Communist Infiltration of the Catholic Church

The NCRegister reviews a very good book.  Excerpts:

Weigel said he based his conclusions on previously secret cables and memos that have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain. He came across the information while researching his latest book on the life of Pope John Paul, The End and the Beginning, which looks at the Pope’s final years and evaluates his legacy.

As a point of orientation, he quoted Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, Pope John Paul’s longtime secretary, who once remarked about the Church’s battle with Poland’s communist regime: “You must understand that it was always ‘them’ and ‘us.’” What he meant, Weigel said, was that “the struggle between communism and Catholicism could not be understood as a matter of episodic confrontations. ... It was all war, all the time.”

Certainly that was how communist leaders from Moscow to Budapest saw it, Weigel said. He catalogued efforts by communist regimes to place spies in local Catholic hierarchies and the Vatican, to exploit the Church’s moves toward openness and dialogue, to create ecumenical confusion and to compromise Church leaders by planting false stories...

Weigel said Soviet bloc intelligence services tried to manipulate the debates of the Second Vatican Council for political ends, a process that continued as the Ostpolitik policy of the Vatican developed and prevailed. He said the Hungarian regime used the Vatican’s diplomatic opening to take control of the Catholic Church in the country; most bishops nominated after 1964 were cooperators with internal security and foreign intelligence services, he said.

At the Pontifical Hungarian Institute in Rome, all the rectors and half the students in the late 1960s were trained agents of Hungarian secret intelligence, he said.

Weigel said communist moles were placed successfully at Vatican Radio, at the Vatican newspaper and in pontifical universities. When Pope John Paul II was elected, he took some counterintelligence steps; for one thing, materials dealing with Poland were no longer archived in the Secretariat of State but were kept in the papal apartment, “where there was no chance for mischief-makers to prowl around,” Weigel said.

When Pope John Paul met with leaders such as Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the Pope decided not to keep a written record of their conversations, so that the notes would not fall into the wrong hands. Instead, Weigel said, the Pope and then-Msgr. Dziwisz would discuss the encounters, and the secretary kept notes in diaries that remained under his control...

There's lots more where that came from.