My point is, are you basing your belief, or rather confirmed in your belief by a one word mention of the Vatican in a wikipedia quote?

No references, names, results of reliable investigations, etc?

Just want you to take intellectual responsibility for your original statement and substantiate it or withdraw it. I am not contesting that the religion of Nazi members, supporters, collaborators, included baptised Catholics, even clergy, but I confidently contest that the Catholic Church "aided and abetted" the two gents you mention, and I have substantiated that contest in Lesson # 1.

Another reason to NOT rely on Wikipedia... Edinburgh university will toss out your paper if you list Wiki as a source.

I guessed what your next line of escape would be so I went and Googled just "Ratlines + Vatican and came up with 816 hits.

http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?...rticle&id=1821
http://www.angelfire.com/ma/romewatch/latenews.html
http://www.remnantofgod.org/ustashe.htm
http://www.vaticanfiles.net/sanfilippo_ratlines.htm

Here are the first four sites, please feel free to avail yourself of their hospitality. This in no way implies that I believe everything I see on the internet, however the allegation that I initially made has been well known for more than forty years and the evidence gets more and more convincing as time goes on. I have no desire to engage in your pointless debate as i am already convinced as I firmly believe that where there is smoke there is fire. In this case the evidence is in my view overwhelming.

Exactly how much evidence do you need. There is any amount if you wish to look for it and it's not hard to find. Then,... will you believe it anyway, I think not. Pointless

I am not going to waste my time debating every individual case and supplying you with endless sources of information that is freely available to you without my involvement.

If you care not to believe the information provided, that is your perogative and I have no argument with it, however don't attempt to browbeat me into your point of view, nor discredit my point of view simply because it does not agree with yours.

Perhaps, instead of you continually having me running around providing you with endless sources to support my argument, why don't you do some searching and see if you can find anything like a similar amount of evidence refuting my claim. There are some, but not many, and most of them do no more than state the view that this is merely an allegation rather than fact. They are far outnumbered by supportive references.

We all have to make decisions in life, and I'm afraid that in this case my decision does not agree with yours.

I don't dispute either, that the anti-Catholic Church propaganda on this issue is long-standing and well established in many minds, just that the validity of it is very contestable and the onus of proof always remains on the shoulders of the accuser.

You fired off the provocative generalisation in the first place. Did you expect it to rest there? You've been on the forums long enough to know what you are in for when you do this. You can leave this heating-up kitchen anytime you want but I wont be the first out.

In one of your quotes above is this paragraph:

Meding's book is a really good example of migration studies and it offers an excellent approach to the Nazi migration to Latin America. Moreover, Meding pays a lot of attention to Nazis' escape routes. Not only the Italian, but also the Scandinavian, Spanish, and Swiss routes. Moreover, he tries to ascertain if organization like Odessa really existed and he answers in the negative. About the Italian escape route he states that there was two. The real "Ratline", which was run by U.S. Intelligence with the help of Draganovic in Genoa, and a second one, the Monastery line, organized by Hudal and other German priests, together with members of the Pontificia Commissione Assistenza. This second line was not the product of the Church pro-Nazi position, but the action of single members of the Catholic clergy. Usually the latter helped people from their own motherland to flee from countries ruined by the war or falling into the hands of the Communists. The Americans and the British both closed their eyes to that route because they were running simultaneously the real Ratline to move former Nazis or collaborators who were now becoming or pretending to become Western secret agents. These two lines ultimately crossed as former spies lived among normal immigrants, while many immigrants had a dubious past. But from the historical point of view Nazi flight from Germany should be studied as another kind of migration.


http://www.vaticanfiles.net/sanfilippo_ratlines.htm

Stick around and simmer if you must, once again that is your prerogative, far be it for me to try to change your mind. Like I have stated previously there is any amount of evidence out there, including members of Odessa (some more reticent than others) who support the "allegation".

I have provided you with a small sample of the huge amounts of collaborative evidence available supporting my view. There is little else that I can do. My argument is upheld, and that is all and more than any expectation on any forum.

Arn't you embarrassed that contained in the links you posted as "evidence" for your original statement is research that asserts that where there was Catholic clergy collaboration with fleeing German Nazis, these clerics were acting independently of the Catholic Church and acting on their own - individually or as a group, out of cultural or political sympathy for fellow Germans.

Bag individuals who were accessories-after-the-fact and who were Catholics and Catholic clerics if you must. I'm ashamed of them myself. But don't bag the whole Catholic Church as you have in one foul sweeping condemnation.

Will you at least concede my point that there is a difference between the Catholic Church and independent or renegade elements that act on their own or organise "under-ground" networks.

I don't blame the whole American Republic for secretive illegal and immoral acts by any individual American who is also on the US public pay-roll. Not unless it is true that those acts were ordered, approved and or later discovered, disapproved but then covered-up, by the US Government. This analogy I apply to the Catholic Church.

I think we're up to Lesson # 3

There was an article in the Catholic Advocate (Newark Archdiocese) page 8, February 21, 2007 by George Weigel.

Weigel stats that Hitler wanted to kidnap Pius XII and then raises the campaign of defamation against Pius XII.

Weigel states that there is now confirmation that the KGB (Soviet intelligence service) was behind the campaign. "General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former Romanian intelligence officer and the highest-ranking Soviet bloc spymaster ever to defect, in an artile posted on National Review Online on January 26 2007 ... [stated] that the Soviets stung by the public relations bludgeoning they had taken because of the persecution of Catholics in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere decided to accelerate the anti-Catholic propaganda offensive theyhad launched toward the end of World War II by depicting the Church as a bulwark of Nazism. Pius XII was the primary target because, as the KGB liked to say:' Dead men cannot defend themselves.'

