Posted on 02/04/2007 9:00:31 PM PST by Dqban22
Pius XII and WWII
KGB intent on linking Pius XII with Nazis, says former spy
Washington DC, Jan 26, 2007 / 04:18 pm (CNA).- A former high-ranking officer with the KGB claims that the Kremlin and the Russian intelligence agency in the 1960s were set on executing a smear campaign against the Catholic Church, and the main target was Pope Pius XII.
In a recent issue of the National Review Online, Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who eventually defected from the former Soviet bloc, recounts how the KGB and the Kremlin designed the deliberate campaign to portray the Pius XII “as a coldhearted Nazi sympathizer.”
“In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe,” writes Pacepa. “Eugenio Pacelli, by then Pope Pius XII, was selected as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had departed this world in 1958. ‘Dead men cannot defend themselves’ was the KGB’s latest slogan.”
The code name for this operation against Pope Pius XII was “Seat-12.”
The KGB used the fact that Archbishop Pacelli had served as the papal nuncio in Munich and Berlin when the Nazis were beginning their bid for power against him. “The KGB wanted to depict him as an anti-Semite who had encouraged Hitler’s Holocaust,” says Pacepa.
To do this, the KGB wanted some original Vatican documents to “slightly modify”. So they called in Pacepa, who was working for the Romanian intelligence service.
Pacepa says he became the Romanian point man. He was authorized to falsely inform the Vatican that Romania was ready to restore its broken relations with the Holy See, in exchange for access to its archives — in order to find historical roots that would help the Romanian government publicly justify its change of heart toward the Holy See — and a one-billion-dollar, interest-free loan for 25 years.
Between 1960 and 1962, the Romanian spy sent hundreds of archival documents connected in any way with Pope Pius XII to the KGB. Pacepa says none of the documents were incriminating in themselves, but they were sent to the KGB in any case.
The KGB used these documents to produce a powerful play attacking Pope Pius XII, entitled The Deputy. It eventually saw the stage in Germany in 1963, under the title The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy. It proposed that Pius XII had supported Hitler and encouraged him to go ahead with the Jewish Holocaust. The German director claimed to have 40 pages of documentation attached to the script that would support the thesis of the play.
The play ran in New York in 1964 and was translated into 20 languages. The play then led to a flurry of books and articles, some accusing and some defending the pontiff.
“Today, many people who have never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and evil man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler do away with them,” Pacepa writes in the National Review Online. “As KGB chairman Yury Andropov, the unparalleled master of Soviet deception, used to tell me, people are more ready to believe smut than holiness.”
Pacepa says the truth has finally begun to emerge with the canonization process of Pius XII, which was opened by Pope John Paul II.
“Witnesses from all over the world have compellingly proved that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler,” says Pacepa.
He also refers to the book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews From the Nazis, by David G. Dalin, which has compiled further proof of Archbishop Pacelli’s friendship for the Jews.
“At the start of World War II, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany,” he concludes.
Woe betide the superficial crank who decides to undertake intellectual suicide by locking horns with you.
KUDOS, brother. I am copying and pasting and emailing this out to me family.
You know, I think your attitude about that part of the world is one reason you are never invited over to share bad wine with Tom Fleming :)
Here is a whole file on Wartime rescue of the Jews by Polish Catholic Clergy
http://www.savingjews.org/docs/clergy_rescue.pdf
I think that Vietnamese people generally have some verrrrrry substantial grievances against the soviets and against the Hanoi regime. Many Vietnamese are US citizens now. Should they be clogging American courts over the real depredations against them or, unlike the perpetually aggrieved Serbians, will they continue to maintain their dignity, appreciate the opportunities afforded by the United States for a better life than was available in their dismal homeland and get on with their lives.
I shall never give a moment's sympathy to any group of people who live to perpetually pester the world with their narrow and usually invalid version of their fanaticism and their ohhhhhhh, sooooooooo terrible litany of the injustices that those long dead have suffered along with perhaps a few dozen survivors.
I am a Roman Catholic. The Ku Klux Klan persecuted Catholics here in this country. So did the 1850s Know Nothings. When my grandmother got off the boat in South Boston at 12 years old, she saw the signs posted by nativists saying: Job Available No Irish Need Apply! I really don't much care at this late date about bigotry against Catholics. Whatever the aggravations, we Catholics have done rather well in the essentially Protestant United States, better than most have done in Ireland or other countries from which our ancestors came.
