Word: pius
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Peephole views of history are peddled in the theater these days the way filthy postcards were once hawked in Paris. Want to see Pope Pius XII do something obscene to 6,000,000 Jews? Scan The Deputy, an original Rolf Hochhuth dirty history postcard. Want to see whites do something obscene to a Negro heavyweight champion? Scan The Great White Hope, an original Howard Sackler dirty history postcard. The theatrical alleys are getting a trifle crowded with these peddlers, but Ireland's Conor Cruise O'Brien obviously thinks there is room for one more. He has a marvelous...
...VATICAN Spies in Surplies In his bitterly controversial play The Deputy, Germany's Rolf Hochhuth accused Pope Pius XII of doing too little to save the Jews of Europe during World War II. According to Hochhuth's thesis, the Vatican and Berlin were thus, by extension, tacit wartime allies. Writing in the current issue of the scholarly Vatican review La Civiltá Cattolica, U.S. Jesuit Robert A. Graham disputes this view. Not only did the Nazis distrust the Vatican, says Graham, but they also flooded Rome with bogus priests and lay spies in an effort to discover whether...
...Germans were principally interested in two facets of church activity. One was what they referred to as Ostpolitik des Vatikans. Despite the Vatican's obvious hostility to Communism, Hitler was obsessed with the illogical idea that Rome and the Russians were about to form an alliance. Thus when Pius in 1942 ordered two monsignori to study Russian, the order stirred apprehensive speculation in Berlin. Nazi leaders like Martin Bormann and Reinhardt ("The Hangman") Heydrich were also interested in what Heydrich called "political Catholicism." Certain that the church was attempting to establish a political alternative to the Nazi Party...
Graham, who researched U.S., German and Vatican archives for his material, says that the Pope was vaguely aware of what was happening. To thwart the Germans, Pius depended on the loyalty of those around him rather than on counterespionage. As Weizsacker noted, those close to the Pope kept their secrets "in a manner most scrupulous, because they are bound by the faith." As a result, the Germans learned little of consequence. Another reason for the failure of Nazi espionage may well have been Teutonic overkill. No fewer than five separate Nazi agencies had spies in Rome. Much of the information...
...lunchtime, and I went off to eat with the other extras. We had box lunches-two hot knockwursts wrapped in silver foil the first day, pius potato salad and a dessert and so forth (they were quite inedible). We complained so much that the next day they gave us fairly decent sandwiches. We had to eat their food because there was no time to go anywhere else...