The survivors could have taken their case directly to him. Perhaps they did.
The Church is not pure as the wind-drifted snow. There are plenty of looted treasures from massacred Jews, Huegenots, Cathars, Templars, heretics and accused witches that have found their way into the Vatican catacombs.
WARNING: This is a high volume ping list
I just hope that the information about the Croatian holocaust will be made more evident to the world because of this trial.
Did the Croatian President also make any apology to the Serbian Christians or the Gypsies for the Croatia's part in their mass murder during WWII at Jasenovic???
As I understand it, No, he did not.
Resisting on the Basis of Christian Beliefs up to 1939
Click on Introduction I
Alouette, I really expect better from you than this uninformed bigotry.
(1) The only massacres of Jews that took place on Catholic soil prior to the 20th century were the Rhineland pogroms.
During those pogroms, the Catholic bishops sided with the Jewish population and denounced the self-styled "Crusaders" who plundered and murdered Jews.
The Church did not despoil massacred Jews.
The Jewish relics and manuscripts found in the Vatican archives and libraries (not the "catacombs" - I don't know where you got that from) come in large part from Catholic converts from Judaism and the Catholic Hebraists of the 15th century like Reuchlin and Ximenes who bought up hundreds of manuscripts and texts for study purposes.
i am not saying that the Church was particularly nice to jews in the Middle Ages - it weighed them down with occupational restrictions, land use restrictions, unfair taxes, forced them to listen to missionizing sermons, confiscated jewish texts suspected of anti-Christian blasphemy, prevented Jewish converts to Christianity from doing teshuvah, etc. - but the Church never endorsed or orchestrated massacres of Jewish citizens.
(2) The attacks on the Huguenots came from the French royal family and the expropriation of the Huguenots went directly to the French crown. The only Huguenot items in the Vatican archives are copies of Huguenot books.
(3) The Cathars (who were virulently anti-Semitic by the way) were again plundered and massacred by the French crown in open warfare between the Cathars' patron - the count of Toulouse - and the King of France. No documents or relics of them really exist in the Vatican archives or elsewhere - anything that was taken from them went to the French victors.
(4) The Templars, again, were victims of the King of France who confiscated their land and their money. By right all of their property belonged to the Vatican anyway, since they were a Catholic religious order - yet France took almost all of it.
(5) You're not going to find much treasure taken from "heretics" other than copies of books by heretics kept on file, and you'll find nothing belonging to witches either - probably because almost every single heretic or witch executed in the Middle Ages was executed by the local secular authority.
However, one can find all over Europe thousands of Catholic churches and Catholic artistic treasures stolen or reduced to rubble by various Protestant sects and now in the possession of those sects or of secular governments.
The Church is hardly, as you say, "pure as the wind-drifted snow" - but there is no need to make up false charges.
I would think that you would be on the side of Margaret Clitheroe on this one.
Indeed.
There are plenty of looted treasures from massacred Jews, Huegenots, Cathars, Templars, heretics and accused witches that have found their way into the Vatican catacombs.
Not to mention that for the latter half of the 20th century the Catholic Church was the number one promoter and disseminator of defamations of the Torah (historical criticism, demythologization, evolutionism, rejection of "old testament" miracles, etc.) throughout the world (this may change slightly for the better under the current Pope, but I'm not holding my breath). Why these attacks on the Torah don't count as anti-Semitism (which is apparently limited to remarks about banks and noses) or even as "theological anti-Judaism" (which is apparently limited to chr*stian supercessionism) is beyond me. But then, liberals can scream about chr*stians who want to impose "old testament law" and atheists can host TV documentaries tearing the Holy Torah to shreds and not a word is said.