NIKITARONCALLI Counterlife of a Pope

NIKITARONCALLI Counterlife of a Pope

by Franco Bellegrandi


To Anita, for her quiet, unflagging, precious help



Author’s Note


Once again to take in hand the manuscript of a book that
was never published, open it, leaf through those pages
written so many years before, is like stepping into a long-closed
house. A house that was once our home, in which we lived,
suffered, and loved.


The dusty windows are, once again, thrust open, and as
the morning light stirs, the rooms from the darkness one
after the other, the eye makes out the ancient layout of the
furnishings concealed by the coverings, of the objects, of
the books once familiar.


And approaching the walls and pushing aside with emotion
the drape which shrouds a portrait, one encounters the gaze
of a person well-known and loved who has continued to
live for all those years, in the dimness of the closed house,
with the very same expression in her look, with the same
fettered ability to move you in the splendor of those eyes,
in the grace of her face, in the elegant and delicate posture
of her figure.


Much time has passed, and yet all has remained in its place
in the house where year after year not a piece has
resounded anymore, nor voice has uttered another word.


However for this very reason those ancient emotions
indissolubly tied to those rooms, to those décors, to that
rich furnishing, to those veiled portraits, appear unscathed
by time.


No irksome hand has violated that seclusion nor moved
anything.


Thus time has stood still in those rooms like the subdued
beat of the old pendulum on the console, in the stillness and
in the shadows in the “physical” absence of life, all the
spirituality, all the ideals, all the delusions and all the
heightened or consuming passions that breathed so many
years before within those walls. As, once again we enter
that house, we find them still powerful, intact, pitiless, and
punctual in “their” actuality having survived time and
events.


To be continued...

So it was with the manuscript of this book. Which ought
to have been published many years ago, when the facts
narrated had just taken place. The draft had been completed
effortlessly, without halting reflections, with the voices of
the protagonists still resounding in my ears, and the echo of
the emotions still stirring in my heart.


For many narrated facts I witnessed in person, with the
awareness of moving in a world and amidst personages on
which the curtain would be forever lowered. Where are
they today? Somewhere they exist, and are living their own
life. Yet erased from History, which, in spite of them, has
turned the page. Confined into silence and lost in the
swarming of the anonymous throng. Power has its
proscenium and its actors. That is the “sanctioned
actuality” continuously proposed. And so today one is led
into thinking that a nation is represented by this unicum of
plebeians in shirt and tie, with no trait of nobility in their
face. And it is these, and always these, in power today. And
yet those others, when death has yet to call an end to their
days, are still alive. But they no longer “exist.” Their
gold-embroidered uniforms, when not consigned to the junk
dealer, lay at the bottom of a closet. Their talents produced
books that today’s power has relegated into oblivion. Their
code of honor called for a duel, to wipe the insult, or for a
shot in one’s own head, in the disgraceful instance. People
used to saying, watching them at ceremonies, “How noble,
what a grand signor!” And yet some would take the
streetcar to get to those ceremonies, the greatcoat buttoned
up to conceal tailcoat and decorations, and born their
destitution with dignity and decorum.


But they are forever gone.


The last of that rare stock with whom I lived, and
befriended under the gilded vaults of the Vatican palace,
furnished me with documents and precious information for
my book, and encouraged me to write it:


May my gratitude and admiration for their courage be
with them wherever they are.


To be continued...

Preface


One could entitle these indispensable lines that introduce
the pages that follow, Preface to the preface. The subject of
this book is not frozen in time, but rather moves on with
time. It flows like the sand in the grand inflexible merciless
hourglass of History, arresting its moment is impossible.


Only memory can immobilize them in its boundless
archive upon which time can however do much, with its
fog and its amnesias, more or less controlled by man. For
the personal use, these amnesias, of the undemanding
humanae gentis.


Perhaps never like the present, a present encased in the
swift passing of seasons, the political reality of the
contemporary world has been devastated by a tremor as
macroscopic as unpredictable, which has upset the political
geography of half of our globe, and uncovered pots in
which were brewing hallucinogenic schemes.


The Soviet macrocosm has disintegrated piece by piece.

All of its quasi-centenary monolithic order has been run
through by cracks and clefts whence with the swiftness of
an otherworldly nightmare have detached and flown away,
obedient to a mysterious centrifugal force, vital fragments
of its empire, which seemed unassailable and indissoluble.

Communism, in an instant has disintegrated. It no longer
exists. And Soviet Russia with hat in hand asks mercy of
the dollar so as to feed herself.


The last great ideology of the twentieth century to which,
willingly or not, millions of men have given their intellect
and sacrificed their lives, is sinking in a jubilation of
shame.


