Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:33pm

Lenin, Stalin, and the Secret War Against the Vatican

Adolph Hitler’s evil twin in terror, Joseph Stalin, once remarked “How many divisions has the Pope?”.  This was done in response to the  future saint Pope Pius XII’s[1] disapproval of his policies.

Well it wasn’t a mocking tone nor was it a sarcastic remark in reference to the Vatican.  It was a serious concern to the ‘meddling’ of the Catholic Church in thwarting Communism’s attempt at world domination.  Stalin was well aware of the tremendous moral power that the Vatican wielded and Vladimir Lenin implemented the full power of the KGB and the eastern bloc spy agencies to monitor and undermine the mission of the Catholic Church.

A new non-fiction book by John Koehler titled, Spies in the Vatican, has recently come out that documents the final twenty years of the Cold War and how it played out as the Soviet Union and their allies infiltrated the Vatican.

Patrick Devenny of the American Thinker reviewed the Mr. Koehler’s new book:

Koehler abruptly begins the story in the Chekist dungeons of the early 1920s as a gleeful Chairman Lenin oversaw the mass murder of thousands of clerics.  The decades of atrocities that followed drive home the central theme of Spies: beginning at its inception, the Soviet government was willing to use all available tools to counter religion’s influence.  Overseeing this effort, Stalin’s successors relied less on brute force and more on the panoply of covert tools wielded so ruthlessly by the KGB and its sister services in East Germany and Poland.  Especially wary of the curia’s influence in the Soviet sphere, Moscow’s spymasters relentlessly pushed their field officers to target church institutions for subversion.  As Koehler deftly recounts using actual Communist source reports, the result was startling:  Soviet leaders enjoyed regular access to the inner deliberations of Vatican leaders for years, secured by the work of several spy networks.

John Koehler was a former U.S. intelligence officer and an Associated Press (A.P.) writer while in Europe.  After retiring from his government post Mr. Koehler investigated and studied into Cold War-era intelligence data which resulted in his new book.

Concerning the new pope in Cardinal Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, the Politburo authorized the vaunted KGB to:

“Use all possibilities available to the Soviet Union to prevent the new course of policies initiated by the Polish pope; if necessary with additional measures beyond disinformation and discreditation.”

Mr. Devenny reports that Mr. Koehler implies that the result may have been the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, but confesses this issue may never be answered.

The book does divulge that a Polish bishop and a German priest and monk were one of the many informants to communist intelligence services but only providing their pseudonyms since that was all that could be mined from the many archives.

We can certainly all agree that one of the many successes of the sons of the French Revolution[2] have been the discrediting of Pope Pius XII by accusing him of failing in saving the Jews.

In time the Truth slowly reveals itself by uncovering the machinations of Soviet and eastern bloc spy agencies and their accomplices.

This is an intriguing article by Patrick Devenny called The Kremlin vs. the Cardinals and if you want to read more click here.

_._

[1] When told of Stalin’s response, Pope Pius XII said, “You may tell my son Joseph he will meet my divisions in heaven.”

[2] The French Revolution was the catalyst for the fall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia that ushered in 70 years of atheistic terror.

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Barry
Barry
Thursday, September 3, AD 2009 10:46am

The French Revolution must have been a pretty long lasting catalyst, I guess, as the Romonov’s fell more than a half or full century later, depending on how you count such things, with the intervention of minor things like Napolean and WWI, again depending on how you count it.
And although 70 years of “athiestic terror” may have occured, subsequetly, I can’t say that it was much worse than the centuries of very theistic terror that occurred under the rule of the Romanovs.

Tito Edwards
Thursday, September 3, AD 2009 1:10pm

Lenin, Marx, and most Socialists and Communists have read up and were inspired by headless French intellectuals from the French Revolution.

It’s an invention called the Gutenberg Press that has been able to facilitate the knowledge of evil.

As for the Atheistic terror, more people died under Stalin and the Soviet Union in 70 years than all the previous centuries combined under the Romanovs.

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