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<xml><p> 27 page printout
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
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<p> This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.</p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius</p>
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<p>THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 2</p>
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<p> HOW THE POPE OF PEACE TRADED IN BLOOD</p>
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<p> THE RED POPE
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by Joseph McCabe</p>
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<p> HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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**** ****</p>
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<p> Chapter I</p>
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<p> THE RED RECORD OF THE HOLY FATHERS</p>
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<p> The color chosen by the Popes is White. Their flag, it is
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true, White and Gold, to remind us that they are Kings and need a
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royal revenue of a billion a year, but that is, they say, necessary
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to a ruler of the world. Their personal color-theme is white, a
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flowing white cassock and a white-silk skull-cap: symbols of their
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purity life and purpose and their never-ceasing efforts to keep the
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world in peace and tranquillity. The vast economic organization
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over which they preside, the Black International, takes its name
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from the black-garbed clergy. For more than a hundred years after
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America had embodied the elementary rights, of man in a
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Constitution the priests called the claim of those rights in other
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countries Liberalism and waged a bitter, blood-soaked fight against
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it. This was the historic battle of the Blacks and the Whites
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(Liberals).</p>
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<p> Toward the end of the nineteenth century a new color, Red,
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appeared in the arena. Whites and Blacks shuddered and got together
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to oppress it. Red meant blood, violence, war. As I explained in
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the last book, our folk are now educated in so false a version of
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history, because truth is offensive to our Catholic fellow-
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citizens, that few know the irony of this. Particularly in America
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men and women were persuaded to greet the new banner with hatred,
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rage, and disgust. These newcomers who preached violence, cruelty,
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and war were outside the pale of our Christian civilization. Shoot
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the dogs down, as Luther said about the rebel-peasants of his time.
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Let me here just outline the historical evidence that the real
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Reds, in this sense, are, and always have been, the Popes and their
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bishops.</p>
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<p> We have read hundreds of times the prophecy of the famous
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||
British essayist, Lord Macaulay that when in some remote age a
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||
traveller comes from New Zealand to see the ruins of London the
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||
Papacy will still flourish. These literary men! Not only does it
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||
seem unlikely that New Zealand will ever support 5,000,000 people
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||
but the idea that an institution which has lasted 1800 years will
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last another few millennia, or even a century, is childish. In </p>
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||
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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THE RED POPE</p>
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<p>Macaulay's time the world was beginning to perceive that
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institutions which appeared thousands of years ago probably had
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||
their roots in ignorance. There were then twenty Kings in Europe.
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A century later there were ten, and most of them looked nervously
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upon a hostile world. In another ten years they will probably be
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reduced to one.</p>
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<p> The Papacy is far more vulnerable than monarchy. As the
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supreme head of the western half of Christianity it was established
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||
about the middle of fifth century. It is quite literally what
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||
Hobbes called it, "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting upon the
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||
grave thereof." As long as that Empire maintain civilization every
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||
branch of the Church, east and west, scorned the Pope's
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||
pretensions. But in a world of blind men the one-eyed man is king,
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||
and Rome ruled the ruins. The Popes were masters of a that was so
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||
debased that during the next seven centuries all Europe did not
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||
produce one book that any but a bookworm now reads or raise one
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building that any but an antiquarian would cross the street to
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||
examine.</p>
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||
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<p> The brilliant civilization which the Arabs meantime created in
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||
Spain and Sicily at last awakened Europe from its hog-like
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slumbers, and for the next eight centuries the power of the Popes
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||
was based upon violence and bloodshed. A distinguished German
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||
historian has estimated that their victims numbered more than
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10,000,00 in 500 years. Certainly they numbered some millions.
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Until the American and French Revolutions these were frankly called
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||
Heretics. Then the world, under the lead of America, decided that
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it was a crime to put men to death for religion, so they were
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||
called Liberals, and the Church got half a million of them
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liquidated. By the twentieth century civilization generally had
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become Liberal so they were called Reds or Bolsheviks. Very few
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people are taught in school -- except in those disreputable
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Communist Schools -- that it is simply an historical truth that
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their flag is "red with martyrs' blood."</p>
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||
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<p> Is it credible that the Holy Fathers, clad in the symbols of
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peace and purity, were guilty of these things? I recently published
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in England a History of the Popes (1939) in which I could pay more
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||
attention to the characters of the Popes than in my larger True
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Story of the Roman Catholic Church (1930). Let me say shamelessly,
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that I read the original authorities in Greek, Latin, Italian,
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Spanish, German and French, and no Catholic has ever attempted to
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answer any of my historical work. And I say, coldly, that these
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Holy Fathers shed more blood in defense of their wealth and power
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than all the other historic religions put together and that the
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record of their vices is the worst in the whole history of
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religion.</p>
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||
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<p> There have been about 260 of these Vicars of Christ, as they
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call themselves. It is difficult to tell the exact number because
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in certain periods there were two or three truculently fighting for
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the holy title. In the tenth century there were 30 in 100 years --
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there have been only six in the last 100 years -- and it is
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impossible to be sure how many were murdered by rivals. Let us say
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that there have been 260. We know nothing about the character of
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||
the great majority of these during the first thousand years of the </p>
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||
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
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2
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THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
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<p>Christian Era. Catholic literature gives the title of martyr to
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||
nearly every Pope to the year 310, though their most learned
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historian, Duchesne, admits that only two were martyred. It gives
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the title of Saint to all but one of them to the fifth century,
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||
whereas we have definite information about only three of them, and
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||
one of these (St. Victor) was at least shady, the second (St.
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||
Callistus) was definitely a crook, and the third (St. Damasus) was
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||
a forger, and an employer of murderous mobs and was charged under
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||
the civil law with adultery. In short, of the 150 or so Popes about
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||
whose characters we can be fairly sure at least 30 were sexually
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||
loose men (six or seven of them sodomists) and about a dozen
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murderers. Scores besides these were men of vile temper and great
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cruelty; and most of them were guilty of simony, nepotism, and
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protecting corruption.</p>
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<p> So put out of your mind the conventional gush about "venerable
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heads of the great Church," and remember that even the best Popes
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were terrible shedders of blood. The holiest of them all, Innocent
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III, was responsible for about 500,000 victims in 18 years (1198-
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1216). The question here is whether this is ancient stuff that
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throws no light or has no bearing on the conduct of the Papacy in
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modern times. That is what Catholics say and most people believe;
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||
but you will not understand the situation today unless you realize
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||
that the "Red Record" which is the title of this chapter, mainly
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||
refers to the record of the Popes from the fall of Napoleon (1814)
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to our own time.</p>
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||
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<p> I said in the last booklet that during this period about
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||
500,000 men, women, and children were done to death by the Church
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and the feudal monarchs in alliance. With that disgusting meanness
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to which the difficulties of their case drives them, Catholic
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writers represent, and try to compel other writers and works of
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reference to represent, these martyrs as a sort of early type of
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Reds, or dangerous agitators against the social order as well as
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religion. On the contrary they were as a rule less radical than
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Washington and Jefferson. Republicanism was rare amongst them, and
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||
the had no idea of persecuting the Church or, even in most cases,
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||
of disestablishing it. They were just men and women who wanted
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||
kings to govern them constitutionally and the Church to suppress
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||
the horrible Inquisition and its vile dungeons. For this Kings and
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||
Popes fell upon them, through the armies, police, and fanatical
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mobs, with incredible savagery.</p>
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||
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<p> Do not listen to the excuse that it was still the Middle Ages.
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Napoleon had made an end of that horror. Some now put Napoleon on
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||
a level with our modern dictators, but with all his faults he was
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||
a clean fighter, only in one case accused of murder (the Duc
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d'Enghien), and he did magnificent work for Europe. He was a
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||
skeptic, of course, as Lord Rosebery shows in The Last Phase
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||
(1900), but he showered wealth and favor upon the Church -- on the
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||
usual terms: the priests must keep the old Republicans quiet for
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||
him. Yet after his fall the bishops joined with the royalists in a
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White Terror which was more brutal than the Red Terror.</p>
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||
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<p> Catholics represent Pope Pius VII as a "martyr" under
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Napoleon. They do not tell how under this Pius VII, when Napoleon
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was beaten, tens of thousands of Liberals were martyred and under
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||
his three successors hundreds of thousands. Well, what were these </p>
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<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
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3
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THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
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<p>Holy Fathers, of modern times, like, and what were they protecting?
