that is largely secular in practice, at least on this major issue. Most, true to that predilection are most often not strong antiabortion advocates.
Secular in outlook and diluted in their faith, presumed efficacious scientific studies, the growing practice worldwide, they find in this greater conviction than what is revealed in our Apostolic tradition.
As for the “presumed efficacious scientific studies,” what say the synodal waywards about the demonstrated absence of any homosexual gene? In the human genome only a “few” markers of little consequence: https://news.yahoo.com/no-gay-gene-study-finds-180220669.html
From the news release: Five of the genetic markers were “significantly” associated with same-sex behavior, the researchers said, but even these are far from being predictive [!] of a person’s sexual preferences. “We scanned the entire human genome and found a handful – five to be precise – of locations that are clearly associated with whether a person reports in engaging in same-sex sexual behavior,” said Andrea Ganna, a biologist at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland who co-led the research.
He said these have “a very small effect” [!] and, combined, explain “considerably less than 1% of the variance in the self-reported same-sex sexual behavior” [!]. This means that non-genetic factors – such as environment, upbringing [alienation from the father?], personality, nurture [early sexual experimentation?] – are far more significant in influencing a person’s choice [!] of sexual partner, just as with most other personality, behavioral and physical human traits, the researchers said.
But as the other Marx’s marionettes said of countervailing evidence against economic determinism, “we will decide this matter politically.”
Indeed Mr. Beaulieu. The so called gay gene issue is ultimately moot because you don’t need gay genetics to have gay sex. All modern society’s internet, social media and political explosion of focus on the subject has accomplished is to greatly expand bi-sexual behavior. Gay sex, although it can sometimes be sincere emotionally, is not sexual intercourse. It is mutual masturbation. You need a gene for that?
Neither is another body needed for that.
Yep. Wait for an “M” to be added to LGBTQI+.
Good research. And has Andrea Ganna made a comparative study of similar minute patterns of other genes in persons and their correspondence to behavior?
Not “other genes,” but here, mere “markers.” As for related research on addictions, there’s this…
Even a relatively innocuous modern addiction—-overindulgence in digital and virtual reality games—-is found to produce corresponding neuro-chemical and possibly cellular changes in the brain itself, e.g., dopamine which is responsible for reward-driven behavior. The computer programs program us!
Also, a recent study completed at University College London (using MRI technology) also strongly implies that a habit of lying tends to suppress the part of the brain (the amygdala) that responds emotionally to a “slippery slope” pattern of small and then larger lies (Garrett/Ariely/ Laxxaro, Nature Neuroscience Journal, October 24, 2016; reported by Erica Goode, New York Times, October 25, 2016).
Lies escalate and the Father of Lies lies at the beginning, so to speak. The German synodal wayward is a prime example.
Peter, I’ve thought, theoretically that our freely willed thought patterns, intentions may effect chemical change, imbalance especially if such are disordered. That the imbalance at times is engendered. German psychiatry prior to WWII initiated treating psychiatric patients with psychotropic medicine that beneficially modified the chemical imbalance. Today as you’re aware the best treatment seems both counsel and medication.
Consequently, what we may find specific to forms of disordered behavior may be the result of the behavior not the cause.
I am quite sure Cardinal Marx and friends would also agree that a good Catholic can disbelieve the existence of Jesus and God, so long as their contributions to Church collections continued.
Its time to jettison the German “church” as represented by Marx. Aptly named, Marx and his allies, are clearly looking for revolution , for schism. Let them either commit to clear orthodoxy or excommunicate them. We don’t have the luxury of any more confusion! Pope Benedict’s statement about a smaller but more “pure” Church wasn’t just an observation it was normative. Marx’s German “church” will fit right in with Germany’s liberal Lutheranism in bleaching authentic Christianity right out of the Gernman culture!
Precisely…because for viceroy Bishops and Cardinals…Cash is King.
If you had ever had the experience of immersion in the theological academy as I did working for years in an Ivy League “trans-denominational” divinity school you would be confirmed in your determination. What we know to be the mysteries of the faith are nothing to these scholars than confections requiring analysis and deconstruction. That accomplished in their drunken state of self-deception the fruits of their labors are ready for publication. Publish or perish — that is the game. The theological academy is sadly a nest of vipers. The exceptions exist but are increasing difficult to find and, even worse, subject to suppression by calumny and professional disparagement. I will never forget a noted feminist theologian questioning, at a faculty meeting, if Catholics “do” theology.
