"Spellman and Kennedy also helped form a pro-Diem lobby in Washington. The rallying cries were anti-Communism and [Roman] Catholicism. Through their connections, they soon had a high-powered committee, which was a lumpy blend of intellectuals and conservatives.
Two men of national prominence, the former O.S.S. chief "Wild Bill" Donovan and General "Iron Mike" O'Daniel, were co-chairmen.
The membership included Senators [John F.] Kennedy and Richard Neuberger; Representatives Emmanuel Celler and Edna Kelly; and Angier Biddle Duke, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Max Lerner, socialist leader Norman Thomas, and conservative Utah Governor Bracken"
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The Cardinal's message was clear. The fall of Vietnam brought the day closer when Communists would dominate the United States. "We shall risk bartering our liberties for lunacies, betraying the sacred trust of our forefathers, becoming serfs and slaves to the Red ruler's godless goons," he swore.
The other speakers needed no introduction: Madame Chiang Kaishek and Admiral Arthur W. Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was a familiar figure at the Powerhouse. Both speakers were friends of the Cardinal and shared his conservative views. Madame Chiang lamented that the Soviets had corrupted the "minds and souls of those who became its puppets--the Chinese Communists." Radford asserted that the United States should be ready to police the world. The audience wildly applauded each speaker, but it was Spellman who brought them to their feet in a thunderous ovation. At the conclusion of the meeting, the Cardinal asked the legionnaires to pray for God's intervention. If Eisenhower wouldn't listen to Spellman, perhaps he would heed the Almighty. "Be with us, Blessed Lord," the Cardinal intoned, "lest we forget and surrender to those who have attacked us without cause, those who repaid us with evil for good and hatred for love."
The day after the convention the impact of Spellman's address was noted in the press. New York Daily News columnist John O'Donnell, for example, reported: "From a political viewpoint-- global, national and New York State--the speech delivered by Cardinal Spellman was by far the most significant and important heard here at the convention....''
Spellman's attack on Ho Chi Minh's revolution was the first sign of his involvement in the politics of Vietnam. Though few people knew this, the Cardinal played a prominent role in creating the political career of a former seminary resident in New York who had just become Premier of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. In Diem, Spellman had seen the qualities he desired in any leader: ardent [Roman] Catholicism and rabid anti-Communism.
Cardinal Spellman had met Diem in New York in 1950, when the Vietnamese had been at the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining, New York. A staunch [Roman] Catholic from a patrician family, Diem was at the seminary at the intercession of his brother, Ngo Din Thuc, a Roman Catholic bishop. A lay celibate and deeply religious, Diem had cut himself off from the world, especially his war-shredded nation, and had been known only to a small, politically active circle in the United States. In his homeland his name had hardly evoked enthusiasm. On an official level in the United States, Diem was an unknown quantity, a situation Spellman helped rectify. Diem's background meant that he inevitably came to the attention of Spellman.
The man responsible for bringing them together was Father Fred McGuire, the anti-McCarthy Vincentian who worked for the Propagation of the Faith. A former missionary to Asia, McGuire's intimate knowledge of the Far East was well known at the State Department. One day the priest was asked by Dean Rusk, then head of the Asian section, to see that Bishop Thuc, who was coming to the United States, met with State Department officials, McGuire recalled. Rusk also expressed an interest in meeting Diem."35
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McGuire contacted his old friend Bishop Griffiths, who was still Spellman's foreign affairs expert. He asked that Thuc be properly received by the Cardinal, which he was. For the occasion Diem came to the Cardinal's residence from the seminary. The meeting between Spellman and Diem may well have been a historic one. Joseph Buttinger, a prominent worker with refugees in Vietnam, believed the Cardinal was the first American to consider that Diem might go home as the leader of South Vietnam."
In October 1950 the Vietnamese brothers met in Washington at the Mayflower Hotel with State Department officials, including Rusk. Diem and Thuc were accompanied by McGuire as well as by three political churchmen who were working to stop Communism: Father Emmanuel Jacque, Bishop Howard Carroll, and Georgetown's Edmund Walsh. The purpose of the meeting was to ask the brothers about their country and determine their political beliefs. It soon became clear that both Diem and Thuc believed that Diem was destined to rule his nation. The fact that Vietnam's population was only ten percent Catholic mattered little as far as the brothers were concerned." Such a step seemed unlikely. Before World War II Diem had been a civil servant connected loosely with nationalists. Later, he repeatedly refused to accept government offices under Emperor Bao Dai; the job he wanted was Prime Minister, but that had been denied him.
As Diem spoke during the dinner, his two most strongly held positions were readily apparent. He believed in the power of the [Roman] Catholic Church and he was virulently anti-Communist. The State Department officials must have been impressed. Concerned about Vietnam since Truman first made a financial commitment to helping the French there, they were always on the lookout for strong, anti-Communist leaders as the French faded.
After Dienbienphu, Eisenhower wanted to support a broader-based government than that of Emperor Bao Dai, who enjoyed little popular support and had long been considered a puppet of the French and the Americans. Thus U.S. officials wanted a nationalist in high office in South Vietnam to blunt some of Ho Chi Minh's appeal. The result was that Bao Dai offered Diem the job he had always wanted-Prime Minister. Diem's self-proclaimed prophecy was coming true. He returned to Saigon on June 26, 1954, or several weeks after the arrival of Edward Lansdale, the chief of the C.I.A.'s Saigon Military Mission, who was in charge of unconventional warfare. U.S. involvement entered a new stage.
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Spellman's Vietnam stance was in accordance with the wishes of the Pope. Malachi Martin, a former Jesuit who worked at the Vatican during the years of the escalating U.S. commitment to Vietnam, said the Pope wanted the United States to back Diem because the Pope had been influenced by Diem's brother, Archbishop Thuc.
"The Pope was concerned about Communism making more gains at the expense of the [Roman Catholic] Church," Martin averred. "He turned to Spellman to encourage American commitment to Vietnam." 38
Thus Spellman embarked on a carefully orchestrated campaign to prop up the Diem regime. Through the press and a Washington lobby, the problems of confronting anti-Communism in Indochina became widely known in America. One of the men Spellman aided in promoting the Diem cause was Buttinger, a former Austrian Socialist who headed the international Rescue Committee, an organization that had helped refugees flee Communism after World War II and now helped people fleeing North Vietnam.
The Geneva Accords provided that people moving between the north and south should have three hundred days in which to do so. The refugee problems were enormous. When he visited New York, Buttinger met with Spellman and explained the situation. The Cardinal placed him in touch with Joe Kennedy, who arranged meetings for Buttinger with the editorial boards of major publications such as Time and the Herald Tribune. Editorials sympathetic to the plight of refugees fleeing Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam began appearing in the American press.
Spellman and Kennedy also helped form a pro-Diem lobby in Washington. The rallying cries were anti-Communism and [Roman] Catholicism. Through their connections, they soon had a high-powered committee, which was a lumpy blend of intellectuals and conservatives.
Two men of national prominence, the former O.S.S. chief "Wild Bill" Donovan and General "Iron Mike" O'Daniel, were co-chairmen.
The membership included Senators [John F.] Kennedy and Richard Neuberger; Representatives Emmanuel Celler and Edna Kelly; and Angier Biddle Duke, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Max Lerner, socialist leader Norman Thomas, and conservative Utah Governor Bracken Lee.
Spellman's man on the board was Monsignor Harnett, who headed the Cardinal's Catholic Near East Welfare Association and now served as the Vietnam lobby's chief link with the Catholic Relief Services.
To a large extent, many Americans came to believe that Vietnam was a preponderantly [Roman] Catholic nation. This misimpression resulted partly from Diem's emergence as ruler. With the help of C.I.A.- rigged elections in 1955, Diem abolished the monarchy and Bao Dai was forced to live in exile. The heavily [Roman] Catholic hue to the Vietnam lobby also accounted for much of the widespread belief. Still another factor was [Cardinal] Spellman's identification with the cause.
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Then there was the role of a winsome young [Roman] Catholic doctor working in Vietnam named Tom Dooley. A navy lieutenant who operated out of Haiphong, Dooley worked with refugees. At one point Dooley, a favorite of Spellman, even organized thirty-five thousand Vietnamese Catholics to demand evacuation from the north. Dooley's efforts were perhaps even more successful in the United States than in Vietnam. He churned out newspaper and magazine articles as well as three bestselling books that propagandized both the [Roman] Catholic and anti-Communist nature of his beliefs.
