Taylor, personal representative of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to Pope Pius XII, remains a strange anomaly in the history of the foreign relations of the United States. While American historians have finally recognised the part played by the United States in provoking the Cold War,3 the papal role has not always been recognised.4 His successor, Pope Pius XII (1939вЂ“58), mobilised Catholic forces to combat communism, initiating a global campaign against Bolshevism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, thus contributing to the opening of the Cold War. They were also catalogued in Pius XIвЂ™s 1937 encyclical (Divini Redemptoris), which condemned atheistic communism,2 despite the fact that Stalin focused on вЂsocialism in one countryвЂ™, and sought rapprochement with the West. These fears were revealed in the apparitions of Fatima, of 1917, where Mary allegedly invoked prayers for the conversion of Russia.

Almost immediately the Vatican perceived the ideology and its adherents as a peril to Christian civilisation. Before the Western Allies recognised the threat of Soviet expansion, before ChurchillвЂ™s вЂIron Curtain speechвЂ™ (1946), the Truman Doctrine (1947) and NATO (1949), the Roman Catholic Church had struggled against communism, which it perceived as an assault upon its doctrine, institutions and community.1 Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holy See feared both the militant atheism of the Soviet state, and its subversion of the social and political orders.

Pope world war 3