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If you want a serious and unchallengeable answer look up that
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highly respectable and most weighty authority the Cambridge Modern
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History (Vol. X). You will find that Leo XII, who succeeded Pious
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-- the Carbolic Encyclopedia admires his "intelligence and masterly
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energy" -- was a converted rake and a doddering old fool who was
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"hated by all, princes and beggars" (as the famous historian L. von
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Ranke who knew him, said) and his death was hailed by the Romans
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||
"with indecent joy" (the Prussian ambassador at Rome said). While
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||
he shot birds in the Vatican garden his troops, with a sanguinary
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||
cardinal in command, shot down his rebels, and many thousands of
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||
them suffered a living death in jails of a repulsive character.</p>
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||
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<p> At his death the cardinals, after invoking the light of the
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Holy Spirit, elected, to meet the grave problems of the new Europe
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a man in the last stage of senile decay, drooling at the mouth as
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they wheeled him round the Vatican garden in his baby-carriage. The
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carnage of rebels went on. He soon died, and the fierce contest of
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cardinals for the holy office was renewed. The ablest candidate
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Albani, but he was so notorious a rogue that they thought the
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||
heretics of England and Prussia might make ribald remarks if they
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elected him Vicar of Christ, so they made him Secretary of State
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(and real ruler of the Church) and elected a monk Gregory XVI.</p>
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||
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<p> Gregory was according to all Italian historians vulgar,
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||
sensual, and frivolous. As one of the more distinguished of them
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||
says, he "absorbed himself in ignoble interests while the country
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||
groaned under misrule." It was widely believed in Rome that he was
|
||
intimate with the wife of his valet, and he was notorious for his
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||
love of strong wine and candy. His horrible jails were crammed with
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||
rebels -- 6,000 at one time -- and the best blood of Italy was
|
||
poured out or driven abroad. His ignorance was weird. He refused to
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||
admit even gas and railways into the Papal States, as if that meant
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||
that the devil got his foot in the door.</p>
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||
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<p> After fifteen years of this the cardinals elected what
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||
Catholics call a Liberal Pope, Pius IX. But when he found that
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||
Liberals wanted real freedom and a share in reforming his corrupt
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||
kingdom he fled in disguise and called upon the Catholic powers to
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||
kill his rebels for him. Then the jails were crammed again. In
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Civita Veechia, which had once been enlivened by the orgies of
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||
medieval Holy Fathers, rebels with a life-sentence were chained to
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||
the wall and not released even for relieving themselves. So the
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||
brutality continued until the Italians bought off the Pope's French
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protectors and took over, with an overwhelming vote of the
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inhabitants, the Papal Kingdom.</p>
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||
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<p> What was this kingdom (the Papal States) which they had shed
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so much blood to protect? There is no dispute amongst non-Catholic
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historians, and some Catholic historian's agree, that it was "the
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most corrupt, backward, vicious, and inept in Europe." The British
|
||
ambassador publicly declared it "the opprobrium of Europe." The
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||
leading monarchs of Europe in 1832 publicly warned the Papacy --
|
||
which is now pressed upon us as the most profound and serene oracle
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||
on political morality -- that unless it cleaned up its Augaean
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stable they would clean it themselves. Rome was described by a
|
||
devout French priest as "the most hideous sewer that was ever
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||
opened up to the eye of man;" and this is approvingly quoted by a </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
4
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
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<p>Catholic historian in the Cambridge Modern History (X, 164) in
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||
which all this is admitted. The real ruler or Secretary of State,
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Cardinal Antonelli, who had been born in a peasant's hut, died
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worth $20,000,000, and left a bastard daughter, the Countess
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Lambertini clamoring for it.</p>
|
||
|
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<p> South Italy, the Kingdom of Naples, was virtually an extension
|
||
of the Pope's Kingdom in respect of Papal influence; and it
|
||
rivalled the Papal States in corruption and viciousness. Its
|
||
monarchs, the Pope's beloved sons, were veritable Neros. From 1790
|
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to 1860 they slaughtered, sometimes with revolting barbarity, about
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200,000 "Liberals." And since the Kings of Spain and Portugal were
|
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just as servile to the Popes we are entitled to bring their
|
||
misdeeds also under the heading of the "moral influence" of the
|
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Popes. Their "Butcher's bill" in 50 years was between 50,000 and
|
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100,000. The savagery was so indiscriminate that no one can get
|
||
nearer to the truth.</p>
|
||
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<p> Well, well, the Catholic says, this is still ancient history
|
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-- less than a century ago -- and with the glorious pontificate of
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Leo XIII a new era was inaugurated; the era of those beautiful
|
||
encyclicals on socio-political matters which are quoted in every
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||
Catholic apology that is put before the American public. For an
|
||
understanding of the present situation it is very important to
|
||
realize that there was no change of policy whatever at the Vatican.
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||
That is why I have given this very slight outline of the bloody
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||
history of the past, which is fully described in my earlier works.
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||
The policy of violence was merely suspended until it could once
|
||
more be applied.</p>
|
||
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<p> Leo XIII could not, if he wanted, maintain the vile practices
|
||
of his predecessors. Italy and France witnessed a rapid growth of
|
||
skepticism in high quarters after 1870 and would not tolerate Papal
|
||
interference or advice. Poland was under Russia, which treated the
|
||
Pope as an Italian monkey. Austria, brought down by its defeats was
|
||
becoming very Liberal. The horrors of the dead Papal Kingdom and of
|
||
Naples were told by hundreds of writers and orators in Europe and
|
||
America. Moreover, the, Vatican had begun to see remarkable
|
||
possibilities of wealth in "converting", America and Great Britain,
|
||
and the Catholics in those countries had as yet not the least
|
||
influence on the press and education and could not have concealed
|
||
atrocities as they now do. So the wolf put on sheep's clothing for
|
||
a few years.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Then the menace of the Reds began and gave them their
|
||
opportunity. There was still only one country in which the "right
|
||
to kill", which (we saw in the last book) was solemnly reaffirmed
|
||
by Leo XIII, could be made the basis of policy. Spain was
|
||
geographically isolated and few people abroad took much notice of
|
||
it. In fact, in the last decade of the century the ruling and
|
||
wealthy classes everywhere were beginning to sniff at this Red
|
||
menace and would not inquire too closely. So in Spain the
|
||
hierarchy, which was more intimately connected with Rome than that
|
||
of any other country, began to cooperate with the corrupt state on
|
||
the old lines. From 1895 to 1909, when Ferrer was murdered and I
|
||
roused so much public attention that the policy had again to be
|
||
suspended, hundreds of rebels were shot and thousands tortured in
|
||
jail.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
5
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> They were not "anarchists." I became an intimate friend of one
|
||
of them, Professor Tarrida del Marmol, who fled to London and was
|
||
under sentence of death in Spain. He was a fine scholar and a
|
||
spanish gentleman of the best type, a man of aristocratic family.
|
||
loathed violence and was an anarchist only in the Tolstoian sense.
|
||
His great crime was that he was a rebel against the Church. In the
|
||
vile dungeons of Montjuich, where he was imprisoned, he saw what
|
||
was done. Men were fed for days on salt fish and dry bread and
|
||
refused water. Cords were tied tightly on their genitals. It was
|
||
afterwards proved that most of the "anarchist plots" were police
|
||
plots, and the Church was fully implicated. This want on under Leo
|
||
XIII and Pius X, and it brings the Red Record of the Popes down to
|
||
our own time. It continued in the only country in the world in
|
||
which it could be continued.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Chapter II</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> WHO IS THIS PIUS XII?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The present Pope Pius XII, is hailed throughout the Catholic
|
||
world as the Pope of Peace. Cardinal Hinsley explains in his
|
||
introduction to The Pope Speaks (1940) that the beautiful motto of
|
||
his ancient and aristocratic family is (translated): "Peace is the
|
||
Fruit of Justice." Yes; Mussolini has said that hundreds of times,
|
||
with the accent on the word justice. Hitler merely wants justice
|
||
and then he will give what is left of us peace. I am going to show
|
||
that Pius XII above any other Pope of modern times, even Pius IX,
|
||
is entitled to be called the Red Pore, the Pope of War.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> One of the flatterers of "the venerable Church" has called him
|
||
"the Greatest Neutral." He never has been neutral. For at least
|
||
five years he has openly called for war on Bolshevism in Mexico,
|
||
Spain, China, and Russia. Does anyone suppose that he was thinking
|
||
of ancient Jericho and merely wanted the priests to blow their
|
||
trumpets? He was summoning Italy, Germany, Japan, and the United
|
||
States to war. Leaving out the United States, which was unwilling
|
||
to draw the chestnuts out of the fire for the Pope and Wall Street,
|
||
in this slogan which Pacelli, as Secretary of State, sent echoing
|
||
through the Catholic world he was shrieking for just that war on
|
||
Spain, China, and Russia which we have seen.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> I am sometimes asked what Catholic apologists reply to these
|
||
very serious historical and actual charges which I make. They never
|
||
reply. They forbid their people to read me, which is much easier.
|
||
But do not Catholics regard that maneuver with suspicion? Listen.
|
||
The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland published a cheap booklet by
|
||
the Jesuit priest D.A. Lord with the title I Can Read Anything. It
|
||
meets the natural wish of many Catholics to read both sides, and it
|
||
takes the usual line that the books they are forbidden to read are
|
||
filthy and mendacious but dangerously clever. Catholic young men
|
||
and women are asked to be too sensible to "pit their minds" against
|
||
"the trained, clever, brilliant minds" of the Church's critics. And
|
||
lest the Catholic should ask if the Church and its 350,000,000
|
||
followers does not include a few equally brilliant writers to reply
|
||
the priest goes on (p. 22)</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> And when they [the anti-Church writer's] are utterly
|
||
unscrupulous, as let's say, Joseph McCabe is, and will twist
|
||
any little bit of history to make a case, and pile yarn on
|
||
yarn to construct a proof, and use fable for fact and
|
||
supposition for solid argument, what chance has the average
|
||
reader against them?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The English Catholic Truth Society dare not publish this -- as
|
||
my friend Haldeman-Julitis shares the Jesuits' opposition with me
|
||
I gather that the book is of American origin -- because the British
|
||
libel courts are the straightest in the world. In an Irish court I
|
||
would get as much justice as a Jew in Berlin, So when folk in
|
||
England write to ask for the Catholic reply to me the officials
|
||
send them an address in Dublin where they can get this cowardly
|
||
little rag. Inquirers have reported this to me.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> If anybody is unaware, which hardly seems likely, that the
|
||
present Pope has for the last five or six years used all his
|
||
influence to get Italy, Germany, and Japan to make war,
|
||
respectively, on Spain, Russia, and China, which would mean a
|
||
world-war, he will have ample evidence later. First let us see how
|
||
this Red Pope became what he is.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Eugenic Pacelli comes of what is commonly called an ancient an
|
||
Italian noble family which had lost its wealth but not its piety.
