KGB INTENT ON LINKING PIUS XII WITH NAZIS

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 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.

DTA:

1. Baloney!

2. Alois Cardinal Stepinac was actually tried by Tito's Communist "Yugoslavian" government on these spurious charges and found innocent, was he not?

3. If all that Pius XII did was save Catholics, please explain Golda Meir's eulogy of Pius XII at the UN, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide's written work in his support, and Oxford historian (and Jewish intellectual) Benjamin Martin's many works on the subject all of which credit Pope Pius XII with saving nearly 1 million Jews and Albert Einstein's tribute to Pius XII and the Church as the only force in Europe raised to save the Jews, and Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli converting to Roman Catholicism AFTER the war and taking as his baptismal name Eugenio (Pius XII's baptismal name) while making public testimony to what he had observed personally of Pius XII's heroic defense of and interventions on behalf of the Jewish residents of Rome. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and non-Catholic made significant efforts to save many Jews and was murdered for his efforts by the same soviet union that instigated the smears against Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church.

4. Those interested in the truth ought to review the brilliant 180-page annotated bibliography of these controversies by William Doino, Jr., which makes up nearly 2/3 of a relatively recent book (2003 or so) called The Pius Wars.

5. The free world and humanity generally are better off by far because of the early death from kidney failure of Yuri Andropov soviet general secretary and former KGB boss (whose second in command of KGB was Mikhail Gorbachev) who paid for Muhammed Ali Agca's attempted assassination of John Paul II and personal assassin of the Hungarian anti-soviet revolutionaries in 1956.

6. There was a centrist political party in Germany in about 1933 which was identified as Catholic and caved before Hitler's political power and potential to harm them individually but that party should not be confused with the German Catholic Church itself much less with the Vatican or Pope Pius XII. Cardinal Faulhaber (the Lion of Munich) and many other Catholic hierarchs publicly defied Hitler and the Nazis.

7. George Will once wrote that the Balkans had produced the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and triggered World War I but had also produced much, much more in the way of tragedy over the centuries than could be consumed by the residents of the Balkans themselves. That there are bloody intramural wars waged among the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Herzogovinians, and the Montenegrans is an historical given. That anyone outside the Balkans cares to share the self-inflicted misery of the Balkans and their residents is NOT a given. One suspects that it is the internecine strife of the Balkans coupled with the fact that Croatia, whatever its shortcomings which, in this Catholic's opinion, do not BEGIN to approximate those of Serbia, is Catholic that lead you to make this sorry attempt to blacken the reputations of Pius XII and Alois Cardinal Stepinac. If you want to serve the soviet libel factory, that is your business but you have chosen a strange venue to regurgitate communist lies.

8. Pius XII's Roman Catholic Church maintained an underground railroad from Central Europe westward through Franco Spain thence to Spanish Morocco and North Africa and wherever thereafter to bring Jews out of Europe from under Hitler's nose. The Chassidic Jewish Reichmann/Gestetner family of postwar Montreal who owned the Olympia and York construction contracting firm came out of Hungary through that route as did hundreds of thousands of others.

9. Apparently you want to read into what you claim to have been Vatican action to send a Croatian dictator to postwar Argentina some suggestion of Nazi sympathy. Pius XII's Vatican, at his express orders, also saved atheist communists from "Yugoslavia" by hiding them in the Vatican from the Nazis. Hiding communists did not make Pius a communist. Assisting Pavlic would not make Pius a nazi. As to making Alois Cardinal Stepinac a cardinal, you are going to be really angry when Stepinac is canonized in spite of the smokescreen of soviet lies against him.

10. Are you Serbian or is your ancestry among the other little anti-Catholic tyrannies that abound in the Balkans? I can sympathize with anyone in the Balkans who suffered under Tito or under what amounted to Nazi satellite governments. I can respect the Orthodox Churches which have such great similarities to the Catholic Church, have the Mass, have all of the sacraments and have apostolic succession. I cannot sympathize with the relentless campaign of lies against Pope Pius XII. Nor can I sympathize with the poisonous nationalisms of the Balkans (any of them) which have worked such evils dishonestly attributing those evils to the Roman Catholic Church or to the Orthodox Church. I eagerly await the canonization of Pope Pius XII, raising him to the honors of the altar, which is very long overdue.

