Will the pontiff heed calls for a probe into the Vatican’s own historic complicity with genocidal regimes?
Jesus reserved his severest verbal floggings for hypocrites. “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” he preaches in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:5). The ludicrous caricature of the “plank” and the “splinter” has become the quintessential parable on hypocrisy.
With one exception, Jesus hurled the opprobrium of “hypocrite” exclusively at the religious leaders of His day. And He repeatedly associated hypocrisy with religious pieties like praying, fasting, and giving.
Our Lord’s diatribe against hypocrites reached a crescendo in Matthew 23. In the fortissimo of an Old Testament prophet, He cried out: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” eight times in the chapter. Hypocrisy is the failure to practice what you preach, which is what the religious leaders of Jesus’s day were guilty of.
So when Pope Francis called for an investigation of Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza in his latest book, Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Toward a Better World, leading voices responded by asking why he had failed to probe the Catholic Church’s own complicity with genocidal regimes, as I reported for The Stream. In essence, they were accusing Francis of hypocrisy.
Pot Calling the Kettle Genocidal
“The pope’s statement not only smacks of ignorance of the history and meaning of the word ‘genocide,’ it also ignores the Vatican’s own long and continuing history of complicity in genocides and its ongoing paternalistic colonialism in developing countries,” novelist Mari Serebrov told The Stream.
“Rather than impugning Israel, Pope Francis needs to clean up his own house, sweeping it of all vestiges of avarice, colonialism, and genocide,” she added.
“Francis not only has it wrong, the Vatican has a long history of complicit behavior with genocides,” observed the Rev. Job Serebrov, an Orthodox Jew who came to faith in Jesus, and an attorney, chancellor, and archdeacon in the Anglican Church of America.
Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck, 93-year-old Hungarian-born Jew who survived the death camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, responded to Francis by pointing out that committing genocide is “something Hamas wants to do,” noting that Hamas has said it “wants to wipe out all the Jews in the entire world.”
Investigate Hamas for Genocide?
Will Francis call for an investigation into Hamas’s genocidal goals? For it is Hamas, not Israel, that has explicitly expressed its “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” which is the very definition of “genocide” as per the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
On the basis of the above convention, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) unequivocally concluded that Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians was an act of “genocidal violence.”
The 1988 founding charter of the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), begins by quoting the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Imam Hassan al-Banna: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Its genocidal intent could not be more clearly stated.
There are ten references to the “Jews” in the charter, which has been muted in the 2017 revised version in an attempt to “rebrand” the terrorist outfit “as slightly less antisemitic and genocidal,” according to the IAGS. Hamas intentionally uses the term “Jews” and not “Israelis,” noting: “Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.”
The charter is unapologetically theological and cites the Koran (30 times) and Hadith to legitimize its genocidal mission. Islamic eschatology calls for the annihilation of the Jews, and the charter cites the Hadiths of al-Bukhari and Moslem calling for the genocide of the Jews:
The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. “The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
Article 13 of the charter states: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
Even in private conversations with Palestinians, Francis has used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions, Shireen Hilal told the Washington Post after meeting the pontiff. But not once has the pope condemned Hamas’s openly genocidal intentions. Hypocrisy?
Papal Non-Response to the Armenian Genocide
In his book The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War, historian Jacques Kornberg explores how popes of the two world wars, Benedict XV (1914–22) and Pius XII (1939-58), witnessed the genocide of Armenians and Jews but “followed a policy of political neutrality and withheld condemnation of those committing wartime atrocities.”
“Where is the controversy over Pope Benedict XV’s response to the Armenian genocide of 1915, or Pius XI’s response to the use of mustard gas against civilians during the Italian conquest of Ethiopia?” Kornberg asks, noting that “the Armenian genocide virtually destroyed the Armenian Catholic Church.”
In September 2023, Azerbaijan carried out a lightning offensive on Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as the Republic of Artsakh, forcing virtually the entire population of some 120,000 indigenous Christians to flee to neighboring Armenia.
“There is no place for genocide at the Olympics!” Christian Solidarity International stated, urging the International Olympic Committee to exclude Azerbaijan from the upcoming Summer Games.
But Francis timidly called for “dialogue between Azerbaijan and Armenia,” and endorsed Azerbaijan’s oligarchy by conferring a papal knighthood on Azerbaijan’s vice-president Mehriban Aliyeva, who is the wife of President Ilham Aliyev.
Elsewhere, I have explored the way Francis has legitimized Azerbaijan’s anti-Christian genocidal oligarchy in exchange for its undisclosed financial support of the Vatican. Hypocrisy?
Francis’s Silence on Islamic Genocides
Since 2000, Islamic outfits like Boko Haram and Fulani jihadists have slaughtered more than 62,000 Christians in Nigeria. Genocide Watch has classified the systematic massacre as genocide. The International Alliance against Genocide lists Nigeria’s among 14 ongoing genocides in the world. It is an “anti-Christian genocide.” Francis’s response? Crickets.
