Vietnam: Why Did We Go? – By Avro Manhattan
Chapter 4 The Pope’s Blessing for a Preventive War
Contents
The cult of Fatima, which had suffered a devotional recess with the defeat of the nazi armies and the suicide of Hitler, was suddenly revived. In October, 1945, the Vatican ordered that monster pilgrimages be organized to the Shrine.
The following year, 1946, our Lady was solemnly crowned before more than half a million pilgrims. The crown, weighing 1,200 grams of gold, had 313 pearls, 1,250 precious stones and 1,400 diamonds. Pope Pius XII from the Vatican addressed the pilgrims by radio, saying that our Lady’s promises would be fulfilled. “Be ready!” he warned. “There can be no neutrals. Never step back. Line up as crusaders!”
In 1947, the Cold War began. Hatred against communist Russia was promoted, headed by the Vatican which sent a statue of our Lady of Fatima, with her “message” on a “pilgrimage” around the world. She was sent from country to country to arouse anti-Russian odium. Whole governments welcomed her. Within a few years, as the Cold War mounted, the statue had gone to Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia and had visited fifty-three nations. The East-West split continued to widen.
In 1948, the frightful American-Russian atomic race started. In 1949, Pius XII, to strengthen the anti-Russian front, excommunicated any voter supporting the communists. And soon afterwards American theologians told the U.S. that it was her duty to use atom bombs.
The following year, in 1950, the “pilgrim statue” of our Lady of Fatima, who had started to travel in 1947, the very year of the outbreak of the Cold War, was sent by airplane, accompanied by Father Arthur Brassard, on the direct instructions of Pope Pius XII, to … Moscow. There, with the warm approval of Admiral Kirk, the American Ambassador, she was solemnly placed in the church of the foreign diplomats. For what specific reason? “To wait for the imminent liberation of Soviet Russia.”
Not content with this, Our Lady appeared in person fifteen times to a nun in the Philippines. She repeated her warning against communism, after which a shower of rose petals fell at the nun’s feet. An American Jesuit took the miraculous petals to the U.S., to revive the energy of fanatical Catholics, headed by the criminal Senator McCarthy and many of his supporters.
American warmongers, led by prominent Catholics, were meanwhile feverishly preparing for an atomic showdown with Russia. Top Catholics in the most responsible positions were talking’of nothing else.
On August 6, 1949, Catholic Attorney General Mac- Grath addressed the Catholic “storm-troopers” of the U.S. – namely the Knights of Columbus – at their convention in Portland, Oregon. He urged Catholics “to rise up and put on the armor of the Church militant in the battle to save Christianity.” (Christianity, of course, meaning the Catholic Church.) He further urged “a bold offensive.”
In that same year another Catholic, one of the most highly placed personages of the U.S. government, James Forrestal, the crusader against communism at home and abroad, helped Pope Pius XII to win the elections in Italy by sending American money, plus money from his own pocket. James Forrestal, who was in very frequent contact with the Vatican and with Cardinal Spellman, knew better than anybody else what was going on in certain Catholic and American quarters. For one simple reason: he was none other than the American Secretary for Defense.
One day, upon hearing a civilian aircraft overhead, he dashed along a Washington street with a most fateful message: “The Russians have invaded us!” he shouted. Later on, notwithstanding the assurance of Pius XII that the Russians would be defeated with the help of Our Lady, Catholic James Forrestal, American Secretary of Defense, jumped from a window on the 16th floor ofa building in the American Capital, yelling that the Russians had better be destroyed before it was too late.
The following year another fanatical Catholic was appointed to another important post. Mr. Francis Matthews was nominated Secretary of the American Navy. On the morning he took the oath of office (in June, 1949), Mr. Matthews, his wife and all their six children contritely heard Mass and received Holy Communion in the chapel of the Naval station in Washington, D.C.
A few months afterwards (October, 1949) Cardinal Spellman was summoned to Rome by the pope, with whom he had repeated and prolonged private sessions. Although giving rise to sharp speculation, it remained a well guarded secret.