The ship is sinking and the rats are abandoning the ship in
droves. All precipitously distance themselves, those who
professed their beliefs in Communism in order to dunk in
the doughnut of their avidity, and are now crying out the
anathema.


But this their distancing themselves, this their
ostentatious outrage cannot annul facts and documents,
cannot wipe out inescapable responsibilities, and cannot
erase with a snap of a finger heavy and very uncomfortable
accounts/scores.


To be continued...

Regrettably for that multitude of “ex,” with tragicomic
punctuality the sins are starting to catch up. And so this
manuscript, recounting the approach between Church and
Marxism, blossomed amidst the lights and shadows of the
Giovannean pontificate, lived by the author in full, a step
away from the pontifical throne, bestirs at the breeze of an
actuality unimagined at the time of its draft. The distance of
those days has been increased hundredfold by the forward
flight of History.


Days sanctified in the liturgy of the proletariat and strict
political and social realities, solemnly affirmed and
apparently indestructible. Days in which these pages
yellowed by the years were written with a solid – if callow
– faith in the fairness and legitimacy and honesty of the
intent. Pages rather quite documental than literary, and thus
designated by the intent – or vain ambitions? – of the
author to a future which then seemed well beyond the
discernible horizon of a lifetime, yet with equally solid
uncertainty as to the if, how, and when, they would be
consigned to the printing press.


Indeed, these pages on which intermingle diary,
chronicle, and history mostly unknown to most, are blotted
by the original sin of a guilt, at that time deserving of the
most passionate blame: having dared, against every
opportunistic logic, to trace a “counter-life” of John XXIII
that would underscore the revolutionary commitment of
that Pope, which earned him the name of “Pope of the
communists.”


The sudden fall of Soviet communism has triggered a
centrifugal jumble within the muddled ranks that used to be
the party of the sickle and the hammer. No one has ever
soiled his hands with the Bolsheviks; no one has pocketed
ready rubles; no one, by George! has ever compromised
himself with Moscow. And in the meantime, as in a
Biblical scourge, from the half-closed archives of the
Kremlin are darting out, as deadly thunderbolts incinerating
the fake, irrefutable documents corroborating the closest –
and logical – cooperation of these individuals with the
Soviet “Mamuska” (mother).


Most of the media, which follow the stream, are hunting
down the comrades lost. Every man for himself. Yet entire
generations did embrace communism. And many still carry
it in their hearts. In the West and East alike. Especially in
the East, the feast over, after the first bitter taste of the new
reality.


To be continued...

Even on the night of the coup, of that 19 August 1991,
there was no counting of the ante-march comrades who
wept and laughed, glued to the TV broadcasting the martial
sequences of that ephemeral coup d'état. Here now, finally,
comes Stalin’s red army, taker of Berlin, to reestablish the
inviolable power of the State Party against the treachery of
the little bourgeois, whom Uncle Sam has bought by the
pound. In the depths of the mausoleum of the Red Square,
the mummy of Lenin has aroused and calls out to the
revival.


Those spirits, pure no matter what, respectable flag-bearers
of faithfulness, lived in their exalted fancy the night
of the coup. They beheld in the courtyards of the barracks,
cut by the beams of the spotlights, the officers standing on
the tanks, haranguing the troops; beheld the invincible
blood-hued flag kissed by the commanders. They perceived
the cry of the engines and the rattling of the caterpillars.


But the exaltation was short-lived. As bitter, the
reawakening. Many are now fleeing the old beloved party,
which diligent hands have castrated of its historical,
chrismatic emblem.


The news hounds are after the comrades compromised
with deeds and actions. But when the exciting lead creeps
under the Bronze Door, an imperious whistle freezes up
their race. How long is this dormant “omertà,” this official
silence upon a Vatican policy and an ecclesial course
responsible and commendable for such a long season of fat
years of the communist parties of our time, yet to last?
Today that the lid has blown off the Eastern pot, and the
uncovered Marxist light broth has caused noses to turn up
the world wide, the threshold of the Leonine City and of its
policy compromised with communism are rigidly precluded
to the media. Oh yes, because the witnessed denunciation
of all the corruption and bloodthirsty ferocity in which
those regimes prospered, made cocky by the Vatican
“Ostpolitik,” renders all the more momentous with
responsibility and moral guilt the opening to that
communism by the Catholic Church and the Vatican,
wanted by Pope Roncalli and carried on to its close by
Pope Montini.