He fabricated stories about the suffering of Catholics at the hands of perverted Communists who beat naked priests on the testicles with clubs, deafened children with chopsticks to prevent them from hearing about God, and disemboweled pregnant women. A graduate of Notre Dame in Indiana, Dooley toured the United States promoting his books and anti-Communism before he died, in 1964, at age thirtyfour. One of the last people to visit his sickbed was Cardinal Spellman, who held up the young physician as an inspiration for all - another martyr. Dooley's reputation remained untarnished until a Roman Catholic sainthood investigation in 1979 uncovered his C.I.A. ties."
Dooley had helped the C.I.A. destabilize North Vietnam through his refugee programs. The Catholics who poured into South Vietnam provided Diem with a larger political constituency and were promised U.S.-supported assistance in relocating. The American public largely believed that most Vietnamese were terrified of the cruel and bloodthirsty Viet Minh and looked to the God-fearing Diem for salvation. Many refugees simply feared retaliation because they had supported the French.
Within his first year in office, however, Diem became so closely identified with the United States that American officials grew worried about his effectiveness. This became apparent when Spellman had Harnett arrange travel plans for him to Vietnam. The monsignor contacted General L. Collins, head of U.S. military operations in Vietnam. When he heard of Spellman's proposed visit, the general became concerned. He cabled Foster Dulles that the Cardinal's presence would encourage propaganda within Vietnam that Diem was "an American puppet....... The fact that both Diem and the Cardinal are Catholic would give opportunity for false propaganda charges that the U.S. is exerting undue influence on Diem." The general noted, however, that if Spellman came he could serve a useful purpose, "dramatizing once more the great exodus of refugees from the North, the greater part of whom are Catholics." He concluded, though, "I think it would be wiser if he did not come."40
Spellman wasn't about to be put off. The Pope had asked him to intervene and he wanted to see the situation firsthand. His physical presence in Saigon, he knew, would place him and the Church firmly in Diem's camp in the public mind. When Spellman arrived at the Saigon airport, he was greeted by a wildly cheering crowd of about five thousand. The sixty-seven-year-old prelate was once again dressed in the army khaki attire that he loved to wear in military zones.
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Spellman's propagandizing of the [Roman] Catholic nature of Diem's regime reinforced a negative image of the [Roman Catholic] Church's position in Vietnam. The sectarian nature of Diem's government and the problems of that government were noted by the writer Graham Greene, himself a Catholic, in a dispatch from Saigon printed in the London Sunday Times on April 24, 1955:
It is Catholicism which has helped ruin the government of Mr. Diem, for his genuine piety . . . has been exploited by his American advisers until the Church is in danger of sharing the unpopularity of the United States.
An unfortunate visit by Cardinal Spellman ["He spoke to us," said a Vietnamese priest, "much of the Calf of Gold but less of the Mother of God"] has been followed by those of Cardinal Gillroy and the Archbishop of Canberra. Great sums are spent on organizing demonstrations for the visitors, and an impression is given that the Catholic Church is occidental and an ally of the United States in the cold war.
On the rare occasions when Mr. Diem has visited the areas formerly held by the Viet Minh, there has been a [Roman Catholic] priest at his side, and usually an American one
The South, instead of confronting the totalitarian north with the evidences of freedom, has slipped into an inefficient dictatorship: newspapers suppressed, strict censorship, men exiled by administrative order and not by judgment of the courts. It is unfortunate that a government of this kind should be identified with one faith. Mr. Diem may well leave his tolerant country a legacy of anti-[Roman] Catholicism.
During his visit Spellman presented a check for $100,000 to the [Roman] Catholic Relief Services, which was active in the refugee-relocation program and later administered a great deal of the U.S. aid program, which closely bound the CRS to the U.S. war effort and later led to the suspicion that the CRS had C.I.A. ties. Turning to the [Roman Catholic] Church to perform such a function was done in Latin America, among other places, but in Vietnam it eventually seemed to bear out Graham Greene's warnings that the [Roman Catholic] Church and the United States were being tied to a cause unpopular among Vietnamese.
The potential for corruption in Vietnam was tremendous and also harmed the CRS's reputation. Drew Pearson estimated that in 1955 alone, the Eisenhower administration pumped more than $20 million in aid into Vietnam for the [Roman] Catholic refugees. Though it did a great deal of good, the CRS eventually encountered a great deal of resentment. Unavoidably, there was much graft and corruption involved in getting food, medical supplies, and other goods from ships to villages. By 1976 the National Catholic Reporter, a hard-nosed weekly newspaper, reported apparent CRS abuses in articles such as one entitled
"Vietnam 1965-1975. Catholic Relief Services Role:
Christ's Work - or the C.I.A.'s?"
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The abuses cited included using supplies as a means of proselytizing; giving only Catholics aid meant for everyone; being identified with the military; and giving CRS goods to American and Vietnamese soldiers rather than to the civilians for whom the goods were meant.41
Moreover, there was much speculation that the CRS leadership in Vietnam had C.I.A. links, although this was never proved.
Long before the National Catholic Reporter began its investigations, both the U.S. government and Spellman backed away from the increasingly arrogant and difficult Diem, who, by the early 1960s, lost support among his people almost daily. Buddhists held massive protest marches against the government and clashed in the streets on occasion with Catholics. Finally, on November 2, 1963, Diem was assassinated during a C.I.A.-inspired coup d'etat.
Two years after the assassination, Spellman told of his knowledge of Kennedy's involvement to Dorothy Schiff, the Post publisher, who again visited him at the chancery. According to her notes:
"He [Spellman] knew that President Kennedy had been asked to make a decision as to whether or not Diem would be removed and had decided that it was all right for this to happen--this on a recommendation from American officials in Vietnam. The Cardinal said he knew that Kennedy had thought about it overnight, changed his mind and that he knew that he would have rescinded his decision of the night before had the event not already taken place and Diem been dead."42
The publisher was amazed by the revelation, but there was nothing she could do with the information. Once again, she had promised not to reveal what she heard at the Powerhouse. Shortly before the coup Spellman disassociated himself from Diem. When Bishop Thuc [ Diem's brother .... JP ]visited New York, Spellman refused to see him, and he personally asked Bishop Fulton Sheen not to receive Thuc as well. Spellman and Sheen were feuding. Sheen disregarded Spellman's request and had Thuc to lunch while Spellman simmered.
Though Spellman backed away from Diem, he didn't turn his back on Vietnam any more than the U.S. government did. The Cardinal became one of the most hawkish, arguably the most hawkish, leaders in the United States. By 1965 he clashed with the Pope, who desperately tried to bring peace in Vietnam as Spellman pounded the drums of war.
[papacy plays the role of "peacemaker" after getting USA into the war in Vietnam on the side of the Roman Catholic ruling class ....JP]
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SPELLMAN EXPECTED DEFERENTIAL TREATMENT NOT ONLY from legions of politicians and millions of laymen but also from members of the hierarchy. Indisputably, he did more for the Church than all the rest of the American hierarchy combined.
His cleverness, contacts, and persistence enabled the Vatican to play a forceful international role, after centuries of limited political power. Spellman was the indispensable source of riches and favors for churchmen in both Rome and America. The Pope depended on Spellman and the Cardinal could get whatever he wanted. At times it seemed impossible to tell where the power of the one left off and that of the other began. It was clear that in America Spellman was the Church's kingmaker. He bestowed the title "monsignor" with the regularity of a commander making battlefield promotions, and he made many bishops in his busy, modern court. If anything, Spellman's power increased after Pius became ill.