|
||
His father was a Papal lawyer and, as is usual in such cases, one
|
||
son was destined for the clerical career; especially as in the last
|
||
century government or military service was closed to good Catholics
|
||
in Italy, the Papacy still branding the government or the royal
|
||
family "robbers." More than four-fifths of the inhabitants of the
|
||
Papal States had voted to be transferred from Papal rule to that of
|
||
the Kings of Italy but that meant nothing to the "democratic" Leo
|
||
XIII. He was "the prisoner of the Vatican", eliciting golden
|
||
sympathy from America, and the Italian statesmen were robbers. So
|
||
careers for Catholic youths of noble birth and little money were
|
||
few in Italy.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> I do not suggest that Pius XII does not believe his theology,
|
||
as probably half the clergy do not in one degree or other. No one
|
||
is likely to know except himself what he believes. Priests hardly
|
||
ever tell each other. Zeal is no criterion, however. The Catholic
|
||
priesthood and hierarchy are an immense economic corporation
|
||
centered in Rome just as Christian Science is, in its official
|
||
framework, a business with headquarters in Boston. Naturally its
|
||
members are zealous; and the more responsibility they have (which
|
||
is won by the extent of their zeal) the more zealous they are. The
|
||
Catholic who imagines its Pope and his cardinals regarding money as
|
||
a mundane affair with which they have to soil their white fingers
|
||
occasionally should hear two or three priests talking about them
|
||
when they get to the second bottle.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Here is some interesting information about the higher clergy
|
||
of Rome which came to me a few years ago from a priest through one
|
||
intermediary, a friend of high character. When Rome obliged English
|
||
Catholics a few years ago by making a Saint of witty old Thomas
|
||
More it sent them, to their stupefaction, a bill for $65,000
|
||
(costs) and of $20,000 for a little present to the Pope! This
|
||
present was a gold chalice which, as the price of gold rose, would </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>be just a lump of pure gold worth about $50,000. The ceremonies at
|
||
Rome were a close monopoly of the Italians -- at least under
|
||
pressure they let one English priest hold a candle and charged him
|
||
$50 -- and every cardinal had his fixed price.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But understand that I suggest nothing whatever about the
|
||
Pope's belief or unbelief. He has a job of work, and this was his
|
||
apprenticeship for it. In college he discovered an ability for
|
||
learning languages and a special zeal for learning Canon Law, so he
|
||
was drafted into the Secretariat of State very soon after he became
|
||
priest, and there he would find himself on the fringe of the
|
||
mysteries of Vatican diplomacy. He also, being of noble birth,
|
||
joined and became a professor in The Academy of Ecclesiastics of
|
||
Noble Birth of course, the less said about that the better in
|
||
America, where one has to protect the legend that all his life --
|
||
when the great ones of the earth kissed his ring during his tours
|
||
of the world, when he occupied a gorgeous suite in the Vatican as
|
||
Secretary of State, and even now that he sits on the golden throne
|
||
-- his one ardent desire was that he could become a humble parish
|
||
priest amongst the poor. He is an aristocrat to his finger-tips. He
|
||
loathes democracy. He doubles Leo XIII (in his crooked diplomacy)
|
||
and Innocent III (who virtually founded the Inquisition).</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli made such progress in the department that at the
|
||
comparatively early age of 41 he was sent out on a very important
|
||
mission. Pope Benedict XV, who had notoriously intrigued with the
|
||
Germans and the Austrians against the Italians, during the war
|
||
recollected that he was a Pope of Peace when, in 1917, it became
|
||
doubtful if the Germans would win. He then wanted to have the
|
||
world-prestige of bringing it to a close, and he sent Pacelli as
|
||
Nuncio (ambassador) with plans of peace to Germany. Pacelli was
|
||
announced as Nuncio to Bavaria, but within a week he was in Berlin
|
||
seeing the Chancellor. He even saw the Kaiser, who told him to take
|
||
his plans home because he was sure to win the war. Why doesn't the
|
||
Pope rather, he said, detach Italy from the Allies and link it with
|
||
Austria, as they are both Catholic countries? Because, said
|
||
Pacelli, there is a very strong patriotic movement in Italy in
|
||
favor of continuing the war led by a fiery young journalist named
|
||
Benito Mussolini. The Pope's biographers say that the Kaiser told
|
||
Pacelli to take no notice of "that scum" but to go ahead and detach
|
||
Italy from England. It is a neat little picture.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The gaunt, grim, swarthy young Nuncio next year saw the fall
|
||
of the Kaiser and the riots in Munich. He met the "mob" with simple
|
||
heroism, of course -- in Catholic literature -- but the important
|
||
point is that this was the beginning of his knowledge and hatred of
|
||
the Reds. He remained in Munich until 1925, so he saw, with what
|
||
feelings he has not told us, the rise of a similar "scum" in
|
||
Bavaria and the comic-opera "March on Berlin," when Hitler made the
|
||
record run of his life -- backwards. In 1925 he was sent as Nuncio
|
||
to Berlin, and as this was the beginning of the best period in
|
||
recent German history, the five years of peace and comparative
|
||
prosperity under a Liberal-Socialist coalition, Pacelli must know
|
||
better than any man in Italy that the excuse which was later made
|
||
for Hitler in the world-press, the flattery under shelter of which
|
||
the Nazis created their formidable power, the plea that they had
|
||
saved Germany from chaos and distress, is a lie.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> As part of the evidence, if evidence is required, that Pius
|
||
XII has only one aim in all his policy -- not the peace of the
|
||
world but the power of the Church -- the twelve years he spent in
|
||
Germany are important. He acquired a thorough knowledge of German,
|
||
thought he speaks it (and French) with, a marked accent, and as far
|
||
as German affairs are concerned he has never been at the mercy of
|
||
bigoted And muddle-headed Vatican officials. He saw the years of
|
||
confusion after the War end in a working compromise and a new
|
||
Germany rising cheerfully from the ruins. Lamentable as the feud of
|
||
Communists and Socialists was, it was a domestic squabble and did
|
||
not seriously disturb the national economy after 1924; and the
|
||
Catholic Church had more freedom and prestige than ever. Pacelli
|
||
knows as little about economics as he does about history and
|
||
science, but at least he was intelligent enough to see, during his
|
||
four years in Berlin, that under a predominantly Socialist rule
|
||
Germany was making all the progress that could be expected with so
|
||
crippling a debt, and it was not internal confusion but its share
|
||
in the world-slumps and the cessation of fat loans from America and
|
||
Britain from the end of 1929 that led to the comparative distress
|
||
of 1930-32 of which the Nazis took advantage. We shall see that
|
||
Pacelli at one time (1934) in a fit of temper wrote the sharpest
|
||
condemnation of Hitler that ever came from a clerical pen, He
|
||
always loathed Hitler as a plebeian upstart and an apostate from
|
||
the Church, even when he was compelling the German bishops to bow
|
||
humbly before him and beg to be allowed to have a share in his
|
||
dirty work. But Hitler promised to make an end of Socialism, and
|
||
that-not (outside of Russia) Communism or Bolshevism -- is the Big
|
||
Bad Wolf in the eyes of the Vatican. Socialism has not only a
|
||
constant anti-Papal tradition, which will surprise nobody who knows
|
||
the facts I summarized in the last chapter, but to oblige its
|
||
wealthy supporters the Vatican has been compelled for half a
|
||
century to condemn it as immoral on the ground that private
|
||
ownership is a right based upon natural moral law.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It was, however, not until Pacelli had left Germany that the
|
||
Nazis showed any prospect of ever attaining power, and he regarded
|
||
them as a vulgar and disorderly rabble led by a bunch of unsavory
|
||
apostates and "pansies." Three years later he would, as Secretary
|
||
of State, compel the proud German hierarchy, against their very
|
||
decided will, to greet Hitler as the Savior of Germany and the
|
||
White Hope of the Church, Let us remember, when we get to that
|
||
point in the next booklet, that Pacelli did not act from ignorance.
|
||
He was less innocent than Chamberlain. If he had any ability at all
|
||
-- and he has considerable ability -- he knew Germany thoroughly.
|
||
Will Catholics call it a wicked suspicion if we assume that this
|
||
observer of events, who lived eight years in Munich and four in
|
||
Berlin, had read Mein Kampf? He knew the program: the glorification
|
||
of the German race, the domination of Europe, the annexation of the
|
||
Ukraine, the massacre of the Jews, the annihilation of France -- in
|
||
a word, war on a stupendous scale. Catholics do not obtrude today
|
||
his intimate knowledge of Germany.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> He was recalled to Rome in the summer of 1929 while Germany
|
||
was still cheerfully recovering and the Catholics cooperated
|
||
amiably with the Socialists and Liberals. Pacelli had been head of
|
||
the diplomatic corps at Berlin. The French ambassador had the real
|
||
right to that position and the Papal ambassador no right. But the </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Germans hated the French too much to let the honor fall to them. It
|
||
is another point to bear in mind about this pre-hitler Germany,
|
||
which Pacelli helped to ruin, that it genially tolerated a Papal
|
||
Nuncio at the head of the diplomatic corps and a Catholic
|
||
Chancellor in the Wilhelmsstragse. German Catholics had never
|
||
before seen such things.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli's patron, the Secretary of State Cardinal Gasparri,
|
||
was now 80 years old and unfit for office. He seems to have marked
|
||
out Pacelli as his successor, and he brought him back to the
|
||
Vatican for a few months of final training. Even Catholic
|
||
literature is a little confused here. Pacelli became Secretary of
|
||
State, which is the highest position in the Church after that of
|
||
the Pope, in February, 1930. In 1931 a gossip-paragraph appeared in
|
||
the Italian press to the effect that it was expected in Rome that
|
||
the new Secretary of State was about to be dismissed and old
|
||
Gasparri reinstated. Clearly the old men were conspiring against
|
||
Pacelli, but the same Catholic writers who say that it was because
|
||
he was too lenient to Mussolini had already said that Gasparri had
|
||
always been in favor of alliance with that brutal adventurer. We
|
||
will return to the point in a moment, but it will be useful first
|
||
to run a cursory eye over the ten years' activity of Pacelli as
|
||
Secretary of State.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> He took up residence in the gorgeous suite of rooms, with
|
||
heavy gilt furniture and magnificent decorations, in the Vatican
|
||
Palace. Just at the time when the Pope and Mussolini, who had in
|
||
the previous year signed the infamous compact by which (in effect)
|
||
the Papacy undertook to condone all Mussolini's crimes in return
|
||
for $90,000,000 and a royal independence, had begun to quarrel
|
||
fiercely, as crooks are apt to do, over the bargain. Pacelli
|
||
smoothed out the quarrel, got the Duce to bend his knees in St.
