As the 20th century dawned little had changed. The far-flung, multifaceted, many-doctrined Church entered the new era, each of its multiple splintered parts confident that IT held the answers to the dilemma of life, each holding itself out as representing Jesus of Nazareth, who reportedly said he was 'the way, the truth and the life.' Come war or disaster, drought or famine, flood or fire, the Church continued to assert that it had the answers, not only for this life but for the life to come. The dying soldier was still tended by the priest, uttering his ritual mumbo-jumbo, the flood victims remembered in memorial service conducted by  priests, the lie perpetuated that Christianity was a divine institution. And all the while the revelations of science have torn down bit by bit the doubtful edifice that was erected by Saul of Tarsus and his band of believers. Not that the pedlars of the Christian deceit give up easily.  Wherever there is a glimmer of light they rush to deny the truth, even when it stares them in the face.

In the 1920s, for example, the Reverend Leon Milton Birkhead occupied the pulpit of All Souls Church, Kansas City. He was a Unitarian, i.e. one who has had made at least some progress in understanding the specious nature of Christianity. He rejected the nonsensical doctrine of the Trinity (i.e. the threefold godhead - Yahweh, Christ and the Ghost) as embraced by the majority of Christians. He was known for his sermons dealing with any and every subject, many of which stirred up the opposition of more 'orthodox' fundamentalist Christians. From his pulpit he freely discussed social issues such as prostitution, euthanasia, sex and Freud, gambling, any subject he felt needed discussing. He once preached a sermon supporting the theory of evolution, for which he was heckled from a back pew by a special team assembled there in a fine display of Christian charity by another minister, the Reverend Gerald Winrod. Winrod was from Wichita and was known as the Flying Fundamentalist. He went about attacking Darwinism, thus confirming the adage, 'Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one's mouth and remove all doubt.'
 
Birkhead supported John Thomas Scopes in his trial at Dayton and commended Sinclair Lewis' insightful book, Elmer Gantry.  In 1927 he was asked to perform a marriage ceremony for the daughter of a freethinking publisher, Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius. The ceremony left out the words 'till death do us part' and 'with all my worldly goods I thee endow'. A Congregationalist minister thundered: 'Birkhead has shaken the very foundations of Christian civilization.' Twenty years later Josephine and Aubrey Roselle, the couple involved, were still happily married.

Meanwhile the divisions continued. A string of 'isms' highlights the uncertainty of that supposedly certain document, the New Testament. The passing years have seen separatism, dispensationalism, millenial-dawnism, pre-millenialism, historicism, sinless perfectionism, pietism, liberalism, modernism, obscurantism, pentecostalism, on and on into utter confusion of voices.  Two forces drive this turmoil: uncertainty and ego. With such a foundation of uncertainty in the dubious documents of the Old and New Testaments, it is no wonder that ego-driven individuals keep founding new religions. The effrontery of the upstart evangelist-preacher, usually, though not always, one must add, a nonentity in civilian life, knows no bounds. The one-time bank clerk or salesperson (significantly, they are often salespersons, or real estate agents; Billy Graham sold brushes in his early days!), now leader of men, is certain he has the truth, come hell or high water. And in any event, up there in his pulpit he is someone. Never mind that a thousand others think they, too, have the truth. It was once said that in South Korea something like 200 'hidden Messiahs' were waiting to spring forth to lead the faithful. Many did actually spring forth. One led a cult that ultimately saw its members suiciding, expecting the arrival of the Christ-god.

And the lies of religion continue. Christians are quick to hail some dramatic rescue or the saving of someone's life in a medical procedure as an 'answer to prayer' - trumpeted abroad as proof of God's existence. Yet, very conveniently, these same Christians fall mute when prayer is not answered. A perfect example was seen in my own country when a terrible tragedy occurred in the snowfields, at a place called Thredbo. One building collapsed down a hill onto another, trapping nineteen people under masses of heavy concrete. As the rescue workers dug into the ruins, from one end of the nation to another people prayed. Church leaders staged prayer vigils, the nation's leaders on all sides of politics called for prayer that the victims might be saved. In the event the score for prayer answered was, sadly, just one. Just one victim rescued alive. The score for prayer unanswered - eighteen.