Authentic Catholicism is held in utter contempt across the spectrum of faith communities. The likes of Marx, and they are legion, are often ironically small men subsumed in self-contempt desperate to be acknowledge credible by those who subsist in odium fide.
This Cardinal offered his resignation to Pope Francis some months ago. It seems the Pope is supportive of the new Luther
I hesitated to post this, since it will inevitably be perceived as the churlishness of the spiritually immature. Then, I thought, there’s really nothing for me to lose.
Beachhouse parties on the German riviera, the Kaiserbäder, and Swinemünde can be quite expensive.
According to Cardinal Marx, one can question the catechism.Especially in matters of sexuality. Because it appears that the Cardinal thinks the CHURCH has to conform to secular society and the current lack of morality there. God forbid anyone committing sin actually be told point blank that they ARE sinning ( Joe Biden anyone?) because that might hurt their feelings.Elimination of mean tweets, elimination of the possibility of ANYONE EVER having their feelings hurt, trumps all else in society. Even the total collapse of society itself. It is more important than even the fall of the Roman empire. Because all that serves the opinions of Cardinal Marx. Marxism. A variant of Marxism, much like this one , is already a proven failure. Lets not try that again. But, it may be too late. Behavioral standards of many kinds are dead. Hence the spectacle of one Hollywood star attacking another on live TV over a “joke”.
The thought processes of atheists are as predictable as water is damp, especially atheists without self-awareness that they effectively are atheists, the sort who believe it is possible for truth to change, since they do not believe truth is the immutable reflection of the unchanging perfect mind of God. Neither do they have sufficient wisdom to believe that God, were God to exist in theory, would not be such an idiot of a God that He would have sadistically forgot to inform the peoples of the past with the necessary innate truths to lead virtuous lives if their free wills aspired to basic decency or holiness.
Atheistic prelates are especially boring and predictable when they can perceive nothing demonic about capitulating to and keeping up with what Scripture uses as a metaphor for evil, “the ways of the world,” or to adopt the world’s slanders that the Church has no compassion or ever has had compassion for the weak. If a prelate has decided to abandon wisdom, can he at least be questioned to try to explain how it came to be that their mindset is such that greater than 98 percent of gays support abortion? When Catholics used to be Catholics, we understood that we delude ourselves about our sinful lives. We do this a lot. Every day.
The winged lions on Cardinal Marx’ coat of arms should be replaced by serpents.
And we, for our part, are free to doubt what “Cardinal” Marx says as well. It is important to remind ourselves that the red color in the vestments of the office of Cardinal is an outward sign that the individual holding that office is willing to die a martyr in witness to the Catholic faith.
I am not reading anything coming from this particular “cardinal” except his willingness to abandon the Catholic Faith for the p
selfish pleasure of sodomy.
Let us continue on our way to follow Christ to the summit of Calvary, and let this lost, dazed and confused bird go his way. As such, we likely shall not cross paths again. He has had his 15 minutes of fame. Give him no more.
In reading this article on Cld. Marx, somehow I thought of Arianism and how Arius would not give up on his heretical teaching. His pride was all encompassing. As a result, how God disposed of him was rather appropriate.
What is totally insane about all this is that there is a solution: leave! Go join like minded people.
If you no longer believe in what the church teaches then join that group that believes what you do. There are plenty such groups starting with the Anglicans and Lutherans.
These priests are just outright liars. Hypocrites. They go through the pretence of being Catholic when they no longer are because they don’t believe Catholic teaching. Atheists who pretend to believe in God.
But then I suppose that is the whole point – they want to corrupt and wreck the Church and they are almost there. Hating beauty they want to make the Church ugly. Abhoring virtue they want to celebrate sin. Where else could that come from but from the serpent himself.
I’d wager that while Cardinal Marx doesn’t regard the catechism as “set in stone,” his own views and those of his synodal colleagues are immovable, non-negotiable and binding on the rest of the peasants.
Who asked him anyway?
All of God’s words are set in stone. It’s really sad that Catholics almost never go to the bible to get their teaching and instruction, but rely on man’s catechism filled with man made traditions. Cardinal Marx is the Carl Marx of the Catholic faith.
