A former KGB spy recently denounced that the Kremlin and the aforementioned Russian intelligence agency orchestrated a campaign in the 1960s against the Catholic Church, whose main objective was to make people believe that Pius XII had been a sympathizer of the Nazi regime.

In a recent issue of National Review Online, Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former KGB spy, explained that “in February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a top-secret plan to destroy the Vatican’s moral authority in Western Europe. Eugenio Pacelli, then Pope Pius XII, was chosen as the KGB’s main target, its incarnation of evil, because he had already left this world in 1958. ‘The dead cannot defend themselves,’ was the KGB’s motto at the time.” The code name of this campaign was “Seat 12”.

Pacepa stated in his article that the KGB based its defamations on the fact that the then Archbishop Pacelli had served as Apostolic Nuncio in Munich and Berlin. “The KGB wanted to portray him as an anti-Semite who had encouraged Hitler’s Holocaust,” Pacepa affirmed, and said that to achieve this the KGB wanted to “slightly modify” some original Vatican documents; for that purpose they called him in, when he was working in the Romanian intelligence service.

Between 1960 and 1962, the Romanian spy sent hundreds of documents related to Pius XII to the KGB. According to Pacepa, none incriminated the Pontiff, but he nevertheless sent them for later modification.

Those altered documents were later used to produce a play attacking the Pontiff, entitled The Deputy, which premiered in Germany in 1963 under the title The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, and proposed that Pius XII supported Hitler and encouraged him to continue with the Holocaust of the Jews.

In turn, the director of the play falsely argued that he had 40 pages of information supporting what the work portrayed. A year later it premiered in New York and was subsequently translated into 20 languages, later becoming an obligatory reference for a wave of books and articles accusing Pius XII.

“Today, many people who never heard of The Deputy are sincerely convinced that Pius XII was a cold and ruthless man who hated the Jews and helped Hitler eliminate them,” Pacepa explained, adding that “as head of the KGB, Yury Andropov, the incomparable master of Soviet deception, used to tell me that people are more willing to believe in evil than in holiness”.

Pacepa also stresses that the truth is finally becoming known now that the canonization process of Pius XII is under way. “Witnesses from all over the world prove that Pius XII was an enemy, not a friend, of Hitler,” he noted.

He also cited David G. Dalin’s book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, in which Pope Pacelli’s work of aid on behalf of the Jewish people during the Second World War is clearly established.

“At the start of the Second World War, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was so anti-Hitler that the Royal Air Force and the French Air Force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany,” he concludes.

WASHINGTON D.C., Jan. 27, 2007 (ACI).