THE visit to Britain by Pope Benedict XVI has only one aim, to make a pact with the British ruling class, to help strengthen its state and to organise the counter-revolution by targeting the ‘evil’ of atheism and ‘godless communism’.
In his speech made immediately on landing, he denounced in vitriolic terms a country that he views as out of control and in the grip of ‘atheist extremism’ and ‘aggressive secularism’.
The pope rounded off his attack on the British working and middle classes by offering up a comparison of ‘atheist extremism’ of Britain with Nazi Germany.
The Nazis, he assured his audience, were also extreme atheists who hated god so much that they launched the Holocaust in order to eradicate religion completely.
As plain Joseph Ratzinger, the pope should know a lot about Nazi Germany, as he was ‘conscripted’ into the Hitler youth at the age of 14.
He has also forgotten that far from opposing the rise of Hitler in Germany, the catholic hierarchy favoured it precisely as a bulwark against atheism in general and very specifically against ‘bolshevik atheism’ – it supported the Nazis against the threat of socialist revolution.
Nor did this support waver dramatically after the coming to power of Hitler in Germany. There are many archive photos of Catholic clergy indulging in Nazi salutes.
Pope Benedict is equally quiet about the Vatican’s relationship with other fascist movements, most notably with the Croatian Ustasha.
When Germany and Italy invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, a puppet government of Croatia was set up under the control of the fascist Ustasha movement.
Apart from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, the Ustasha enjoyed the unqualified support of the Catholic church and the Vatican.
The leader of the Ustasha, Ante Pavelic, was granted the honour of a Papal Audience in Rome in May 1941, while it is well documented that many catholic priests took either a passive or active role in the pogroms.
A Franciscan monk, Miroslav Filipovic, was the commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp where up to 600,000 Serbs, Jews and communists were murdered.
A number of Ustasha leaders escaped to South America after the end of the war, helped by sympathisers in the Vatican who provided them with fake passports.
Then, of course, you have the Spanish fascist government of General Franco, who enjoyed the support of the Catholic Church through the civil war and beyond.
On the other hand, Fascism in Europe was defeated not by any ‘god fearing’ countries but by the enormous sacrifice and struggle of those ‘atheist extremists’, the godless communist workers of the Soviet Union.
Without their sacrifice, the young Ratzinger might very well have been ‘conscripted’ and ‘forced’ into another career – in the Nazi military or government.
It is no accident that the pope is visiting Britain. His visit is at the invitation of the Queen, the head of the British State, at a time when her government is poised to begin a life or death struggle with the working class to smash its Welfare State by imposing the most savage cuts.
He is here to rally all of the counter-revolutionary forces to give their support to this massive attack, which is about to begin. This is why his visit is being given an over-the-top hysterical support by the most reactionary sections of the bourgeois media.
Just as the fascists in the 1920s and 30s used a willing church to mobilise against their joint enemy – Bolshevism – so today the ruling class and the pope are joining together in an attempt to defeat the developing British socialist revolution.