Matthew 19:4-6 “Haven’t you read (apparently not!),” Jesus replied, that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
Save your bigotry for another forum. Catholics use the book they created, the Bible, all the time, of which the entirety of our Catechism is based. Nothing in the Catechism is man-made as your religion hatred, perhaps unintentional but implicit nonetheless, would have it.
Reptilian rationalizations emerge reflexively from this pathetic individual and his confreres in the Teutonic episcopate. One is left to wonder what fuels his contempt for the faith and the faithful. What nails down his obstinacy in persevering in his office when, ultimately, Catholicism is nothing but a sociological entity serving some secular purpose in his self-deceit. What are the advantages to him to remain on the stage katholicism provides when there are multiple alternatives to him to stand in the limelight — or maybe in protestantism he would merely fade into the wallpaper.
There is nothing good to be said of this Marx or his allies in mendacity. He is a scandal. That he is provided the long leash says everything about the current state of the Church. Jerusalem sacked and burning.
I know a man who lived the “GB” portion of the LGBTQ lifestyle, and came out of the abyss of that, and now suffers the ravages of AIDS and other STDs. He says this of men like Eminence Marx: “It is insane for adults to teach others, including children, that it is OK for a man to inseminate the intestines of another man.”
We all know another man, some 2000 years ago, who sternly warned false shepherds about the judgement they will face: “It would be better for that man that he had never been born.”
It is “sobering” (to put it lightly) to acknowledge that the anti-Christ ideology and behavior of “Eminence” Marx and “Eminence” Hollerich and “Eminence” Cupich, etc etc, are all “players” and “Coordinators” are all at the service of the Pontiff Francis.
These men are false shepherds, and we must obey the command of Jesus and pray for them, because Jesus commanded that we are to “love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
Amen Lord, your word is Truth.
Indeed Mr. Beaulieu. The so called gay gene issue is ultimately moot because you don’t need gay genetics to have gay sex. All modern society’s internet, social media and political explosion of focus on the subject has accomplished is to greatly expand bi-sexual behavior. Gay sex, although it can sometimes be sincere emotionally, is not sexual intercourse. It is mutual masturbation. You need a gene for that?
A faithful and true shepherd, Bishop Robert Morlino, voices the truth, against the false gospel of “Cardinal-Coordinator” Marx (and company):
https://madisoncatholicherald.org/letter-scandal/
Something seems amiss here. Maybe the Church should have annual reviews for management.
Marx should be reminded that God’s commands were literally written in stone atop Mt. Sinai.
These Marx-ist German bishops are in urgent need of a new spiritual home. I do hope Pope Francis assists them in finding one.
LexCredendi,
As regards Pope Francis’ assisting the wayward Marx-ists to a new spiritual home, don’t count on it.
Yes, I agree. I’m not counting on it. Just expressing a wish.
The Church has faced Many Heresies and has defeated them all so far. Most of the Heresies in the past where in relation to Transcendent Truths such as the Dual Nature of Christ, or the Reality of the human person as both Body AND Soul. Since Satan has failed at derailing the entire Church (though he led many astray) with these previous heresies, he is finally trying to stay out the realm of Transcendent truths, and now is attacking the truth’s of God’s shown in nature. Again, this attack is directed at God himself in the humanity of Christ, but it’s directed towards all humanity. It is an attempt by the enemy to create a division between what is human nature as made by God, and our human free will. What this heresy will be known as in the long run it’s difficult to know, but let’s just describe it as the heresy of Human nature as a malleable function of our free will. It is to posit that somehow our nature is not dependent upon God’s inherent design for us, but instead is dependent upon our own free will. Satan is cunning, since he knows our free will is our most God Like attribute, and yet it was our free will which was the beginning of sin entering into humanity through our first parents. God Gave to Adam and Eve the job to tend creation, but the tree of knowledge of good and evil they were forbidden to partake in. Of course, Satan delights in seeing humanity deform our own understanding of our nature. Satan delights in seeing us destroy the Goodness of God in our very selves. Cardinal Marx, like many confused and deceived bishops before him who promoted heresies in the past, is a willing participant in the game plan of Satan, even if he himself does not know this! By divorcing Free will from reason, and couching it terms of ‘compassion’ and ‘journey’, he speaks the same words of Satan in the Garden; ‘You will not surely die!’ Satan must have seemed very comforting and empathetic to Eve in her desire for the sin of disobedience. You could almost Say that Satan ‘accompanied’ Eve into her sin of disobedience. Oh yes, by enabling humanity in the Sin of Disobedience against our Nature, Marx, and others who give cover to sexual vice, especially that which is contrary to human nature (homosexuality, transgenderism etc…), these prelates and priests are full cooperator’s in the deception and destruction of those who are tempted to these unnatural sins. The Church needs to stand up to this heresy, condemn it or else many will perish.