From the standpoint of the clergymen involved, this
silence imposed with the ancient authority is
understandable: that preaching and pursuing the
antagonistic union between Catholicism and Marxism, that
carrying forward so complacent a policy toward the
Communist regimes of the East – as so well knows cardinal
Agostino Casaroli, then monsignor, and Vatican’s chargé
d’affaires, who in those crimson government palaces was
one of the family – on the skin of the Church of Silence,
today can but arise bewilderment and meditated
condemnation.


To be continued...

The iron curtain has been torn to pieces, and the eye of
the world has been able to wander over the countries of the
European East, inviolate satellites of the Soviet planet.
Horror, condemnation, and indignation have come back to
haunt the doped affluence of the Western consumer, and
the many who were in cahoots with those regimes for
flaunted open-mindedness or aimed political opportunism,
have rushed, as the saying is, to distance themselves.
Although their words hailing those regimes and the men of
those regimes, and, what is worse, the political steps,
sometimes ominous, undertaken and undersigned with
those regimes, still mark the trail of their hastened retreat.


Comes to mind what Giancarlo Vigorelli wrote not long
ago: “I have known three great peasants, Mao Ze Dong,
Ceausescu, and John XXIII”. I doubt that pen, dipped in
opportunistic ink, today would write that wanton praise,
after the slaughter of Tienanmen square and the unmasked,
witnessed thuggish ferocity of the “great Rumanian
peasant.” And the author of that historical tirade could
hardly ever fancy to be making, putting together the three
characters, a singular matching loaded with prophetical
significance and inescapable coincidences, which only a
few years later would stir shuddering reflections.


And that is what lies behind this “counter life” of John
XXIII, the Pope from Sotto il Monte responsible for that
turn in a Marxist key, ecumenical and not ecumenical,
which set in motion the opening of the Church and of the
Vatican to communism. Of an all-new Vatican that with
Giovanni Battista Montini would achieve the inconceivable
goals of closing agreements, secrets and not, with the
regimes of the East. Starting with the liquidation of the
Church of Silence and of her most important representative,
cardinal Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary. Of a Vatican that
welcomes politicized “priests of the peace,” invented by
those regimes that would impose their approval upon the
election of the new bishops. And so bishops – potential
cardinals – bearing the DOC official label (Denominazione
di Origine Controllata; or Certified Origin, originally
limited to first-rate wines) of the communist approval have
come to mark the Episcopal grape-harvest of those years.


But today’s man has a poor memory. The fast pace of the
events, the violence exerted with growingly sophisticated
sapience by the mass media on the opinion, have made man
unable to experience but a “mesmerized” present, and to
retain even the most recent past. True, it would be
sufficient to remember, to debunk, ridicule, nail to silence
so many “mosche cocchiere,” (fly riding on the back of a
horse, as though steering the larger animal) delegated by
most to the helm of the nations.


Will History ever get the better of these Two-Faced
Januses?

The genuine memory, the noble memory, the non-polluted
memory “ad usum delfini,” is the backbone of
History. It should be the duty of anyone in the know, to
consign to her archives, precious for humanity, without
reticence, without false respects, even for purple and
Triregno (Papal Tiara), the name and the actions of those
who with those regimes have come to terms, deeming them
invincible. The actions and policy of raw models at the
head of great masses of humanity, such as those Roman
Pontiffs who that communism have promptly accepted and
for long years encouraged, with which they have entered
into pacts in flagrant contradiction with the principles and
religion they personified, and whose atheist and
materialistic doctrine have permitted, with their dormancy
and stunning collaboration, to proliferate in those years
amongst the masses of the West, cannot and must not be
erased. What is more, that communist penetration amongst
the Catholics had been checked by an uncongenial
predecessor of theirs, without mincing words, with
excommunication.


Fortunately for our descendants, History has neither face
nor political hue, and could not care less whether in her
truths are caught up untouchable personages. Only, it is
often so terribly vexing and unpopular, with the eyes
fastened onto History, as onto the peremptory hand of an
infallible compass, to write the truth one has lived, if from
minimal angles, when such truth involves and overwhelms
untouchable personages holding in their hands the blazing
thunderbolts of power.


Challenging those thunderbolts, in the conviction of
doing something coherent with my principles, I have
handed my manuscript over to the publisher. For it would
have seemed to me unworthy, precisely in light of my
deep-rooted principles, to subtract the tessera of a personal
experience, singular and unrepeatable, to the great mosaic
of memory, and, who knows, of history.


To be continued...

CHAPTER I

“The only real struggle in History is that either for or
against the Church of Christ.” St. John Bosco


“Never, perhaps, did a Pope render the spirit in a human
concept more unanimous…” With these words,
“L’Osservatore Romano” of Monday-Tuesday, June 3-4,
1963, opened, on the front page of a special bereavement
edition, with the news of the death of John XXIII, that
occurred on Monday June 3, at 19:49 hours.