You are flat out wrong and, indeed, possessed of quite bigoted and untrue lies regarding Cardinal Stepinac. You accept the communist propaganda about him while quite possibly having no communist sympathies, using communist lies to buttress your own chronic prejudices against Croatians and or Catholics. No one here says you have to like Catholics much less Croatians. Nor is it written that any American need have any use for the chronic Serbian grievance industry. I don't think we had any business getting involved in the matter of Kosovo either. I think that the chronic squabbling among the insignificant nations of the Balkans belong, well, in the Balkans.
I am partially Irish. I have Catholic and Protestant relatives there. There is injustice on BOTH sides. If the Ian Paisleys and the IRA provos cannot behave like civilized human beings, I think it would be a great idea to lock them all in one big secure warehouse with fully automatic weapons, infinite supplies of ammunition, nothing to hide behind and a supply of body bags equal to the number of combatants inside. Shoot the last survivor(s) and bury the lot of them. Likewise Serbs, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Montenegrans and Croats who just insist on prolonging their essentially insignificant differences infinitely. There are no great principles at stake there, just perpetually dueling bigotries. Trust me, most Americans of whatever persuasion really do not give a rat's patoot over the faux causes that motivate those permanently aggrieved and professionally "outraged" communities of the Balkans. There are a lot more Irish here than Yugoslavians and even we Irish are generally not moved by all those nutcases on all sides in the auld sod (Ireland for those in Rio Linda) who just cannot grow up and get over it.
Grow up and get over it. Ohhh, and if they suffered in Croatia, their lawsuits belong there too, preferably before Croatian juries.
Heresies always serve the greater good of the Church because God draws the good of truth out of the evil of heresy while extinguishing any errors attached to it and we layman end-up seeing the pellucid truth even clearer.
It is interesting to me that you here are engaged in a not dissimilar work.
You are doing the work of the Church in the secular realm by clarifying the facts and letting the light of truth burn-off the dross of calumny leveled against Christian Prelates by enemies of the Church. God Bless you, sir. Thank you.
I know you know your good work will not go unpunished :)
Already the guilt-by-association charges abound...
Actually, Benito Mussolini was "Il Duce" from the, ummmm, Latin third declension noun: dux, ducis which means leader. Any Italian word in between was not the root but the intermediary. I don't think that claiming a title of nobility (Duca or Duke) was consistent with Mussolini's politics when he was a socialist leftist newspaper editor or when he was a fascist dictator trying to re-establish the lost glory that had been Rome by trying (in vain) to conquer mighty Ethiopia. O tempora, o mores!
Yeah, but I should only do history as well as you handle theology.
Nice job of drawing out the religious part of his agenda! Sorry not to have pinged you. Glad you were patrolling anyhow.
I was about to take Perfidious England to court for what Old New England did to me ancestors in Ireland. And then I was gonna sue for what they did to my Algonguin ancestors in New New England. I was gonna sue for millions.
England sold some of me family as SLAVES. Did Oprah star in a movie called Potatoes; The Root of all Slavery
NO.
And now, what is the point? If I can't nurse my grudge all the way to the grave, do I really LOVE my progenitors?
OH,Oh.. and this too. Me Grandfather on me Dad's side converted to Catholicism in the 1930's in Vermont. His neighbors celebrated the occasion by burning a Cross in his back yard. I got PLENTY of stories like this. Me Great Great had to flee to Canada from Ireland just 'cause he bumped-off a Limey Cop. Where's the justice in that? Since WHEN can't a native Catholic gun-down an occupying cop and then have all sides just have a good laugh over it and then forget and forgive? I tell ya, them Brits are finicky and petty about those events...
Why won't you people LISTEN to me? You think Jesus had it tough...HEAR MY PAIN......
And the role of Tito and his spreading communism in Yugoslavia played what role in the Church's support?
Matthew 16 may make for interesting reading, but Matthew 7 makes even more so.
It talks about a wise man who build it house on the rock. Could it be the same rock that is referenced in Matthew 16?
Thank my brother in Christ, bornacatholic
Hatred and deep bigotry is behind the slanderous campaign against His Holiness, Pius XII, and the Catholic Church.
