OSS, CiA, William Donovan, the AJC and Vatican II

1 -THE PRO DEO INFORMATION CENTER (CIP), General William Donovan, Agent Morlion, and Pro Deo

William Donovan (1883–1959)—a U.S. Army general and secret agent who became head of the OSS during World War II—had secretly established an espionage network with elements within the Vatican as early as 1941.

It was W. Donovan who recruited Frank Gigliotti and Father Morlion to prepare—in collaboration with the Mafia and Freemasonry, of which Gigliotti was a prominent, high-ranking representative—the American landing in Sicily. As early as 1942, Donovan had contacted Mafia boss Lucky Luciano (then imprisoned in New York) to facilitate contacts with the Sicilian Mafia, with the aim of successfully carrying out the landing and, above all, subsequently governing Sicily—and then all of Italy—seamlessly.

Moreover, let us not forget that Gigliotti was a Protestant pastor and Morlion a Dominican friar. Donovan exploited their dual “religious/spy” status for intelligence purposes, in order to spread democracy under God (and Mammon, above all).

It was precisely in that same year that Donovan arranged for Father Morlion to emigrate from Lisbon to New York; Morlion had shortly before fled German-occupied Brussels to seek refuge in Portugal, yet even there he did not feel safe, as he was being hunted by the German political police, who could have apprehended him more easily in Europe than in the United States.

Then, as the war was drawing to an end in June 1944—when the Americans entered Rome—Donovan generously funded (in “the American way”) the Centro Pro Deo and arranged for Father Morlion to return to Rome from New York, securing him accommodation within the Vatican.

2 – THE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL STUDIES (Luiss) PRO DEO (Morlion, Andreotti and Montini, then Valetta and Morelli)

In 1948, LUISS Pro Deo University was inaugurated in Rome; Giulio Andreotti was one of its professors. Furthermore, on June 4, 1944—when American troops entered Rome—Father Morlion, with the assistance of Monsignor Montini (the future Pope Paul VI), established a new institution aimed at promoting the quintessentially American concept of a “democracy under God” (read: “Christian Democracy”). On November 20, 1944, Montini inaugurated the School of Mass Communication at LUISS Pro Deo University.

Yet Monsignor Montini—so eager to establish an American-style Christian democracy in Italy traveled personally to the United States in 1951. He maintained close, continuous, and strategic ties with American intelligence agencies (the OSS and CIA) throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to General Donovan, his contacts included Myron Taylor, Roosevelt’s special envoy to the Vatican, and James Jesus Angleton—the legendary OSS counter-intelligence chief in Italy and architect of the Gladio network—who went on to join the CIA and forge an enduring alliance between the United States and the Sicilian Mafia.

LUISS Pro Deo University went through two phases that paralleled the CIA’s concerns regarding the Vatican: during the first (1944–1948), it focused primarily on Soviet and Italian communism and—out of sheer expediency and for espionage purposes, rather than out of conviction—aligned itself with Professor Luigi Gedda’s “Civic Committees.”

During the second phase (1948–1953), after defeating the PCI [Italian Communist Party] in the elections of April 18, 1948, it focused more on training future leaders in commercial and economic sciences (… and “Pro Mammon” …).

In 1962, Pro Deo University had an enrollment of approximately 2,000 students—mostly Africans, Asians, and North and South Americans; the environment was distinctly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-faith (open to Protestants and led by Jews who, even then—in 1962—were our “elder brothers” in high finance rather than in the faith of Abraham).

At that time, Pro Deo made contact with Vittorio Valletta (a Freemason and executive who served as general manager and later president of FIAT from 1921 to 1966) and the lawyer Mario Morelli, who was very close to Msgr. Montini.

