The Final Unholy Alliance

By Russell and Colin Standish

The Final Unholy Alliance

By Russell and Colin Standish

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, traveled 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 stock market crash of 1929. However, by 1935 it was again investing in blue-chip stocks in the United States (See J. F. Pollard, “The Vatican and the Wall Street Crash”). 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.

It cannot be doubted that Rome, recognizing that the United States would be useful for its purposes, sought to increase its influence in that nation. 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. The hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States was celebrated with pomp and ceremony in the Cathedral of Baltimore on November 10, 1889. Archbishop Ireland gave an address entitled “The Mission of Catholics in America” which contains some statements of significance.

Catholics of the United States are called . . . to make America Catholic. . . .

The conversion of America should ever be present to the minds of Catholics in America as a supreme duty from which God will not hold them exempt. . . .

The value of America to the cause of religion cannot be overestimated. This is a providential nation. . . . In the solution of social and political problems, no less than in the development of industry and commerce, the influence of America will be dominant among nations. There is not a country on the globe that does not borrow from us ideas and aspirations. The spirit of American liberty wafts its spell across seas and oceans, and prepares distant continents for the implanting of American ideas and institutions. This influence will grow with the growth of the nation. . . . The center of human action and influence is rapidly shifting, and at a no distant day America will lead the world. . . .

We cannot but believe that a singular mission is assigned to America, glorious for itself and beneficent to the whole race, the mission of bringing about a new social and political order, based more than any other upon the common brotherhood of man, and more than any other securing to the multitude of the people social happiness and equality of rights. With our hopes are bound up the hopes of the millions of the earth. The Church triumphing in America, Catholic truth will travel on the wings of American influence, and encircle the universe. (John Ireland, The Church and Modern Society, 55–58)

In 1894, The Catholic Standard and Times of November 3 spoke forthrightly, stating,

The United States of America, 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 to him: “But the United States 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. (Cited by Edwardson, Facts of Faith, 240)

The report of “the third Washington conference” says: “Our purpose is to make America dominantly Catholic.”—“ The Mission Movement in America,” issued from the Catholic University, Washington, D.C. June 1909. (Ibid.)

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. He 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. (Boyd Barrett, Rome Stoops to Conquer, 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.

Were Rome to fail to dominate American thought and American lives, her civilization, her moral code, all her glorious incredible dogmas would perish from the earth. Should Rome triumph, she will ascend to a higher state than ever she has enjoyed heretofore. Therefore she must win—if it be given her to win what, as she claims, God has promised—what her Prophets have foretold. Then will the vast West be hers wherein to set up anew her earthly kingdom. 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 lie. Rome will stoop to conquer. (Ibid., 266–267)

At the time of Cardinal Pacelli’s triumphant tour of the United States, the secular newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press of November 4, 1936, 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 marshaled direct from Rome by Monsignor Pizzardo—next to Pacelli the Holy See’s shrewdest diplomat and politician—instead of by the local bishops as before. (Cited by Christian Edwardson, Facts of Faith, 241.)

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 the innocent millions, murdered by papal persecutors, and that there never was such a monstrosity as the alleged sale of papal pardons of sins.

The Catholics denounce secular education and public schools—why? Because under the papal system, the child is never to be permitted to do its own thinking. . . .

Educate youth in this Catholic way, and the consequences are logical: the children graduate in obedience; feel no divine thirst for free knowledge; depend upon authority, rather than upon investigation; cringe to the priest; look to him for guidance and control; lose mental self-reliance, and gradually cease to be liberals, progressives, democrats, republicans, believers in the capacity of the people to govern themselves. (Roman Catholics in America, 5. Emphasis original.)

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. Domenica of Philadelphia, reveals what was in the minds and hearts of other priests.

We the hierarchy of the Holy Roman Catholic church expect all loyal children of the Church to assist the President [Franklin Roosevelt] with all our strength to see that the individuals comprising the United States Supreme Court shall obey the President’s injunctions. And if necessary we will change, amend or blot the present Constitution, so that the President may enforce his or rather our humanitarian program on all phases of human rights as laid down by our saintly popes and the Holy Mother the Church. . . .

We are going to have our laws made and enforced according to the teachings of our 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 construed to the end that atheism, the red peril of al blathering isms—Protestantism, Communism, Socialism and all others ilk and stamp, be driven out of this fair land.

The cross was planted on our shores by a staunch, loyal 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 elected our worthy President by the greatest majority ever recorded in history. . . .

We control America and don’t propose to stop until America, or the Americans are genuinely Catholic and remain so. God help us. (Domenica, Is Washington in the Grip of the Roman Church? 23–24)

Thus the judiciary, executive, and 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 Scofield Bible, especially in the Southern States of America in the early twentieth century, Cyrus Scofield’s notes within that Bible were virtually accepted as truth. Those notes neutralized 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, Scofield 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 secret rapture in the late eighteenth century. This fiction was grasped by Scottish evangelist, Edward Irving in 1827 and years later accepted by Cyrus Scofield via the teachings of John Darby, the founder of the Plymouth Brethren faith.

Blinded by these Jesuit-inspired errors, Evangelical Protestants were lulled to sleep. 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, by Colin and Russell Standish, listed in the back of this book.)

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:

The intervention of the secular power in the cause of heresy has left memories which haunt the imagination of our contemporaries like a nightmare. Many men of divers opinions find in this the great scandal of ecclesiastical history. Our deadly enemies find herein matter for furious assaults, whilst our kindly adversaries here encounter the stumbling-block which prevents their return to us. Indeed, even among our friends and our brothers we find those who dare not look this problem in the face. 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, 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 as long as such practice does not interfere with the same freedom of others. But it is a fearful mistake, with far reaching consequences, to blind ourselves to the Papacy’s awful history and prophesied future persecution. In so doing, 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 Nation of December 13, 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 Russia and the United States. It protects child labour; it is building, from infant school to university, its own educational imperium in imperio [empire within an empire]. It has immense influence over the movie industry, not least where films of a 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 Roman 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, I doubt whether there is any country in the world today in which its authority is greater than in America. (Cited in The Christian Century, December 31, 1947)

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!