That statement by the Vatican newspaper had stricken
me, and had caused me to reflect as, in the late morning of
Tuesday, June 4, I was walking up to the papal apartment,
to pay homage, as a dignitary of the Pontifical Court, to the
body of the deceased Pope. Due to my responsibilities
(Chamberlain of the Sword and the Cape of His Holiness)
and my long-standing position as a journalist for
“L’Osservatore Romano”, I had lived, day in and day out,
behind the scenes, throughout the pontificate of Angelo
Giuseppe Roncalli. A startling, amazing pontificate, and
today we may add, fatal, for the survival of the Church and
the fate of all of mankind. I quickly began to have an
inkling of what a formidable reforming and progressive
will was hiding behind the kindly and humble countenance
of Pope Roncalli, as well as his authentic personality,
oozing with abilities and diplomatic shrewdness, of his
perfect knowledge of human psychology, of irony and
sympathy with which he spiced up his relationships with
his fellow man and with his direct collaborators. In the
course of his brief pontificate, that was to last less than five
years, yet so explosive as to unsettle twenty centuries of the
Church, I had spoken with cardinals and bishops startled
with lightning-quick papal resolutions, I had witnessed the
desperation of old and venerable men of the Church who
foresaw in that supreme expression of the reforming will of
John XXIII which was the Vatican II Ecumenical Council,
the beginning of the disintegration of that monolithic block
which had been the Church up to Pius XII. Today as I am
writing these pages, the painful foresight of those old men
sounds prophetic.


An American Jesuit resident in Rome, hiding behind the
pseudonym of Xavier Rynne, revealed in the “New
Yorker” of the second week of July, 1963, that when
Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Secretary of State and,
amongst the cardinals, one of the most informed on the
situation of the Church in the world, learned of the
intention of John XXIII to summon a Council, as a good,
forthright Roman, he confided to those close to him that he
considered that the Pope had “temporarily gone mad.” The
Ecumenical Council had immediately proved an explosive
instrument upon which the Marxist dynamite was promptly
triggered.


To be continued...

It will suffice to consider that, following the promulgation
of the encyclical “Pacem in Terris”, in which Pope Roncalli
proclaimed that “… There can, and should be cooperation
between the Catholics and the Communist regimes on the
social and political level…” in the April 28, 1963 Italian
elections the communists gained one million more votes
than in the previous elections, five years earlier. This first
clamorous success of the Italian Communist party (PCI)
was unanimously attributed to the policy of John XXIII;
they called it “Ecclesiastical Leftism”, when he was still
alive, or “Giovannismo” which they did after his death.


The statements by the Secretary General of the Italian
Communist party, Palmiro Togliatti, given to the
Florence’s daily “La Nazione”, in an interview of August
26, 1963, are of a lapidary eloquence: “In fifty years? I may
be wrong, but the world will be dominated by us and by the
Catholics, and it is certain that we shall find the
groundwork for a reciprocal collaboration… We’ll never
get to know a time of perfect “Civitas Dei”: Marxism’s
well aware of it. Perhaps the most intelligent Catholics
know these things as well as knowing where the world is
headed, but are nonetheless afraid. They fear, for example,
to examine in depth that great phenomenon that has been
the “Giovannean Pontificate.” (John’s pontificate). It’s not
just a matter of peace-now, but of a superior human
understanding, of a mutual rapprochement that we’ll be
able to achieve. As to the present, moreover, the
“Giovannean” phenomenon, has been that of creating a
responsible Catholicism in politics. They are the premises
for a transformation of the world…”


Twelve days before these statements by the Italian
communist leader, and precisely seventy-two days
following John XXIII’s death, on August 14, 1963 the
Soviet magazine “Nauka i Relighia” published a script by
Anatoli Krassikov, in which the author, after stating that
“…The Ecumenical Council, which is to resume its work
on September 29, has already shown that within the
ecclesiastical hierarchies there exists a strong tendency
rejecting the old methods of Pius XII…” recognizing in the
deceased Pontiff qualities of “…wise and farsighted
politician, who saw realistically the changes coming about
in the world and knew how to value the imperatives of the
time…” Then, commenting on the encyclical “Pacem in
Terris,” the Russian columnist wrote that John XXIII
“…puts forward for the first time in an official document
the issue of a possible cooperation between Catholics and
non-Catholics toward the achievement of a scope that is of
interest to all humanity. He writes explicitly that the
reconciliation, which only yesterday was or seemed
impossible, is necessary today or could become so
tomorrow…


Certainly the desired “reconciliation” has turned out to be
unexpectedly advantageous to the Marxists. It has
alienated, on the other hand, a considerable mass of
believers who no longer recognize their own Church in the
post-Conciliar Church. I carry in my memory and in my
heart the words spoken to me by Cardinal Mindszenty in
Vienna on October 18, 1974. I had asked the Primate of
Hungary, twice nailed onto the cross of his martyrdom, first
by the fierce fury of the Marxist bailiffs, subsequently by
the cold callousness of Papa Montini: “Which is the True
Church, that official one that now, in the world, fraternizes
with Marxist atheism, or else the one abandoned by Rome
because it remained faithful to Tradition.” The old Magyar
bishop had directly replied to me, “The one abandoned by
Rome.”