Mario Morelli was a senior Italian executive at Confindustria, serving as its Director General and Secretary General after World War II. His ties to Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini dated back to the 1940s—specifically the war years—when Montini worked at the Vatican Secretariat of State and maintained contact with the CIA; in the parlance of the Curia, he was not an informant but rather “engaged in an exchange of diplomatic information” with the agency, with the aim of hastening the fall of the Fascist regime and establishing “democracy under God and Mammon” in Italy and across Europe. In the autumn of 1944, Morelli traveled to Washington on a highly confidential special mission—diplomatic and commercial in nature—arriving shortly before Msgr. Montini. This dual journey—which was, in reality, a single undertaking—aimed to convey to the American administration that the future republican, anti-fascist Italy enjoyed the backing of secular financial interests (Mattioli and Cuccia), a stable and moderate government entity (Morelli and Quintieri), and the Vatican—which was already, at that time, “ideally post-Pacellian,” modernized, Americanized, and Christian Democratic (Montini).

3 – Morlion, the “American Way of Life,” and the Essence of Americanism

Moreover, his encounter with the “American way of life” convinced him to found his own university, applying the philosophy of the United States’ Founding Fathers—Puritanism—which sought to “purify” Christianity of “popery” by replacing it, on a global scale, with democracy under God. All this might almost bring back into fashion the phrase Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BC) used to utter at the end of every speech: *Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam* [Furthermore, I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.]—substituting the Vatican for Carthage…

Monsignor Henri Delassus (1836–1921) explains in L’Américanisme et la Conjuration antichrétienne (Lille-Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1899) that the term “American Catholicism” or Americanism (condemned by Leo XIII in the 1895 letter *Testem benevolentiae*) does not denote a schism or a heresy, but rather “a set of doctrinal and practical tendencies rooted in America that spread from there throughout the Christian world, and especially into Europe.“ Beware of American ”Catholicism”…

The most concerning aspect of Americanism lies in “its relationship with the hopes and plans of Judaism, particularly with the anti-Christian tendencies of the laws of the modern world and of American society, which aspires to hold a monopoly on revolutionary thought.”

One of the “distinctive elements of the ‘American Mission’ is the return to the unity of all religions—through the destruction of barriers and differences—culminating in an international congress on interfaith tolerance, in order to combat atheism together.” Indifferentism, or tolerance as a matter of principle—towards which Americanism tends—consists of placing “all religions on an equal footing, as being all equally good.“

“The anti-Catholic conspiracy is infiltrating everywhere in order to destroy—were it possible—the Church and to erect liberal and humanitarian Judaism in its place.“ ”This conspiracy has become universal.”

“Presumption or overconfidence is the defining characteristic of Americanism, and Jews hope to see a liberal and philanthropic ‘Israelism’ emerge from it”—that is, the neo-religiosity of the new era.

Monsignor Henri Delassus explains that the Church’s Magisterium has condemned all the false principles upon which the Americanist spirit rests: the rights of man (condemned by Pius VI); absolute freedom of the human person, freedom of thought, of the press, of conscience, and of religion (by Gregory XVI and Pius IX); and the separation of Church and State (by Leo XIII).

On the contrary, for the Americanists, the approach must be based on “broad or latitudinarian liberalism and on extreme doctrinal tolerance, while avoiding any mention of anything that might displease Protestants and other religions.”

For the Church of Rome, “Catholicism is the true religion, whereas for the Americanists, it is merely one religion among many.” Unfortunately, the Americanist ideal—some fifty to seventy years after Leo XIII’s condemnation—became a reality: first latently during the Second Vatican Council, and later openly at Assisi in 1986 and 2016. Indeed, “Americanists assert that American ideas are those God wills for all the peoples of our time. Both Judaism and Americanism believe they have received a ‘divine mission.’ Regrettably, America’s influence—with its spirit of absolute liberty—is spreading ever wider among nations, such that America will come to dominate other nations.”

America appears to be the “Nation of the future.” However—the prelate observes—”if this future is one of industrial, commercial, social, and political development based on the principles of 1789—that is, material progress and man’s absolute independence from all authority, even divine—then the era we are to witness will be the most disastrous ever known. In the course of it, America (along with Israel) will destroy European national traditions in order to merge them into a unified whole or a Pax Americana.”