"So the KGB concocted a scheme whereby its Romanian ally would penetrate the Vatican archives, using agents disguised as priests; certain Vatican officials, it seems took the bait.

"No documents incriminating Pius XII were found, but the plot now shifted. In 1963, a senior Soviet intelligence official tolkd his Romanian colleagues that the centerpiece of the anti-Catholic offensive would now be a play defaming Piux XII: ' The Deputy'. It's author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a former Hitler Youth turned communist fellow traveller. A lifelong communist produced the play. The results for The Deputy was the Pearl Harbor of the Pius War - vindicated KGB chairman Yuri Andropov's conviction that the gullible find smut easier to believe than holiness.

"Don't bet the mortgage money that this new evidence will appear in The New York Times anytime soon."

{George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and PublicPolicyCenter in Washington, D.C.}

This is quite possible. I never at any stage stated that I had read every piece of information on the 'net, I merely took the first four sites on the list I could have just as easily quoted a thousand, but deemed it unnecessary.

I also have no doubt that there are a percentage of sites that are virulently anti Catholic who have seized on this information. I do not insinuate that my quoted sites are all 100% correct or without malice.

Your discovery not withstanding, there is still (in my view) overwhelming support of my argument. As much as you may try to make me look like some uneducated fool, I do have a good grasp of what is right and wrong.

I have on at least one occasion stated in this thread that I have no vested interest in the outcome. I am merely reporting what I believe to be the facts having taken into account the information that I have seen and read.

The very fact that you found some supportive evidence on a site that I posted should convince you of the fact that I am not quoting selectively.

I have deliberately avoided "bagging" individuals, because I have no idea of the internal workings of the Church and also have no idea who is responsible to who, or how much freedom without the knowledge of their superiors an individual has in these matters. It is my considered opinion on this matter that an exercise of this size and complexity could not reasonably have been carried out without some knowledge by one's superiors. How far this knowledge went is not my concern.

Taking the focus off the Catholic church for a moment, it is very similar to the finding of the courts in a recent case involving the Anglican Church (no I'm not an Anglican basher either) in South Australia where the church was ultimately held responsible for the actions of a number of it's clergy involved in a criminal matter. It was reasoned that if the "church" was not perhaps responsible for their actions, they were responsible by not being aware of what was happening within their organization (I do not know the proper legal terminology. In my view this finding in itself was a cop out by the courts as their was plenty of evidence of a coverup by the superiors in this case. (My opinion)

So my opinion was not a matter arrived at without considerable thought on my behalf, you may see it differently I have no beef with that.

In Lesson # 4 as in some previous lessons, I'm not so much tackling your absurd argument as I am informing you of the true picture of the Catholic Church's position on Nazism (as opposed to individual Catholics who supported German facism).

Lesson # 4

There were a couple of important details in regard to the Catholic Church and the Holocaust that I think would be of great help to your education.

Your references/links mentioned that the Vatican did not speak out against the Nazi party. This struck me as odd as history clearly shows the opposite. Pope Pius XII was no friend of the Nazi party. His opposition to them began years before the War, before he was elected to the papacy, when he was still Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State.

On April 28, 1935, four years before the War even started, Pacelli gave a speech that aroused the attention of the world press. Speaking to an audience of 250,000 pilgrims in Lourdes, France, the future Pius XII stated that the Nazis "are in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult." It was talks like this, in addition to private remarks and numerous notes of protest that Pacelli sent to Berlin in his capacity as Vatican Secretary of State, that earned him a reputation as an enemy of the Nazi party.

The Germans were likewise displeased with the reigning pontiff, Pius XI, who showed himself to be a unrelenting opponent of the new German "ideals." He even wrote an entire encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), to condemn them. When Pius XI died in 1939, the Nazis abhorred the prospect that Pacelli might be elected his successor.

Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Polish Jew who served as a diplomat and later an official of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, writes: "Pacelli had obviously established his position clearly, for the Fascist governments of both Italy and Germany spoke out vigorously against the possibility of his election to succeed Pius XI in March of 1939, though the cardinal secretary of state had served as papal nuncio in Germany from 1917 to 1929...The day after his election, the Berlin Morgenpost said: 'The election of cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism and practically determined the policies of the Vatican under his predecessor.' "

Former Israeli diplomat and now Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Pinchas Lapide states that Pius XI "had good reason to make Pacelli the architect of his anti-Nazi policy. Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler's doctrines.... Pacelli, who never met the Führer, called it 'neo-Paganism.' "

A few weeks after Pacelli was elected pope, the German Reich's Chief Security Service issued a then-secret report on the new Pope. Rabbi Lapide provides an excerpt:

"Pacelli has already made himself prominent by his attacks on National Socialism during his tenure as Cardinal Secretary of State, a fact which earned him the hearty approval of the Democratic States during the papal elections....How much Pacelli is celebrated as an ally of the Democracies is especially emphasized in the French Press."

Early in 1940, Hitler made an attempt to prevent the new Pope from maintaining the anti-Nazi stance he had taken before his election. He sent his underling, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to try to dissuade Pius XII from following his predecessor's policies. "Von Ribbentrop, granted a formal audience on March 11, 1940, went into a lengthy harangue on the invincibility of the Third Reich, the inevitability of a Nazi victory, and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Führer. Pius XII heard von Ribbentrop out politely and impassively. Then he opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing the date, place, and precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated; the Pope's position was clearly unshakable."

Post 5 line 2

The error of Post 2 line 1 is what I'm challenging until it is withdrawn or proven.

I concede that Post 5 line 2 contradicts Post 2 line 1.