A plan to assassinate Pope Pius XII? Exclusive: Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa makes compelling case that Stalin tried to kill pontiff

Pacepa’s latest book, co-authored by historian Ronald Rychlak, is “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.”

One of the major Soviet disinformation campaigns the book exposes is the elaborate and maniacal effort to “frame” Pope Pius XII as a collaborator with Hitler – when the truth was just the opposite.

 Winston Churchill called Pius “the greatest man of our time,” and Albert Einstein wrote, “Only the Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I felt a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty.” In fact, the chief rabbi of Rome and his wife, Israel and Emma Zolli, converted to Catholicism, with Zolli adopting the Christian name Eugenio, to honor the man who, according to him, had done so much to protect the Jews during the war: Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli.

Did Iosif Stalin try to assassinate Pope Pius XII?

There is now strong evidence that he did. And from the Russian tyrant’s point of view, why not? The outcome of World War II opened Stalin’s horizon to the great game of international politics and gave him the confidence that, with a little ingenuity, he and Russia could become No. 1 in the world. He saw Pope Pius XII as his only rival for world domination.

Stalin knew he could not control the pope and his enormous sphere of influence the way he could control the Orthodox Church – by having the Russian patriarch in his vest pocket. Since time immemorial it has been a Russian tradition simply to assassinate your rivals if you cannot win them over. For Stalin, the obvious way to neutralize the powerful and far-flung Catholic Church was to cut off its head.

Just as Peter III was assassinated so his wife could become the tsarina Catherine the Great, so did Stalin arrange for the assassination of all other members of Lenin’s Politburo so he could become the leader of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Stalin firmly believed that in politics, if you eliminated the head, the body would wither away. He had seen this conviction vindicated with the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, after which the whole Trotskyite movement simply melted away, contrary to what his advisers had been predicting. Why wouldn’t the same tactic work against the Catholic Church?

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