The health of a pope is always taken seriously. When it appeared in December 1954 that Pius was dying, Spellman was continually on the telephone to Rome. He had visited the Pope months earlier when Pius was first suffering from violent bouts of hiccuping that left him exhausted and unable to hold food down. Spellman sat by his old friend's side in the Pope's bedroom, with its two windows overlooking St. Peter's Square and its simple furnishings--a brass bed, a chest of
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Chapter 20The Two Catholic Presidents and a Revolutionary PopeThe role played by Cardinal Spellman in the consolidation of the Vatican-U.S. partnership should not be underestimated. Without his acting as the privileged ambassador of the Dulles brothers to the Pope, and visa-versa, the special relationship of the U.S. with the Vatican would never have developed. Thanks to Spellman, Dulles was able to forge a semi-secretive link with the Vatican and bypass the official vigilance of the State Department including his statutory reporting to the President and his advisors. General Eisenhower, essentially a military man, credited any alliance not backed by the big battalions as unimportant. Thus he had convinced himself that the role of a church in the anti-Communist campaign was minimal, whether represented by the Vatican or not. The Dulles brothers did nothing to discourage this belief since it gave them a free hand to pursue their own ideological crusades and strategic schemes which they had already set in motion. Spellman, the man with one foot on Capitol Hill and another in St. Peter's at Rome, and with a finger in most of the problems relating to the Dulles brothers and the Pope, became indispensable to both in operating the Vatican-U.S. Alliance. Besides his value in promoting Catholic interests in the domestic fields, he was a kind of genius in his own right in most other areas such as high finance. Besides making his own archdiocese the richest in the U.S., he helped to solve certain financial problems for the Vatican itself.[1] But Spellman was at his best in political, national, and international matters. There his diplomatic intrigues became proverbial. Endowed with the personal protection of the Pope and that of the Secretary of State, his power of persuasion on behalf of their joint policies became almost irresistible in the most influential circles of the U.S. These included diplomatic, financial, and political ones as well as the mass media. Because of this broad influence, Spellman acted very much like an American Pope. Indeed his archdiocese was nicknamed the little Vatican of New York. To add weight to his sponsorship of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Spellman eventually was nominated Vicar of the American Armed Forces, and became a frequent visitor—carried in U.S. military jets—to the Vietnamese battle fields. When not inspecting the American soldiers, whom he called the Soldiers of Christ, he moved in the political milieu in his role of an American ecclesiastic, diplomat, and official ambassador. Spellman, as mentioned elsewhere, had been one of the earliest sponsors of the then unknown Vietnamese leader, Diem. From the very beginning when Diem went to seek American sponsorship in the U.S., Spellman persuaded many influential politicians, including Senator Kennedy the future President, to support Diem in preference to other candidates. He praised Diem for his honesty, integrity, religiosity, and above all for his dedication to anti-communism. It was this last quality which endeared Spellman's protégé to the State Department, which finally decided to opt for him. When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, Cardinal Spellman's operations multiplied as did his lobbying on Capitol Hill. There rumors were heard about him becoming the first American Pope. Spellman never scotched the rumors, since he secretly entertained a long standing ambition to the papacy.[2] Indeed he confidently expected that the cardinals at the forthcoming Conclave would select him as the successor of Pius XII in recognition of his effective diplomatic anti-Communist efforts, which he had so successfully conducted on behalf of the deceased Pope and the State Department. Spellman was a firm believer in the prophecies of St. Malachy, the 12th century Irish prophet, and had taken such prophecies about the papacy with the utmost seriousness. St. Malachy had characterized each Pope, from his days onwards, with a Latin tag indicating the basic characteristics of each pontificate. He had distinguished the successor to Pius XII as "Pastor et Nauta", Shepherd and Navigator. During the Conclave of 1958, Spellman's papal ambitions became the talk of Rome, encapsulated in a current joke. Spellman, so the joke went, had hired a boat, filled it with sheep and sailed up and down the river Tiber in the belief that he was helping the fulfillment of the prophecy. The result of the election was anything but what Cardinal Spellman had expected. Cardinal Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice became the new Pope John XXIII (1958-63).The contrast between Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII could not have been more striking.[3] The partnership between Washington and the Vatican collapsed almost overnight. Cardinal Spellman was banished almost at once from the papal antechamber. No longer was he the welcome and frequent messenger from the two most ferocious
anti-Communist Dulles brothers. His sudden banishment from the Vatican was such a personal blow to his inner pride that he never recovered from it for the rest of his life. The State Department was no less shocked and worried at what might follow. The Vatican under Pope John had completely reversed its former policy. The U.S.-Vatican anti-Communist strategy had crashed in a matter of days. The result of such unexpected disaster was unpredictable and was bound to force the U.S. to reshape its own anti-Communist grand strategy from top to bottom. While the U.S. was considering how to do so, two events of major importance had taken place in Vietnam and in the U.S. itself. In Vietnam Diem, thanks to his protectors, had become president and had begun to consolidate his regime with an able mixture of religious motivation and acts of political ruthlessness. In the U.S., Kennedy, Diem's former sponsor, had entered the White House as the first Catholic President in American history. The hopes of Cardinal Spellman were partially and briefly revived.. His dream that a Catholic President would help to consolidate the Catholic presidency of Vietnam soon came to nothing. While Kennedy played a waiting game about what to do with his Catholic presidential counterpart in Vietnam, the latter had started to irk American public opinion with his repressive anti-Buddhist operations. Kennedy, while succumbing to the Catholic lobby of the U.S. and to the arguments of Spellman, resisted their pressure to put all the weight of America behind the Catholic regime of Diem. The latter had not only alienated public opinion in Vietnam and created enmity with the Buddhist population, he had alienated also public opinion in America to a degree seldom experienced even there. The Buddhist monks' suicide by fire, had been too macabre and horrifying not to adversely influence U.S. public opinion against Catholic Diem. Kennedy was too astute a politician to risk compromising his future career to support the religious idiosyncrasies of a fellow Catholic president and the silence of the Vatican. Ruthless politician that he was, he put his political career at home first, and the equivocal policies of his church, embodied by Diem, second. Kennedy's attitude chagrined Spellman, even though Kennedy, as a palliative to the cardinal, ordered 16,000 American troops into Vietnam; the first fateful step by the U.S. into the Vietnamese military bog. The expedition assuaged the most vocal sections of the Catholic lobby in the U.S., who saw it as a move in the right direction. By now however, the politics of the old U.S.-Vatican partnership had already radically changed. Pope John XXIII had promptly begun to steer the church towards a "modus vivendi" with communism, with the ultimate objective of doing the same with Soviet Russia itself. His motto, contrary to that of Pius XII and the Dulles brothers, became no more a struggle against communism, but cooperation; not war, but understanding. While such papal policy was being put into effect, Diem continued to intensify his repression against the Buddhists of Vietnam with increasingly horrendous results. Pope John while never openly condemning such persecutions, privately warned Diem to use prudence and moderation. Not only were the persecutions tarnishing the image of the Catholic Church in the world at large, and specifically in the U.S., but Pope John himself genuinely believed in conciliation with non-Christian religious and revolutionary ideologies. The results of such papal credence fathered a hybrid called ecumenism, an ecclesiastical creature which, more than anything else, characterized his pontificate, the original inspirer of the Second Vatican Council, from which it emerged. The harassed Buddhists, encouraged by Pope John's ecumenism, appealed to him to intervene with Diem. A Buddhist delegation went directly to the Vatican and was received in audience by the Pope. John gave them words of reassurance and told them that he would do his best to persuade Diem to relent and to be fair to their religion. The Buddhist delegation went back to Vietnam, but the persecution, instead of abating, increased violence. Buddhists were arrested, beaten and imprisoned. The world at large was shaken. So was American public opinion. So was President Kennedy, who threatened to cut off all aid to Vietnam and to President Diem. But again to no avail. It might be of interest at this stage, although we have already dealt with it in earlier chapters, to describe in some detail the sequence of events which pushed the main protagonists towards the edge of the precipice. It will be seen how the religious zeal and the dogmatic stubbornness of the two brothers, Diem and the chief of police, prompted them to disregard American and world opinion, the warning of Kennedy, and the mounting opposition of the Buddhists. This sense of a mission on behalf of Catholicism inspired them to dismiss the ominous warning of the impending collapse, which was to end with their assassination. Meanwhile President Kennedy pressed Pope John through Cardinal Spellman to try to restrain Diem. There was no apparent result. To show that he meant business, Kennedy took a drastic step and changed the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Then in July, 1963, he sent Diem a personal message via ambassador Nolting in a desperate effort to persuade Diem and his Catholic brothers, the chief of police, the archbishop to alter their policies of repression. Kennedy's efforts were again of no avail. On the contrary, it seemed that instead the head of the secret police, with the excuse that Red elements had been found among the Buddhists had turned the harsh discriminatory campaign into religious persecution. Buddhist monks, Buddhist nuns, and Buddhist leaders were arrested by the thousands. Pagodas were closed and besieged. Buddhists were tortured by the police. One day another monk burned himself alive in public, to draw the attention of the world to the Catholic persecution. President Diem, undeterred, continued his policy. The secret police packed the jails with more monks. A third monk committed suicide by fire, and then another. Within a brief period, seven had burned themselves alive in public. Vietnam was put under martial law. Troops now occupied many pagodas and drove out all monks offering resistance. More Buddhist monks and nuns were arrested and taken away in lorries, including a large number of wounded. Many were killed. Nhu's special forces, whenever the opportunity arose, went on storming pagodas and monasteries with submachine guns and grenades to enforce martial law. Ten thousand Buddhists took part in a hunger strike in blockaded Saigon, while a giant gong tolled from the tower of the main Xa Loi Pagoda in protest against the persecutions. At Hue, in the North, monks and nuns put up a tremendous struggle at the main pagoda of Tu Dam, which was virtually demolished, while eleven Buddhist students burned themselves inside it. The Diem government, instead of trying to appease its restless opponents with a policy of compromise, refused to see the portents. It went on with suicidal assurance and self righteousness. It appealed to both teachers and students, not with concessions, but with invitations to remain calm and clear-sighted, so that they might be enabled "to see the truth" concerning "this Buddhist affair." President Diem added insult to injury by stating that the solution had to be his solution. "I confirm," he said at the time, "that the policy of the government . . . is irreversible."[4] But, while President Diem's attitude to the rapidly deteriorating situation was inflexible, the reaction of his closest associates was of such blind placidity as to border on the incredible. This, perhaps, can best be summarized by a remark of the vice-president in answer to a reporter who raised the issue of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks and to the efforts of a young girl student who tried to chop off her arm at the Xa Loi Pagoda at 10 p.m. on August 12, l963. "I am very saddened," replied the vice-president, "to see that the cases of self-immolation and self destruction only waste manpower."[5] Vice-President Tho went even further. "Such acts," he declared, "are not very necessary at the present time."[6] Thereupon he added what must be the greatest understatement of the century: "They may make the public believe," he said, "that the Buddhists are putting pressure on the government." [7] Soon the U.S. applied even stronger pressure and threatened to cut off all aid to President Diem. Again, to no avail. South Vietnam's ambassador in Washington, a Buddhist, resigned in protest. President Diem's brother and his sister-in-law, Mrs. Nhu, scoffed openly at the Buddhist monks who had committed suicide, declaring that they had used "imported gasoline" to "barbecue" themselves. By this time the Buddhist leader, Thrich Tri Quang, had to seek asylum in the American embassy to escape with his life.[8] The American government grew openly impatient. The American State Department issued an official declaration deploring the repressive actions which the South Vietnamese government had taken against the Buddhists. "On the basis of information from Saigon it appears that the government of the Republic of Vietnam has instituted serious repressive measures against the Vietnamese Buddhist leaders," it said. "The action represents direct violation by the Vietnamese government of assurances that it was pursuing a policy of reconciliation with the Buddhists. The U.S. deplores repressive actions of this nature." [9] Vietnam was split. The army became openly restive and put up passive resistance, not against the Communists, but against their own government. Result: The war against the Communist North was rapidly being lost, since the population at large, upon whose support the struggle ultimately rested, refused to cooperate. At long last the U.S., realizing that its strategy in that part of Asia was in serious danger, took action. The American Central Intelligence Agency, in cooperation with Vietnamese Buddhist elements, successfully engineered a coup. The extreme right-wing Catholics in the U.S. were no longer at the center of things as they had been under the Eisenhower administration although ironically they were now under an administration run by the first American Catholic President. Yet they were still on good terms with certain top elements of the CIA. Getting wind of what was afoot, they made a last desperate effort to mobilize the American public opinion in Diem's favor. They sponsored a campaign to counter the one waged by the State Department and the others who had decided Diem's fate. Madame Nhu, the wife of the head of the secret police, was invited to come over and "explain" the true situation to the Americans. Madame Nhu came and her first call was upon the principle sponsor of the Diem regime, Cardinal Spellman. The vast Catholic machinery went in to action to make the campaign a success. Catholic papers, individuals, organizations and all the vast tangible and intangible ramifications of Catholic pressure upon the mass media of the U.S. were set in motion. While the hidden Catholic promotional forces worked behind the scenes, influential Catholics came to the fore to sponsor, support, and promote Madame Nhu's advocacy of the Diem regime. Clare Booth Luce, the converted Catholic who, it had been said when she was ambassador to Rome, was more Catholic even than the Pope himself, acted as press agent, campaign manager and general sponsor of Madame Nhu. The reception that President Diem's sister-in-law received demonstrated how Catholics in the U.S., far from condemning the religious persecutions, tacitly approved of or openly supported them. On the other hand the American Protestant and liberal segments told Madame Nhu in no uncertain terms that the persecutions carried on by her husband and brother-in-law were abhorred by the American people. During a visit to Columbia University, for instance,
Madame Nhu was greeted by the students with catcalls and boos. At Fordham University, however, she had an "enthusiastic" reception from 5,000 Catholic students at the Jesuit school. The striking difference in her reception by two diverse sections of American youth was significant, particularly in view if the fact that the 5,000 students with their Jesuit teachers claimed to believe in religious liberty. The Jesuit reception was even more startling because the Vatican, since the accession of Pope John XXIII, far from encouraged the Diems in their religious fervor had, as we have already mentioned, cold shouldered them. [10] On more than one occasion the Vatican had even asked the archbishop to stop offering "spiritual guidance" to the president and to the head of the secret police. These reproofs the archbishop completely ignored stubbornly refusing to believe that the ideological climate was no longer promoted by John Foster Dulles and Pope Pius Xll. But while it was true that Pius XII's policy had been greatly modified, it was no less true that Pope John and President Kennedy had to tread very cautiously in the situation. Although each for his own particular reasons wished to tone down the super-Catholicity of the Diem dynasty, neither could do so in too obvious a manner. This was owing mainly to the Asian-American-Vatican policy spun jointly by the previous American administration, via Cardinal Spellman and Pope Pius XII. The open reversal of the Dulles-Pius grand strategy could trigger suspicions of pro-communism and of appeasement towards aggressive communism in Asia—something which had to be avoided, particularly if accusations of such a nature were made by the powerful Asian lobby in Washington or the American lobby at the Vatican, not to mention South Vietnam itself. One major event outside South Vietnam helped to precipitate matters. Pope John died. A few days before the downfall of President Diem, the seventh Buddhist monk was self-immolated only a hundred yards from the Roman Catholic cathedral of Saigon with a United Nations fact finding mission nearby. President Dim and the head of the secret police, by now totally blinded by their religious blinkers, isolated themselves from all and sundry in South Vietnam, as they had already done from all outside it. Diem, now more that ever, lacked any capacity for compromise. Like his brothers, he had no compassion. His ambassador in Washington, before resigning from his office in protest against the persecution of Buddhists, summed up Diem and his brothers: "They are very much like medieval inquisitors," he said, "who were so convinced of their righteousness that they would burn people for their own sake, and for the sake of mankind, to save them from error and sin." [11] That is precisely what made Catholic President Diem think and act as he did. "We must continue to search for the Kingdom of God and Justice," he wrote, years before he became president, from a seminary in which he was then living (ironically in the U.S.), "All else will come of itself." [12] It came. But with the help of the U.S. Kennedy and his military advisors had become increasingly anxious about the military effect which Diem's fanatical antagonism against the Buddhists might have in the general conduct of the U.S. and South Vietnamese operations. Unless stopped at once, Diem was becoming a most serious obstacle for the efficient prosecution of the war against the Communist North. His anti-Buddhist campaign, when added to the mass antagonism which the Northern Catholics had caused following their flight from the North, was beginning to impede U.S. plans. After prolonged and painful assessment, Kennedy and his closest associates finally reached the conclusion that the only way to get rid of the Diem regime was to get rid of President Diem himself. There have been contradictory reports of how the ultimate decision was reached and by whom. Although books, and newspapers have described the step by step evolution, in the end it turned out to be a planned cold blooded assassination of Diem. [13] Meanwhile Diem and his brothers, as confident in the righteousness of their actions as ever, continued to act as if nothing had happened, notwithstanding the ominous behavior of certain American officials. On the afternoon of November 1, 1963, President Diem had tea with Admiral Harry Felt, Commander-in-Chief of the American forces in the Pacific, and with Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador, who hours before had cabled Washington that President Diem's last hours had arrived. Soon afterwards the plotters set their plans in motion. At dawn the next day their troops invaded the presidential palace. The president and his brother, head of the dreaded secret police, had gone. A few hours later, however, they attended mass at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in Saigon and devoutly took Holy Communion. Upon being discovered there they were promptly apprehended and shot. It was the 2nd of November, the Feast of All Souls. Their bodies were laid in St. Joseph's Hospital, only a few hundred yards from the Ax Loa Pagoda, where Buddhist resistance had first lit the spark of revolt which was ultimately to put a tragic end to President Diem's Catholic authoritarianism. Thus died two most devout sons of Holy Mother Church. And with them died the political regime they had attempted to impose for her sake upon an unwilling non-Catholic—even non-Christian—nation. [14] 1. For more details see author's THE VATICAN BILLIONS, Chick Publications, 1983.