New slander against Pius XII (Vatican).

The latest attack on Pius XII is by novelist John Cornwell, who earlier wrote a fanciful book about the death of Pope John Paul I. He impudently entitles his new book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. An excerpt appeared in the October issue of Vanity Fair.

The author claims that the Pope was deeply anti-Semitic and that this was the reason why he refused to condemn Nazi atrocities during World War II. His key piece of evidence is a letter of 1919 which he says he discovered in the Vatican archives, in which the future Pope, then Papal Nuncio to Bavaria, described a group of revolutionaries in Munich.

"The confusion," he writes, "totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating...the building, once the home of a king, resounding with screams, vile language, profanities...a gang of young-women, of dubious appearance, Jews, like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with provocative de-meanour and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female gang was Levien s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge."

Levien was the Jewish leader of the attempted putsch in Munich. Similar Jewish Bolshevik attempts were made at the same time in Budapest, Berlin, Dusseldorf and other places. Remember, the Bolshevik dictatorship established itself in St. Petersburg in October 1917 and appealed to all "socialists" everywhere to follow suit. There is nothing new about this. That papal nuncio Eugenio Pacelli was disgusted at the bizarre violence is perfectly understandable.

Cornwell goes on to spin an anti-Jewish web around Pius XII based on innuendo, conjecture, misinformation, and earlier unproven allegations, while ignoring all the evidence to the contrary.

Zenit, the Vatican's international news agency, produced two refutations of Cornwell, one by French Jesuit Pierre Blet, co-author of the 12-volume work Acts and documents of the Holy See during the Second World War, and the other by Jesuit Church historian, Peter Gumpel (Sept. 16, 10 pages). Gumpel pointed out on October 4 (Zenit) that the letter which Cornwell professed to have discovered was published in a 1992 Italian history of Papal relations with the Weimar Republic. It is six pages long and contains nothing against the Jews. The reference to Levien was a matter of fact observation, nothing else.

Berlin-On August 30, the National Post reported that the remains of Adolf Hitler's right-hand man, Martin Bormann, were secretly cremated and scattered in the Baltic Sea in mid-August. The sea burial was done to prevent the site from becoming a shrine for neo-Nazis.

Bormann's whereabouts had long puzzled historians. The family insisted he had died in Berlin in May 1945. But for decades, others, especially Jewish critics, had accused the Vatican of having spirited him to South America after the defeat of the Nazis. Sightings of him were reported in Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina.

Bormann was baptised a Catholic (as was Hitler) but, needless to say, had long since cast off his religion. His remains were found in a Berlin building site in 1972, but only DNA testing of the skull and other remains in 1998 provided definite proof that it was he. So ends another anti-Vatican myth.