To be continued...

It will be historically proven how important “the
reconciliation” had been to Communism, for its affirmation
in the world, the Vatican of John XXIII and Paul VI.
French bishop Marcel Lefebvre responded on the pages of
the daily “Vita” of February 27, 1977, to those who asked
him what he thought of the relations between the Vatican
and the communist countries: “Just look at the outcome;
that is, the worldwide communist advance on every front.
The Vatican deserves the gratitude of the Soviets for the
extraordinary help it is contributing to their victory. We
may see soon how the gratitude of the communists will
manifest itself.”


The Council (Vatican 2), therefore, had obliterated in an unimaginable conflagration the solidity of the entire ecclesial body, and gave rise to disorientation, dispute, and hostility amongst the peoples.


Such were my cogitations on that late June 4, 1963
morning, as I was walking up to the papal apartment. I had
chosen not to use the elevator to avoid the queue of
personalities from the diplomatic corps and clergy that
continuously formed in the small lobby that opens onto the
St. Damaso’s Courtyard, bustling with an incessant coming
and going of big black automobiles. Above all, that
reference to the “Enhanced human accord” caused me to
give a start for the evident contrast with the reality, and
bitterly to smile to myself. The silence, along those ancient
solitary stairs of the Apostolic Palace, was at a peak. That
ascent across the courtyards, the immensely high walls
bathed in history, the hundred halls of the palace of the
“Supreme Sovereign,” as always, overwhelmed me. It
seemed as though I was climbing step after step toward a
mystical height. It seemed as though, as I was climbing that
ancient flight of stairs immersed in the shade. I could
perceive the heart-beat of that venerable and notable edifice
of the Bramante, which for centuries had been holding in
its walls the breath, the thoughts, the life of the Popes. It
seemed to me as though I had left down below, in a St.
Peter’s square darkened with a mass of silent people, all the
reality, all the bitter and desecrated history of our time, all
the tangled and disquieting questions for the imminent
future, my very human identity, with its capacity of
detached observation, with its analytical and critical spirit,
with its disenchanted cynicism in evaluating the events,
with all its boundless and conscious and, perhaps, resigned
disillusionment. And now I was climbing toward that room
that had been visited by the Angel of Death, with
trepidation. And as I was coming to the end of the ascent,
an obscure disquietude was invading my soul. An obscure
disquietude and a heartfelt anguish and sadness, and a
poignant melancholy. I heard my footsteps resound, step
after step, under the fourth century vaults and, in a moment,
the sense of that anxious, earnest melancholy realized itself
in me, lunar, painful, and distant: the memory, with a silent
fluttering of wings, flew toward me from above, from the
stairs that faded in the shadow and brought me, like a
breath and a caress in my heart, the lake-setting of Castel
Gandolfo and the poignant sadness of the fall night when,
on the shores of that lake, Pius XII passed away. I stood a
moment, and I breathed that unreal silence in the deepest
and most secret intimacy of the Apostolic Palace, evocative
of ghosts and memories of times that a mysterious, yet
most powerful will, had imposed on everyone, in the
Vatican and in the outer world, to forget.


***


To be continued...

It had seemed a premonition: the last great Pope in
History wanted to die immersed in the magical quiet of
those woods that had been sacred to the Romans, away
from a Vatican that was now enemy to him.


