Chapter 17
The Final Unholy Alliance
The Papacy at
its zenith of power ever allied itself with powerful states which agreed
to do its biddings. By a mixture of threats, favors and the dispensing
of privileges, the Papacy adroitly achieved its aims. In the
twenty-first century no European power, not even the European Union,
matches the United States in potency and influence. This situation
developed in the last half of the twentieth century. It is only natural
that the Roman Catholic Church would see it expedient to make every
effort to form a liaison with the United States, despite that
Protestants outnumber Roman Catholics in that nation.
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, two
and a half years before he was elected Pope Pius XII, sailed for New
York on October 8, 1936. There he was met by the young auxiliary bishop
of Boston, Francis Joseph Spellman, only thirty-seven years of age.
Later Spellman became the powerful Cardinal Archbishop of New York.
Already Bishop Spellman had experience as a Vatican bureaucrat. In
thirty days Cardinal Pacelli, then the Vatican Secretary of State,
travelled 6,500 miles in America visiting numerous cities and Catholic
educational institutions. Most of the nation’s major cities were visited
including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit,
Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis, St. Paul, San Francisco and
Washington, in addition to New York.
It was during a visit with President Franklin
Roosevelt that Pacelli received an assurance that the United States
would once more forge diplomatic ties with the Vatican, ties that had
been severed in 1867 before the Papal States were disbanded. But the
Senate refused to permit Roosevelt’s promise to become a reality. The
President was forced to content himself with the appointment of Myron
Taylor as his personal representative at the Holy See in 1940.
Thus de facto diplomatic recognition was
accorded. The United States Senate had severed diplomatic ties after
Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus of Errors which was deeply offensive to
Protestants. A future alliance between the United States and the Vatican
seemed impossible at that time, but God had spoken and once more His
word would be fulfilled. So sensitive were Protestants to the Papacy in
1936 that Roosevelt dared not meet Pacelli until after the 1936
Presidential Election had secured him a second term in office. How
different from the 1996 election sixty years later when President Bill
Clinton saw Papal contacts as an enhancement to his prospects of
reelection.
Pacelli, at that time, was the highest Vatican
prelate ever to visit the United States. So great was the Vatican’s
confidence in the United States that it had invested heavily in Wall
Street, only to see this means greatly reduced in the Wall Street Crash
of 1929. However, by 1935 it was again investing in blue-chip stocks in
the United States (J. F. Pollard, The Vatican and the Wall
Street Crash: Bernardino Nogara and Papal Finances in the Early 1930’s).
Pollard also claimed in his paper that in May, 1939 the Vatican sent
$7,665,000 worth of gold bars to the United States. This move provided
cash for the Papacy during the war years. It was strange indeed that the
predominantly Protestant United States was preferred to banks of Zurich,
a city which is predominantly Roman Catholic.
That Rome, recognizing the usefulness to its purposes
of the United States, sought to increase its influence in that nation,
cannot be doubted. Already the large number of Irish, Italian and
Hispanic migrants had bolstered the number of adherents to the Roman
Catholic faith in the United States, providing Rome with no little
influence there.
As early as the end of the nineteenth century the
Vatican had set its sights on the United States. In 1890 Archbishop
Ireland had stated,
Catholics of the U.S.A. are called . . . to make
America Catholic . . . Catholic truth will travel on the wings of
American influence and with it encircle the universe. (Quoted in
The Pope and the New Era, pp. 222, 223)
In 1894 The Catholic Standard and Times of
November 3 spoke forthrightly stating,
The U.S.A., it can be said without exaggeration,
are the chief thought of Leo XIII. . . . A few days ago, on receiving
an eminent American, Leo XIII said, "The United States of America are
the future, we think of them incessantly.". . . That is why Leo XIII
turns all his soul, full of ideality, to what is improperly called his
American policy. It should be called his Catholic universal policy.
One year earlier the Catholic University, Washington,
D.C., had published in The Mission Movement in America that "Our
purpose is to make America predominantly Catholic."