|
||
Peter's, and got the Pope to have a cordial chat with him. So
|
||
Mussolini was safely launched on his bloody career.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In the same year, 1931, Japan seized Manchuria and began to
|
||
debauch the Chinese. While all the world looked on with disgust at
|
||
the brigandage Pacelli accepted the overtures of Japan and the more
|
||
Japan advanced and became a menace to half the world, the
|
||
deeper Pacelli made the Vatican's alliance with the callous and
|
||
unscrupulous bandits. In 1932 Hitler made his supreme bid for power
|
||
and failed, and Pacelli then ordered the German hierarchy to
|
||
withdraw their opposition to him so that he secured power and enter
|
||
upon his career of blood.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In 1934 Pacelli went to South America to preside at a
|
||
Eucharistic Congress and saw the heads of each "Republic and their
|
||
bishops; and by a remarkable coincidence, if you can think it that,
|
||
Fascism began to sweep the country, rebels against the Church went
|
||
to jail in tens of thousands, and the Germans and Italians in South
|
||
America entered upon their audacious plans. In the same year the
|
||
Christian Socialists of Austria, after their leaders visited the
|
||
Pope, treacherously crushed Socialism and prepared the way for
|
||
Hitler. In the same year Mussolini began the slaughter of Abyssinia
|
||
and the whole Italian Church made whoopee, and at the end the Pope
|
||
gave the Queen of Italy as Empress of Abyssinia Golden Rose, which
|
||
is the highest mark of Papal approval.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In 1936 General Franco visited the Vatican, and his revolt,
|
||
which had the most open and solemn blessing of the Papacy, was the
|
||
first serious step of the Axis bregands in their projected
|
||
campaign. In 1938 Hitler annexed Austria with the full support of
|
||
the Austrian Church, which is one of the most docile to the Vatican
|
||
in the world. In the same year the Sudeten Catholics at one end of
|
||
Czecho-Slovakia and the Slovak Catholics at the other betrayed
|
||
their country and put Hitler in a position to defy the rest of
|
||
Europe and prepare for his insane attempt to dominate the world.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> A remarkable ten-year record for the Pope of Peace, the
|
||
Greatest Neutral, the Friend of Democracy, and the Black
|
||
International which carried out his instructions! That record we
|
||
have to examine in detail, proving it by public acts and published
|
||
utterances, and then to consider the Pope's first two years of
|
||
pontifical activity. But, as we go into detail, do not lose sight
|
||
of the fact that Pacelli-Pius's ruling idea throughout is "the
|
||
extinction of Bolshevism" by the peaceful bombs and bayonets of the
|
||
Germans, Italians, Japanese; to which, in furtherance of the work
|
||
of peace, he now wants to add the bombs and bayonets of Vichy
|
||
France, Franco Spain, Salazar Portugal, and Horthy Hungary.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Chapter III</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> HIS GLORIOUS ALLY MUSSOLINI</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It was on March 12, 1939, that Eugenio reached the summit of
|
||
ambition and was crowned in St. Peter's. Next day a man who lived
|
||
on the frontier of Italy and France sent to the most respected
|
||
newspaper in Great Britain, the Manchester Guardian, a letter which
|
||
it -- and probably it alone of the British or American press -- had
|
||
the courage to publish. The writer reminded people that March 12th
|
||
was also the last day for Jews to remain in Italy. He described
|
||
from personal observation the appalling sufferings of the 70,000
|
||
Jews who, robbed of their goods, were racing for frontiers which to
|
||
a large extent were sealed against them. He saw old men, women, and
|
||
children panting up the Alpine slopes to France and says that the
|
||
carabineri and frontier-troops had "orders to facilitate their
|
||
migration if necessary with the help of a bayonet." He saw elderly
|
||
folks "collapse on the way up the vast acres of the Italian slope";
|
||
little children "stagger, their feet bleeding, into the frontier
|
||
villages"; women try to throw themselves under the traffic when the
|
||
French at last put up the barriers; babies abandoned or lost by the
|
||
wayside.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> This had gone on for a week and it was continuing in a last
|
||
frantic rush of the robbed Jews while the bells of St. Peter's and
|
||
all the churches in Italy rang out joyously over the sunny land.
|
||
What did the Pope of Peace do? The writer of the letter says that
|
||
the Italian carabinieri and soldiers were so moved that they forgot
|
||
their instructions about the bayonet and carried children tenderly
|
||
to the frontier. What did the Pope do? Nothing: except receive the
|
||
splendid congratulations of Mussolini and his ministers. Catholic
|
||
biographers boast that during the week which followed his
|
||
coronation Pacelli-Pius, sinking under the burden of work, slept
|
||
only three hours every night. Very heroic, but a little puzzling,
|
||
because as Secretary of State he had been doing just that work for </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>ten years. Why the arrears? But what did he do for the Jews, for
|
||
crushed and bleeding democrats of Italy, for the heart-broken and
|
||
suffering Czechs? Nothing, just nothing.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The Italian problem had, as I said, been the first to engage
|
||
Pacelli when he became Secretary of State. I have told elsewhere
|
||
(Little Blue Book No. 1501 and ABC Library No. 2) the story of the
|
||
rise of Fascism and its early relation to the Church, In 1917
|
||
Mussolini and his cut-throats were, as the Kaiser had said, "scum."
|
||
They were atheists, republicans, and gangsters until 1921. Then, to
|
||
the surprise of many, Mussolini asked Cardinal Ratti for permission
|
||
for the Black Shirts to make a solemn procession to the tomb of the
|
||
Unknown Warrior in Milan Cathedral and the cardinal gladly accepted
|
||
and gave them a place of honor," says the Catholic Teeling (p.
|
||
106). Next year was the march on Rome (with Mussolini 100 miles
|
||
away), and the Duce pompously declared St. Peter's and all church
|
||
property under his special protection and ordered a thanksgiving
|
||
service with the King in attendance, At one of the principle
|
||
churches of Rome for the salvation of Italy. From Scum to Savior of
|
||
his Country in two years!</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> There is no secret about it. It is one of the most painful
|
||
features of the American literature of the subject that the
|
||
respected head of a great university, Nicholas Murray Butler, dupe
|
||
of American Catholics, lent his pen (Looking Forward) in that
|
||
glorification of Mussolini which was as useful as a smoke-screen to
|
||
the Fascists while they prepared for war, Professor Salvemini
|
||
(Under the Axe of Fascism, 1936) has given Dr. Butler a
|
||
chastisement such as few scholars ever give each other for his
|
||
gullibility in accepting Catholic lies about the "confusion and
|
||
ruin" caused by the Communists from which Mussolini saved Italy.
|
||
The author Selde's shows that Mussolini later confessed that he
|
||
invented the Communist boogie to help the loan he had floated in
|
||
America. The danger was Socialism which was conquering Italy, and
|
||
so politicians, royalists, generals, and industrialists put
|
||
Mussolini in the saddle, after fumigating him of his atheism and
|
||
republicanism.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But in spite of this powerful support of throne, army, and
|
||
capital the seat in the saddle remained very insecure for seven
|
||
years. Mussolini had not dared to extinguish the democracy for
|
||
which italians had fought so nobly from 1790 to 1870. Liberals and
|
||
Socialists were powerfully organized and, as in Spain, commanded
|
||
the majority of the votes in the cities, where the most intelligent
|
||
and the best-informed of the Italians lived. When, in 1924,
|
||
Mussolini was believed to have had the most respected leader of the
|
||
Socialists, Matteotti, removed by murder -- his public utterances
|
||
on the murder were so gross and callous that his guilt seemed clear
|
||
-- so many turned against him that at the elections of 1926 his
|
||
power was ominously shaken. He needed just one element to turn the
|
||
scale in his favor.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The peasants and a certain number of the urban workers were
|
||
organized in a powerful Catholic Democratic movement. The Pope had,
|
||
as in Germany and Austria, allowed this bastard Socialism to grow
|
||
up under their eyes as one way to cheek the loss of so many
|
||
millions to the Socialists and Communists. These Catholic democrats</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>fought the Fascists as truculently as the Communists did and while
|
||
they equally detested the Socialists and Liberals and would not
|
||
cooperate with them, they at least represented further millions in
|
||
opposition to Mussolini.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> As Pacelli was in Germany during these years we do not suppose
|
||
that he had much to do with Vatican policy in Italy and will
|
||
dismiss events with a brief notice. Both sides, Blackshirts and
|
||
Black International, saw that they must sooner or later enter into
|
||
alliance against Socialism, and Mussolini's backers, the throne,
|
||
army, and capital, insisted on it. Mussolini on his side sacrificed
|
||
his convictions and restrained his anti-Papal followers with all
|
||
the ease of an adventurer. He, as I said, ordered a superb
|
||
thanksgiving service in church for his accession to power and
|
||
presented a very valuable, old library to the Vatican. He then
|
||
complained to the Vatican about ending the conduct of the Catholic
|
||
democrats under the priest Sturzo. The priest disappeared because
|
||
of obscure Fascist threats of reprisals against the Church. Seldes
|
||
says (The Vatican, p. 331) and the party was weakened. But the
|
||
opposition went on and Mussolini made little progress. The Vatican
|
||
knew the strength of its hand and wanted a price that Mussolini
|
||
feared his followers would never agree to pay.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Seldes says that the revelation of the Pope's prestige in
|
||
America the Chicago Eucharistic Congress in 1926 at length stirred
|
||
Mussolini to bold action. It was more probably the menace of
|
||
Italian elections. Secret negotiations began at that time but the
|
||
Pope's terms were so exorbitant that they dragged out for two
|
||
years. In 1926 Farinacei, Mussolini's bulldog and leader of the
|
||
anti-clerical Old Guard of the Fascists, publicly declared that the
|
||
alliance was necessary. Mussolini, he said -- Seldes gives his
|
||
words -- was ready to deal with the Pope "in return for the moral
|
||
support of the Vatican for his policy." What the policy was" every
|
||
child knew -- the final extinction of liberty in Italy and, as a
|
||
minimum, the recovery of Savoy and Corsica from France, Malta from
|
||
England, Dalmatia from Yugo-Slavia -- and, instead of talking about
|
||
peaceful recovery by negotiation Mussolini was thundering about his
|
||
millions of bayonets whenever he opened his elegant mouth.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In 1928 the Maltese got up a kind of revolt against Britain.
|
||
There was a trial of strength between the civil and the clerical
|
||
authorities, and the Premier, Lord Strickland, though a Catholic,
|
||
bitterly resented the interference of the clergy in the elections.
|
||
It was proved that they even used the confessional to intimidate
|
||
voters. Mussolini watched with great interest, and, when the
|
||
British Government in the end began its historic policy of
|
||
appeasement and Strickland was sacrificed, the Duce had a new proof
|
||
of the utility of the Church. A high Anglican official in Malta at
|
||
the time informed me, privately, that the Governor of the island,
|
||
who let, down Strickland, was "grossly deceived by the Papal
|
||
Delegate, Msgr. Pascal Robinson"; and he added "more mischief-
|
||
making in Dublin." The Black International won first blood for
|
||
Mussolini.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> So Fascists had to swallow the condition's, and in 1929 the
|
||
Blackshirts and the Blackmailer signed their compact. The Pope got
|
||
nearly $100,000,000, the independence and sovereignty of the
|
||
Vatican City, the control of all Italian education except in the </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>universities, and the enforcement of the Canon Law, the
|
||
establishment of the Church and endowment of the priests. The Duce
|
||
got a hand for the complete destruction of democracy in Italy and
|
||
the silence of the Pope while he murdered democrats and get out on
|
||
his glorious campaign to make Empire by selecting weak countries
|
||
for aggression.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> This was the year of Pacelli's return to Rome, but his
|
||
biographers are not lavish with detail at this point and do not
|
||
enable us to say definitely -- and I refuse to go on suspicions --
|
||
what, if any, share he had in this sordid business. I have to
|
||
recall it, as briefly as possible, because it was the first great
|
||
triumph of the Black International in our time, and it was one of
|
||
the most important steps in the advance of the brigands toward the
|
||
realization of their, plot. It finally established the power of
|
||
Mussolini. It caused Catholic papers and writers (and sympathizers
|
||
like Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler) to take the lead in that praise of
|
||
Fascism in italy -- had not the Pope blessed it? -- which was of
|
||
the greatest importance to the brigands in preparing their
|
||
armaments. And it gave Mussolini's imitator in Germany the idea
|
||
that after all it would pay to come to terms, hypocritically, with
|
||
the Black International.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But, whatever share Pacelli may have had in drafting the
|
||
treaty of alliance with Mussolini, he had a full share in securing
|
||
that the alliance was not wrecked. The Fascist Party was still so
|
||
bitterly anti-Papal that Mussolini had, in soothing his followers,
|
||
to use language which the Pope angrily described (in the
|
||
Osservatore, May 30) as "heretical, and worse than heretical."