A few months after the passing of Pope Pacelli, I met at
Palazzo Farnese, blazing for a reception by the ambassador
of France, Cardinal Eugenio Tisserant, who honored me
with his confidence. The aged cardinal who had maintained
under the purple the courage and the openness of the old
officer of the Spahis, told me, indignant, pacing hastily
beneath the gilded ceilings of Rome’s most beautiful
Renaissance palace, how in the last weeks of Pius XII’s
illness some representatives of the Vatican echelon had
begun to disobey openly. And he then told me, grinding
that Gallic Italian of his, pronounced with military ease, in
the great white beard that descended to rub the pectoral
cross, as the German nun detailed to the person of the Pope,
the unforgettable Suor Pasqualina, originally Josephine
Lenhert of Einsberg, was to suffer the extreme affront by
Pacelli’s foes. Pius XII was agonizing. The nun, who had
dashed to the Vatican to fetch some linen for the Pope, was
denied the service-car to return directly to Castel Gandolfo,
to the bedside of the dying Pontiff. The most erudite French
cardinal, Dean of the Sacred College, Librarian and
Archivist of Santa Romana Chiesa, distinguished himself
amongst the cardinals, as a “man of integrity”. He was
respected and feared in the Vatican for two precise reasons:
his crude and resolute boldness, which brought him to
expose clearly his opinions in front of anyone, and the
awareness of knowing a quantity of “uncomfortable”
secrets, tied to the past of many Vatican personalities. The
former officer French cardinal possessed, indeed, an
archive of his own, vast and continually updated and
enriched, containing documents of great historical value
and often of shattering consequence, put together, with
competence and method, in nearly half a century of activity
at the service of the Holy See. This most eminent cardinal
with the great beard knew, therefore, one by one, the foes
of Pius XII and of the “Pacellism.” In that archive was
documented, for example, the Marxist “credo” of the then
monsignor Giovani Battista Montini, substitute of Pius
XII’s Secretary of State. Montini, in 1945, had befriended
the secretary of Italy’s Communist party, Palmiro Togliatti,
who had just returned to Italy from the Soviet Union. The
uninformed monsignor Giuseppe De Luca, an eminent
Latinist, intimate friend to the Marxist leader with whom he
shared a love of the Italian Classics, had godfathered that
hazardous friendship that for Togliatti was the first,
unhoped-for success, conquered without moving a finger,
on the Italian soil, with Fascism scarcely out of the way.
Soon, that most secret union between devil and holy water
had borne its fruits. Through Protestant circles of the
University of Uppsala and their ties with the Russian
orthodoxy, the Substitute of Pius XII’s Secretary of State
let the Kremlin know that “…Not all the Church and not all
the Vatican approved of the political directions of Pope
Pacelli for the future.” These most secret initiatives by
Giovani Battista Montini, however, did not escape the then
monsignor Tardini. Not by chance the two prelates,
distinguished by opposite temperaments – so rationally
ambiguous the former, as open and assertive the latter –
never had a good relationship. And in cardinal Tisserant’s
archives, together with other important documents on the
delicate “affaire”, ended up the secret relations by the
Archbishop of Riga and Pius XII, in which are described,
with a wealth of documentation, the contacts that Giovanni
Battista Montini had, unbeknownst to the Pope, with
emissaries of the Soviet Union and of satellite States’, and
the sensitive outcome of the secret investigation that Pius
XII had immediately entrusted to an officer of the French
Secret Service. The agent had laid his hands on a collection
of letters attributed to Montini that signaled to the K.G.B. –
the Soviet political police – the names and the movements
of the priests, largely Jesuits, who, in those years, exercised
clandestinely their ministry amongst the populations of the
communist countries, oppressed by religious persecution.


To be continued...

That officer would later relate to French writer Pierre
Virion that “…I was dumbfounded when I laid my eyes on
those accusatory letters, written on Segreteria di Stato di
Sua Santità’s letterhead” (2).


(2) Pierre Virion will confide the episode to Vaticanist Gabriella de
Montemayor, met in Rome in June 1974, who will receive
confirmation from a high ranking Roman justice, dottor Giulio
Lenti, who had received the information from mons. Domenico
Tardini, to whom he was bound by a long-standing friendship.
Indeed, Pope Pacelli, distraught by that revelation, had
immediately summoned mons. Tardini.
Cardinal Tisserant’s secretary, monsignor Georges Roche,
annotates the episode in his book “Pie XII devant l'histoire”,
published by Laffont of Parigi.


Pius XII collapsed immediately upon reading those papers.
Forced into bed for many days, he disposed the immediate
departure of Montini for Milan, the first vacant diocese that
in that moment of terrible anguish was at hand. The future
Paul VI, who at that time was de facto Secretary of State,
thus departed at moment’s notice his office at the Vatican.
In fact, Pius XII had left that office vacant, after the death,
in 1944, of cardinal Maglione.


Montini departed Rome and the great pain caused to the
heart of the Pontiff, and reached Milan in conformity with
that ancient Vatican norm “promoveatur ut removeatur”
(“promote to remove”). It was the late autumn of 1954. In
order to obtain the much sought-after “Galero”
(cardinalitial hat), the Hamletic monsignor from Concesio
would have to wait, from that day on, for the election to the
See of Peter of his “precursor” Roncalli (3).