Dr. Barrett, who was for many years in the Jesuit
Order, wrote in 1935 a remarkably frank account of the work of Catholic
Action, which was established in the twentieth century. It left no doubt
concerning its aims in America:
In theory, Catholic action is the work and service
of lay Catholics in the cause of religion, under the guidance of the
bishops. In practice it is the Catholic group fighting their way to
control America. (Dr. E. Boyd Barrett, Rome Stoops to Conquer,
p. 15)
The effort, the fight, may be drawn out. It may
last for five or ten years. Even if it lasts for twenty—what is twenty
years in the life of Rome? The fight must be fought to a
finish—opposition must be worn down, if it cannot be swept away.
Rome’s immortal destiny hangs on the outcome. That destiny overshadows
the land. (Ibid., p. 266)
And in the fight, as she has ever fought when
battles were most desperate in the past, Rome will use steel and gold
and silvery lies. Rome will stoop to conquer. (Ibid., p. 267)
At the time of Cardinal Pacelli’s triumphant tour of
the United States, the secular newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press
of November 4, commented,
Pope Pius [XI] feels that the United States is the
ideal base for Catholicism’s great drive . . . The Catholic Movement,
Rome’s militant organization numbering millions all over the world,
will be marshalled direct from Rome, by Monsignor Pizzardo—next to
Pacelli the Holy See’s shrewdest diplomat and politician.
Pacelli had visited St. Paul in Minnesota, sited
across the river from Minneapolis. This report indicated that even
before the United States assumed its post-war drive for world dominance
the Vatican had its sights firmly focused upon that nation.
But not all Protestants were asleep to one successful
means Rome employed in her quest for influence in the United States.
United States Senator Thomas E. Watson in 1928 wrote,
In the public schools the Catholics have stealthily
introduced textbooks written by Jesuits; and your children are being
taught that the Roman church was misunderstood in the past; that its
doctrines are not fatal to humanity and gospel religion; that its
record is not saturated with the blood of innocent millions, murdered
by Papal persecutors, and that there never was such a monstrosity as
the alleged sale of papal pardons of sins. (Roman Catholics in
America Falsifying History and Poisoning the Minds of Protestant
School Children, p. 5)
Educate youth in this Catholic way, and the
consequences are logical. (Ibid.)
There was no question that Rome had to alter
Protestant perceptions in order to fulfill the prophetic word that the
United States would become a tool of Papal policy. The education system,
in itself, could fulfill this role perfectly.
But the Roman Catholic Church had other means at its
disposal. While the Roman Catholic priest, Patrick Henry O’Brien, may
have let his Irish zeal run a little riot, nevertheless his letter to
former priest and later Protestant minister, Dr. Domenico of
Philadelphia, reveals what was in the minds and hearts of other priests.
O’Brien’s letter, written in the second half of the twentieth century,
was published by the Italian Baptist Association of America. It read, in
part,
We the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church
expect all loyal children of the church to assist the president [of
the U.S.A.] with all our strength to see the individuals comprising
the U.S.A. Supreme Court shall obey the President’s injunctions. And
if necessary, we shall change, mend or blot the present constitution
so that the president may enforce his, or rather our, humanitarian
program, and all phases of human rights as laid down by our saintly
popes and the Holy Mother Church.
We elected our worthy president by the greatest
majority ever recorded in history. We are going to have our laws made
and enforced according to the Holy See, and the popes and the canon
law of the Papal throne. Our entire social structure must be rebuilt
on that basis. Our educational laws must be constructed to this end—that
atheism, the red peril of totalitarianism, Protestantism, communism,
socialism and all other like ilk and stamp, be driven from this fair
land.
The cross was planted on our shores by a staunch
Roman Catholic [Columbus]. This land belongs to us by every right.
Long enough have we compromised on every important question. Now we
demand what is really ours, and we are going to have it. We will
support our president in every way to obtain it, peacefully, honestly
if we may. If necessary we are ready to fight and die for it.
We want as cabinet members, children of the Holy
Mother Church, holding important positions in the entire structure of
our government.
We control America and we do not propose to stop,
until America, or Americans are genuinely Roman Catholic and remain
so. God help us.
