Italy: The Death of Pope Karol Wojtila

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Sunday April 03, 2005 18:02 by FAI

A communique from the correspondance commission of the Italian Anarchist Federation -- FAI
www.federazioneanarchica.org

A man is dead. We anarchists love life and we can't dislike that. Especially for the unspeakable cruelty of an agony indecently exhibited on the world by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Anyway, this day that sees all politicians, from Fausto Bertinotti [PRC] to Alessandra Mussolini [ex-AN, "neo-fascists"], bow down in front of the "throne of Peter" we want to remember the man who was at the head of an absolute monarchy distinguished for centuries in its barbarity. The church that has perpetuated and blessed the massacre of millions and millions of men and women, tortured, burned, killed in the name of the cross isn't the memory of a now disowned past, but found in Wojtila, its deserving descendent.

Karol Wojtila, for 27 years, has made a name for his reactionary choices.

Karol Wojtila has been responsible for the diffusion of AIDS in Africa, where the publicity and the use of condoms could have saved millions of people from the illness, among which were lots of children.

Karol Wojtila gave cover for dictatorships, the torturer and Chilean Assassin Augusto Pinochet, who shook hands during his trip to the tortured south american country, in whose prisons thousands from political opposition have been tormented. Not a word for the victims but only the benediction for the executioner and his family.

Karol Wojtila has dressed in sheep's clothing and that of the wolf according to the interests of the organization of which he was sovereign. The left sing hymns for his pacifism in Iraq, but forget that he sustained and justified the war that bloodied ex-Yugoslavia. With the catholic cross, against muslims and the orthodox, the pope of religious "ecumenicism" made a saint of Stepinac, the cardinal who with the croatian fascists that lined up with Hitler, said they were "sent by God" and blessed the innumerable atrocities perpetrated by the croatian Ustase regime with the complicity of the occupying italian troops.

Karol Wojtila has protected and supported the cardinal Pio Laghi, already a papal apostolic in Argentina at the time of the dictatorship that massacred 30,000 people. Laghi blessed and covered the torturers and the assassins.

Karol Wojtila was the head of a multinational company with far-reaching interests in the whole world and a huge income in a planet where the majority of the population survives on less then two dollars a day.

Karol Wojtila, a "champion of life" that has maintained a ambiguous attitude towards capital punishment, was standard-bearer for a culture of oppression. A culture that would like the humiliation of the women's lives, one that condemned at any cost the birth of babies malformed or destined to famine. A culture that prefers a life of pain to one of joy and health, a culture that criminalized gays, that transformed desire and love into guilt, that defends those who haven't been born and persecutes those that live.

Karol Wojtila has sanctified the spanish priests that line up with arms with the catholic-fascist troops of Franco. These martyred saints wanted to revive the glories of the church of Torquemada and of the Quemaderos, the "collective ovens" where the heretics were cooked at a low simmer.

Just like the anarchists and libertarians of '36 that fought for life and liberty against fascism and the clerical oppression, we, anarchists and libertarians today, even with respect for a dead man, we won't bow, we won't join in the chorus of many, that from the right as well as from the left bow to their knees in front of the funeral of the head of the most ferocious, bloody, and freedom-destroying organization that history can remember. Our fight against religion and the church nourishes itself on the understanding that only the emancipation from religious stupidity and from priests, that in nourishing can allow men and women a full, joyous life, lived in liberty and respect for diversity, in solidarity between equals.

The correspondance commission of the Italian Anarchist Federation -- FAI