Pope Apologizes

It seems the Pope has apologized to the Bosnians.

On a one-day visit to the Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka, the Pope asked for mercy for “the sins committed against humanity, human dignity and freedom, also by children of the Catholic Church”.

A little background:

Hatred between the two communities dates from long before the recent civil war to the time of the Nazi occupation and is originally rooted in theological differences dating back centuries.

In 1942 a Franciscan friar known as “Brother Satan” led a brutal and particularly bloodthirsty massacre against the ethnic Serb residents of Banja Luka.

Friar Tomislav Filipovic Majstorovic headed Croat forces of the Nazi-allied Ustashe regime as they rampaged through the streets of the town, killing more than 2,000 people.

The fiercely ideological Majstorovic is said to have intoned the words “This is the way I baptise these bastards in the name of God” as he slashed the throats of Orthodox children, earning the grisly soubriquet Fra Sotona or Brother Satan.

He later went on to become commandant of the Ustashe concentration camp at Jasenovac, where he continued to kill at will.

The pope’s actions don’t exactly match his words.

Relatives of those who died at his hands expressed outrage yesterday that the Pope celebrated Mass at the site of the Petricevac monastery, where the monk lived before the Banja Luka atrocity.

I wonder what Dave Hunt will have to say about this.