A score of 1 versus 18 is hardly a ringing endorsement for the power of prayer. Yet a minister of religion had the audacity to write to a major newspaper decrying the fact that God was not being thanked for the rescue of the one survivor. A letter I wrote to a newspaper at the time, pointing out the truth concerning unanswered prayer, remained unpublished. Thus do the lies of Christianity persist and thus are people blinded to the truth.

The 20th century has seen as many, if not more, new offshoots of the Christian tree as the 19th. One such is the church founded by that sinister character Dr Sun Myung Moon, who has been responsible for so much misery within families bereft of their children. Moon was first heard of around 1945, when he emerged from North Korea as yet another self-appointed prophet but few among this tribe of evildoers can match the Millionaire Messiah in sheer gall, in cruel deception, in cynical manipulation of young lives, in hypocrisy and in wholesale fraud upon the community of the human family. There is much uncertainty as to how Moon got himself started on the road to religious riches and power. The most probable account is that he started out as a young preacher in the Korean Presbyterian Church but was excommunicated from that body in 1948 for teaching false doctrines. Presumably by then he was setting forth is own peculiar views of religion. We shall return to Dr Moon later.

And while the Protestant churches and their offshoot cults multiplied Rome and Orthodoxy still flourished - and still remained antagonistic to one another. Not less so than in the Balkans as the Second World War broke out. Like other parts of the world the Balkans has through the centuries seen the clash of religions - Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim. On 6 April 1941, just a few days after the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, the Fascist Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed. The Nazis, naturally, approved. The rebels, or Ustashi, gave the world a name synonymous with infamy.  Indeed, some historians think that the Ustashi even outdid the Nazis themselves in the ferocity and cruelty of their brutal reign. They were led by Ante Pavelic, a Catholic, who aimed to eliminate from the country not only every Jew and Gipsy but Serbs too, at least those who would not bow to his will. The two million Serbs, members of the Orthodox Church, then living in Croatia inspired even greater hatred in Pavelic (sometimes spelled Pavelitch) and his henchmen than the Jews and Gipsies did. In the end somewhere between 1 million and 1.7 million people lost their lives in the terrible civil war that raged within Yugoslavia while the world beyond its borders fought its greater war.

It has been claimed that some of Pavelic's keenest supporters were members of Catholic Action and among their number were a great many priests and nuns. On 16 December 1937 Pope Pius 11th commented on the progress of Catholicism in Yugoslavia: 'The day will come . . . when many will be sorry not to have openly and generously accepted the great gift which the Vicar of Jesus Christ was offering their country.' That day had now come with a vengeance! On 18 May 1941, six weeks after taking control in Croatia, Pavelic was received in private audience by Pius 12th.

As soon as they had taken control the Ustashi brought into play all the standard apparatus of tyranny - the concentration camps, the torture centres, the censorship of literature and radio and the daily threat to life and limb. Hand-in-hand the secular leadership and the churchmen began a program of what might be called 'religious cleansing'. Archbishop Stepinac, Primate of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia, worked closely with the authorities in implementing this program. It was a moment many had been waiting for, an opportunity to assert once and for all the authority of Rome: kill or convert the Orthodox Serbs and exterminate the Jews.

On 31 August 1941 a telling article appeared in the Yugoslavian journal, Katolicki Tjednik ('Catholic Action'). This journal was published with the imprimatur of Archbishop Saritch of Sarajevo and was written by a priest, Father Peter Pajic. It was titled, amazingly: Hitler Upholds the Mission. In read, in part:

Until now, God spoke through papal encyclicals, numerous sermons, catechisms, the Christian press, through missions, through the heroic examples of the saints, and so on  . . . And? They closed their ears. They were deaf. Now God has decided to use other methods. He will prepare missions. European missions! World missions! They will be upheld not by priests but by army commanders led by Hitler. The sermons will be heard with the help of cannons, machine-guns, tanks and bombers.