(3) Thirty years later will write Antonio Spinosa in “Pius XII, The
Last Pope” (le Scie Mondadori, October 1992, p. 357, 358):
“At the close of that same year 1954, the Pope appointed Montini
archbishop of Milan. Had he wanted to distance himself from him?
In August had died in the Lombard capital the Benedictine cardinal
Schuster, head of the Ambrosian Archdiocese, and by the
beginning of the following November the Pontiff had already
replaced him with Montini. He broke the news to the main
exponents of the Uomini di Azione Cattolica gathered before his
residence at Castel Gandolfo. “You’ve never disappointed me, said
he to those present, turning in particular to Gedda, Father
Lombardi, and to the Association’s assistant monsignor Fiorenzo
Angelini. “And I’m glad of it”. Then he added: “I must now give
you some news: His excellency mons. Giovan Battista Montini is
the new Archbishop of Milan.” Heartfelt and lengthy was the
applause of those present, but the buzz had it that many failed to
grasp the hidden significance of the appointment... Montini was not
happy, rather, he appeared as though bewildered to a friend,
Camaldolese father Anselmo Giabbani, who met him in those
days. “His countenance,” witnessed the friar, “had changed. Even
the tone of his voice was different, and his gestures less
expressive.” It was spoken of a true exile inflicted upon the
monsignor who had dared to “betray” - the term was very strong –
Pacelli’s anti-Socialist, and anti-communist battle. Suor Pasqualina
had seen the Pope weep, disappointed by Montini’s receptive
approach. The monsignor had already drawn the attention of the
pro-secretary of the Sant' Uffizio (Holy Office), cardinal Ottaviani,
a front-liner, with Gedda, of those who accused Montini of plotting
with Fanfani and of aspiring to a Christian Democrat party
autonomous of the Vatican. It was also alleged that the monsignor
had even been present at certain black masses. It was father
Lombardi who broke the news to the Pope.


To be continued...

The Vatican of the new direction, attempted by whatever
means, naturally, to get hold of that collection of
documents. Now forced into a corner, cardinal Tisserant
had to give up his prized archive, but not, however, prior to
having his secretary, abbot Georges Roche, photocopy the
whole lot. For years, after the death of Tisserant, the
Vatican pursued in vain Roche and the niece of the
deceased cardinal in order to acquire, at any price, that
inconvenient double that was abroad.


At length, cement-businessman Carlo Pesenti, who had
managed to acquire from Roche for 450 million lire
($750,000) the precious archive, gave it to the Vatican, in
the person of monsignor Benelli, in exchange for a
facilitated loan of 50 billion Swiss Francs. In fact Pesenti
was in need, at the time, for his banking group and for the
acquisition of two banks at Munich and Monte Carlo, of
foreign currency loans from the Istituto per le Opere di
Religione (Monsignor Marcinkus, monsignor De Bonis,
doctor Strobel).


Pesenti’s interest was that of being able to use that
Vatican institute both as a guarantor or co-guarantor of this
credit, and to profit on the spread between the official
exchange rate and the “black market” rate.

So, the anti-Pacellian front, progressive and advocate of
the “dialogue” and of the “openings,” was already a solid,
disconcerting reality, some years prior to Pius XII’s death.


The agitators of the new times despised Pius XII. They
considered him the most anti-democratic Pope of the
modern Church, with his only two Consistories of 1946 and
1952, and with that fulminating hand-grenade launched
between the legs of Marxism, which was the
excommunication of the communists. And the Italian
Republic born of the Resistance could not forgive Pope
Pacelli his excessive love for the German-speaking peoples,
from 1914 to 1945.


In observance, expectedly, of the teachings of the “Soviet
Encyclopedia,” at the voice of “Catholicism” (Vol. 20, p.
379) wherein Pius XII is presented as Germanophile.


To be continued...

His enemies lay in wait for Eugenio Pacelli’s death. It
was necessary to debunk the figure of Pius XII, of the
“Pastor Angelicus” and of his twenty-year-old pontificate.
It was imperative to render it miserably human to the eyes
of the masses. So it was started, that terrifying direction,
that transformed the death of a Pope into a grotesque
tragedy, to feed the vulgar, voracious and inextinguishable
curiosity of the man of the consumer world. Unscrupulous
editors spared no efforts to buy Pontifical Archiatra (Pope’s
personal physician) Riccardo Galeazzi Lisi, called “The
crow with the Leica,” whom with his camera searched and
fixed on celluloid, with callous coldness and precision,
moment after moment, the face of Eugenio Pacelli
devastated by agony. So, in full standing, on the front pages
of the newspapers, the image of a dying Pius XII, supine on
the pillows, the gaunt face darkened by the growth of days,
the eyes closed and sunken, the mouth open in the rattle of
death, sold like hot cakes amongst the throngs famished
with desecration, traveled despoiled on coffee-shop tables,
between empty “cappuccino” cups and cigarettes stumps,
hanged for days at newsstands amidst pin-up girl
magazines and tabloids, finally ending up in trash-bins.


