From .................. PEOPLE OF GOD

By Roman Catholic author- [the late] Penny Lernoux

Published by Viking, division of Penguin 1989

ISBN 0-670-81529-2

Some good stuff in this book.

"SMOM" is the "Knights of Malta", an "elitist" Roman Catholic sub-cult, sworn to loyalty to the papacy and RC cult.

William Casey, the first director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan, was a Knight of Malta.

["Wild Bill"] Donovan mentioned below, was also a SMOM.

pages 286-287

"...... Braden's presence, the archbishop was instructed to show Braden anything he wrote about the United States before releasing it. Braden was impressed. "It was good theater," he said.4

[Cardinal] Spellman also played an important role as emissary between the White House and Rome as, for example, in relaying the pope's concern about Allied bombings of Italy. And he encouraged Vatican cooperation with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner of the CIA that was headed by his old friend Gen. William ("Wild Bill") Donovan .5

Much of the European aristocracy that provided SMOM ["Knights of Malta"] with its membership was allied with the Falangist groups in Spain, the Catholic integralist-Vichy French, the Italian fascists, and the German-Austrian supporters of Hitler. While they objected to Hitler's attempts to create a Nordic system of belief in competition with the teachings of the Catholic Church, some agreed with the Nazis on the "Jewish question."

For example, Franz von Papen, a Catholic aristocrat from the Westphalian nobility and Knight Magistral Grand Cross of SMOM, paved the way for Hitler's assumption of power after von Papen became chancellor with the support of the Nazis.6

During the war the Vatican's position was ambivalent, not because Pius XII approved of Nazism-on the contrary, he abhorred it-but because he feared communism more than fascism and because he was afraid to risk the loss of the church's power by taking an uncompromising stand against the self-declared masters of Europe. Or as the British Foreign Office put it, the pope, "for worldly rather than spiritual reasons, has allowed himself, like others, to be bullied."

Although the Vatican undertook many private initiatives to help Jewish and other refugees, Pius remained silent through most of the war. He refused to condemn the German invasion of Poland in the belief that the Poles were at fault, and despite repeated pleas from the Polish government in exile he failed to condemn Nazi genocide. "We cannot forget that there are 40 million Catholics in the Reich," he said at the time of the invasion of Poland. "What would they be exposed to after such an act by the Holy See?"

When he did speak out, as in his 1942 Christmas message about the deaths of "hundreds of thousands of people ...... merely because of their race or their descent," the appeal was lost in the opacity of Vaticanese language.

Similarly, the Vatican said nothing about the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Serbs belonging to the Serbian Orthodox Church during the Nazi Catholic puppet dictatorship of Croatia, apparently because its leader, Ante Pavelic, and his Ustashi thugs had the support of the local Catholic clergy. The only important Catholic voice to speak out against the slaughter was that of the French cardinal Eugene Tisserant, who said that at least 350,000 people had been killed by Pavelic's forces. The Holy See, said Tisserant, had accommodated itself "for its own exclusive advantage-and very little else."7

Much the same might have been said of some American members of the Knights of Malta. For example, W.R. Grace & Co. was on the U.S. government's "watch list" of companies known or suspected to be trading with the enemy during World War II. State Department documents showed that some Grace personnel in Latin America were kept under surveillance because of their ties to Nazi agents, particularly those in the company's shipping lines and in the Panagra airline, which Grace owned jointly with Pan American Airways. (J. Peter Grace, who took over the company at the end of the war and became SMOM's leading American Knight, later employed a Nazi war criminal and chemist, aiding him to enter the United States under the U.S. government recruitment program of Nazi scientists known as ''Project Paperclip.")

Joseph Kennedy, another prominent American Knight, was forced in 1940 to leave his post as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain because of his noninterventionist stance.8

After the war, the Vatican, the OSS, the SS (Schutzstaffel, the elite guard of Nazi intelligence), and the various branches of SMOM joined to do battle against the common Soviet enemy - and to help Nazi war criminals escape.

In 1945, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, the OSS approached Reinhard Gehlen, who was Hitler's chief of intelligence on the Eastern Front. The aim was to revamp the Gehlen Organization into an OSS-controlled operation. The plan was so successful that "Gehlen Org" was transformed into West Germany's postwar intelligence agency, the BND, with help and money from the OSS's successor, the CIA.

Paralleling the OSS-Gehlen plan was "Project Paperclip," which smuggled more than 900 German scientists into the United States.

Gehlen's brother was secretary to one of the chief officials in SMOM's Rome headquarters, and the Knights were active as go-betweens.

Baron Luigi Parrilli, an Italian aristocrat who was a Knight of Malta, papal chamberlain, and fascist sympathizer, took part in the negotiations between SS leaders and the CIA's future director, Allen Dulles. Meanwhile, James Jesus Angleton, who would later become the CIA's Controversial director of counterintelligence, was dispatched by Admiral .............."