[Back] 2. See also author's THE VATICAN MOSCOW WASHINGTON ALLIANCE, Chick Publications, 1983.[Back] 3. For details, see the author's THE VATICAN IN WORLD POLITICS or VATICAN IMPERIALISM IN THE 20th CENTURY orTHE DOLLAR AND THE VATICAN.[Back] 4. President Diem in an interview given to Marguerite Highness, correspondent of The New York Herald Tribune, August 14, 1963. See also "The Buddhist Question"—Basic Documents, Volume 11, from August 22, 1963, to September 2, 1963.[Back] 5. Vice-President Nguyen Ngoc Tho, at a press conference at Dien Hong Hall, August 13, 1963. See official documentation of the South Vietnam Government, "The Buddhist Question," "The Position of the Government of the Republic of Vietnam." Basic documents, Volume 1, from May 6, 1963, to August 21, 1962, p. 34.[Back] 6. Op Cit. p. 35.[Back] 7. Ibid.[Back] 8. September 2, 1963.[Back] 9. August 21, 1963, The New York Times. September 22, 1963, The Times, London.[Back] 10. Although Archbishop Thuc was at the time in Rome at the Second Vatican Council. In 1964 he received another snub from Pope Paul VI, who refused him a papal audience. Archbishop Thuc, thereupon, went to see Cardinal Spellman, by way of consolidation.[Back] 11. Tran Van Chuong, South Vietnam's Ambassador to Washington and father of Madame Nhu. See also The Last Confucian, by Dennis Warner.[Back] 12. See The Last Confucian, by Dennis Warner.[Back] 13. For details of the decision see special report of the U.S. News & World Report, October 10, 1983. Also Time, November 14, 1983.[Back] 14. Following Diem's downfall, Catholic fortunes suffered accordingly. But later on the Catholics regrouped themselves, sponsored by their American colleagues and by the Vatican. As the war assumed wider proportions and the U.S. sent hundreds of thousands of troops, the Vatican and the U.S. reorganized South Vietnam's Catholicism as a political weapon.
   July 1963 "[Paul VI] re-opened the Vatican Council on 29th September 1963 giving it four priorities: A better understanding of the Catholic Church Church reforms Advancing the unity of Christianity Dialogue with the world He reminded the council fathers that only a few years earlier Pope Pius XII had issued the encyclical Mystici Corporis about the mystical body of Christ. He asked them not to repeat or create new dogmatic definitions but to explain in simple words how the Church sees itself. He thanked the representatives of other Christian communities for their attendance and asked for their forgiveness if the Catholic Church is guilty for the separation. He also reminded the Council Fathers that many bishops from the east could not attend because the governments in the East did not permit their journeys. The Council discussed the texts on the Church, ecumenicism and liturgy. He told the assembled fathers that he intended to visit the Holy Land, where no other pope had been since Peter." On November 2nd 1963, the Catholic oligarchy of South Vietnam fell - Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were put to death and executed in the back of an armoured car (some say by Howard Hunt). Madame Nhu was on a speaking tour of the US with her daughter and survived - she flew almost immediately, following a series of press conferences, from Beverly Hills to Dallas, where she was was put up as a guest of oil millionaire Clint Murchison in his home for several months subsequently, at his expense.  July 1963 Chapter 21Secret Deal Between the Pope and the Communists of North VietnamWhile the doomed Diem-Kennedy plot unfolded like a classic Greek tragedy, a no less fascinating calamity had been shaping up within the secretive walls of the Vatican. Pope John XXIII, in standard Vatican duplicity, had secretly contacted Ho Chin Minh, Communist leader of North Vietnam. This step was taken without the least consultation with either the State Department, Cardinal Spellman, or indeed anybody else in Rome or Washington. The Pope presented a simple proposition. The Vatican was willing to reach a kind of "modus vivendi" or practical compromise with the future Communist leader of a United Vietnam. The implications of the Vatican move was, to say the least, portentous. Vatican recognition of a future United Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, could only mean the acceptance of defeat in South Vietnam and its eventual absorption into a Communist North. In other words it would mean the recognition of a future United Republic of Vietnam ruled by the Communists. Ho Chi Minh, although a Marxist, kept diverse Catholic advisors by his side, including a Catholic bishop. He accepted the proposal in principle and countered with tempting offers of his own: total religious freedom in the future United Vietnam, plus special treatment of the Catholic Church, including favorable educational facilities and frequent financial grants for buildings and the clergy. All this was carried out in the utmost secrecy, since at the same time the Vatican was loudly reiterating that the objective of the Vatican-U.S. joint operations in Vietnam was the reunification of the North with the South under Catholic Diem. In contrast to his predecessor, Pope John XXIII was a genuine believer in the coexistence of the Church with communism, both global and regional. He had convinced himself that both North and South ultimately were bound to come together to form a United Vietnam. But under a kind of communism peculiarly indigenous to Indo-China. He had equally convinced himself that the Catholic Church under Ho Chi Minh, would fare well, because of the traditional role which she had played in Indo-Chinese history and culture. Such thinking resulted in three important moves:
These three were set in motion without breaking the Vatican's public opposition to a total takeover of Vietnam by the Communists. The first result of such policies was seen at the Marian Congress held in Saigon in 1959 where the Pope consecrated the whole of Vietnam to the Virgin Mary. Although this seemed religious in nature it had evident political
implications. Many Catholics and non-Catholics took notice of this including Cardinal Spellman and his supporters. Their frown became shock, however, when in December of 1960 Pope John created an episcopal hierarchy, again for the whole of Vietnam. Not content with this Pope John took an even more ominous step. He created an archdiocese of the Catholic Church in the capital of Communist North Vietnam itself. These announcements astounded religious and political pundits everywhere, beginning in Vietnam, North and South, and in the U.S. However many interpreted the move in a favorable light. They saw it as the Pope preparing to set in motion the ecclesiastical machinery of the Church, while waiting for the inevitable take-over of a United Vietnam, under President Diem and his protector the U.S. In the political circles of Washington these religious moves and comments were judged to be mere inspirational bravado, and dismissed as such. Their potential implications for the future were dismissed except by the few who recognized the Pope's gestures as a dangerous exercise of ecclesiastical brinkmanship. Though disguised under the mantle of piety, it was clear that the Church was no longer seriously interested in the U.S. military efforts to defend South Vietnam. In other words, the Vatican had given notice, even if tangentially, that from then onwards it was going to look exclusively after the interests of the Catholic Church. Negotiating with the Communists of the North, the Vatican reached a secret agreement with Ho Chin Minh concerning the freedom of movement of all the Catholics of North Vietnam. These North Vietnamese Catholics formed the majority of all Catholics in the whole of Vietnam. By this agreement they were permitted "if they so desired", to emigrate to South Vietnam and to settle under the protection of President Diem and his Catholic administration. To avoid giving the impression that the Vatican was conniving with the Communists, however, the exodus of the North Vietnamese Catholics had to appear to be a flight of religious people apprehensive of an irreligious regime run by atheists. The image had to be maintained to impress public opinion and even more to create a worldwide sympathy for the Catholic Church and for President Diem, her staunch defender against intolerant communism. Ho Chi Minh was too astute a politician not to see in the request, beside a ruse advantageous to the Church, also a deal with long range political and military implications for the potential advancement of his own cause. He reasoned that a mass exodus from the North would greatly embarrass rather than help the Catholic regime of Diem by increasing the tension which already existed. The competition for jobs and privileged positions amidst the already harassed Diem administration would be greatly increased by those coming from the North. Ho Chi Minh saw that this emigration could only increase the disruption in a government busy harassing its most troublesome majority, the Buddhists. His calculations proved correct. After a short honeymoon between the Catholics of the North and those in the South, thousands of the new arrivals asked for repatriation. They demanded help from the local authorities and then directly from the government of Diem. Even the Catholic Church, though willing to give out aid, was unable to cope with the problem which grew with each passing day. The economic situation continued to worsen. The prospect for the new arrivals of any kind of employment diminished, the lack of money became acute, and starvation made its appearance.The emigrants began to agitate and create minor commotions which soon degenerated into riots, many of which were suppressed with the utmost severity. The slogan, "The Virgin Mary had gone South," which had encouraged the emigrants to follow her to the Catholic paradise of a Catholic administration had proved to be the siren's call to disaster, both for them and the stability of South Vietnam—just as Ho Chi Minh had envisaged. |
Chapter 22
Disintegration of the Vietnam-U.S. Partnership in Vietnam
The Pope John XXIII—Ho Chi Minh agreement initially contained a subtle reciprocal ruse by both negotiators. It then turned into a double-edged sword threatening the future stability of Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia.
Spellman and his supporters had watched the development of the whole affair with a sense of impotent outrage and ideological affront. This new papal dialogue with the Communists trespassed into the field of practical politics and threatened the whole grand strategy of President Diem and the U.S. military efforts in the region. Their bitterness however, soon was mollified by the sight of hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese Catholics fleeing from an atheistic regime. In the long run this would be beneficial to the cause of Diem.
After the rivulets of emigrations had turned into a veritable human flood, the Pope came out with a masterstroke of religious emotionalism. He invoked the Virgin Mary and then solemnly dedicated the whole of the Vietnam personally to her. In this manner the Virgin Mary became at one stroke the official protectoress of all Vietnamese North and South, whether Catholics or not, including President Ho Chi Minh himself.
Ho Chi Minh had other cause for rejoicing, however, as he watched the hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese streaming southward. As he had earlier envisioned, instead of alleviating the chaotic conditions in the South the new arrivals only increased the mounting confusion there a hundredfold. The migration, besides proving an astute political move for Ho Chi Minh, set a precedent of great importance. The pattern became a formula successfully exploited during and after the war. Following the U.S. withdrawal from the region the united Marxist Vietnam created a politically inspired "migratory wave" characterized by the world media as "the boat people."
Hundreds of thousands of these refugees were encouraged and even helped to "escape" mostly by sea. While thousands drowned, hundreds of thousands were received by the West, the largest portion becoming guests of the U.S. This exodus turned into a long range victory for the Catholic Church. After having suffered a crushing defeat with the fall of Diem and then of South Vietnam, importation of the Catholic migrants into the U.S. helped to increase her battalions in pursuit of the Church's final objective: to become the most powerful church in America.
Meanwhile the inter-Vietnamese conflict between North and South was being intensified, the slippery escalation leading towards a full U.S. military involvement. In 1963, Pope John XXIII, the father of the Vatican Council II, died. Yet, as he put it, he had opened the window to the wind of change. Soon after his death, this wind of change turned quickly into a veritable hurricane in the swing towards world Marxism.
His successor Paul VI, who only a decade before had been exiled from the Vatican by anti-Communist Pius XII for his extreme left wing views, went even further than John in appeasing communism. [1] Soon after his election, in fact while the U.S. was still heavily involved in her conflict in Vietnam, Paul Vl made the first tentative offer to Moscow. This offer was labeled by the present author the Vatican-Moscow Alliance in a book by that name.[2]
The political results of the Vatican-Moscow Alliance was spectacular and concrete. Eastern Europe with its large Catholic population was pacified in a very short time in its struggle between the Catholic Church and their militant Communist regimes. Priests, bishops, and cardinals who until then had been systematically persecuted, arrested and imprisoned were released. Churches were opened and the clergy and the state began cooperating. To the chagrined surprise of the U.S., who was waging her vigorous Cold War against Soviet Russia and her satellites, the two former mortal enemies now began unprecedented cooperation.
In Europe the effect of the Vatican-Moscow Alliance was spectacular but in Asia caution had to be exerted. There, as the U.S. was escalating an increasingly ferocious war, the Catholic Church began to retreat as imperceptibly as she could, trying to avoid giving any formal shock to her ideological American partner. Not only must she avoid upsetting the U.S., but also not offend the patriotic susceptibilities of the American Catholics who had supported the Vietnam War. Many of them had done so in the belief that it was not only their country which had supported it, but also their Church, preoccupied with opposing the devil incarnate, world communism.
The process of the Church's withdrawal was as subtle and imperceptible as it had been grossly overt in Europe. It was hardly noticed also because the American Church formally went on supporting the war as if the former Vatican U.S. partnership was still functioning.
This general impression was given daily substance by the frequent and much publicized trips to the Vietnamese front by the Vicar of the American Armed Forces, Cardinal Spellman. Although persona non grata at the Vatican, he was a genuine supporter of the war and acted as if Pope Pius XII was still conducting the Cold War with the Dulles brothers.
The cooling of the Vatican-U.S. Alliance, in spite of Cardinal Spellman's efforts, finally became apparent even to the Pentagon. As the political void in Vietnam became increasingly felt at every level, military pressure was substituted to fill that void. If the Vatican-U.S. anti-Communist crusade was weakened by Pope John XXIII's winds of change, the attitude of Pope Paul VI gave the final blow to its very existence. Thus the new policy of the Vatican had become a major contributor to the ultimate defeat of the U.S. in that region.
With the assassination of Diem and the fall of his regime Catholics both in Vietnam and in the U.S., although continuing to support the prosecution of the war, were no longer a major factor in its conduct.
In 1964, after Diem's elimination, Vietnam was governed by increasingly incompetent presidents, generals and a corrupt amalgam of political-military puppets dancing to the tune of an ever more bewildered and confused American administration.
After Kennedy's initial send off of the first 16,000 troops into Vietnam, the U.S. slid ever more swiftly into the abyss By 1965 President Johnson had imprudently crossed the fatal "advisory limit" to military aid and authorized a gradual escalation against North Vietnam—the beginning of a full fledged war.
Following mounting massive air operations against the Communists of the North, the U.S. dispatched an increasing number of combat troops fully entering into the land war
Pope Paul VI greeting Soviet President Podgorny at the Vatican January 30, 1967. This was the first meeting ever held between a Pope and a Russian Communist head of state. The encounter culminated in the new policy of Paul VI of full cooperation with Soviet Russia and the Communist satellites of Eastern Europe. Results of this policy were soon seen in Poland, Rumania and Hungary. The formerly persecuted clergy in those countries were freed and partial freedom was granted for religious activities. Thus Paul VI fathered the Vatican-Moscow Alliance, which undermined the anti-Russian strategy of the U.S. in Europe and Asia. This alliance became an important factor in the final defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam.
which she had tried to avoid a few years before by supporting a Catholic dictator in the recently partitioned South Vietnam on the advice of the Catholic lobby in Washington.When Pope Paul VI finally died in 1978, only one year after Vietnam had become a united Marxist nation, the chapter of the Vatican-Washington-Vietnam Alliance came officially to a close.
The same year a new Pope, hailing from Poland, a Communist country and a satellite of Soviet Russia succeeded him (1978). The new Pope, John Paul II, initiated at once an even more ambivalent policy toward Soviet Russia and world communism. He has sponsored an ambiguous kind of radicalism, though disassociated from that of Soviet Russia, yet openly encouraging social unrest and ideological conflict in both the West and the East. The unrest and revolution in Communist Poland and in Central America are the most striking examples of his policy.
Meanwhile the history of the tragedy of Vietnam terminated when the new Marxist nation, the United People's Republic of Vietnam, was made to spin along the orbit of the great Asian giants, Soviet Russia and Marxist China, as another Red satellite.
For the U.S. however, the bitter aftermath of an unimagined military defeat had become a national humiliation unmatched since the War of Independence. A timely reminder to the still idealistic young America that her eagle, as a symbol of national might, should avoid the example of the legendary rapacity of the imperial eagles of the great superpowers of yore.[3] In the future she had better instead identify herself with the legendary dove, as the harbinger and the keeper of peace. [4]
By disregarding the counsel of the Founding Fathers to exert the utmost prudence when dealing with world problems, the U.S. became embroiled in unpredictable misadventures and uncalculated calamities.
Ignoring the maxim of the Monroe Doctrine, she trespassed into the military quicksand of the Asian conflict, and was caught in the vortex of a major global political military turbulence which she had never expected, first in Korea in the fifties, and then in Indo-China in the sixties and the seventies.
This she did reluctantly, even if imprudently, in the pursuit of an unreachable chimera. The encouragement of interested allies who prompted her to go for the chase. Chief amongst these was the Catholic Church, determined since the end of the Second World War to promote her own religious and ideological schemes of expansionism in the wake of American political power.
The imprudence of a vigorous superpower like the U.S., associating herself with an aggressive religious crusader like the Catholic Church will yield as it did in the ancient and recent past, not dreams, but nightmares. And in the case of the Vietnamese tragedy the nightmare became the greatest traumatic politico-military misadventure experienced by the U.S. since the American Civil War. A lesson and a warning.
1. See the author's THE VATICAN MOSCOW WASHINGTON ALLIANCE, Chick Publications, 1982.[Back]
2. See the author's THE VATICAN MOSCOW ALLIANCE, Ralston-Pilot Inc., Los Angeles, 1977.[Back]
3. Benjamin Franklin wished the turkey and not the eagle to become the national symbol of the U.S. When asked the reason, he replied that he considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."[Back]
4. The eagle was the symbol of the Roman, Napoleonic, Russian, Austria-Hungarian, and other empires, which became characterized by their territorial and military expansionism.[Back]
Mel Gibson, Ngo Dinh Thuc and Sedevacantism
Sedevacantism is the position, held by a minority of Traditionalist Catholics, that the present occupant of the papal see is not truly pope and that, for lack of a valid pope, the see has been vacant since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958. A tiny number of these claim the vacancy actually goes back to the death of Pope Pius X in 1914.
Sedevacantists believe that there is at present a vacancy of the Holy See that began with John XXIII (1958–63) or at latest with Paul VI (1963–78), who, they say, espoused the heresy of Modernism and otherwise denied solemnly defined Catholic dogmas and so became heretics.The term "sedevacantism" is derived from the Latin phrase sede vacante, which literally means "the seat being vacant".[3] The phrase is commonly used to refer specifically to a vacancy of the Holy See from the death or resignation of a pope to the election of his successor. "Sedevacantism" as a term in English appears to date from the 1980s, though the movement itself is older.
Among those who maintain that the see of Rome, occupied by what they declare to be an illegitimate pope, was really vacant, some have chosen an alternative pope of their own, and thus in their view ended the vacancy of the see, and are known sometimes as "conclavists".[citation needed]The number of sedevacantists is largely unknown, with estimates given in tens to hundreds of thousands.
Sedevacantism owes its origins to the rejection of the theological and disciplinary changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).
Sedevacantists reject this Council, on the basis of its documents on ecumenism and religious liberty, among others, which they see as contradicting the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church and as denying the unique mission of Catholicism as the one true religion, outside of which there is no salvation.
They also say that new disciplinary norms, such as the Mass of Paul VI, promulgated on April 3, 1969, undermine or conflict with the historical Catholic faith and are deemed heresies.
They conclude, on the basis of their rejection of the revised Mass rite and of postconciliar Church teaching as false, that the popes involved are false also.
This is a minority position among traditionalist Catholics and a highly divisive one, so that many who hold it prefer to say nothing of their view, while other sedevacantists have accepted episcopal ordination from sources such as Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục.
Catholic doctrine holds that any bishop can validly ordain any baptised man to the priesthood or to the episcopacy, provided that he has the correct intention and uses a doctrinally acceptable rite of ordination, whether or not he has official permission of any sort to perform the ordination, and indeed whether or not he and the ordinand are Catholics.
Absent specified conditions, canon law forbids ordination to the episcopate without a mandate from the pope, and both those who confer such ordination without the papal mandate and those who receive it are subject to excommunication.
In a specific pronouncement in 1976, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared devoid of canonical effect the consecration ceremony conducted for the Palmarian Catholic Church by Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục on December 31, 1975, though it refrained from pronouncing on its validity. This declaration also applied pre-emptively to any later ordinations by those who received ordination in the ceremony.
Of those then ordained, seven who are known to have returned to full communion with Rome did so as laymen.
When Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo conferred episcopal ordination on four men in Washington on September 24, 2006, the Holy See's Press Office declared that "the Church does not recognize and does not intend in the future to recognize these ordinations or any ordinations derived from them, and she holds that the canonical state of the four alleged bishops is the same as it was prior to the ordination."
This denial of canonical status means Milingo had no authority to exercise any ministry.
However, Rev. Ciro Benedettini, of the Holy See Press Office, who was responsible for publicly issuing, during the press conference, the communiqué on Milingo, stated to reporters that any ordinations the excommunicated Milingo had performed prior to his laicization were "illicit but valid", while any subsequent ordinations would be invalid.
On June 11, 2011, the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts issued a statement regarding episcopal consecrations in China, saying that the penalty of excommunication imposed by law on those who consecrate or are consecrated without a papal mandate "must be tempered or a penance employed in its place" when those involved in the intrinsically evil act are "coerced by grave fear, even if only relatively grave, or due to necessity or grave inconvenience". It recalled that absolution from the excommunication in question is reserved to the Holy See. Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, Secretary of the Pontifical Council, explained that the statement applied to the bishops ordained by Milingo and Thuc, as well as to the Chinese cases.
The bishops who are or have been active within the sedevacantist movement can be divided into four categories:
Bishops consecrated within the "official" Church Who were subsequently persuaded to the sedevacantist position.
To date, this category seems to consist of only two individuals, both now deceased: the Vietnamese Archbishop Thục (who, before his death in 1984, may have been reconciled to Pope John Paul II) and the Chicago-born Mgr. Alfredo F. Mendez, the former Bishop of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Some would add Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer of Campos.
Bishops whose lineages derive from the foregoing bishopsWhich essentially means the "Thục line" of bishops deriving from Archbishop Thục. While the "Thục line" is lengthy and complex, reportedly comprising 200 or more individuals, the sedevacantist community generally accepts and respects most of the 12 or so bishops following from the three or four final consecrations that the Archbishop performed (those of Bishops Guerard des Lauriers, Carmona, Zamora and Datessen). Bishop Mendez consecrated one priest to the episcopacy, Fr. Clarence Kelly of the Society of St. Pius V, who consecrated one further bishop.
Many bishops in the "Thục line" have been associated with the conclavist Palmarian Catholic Church. On September 24, 1991, Father Pivarunas was consecrated a bishop at Mount Saint Michael by Bishop Moises Carmona. On November 30, 1993, Bishop Pivarunas conferred episcopal consecration to Father Daniel Dolan in Cincinnati, Ohio, and on May 11, 1999, he consecrated Martin Davila for the Union Catolica Treno to succeed Bishop Carmona.
The Pope John XXIII—Ho Chi Minh agreement initially contained a subtle reciprocal ruse by both negotiators. It then turned into a double-edged sword threatening the future stability of Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia.
Spellman and his supporters had watched the development of the whole affair with a sense of impotent outrage and ideological affront. This new papal dialogue with the Communists trespassed into the field of practical politics and threatened the whole grand strategy of President Diem and the U.S. military efforts in the region. Their bitterness however, soon was mollified by the sight of hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese Catholics fleeing from an atheistic regime. In the long run this would be beneficial to the cause of Diem.