In 1942, Croatia's Jews were being brutally persecuted by the Nazi-installed dictatorship. On August 4, Chief Rabbi Miroslav Freiberger of Zagreb, Croatia's capital, sought more assistance from Pius XII. Already, the Vatican's unofficial diplomatic representative in Croatia, Msgr. Joseph Marcone, who was acting on Cardinal Maglione's instructions, and Archbishop Alois Stepinac opposed the anti-Jewish persecutions. In his letter, Chief Rabbi Freiberger appreciated "the limitless goodness that the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church showed to our poor brothers." (Actes, VIII, p. 611). Throughout the war, the Chief Rabbi continued to express his gratitude to the Vatican for helping Croatian Jews.
Pius XII and the Vatican opposed the forced conversion to Catholicism of Orthodox Serb and Croatians as strongly as they opposed the persecution of Orthodox Serbs and Gypsies by the pro-Nazi regimen of the new created state of Croatia.. The Holy See did expressly repudiate the forced conversions in a memorandum dated January 25, 1942, from the Vatican Secretiat of State to the Yugoslavian Legation.
Professor Ronald J. Rychlak in his book “Hitler, The War and the Pope” discredited most of the falsehoods used by enemies of The Church in order do defame His Holiness Pius XII and the Holy See.
One of the most controversial was the meeting of Pius XII and the fascist dictator of the newly created Croatian State, a puppet regimen obedient to Hitler dictates. On 18 May 1941, Pope Pius XII received the head of the Croation fascist state, Ante Pavelic.
While the Vatican had received Pavelic as an individual Catholic, not as head of state, there were political implications as a result of this reception. Before his reception, the Yugoslav minister to the Holy See brought to the Vatican’s attention Pavelic’s involvement in committing atrocities against the Serbs and protested the reception of Pavelic in any capacity because he was the head of an “illegitimate” puppet state.
Subsequently, Pavelic's regime was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, gypsies, and partisans. It is not known how the Pope reacted to these atrocities. Are there any archival materials that can illuminate this issue?
Many unanswered questions also surround the Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac, beatified in 1999. While in 1941 he initially welcomed the creation of a Croatian state, he subsequently condemned atrocities against Serbs and Jews and established an organization to rescue Jews. Are there any archival documents or materials from the beatification process that can illuminate this matter?
Professor Rychlak explained the background and consequences of the encounter of Pius XII with Pavelic.
Croatia came into being during the war. On March 25, 1941, Italy, Germany, and Yugoslavia signed an agreement bringing Yugoslavia into the Axis. Two days later, a group of Serbian nationalists seized control of Belgrade and announced that they were siding with the Allies. As a result, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia. Croat Fascists then declared an independent Croatia. The new Croat government was led by Ante Pavelic and his supporters, the Ustashe.
There had been a long history of hatred in this part of the world between Croats (predominantly Catholic) and Serbs (mainly Orthodox). The Ustashi government exacted revenge against the Serbs for years of perceived discrimination. According to some accounts, as many as 700,000 Serbs were slaughtered. Among the charges against the Catholic Church in Croatia are that it engaged in forcible conversions, that Church officials hid Croat Nazis after the war, that Nazi gold made its way from Croatia to the Vatican, and that Catholic leaders in Croatia supported the governments brutality toward the Serbs.
While some of these charges are recent in origin (and from suspect sources), there is no credible evidence that the Pope or the Vatican behaved inappropriately. For instance, the Vatican expressly repudiated forcible conversions in a memorandum, dated January 25, 1942, from the Vatican Secretariat of State to the Legation of Yugoslavia to the Holy See (addressing conversions in Croatia).
In August of that year, the Grand Rabbi of Zagreb, Dr. Miroslav Freiberger, wrote to Pius XII expressing his “most profound gratitude” for the “limitless goodness that the representatives of the Holy See and the leaders of the Church showed to our poor brothers.” [Actes et Documents, vol. VIII, no. 441. See also id. vol. VIII, no. 537 (report on Vatican efforts to alleviate the sad conditions of the Croatian Jews); id. vol. VIII, no. 473 (efforts to find sanctuary for Croatian Jews in Italy); id. vol. VIII, no. 557 (insistence on “a benevolent treatment toward the Jews”).]
In October, a message went out from the Vatican to its representatives in Zagreb regarding the “painful situation that spills out against the Jews in Croatia” and instructing them to petition the government for “a more benevolent treatment of those unfortunates.” In December 1942, Dr. Freiberger wrote again, expressing his confidence “in the support of the Holy See.”
