The Soviet smear of Pius XII.(Inside Track)(Brief article)

For decades Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius the XII, has come under intense fire for his purported Nazi sympathies and his alleged inaction in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust. The truth is that Pius XII, who demonstrated his greatness by shepherding the Catholic Church through the darkness of World War II, has been the victim of an intense smear campaign begun and orchestrated by the Soviet KGB. That's the stunning revelation from Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa--the highest-ranking intelligence officer to ever defect from a Soviet Bloc nation.

Writing in National Review Online, Pacepa recalled: "In February 1960, Nikita Khrushchev approved a super-secret plan for destroying the Vatican's moral authority in Western Europe." The plan called for a smear campaign against Pius XII, who had died two years earlier in 1958, because "dead men cannot defend themselves." Pacepa himself was a prominent ...