“Sure, there are people who want to see sexuality limited to procreation, but what do they say to people who can’t have children?” -Cardinal Marx
“TRUST IN GOD” is what we say, and so should Marx. Sarah/Abraham and Elizabeth/Zechariah couldn’t have children either, yet God blessed them with Isaac and John the Baptist. The impossible is possible only with God. But He does it in a way that respects male & female complementarity. NEVER has He made possible natural conception (i.e., no outside human intervention, like IVF, sperm donors, surrogates) of a child between same-sex partners. Why? Because that’s not how He made us, nor what His will is for us.
We each bear crosses, and some are harder to bear than others. Persons with other than heterosexual desires must TRUST IN GOD to help them carry their cross and lead a chaste life. ALL of us must turn to His truth, not our self-proclaimed “reality”; to His will, not our own selfish desires.
Cardinal Marx and his kind are bowing down to demonic cultural forces simply because they are popular, and many of their flock would vanish overnight if they held firm to the eternal truths of our faith and the Word on matters of human sexuality. I pray for their repentance, and may God have mercy on them for leading others astray. “What a man believes depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.” -G.K. Chesterton
May I say this charitably?
HERETIC
Right, the greatest enemies of the Church come from within the Church.
It’s refreshing to see some lay people finally waking up to the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. Read the scriptures more closely and compare it to the churches traditions……what an eye opener!
I thank God that His Eminence, Cardinal Marx and his likes, are coming out plain. Who is still in doubt that we’re at the end times? Satan and his minions have been battling the One Church founded by Jesus Christ on the faith expressed by St Peter. The firm promise of Christ still stands: “The gates of the netherworld cannot prevail against it” Let’s buckle up our weapons of faith and engage the Devil and his agents. The Sacraments are our greatest weapons- The Holy Eucharist, Confession, etc. Let us fight to the point of laying down our lives. God bless us all as we engage in this battle for souls. Communion of reparation-on the Tongue and kneeling. “Shine your eyes” my people will say. Your soul and mine are worth the fight.
Another example of the leaders of our Church leading away from the Catholic Faith.
Well put.
Yep. Wait for an “M” to be added to LGBTQI+.
Correction. LGBTQAI+.
Something’s missing; and it is, teleology. What is the end of it? The thing that is being aimed for is not shown to be faith.
Something else is missing; and it is, ontology. What is the integrity of it? The thing that is in process lacks cogent elements.
Maybe they will say something like, “The end IS the relationship – the relational continuum. Because our interest is accompaniment. This was how the primitive church was.” In which case I think they have not proven their case.
Cardinal Marx is also demonstration a survey method, I think. He is eliciting responses and fielding information that can be gathered up and formulated into “new norms” in the “Walking Synod”. They will not be new though.
Edit: ….. is also demonstrating …..
Much of the evils wrought by Nazi Doctor experimentation in World War II concentration camps, are the direct antecedent to these modern abominations: concentration camp experiments, twin studies, and the like, have led to IVF and other monstrosities by the medical community today. As an RN and NP, I will tell you this, all transgender operations mean money to doctors and hospitals and the unnatural hormonal changes create a “permanent patient” and cash flow for surgeons and physicians and pharmaceutical companies. Attack this from not just moral grounds, but economies/financial as well. President Biden states all government FORMS will now have a section for male , female and “x” as gender. How much money will this cost the American taxpayers to change ALL their many forms? Tax payers should know those financial numbers.Fight insurance companies being allowed to cover the surgeries and the medications. Hit this not just from the moral high ground, attack the pocketbooks. Make it financially non viable for the medical community. The Doctor who started doing these sex change operations in Telluride, Colorado decades ago is not working for free. Don’t allow it to become mainstream financially. Cut off the flows of cash supporting these unscrupulous and amoral surgeries. These patients need psychiatric help, not permanent patient hood. As for the Bishop Marx, yes, he is a heretic; but if there was no money supporting his articulations, no one would be listening and he’d be sent to a small parish. Given time to repent, and then excommunicated. Hit every aspect of this in all those wide varieties of interconnected spiderwebs of the pocket books. The battle will be shortened.