The “perpetrators’ declared intent to eradicate the Christian community” in the Middle East and Africa has “led to several Parliamentary declarations in recent years that the faith group has suffered genocides according to the definition adopted by the UN,” according to a 2018 report commissioned by Britain’s ministry of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
Far from condemning the genocides which are perpetrated exclusively by Islamic groups in these countries, Francis has signed what virtually amounts to a “concordat” with the hardline leader of the Sunni Muslim world, Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb.
Despite the fact that the U.S. government has designated China’s ongoing atrocities against the Uyghurs as “genocide” under the 1948 Genocide Convention — not to mention that China is ferociously persecuting Catholics and Protestants as well — Francis renewed the Vatican’s hugely controversial “concordat” with China in October. Not once has the pontiff called for a probe into Beijing’s genocide.
The Catholic Church has shamelessly collaborated with genocidal regimes over the decades. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity lists several examples of the Church’s collusion, including its complicity in the 1994 Rwandan genocide — a country in which 62% of the population is Catholic.
According to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, several Catholic clergy incited hatred against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu. “In terms of the actual genocide, critics once again hold the Church directly responsible for inciting hatred, sheltering perpetrators, and failing to protect those who sought refuge within its walls,” the encyclopedia notes.
Rewriting History of Complicity with Genocidal Regimes
Historian David Kertzer’s The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler, written after the opening of the Pius XII archives in 2020, explores how Rome frenetically tried to cover up and rewrite the history of the pope’s collaboration with the Nazi and Facist genocidal regimes during the Second World War.
Both collaborations were possible partly because of concordats the Vatican had signed with Hitler in 1933 and Mussolini in 1929. While Catholic apologists argue that the pope had his hands tied during the war, they turn a blind eye to the dark history of the Vatican in aiding and abetting the escape of Nazi war criminals Hitler’s axis of evil was overthrown.
Gerald Steinacher is one of many historians who has unearthed damning evidence to demonstrate that “the Vatican relief commission for refugees played a central part in the escape of Nazis and war criminals,” as he documents in his work Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice.
And yet, Francis has never called for an independent body to investigate the church on any of these genocidal allegations.
“Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people,” remarks author Michael Shellenberger. Pope Francis should know. As pope, his rule book states that he is answerable and accountable to no man.
So forgive me, Papa. After all who am I to judge?
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral. This article has been cross-posted with the author’s permission from The Stream.
Kepha says
One does not instigate a “people’s war” without expecting a lot of collateral damage. Hamas wanted the Gaza strip to be a dagger pointed straight at the heart of Israel, and hence the people who voted it into power are paying the price.
On the other hand, there is no parallel between what was done to Europe’s Jews and what has happened to the Gaza Strip. There was never an organized Jewish cabal out to destroy the Christian nations of the West–just a crude forgery from the Tsar’s Okhrana entitled _The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion_ (which is still widely circulated in the Arab lands). The Jewish Bolsheviks and Anarchists so prominent in the late 19th and 20th centuries whom the Nazis and others pointed to to justify their genocide were also out to destroy traditional Jewish life as well and often found their fiercest critics form inside the Jewish community (and I write this as someone who would like to see all the world embrace the Gospel of Christ). It is clear that Hamas launched its attack on Oct. 7 in the belief that it could seize the initiative in its stated goal of wiping out the Jewish presence in ‘Eretz Yisroel or, very cynically, use the inevitable Israeli retaliation to make proaganda points. Either way, the Hamas leadership is far more guilty than Netanyahu and his government.
somehistory says
The creature called “pope,” is a false shepherd, a wolf in sheep’s clothing who *profits* from the belief of thousands of people who believe that the creature speaks for Jesus Christ.
the ‘pope’ is just like the Pharisees whom Jesus called “serpents, offspring of vipers, whitewashed graves full of dead men’s bones, unwashed cups full of uncleanness.”
Jesus asked those men, “How are you to flee the Judgment of Gehenna?”
Gehenna was a dumping ground for dead animals and the bodies of criminals, where fire burned continually.
No one who values Truth or wishes to please Jesus Christ and His Heavenly Father should listen to anything the ‘pope’ has to say.
Siddi Nasrani says
To me the Pope is a (S/S) = Servant of Satan & so he does his bidding.
The devil’s essential disposition is that of a liar. There is no truth in the devil because lying is all he knows. He has been deceiving people since the beginning of time (Genesis 3:4–5; 2 Corinthians 11:3). He is a devious perverter of truth (2 Corinthians 11:14; 1 Timothy 3:7; 2 Timothy 2:26) and a counterfeiter of truth (2 Thessalonians 2:9). He is always scheming ways to deceive anyone who will give him an inch of control over their thoughts and lives.
somehistory says
The demon’s intent is to keep people from knowing the Truth and choosing Life.
Bexarkat says
Il Papa has come to realize Jews are not harmful to the Church, therefore they become perfect targets. Unlike the hoards of Islam whose goals are dominance and to be the only surviving “true’ faith of the Abrahamic streams.
