Did "The Catholics" Perp the JFKA?

[Benjamin Cole]

LP--

Not only that--

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-done/#:~:text=And%20with%20Polish%20Communists%20embrac,progressive%20clerics%20in%20Latin%20America.

Their Will Be Done
From the Archives
 Let the pope keep the kingdom and the glory — the CIA wants the power.
Martin A. Lee
Bio

Photo: AP/Wide World Photos

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One day in July 1944, as the Second World War raged throughout Europe, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan was ushered into an ornate chamber in Vatican City for an audience with Pope Pius XII. Donovan bowed his head reverently as the pontiff intoned a ceremonial prayer in Latin and decorated him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester, the oldest and most prestigious of papal knighthoods. This award has been given to only 100 other men in history, who “by feat of arms, or writings, or outstanding deeds, have spread the Faith, and have safeguarded and cham-pioned the Church.”

Although a papal citation of this sort rarely, if ever, states why a person is inducted into the “Golden Mili-tia,” there can be no doubt that Donovan earned his knighthood by virtue of the services he rendered to the Catholic hierarchy in World War II, during which he served as chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1941, the year before the OSS was officially constituted, Donovan forged a close alliance with Father Felix Morlion, founder of a European Catholic intelligence service known as Pro Deo. When the Germans overran western Europe, Donovan helped Morlion move his base of operations from Lisbon to New York. From then on, Pro Deo was financed by Donovan, who believed that such an expenditure would result in valuable insight into the secret affairs of the Vatican, then a neutral enclave in the midst of fascist Rome. When the Allies liberated Rome in 1944, Mor-lion re-established his spy network in the Vatican; fromthere he helped the OSS obtain confidential reports provided by apostolic dele-gates in the Far East, which included information about strategic bombing targets in Japan.

Pope Pius’ decoration of Wild Bill Donovan marked the beginning of a long-standing, intimate relation-ship between the Vatican and U.S. intelligence that continues to the present day. For centuries the Vatican has been a prime target of foreign espionage. One of the world’s greatest repositories of raw intelligence, it is a spy’s gold mine. Ecclesiastical, political and economic informa-tion filters in every day from thousands of priests, bishops and papal nuncios, who report regularly from every corner of the globe to the Office of the Papal Secretariat. So rich was this source of data that shortly after the war, the CIA created a special unit in its counterintelligence section to tap it and monitor developments within the Holy See.

But the CIA’s interest in the Catholic church is not limited to intelligence gathering. The Vatican, with its immense wealth and political influence, has in recent years become a key force in global politics, particularly with Catholicism playing such a pivotal role in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Unbeknownst to most Catholics, the Vatican, which carefully maintains an apolitical image, not only has a foreign office and a diplomatic corps, but also has a foreign policy. And with Polish Communists embrac-ing Catholicism and Latin American Catholics embracing communism, the U.S. government and particularly the CIA have recently taken a much greater interest in Vatican foreign policy. A year-long Mother Jones investigation has revealed a number of unlikely channels—both overt and covert—which the agency uses to bring its influence to bear upon that policy.

Since World War II, the CIA has:

subsidized a Catholic lay organization that served as the political slugging arm of the pope and the Vatican throughout the Cold War;
penetrated the American section of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Vatican orders;
passed money to a large number of priests and bishops — some of whom became witting agents in CIA covert operations;
employed undercover operatives to lobby members of the Curia (the Vatican government) and spy on liberal churchmen on the pope’s staff who challenged the political assumptions of the United States;
prepared intelligence briefings that accurately pre-dicted the rise of liberation theology; and
collaborated with right-wing Catholic groups to coun-ter the actions of progressive clerics in Latin America.
It was in this last regard that the CIA supported factions within the Catholic church that were instrumental in pro-moting and electing the current pope, John Paul II, whose Polish nationalism and anti-Communist credentials, they thought, would make him a perfect vehicle for U.S. foreign policy. John Paul’s recent trip to Nicaragua could not have been matched by any American’s for the contri-bution it made to President Reagan’s Central American initiative. And hopes are high in Washington, D.C., that the pope’s forth-coming trip to Poland, where 90 percent of the people are Catholic, will re1 spark the anti-Soviet upris-ing so vital to Reagan’s plans for Eastern Europe.

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It goes on. The links between the Vatican and the CIA were deeeeeeep in the 1960s.