Historians and communist-era diplomats have cast doubts on a former Romanian general's claim that he helped with a KGB plot to portray Pope Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer in order to weaken the Catholic Church.Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian intelligence chief under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, said that between 1960 and 1962 he recruited three Romanian spies to disguise themselves as priests and gain access to the Vatican Secret Archives.
Their objective was to steal documents for the KGB, the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency, so the documents could be manipulated as evidence against Pope Pius, who died in 1958, said Pacepa.
Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, said these documents also contributed to a devastating anti-Pope Pius play, "The Deputy," which opened in Berlin in 1963.
He said a KGB chief of disinformation created an outline for the first draft of "The Deputy," which helped popularize the notion that Pope Pius supported Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
His claims were included in an article, "Moscow's Assault on the Vatican," posted in late January on the National Review Online.
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce