Taking a stand, for the last time.

Last week, I said that A Pius Stand is coming.

It's finally going to be over.



If you've been with this blog since the beginning -- or if you've read "Pius Origins" link on the sidebar -- you know that this started out as a history paper gone amuck. It was a graduate paper in which I examined the truth behind Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.



SPOILERS FOR A PIUS MAN, but, what I learned from my research was simple. Pius XII did more than any one person to save people in Europe during World War II.  More POWs. More Jews. More refugees. Because life was precious, and if they didn't like it, they could just come and get him.



But if you read any media around Pope Pius XII, you get Hitler's Pope. And Susan Zuccotti. And John Cornwell. And Gary Wills and Michael Phayer. The Wiki page on it has become more balanced, but still incomplete. You don't even want to know what it looked like when I started writing.  All of these great big names trying to spin a story I know to be false, and I spent a whole four months looking at primary documents as a grad student in America. They were journalists and historians. They should have known better.



I don't like liars.



The Pius Trilogy started out as a devotion. One that I tried to make readable for everyone. I wanted the opening to be dark and ominous to trap anti-Catholic to reading on, until they are so hip deep in the book that by the time that the revelation is given, the trap springs shut.



END SPOILERS.



The short version is, this was a devotion.  This was to sing the praises of God and His followers. This was a devotion to the truth, and a war on lies. At the same time, I was making it readable for other people. Heck, one of my friends on Facebook became a friend of mine BECAUSE of A Pius Man, and she's Jewish, I can't make it too much more open and readable than that.



The reason my cast was so big was simple -- I wanted to make it clear that the truth was not some subjective moving target. I needed a doubter, a neutral party, two red herrings, confirmation of the mystery ... well, you'll just have to read it to perform that matching column.



But my premise was that of philosopher Peter Kreeft -- this was an ecumenical jihad, a war against one very specific force of darkness, and one that the religions in A Pius Man could get behind. Because the liars I've been fighting since the beginning all have one thing in common.  What is that thing? Read A Pius Legacy.

But then I couldn't get the Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval for APM. Why? Because the book was too violent, and some poor little dear was squeamish. I know this happened because I had officers of the Guild come up to me and suggested that there needed to be changes in the was the Seal of Approval was handled. Devotion to truth? Devotion to God? Who needs it? I've got a gun-toting Catholic! Run!


Then I had one or two of those officers write positive reviews. I'll take it.



The reason I kept going was that some things needed to be said. Some things needed to be put out there and thrown at people's heads until they either take notice or are bludgeoned to death.  Because the truth is not a game, or a weapon, except against lies. Truth is what happened, and maybe we can speculate about reasons, or about the why of things, and sometimes people will leave a diary detailing what and why they did. Then we hope the poor schmuck isn't a schizophrenic or a pathological liar.



And I kept going because I had to. Because writing is all I have. This trilogy has been my life for ten years. And now it's time for me to say goodbye.

Catholic Conspiracies: The Illuminati Polka and the attack of the Vatican Ninjas.

 

I have decided to make this a comedy posting. Why?



Recently, I went looking for a book on one end of the crazy spectrum. The book had been (loosely) based on an episode during World War II, and it was supposed to “prove” that Pope Pius XII could not qualify as “Hitler's Pope.” Instead, this conspiracy theory had Pope Pius XII using the Jesuits to assassinate Adolf Hitler in World War II.



It was called Vatican Assassins.



On the one hand, it really covered an actual incident during the war: where German Generals who wanted to kill Hitler had expressed a desire to use Pius XII as an intermediary. The Generals thought that Pius XII could be a neutral party when talking to the British, laying the groundwork for a truce after they had assassinated Hitler. Obviously, the plan didn't work, since Hitler killed himself years later.

Vatican Ninja, by Matt

On the other hand ... Vatican Ninjas?  Are we serious?

Okay, Vatican Ninjas would be cool, but that's next week....

Or I can show a very well done photo by Matthew Funtime, for extra gratuitous coolness....

As for Vatican Assassins, I had originally stumbled across this work six years ago, when I first researched the entire matter of “Hitler's Pope” for a graduate paper. This was a few months before I even started writing A Pius Man. Perhaps an entire year before the book.

Recently, I wanted a laugh, and I wanted to see if anything had happened with this particular nutjob and his Vatican Ninjas.



So, I put Vatican Assassins into an Amazon search, and then Google …



Oh my dear God, the results I got…



Eric Jon Phelps: Vatican Assassins: Wounded in the House of my Friends. This, um, interesting work exposes THE TRUTH, about how the Jesuits killed President Lincoln on the orders of the Pope. They also assassinated John F. Kennedy. (paging Oliver Stone, someone is stealing your plot).  It includes a "History Of The Jesuit Order" … I don't even know where to start on this one.



Vaticanassassins.org: which discusses “Obama's White Papal Masters.” Apparently Rome has taken over the White House; I didn't know that we supported the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.



Thewatcherfiles.com: “Vatican Assassins Ordered Attack on WTC World Trade Towers.” Again, the head of the Jesuits is to blame here. The dark, mysterious figure of “The Black Pope,” who everyone knows about (the colors of the Jesuits are black … and black … he lives in Rome, hence “Black Pope”). Proclaimed as welcoming “the New World Order,” a catchphrase of nutjobs for, at a guess, longer than I've been alive.



Also in books, I got: The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage.  The "Entity" is supposed to be the Vatican spy service.  The description?

"The Entity has been involved in the killings of monarchs, poisonings of diplomats, financing of South American dictators, protection of war criminals, laundering of Mafia money, manipulation of financial markets, provocation of bank failures, and financing of arms sales to combatants even as their wars were condemned, all in the name of God. The contradiction between God’s justice and Earth’s justice, Christian beliefs and Christian power all fall before the motto of the Entity: With the Cross and the Sword."

Nod very slowly, and back away.  Someone here is a little crazy.

Another book: The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia.  Obviously, written by someone who saw Godfather III



WTF?



And, a classic: a 1983 “Secret History of the Jesuits.”   In this book, we are apparently not only responsible for one, but two, count 'em, two world wars.

I'm going to give you one guess, and only one guess: what is the ONLY offensive thing I have found in all of these crackpot conspiracy theories, strange, delusional fantasies, and utter comedy routine?  If you have guessed that it is the image on the right, you guessed correctly

So, at the end of the day, instead of finding a ludicrous conspiracy theory based (very) loosely on an actual event (and that hit every branch of the crazy tree on the way down), I found a whole bunch of borderline schizophrenic theories, brought to you by the tinfoil hat brigade.

Now, it might be me.  It might be I'm strange.  For the most part, I find these people funny. Then again, the theories are so ludicrous, I hardly know where to begin.



At random, shall we start with the Jesuits assassinating President Lincoln? I don't know why the Catholic Church would want to kill him, but before even reading the book or the rest of the book's description, I'm already laughing. Why? Because President Lincoln requested that the Vatican create American Cardinals, moving the United States out of missionary status. Lincoln wanted the Catholic Church in town as an actual establishment. Considering that this was within the decade before Thomas Nast's anti-Catholic propaganda were popular, I can only think this is the closest a non-Catholic like Lincoln could get to being supportive of Rome.



Or, we could look at President Barack H. Obama's "White Papal Masters"..... how anyone can say it with a straight face is beyond me.  As a Democrat, last time I checked, Obama supports abortion in America. He supported the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Funny, I didn't know that Rome supported either of the above.



So, let me get this straight: the Vatican kills people who support us (Lincoln) and controls people with principles that are the opposite of what it publicly postulates …



And, of course, the Vatican started World War II .... a war that tore apart and butchered six million Polish citizens, half of whom were Catholic.  Because, after all, it's an institution that's been around for soooooo long, it can afford to lose three million people like that.



I'd continue, but I'm too busy laughing.  The authors of these various works might have had less than savory motives, or they might even believe this drivel.  If they believe it, they have my condolences, and my suggestion that they see a good shrink. These are almost as stupid as Godfather III, where the theory was that Pope John Paul I, who died within a month of being elected Pontiff, had been assassinated by the people involved in ripping off the Vatican Bank. (Let's completely ignore that Albino Luciani, before becoming John Paul I, had a crappy medical history; if anyone knew what sort of shape he had been in, he would never have been elected. But you can't talk some people out of a good conspiracy.)



And you thought people had a lot of conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.



This is so bad it's laughable. Not to mention that the Jesuits, the root of all of the conspiracy theories, have basically been running amok with “Liberation Theology”-- a concept that had been condemned by the Pope. So, the Jesuits, “the spooooooooky Vatican assassins,” have been at odds with the Popes for at least thirty years. Maybe forty.  And, somehow, the Popes of that time period were not, and have not, been assassinated. Hmm, funny that.



As my friend Jason noted, when I first told him of this blog idea, “[T]he only [C]atholic conspiracy I can buy is that 'Yes, we want Notre Dame to win in the NCAA'. But that goes without saying.”



UPDATE: Part 2: Revenge of the Vatican Ninjas.