Even the television had its jackal-share in that fierce
tearing to pieces of a myth. So that the agony of Pius XII,
complete with its hallucinating details, entered the Italian
homes, was observed from behind the set tables, between a
“forchettata” (forkful) and another of spaghetti, between a
glass of wine and another. The most reserved Pope in
modern history — when he walked in the Vatican gardens
the guards on detail were ordered to conceal themselves
behind the trees; and no one, other than Suor Pasqualina,
ever violated the intimacy of his apartments, of his work
desk, of his papers — was thrown, dying, to the world. All
the dramatic intimacy of his agonizing humanity, of his bed
muddled by the starts of death, all was meticulously and
pitilessly and despicably tossed to the public feeding frenzy
of prying eyes.


The recollection of that death overwhelmed me, as I had
slowly started up the sounding stony steps and was
approaching this other Papal death. And yet what an abyss
divided them. The “Pastor Angelicus” had died in a climate
of Greek-tragedy. Concluding or wrapping up a chapter of
the history of the Church and humanity that spanned much
longer than the twenty years of his pontificate. He had lived
and operated luminous, as a sun of spirituality. That new
world that was about to appear on the scene of History had
transformed his human death, with studied measure, into an
iconoclastic slaughter. John XXIII, reformer and
progressive, responsible, with the Council, for the doubts
and obscure destinies toward which were plunging the
entire Church and humanity, had passed away in an
atmosphere oozing serenity, optimism, almost happiness;
loved or flattered by his own people, in the Vatican.
Exploited as no other Pope ever was, in the world;
applauded by the Marxists to whom he had unexpectedly
opened the doors of the Christian citadel.


To be continued...

Only a few years had passed since the passing of Pius XII.
As I now recalled it, in that my solitary ascending to the
papal apartment, it seemed to me as though a century had
gone by. I recalled with blinding lucidity that afternoon of
waiting on the Church yard at St. John’s basilica. The
squad of the Noble Guard drawn up before the gates, with
the sun flashing on the gilded helmets and the scarlet coats.
I recalled, next to that line up of Roman aristocracy, the
aspect irremediably “petit-bourgeois” of the representatives
of the Italian State. There were, naturally, the Christian
Democrats in full ranks. Precisely all those who, years
later, would take the historical leap into the arms of the
communists. “The verbose pigmies “ of Italy’s politics, as
general De Gaulle, jokingly, defined them, crowded as
schoolboys, in their brand new tailcoats, holding their top
hats behind their backs, visibly uneasy amidst so much
nobility at arms. Then the arrival of the coffin from Castel
Gandolfo, and the winding of the long funeral cortege
through the streets of old Rome, amidst the dull rumbling
of the bells and two overflowing wings of silent crowd:
clapping the dead became popular only later. The Roman
Pope was returning, dead, to Rome among his children. The
Pope of my youth, the Pope of the war, who had risen like a
white apparition through the smoke and the rubble of
San Lorenzo devastated by the American bombs, when the
rumble of the “liberators” still vibrated in the azure Roman
sky, with his arms open in an embrace toward his people
lashed by iron and fire, that squeezed him from all sides,
pressing about him to touch him, dusty and bloodstained, as
the white tunic of the Pope crimsoned itself with that
blood.


But in what a state was he coming back! The embalming
process had gone wrong, and so the body borne on shoulder
by the “sediari” in their costumes of scarlet brocade, before
the horrified gazes of the cardinals of the Court, appeared
unrecognizable, swollen, bluish, and fetid with
putrefaction. We were a small group, around the
Confession, in a St. Peter deserted and immersed in the
shade. Night had descended. The great doors of the Basilica
had been shut onto the piazza illuminated by the blazing
flares of the mute and solemn crowd. In that atmosphere
loaded with death and eternity, we paid the last respect to
the transfigured remains of Pius XII, clothed with the
sumptuous pontifical dresses, escorted by the Swiss
halberdiers and by the dignitaries of the Court to the three
traditional biers in wait, wide open, beneath the Berninian
bronze canopy. The cardinals paraded before their defunct
Pope bestowing their benediction, before those features,
with no remnant of the ascetic countenance of Pius XII,
would disappear forever under the first, heavy cover.


To be continued...