After the rivulets of emigrations had turned into a veritable human flood, the Pope came out with a masterstroke of religious emotionalism. He invoked the Virgin Mary and then solemnly dedicated the whole of the Vietnam personally to her. In this manner the Virgin Mary became at one stroke the official protectoress of all Vietnamese North and South, whether Catholics or not, including President Ho Chi Minh himself.
Ho Chi Minh had other cause for rejoicing, however, as he watched the hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese streaming southward. As he had earlier envisioned, instead of alleviating the chaotic conditions in the South the new arrivals only increased the mounting confusion there a hundredfold. The migration, besides proving an astute political move for Ho Chi Minh, set a precedent of great importance. The pattern became a formula successfully exploited during and after the war. Following the U.S. withdrawal from the region the united Marxist Vietnam created a politically inspired "migratory wave" characterized by the world media as "the boat people."
Hundreds of thousands of these refugees were encouraged and even helped to "escape" mostly by sea. While thousands drowned, hundreds of thousands were received by the West, the largest portion becoming guests of the U.S. This exodus turned into a long range victory for the Catholic Church. After having suffered a crushing defeat with the fall of Diem and then of South Vietnam, importation of the Catholic migrants into the U.S. helped to increase her battalions in pursuit of the Church's final objective: to become the most powerful church in America.
Meanwhile the inter-Vietnamese conflict between North and South was being intensified, the slippery escalation leading towards a full U.S. military involvement. In 1963, Pope John XXIII, the father of the Vatican Council II, died. Yet, as he put it, he had opened the window to the wind of change. Soon after his death, this wind of change turned quickly into a veritable hurricane in the swing towards world Marxism.
His successor Paul VI, who only a decade before had been exiled from the Vatican by anti-Communist Pius XII for his extreme left wing views, went even further than John in appeasing communism. [1] Soon after his election, in fact while the U.S. was still heavily involved in her conflict in Vietnam, Paul Vl made the first tentative offer to Moscow. This offer was labeled by the present author the Vatican-Moscow Alliance in a book by that name.[2]
The political results of the Vatican-Moscow Alliance was spectacular and concrete. Eastern Europe with its large Catholic population was pacified in a very short time in its struggle between the Catholic Church and their militant Communist regimes. Priests, bishops, and cardinals who until then had been systematically persecuted, arrested and imprisoned were released. Churches were opened and the clergy and the state began cooperating. To the chagrined surprise of the U.S., who was waging her vigorous Cold War against Soviet Russia and her satellites, the two former mortal enemies now began unprecedented cooperation.
In Europe the effect of the Vatican-Moscow Alliance was spectacular but in Asia caution had to be exerted. There, as the U.S. was escalating an increasingly ferocious war, the Catholic Church began to retreat as imperceptibly as she could, trying to avoid giving any formal shock to her ideological American partner. Not only must she avoid upsetting the U.S., but also not offend the patriotic susceptibilities of the American Catholics who had supported the Vietnam War. Many of them had done so in the belief that it was not only their country which had supported it, but also their Church, preoccupied with opposing the devil incarnate, world communism.
The process of the Church's withdrawal was as subtle and imperceptible as it had been grossly overt in Europe. It was hardly noticed also because the American Church formally went on supporting the war as if the former Vatican U.S. partnership was still functioning.
This general impression was given daily substance by the frequent and much publicized trips to the Vietnamese front by the Vicar of the American Armed Forces, Cardinal Spellman. Although persona non grata at the Vatican, he was a genuine supporter of the war and acted as if Pope Pius XII was still conducting the Cold War with the Dulles brothers.
The cooling of the Vatican-U.S. Alliance, in spite of Cardinal Spellman's efforts, finally became apparent even to the Pentagon. As the political void in Vietnam became increasingly felt at every level, military pressure was substituted to fill that void. If the Vatican-U.S. anti-Communist crusade was weakened by Pope John XXIII's winds of change, the attitude of Pope Paul VI gave the final blow to its very existence. Thus the new policy of the Vatican had become a major contributor to the ultimate defeat of the U.S. in that region.
With the assassination of Diem and the fall of his regime Catholics both in Vietnam and in the U.S., although continuing to support the prosecution of the war, were no longer a major factor in its conduct.
In 1964, after Diem's elimination, Vietnam was governed by increasingly incompetent presidents, generals and a corrupt amalgam of political-military puppets dancing to the tune of an ever more bewildered and confused American administration.
After Kennedy's initial send off of the first 16,000 troops into Vietnam, the U.S. slid ever more swiftly into the abyss By 1965 President Johnson had imprudently crossed the fatal "advisory limit" to military aid and authorized a gradual escalation against North Vietnam—the beginning of a full fledged war.
Following mounting massive air operations against the Communists of the North, the U.S. dispatched an increasing number of combat troops fully entering into the land war
Pope Paul VI greeting Soviet President Podgorny at the Vatican January 30, 1967. This was the first meeting ever held between a Pope and a Russian Communist head of state. The encounter culminated in the new policy of Paul VI of full cooperation with Soviet Russia and the Communist satellites of Eastern Europe. Results of this policy were soon seen in Poland, Rumania and Hungary. The formerly persecuted clergy in those countries were freed and partial freedom was granted for religious activities. Thus Paul VI fathered the Vatican-Moscow Alliance, which undermined the anti-Russian strategy of the U.S. in Europe and Asia. This alliance became an important factor in the final defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam. |
which she had tried to avoid a few years before by supporting a Catholic dictator in the recently partitioned South Vietnam on the advice of the Catholic lobby in Washington.When Pope Paul VI finally died in 1978, only one year after Vietnam had become a united Marxist nation, the chapter of the Vatican-Washington-Vietnam Alliance came officially to a close.
The same year a new Pope, hailing from Poland, a Communist country and a satellite of Soviet Russia succeeded him (1978). The new Pope, John Paul II, initiated at once an even more ambivalent policy toward Soviet Russia and world communism. He has sponsored an ambiguous kind of radicalism, though disassociated from that of Soviet Russia, yet openly encouraging social unrest and ideological conflict in both the West and the East. The unrest and revolution in Communist Poland and in Central America are the most striking examples of his policy.
Meanwhile the history of the tragedy of Vietnam terminated when the new Marxist nation, the United People's Republic of Vietnam, was made to spin along the orbit of the great Asian giants, Soviet Russia and Marxist China, as another Red satellite.
For the U.S. however, the bitter aftermath of an unimagined military defeat had become a national humiliation unmatched since the War of Independence. A timely reminder to the still idealistic young America that her eagle, as a symbol of national might, should avoid the example of the legendary rapacity of the imperial eagles of the great superpowers of yore.[3] In the future she had better instead identify herself with the legendary dove, as the harbinger and the keeper of peace. [4]
By disregarding the counsel of the Founding Fathers to exert the utmost prudence when dealing with world problems, the U.S. became embroiled in unpredictable misadventures and uncalculated calamities.
Ignoring the maxim of the Monroe Doctrine, she trespassed into the military quicksand of the Asian conflict, and was caught in the vortex of a major global political military turbulence which she had never expected, first in Korea in the fifties, and then in Indo-China in the sixties and the seventies.
This she did reluctantly, even if imprudently, in the pursuit of an unreachable chimera. The encouragement of interested allies who prompted her to go for the chase. Chief amongst these was the Catholic Church, determined since the end of the Second World War to promote her own religious and ideological schemes of expansionism in the wake of American political power.
The imprudence of a vigorous superpower like the U.S., associating herself with an aggressive religious crusader like the Catholic Church will yield as it did in the ancient and recent past, not dreams, but nightmares. And in the case of the Vietnamese tragedy the nightmare became the greatest traumatic politico-military misadventure experienced by the U.S. since the American Civil War. A lesson and a warning.
1. See the author's THE VATICAN MOSCOW WASHINGTON ALLIANCE, Chick Publications, 1982.[Back]
2. See the author's THE VATICAN MOSCOW ALLIANCE, Ralston-Pilot Inc., Los Angeles, 1977.[Back]
3. Benjamin Franklin wished the turkey and not the eagle to become the national symbol of the U.S. When asked the reason, he replied that he considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."[Back]
4. The eagle was the symbol of the Roman, Napoleonic, Russian, Austria-Hungarian, and other empires, which became characterized by their territorial and military expansionism.[Back]
