Of course, if this was true, witnesses on the ground made such a misjudgment, it was likely anyone on the roof would have made the same mistake. Suenens, leader of liberalism in the Catholic world, would be one of the most influential members in the conclave. Yet, the incident was a mere foretelling of what was about to occur.
Cardinal Yu Pin keeled over at Paul’s funeral. The Vatican cited ‘heart attack.’ Cardinal Delargey, closest friend of Yu Pin who had shared rooms with him the night before, called for an autopsy. He assured the press Yu Pin had no history of heart disease. Several newspapers demanded an autopsy. The body was quickly embalmed and returned in a triple-sealed coffin to Taipei for interment.2
A week later came another strange happening. Cardinals Benelli and Suenens narrowly escaped death when a small section of a frieze fell from the Torre Borgia missing them by inches. Though Vatican buildings are aging, this is rare, as the facades are routinely checked for defects to protect the tourists that roam Vatican City.
A notice in the Vatican paper called for increased inspection.3
In Brussels, the situation was different. Because the incident resembled so closely that which had killed the bishop two weeks earlier, the press pointed fingers.3 Yet, in time, the incidents were discarded as having been mere coincidence.
1 Le Soir Brussels 10 Aug 78
2 London Times 9 Aug 78 details of Yu Pin’s death is covered on the Internet
3 L’Osservatore Romano 22 Aug 78 Le Soir Brussels 25 Aug 78
Chapter 14
The Good Guys vs. the Bad Guy
“Some kinds of people are born better than others and are entitled to more, little boys are better than little girls, etc.”
The Roman Catholic Church
Albino Luciani – John Paul I
Karol Wojtyla – John Paul II
Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI
John Paul I and his successors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were very different kinds of men, the latter fixed conservatives and the former a moderate-liberal. Yet, just how far apart were these men in their ideologies and why did they think so very differently?
To begin with, one must consider their upbringing.
Both Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger were born into well-to-do families. Unlike Albino Luciani, they never knew what it was to wonder where their next meal was coming from.
This made them less compassionate of the poor; they were able to champion a ban on contraception and sleep on pillows of down in magnificent palaces and think it right.
Conversely, Luciani supported the pill. Conscious that the ban on contraception was the driving force behind the spread of disease, poverty and starvation in third world countries, he thought it wrong.
More fundamental to the men they would become, Albino had been born to a mishmash of parents—an atheist father and a devout mother—while Karol and Joseph had been born to devout parents of the conviction that whatever the men in Rome had to say was right.
Karol Wojtyla
From the age of six through the time he entered college, Karol was educated in expensive prep schools which even today are reserved for the rich. His early years were spent in the Wadowice Military Academy which brainwashed its students in fascism.
Non-Christians in Poland were made to live in ghettos and not provided opportunity particularly higher education. To preserve the purity of the white race, blacks were not allowed in Poland, This was also true of Italy and other Catholic countries in Europe.
Karol has been unduly criticized because he refused to join the resistance and instead went to work for the Nazis. This is not fair. In Poland, just about everyone went to work for the Nazis. What’s more, they went to work for the Nazis eagerly.
That is, except for a few—mostly Jews and Jew supporters—who escaped to the sewers. It was in Krakow, the resistance picked up the nickname ‘the Underground’ where it was literally confined to the drains which ran under the city.
It was that the Poles were so intensely fascists—anti-Semitic, homophobic, atheist-haters and anti-socialists—most extermination camps were built in Poland and the overwhelming number of those who lost their lives in the Holocaust—including a million children—died in Poland.1 This doesn’t mean the Poles were bad people, just that they were good Catholics—zealous cohorts of the men in Rome.
This is demonstrated that the Nazis never tried to hide the atrocity from the Poles, the largest and most dreadful camps were located in the largest metropolitan areas—Treblinka at Warsaw and Auschwitz at Krakow—to draw on the Polish workforce.
