Zagreb, Croatia, May 17, 2016 / 03:02 am (CNA).- Was the controversial Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac a target of decades-long communist smears and disinformation? One researcher of the period says the facts can counter false claims about the beatified cardinal's wartime record. “Stepinac was and remains an enormous hero in Croatia today,” Prof. Ronald J. Rychlak told CNA. “Just about every church you go into there’s a picture or a statue or a painting of Stepinac. He’s truly a national hero over there. And he did stand against the Ustashe. He stood against the communists as well. They imprisoned him.” Cardinal Stepinac was the Archbishop of Zagreb from 1937 until his death in 1960 at the age of 61. In Yugoslavia during the Second World War, the pro-Nazi Ustashe movement came to power under leader Ante Pavelic after the Axis occupied the country. “They were very vicious. They were considered worse than the Nazis in their persecution of Jews, of Serbs, of anyone who got in their way,” said Rychlak, a professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Pope St. John Paul II beatified Cardinal Stepinac as a martyr in October 1998. His cause for canonization is still pending, but Pope Francis has arranged a special commission of Catholic and Orthodox leaders to explore his wartime record. Many in the Serbian Orthodox community are deeply skeptical of the cardinal’s wartime record. For Rychlak, however, the historical record is on the cardinal’s side. Pavelic, the Ustashe head, called himself a Catholic. The Ustashe claimed a Catholic background, and  forcibly converted many people to Catholicism. The future cardinal initially cooperated with the government, but was not silent in the face of its crimes. “Stepinac’s sermons against the Ustashe were so strong. They prohibited them from being published, because they were so strong against the Ustashe,” Rychlak said. His words were secretly printed and circulated and occasionally broadcast over the radio. “There’s a great story about a Nazi officer who came to Zagreb and he heard Stepinac preach,” Rychlak recounted. The archbishop condemned the Ustashe’s actions so strongly, the general said “If a churchman in Germany spoke like that, he would not step down from the pulpit alive.” He severely condemned the Ustashe’s destruction of Zagreb’s main synagogue in 1941. “A House of God, of whatever religion, is a holy place,” he said. “An attack on a House of God of any religion constitutes an attack on all religious communities.” In October 1943 homily, the archbishop condemned notions of racial superiority. “The Catholic Church knows nothing of races born to rule and born to slavery,” he said. “The Catholic Church knows races and nations only as creatures of God.” The Ustashe lost control to Marshal Tito’s communists partisans, who had used Stepinac’s anti-Ustashe comments in their propaganda. Yugoslavia’s communists then turned on Archbishop Stepinac. In 1946, Stepinac was put on trial for allegedly collaborating with the Ustashe’s crimes. The trial drew critical coverage from Western media like Time and Newsweek and protests from those who saw it as a show trial. Among the trial’s critics was the American Jewish community leader Louis Breier, who organized protests in New York City support of the archbishop. Archbishop Stepinac was denied effective representation and only met with his attorney for an hour before the trial. The government’s witnesses were told what to say, and the archbishop was not allowed to cross-examine them. What you have is a false narrative created by Soviet agents. He was sentenced to hard labor, but after a global outcry his sentence was reduced to house arrest. “Nevertheless, it becomes the public record that he was convicted of collaboration,” Rychlak said. Rychlak sees the trial and its aftermath as part of the same propaganda campaign that would target Pope Pius XII, Hungary’s Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and other Eastern Bloc churchmen with claims of Nazi collaboration. “What you have is a false narrative created by Soviet agents,” Rychlak said. “The directive would have come from the Kremlin.” A communist-made movie circulated throughout Yugoslavia used footage of the archbishop’s trial in a misleading way. At the trial, Archbishop Stepinac began his 18-minute criticism of the trial’s legitimacy with the phrase “I will not defend myself against these charges.” The movie only showed this first phrase, and not the archbishop’s lengthy criticism. In the early 1960s, the Italian writer Carlo Falconi sought the records of the Stepinac trial from the Yugoslavian government. Rychlak said the government’s records show a “frantic rush” to respond. “If they turn over the files as they existed, it would be clear that it’s a sham. They fabricate some documents, cherry-pick some documents, and send him some files,” the professor said. Falconi’s book and its strong criticism of Stepinac then became a foundational text in criticisms of Pius XII’s wartime record. After the fall of communism, one of the first acts of the new parliament was to apologize for the archbishop’s show trial. The archbishop’s prosecutor acknowledged the prosecution was motivated by the archbishop’s bad relationship with the communists, not because of his relationship with the Nazis. Others involved in the fabrication of documents came forward and denied that Cardinal Stepinac’s trial was legitimate. “Disinformation is a false narrative that appears to come from a reliable source,” Rychlak said. “Once it’s out there, it takes on a life of its own.” Rychlak authored the book “Hitler, the War, and the Pope,” a history of Pius XII in World War II. He co-authored the 2013 book “Disinformation” with Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former leader in the Romanian secret police and intelligence services who defected to the U.S. in 1978. Pacepa has charged that many of the false claims about Cardinal Stepinac are due to the work of the Yugoslavian state security service UDBA and Soviet intelligence agents. Three years after the cardinal’s trial, trial, Vyshinksy became foreign minister of the Soviet Union. After five years in a Yugoslav jail, Archbishop Stepinac was given the option of seeking refuge in Rome or confinement under house arrest in his home parish. He chose the latter.  