The language of these sermons will be international. No one will be able to complain that he did not understand it, because all people know very well what death is and what wounds are, disease, hunger, fear, slavery and poverty are. . . 

Another journal, the official publication of the Catholic Crusader Brotherhood, Nedlja, in its issue of  6 June 1941 said:

Christ and the Ustashi and Christ and the Croatians march together through history. From the first day of its existence the Ustashi movement has been fighting for the victory of Christ's principles, for the victory of justice, freedom and truth. Our Holy Saviour will help us in the future as he has done until now, that is why the new Ustashi Croatia will be Christ's, ours and no one else's!

It was this Great Brotherhood of Crusaders who, upon the proclamation of the new State, embraced the invaders with zeal. Pavelic and a fellow-butcher, Kvaternik by name, with Crusader help, set to work with a will. Pavelic may have been speaking figuratively in December 1941 when remarking that 'he who could not cut away a child from his mother's womb is not a good Ustashi,' but in time this particular atrocity was to be carried out - literally. 

[A warning to my readers: The next few paragraphs make gruesome reading. Some may care to skip them.]

An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 Jews were either murdered or forced to flee. And no less than a quarter million Orthodox Serbs embraced Catholicism to save their lives. The alternative was a simple one: death. Hundreds of thousands more did die. A system of certificates was instituted. Those who converted to Catholicism were given a paper to prove the fact should they be accosted by soldiers. But often even this didn't save them. The resisters were tortured and slaughtered and their bodies cast into mass graves. Documents extant bearing the signatures of Archbishop Stepinac and another prelate, Archbishop Saritch of Sarajevo, can be examined in the Yugoslav State archives, showing that both had authorized the transfer of former Serbian church properties into Catholic hands.

The tale of atrocities is of such proportions that one does not know where to begin. Perhaps with the priest, Dr Srecko Peric, of Livno, who preached in church that all Serbs should be slaughtered - his sister the first, because she had married a Serb! He personally promised absolution to the murderers. Men, women and children in Livno soon suffered horribly. Another Catholic priest, Father Ivan Mikan, made personal daily visits to imprisoned Serbs in Ogulin, not to comfort them but to beat them with a bullwhip! He upbraided the Ustashi for being lax. Yet another priest, Fra Anto, of Tamosnjica, organized a band of Ustashi and proceeded to round up Serbian families. The captives, children among them, were then locked up in a shed and held for days without food and water. In village after village the priests were actively engaged in denouncing 'traitors' to police. One godly father, by name of Eugen Pujic, of Herzegovina, personally cut the throat of the the local Orthodox minister, using a large knife.

Simply because they were Serbs, a doctor and his family were taken and executed at Livno. Dr Dushan Mitrovich was a prominent and respected member of the community and had worked there for 20 years. He had made it his special task to foster good relations between the different peoples. The doctor's two children were axed before their parent's eyes after which they too suffered the same fate. All but 100 of the 2000 Serbians in that town died. One butcher, Sudar by name, who took his pleasure of the people of Lika, enjoyed the sport of grabbing a small baby from a mother's arms and, holding it head-down, then dashing it to death against a wall. The group of thugs he led gouged out men's eyes and sliced off women's breasts - after first stripping, and sometimes raping, them. He once boasted of sending human eyes to the Ustashi headquarters at Zagreb to gain a suitable reward. Reportedly such means were used to provide a tally of the dead enemy.
 