|
||
Blackshirts in Rome and the country insulted the priests and the
|
||
Church. The Pope spoke publicly of the possibility that he would
|
||
repudiate the Treaty, and in that case, he said, "Vatican City
|
||
itself would fall together with the state that is dependent on
|
||
Vatican City for its being" (same letter in the Osservatore). The
|
||
Catholic world and the world-press were alarmed. If Mussolini fell,
|
||
they said, Socialism would capture Italy. As Cardinal Hinsley, head
|
||
of the Church in Britain, said at a later date, Fascism was "in
|
||
many respects unjust" but it "Prevented worse injustice -- if it
|
||
goes under, God's cause goes with it." (Catholic Times, October
|
||
18th, 1935). God's cause is, in the mouth of a cardinal, the power
|
||
of the Church: and the end justifies the means.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli to the rescue. Old Gasparri, who was stirring the Pope
|
||
to resist, was pushed aside, and the Saint George -- who wanted to
|
||
save the world -- the world of wealth and privilege -- from the
|
||
Dragon, Socialism donned his shining armor. Friction continued, of
|
||
course. Most of the leading Blackshirts hated the Pope, and the
|
||
Pope and his new Secretary of State heartily hated them. But the
|
||
alliance was indispensable. Mussolini now roared like any sucking
|
||
dove about the beauty of religion. "I wish to see religion
|
||
everywhere in the country," he said; "let us teach the children
|
||
their catechism" (Manchester Guardian, June 19, 1931). He, as I
|
||
said, publicly prayed in St. Peter's. Cardinal Gasparri at the
|
||
Eucharistic Congress of 1932 hailed him as "the man who first saw
|
||
clearly in the present world chaos" the man who is "getting the </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>State to work in accordance with the moral law of God" (Catholic
|
||
Herald, September 16 1932). The, friction was reduced and the world
|
||
was officially assured that the last Census had proved that 99
|
||
percent of the, Italians were Catholics.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It was an insincere alliance. The organization of lay dupes
|
||
known as Catholic Action now gave Mussolini trouble. He demanded
|
||
that the Pope check it, and something seems to have been done, but
|
||
secretly Pacelli got the pope to write glowing praise of the
|
||
international Catholic Action and knowing that in spite of the
|
||
sacred independence of the Vatican City Mussolini's spies watched
|
||
it closely he sent the document by two priests to Paris for
|
||
publication. The old trickery of Vatican diplomacy was cultivated.
|
||
When, as in the case of the annexation of Austria, local prelates,
|
||
who would not dare to stir a finger against Papal policy, acted in
|
||
support of the Axis, the Vatican Radio would announce to the world
|
||
that the Pope disapproved. When this angered Axis supporters they
|
||
were assured that the radio message was unauthorized and sent out
|
||
without consulting the Vatican. Sometimes the Papal newspaper, the
|
||
Osservatore, was used and, to please both sides, was then declared
|
||
unauthorized. Neither the Radio nor the Osservatore would dare to
|
||
send out or print an unauthorized message on an important point.
|
||
Foreign correspondents in Rome received telephone messages from the
|
||
Vatican which were later declared unauthorized. Ambiguous
|
||
utterances, as in the case of Abyssinia, were put into the mouth of
|
||
the Pope, and Axis Catholics were encouraged to read them one way
|
||
and democratic Catholics to read them in the opposite way. And
|
||
every Easter and Christmas the beautiful message of Peace rolled
|
||
out, while between those festivals the Catholic world was inspired
|
||
everywhere to demand war on Spain, Russia, China, and Mexico.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> There was another aspect of the alliance. While Cardinal
|
||
Gasparri assured the Catholic world that Mussolini was "getting the
|
||
state to work in accordance with the moral law of God" and Cardinal
|
||
Hinsley was warning it that "God's cause" would be lost in Italy if
|
||
Mussolini fell, it was open to anybody to ascertain what social
|
||
improvement, if any, the Duce had actually accomplished. Reference
|
||
books like the Statesman's Year Book which were in every good
|
||
library gave year by year the official Italian returns of crime,
|
||
education, production, trade, debt, etc.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It is astonishing today to reflect how very few people thought
|
||
of testing in this simple and positive way what truth there was in
|
||
almost universal press admiration of the efficiency and national
|
||
service of Fascism. It must, at least, seem astonishing to any man
|
||
who does not accept my suggestion that Mussolini's work in crushing
|
||
a great Socialist movement was so appreciated in the world-press
|
||
that it would not inquire whether his boast of efficiency was true
|
||
or not. It reproduced everything that its correspondents in Italy,
|
||
generally, Catholics, cared to send it about finer rail-services
|
||
(on some lines), new buildings, great farms on reclaimed land, and
|
||
so on, and it refused to see in works of reference, which were at
|
||
every editor's elbow that production was decaying and the internal
|
||
debt (chiefly due to forced loans) was increasing at so formidable
|
||
a rate that bankruptcy loomed ahead -- unless Mussolini brought
|
||
off, and brought off successfully, the aggressive war he promised
|
||
his people, and founded an Italian Empire by murdering and looting
|
||
other peoples.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> On the religious side it was worse. The only definite test
|
||
weather a nation is or is not getting more in accord with "the
|
||
moral law of God" is to examine its criminal statistics. In the
|
||
Papal States, before the Kingdom of Italy had been established,
|
||
there had been no statistics of any sort, but not a single
|
||
authority questions the statement of contemporary Italian statesmen
|
||
and foreign visitors that crime and corruption were appalling.
|
||
Italy then, from 1870 onward, had a very fair success in reducing
|
||
crime, though the success was not nearly so great as in less-
|
||
Catholic countries. But from the time of the accession to power of
|
||
Mussolini crime increased amazingly. Convictions rose from about
|
||
500,000 a year in the period which Dr. Nicholas Murrak Butler
|
||
describes so darkly, the Socialist-Communist-Liberal period (before
|
||
1923), to 800,000 a year in the period of Mussolini's remarkable
|
||
efficiency.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It makes it rather worse that this was due to some extent to
|
||
the poverty and distress he had brought upon both the workers and
|
||
the middle class while the Church, as I said, got an enormous
|
||
accession of wealth. Other causes were the impoverishment and
|
||
prostitution of education and the preparation of the people for the
|
||
wanton bloodshed of aggressive war. It was at the very time when
|
||
Pacelli, the future Pope of Peace, was bringing the Pope and the
|
||
Duce to have a cordial meeting in the Vatican that Mussolini was
|
||
writing the most official statement of the nature of Fascism for
|
||
the new Encyclopedia Italiana (article, "Fascism")</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> When Fascism looks to the future, the general development
|
||
of humanity, apart from considerations of present polities, it
|
||
rejects the idea that perpetual peace is either possible or
|
||
desirable. It repudiates Pacifism, which means a renunciation
|
||
of struggle, a refusal to make sacrifices, War alone raises
|
||
the energy of man to the highest pitch and impresses a seal of
|
||
nobility upon the nations which have the manliness to
|
||
undertake it. All other trials of strength are substitutes
|
||
which never prove a man's worth by confronting him with the
|
||
alternative of life and death.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> That was taught to every child in every school in Italy.
|
||
Didn't the Vatican know it? Are we supposed to find documentary
|
||
proof that the Vatican knew what was going on in every part of
|
||
Italy?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli had come from Germany where he had seen Socialism as
|
||
a mighty power already in control of more than one-third of the
|
||
country, dreaded by the Catholic hierarchy because, though the
|
||
Social Democrats now worked with the Catholics, they drew millions
|
||
from the Church, dreaded by imperialists, militarists,
|
||
industrialists, and landowners. He came to Italy where he saw how
|
||
just such a powerful Socialist organization had been completely
|
||
destroyed as it was from 1928 onward by just such a coalition of
|
||
royalists, industrialists, militarists, and landowners taking up a
|
||
brutal spearhead resembling the German Nazism and consolidating its
|
||
position by an alliance with the Church just as in the good old
|
||
days of the early nineteenth, century. His grand idea, war on
|
||
Socialism, gradually took shape. How in its interest he kept the
|
||
Pope silent and the Italian Church wildly patriotic when Mussolini
|
||
began his imperial brigandage in Abyssinia we shall see later.
|
||
Other problems meantime confronted him and the Black International.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Chapter IV</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> HIS DEAR YELLOW BROTHER IN BUDDHA</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> the year 1899 the democratic Pope Leo XIII had made the ears
|
||
of American Catholic's burn. Their apologists and prelates had
|
||
begun to put before the public that conception of the Church of
|
||
Rome as the devoted ally of democracy and freedom with which we
|
||
have grown very familiar in recent years. Leo smote them hip and
|
||
thigh. That was "Americanism" not sound Catholicism. The arch-
|
||
bishops writhed but were silent. Leo was not very far from death,
|
||
and "from that time to this no Pope has spoken out." So says the
|
||
Catholic Teeling, and he adds: "The reason would seem to have been
|
||
that America has provided an ever-increasing supply of funds and an
|
||
ever increasing supply of missionaries." (The Pope in Polities, p.
|
||
150). Certainly a golden reason; though why, on Catholic
|
||
principles, a particular version of Catholicism not backed by gold
|
||
Should be so humiliatingly denounced and then tolerated when it was
|
||
gold is not clear. If I assigned that reason for the Vatican's
|
||
change of policy in regard to American Catholic propaganda I would
|
||
be angrily accused of wicked suspicions and suggestions where I
|
||
could not give positive evidence.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But the Vatican only changed its tactics not its policy. Pius
|
||
XI, says Teeling, was particularly zealous to bring the oriental
|
||
Churches into his fold -- "so that the growth of democratic
|
||
Catholicism in the New World be counter-balanced." At the Vatican,
|
||
he says (p. 3), "Western influence is not considered very good for
|
||
the Church." That we shall see, is one reason why, Mussolini was
|
||
encouraged in the rape of Abyssinia and his design of becoming
|
||
Emperor of the East, why the Vatican flirted for years with Russia,
|
||
and why it approved the savage aggression against Yugo-Slavia and
|
||
Greece. To sustain this policy the Secretary of State had to do
|
||
some very neat tight-rope balancing. For British opinion, in spite
|
||
of all the "Lords" and aristocrats the Jesuits have captured, he
|
||
seems not to have cared much. If for once I cared to indulge in a
|
||
conjecture I should say that he detests England. Whether that is
|
||
connected with his chilly experiences when he was sent to represent
|
||
the Papacy at the coronation of George V or whether he sees through
|
||
the Catholic pretense that they are "converting England" I don't
|
||
know, but Teeling, who made a number of visits to Rome, says that
|
||
after Pacelli became secretary of State English Catholics found a
|
||
reception at the Vatican and could with difficulty get an audience
|
||
with the Pope. They were told to see Pacelli, and they discovered
|
||
that they were "not popular," though doubtless they left the
|
||
customary purse with Pacelli.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But American Catholicism was a very different matter. It
|
||
claimed 20,000,000 members and said that it would have the majority
|
||
in America by the end of the century. Its wealth is already in the
|
||
billions of dollars; its annual income $800,000,000. Imagine
|
||
Pacelli's eyes rolling as he turned these sum's into Italian lire!