The foundation—or the lowest common denominator—of this mixture of religions, peoples, and cultures is a sentimental moralism, or a “vague morality”: subjective and autonomous in the manner of Kant, “independent of dogma, where each person is free to interpret it in their own way.”

“The neo-Christian or Americanist movement tends to break free from dogma in order to ground itself in the beauty of ethics,“ ”to replace Faith with an independent culture or moral sensibility, through a vague religiosity that stands above all other positive religions.”

According to Catholic doctrine, “faith without works is dead” (Saint James, Epistle, II, 26), yet “without faith, it is impossible to please God” (Saint Paul, Hebrews, XI, 6). Therefore, one must not despise morality, but neither should one reduce religion to mere morality while disregarding dogmatic integrity.

Monsignor Delassus explains himself even more clearly, writing: “There exists an understanding between Judaism and Americanism aimed at replacing the Catholic religion with this ‘ecumenical or globalist Church’—this ‘democratic religion’—the advent of which the Alliance Israélite Universelle is preparing.”

Americanism is the instrument of liberal and philanthropic-humanitarian Judaism, which has replaced the “faith” of Orthodox Judaism (in a personal and militant Messiah who would have restored Israel’s dominion over the world) with the “human belief” of liberal Judaism (in a “Messiah-idea”—that is, the modern world, born of humanism, Protestantism, and the revolutionary Enlightenments of England, America, and France, which will plunge the world into relativism and irenicism, thereby eroding the Catholic Creed and what remains of European Christendom)—”in order to lead humanity, gently, toward the New Jerusalem.”

It is therefore quite natural that we come to the funding of Pro Deo by American Jews, given that the American project was, in reality, a Judeo-American project.

4 – The American Jewish Committee, high Jewish finance, and Pro Deo.

The American Jewish Committee, the leading global organization advocating for the Jewish people and combating antisemitism, maintained close ties with Pro Deo International University from at least the early 1950s. Yet Saint Paul and the Gospel teach us: “What accord is there between Christ and Belial?” […]. “Between God and Mammon?” (2 Cor. 6:15–17; Matt. 6:24).

Morlion’s Pro Deo should therefore have been more accurately titled “Pro Deo et Mammon,” since it sought to reconcile the irreconcilable: God and Mammon, the “yes” and the “no”; yet the Gospel teaches us: “Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything more than this comes from the Evil One” (Mt 5:37).

Montuori writes that “Frank Altschul, Nathan Cummings, Leo Cherne, and David Steinman were the first Jewish members of the board of directors of the ‘American Council for the International Promotion of Democracy Under God’.” In short, the Christian Democratic plan—conceived by Morlion, Murri, Sturzo, De Gasperi, and Montini—that gave rise to Pro Deo was funded by Jewish high finance based in North America.

• Frank Altschul (April 21, 1887 – May 29, 1981), an Ashkenazi Jewish banker of Prague origin born in San Francisco, worked at Lazard Frères & Company.
• Nathan Cummings (1896–1985) was a prominent Canadian-born, naturalized American businessman and philanthropist of Jewish heritage. His relationship with Morlion unfolded within the context of international philanthropy, diplomacy parallel to that of governments and the Vatican, and interfaith cooperation. Although Jewish, he actively supported Father Morlion’s initiatives along two main lines: 1) the funding and support of Pro Deo; 2) the organization of “Agape” meetings, held in New York under the auspices of Pro Deo and led by Morlion. Leaders from various religious denominations—notably Jewish and Christian—also participated in order to promote globalism. In April 1963, at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Cardinal Augustin Bea—a key figure in Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue—participated in the event and also delivered an address.
• Leo Cherne was an American economist, lawyer, philanthropist, and political figure of Russian-Jewish descent. He exerted considerable and profound influence on United States foreign policy. In 1936, he co-founded the Research Institute of America (RIA), a corporate consulting giant that provided economic analysis and politico-military intelligence, particularly during World War II. For many years, he served on the PFIAB (President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board), the White House advisory body responsible for overseeing the various branches of U.S. intelligence agencies. Furthermore, he collaborated closely with the CIA and was thus a colleague of Morlion.
• David Steinman was an American civil engineer specializing in bridge design. He was also an intellectual. He not only built bridges but viewed them as symbols intended to unite different cultures, peoples, and religions. He was born in present-day Belarus into a Jewish family that emigrated to the United States. He saw God as the “Great Architect of the Universe”; in short, he was a Freemason.