A particularly gruesome incident was reported from Nevesinje. A mother, father and three children were arrested by the Ustashi. The father was taken away and the mother and three children locked in a cell, left to starve. They had no idea where the father was. For seven days the four were kept that way, then their jailers brought them a large roast and some water to drink. The mother and children gratefully ate up all the food and drank the water. They were then told that the flesh they had eaten was that of their own husband and father! I remind my readers that while these terrible atrocities were being carried out on a political level they were actively encouraged by the Catholic Church which was anxious to crush the Orthodox faith in the country.

By July 1941, that is just three months after the new State was proclaimed, so many corpses jammed the River Neretva that boats had difficulty navigating and captains began refusing to try to sail through the waters. In January 1942 there was a new and terrible outbreak of atrocities, especially in the districts of Dvor and Nova Gradiska. Here some of the worst torments were recorded. Men were dragged along roads tied to the back of trucks, beards of Orthodox clergy pulled off, complete with the skin, and fire and boiling water applied to people's chests as they were held down on the ground. Pregnant women had their bellies cut open and babies torn from them. Some people were buried alive.

Children suffered unspeakable horrors. In one place small boys were put onto a hot fire. Some had their eyes gouged out and ears cut off and were then thrown onto the fire. Some children had steel nails driven into the heads and their arms and legs amputated while they were alive. In other places children's limbs were torn from their bodies, their heads pounded against walls. Others were thrown alive into boiling water and into lime pits. Not a shred of pity was felt by their tormentors. Young woman and girls and even prepubescent children were dragged off by the soldiers to their camps to serve as prostitutes. Some were installed in specially designated houses, others subjected to rape outside a camp and then let go. Mothers were raped in the presence of young daughters and young girls raped as their mothers were forced to watch. A son was forced to rape his own mother, whose name was Olga Kepliya. Rapes even took place in churches.
  
Hard evidence of atrocities was provided by some Italians in one area who managed to photograph Ustashi soldiers. Like the Germans, the Ustashi often foolishly had themselves photographed in compromising situations. Around their waists were hanging an array of human tongues and eyes. The Italians also took photographs of some Ustashi proudly holding a large dish containing a big quantity of human eyes. Few prisoners died simply. Most were first tortured cruelly. It was not uncommon, for example, to break the arms and/or legs of people before they were actually killed. Or they died horribly, like some victims, men, women and children, who were stripped naked and then, with hands bound behind their backs, pushed alive into the near-freezing Danube River, through holes dug into the ice covering. Among these victims were children as young as 5 years of age. Other children were separated from their families and put into a special camp to be trained up as good Croatian Catholics.

And as the months continued so did the atrocities. An Orthodox bishop and a priest were laid on the ground and a fire built upon their chests and they were then slaughtered. Families were ejected from their homes and Orthodox churches entered, the congregations being slaughtered on the spot. At Kladusa, Serbian families were rounded up and carted off to an actual slaughterhouse. Here they were put through the routine used to butcher animals. They were first stripped of their clothing and then had their throats cut. Many, including children and women, were hung up on meat-hooks, naked and still alive, before they had even expired. In one village small babies were found impaled and still living, on the pointed ends of a fence, their small limbs contorted in pain, pinned like insects.
    
The atrocities occurring in camps prefigured those of recent times in that same area. In one camp a member of the Ustashi, Matkovich, murdered a prisoner by slowly paring flesh from his chest, while he was held to the ground by guards. Over a period of half an hour the torture continued, then the victim's heart was torn from his body. The other prisoners were forced to watch this gruesome episode.

The genitals were favourite targets of the torturer. Women's breasts were cut off and objects of all kinds forced into their vaginas. Men and boys would be emasculated and young girls attacked sexually. In a play on their own religion, crucifixion was sometimes used to execute prisoners - nailing the victim to the door-frame of his or her own house. Orthodox clergy were a special target of abuse for the Catholic mobs. Clergy were made to clean out latrines with their bare hands. Some Serbs were made to parade barefoot over barbed wire while bearing on their heads a crown of thorns. Prisoners were literally whipped to death or force-fed with human faeces. Serbs in one prison were tied to a bench, then needles were forced beneath their fingernails and toenails. As they lay there suffering agony from the needles they were whipped as well. Then their legs were untied and were forced far apart, causing intense pain. Probably the worst atrocity against a clergyman involved Bishop Platon, 81 years of age. His tormentors nailed horseshoes to his bare feet and forced him walk a long distance thus shod. When his mutilated feet could carry him no further and he fell to the ground they tore off his beard and lit a charcoal fire on his breast in the usual fashion. Then as he lay dying they finished him off with a hatchet.