The Auschwitz extermination system alone included forty-eight camps and there were scores or others besides Treblinka—Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, you name them. It took millions of men to build and maintain them with their ovens and gas chambers in such a short time. Though the Nazis oversaw their construction, Hitler did not divert millions of soldiers from his front lines. The Poles built them.
The heaviest toll of all was in the Auschwitz system a stone’s throw from Wadowice where Karol had been born and had grown up. Karol and his fellow Poles could peer through the barbed fence and see what was going on. Actually, they knew what was going on as many of them provided maintenance and other specialty services to the camp on an ongoing basis. The first Jews herded into an extermination camp during the war came from the sewers of Krakow and later out of ghettos of the same city.
Karol, like other Polish youths, shared the ideologies of Hitler and Pius XII—white superiority, segregation of blacks, persecution of homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and other ethnic peoples—fascism—some kinds of people are better than others and are entitled to more. Karol, like most everyone else, was caught up in the Opium of the Masses—Christianity—fascism.
At the time, this was the way the population thought. Even those oppressed thought it was God’s intention they live subordinated lives. We see this even today where seven hundred million members of the so-called fair sex pay a man in Rome for their salvation—a man who conditions their children from an early age little boys are better than little girls—the most fundamental discriminatory canon of the Roman Catholic Church. We see this today where millions of homosexuals pay this same man for their salvation, among the most homophobic men who ever lived. We see this even today where…
One would wonder why Poland fell in a few days.
The Poles and the Nazis shared the same ideals. Their common enemy was communism, not fascism. In Poland, Karol was just one of an army of millions of Polish fascists who enthusiastically went to work building ammunition and supplies for the German army.
The Poles built much of the infrastructure Hitler needed to fight his war. They broke ground on Auschwitz a week after Germany’s occupation and had it up and running in the space of a few months. They built hundreds of supply plants including the IG Farben and Solvay chemical plants which annexed the main Auschwitz camps.2
Karol progressed rapidly from a quarry to a supervisory position in the Solvay chemical plant. Among other military supplies, the plant produced chemicals used to gas prisoners in death camps3
In his job as distribution supervisor, Karol traveled to Treblinka and other camps in the Nazi extermination system. The Man Who Would Be Pope staring John Voight depicts Karol as quartermaster of the Solvay supply depot. A resistance leader, Boleshaw Filipiak solicits Karol to divert supplies to the resistance; Karol refuses.4
While at Solvay, Karol joined a theater group. The love of his life was the theater. He wanted to be an actor. The record shows he was quite an actor usually commanding the leading role. Twenty-two year old Karol is shown here in the leading role of a romantic satire of Hitler’s youth performed before Nazi officers. One could ask, if he wanted to be an actor and had no interest in the priesthood, why he entered a seminary? 5
As the war progressed and an allied victory became imminent, Polish youth—who like the Germans were devout Christians—were forced into the German Army—particularly true of youths like Karol who had show
n loyalty and were rising in the Nazi civilian ranks.
To escape enlistment, Karol entered a seminary. During the war no adult male was exempt from the draft including fathers of young children. Even advancing age was no excuse. If a man was able-bodied he was inducted. The exception was enrollment in a seminary owed to the immense demand for chaplains in the German army.
Seminary deferment gave Karol a window of two years in which time he gambled the war would be over. While in the seminary Karol realized he could use his acting abilities in the Church. There was a great similarity between the two professions as both preachers and actors dealt with the world of make-believe.5
Eagle’s Nest
Unlike Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger wanted to be a priest from the start. As already mentioned, when he was five, Joseph fell in love with the Archbishop of Munich’s elaborate gown and announced at dinner that evening he was going to be a cardinal.6
Obersalzberg7 is a sprawling mountainside resort area tucked in between the village of Berchtesgaden and the district of Traunstein in southeastern Germany. In 1933, Hitler built his residence here—the Berghof. Other Nazis including Adolf Eichmann, Herman Goring, Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann, had homes here.
