Pope Francis Should Examine Rome’s Genocidal Past Before Taunting Israel

Stroop Report: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Public Domain)

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 attorney, chancellor, and archdeacon in the Anglican Church of America, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background.

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 US 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 Fascist 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?