The new Catholic Secretary of the U.S. Navy, strangely enough, soon afterwards began unusually active contacts with other prominent American Catholics. Among these, Father Walsh, Jesuit Vice-President of Georgetown University; Cardinal Spellman, the head of the American Legion; the leaders of the Catholic War Veterans and with Senator McCarthy, the arch-criminal senator, who upon the advice of a Catholic priest, was just beginning his infamous campaign which was to half paralyze the U.S. for some years to come. The Catholic press began a nation wide campaign of psychological warfare. Open hints of a quick atomic war were given once more.
The culmination of all these activities was a speech delivered in Boston on August 25, 1950 by Mr. F. Matthews. The arch-Catholic Secretary of the U.S. Navy, the spokesman of certain forces in the States and in the Vatican, called upon the U.S. to launch an attack upon Soviet Russia in order to make the American people “the first aggressors for peace.” “As the initiators of a war of aggression,” he added, “it would win for us a proud and popular title: we would become the first aggressors for peace.” The speech created a sensation, both in the U.S. and in Europe. France declared that she “would not take part in any aggressive war … since a preventive war would liberate nothing but the ruins and the graveyards of our civilization.”s Britain sent an even sharper protest.
While the people of the world shuddered at the monstrous proposal, George Craig of the American Legion declared (August, 1950) that, yes, “the U.S. should start World War III on our own terms” and be ready when the signal could be given “for our bombers to wing toward Moscow.”
The fact that the advocacy of a “preventive atomic war” was first enunciated by a Catholic was no mere coincidence. Mr. Matthews, the head of the most important branch of the American armed forces, the American Navy, the largest naval war instrument in the world, had become the mouthpiece of his spiritual master, Pope Pius XII.
Arch-Catholic Matthews was not only the frequent ring kisser of the members of the Catholic hierarchy in America, he was one of the most active promoters of Catholicism in action in the U.S. In addition to which, this Catholic Secretary of the American Navy was the chairman of the National Catholic Community Service and, more sinister still the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus,6 the shock troops of Catholic power in the U.S. And last but not least, a secret privy chamberlain of Pope Pius XII. The Catholic hierarchy, the Catholic press, the Knights of Columbus – all supported Matthews’ advocacy of a preventive atomic war.
Jesuit Father Walsh, the foremost Catholic authority in the U.S. and a former Vatican Agent in Russia (1925), told the American people that “President Truman would be morally justified to take defensive measures proportionate to the danger.” Which, of course, meant the use of the atom bomb.
When the U.S. went ahead with the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb, even the Chairman of the Atomic Commission, Senator Brian MacMahon, shrank in horror at the prospect of the sure massacre of fifty million people with such a monster weapon.
Yet Catholics approved of its use. Father Connel declared that the use of the hydrogen bomb by the U.S. was justified, because “the communists could utilize their large armed forces … to weaken the defenders of human rights.”
Advocacy of a preventive atomic war by a Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus – i.e. Mr. Matthews – assumed horrifying significance when it was remembered that the Secretary of the U.S. Navy’s war speech did not come as a surprise to certain selected Catholic leaders or, even less, to the Vatican. How was that? Simply that Mr. Matthews had disclosed the contents of his Boston speech to top Catholics several days prior to its delivery. Chief among these top Catholics was the head of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal Spellman.
Now it must be remembered that Cardinal Spellman was in continuous personal contact with Pope Pius XII, whose intimate friend and personal advisor in political matters he had been since the Second World War. Cardinal Spellman, moreover, was the counselor and personal friend of most of the influential military leaders of America. So that whatever of importance was known at the “Little Vatican” in New York, as Cardinal Spellman’s residence was called, was instantly known at the Vatican in Rome, and vice-versa.
Pope Pius XII had been kept well informed about the whole process long before Matthews’ Boston speech. Indeed, the evidence is that he was one of its main tacit instigators. The continuous visits at this time of top U.S. military leaders to the pope (five in one day), the frequent secret audiences with Spellman, the unofficial contacts with the Knights of Columbus – all indicated that Pius XII knew very well what was afoot.
A few years later, in a hate crusade speech broadcast simultaneously in twenty-seven major languages by the world’s main radio stations, Pius XII reiterated “the morality … of a defensive war” (that is, of an atom and hydrogen war), calling for – as the London Timessomberly described it, “what almost amounts to a crusade of Christendom” and what the Manchester Guardian bluntly called “the pope’s blessing for a preventive war.”