11. Finally, the Roman Catholic Church is a Church and is headquartered in the Vatican. The pope of any given time is the head of that Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. The Vatican City is also a national government with the pope of any given time as its monarch. As a government, the Vatican takes up secular responsibilities in addition to its obvious religious functions. The Vatican used its accredited diplomatic corps to facilitate the escape of Jews (among others) from nazi clutches. It used its legal authority to crate passports. It used its ability to accept new people as Vatican citizens. It used Vatican radio and L'Osservatore Romano, its newspaper, to combat naziism and communism. The Vatican has a secret service and maintains intelligence networks. Ask any former soviet stooge, if you know any, what role John Paul II's Vatican played (along with Reagan and Thatcher) in bringing down the Iron Curtain and the soviet union itself a scant eight years after Andropov ordered him killed.

12. Hitler was utterly incapable of bringing the Roman Catholic Church to an end. Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church and guaranteed to be with it to the very end. The Roman Catholic Church has buried the overwhelming majority of its enemies. The rest will follow by the end. Note that neither the Roman Empire, nor the third reich nor the soviet union are any longer among the existing regimes on earth. It was in all the bibles.

Thank you for a good discussion.

When I think of the "five solas" of Reformation fame --- faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, Scripture alone, and for the glory of God alone --- I'm reminded that a religious deviation is generally not an outright falsehood, but a truth gone wild. Or rather, a truth deprived of all the other truths around it which defined it and protected its meaning.

Faith alone --- but what kind of faith? A living faith, of course: because faith without works is dead. And so forth.

By the way, I'm always kind of sorry to see FReepin' dscussions on infallibility, because generally you get sincere Protestants overstating it (as if RC's believed the Pope to be an all-purpose oracle) and sincere Catholics inadvertently understating it. By this I mean that, although the technical exercise of ex-cathedral papal infallinility is vanishingly rare, the authority of the Pope is far broader than infallibility. (Otherwise, RC's would be obliged to believe nothing except the Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption of Mary -- and that would be --ahem --- truly strange.)

The main, encompassing, and yet everyday authority of the Pope (together with the all the Bishops, including those I may think are --- uh --- less than perfectly sound) is called the "Ordinary Magisterium" --- and that's a far more interesting concept. It means "everything we have always believed, held, and followed": the broad, deep, and solid consensus you find in Scripture, the Ecumenical Councils, and the Fathers of the Church.

Some have disdained this as a "theology of conservation" or a "theology of repetition." But that's OK. It's conserving the Good Stuff.

So you believe the pope can be infallible for one time and fallible for another. So these days I dont have to be catholic or subject to Rome to have salvation?

No. Where do I say that it only applied to that situation and that time? I was just bringing up the historical ground that the Bull was fashioned in as a reminder to us all. The guard rail of Papal infallibility (provided by Christ's grace and promise, Mt 28:20 "Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.") does not allow Truth to change over time. It only guards the Pope from teaching error. The historical period of Unam Sanctam called for Christ's teaching to be communicated and understood in a certain manner. Much more recently the Church has taught Christ's gospel on the same subject in the document DOMINUS IESUS.

From that document section 20: "Above all else, it must be firmly believed that “the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door”.77 This doctrine must not be set against the universal salvific will of God (cf. 1 Tim 2:4); “it is necessary to keep these two truths together, namely, the real possibility of salvation in Christ for all mankind and the necessity of the Church for this salvation”."

But it is best to read the entire document Dominus Iesus to get a true understanding of what it really says.

Why are you so hesitant to admit that what he said about recieving salvation only through subjection to Rome is not biblical teaching.

I am not hesitant. I have nothing of the sort to admit. The Church does not look for subjection to itself. The Church guides us to God as Christ's body here on earth. The Church can only point to Christ for any of its "power". Please do not back me into a corner that does only exists in your mind.

You are the one looking for power to shake up in Rome. I didn't bring up infallibility. The article only looked to clear the pope of wrong doing against the Jews in World War II. We should both understand that there is no other power in the Church than what is in the Bible and handed down by the Apostles.

You have not proven a teaching by any Pope wrong. You started this whole thing by throwing a general barb at some unidentified priests: "there have been priests that collaborated and stepped down, its not like it couldn't have been a possibility." Then you tossed out a gripe against papal infallibility (since you had no evidence against Pope Pius XII) like it was impeccable with: ...as if hes infallible or anything.

Now you seem to understand infallibility ... and we are still waiting for true evidence that any Pope taught something wrong on faith or morals. Or even more to the point of the article, true evidence that Pius XII did anything against the Jews in WWII.

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