Archbishop Dadeus Grings
Catholic clerics have not learned that one must be ultra-cautious in making any statement about the Holocaust. Jews are understandably sensitive about anything that tends to minimize their unimaginable suffering.
Archbishop Dadeus Grings of Porto Alegre in Brazil has not learned this lesson.
According to reports here, here, here, and here he has said
The Jews talk about six million people killed. But how many Catholics were victims of the Holocaust? They were 22 million in all.
There were not 22 million killed in the Nazi camps; there were 22 million, probably many more, civilian victims of the war, and I suspect the biggest group of civilian victims was among the Slavic Orthodox. Among Catholics, Poles suffered terribly, and then probably Germans, but Catholics were not the biggest civilian group of victims, either in numbers or proportion.
Grings added
Jews say they were the main victims of the Holocaust, the biggest victims were the gypsies, because they were exterminated.
The gypsies (Roma) were also a target of the Nazis, and it is possible that a greater proportion of gypsies than of Jews was killed by the Nazis– I have not seen any analysis. But the gypsies were not exterminated; there are numerous gypsies (who seem to be mostly Catholic – of a sort) in Europe.
But Grings really inserted and pushed his foot firmly into his mouth when he added
Os judeus têm a propaganda do mundo
The Jews control the world press.
Grings has been at it before. In 2003 he said “one million” Jews were killed by the Nazis:
Sem entrar na questão de número das vítimas, que tem muito de ideológica, é preciso reconhecer, como historicamente comprovado, que o nazismo provocou em torno de 22 milhões de mortes, sendo que os judeus participam desta cifra com cerca de 1 milhão. Portanto a grande vítima do nazismo não foram os judeus, mas os cristãos.
Grings is repeating in 2009 what he said in 2003: Christians, not Jews, were the primary victims of the Holocaust. This is simply not true, and Grings, like Williamson, is providing respectability to anti-Semites. A comment on one Catholic blog was:
It takes courage to speak the truth and this Archbishop has added his name to those like Bishop Williamson who seek the truth and fight against the evils of this world. I have much respect for all of them.