Hitler headquartered his SS Guard—the Leibstandarte—in nearby Traunstein.8 Hitler’s pride and joy the Traunstein Scouts—a composite of the Jungvolk, ages 10-14, and the Hitler Youth, ages 14 and up—operated under the auspices of the SS Guard. To put it bluntly, the Traunstein-Berchtesgaden area was crawling with Nazis.
In the spring of 1937, Martin Bormann broke ground on Eagle’s Nest—a mountaintop retreat—a gift from the Third Reich to its Fuhrer in honor of his fiftieth birthday.9
A strange happening
In the spring of 1937, Joseph’s father, a police officer in western Bavaria, did a strange thing. At a time retirement was not a part of a common man’s life and Hitler needed every man either on the front lines or in factories, he took ‘early retirement.’
Yet, even more bizarre, at a time when most people died in the same village in which they had been born, he moved his family from what had been for centuries their ancestral home in Marktl am Inn in western Bavaria all the way across the country to Traunstein.10
In his biographies Joseph Ratzinger claims, “My father hated the Nazis and what they stood for…” As we know today, they stood for the same thing both the Vatican and Hitler stood for at that time.
One can wonder why he pulled his family up from their ancestral roots and moved them across the country to the heart of Nazism in the western world and took a house a few kilometers from Kehlstein Mountain at the precise time Eagle’s Nest was woven at its top.
The only logical answer suggests he was employed as a security officer at the Hitler compound or was a member of the SS Guard located in Traunstein. Is there any other explanation? 10
Yet, what one does know is that his father hated the Nazis so much he moved his family to Traunstein which was crawling with them, forcing Joseph into Hitler’s personal scout troop.
It is reasonable to surmise Joseph had the privilege to have been reviewed by the Fuhrer as the Traunstein troops were often invited to Eagle’s Nest. Yet, the extent of their relationship is not known.
In 1984, when photos surfaced of John Paul II’s fascist activities in the war, he ordered destroyed incriminating photos of prominent cardinals; the reason few wartime photos of Benedict have survived. Nevertheless, what does the man have to say for himself today?
“…It was on my tenth birthday we arrived in Traunstein…at first, inducted into the Jungvolk…on my fourteenth birthday I was promoted to the Hitler Scout troop as required by law. Yet, I did not participate in the scouts and refused to attend meetings. I tried to get an exemption by entering a seminary but as the tide began to turn against the Axis powers in 1943 and the draft age was lowered to sixteen. I was drafted into the army and assigned to an anti-aircraft battery protecting a depot in Hungary. Still I refused to fire a shot. A year later I became a part of the Austrian Legion… When the end of the war became imminent in 1945, I deserted…” Benedict XVI 10
“…refused to attend meetings? …refused to fire a shot?” I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think this is how armies are run. “Thou shalt not bear false witness?” Joseph, now, Joseph?
It is not unusual for those who were the ‘good guys’ who fought to maintain the status quo of yesterday, when the ‘bad guys’ of yesterday won the race and became the ‘good guys’ of today, to claim to be the ‘bad guys’ of yesterday and the ‘good guys’ of today.
Nevertheless, neither of these men—Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger—have come clean of their past. What’s more, they have been unable to break free of what the little boy Albino Luciani’s father once called, the Opium of the Masses—Christianity—some kinds of people are better than others and are entitled to more.
The reason, I suppose, Gandhi said, “I love your Christ. But I do not like your Christians.”11
Coincidence
By sheer coincidence, in a few minutes, it is possible to take a tour bus from the stately home in which Karol Wojtyla grew up in Wadowice to the Military Academy where he was schooled to the Auschwitz concentration camp he would pass each day on his the way to the Solvay chemical plant where he worked for the Nazis. It is possible in the same few minutes to take a bus from the house Joseph Ratzinger lived in up the mountain to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and even less time to visit the SS Guard headquarters in Traunstein.