In 1953, Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal, although he was never allowed travel to the Holy See to be officially elevated. He died in 1960 of an alleged blood disorder, which was said to have been caused by the conditions he endured in jail. Recent tests of his remains by Vatican investigators show evidence he was also poisoned. In June 2011 Pope Benedict XVI praised Cardinal Stepinac as a courageous defender of those oppressed by the Ustase, including Serbs, Jews and gypsies. He said the cardinal stood against “the dictatorship of communism, where he again fought for the faith, for the presence of God in the world, the true humanity that is dependent on the presence of God.” Read more

Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 15, 2016 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- A Dutch woman in her 20s was euthanized after her mental health condition was declared “insufferable” by a team of doctors and psychiatrists in the Netherlands, according to recently released reports from the Dutch Euthanasia Commission.   Why? The unnamed woman was sexually abused from ages 5 to 15.   As a result, she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and other mental illnesses. Multiple reports say the documents classified her condition as “incurable,” thus legally justifying the woman's death by euthanasia under Dutch law. Health professionals and advocates in the United States argue that the case is a blow to others who are suffering with similar illnesses, because it sends a message of hopelessness. “I think it's devastating in the message that it sends,” aid Dr. Greg Bottaro, a clinical psychologist with the CatholicPsych Institute. “But by putting this out there in this public mindset, it calls into question even more the people who are in despair and it gives them greater reason to believe that it's worth giving up.”   According to reports from The Telegraph, the documents also reveal that this woman was not an exceptional case, as the number of people with mental illnesses who have died by euthanasia has significantly increased since the practice was first legalized in the Netherlands in 2002. In 2010, only two people were granted euthanasia due to “insufferable” mental conditions, the number rose to 56 in 2015, according to the Telegraph’s report on the documents from the commission. Dutch psychiatrist Paulan Stärcke, who has carried out euthanasia requests at the country’s End-of-Life clinic, argues that psychiatrists are “too hesitant” about agreeing to euthanasia for patients with psychiatric diseases, and she told The Telegraph that children as young as 12 should be allowed to request to end their lives and be taken seriously. Dr. Bottaro, however, said that the pro-euthanasia mindset is not only a political agenda, it’s a dangerous threat to public health. “It’s really a threat to public health itself, because one of the biggest hurdles to get over in treating these illnesses is despair, and a lot of times the first part of treatment is to instill hope that the possibility of healing is there and it's worth working towards, no matter how difficult it might be, that the goal is worth the struggle.” Dr. Bottaro added that he doesn’t understand how the Dutch medical professionals could reach a diagnosis of “incurable.” While there are complex and severe cases of trauma, he said, there’s never a point where all hope is lost. “There’s always hope for further treatment,” he said. Tim Rosales, a spokesperson with the advocacy group Patients Rights Action Fund, said that euthanasia is an extreme and outdated way to handle people’s suffering. “There are better ways to address the issue of people with serious or terminal illnesses,” he said. “Assisted suicide is an extreme way that really is outdated, because with modern medicine and modern therapies, doctors are able to care for individuals and their families who are facing those types of illnesses so that they don’t experience pain,” he said. “I would say that it certainly is not the response, both from a healthcare standpoint or even a compassion standpoint, that society ought to be endorsing.” Dr. Bottaro said that in light of the news, anyone with a psychological illness needs to know that there is always hope. “There’s always hope, and the designating of a particular illness as untreatable – it’s a lie. We need to keep pushing forward and keep hoping for healing and working towards it.” Only a handful of countries have laws allowing for either euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Euthanasia differs from physician-assisted suicide in that anyone – a doctor, a family member, the patient – may administer lethal drugs to the patient. Under physician-assisted suicide, the patient’s doctor prescribes lethal drugs, but legally only the patient can administer them to themselves. In the United States, physician-assisted suicide is allowed under legislation in four states – California, Oregon, Vermont and Washington – with Montana has legal physician-assisted suicide by court ruling. The release of the documents from the Netherlands comes at a time when Canada’s Parliament is considering a euthanasia law, which is due for a vote in early June. Medical professionals and advocates from Belgium have been releasing a series of videos urging the country not to legalize it. Read more