|
||
In 1936 he visited America, Did he encourage the efforts as
|
||
described by Seldes, of American Catholics, in cooperation with
|
||
Mexican refugee priests, to get an alliance with Wall Street in
|
||
order to secure the liquidation of Bolshevism in Mexico? Had he any
|
||
meetings with the Italian and German plotters in America? Did he </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>harden that feeling against Russia which Germany counted as one of
|
||
its favorable conditions? But we must not be suspicious. There is
|
||
no Proof. We know one thing that he did do. Instead of rebuking the
|
||
American propagandists who represented the Church as spontaneously
|
||
democratic and a lover of freedom and peace he went out of his way
|
||
everywhere to leave the impression that he cordially admired the
|
||
American spirit of freedom and democracy. He certainly did not
|
||
mention that the Vatican policy was to augment the oriental
|
||
elements in the Church so as to counter-balance "western influence"
|
||
which was "not considered very good for the Church, in the mild
|
||
language of a Catholic writer. And he certainly did not call the
|
||
attention of Americans to the fact that the Vatican had entered
|
||
into a close alliance with Japan.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> This alliance with Japan ran the usual course in Catholic
|
||
literature. At first it was indignantly denied. Where was the
|
||
proof? When the Osservatore itself proudly announced on May 5,
|
||
1935, that the Pope was to send an ambassador to Tokyo and that
|
||
Tokyo was to appoint a representative at the Pope's court in
|
||
Vatican City a new note was struck. It was the Pope's duty to enter
|
||
into negotiation with any government to protect the spiritual
|
||
interests of Catholics under that government. Had not even England
|
||
sent a representative to the Pope's court? Yes: but "poor rich
|
||
powerful England" as Ambassador Dodd called it, was up to its eyes
|
||
in a policy of appeasement, while in 1936 Japan had started on its
|
||
full career of aggression and of the massacre, debauching, and
|
||
exploiting of hundreds of millions of weaker folk. That is some
|
||
difference. And when, in the spring of 1941, Pacelli-Plus had a
|
||
most cordial interview with that other Man of Peace Matsuoka, the
|
||
most brazen liar in a world of fluent liars, in the Vatican and,
|
||
just when Japan was plotting to take advantage of the heavy burden
|
||
of America and Britain to defy them by worse aggression and more
|
||
insolent outrages than ever, the Pope smilingly presented him with
|
||
a gold medal . . .</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The story of the Japanese share in the world-crime is now
|
||
fairly well known -- see ABC Library No. 6 -- and cannot be
|
||
repeated here. All the world has seen its steady aggression for ten
|
||
years, and all the world ought to have known from the start that
|
||
Japan meant to conquer the whole eastern half of Asia and all
|
||
islands in the Pacific. That the truth of this depends upon the
|
||
disputed authenticity of some memoir by Baron Tanaka in the year
|
||
1927 is nonsense. I have described, largely from American
|
||
journalists and authors (like Upton Close's Challenge. 1933), the
|
||
very open growth of the plot since the later years of the last
|
||
century. America was in fact so well aware of it that it alone of
|
||
the democracies began years ago to take defensive naval measures,
|
||
but there was, under the usual trade-interests, a lamentable lack
|
||
of warning in the Press an almost general failure to see that
|
||
Japan's were part of a world-plot and in this case a very
|
||
mischievous appeasement-policy in religious periodicals on account
|
||
of Japan's threats to the Christian missions.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> To state events very briefly up to the time when the Japanese
|
||
criminals, the American and European encouragement of modernization
|
||
in Japan (while it paid better not to encourage it in China), the
|
||
disbanding of the old Samurai swashbucklers (which sent vicious </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>elements into the army, politics, and journalism), and the
|
||
successful wars of Japan on easy victims like China (1895) and
|
||
Tsarist Russia (1904) gave the yellow men inflated ideas of their
|
||
ability and importance. The Black Dragon Society, which wanted the
|
||
conquest of north-eastern Asia, was founded in 1901 and inspired
|
||
aggressive fanaticism in naval and military circles. Advantage was
|
||
taken of the European War of 1914-18 to get a strangle-hold on
|
||
China but a terrible earthquake and the quick recovery of the
|
||
Allies checked the ambition, though propaganda continued. By 1931
|
||
there were patriotic societies enthusiastically preaching it and
|
||
running to two or three million members. General Hayashi, who had
|
||
led the invasion of Manchuria in defiance of the civil government,
|
||
said in a speech to foreign correspondents; at the close of the
|
||
campaign:</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Japan's desire for expansion on the Eastern Asiatic
|
||
Continent manifested in her Manchurian police has been her
|
||
unalterable policy since her foundation.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The development of the gangrene differed little from the
|
||
development in Europe. In Japan the army and navy were the nucleus
|
||
and source of infection. The score of rich families which mainly
|
||
represented capitalism were easily persuaded to see that it was the
|
||
destiny of the Yamato race to extend its culture to (or exploit)
|
||
China. The Emperor hardly needed persuading that soldiers know
|
||
best. The politicians and the heads of the Buddhist and Shinto
|
||
religions were bought. For the quite open share of these religions
|
||
and their sudden enrichment by the imperialist brigands see the
|
||
speeches at the Chicago International Conference on Religion in
|
||
1934 (edited by A.E. Haydon, Moderit World-Trends in Religion).</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 was the first step in the
|
||
realization of what would prove to be a plot of Germany and Japan
|
||
to control and exploit the world: a crime which in future history
|
||
dwarf every other crime that was ever committed or attempted. The
|
||
world now pays a ghastly price for the obscene squabbling of trade-
|
||
interests which prevented the destruction of the plot at this early
|
||
stage by an economic ostracism of Japan, but few people still seem
|
||
to understand that the Black International at once moved to the
|
||
support of the aggressor.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> This is no matter of "suspicion." It was done quietly and in
|
||
such a form that it could, if the world's attention was drawn to
|
||
it, be represented as an inevitable exercise of the Vatican's
|
||
religious functions. It was first disclosed, as far as I can trace,
|
||
in an article by a French priest in the Catholic Review des Deux
|
||
Mondes in 1935 (January 15). The negotiations which were then going
|
||
on at the Vatican for mutual ambassadors with Japan made it clear
|
||
that some years of cordial cooperation had preceded; and in any
|
||
case the French had played as sordid a part in the matter as the
|
||
Black International and they were disposed to boast about it.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The facts are now so well known that Catholic writers like
|
||
Teeling discuss them freely. It appears that the Vatican had
|
||
approached Japan, seeking favored-nation treatment, in 1922, but
|
||
the Buddhist authorities, already brought (or bought) to the
|
||
convention that the Yellow Race would sweep all White influence out</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>of eastern Asia, successfully resisted the application. Buddhist
|
||
monks might take that view but Japanese statesmen knew that the
|
||
White Race was not to be turned down too openly until the plot was
|
||
far advanced. It was to be duped by smooth assurances that it would
|
||
have its share in a regenerated China and its enormously increased
|
||
capacity for consumption. It was particularly necessary to do this
|
||
after the first rape of China, so the Vatican got its opportunity.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The French clerical writer says:</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> "A short time after it had given birth to the new state
|
||
of Manchukuo the Japanese government advised its ward to turn
|
||
to the Holy See with a request that it should be officially
|
||
recognized; an event of some importance seeing that the Powers
|
||
refused to recognize it and Japan had left the League of
|
||
Nations. These Japanese-Manchukuoan overtures did not secure
|
||
formal recognition but, as the Catholic missions in Manchukuo
|
||
supported them the Vatican appointed a French Vicar Apostolic
|
||
to negotiate with the government of Manchuktio about religious
|
||
affairs." (p. 297).</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> He further explains that it was the French missionaries in
|
||
Japan who persuaded the Japanese government to approach the
|
||
Vatican. France was at the time, for reasons which will be given
|
||
later, working very amiably with the Vatican, and French
|
||
missionaries would not be ignorant of the golden rule that trade
|
||
and the evangelization of the heathen go together. The Vatican was
|
||
to get a monopoly of missionary work in Japan and China, which it
|
||
fully expected to be taken over by Japan (Teeling), and France
|
||
would be rewarded with trade.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It was a nice problem for Pacelli, the new Secretary of State,
|
||
and he solved it in his characteristic manner. Formally to
|
||
recognize the annexation of Manchuria just when merely secular
|
||
governments all over the world were condemning it as an outrage and
|
||
a danger to the peace was out of the question. Even the American
|
||
apologist would hardly be able to explain away that. So the Papal
|
||
organ announced quietly, as a matter of routine, that a Vicar
|
||
Apostolic had been set up in Manchukuo at the request of its
|
||
government. That was for the Japs a sufficiently clear recognition
|
||
of that government by the Vatican as a sovereign power. Does any
|
||
man suppose that the Japanese statesmen and military leaders nearly
|
||
all of whom are skeptics, cared the toss of a coin about the
|
||
spiritual interests or the immortal souls of the Manchurian
|
||
peasants? Or that the Vatican supposed they did? The brutalized
|
||
condition to which the Japs soon reduced the natives is answer
|
||
enough.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The Chinese in Shanghai sent me copies of bitter complaints of
|
||
the Protestant missionaries in China about the way in which the
|
||
Japs were persecuting them in favor of Catholic missionaries, but
|
||
a more important feature of the matter is that from that time the
|
||
Pope damped down in the whole Catholic world all criticism of his
|
||
dear Yellow Brother in Buddha. By 1934, the clerical writer in
|
||
Revue des Deux Mondes said, the cordial relations of the two had
|
||
gone so far that "no Japanese prince or mission now passes through
|
||
Rome without paying its homage to the Sovereign Pontiff." And to </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>Mussolini, of course, who was now in prayerful communication with
|
||
the Vatican. Again, does anyone suppose that Japanese diplomats and
|
||
princes called upon the Pope to thank him for caring for the
|
||
immortal souls, in which they did not believe, of Manchurian
|
||
peasants?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But the alliance was brought into full light in 1935 when the
|
||
Obsservatore announced the proposal of an exchange of ambassadors.