The Cardinal Secretary of State=s notes reflect that Vatican petitions were successful in getting a suspension of “dispatches of Jews from Croatia” by January 1943, but Germany was applying pressure for “an attitude more firm against the Jews.” Maglione went on to outline various steps that could be taken by the Holy See to help the Jews.
Another instruction from the Holy See to its unofficial representatives (since there were no diplomatic relations) in Zagreb directing them to work on behalf of the Jews went out on March 6, 1943. On September 24, 1943, Alex Easterman, the British representative of the World Jewish Congress, contacted Msgr. William Godfrey, the apostolic delegate in London and informed him that about 4,000 Jewish refugees from Croatia were safely evacuated to an island in the Adriatic Sea. “I feel sure that efforts of your Grace and of the Holy See have brought about this fortunate result,” wrote Easterman.
Croatian Archbishop Alojzij Stepinac originally welcomed the Ustashi government, but after he learned of the extent of the brutality, and after having received direction from Rome, he condemned its actions. [The British Minister to the Holy See during the war years, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, wrote that Stepinac always acted according to the “well-intended dictates of his conscience.”] A speech he gave on October 24, 1942, is typical of many that he made refuting Nazi theory:
“All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction. Those who are Gypsies, Black, European, or Aryan all have the same rights.... for this reason, the Catholic Church had always condemned, and continues to condemn, all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories of class, race, or nationality. It is not permissible to persecute Gypsies or Jews because they are thought to be an inferior race.”
The Associated Press reported that “by 1942 Stepinac had become a harsh critic” of that Nazi puppet regime, condemning its “genocidal policies, which killed tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Croats.” He thereby earned the enmity of the Croatian dictator, Ante Pavelic.
Although Cornwell argues that the Holy See granted de facto recognition to the Ustashi government, in actuality the Vatican rebuked Pavelic and refused to recognize the Independent State of Croatia or receive a Croatian representative. [Actes et Documents, vol. IV, no. 400 (“Pavelic is furious... because... he is treated worse by the Holy See than the Slovaks”).] When Pavelic traveled to the Vatican, he was greatly angered because he was permitted only a private audience rather than the diplomatic audience he had wanted. He might not even have been granted that privilege, but for the fact that the extent of the atrocities that had already begun were not yet known.
Josip Broz Tito was a Croat, Roman Catholic and Communist dictator. Some say that he was excommunicated from The RC Church in 1945 after putting Stepinac on trial. Maybe he was excommun icated even earlier. However, Tito was received in private audience with Pope Paul VI. Only God knows what they spoke about.
Usually, the extraordinary privilege of private audience is not granted to people who are not suporting RC church. Especially not to two bit Communist dictators.
Hopefully, one day, the Vatican archive will be opened and we will learn more.
bookmark
ALTHOUGH PIUS XII AS CHIEF OF STATE OF THE HOLY SEE RECEIVED MANY FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, HE NEVER MET HITLER NEITHER AS POPE, NOR AS SECRETARY OF STATE, OR AS APOSTOLIC NUNCIO TO GERMANY. REAGAN RECEIVED GORBACHEV PRIVATELY, DOES IT MEANT THAT REAGAN WAS A CLOSET COMMUNIST OR WAS THE COMMUNIST LEADER SUPPORTING REAGAN'S GOAL OF DEFATING THE SOVIET UNION???
If you accept what the NT teaches, that Jesus Christ founded a Church, that it is "One Church" because it is the Body of One Christ (and we are one because we are in Him), that it was built and organized by the Apostles whom He called by name for this purpose, and that the Gates of Hell have not prevailed and thus it has had a continuous, organized, living and organic existence from AD 33 til now, --- that should narrow the field and focus your attention considerably.
I dont serve Rome nor ever will. I go directly to God the father through Jesus.
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Good question, and you'll notice that all the "rock" and "stone" imagery in the OT and the NT are related: the 12 stones which represent the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 foundation stones in Revelation which have on them the names of the 12 Apostles, Peter ("Rock"), all of us believers who are "living stones," and of course Jesus THE Rock. Even the rock which "followed" the children of Israel in the desert, was Christ.
(Excuse mty lack of chapter and verse here. I presume you recognize these familiar references,and it's 10:30 PM, I don't have time to look it all up.)
The point being, we who are "in Christ" participate in a way in His "rockishness." Peter was specially singles out, named and appointed as a big un' --- and people like me, well, you can call me "Pebbles."
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