Honestly, I would like to see the children who went trans surgery or therapies and the like to be allowed to sue the doctors (and parents) for medical malpractice, if–when the children get to be an adult–things are not so rosy (and they are not likely to be rosy). That ought to help put a stop to the insanity.
Karl Marx. Adolf Hitler. Helmut Kentler. Reinhardt Marx. Georg Batxing. Germany is a nonstop source of evil, perverted people spreading their poisonous ideas to the rest of the world.
Why wait to sue the perpetrators of the castration/sterilization and their media cheerleaders?
More defective thinking from people you would not trust to choose a toaster oven, let alone influence your eternal destiny:
German theologian H. Hoping: “The Synodal Way Changes the Architecture of the Doctrine of Knowledge”
The reason Jesus calls our first Pope, St. Peter, ‘Satan’, is because Peter is talking and thinking like the secular world talks and thinks. Matthew 16:23, He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”
We have to all Pray the 1890 version of the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. It gives a clearer picture of what was on Pope Leo XIII’s mind when he desperately wrote the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel. After a millennium and a half of relative safety, Pope Leo XIII saw the Spiritual authority of the papacy in grave danger. Papal States had fallen in 1870, which destroyed the papacy’s temporal authority. In writing the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, Pope Leo XIII is sending out a, calling all angels, SOS, to protect Spiritual authority ‘The Holy Place’ of the papacy from falling under the control of, the secular world ‘Satan’, as well.
A portion of, Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel 1890 edition
These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions.
In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most blessed Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered.
Arise then, O invincible prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and bring them the victory.
Quoted from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_to_Saint_Michael…
Jesus prophetic sign for His Second Coming, is that, after the gospel has been proclaimed around the world, we will see: Matthew 24, ‘The Desolating Abomination spoken of through Daniel the prophet Standing in the Holy Place’ When we do see Christ’s Holy Place, talking and acting like the secular world, political left, ‘gay lobby’, etc., Jesus tells us to run to the mountains and don’t even go back in your house to get your coat, “for at that time there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will be.”
Through locutions to St. Faustina, Jesus and the Blessed Mother have confirmed that Jesus is, in fact, inbound to earth. In the third secret of Fatima, we see that the Blessed Mother has St. Michael the Archangel in a holding pattern, ready to light the earth on fire, upon her command. As of the year 2000, Jesus has opened a portal with His recent gifts of Divine Mercy Sunday, for us to now run to. Jesus swears to us that anyone who takes refuge in His Divine Mercy, will be spared the great tribulation which comes with Jesus, upon His Second Coming.
Matthew 24:15 The Great Tribulation.
“When you see the desolating abomination spoken of through Daniel the prophet standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, a person on the housetop must not go down to get things out of his house, a person in the field must not return to get his cloak. Woe to pregnant women and nursing mothers in those days. Pray that your flight not be in winter or on the sabbath, for at that time there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will be.
Divine Mercy in My Soul, 635, The Blessed Virgin Mary :
… you have to speak to the world about His great mercy and prepare the world for the Second Coming of Him who will come, not as a merciful Savior, but as a just Judge. Oh, how terrible is that day! Determined is the day of justice, the day of divine wrath. The angels tremble before it. Speak to souls about this great mercy while it is still the time for [granting] mercy. If you keep silent now, you will be answering for a great number of souls on that terrible day.
A portion of the Third Secret of Fatima
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’
Quoted from the Vatican: The Message of Fatima
Please visit: Jesus is Getting Married!
http://apocalypseangel.com/married.html
Marx tries to make sin into virtue. Somebody bench him before he can do any additional damage.
I agree with Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas. Cardinal Marx has left the Catholic faith, and should do the honest thing by resigning from office he holds in a Church whose teachings he no longer believes in.
Please pray for Cardinal Marx…I fear for his soul:
“ But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.” Matthew 18:6
He seems to have allowed his ideological beliefs overwhelm his religious convictions. That’s obvious from his comments on the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching remark. No where has he implied or does he state that his belief on this teaching has been divinely revealed. It seems reckless and dangerous for a Cardinal of the Catholic Church to go against the full weight of 2000 years of teaching on this aspect of our lives. Pray that he turns back to teaching in full communion with all that has been revealed to us through the Holy Catholic Church.