Evidence of priestly participation in the sordid events is not difficult to find. For instance, Dr Nikolas Bilogrivitch, priest at Banja Luka, went before a war crimes tribunal after hostilities ended. He had collaborated closely with the Governor of Western Bosnia, Dr Viktor Gutitch. On the date of an Orthodox feast the 'massacre of St Elijah's Day' had been organized. The Ustashi exterminated in that period hundreds of thousands of Serbian men, women and children. Recounting the details himself before the tribunal, ex-Governor Gutitch described how one priest, Father Miroslav Filipovitch, came to him after a massacre and 'asked me for some spirits. While he was drinking, he said: “Yesterday, at Drakulitch, we exterminated every living soul - about 1,300 men, women and children.”.'
   
On 8 February 1942 a former minister in the Yugoslav government, and a Croatian Catholic himself, Prvislav Grizogono, wrote to Archbishop Stepinac, pleading with him to do something about the terrible atrocities occurring throughout the area. He wrote, he said, as 'man to man, as a Christian to a Christian.'  In part the letter said:

These atrocities do not amount to simple killings alone. They aim at the extermination of every Serb, men, women and children, and with terribly wild tortures of the victims. These innocent Serbs were stuck on poles alive and fires built on their bare chests. Literally they were roasted alive, being burnt to death in their homes and in their churches. 
In many cases boiling water was poured on living victims before their mutilation, their flesh was salted and their eyes gouged out while they were still living, their ears and their noses were lopped off and their tongues cut out. The beards and moustaches of clergy, together with their skin were ripped off by knives, while the victims' sex organs were cut off and stuffed into their mouths. Some were tied to trucks and dragged, while other victims had their arms and legs broken and  their heads spiked. Their heads were smashed with crowbars, many were thrown into deep cisterns and caves, and then literally bombed to pieces.

Their children were thrown into fire or scalding water, and they were fed to the fired lime furnaces. Other children were torn apart by the legs, their heads were crushed against walls and their spines were broken against rocks. In one boat on the Sava [river], there was a pile of children's heads with a woman's head (presumably that of the mother of the children) labelled: 'Meat for Jovan's Market - Belgrade'.

The case of Milenka Bozinich from Stapandza, is a particularly gruesome one, because they ripped her unborn child out of her with a knife. In Bosnia, a huge pile of roasted heads was found. Utensils full of Serbian blood were also discovered - this was the hot blood of their murdered brothers that other Serbs were forced to drink. About 3,000 Serbs were murdered in the Serbian Orthodox Church at Glina and the massacre of Serbs before the altar at Kladusha with sledgehammers is something that may never be mentioned in history.

There are detailed and official minutes of these unheard-of crimes. They were terrible as to have shocked even the Germans and the Italians. Many pictures were taken of these massacres and torture orgies.  The Germans claim the Croats did the same things during the Thirty Years' War and that, since then, there has been a proverb in Germany: 'God save us from cholera, hunger and the Croats'.

The Italians have photographed a utensil holding 31.5 kg (about 70 lbs) of Serbian eyes, and one Croat who came to Dubrovnik decorated with a string of eyes and with two wreaths of Serbian tongues. The horror in the camps where thousands of Serbs were murdered or left to die from hunger, cold and mistreatment, is indescribable. The Germans tell about one camp in Lika in which the Croats confined thousands of Serbs. Yet when they came there they found the camp empty, flooded with blood, and clothing strewn everywhere. 

