XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, or.politics   
   From: webermark@polaris.net   
      
   The Jews better keep their heads down or Trump will go after them next.   
      
   The Nazis’ systematic persecution and genocide led to the deaths of 6   
   million Jews in Europe, but Catholic priests and nuns were also among their   
   victims.   
      
   Half of all Poland’s Catholic priests, monks and nuns suffered repression   
   during the six years of World War II, with more than 2,800 killed at Nazi   
   and Soviet hands. Researchers like Anna Jagodzinska of Poland’s National   
   Remembrance Institute say clergy were particularly targeted as upholders of   
   national culture and identity.   
      
   Of the nearly 2,800 clergy of all denominations incarcerated at the Nazi   
   concentration camp of Dachau, 1,773 were priests from Poland, of whom 868   
   were killed. Others were subjected to exhausting labor and pseudo-medical   
   experiments.   
      
   Despite the horrors, many priests witnessed to the faith by hearing   
   confessions and staging secret Masses, also offering practical and   
   spiritual support to fellow inmates.   
      
   Catholic clergy of various nationalities died as martyrs at other Nazi-run   
   camps, including the largest, Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose 1.2 million mostly   
   Jewish victims included St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Edith Stein, also   
   known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.   
   dd   
   Other beatified martyrs include 11 Polish nuns from the Holy Family of   
   Nazareth shot by the Gestapo at Navahrudak, in present-day Belarus, in   
   August 1943 after the nuns volunteered to die in place of local villagers.   
   Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite, was killed with a lethal   
   injection after defending Jews and press freedom. French lay Catholic   
   Marcel Callo was sent to the camps for involvement with the Young Christian   
   Worker movement.   
      
   An Italian Catholic from Savona, Blessed Teresa Bracco, was killed   
   resisting rape by a Nazi soldier. Blessed Emilian Kovtch died at the   
   Majdanek concentration camp and was one of 26 Ukrainians beatified as   
   martyrs in 2001.   
      
   Blessed Sara Salkahazi, a member of the Sisters of Social Service and   
   founder of Hungary’s Catholic Women’s League, was shot and tossed in the   
   River Danube in December 1944 by agents of Hungary’s pro-Nazi Arrow Cross   
   regime. Her crime: sheltering Jewish women and children at her Budapest   
   convent. She is one of more than 600 religious leaders from various   
   countries and denominations honored by Israel as “Righteous Among Nations”   
   for similar actions.   
      
   Research on the wartime martyrs was encouraged by St John Paul II, not   
   least in his 1994 apostolic letter, “Tertio Millennio Adveniente,” which   
   compared them to the holiness of the initial Christians.   
      
   In St. John Paul’s native Poland, which lost a fifth of its population   
   under Nazi occupation, including 90 percent of its 3 million-strong Jewish   
   minority, the National Remembrance Institute has worked with historians   
   across Europe to build up a database of victims.   
      
   At least 1.8 million Poles were also sent to Soviet labor camps by Soviet   
   occupation forces; many Catholic clergy who survived Nazi repression later   
   died at communist hands.   
      
   “While the Nazis eliminated clergy as a barrier to Germanization, later   
   communist governments prohibited any acknowledgment of Catholic martyrs to   
   aid their own anti-church campaign,” Jagodzinska told Catholic News   
   Service.   
      
   “Martyrdom is always martyrdom, whenever people die for their faith, and   
   their stories still attract great public interest, while much material   
   still awaits study for handing on to the next generation,” she said.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)