James Lincoln says
Dope Francis should just recite the Shahada – and get it over with.
Robert Murray says
Dear Friend. I know your love for Jesus. They keep you trapped in this horrible religion by convincing you that you need a priest to prepare the host. This is a terrible earthly and non-Spiritual interpretation of John 6. All understanding of Jesus must be in the Spirit, not the physical realm. Eating and drinking Jesus is a Spiritual metaphor. “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
somehistory says
Great Scriptural reference, and quote.
Bud says
If it is a spiritual metaphor then why does it say in John 6:60: “Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said: “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, and, in John 6:66: “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer walked with him.” The word Jesus uses for ‘eat’ translates to ‘gnaw’. Disciples don’t walk away from their teacher, especially Jesus, over something that is only meant to be a spiritual metaphor.
You quote, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” By using this scripture to try to validate your point of view, it seems that you are denying Jesus’ human nature, that he was fully God and fully man, which is called in the Catholic Church, the hypostatic union.
I am no fan of Pope Francis, but I am a committed, yet, very fallible and broken Catholic. There are well documented sources that show that Pope Pius XII deserved the recognition he received from the state of Israel as a “Righteous Gentile” after WWII. Yes, the Church has a sullied history, just like I do, and I presume all of us do, in one way or another. Mark 2:17: “When Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” My prayer is that we unite in our defense of our Christian Faith against the onslaught of the Marxist/ Islamist ideologies.
And, as a reminder, if it it weren’t for the Catholic Church’s resistance from the very beginning against the countless Muslim invasions, Western Civilization as we know it may never have had the opportunity to grow and flourish.
Bud says
If it is a spiritual metaphor then why does it say in John 6:60: “Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said: “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?”, and, in John 6:66: “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer walked with him.” The word Jesus uses for ‘eat’ translates to ‘gnaw’. Disciples don’t walk away from their teacher, especially Jesus, over something that is only meant to be a spiritual metaphor.
You quote, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” By using this scripture to try to validate your point of view, it seems that you are denying Jesus’ human nature, that he was fully God and fully man, which is called in the Catholic Church, the hypostatic union.
I am no fan of Pope Francis, but I am a committed, yet, very fallible and broken Catholic. There are well documented sources that show that Pope Pius XII deserved the recognition he received from the state of Israel as a “Righteous Gentile” after WWII. Yes, the Church has a sullied history, just like I do, and I presume all of us do, in one way or another. Mark 2:17: “When Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” My prayer is that we unite in our defense of our Christian Faith against the onslaught of the Marxist/ Islamist ideologies.
And, as a reminder, if it it weren’t for the Catholic Church’s resistance from the very beginning against the countless Muslim invasions, Western Civilization as we know it may never have had the opportunity to grow and flourish.
STJOHNOFGRAFTON says
Put the Pope on trial for The Inquisition, then follow up with his auto da fé.
Peter Williamson says
Comrade Francis has to go
Siddi Nasrani says
Yes, he wants de-frocking.
Sir Peter says
Mossad needs to solve this problem
gravenimage says
Pope Francis Wants Israel Investigated for ’Genocide’ When Rome Is Guilty of Far Worse
……………………………….
The idea that Israel defending herself against openly threatened genocidd is geocide is just projection. Perverse.
Edward Amos Brandwein says
Pope Francis is a commie in disguise
tgusa says
“Will the pontiff heed calls for a probe into the Vatican’s own historic complicity with genocidal regimes?”
Not today, the pope is on to the next complicity. The pope want’s to spare the rape torture murderers so they can sneak off to do it again. The pope might as well have said, Make Ratlines Great Again.
Skeptiker says
“Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen,”
“Faulheit und Feigheit sind die Ursachen, warum ein so großer Teil der Menschen …gerne zeitlebens unmündig bleiben und warum es anderen so leicht wird, sich zu deren Vormündern aufzuwerfen.”
Immanuel Kant
Siddi Nasrani says
So true.
Skeptiker says
…und wer es noch nicht gewusst hat: Die katholische Religion ist genauso Frauenfeindlich wie der Koran. Ganz zu schweigen von ihrem gemeinsamen Rassismus und Antisemitismus.
Troybeam says
Pope Francis has gone against everything the church stands for. A patsy for Satan.
Thomas Hulting says
Pope Frank is Satan’s “bagboy!”
Andrew Blackadder says
The main reason the Jihadi nutters have not yet attacked the Vatican as they have done against many many Churches is due to them using this current wee Popey dude as the useful idiot he obviously is as he sleeps soundly behind the massive Wall built to keep out the islamic warriors of years gone by however methinks as soon as he is out of the picture and some other wee Popey dude takes his place who is hopefully not so in love with islam then we will see a serious attack against those Walls around the Vatican, so Francis is playing it safe for himself but not for the Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria Sudan or many other countries around the World.
He may well be the actual anti Christ spoken of as he sure acts and sounds like it.
islamist have said, first we take Istanbul and then we take Rome.
islamism is the new nazism for the 21st century.