Posted on 09/10/2012 5:51:41 PM PDT by AstralisLux
Revealed: Soviets influenced reputation of Pope Pius XII as Nazi collaborator.
Documents continue to trickle out from a number of sources, including the Vatican, that may begin to restore the image of the wartime pope who at the time was heralded as a champion of the rights of Europe’s minorities, including the Jewish community...
(Excerpt) Read more at speroforum.com ...
...In their forthcoming book, Disinformation, author Ion Pacepa and co-author Ronald Rychlak, offer new evidence of a widespread campaign by the Soviet Union to portray the Catholic Church and the papacy as Hitler’s dupes or collaborators. This began even before the war ended, according to Pacepa – a former Romanian intelligence officer – who was part of the disinformation campaign to besmirch the record of Pope Pius XII.
For example, on June 3, 1945, Radio Moscow proclaimed that Pope Pius XII was effectively “Hitler’s Pope,” thus implicating him in the extermination of the Jews. This was counter to an address made by the pope just the day before, in which the pontiff condemned before the College of Cardinals the “satanic spectre of Nazism.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed appreciation for the pope’s “assisistance to the victims of racial and religious persecutions” in a public letter. Previously, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of Pius XII as “the greatest man of our time.” And it was Albert Einstein who would later say, “Only the Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then, I had not been interested in the Church, but today I felt a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty.” Similar sentiments were also expressed by the earliest leaders of the modern state of Israel.
The above accolades run counter to the image of Pius XII that was later developed, as part of the disinformation campaign launched by the Soviets, according to later analysts. In an interview with Spero News, Professor Ronald Rychlak of the University of Mississippi College of Law, author of Hitler, the War, and Pope Pius XII and Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church saved Half a Million Jews From the Nazis, sought to put the image of the so-called ‘Hitler’s Pope’ into historical context in light of new evidence.
Rychlak said “Pope Pius XII’s reputation flipped dramatically,” especially at the beginning of the 1960s, due to a Soviet campaign using fabricated histories, dramatic plays, and other methods of spreading disinformation that came amidst cruel persecution of Catholics living in the Soviet Union. It was in 1962 that Rolf Hochhuth's Der Stellvertreter: Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, A Christian Tragedy, was released in English in 1964) portrayed the Pope as a hypocrite who remained silent in the face of the annihilation of European Jews. Thus began a revision of the view of Pius XII held by many during his life. Some analysts even dismiss the accolades the Pope received from Golda Meir, an American who would later become Israel’s prime minister, as mere diplomatic niceties aimed at obtaining Vatican recognition of the Israeli government.
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The 60’s were the times of renewed persecutions of Christians of every kind in the Soviet Union, but unlike the Orthodox, whose Moscow Patriarchate collaborated with the Soviets since 1923, the Catholics were subject of special hostility. A large number of Central European Catholics fell under Communist rule after the Second World War.
If My requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions against the Church.
Certainly "Russia" has been spreading errors throughout the world since 1917.
And since 1917 the world has been uncritically ingesting these errors as though they were writ ex cathedra. It is extraordinary how leftist propaganda is given credibility in the West.
They must have had Walter Duranty covering this story.
Oh shock! The slander the Godless and the leftists repeat about Pius comes from the Communists.
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