The former minister now drew the Archbishop's attention to the fact that the Church itself was an active participant in these terrible atrocities:

Today, in the camp of Jasenovac thousands of Serbs are being tortured and murdered. In this bitter winter, they're kept in Gipsy barracks without enough straw or covers, and their food consists of but two potatoes a day.

Nothing  like this has ever happened in the history of Europe. We must go to Asia, to the times of Tamerlaine and Ghengis Kahn, or to Africa, to the states of the beastly Negro rulers, to find anything similar. The Croatian name has been blemished with dishonour and shame for centuries for these atrocities. Nothing can clear us now.
 
A large number of priests, clerics, friars and organized Catholic youth actively participated in all these crimes, but more terrible, even Catholic priests became camp and group commanders [my italics] and, as such, ordered or tolerated the horrible tortures, murders and massacres of a baptised people.

One Catholic priest slit the throat of an Orthodox Serbian minister. None of this could have been done without the permission of their bishops and it is was done, they should have been brought to the ecclesiastical court and unfrocked. Since this did not happen, then ostensibly the bishops gave their consent by acquiescence at least . . . And while the land streamed with the innocent blood of martyrs and while the moanings of the surviving unfortunates were still audible, the friars and nuns carried Ustashi knives in one hand and a cross and a prayer-book in the other . . .
I write you this - about these terrible crimes - to save my soul and I leave it to you to find a way to save your soul.
(Signed) Privislav Grizogono

It hardly needs adding that the minister's impassioned plea fell upon deaf ears. But his letter remains in the records, pointing the finger of guilt at those who unleashed such terror on that section of the human race which lived for a little time in one small corner of the earth. In the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, there was seen 'a massacre of Serbs which in the whole annals of World War 2, was surpassed for savagery only by the mass extermination of Polish Jews.'

When the war ended and the rats were deserting the sinking ship of state, no less than 500 Catholic priests fled to Austria, along with Ante Pavelich and many of his henchmen. Among their number were the two key bishops, Archbishop Saritch and Bishop Garitch, who had played major roles in the massacres. Most of the priests went to Switzerland where Bishop Garitch eventually died. Pavelich went into hiding to avoid being tried as a war criminal - in first one then another Catholic monastery, where he dressed in the garb of a priest in order not to be recognized by visitors. In 1948 he moved into another monastery in Rome, under two different assumed names, both bearing the term 'Father'. Then in November of that year, aided by the Catholic clergy, he embarked for Argentina, the destination of so many war criminals. His passport had been issued, like so many others issued to war criminals, by (to their everlasting shame) the Red Cross. Many other top Ustashis were also hidden under the garb of the priesthood, with the ready acquiescence of the Church, and given false names as such.

We should not be surprised that throughout the war period Pope Pius 12th (a Nazi sympathizer) had contact with Pavelich and his regime. On 6 February 1942, for example, Ustashi youths of the Crusaders group were received in audience by His Holiness.  On 12 March 1942 and at New Year, 1943, the Pontiff communicated with Pavelich. There were other contacts in March and June, 1943 and again in 1944. And back in July 1941 the Pope received in audience 100 agents of the Croatian State Police!  They were the men who operated the concentration camps and arranged for the hangmen's nooses. Their head, also attending and receiving the Pope's blessing, was Eugen Kvaternik-Dido, the Zagreb Chief of Police. This man had committed such horrors that his own mother suicided in despair!

After the war Catholic Archbishop Aloïs (Aloysius) Stepinac was tried by the new rulers of Yugoslavia and sentenced to 16 years' jail. The Pope of the day accused the Communists of 'persecution' and doubtless there was bias on the part of the Communists but the guilt of the Archbishop and his Church has been well established by independent authorities. On 19 December 1958 the journal France Catholique reported a meeting at the highest level of French Catholics, presided over by Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, to 'exalt the greatness and heroism of His Eminence Cardinal Stepinac.'