Speaking about the Pope's canonisations during John Paul II's burial in the Vatican, CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour said that some of them were very controversial. She went on to say that the Pope had raised to the level of sainthood a man from a time when Croatian fascists were almost allies with the Catholic Church and conducted terrible persecution campaigns against Serbs during World War II. After this, CNN reporter John Allen confirmed Amanpour's words, concluding that Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac had been intolerably close to the Ustashas, the paramilitary group in Croatia allied with the Nazis.
The truth is completely different from what the CNN reporters said, Kosic said.
"Cardinal Stepinac was all the time in conflict with regimes, both the Ustashas and Communists. If your reporters checked sources, Stepinac's letters, sermons and epistles from the war period, they would discover, for example, that on 25 October 1942 he stated in the Zagreb cathedral: 'Every nation and race has the right to a life worthy of man... The Catholic Church has always condemned, as it does today, every injustice and violence committed in the name of class, racial or national ideas... Nobody has the right to kill or otherwise harm members of other races or nationalities'."
Pope John Paul II, who himself experienced the gravity of both Nazi and communist terror, was well acquainted with the methods of totalitarian regimes which declared victims to be criminals, which is why he decided to restore dignity to the victim Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, by beatifying him in 1998, Kosic said, calling on CNN to apologise to its audience for publishing untruths.