Thus the judiciary, executive and the legislature of
the country has been targeted to assist the aims of the Roman Church.
While Rome steadily pursued its agenda, much of Protestantism slept. A
remarkable ally for the aims of the Papacy was found in Evangelical
Protestantism when, largely through the sale of the Schofield Bible,
especially in the Southern States of America in the early twentieth
century, Cyrus Schofield’s notes within that Bible were virtually
accepted as truth. Those notes destroyed the Bible evidence that the
Papacy is the Antichrist and in its place promoted the Jesuit view
invented by the sixteenth century Jesuit priest Francisco Ribera, that
the antichrist was a future evil individual who would pursue a vile
agenda for three and a half years at the end of time.
Further, Schofield promoted another concept devised
by a Spanish Jesuit priest. Manuel de Lacunza y Dias, using the
pseudonym, Rabbi Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, ministering in Chile, espoused
the non-Biblical theory of the Rapture in the late eighteenth century.
This fiction was grasped by Scottish evangelist, Edward Irving in 1827
and years later accepted by Cyrus Schofield via the teachings of John
Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren faith.
Blinded by these Jesuit-inspired errors, Evangelical
Protestants were lulled into somnolence. Losing their Scriptural
moorings and cast adrift on a sea of error, they slept while Rome’s
agenda was pushed very successfully. (See The Evangelical Dilemma,
Colin and Russell Standish, Hartland Publications, Rapidan, Virginia,
1994.)
The renowned Roman Catholic scholar and prelate,
Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart of France, after recounting the fearful
history of Papal persecution, then proceeded to quote the words of
Monsignor d’Hulst:
Indeed, even among our friends and our brothers we
find those who dare not look this problem in the face. [i.e.
the problem of Rome’s dark and awful past.] They ask permission from
the church to ignore or even to deny all those acts and institutions
in the past, which have made orthodoxy [Catholicism] compulsory. (The
Catholic Church, the Renaissance and Protestantism, pp. 183, 184)
It is a grave sin to hate Roman Catholics. They are
entitled to our love. They must be assured of the religious liberty to
believe, practice and promote their beliefs. But it is a fearful
mistake, with far reaching con-sequences, to blind ourselves to the
Papacy’s awful history and prophesied future persecution. In doing so
American Protestantism has denied its roots and ceased the mighty
protest from which its very name is derived.
The British Professor at Harvard University, Harold
Laski, clearly saw the trends in these matters in the United States when
he wrote in the Protestant journal, The Christian Century,
December 31, 1947:
I add with both hesitation and regret, my feeling
that a good deal of what is most reactionary in the political and
social life of America today, is directly traceable to the influence
of a militant Roman Catholic church, which is as much the expression
of the purposes of a foreign power as any influence exerted by the
Communist Party. No other body has devoted itself so consistently, to
poisoning the relations between the U.S.A. and Russia. It protects
child labour, it is building from infant school to University, its own
educational emperium in emperio [empire within an empire]. It
has immense influence over the movie industry, not least where films
of political complexion are concerned. It plays a major part in the
repression of freedom of speech. It is attempting with subtlety and
skill to establish a concealed control of trade unions in cities where
there is a large Catholic population. I doubt whether there are three
Americans today whose authority direct and indirect counts for more
than that of the Cardinal-Archbishop of New York.
And to this must be added the curious and
significant fact that the members of the Roman Catholic church seem
able, like their co-religionists in Great Britain, to obtain pivotal
posts in the foreign service, exercising a power of infiltration which
must make members of the Communist party feel that they are infants at
the game.
Anyone who measures Roman Catholic strength in the
United States today with what it was a generation ago cannot fail to
be impressed by its growth, as well as perturbed by its direction.
Spain apart, it is doubtful whether there is any country in the world
today in which its authority is greater than in America.
If these conclusions were true well over half a
century ago, how much further has the United States progressed under the
skillful posturing of Roman Catholic clerics toward the single-minded
goals of the Papacy to control the political, legislative and judicial
agendas of the greatest nation of history! |