Regardless, it is a remarkable coincidence, Karol Wojtyla who during his formidable years had been dressed in the military uniform of a fascist school and Joseph Ratzinger who during his formidable years wore the military uniform of the Jungvolk and Hitler Scouts, both having been guided by devout parents, rose to the helm of the Roman Catholic Church.
It is even a more remarkable coincidence, Karol Wojtyla who had once furnished cyanide pellets which were used to gas men, women and children in the extermination camps and Joseph Ratzinger who had once protected a depot which herded Jews to the same camps would both eventually succeed to the papacy.
Albino Luciani
Just where was Albino Luciani during the war?
During the early war he seemed not much better than the others.
As a seminarian exempt from military service he was studying for his doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome. His presence in Rome gave birth to stories he was a member of the resistance in Rome, something, other than an incident in which he interceded in behalf of Jews docked at Naples, seems unsubstantiated.
Later in the war, on returning to the Veneto country, he developed a knack for mountain climbing while ministering to members of the resistance hiding in difficult to get at places in the Italian Alps. Here, he wears the soft cap of the Italian Resistance.
He spoke of the most difficult moment of his life; he felt the pulse of a boy run out between his fingers—shot while blowing up a railroad trestle to cut off military supplies coming from Poland.
The end of a dream
Regardless, if Hitler had won the war, all that Karol and Joseph had ever dreamed of would have become a reality. We would, today, be living in a world of white male superiority rather than in this world in which we find ourselves, this world of equal rights and dignity for everyone, this anti-Christian, anti-Fascist world of justice for all, which, as we speak, threatens to be extended to homosexuals, transsexuals and worst of all, atheists—people who bring their children up in the real world of today rather than the make-believe world of yesterday.
World War II broke the backbone of fascism which had been the way of life in the western world for thirty-five hundred years. Unlike previous wars, it did much more than to decide the superiority of one nation over another. From its embers would rise the social evolution beginning with integration and eventually expanding into feminism, planned parenthood, sexual education, divorce and remarriage, single parenthood, gay liberation, the right to believe or n
ot to believe, and a general trend away from a Vatican controlled state.
After the war, both Wojtyla and Ratzinger rose up as leaders in the effort to preserve segregation of blacks and whites. Luciani rose up as an anti-segregationist, not only in the Church but in society as well. As feminism, homosexuality, divorce and remarriage and other facets of the social revolution raised their ‘ugly’ heads, Wojtyla and Ratzinger raised their voices and held up their hands to stop them while Luciani became a part of them. At the time, Wojtyla and Ratzinger were the ‘good guys.’ Luciani was the ‘bad guy.’ One knows where the courage was. The masses were overwhelmingly against each of these uprisings as they were put on the table.
After the war, referring to the dangers of the gullibility of men, Luciani told a reporter, “It was not so much Hitler and Mussolini who were the culprits in this thing, as it was the ignorance and the weakness of the minds of the masses that believed in them”12
Two different Gods
Perhaps the greatest difference between these men was their relative doctrinal convictions. Whenever doctrine placed undue hardship on the lives of innocent people, Luciani stepped in. On the other hand, Wojtyla and Ratzinger, as doctrinal conservatives, didn’t care how much suffering doctrine unfairly placed on the everyday lives innocent people. In their minds, what pre-medieval self-serving men had once written was etched permanently into society.
For example, during the twenty years Wojtyla and Luciani served as a bishop and as a cardinal, each of their countries—driven by the Vatican’s condemnation of out-of-wedlock children—suffered from an immense orphan problem—two million in each country. During that time Wojtyla built and dedicated fifty-three churches and not a single orphanage. Luciani built and dedicated forty-four orphanages and not a single church. Each time the fork in the road would come up, Wojtyla would ask himself “Now, what would Moses do in this case?” Each time the fork in the road would come up, Luciani would ask himself “Now, what would Jesus do in this case?”
Murder in the Vatican Page 17