Spy vs. Spy

Source

NCR reporter Tom Hoopes relates a few details he picked up from two Vatican experts about Ven. Pius XII's efforts to thwart Nazi abuses and atrocities.

* The Nazis considered the Catholic Church in general and the pope in particular threats to their regime.

* The Catholic hierarchy and clergy were monitored closely by the Nazi secret police through the use of informants, phone taps, and mail surveillance. One effort involved establishing a phony seminary and filling it with seminarians who were actually German agents.

* In the winter-spring of 1939-40 Pius deliberately served as a channel of communications between London and the German resistance inside the German army and intelligence service.

* In Rome's Central Synagogue there is a bronze memorial plaque mounted near the entrance from Israeli Premier Golda Meir thanking the Vatican for saving Jews from Nazi persecution.

* According to Israeli Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and diplomat Pinchas Lapide, Pius XII was repsonsible for saving over 700,000 Jews, and perhaps as many as 860,000.

The Nazis are "in reality only miserable plagiarists who dress up old errors with new tinsel. It does not make any difference whether they flock to the banners of social revolution, whether they are guided by a false concept of the world and of life, or whether they are possessed by the superstition of a race and blood cult."
- Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII), in Lourdes, France, 1935