|
||
There seems to have been some hard bargaining, but in 1936 a Roman
|
||
Catholic prelate appeared, incongruously enough, at the Mikado's
|
||
court and a yellow man in the Vatican City. By this time the
|
||
Japanese pretense of merely wishing to civilize Manchuria was a
|
||
mockery. It had now advanced far into China, having taken Jehol in
|
||
1933 and broken through the Great Wall in 1935. The mask was
|
||
cynically thrown aside just when the diplomatic relations with the
|
||
Vatican were put on the most respectable footing. By the customary
|
||
Axis method of brazen lying excuses for further aggression upon the
|
||
weak Chinese were invented, the "incident" was conducted with
|
||
appalling outrages, and a trail of misery and demoralization spread
|
||
in the wake of the Japanese armies. Japan was now as deadly a
|
||
menace to civilization as Germany and Italy, and the bland lies
|
||
with which it met every inquiry were nauseating.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> During these years very little was said in the world-press
|
||
about this beautiful friendship of the supreme head of the Church
|
||
of Rome and the supreme head of the degenerate Shinto and Buddhist
|
||
religions. Catholics had won their claim and censorship of the
|
||
press on the edifying principle that it was not right to print
|
||
anything that was "offensive to Catholics"; and to obtrude this
|
||
cordial alliance of the Vatican with the Japanese government, which
|
||
had by this time incurred the loathing of every decent man and
|
||
would be decidedly offensive to Catholics. Yet the cordiality
|
||
continued through all the years of mendacity, hypocrisy, outrage,
|
||
and increasing menace to the world.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> On December 26 Matsuoka, who was particularly used for some
|
||
years to dupe Americans because he was a Christian, said in the
|
||
Japanese Diet, dropping the mask of lust now that Japan could take
|
||
advantage of the war in Europe, that there would be peace only if
|
||
America agreed that Japan should "dominate the mainland and occupy
|
||
a preferential position in Indo-China and the Dutch Indies," and to
|
||
"dominate the Western Pacific"; not for its own profit, of course,
|
||
but for "the good of humanity." In March, 1941, this slimiest of
|
||
the yellow reptile-group went to Moscow and signed a cynical pact
|
||
with Russia. We will not call that hypocrisy because Stalin was
|
||
certainly not duped, but that was not for lack of intention on
|
||
Matsuoka's part. He went on to Berlin and Rome to discuss with the
|
||
other gangsters the real plan for the summer, the sudden attack on
|
||
Russia and the question of Japanese intervention, and he had also
|
||
a long cordial talk with the Pope, who presented him with a gold
|
||
medal. All this can be verified in Keesing's admirable day-to-day
|
||
survey of the world-press. Are we asked to believe that with the
|
||
Pope Matsuoka discussed only the spiritual interests of the Chinese
|
||
who were under the loving care of the Japanese army of occupation?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> What exactly the situation is today it is impossible to
|
||
ascertain. Japan will, of course, soon or later double cross the
|
||
Vatican, as those super-crooks always do. Has it already done so?
|
||
The latest news is that the Japanese are organizing a National
|
||
Spiritual Mobilization Campaign in which three recognized
|
||
religions, Shinto, Buddhism, and Christianity are to cooperate. But
|
||
the Christian Church is to be purely Japanese. It must receive no
|
||
funds from abroad -- which opens up a nice prospect for the
|
||
American Protestant missions -- admit no foreign influence, and
|
||
make minute reports of all its services and activities; and the
|
||
worship of the Son of Heaven must be included in the cult
|
||
everywhere. Has Pacelli-Pius swallowed that pill?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In the eighteenth century Rome made it, one of its chief
|
||
counts in its indictment of the Jesuits that, in order to win more
|
||
converts than other missionaries, they had mixed heathen rites with
|
||
Christian. Pacelli has done just that. An Anglican prelate who was
|
||
present at the large International Conference on religion in India
|
||
in 1938 wrote me that the representatives of the Protestant
|
||
Churches learned with a shock that "the Papacy, after much
|
||
wavering, has finally given permission to Japanese Papists to
|
||
indulge in Emperor worship." Presumably they do not tell their
|
||
Japanese converts how early Christians died rather than worship the
|
||
Roman Emperor.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It should prove, when the details are known, a picturesque
|
||
development, but to most of us trifle in comparison with the
|
||
Vatican's moral apostasy and betrayal of civilization. For an
|
||
exhibition of greed, hypocrisy, and condonation of crime its
|
||
alliance with Japan would be hard to beat. During these ten years
|
||
when Pacelli was vilifying Russia, which was building up in peace
|
||
and with a sense of international honor what most people now call
|
||
great civilization, he was cultivating friendly relations with and
|
||
giving aid and encouragement to one of the real blackguard-nations.
|
||
It is futile to protest that we must look at the Situation from the
|
||
Papal angle. The most respectable light in which you can put it is
|
||
that a Churchman would be bound to consider that a prospect of
|
||
bringing into the Roman sphere of influence, which is so much more
|
||
morally effective than any other, all the missionary work in
|
||
eastern Asia, outweighs all other considerations. So much the worse
|
||
for the Churchman's creed or policy. It puts the increase of the
|
||
power of the Church above all decency of international intercourse,
|
||
above the appalling sufferings of hundreds of millions of Chinese
|
||
and their right to a national life of their own, above the ghastly
|
||
and very imminent chances of a world-war. it means that the Black
|
||
International tramples on those social, moral, and humanitarian
|
||
principles which are said by its apologists in America to be just
|
||
what the Church holds most sacred.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Chapter V</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> HE ORGANIZES THE PLOT IN SOUTH AMERICA</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli-Pius was rightly selected for the Papacy as the ablest
|
||
cardinal in the Church of Rome. That does not imply genius. Half of
|
||
these cardinals would not successfully run a large grocery store.
|
||
Pacelli has considerable ability. He is also the most widely-</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>informed cardinal on the world-situation. His immediate
|
||
predecessors were of the type that asks: What are Keats? Even Leo
|
||
XIII was amazingly duped by his Vatican 'specialists' about the
|
||
state of affairs in England -- they persuaded him that if he
|
||
recognized the validity of Anglican "orders" the whole Church of
|
||
England would join up under the Papal banner -- in France, and
|
||
elsewhere. Pacelli has travelled more than any. Besides spending
|
||
twelve years in Germany he has made three visits to England,
|
||
travelled all over North and South America, and visited France,
|
||
Hungary, and other countries.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Upon which boast of his biographers we may make two comments.
|
||
First that in very few of his acts can any apologist make the
|
||
excuse of ignorance or misinformation, the common Catholic excuse
|
||
for Papal misconduct. Matsuoka might deceive some people with his
|
||
bland assurances that his country sought "not the good of the good
|
||
of Japan but the good of humanity" and (in the spring of 1941) that
|
||
it had "not the slightest idea of taking advantage of the
|
||
misfortunes of France," but he no more deceived Pius XII than he
|
||
deceived Stalin. The Pope knew well that Japan was pledged to a
|
||
course, in its selfish interest, which would lead inexorably to war
|
||
math America and Great Britain. So it was in every other part of
|
||
his policy.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The second comment is that, instead of flowers springing up
|
||
wherever Pacelli trod, as is told of holy men in earlier ages, the
|
||
path might generally be traced by blood and misery. The violence
|
||
had occurred in Italy before he returned to it, but he took care
|
||
that it was not relaxed. He compels the Church in Germany to help
|
||
to power the most dangerous psychopath in Europe. He goes to South
|
||
America, and his visit is followed by the triumph of Fascist
|
||
violence everywhere. He goes to the United States, and there is a
|
||
fresh demand for the extinction of Bolshevism in Mexico and Russia.
