The Popes Hands Are Tied ...

Is This What Prevents Him from Making the Consecration? Reporting a meeting of several Cardinals in early spring 1981, Father Malachi Martin tells us in his book The Jesuits (on pages 85-86) that the Vatican-Moscow Agreement was reaffirmed in the early days of the Pontificate of Pope John Paul II. We quote here the appropriate passage where Stato (as the author refers to the Secretary of State who is Cardinal Casaroli) openly refers to this historic and sad event.

"Religiosis challenge to His Holiness to let the meeting go off-track, veer away from the matter of the Jesuit problem, had been surgically amputated.

"With almost no gap in the discussion, however, Stato* took up the cudgels. His approach was much more indirect than Religiosis had been. Stato* reminded his Venerable Colleagues that he had been with the present Holy Father at His Holinesss two meetings with the Soviet negotiator, Anatoly Adamshin, the most recent of which had been earlier this very year of 1981. His Holiness had given the Soviets a guarantee that no word or action, either by His Holiness or the Polish Hierarchy or Solidaritys leaders, would violate the Moscow-Vatican Pact of 1962. 

"Stato* did not need to explain to his listeners that in the late spring of 1962, a certain Eugene Cardinal Tisserant had been dispatched by Pope John XXIII to meet with a Russian prelate, one Metropolitan Nikodim, representing the Soviet Politburo of Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Pope John ardently desired to know if the Soviet Government would allow two members of the Russian Orthodox Church to attend the Second Vatican Council set to open the following October. The meeting between Tisserant and Nikodim took place in the official residence of Paul Joseph Schmitt, then the bishop of Metz, France. There, Nikodim gave the Soviet answer. His government would agree, provided the Pope would guarantee two things: that his forthcoming Council would issue no condemnation of Soviet Communism or of Marxism, and that the Holy See would make it a rule for the future to abstain from all such official condemnation. 

"Nikodim got his guarantees. Matters were orchestrated after that for Pope John by Jesuit Cardinal Augustine Bea until the final agreement was concluded in Moscow, and was carried out in Rome, in that Vatican Council as well as in the policies of the Holy See for nearly two decades since.

"Stato* said he had but two questions to ask. The Vatican Council and two Popes since John XXIII had respected this guarantee. Would His Holiness also respect the guarantee? And would his Polish Hierarchy and Solidaritys leaders respect it?

"The question Stato* did not ask was so clear to everyone by now that he did not need to put it into words: How could John Paul II indict the Jesuits for their

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support of Marxist thinkers and Communist guerillas in Latin America without explicitly condemning Soviet Marxism and its Communist surrogates? Without, in other words, violating not only the Metz Pact, but his own assurance to Adamshin that "Metz," as the little-known agreement was generally referred to, would be respected during his pontificate?

"Statos* message, then, was clear. He knew as well as anyone that Jesuit wanderlust from Catholic teaching could be reproved in terms that would violate no pact or agreement. But he would protect the Jesuits. Would His Holiness fight about it? Or compromise?"

As explained above, Stato is Cardinal Casaroli. *

Emphasis added by Editor of The Fatima Crusader.

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