I remember reading “La Popessa” some years ago.
My recollection was that there was nothing in it even resembling or supporting any kind of conspiracy or conspiracy theory.
It was in one sense an innocuous “silly” book (no attempt at being deep or political or even a theological work), but this memoir/biography/autobiography of Pope Pius XII’s housekeeper had some interesting anecdotes.
The “story” that I enjoyed the most dealt with the description of Jewish refugees who were smuggled into the Vatican City during WW2. Hitler was enraged that the Catholic Church was sheltering Jews in the Vatican. There were THOUSANDS of them.
The Pope had no money to feed them, so Cardinal Spellman of New York had a diplomatic passport and when he visited the Vatican, his suitcases were FILLED with cash which he had collected from wealthy people in New York City. Sister Pascalina used the money to buy food for the refugees.
Interestingly, the Germans were very officious and respected paper credentials… so the Vatican employed a forger to create phoney documents for each of the Jewish refugees identifying them as Italian Catholics. The Germans respected the documents and the Jewish refugees were taken by Vatican railways to the Mediterranean Sea and put aboard ships and taken to a safe haven.
Even more interesting, is that there is NO official RECORD of where the Jewish refugees ultimately ended up. The Med and the Atlantic were filled with Nazi submarines. North Africa was in Nazi hands. South America was too far away… so where did all those many thousands of refugees end up??? My betting is that they ended up in Spain, protected by Franco.
Maybe someday soon the destination will be declassified.
Oh, and the name of the forger … Angelo Roncalli…
You might know him better as Pope John XXIII.
“And now you know the rest of the story!”
[Pincus Lapide, an Israeli historian, wrote a book, “Three Popes and the Jews” and he claimed that the Catholic Church was responsible for the rescue of 765,000 Jews during WW2… I’m doing this from memory… maybe someone could look it up for verification.]*