|
||
He goes to Paris in 1937 and France prepares to betray Czecho-
|
||
Slovakia and, when the time comes, to betray itself. He goes to
|
||
Hungary in 1938 and it is ready to see Austria and Czecho-Slovakia
|
||
enslaved and to march itself against Russia and help in every way
|
||
the destroyers of civilization.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The visit to South America was in 1934, when the usual excuse
|
||
for Papal intrigue was given: he must preside at the Eucharistic
|
||
Congress at Buenos Aires. Twenty years, even thirty years ago, the
|
||
priests of Buenos Aires would not have dared to hold such a
|
||
function. When it was proposed to hold one in London Protestants
|
||
appealed to me to cooperate in getting Catholics forbidden to have
|
||
a procession of their Eucharist in one street. I said that I would
|
||
rather encourage them to do so -- and take care that the crowd
|
||
understood what it meant. The doctrine is so monstrous and
|
||
incredible that the journalists who every year write with profound
|
||
respect about the holding of the Eucharistic Congress cannot have
|
||
the least idea what it means.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> You see a priest carrying a star-shaped golden vessel in the
|
||
center of which, enclosed in glass, is the white disk of a wafer of
|
||
wheaten flour. To the Catholic it was a thin wafer until the priest
|
||
breathed his magic wards over it, but there is no longer any flour
|
||
there. The substance of the cake has been annihilated: only the </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>accidents (the color, shape, feel, etc.) remain. As I have hid to
|
||
swallow it -- the wafer, I mean, as well is the doctrine --
|
||
thousands of times I can assure that the "accidents" are very much
|
||
like those of a dry cracker. It sticks to the pilate, etc. And on
|
||
the strength of this prehistoric theory of substance and accidents,
|
||
begot by the genius Aquinas out of Aristotle, the Church today
|
||
sternly insists that the wafer has been annihilated, and the living
|
||
divine-human person of Jesus has taken its place -- quite literally
|
||
-- that if you broke it into a hundred crumbs the living and entire
|
||
body of Jesus would be present in each, and that this is true of
|
||
each one of the millions of wafers (Eucharists) which are stored in
|
||
little safes on the altars of all the Catholic Churches in the
|
||
world. Pfew!</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> I say that in the earlier part of this century priests in
|
||
Buenos Aries or Rio or Lima would not have made a parade of that
|
||
belief in the streets The historic conflict of the Blacks and
|
||
Whites in Latin America had ended in an incomplete but considerable
|
||
victory for the Liberals. The middle-class was substantially
|
||
skeptical. In 1906 the Freethinkers of South America held a
|
||
Congress in Buenos Aires. The delegates crowded the Teatro
|
||
Argentino. Argentinians of high position (Vice-Admiral Howard, Soto
|
||
and Alvarez of the Council of War, etc.) supported them. The
|
||
Presidents of Guatemala and Uruguay sent telegrams of
|
||
congratulations in the name of their republics. The Women's
|
||
Committee, of 50 members, included some the most brilliant writers
|
||
in South America. The leading papers treated the Congress with
|
||
respect . . .</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> And in 1934 the public men of Argentina were falling Over each
|
||
other to kiss Pacelli's ring. What had happened? The Reds, of
|
||
course. Socialism spread through South America with extraordinary
|
||
rapidity after the last war, and the news of the revolution in
|
||
Spain in 1932 gave a powerful impetus to the movement. So impartial
|
||
an observer as the famous woman traveller Rosita Forbes said in
|
||
1933 after a prolonged visit that "it is possible that the
|
||
organization and method's of Soviet Russia may be destined to
|
||
provide the machinery necessary to liberate the South American
|
||
Republics" (Eight Republics in search of a Future, p. 7.) In Peru,
|
||
she found that "the educated youth of Peru is in the hands of
|
||
Moscow." A minister who introduced an anti-Communist law in the
|
||
Chilean Congress was compelled to resign, and the government
|
||
refused to recognize degrees granted by Catholic universities. An
|
||
American merchant who had lived 25 years in Chile reported that
|
||
"Communism of the intellectual type" was very widespread. The
|
||
Alianza Popular Revolutionaria Americana (Apra) swept the
|
||
continent, and its leader would have become President of Peru but
|
||
for Black corruption of the vilest kind. The Rev. Dr. McKay, a
|
||
Protestant missionary in the Argentine, said that the Trade Unions
|
||
turned out any worker who supported the Church, that the workers
|
||
now commonly called a man they wanted to vituperate "you poor
|
||
Christ" (equivalent to the American "son of a lady-dog"), and that
|
||
one of their leaders said publicly that the sound of the word God
|
||
made him spew. I was editing the Militant Atheist in 1933 and gave
|
||
plenty of details of this sort.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli to the rescue. Returning to the subject in the 'Appeal
|
||
to Reason' Library (No. 3) in 1935 I gave the symptoms of spreading
|
||
reaction and asked: "Will the struggle end as in Italy, Spain, and
|
||
Poland, in a coalition of all political parties with the Church
|
||
again Labor?" At the time Pacelli was still an obscure emissary of
|
||
the Vatican whose position as Secretary of State was according to
|
||
the Italian Press, not very secure. How bitterly we pay for not
|
||
watching the Black International more closely! In South America, as
|
||
in America and Britain and Italy and Germany, there were Socialist
|
||
leaders who said that the fight against the Church was over -- some
|
||
wanted friendly alliance with it -- and all attention must be
|
||
concentrated on the politico-economic struggle. And in the whole of
|
||
South America as in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Czecho-
|
||
Slovakia, etc., within a year or two Socialism was bloodily trodden
|
||
underfoot and the Church was triumphant.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The change did not begin in 1934. The Blacks were already
|
||
organizing and intriguing everywhere, and futile revolts
|
||
strengthened their hands. But after 1934 the clerical-capitalist
|
||
revolution proceeded at a great pace. I have not a shred of proof
|
||
to offer that, Pacelli counted in the organization of this. Just
|
||
naughty suspicion, and you may please yourself whether you accept
|
||
it. I do not say that Pacelli intrigued to bring closer together
|
||
the heads of the Church and the heads of the army and state who in
|
||
every part of South America were shuddering before the Red Menace.
|
||
The only facts we know are that the situation was completely
|
||
transformed after 1934; that within a few years six of the ten
|
||
Republics of South America including Brazil and Peru, were
|
||
truculently Fascist, and even Argentina (where the priests have no
|
||
millions of Indians to stir up) and Chile were semi-Fascist; that
|
||
most of the Liberals had in fact lined up with the Church; and that
|
||
this coalition was first revealed on a large scale when Pacelli,
|
||
the arch-intriguer and hater of Socialism in every form had gone
|
||
from capital to capital and soldiers and statesmen knelt for his
|
||
blessing. You may want to go father than I do and believe that
|
||
Pacelli not only promoted the entire cordial of Liberal statesmen
|
||
and their traditional enemies, but encouraged also the leaders of
|
||
the millions of Italians and Germans, who, as the duped statesmen
|
||
have now found, were already secretly weaving their great plot.
|
||
Please yourself.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The upshot was that not only was "the menace of Bolshevism"
|
||
destroyed in South America but the Church got between ten and
|
||
twenty million apostates bullied into silence and their leaders
|
||
flung into jail. Figures are farcical in Latin America. In Mexico
|
||
a high official warned me privately that their published statement
|
||
that their population consisted of 4,000,000 Indians and 12,000,000
|
||
Mexicans might be turned the other way round. A careful recent
|
||
estimate is that there are 90,000,000 Indian's in South and Central
|
||
America. Few people seem to realize that these provide about one-
|
||
third of the total number of the Pope's real subjects. As in
|
||
Mexico, the majority of them would turn against the priests as soon
|
||
as they got encouragement to do so from their government. The
|
||
situation was closely parallel to that of Russia. Within another
|
||
ten years the great bulk of the 90,000,000 would be lost to the
|
||
Vatican. Are we asked to think that Pacelli scrupulously avoided </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>political maneuvers that promised to avert that tragedy? Remember
|
||
the Irish revolutionaries confiding their plot to the Pope;
|
||
remember Dollfus's, Franco, Henlein, and others.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> But we are concerned with actualities. The cream of the
|
||
Indians, of the millions of workers of such mixed blood that it is
|
||
time we dropped these racial distinctions, are the industrial
|
||
workers. The majority, we saw, had abandoned Rome, Add the
|
||
university youths and a large number of their professors and other
|
||
middle-class men and Liberals of the old school, and it will be
|
||
seen that Rome had to envisage an actual secession of between ten
|
||
and twenty millions. They are now back in the fold -- on paper.
|
||
They are bullied into silence and their most active representatives
|
||
are in jail. By the end of 1935 there were 10,000 political
|
||
prisoners in jail in Brazil alone. Yes, says the Catholic, the scum
|
||
who had recently organized a rebellion. So it was reported in
|
||
America. But the very impartial British 'Annual Register' (1935)
|
||
which gives the above figure adds: "Among these were university
|
||
professors and many other distinguished Brazilians belonging to the
|
||
best society" (p. 312). They were victims of the Black
|
||
International.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> And by one of those blunders into which the brutally and
|
||
callousness of the agents of these Fascist governments are always
|
||
betraying them we learned that this Church-Wealth coalition is not
|
||
only using force but, as it has always done, using it savagely. The
|
||
Brazilian police arrested as spies two ladies of the British
|
||
aristocracy, Lady Hastings and Lady Cameron, who were visiting Rio.
|
||
Viscount Hastings wrote a letter to the London press (News-
|
||
Chronicle, July 14, 1936) on what they saw. It contained such
|
||
things as:</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In the prison they saw men and women who had been so
|
||
badly beaten that they could only move with the greatest
|
||
difficulty; a man's wife had been beaten insensible in front
|
||
of him to make him confess; the hands of another man had been
|
||
mutilated by having iron spikes driven underneath the nails
|
||
... The day before my wife and sister were arrested, the
|
||
American boy Victor Baron was found dead in prison after
|
||
'questioning' . . .</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Immutable Rome! So it was in France in the thirteenth century,
|
||
all over south Europe in the nineteenth, in Spain forty years ago,
|
||
and is now in many countries. If a mere working man, or even a
|
||
professor, had reported these things, moat people would say "Red
|
||
lies." There is obviously some use in Aristocrats.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> In Mexico the struggle with the Church and the attempt of
|
||
Catholics in America to get intervention, which would certainly
|
||
mean war and annexation, had begun long before Pacelli became
|
||
Secretary of State. I am tracing the action of the Black
|
||
International not of Pacelli alone but I have written this earlier
|
||
history so fully elsewhere that I will not return to it. I need
|
||
repeat only about the acute conflict of 1926 that I was then in
|
||
Mexico and saw with what remarkable indifference the people
|
||
accepted what was mendaciously called the persecution of the
|
||
Church, and read articles by Mexican Catholic journalists in the </p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
THE RED POPE</p>
|
||
|
||
<p>leading Havana paper a little later expressing deep disgust with
|
||
the lies (executions of priests etc.) sent by the priests to the
|
||
Knights of Columbus, who zealously enlarged them and circulated
|
||
them in Wall Street. If you want a Catholic (or at all events pro-
|
||
Catholic) witness to this close alliance for years of American
|
||
Catholics. and Wall Street read George Seldes' 'The Vatican' (1934,
|
||
pp. 278-86). There was, of course, an outcry and the American
|
||
Catholic bishops published a letter denying that they were working
|
||
for armed intervention." They merely felt it their duty to "sound
|
||
a warning to Christian civilization that its foundations are being
|
||
attacked and undermined." God, they said would find a way to,
|
||
destroy the evil. By priests blowing trumpets, I suppose. A thinner
|
||
pretense of pacifism it would be hard to find. It has a Japanese
|
||
ring.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Pacelli did not go to Mexico, but the brilliant Church-Fascist
|
||
success that followed his visit to South America had echoes in the
|
||
north. In 1935 F.V. Williams, Al Smith's publicity agent, had a
|
||
revolting article in 'Liberty' (Aug. 24) calling for intervention.
|
||
A Mexican Catholic annihilated his statements in the 'Forum;' in
|
||
fact, they had been answered in advance by various visitors to
|
||
Mexico (World-Telegram, June 8, 1935, etc.) The Catholic Teeling
|
||
also admits that Catholics intrigued at Washington to get
|
||
intervention and that Msgr. Burke served as intermediary.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> It is, at all events, true that from 1936 Pacelli included
|
||
Mexico in the list of countries in which he invited the great
|
||
powers to "extinguish" Bolshevism. It was so clearly a war-program
|
||
that I have never read even a Catholic attempt to give his words,
|
||
the slogan he sent through the whole Catholic world, any other
|
||
meaning. An innocent young nun or a Lord Halifax might suggest that
|
||
he "extinguish it by prayer." Is that what he meant when he sent
|
||
Cardinal Faulhaber, as we shall see, to beg Hitler to allow the
|
||
Church to cooperate with him in the good work? It was a war
|
||
program; a call to, as it has proved, the bloodiest war in history.
|
||
So who are the real Reds?</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> **** ****</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
|
||
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
|
||
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
|
||
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
|
||
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
|
||
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
|
||
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
|
||
that America can again become what its Founders intended --</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> The Free Market-Place of Ideas.</p>
|
||
|
||
<p> **** ****
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
</p></xml> |