Beware of those millions of US dollars; they are “healthy carriers of democracy”—with or “under God”—… those who distribute them do not fall ill, while those who receive them are lost.

5 – Pro Deo and the Jewish Pedagogy of the Rabinowitzes and Zellerbachs

Moreover, Pro Deo operated under the aegis of a board of trustees responsible for the university’s programs, precisely at the time when Louis Rabinowitz… succeeded James Zellerbach… on the board.

Louis M. Rabinowitz [was] a renowned industrialist and philanthropist (it goes without saying…). The ties between the Rabinowitz family and Morlion must be viewed within the post-war geopolitical context—spanning the Atlantic and encompassing pan-ecumenical, interfaith relations—that awaited the death of Pius XII before fully coming to light. In addition to Pro Deo, Rabinowitz also provided funding to Yale and Columbia universities.

James David Zellerbach was born and raised in one of San Francisco’s most prominent and influential Jewish families; he was a renowned American entrepreneur and diplomat who also led the Marshall Plan mission in Italy from 1948 to 1950. Furthermore, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Rome from 1957 to 1960 and came into contact with Mafia boss Frank Gigliotti. He played an active role in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and also served on the board of directors of Father Morlion’s university.

With such mentors, Pro Deo was characterized by three fundamental components:

1) Americanism to be exported worldwide via U.S. intelligence agencies (OSS, CIA) by applying the Puritan “philosophy” of the Founding Fathers of the United States, particularly in Europe and Latin America;

2) Judeo-Americanism, intended to give the Pro Deo University an ecumenical character (that is, to strip or “purify”—in the Puritan manner—Catholicism of its true nature, leaving behind only the name and the outward appearance). In short, the Judaizing ecumenism of Nostra Aetate originated as early as 1946 with the Pro Deo initiative of Morlion, Bea, and Montini;

3) Capitalist Catholicism: leading man to God through super-capital and hyper-liberalism.

Pro Deo, together with Morlion, Rabinowitz, and Zellerbach, became the launchpad for “ecumenism”—a movement that exploded during the Second Vatican Council, which had been prepared by the OSS, the CIA, B’nai B’rith, and others.

6 – Cardinal Augustin Bea, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Morlion — towards Vatican II

The relationship between Bea and Morlion was very close and crucial; this collaboration, which began in the 1960s, developed primarily during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and reached its peak with the drafting of Nostra Aetate.

Cardinal Augustin Bea leveraged the diplomatic and intelligence-gathering networks of Morlion, who made his long-standing international connections—linking Pro Deo University with the American Jewish community (via the American Jewish Committee)—available to Bea.

However, Bea (= Judaizing modernist theology) and Morlion (= underground diplomacy—that is, espionage running parallel to the Vatican’s official diplomacy) had to face a very virulent reaction from traditionalist prelates, particularly Msgr. Luigi M. Carli—Bishop of Segni and later of Gaeta, and a leading expert on the Jewish question. Morlion defended Bea with exceptional zeal, both in public and, above all, in private.

Among the Jewish leaders who worked with Morlion and Bea during the drafting of Nostra Aetate were: Rabbi Marc Tenembaum, Director of Interreligious Affairs at the American Jewish Committee; the Polish-born Abraham Joshua Heschel (from Warsaw), who spearheaded the “Judaization” of the Vatican; Zachariah Shuster, a Polish-American based in Paris from 1948 to 1974—who, alongside Tenembaum and Morlion, managed the secret, parallel diplomatic channels between the Vatican and Jewish circles to facilitate meetings between American and French Jews and progressive prelates; and Joseph Lichten (of the B’nai B’rith ADL), a Polish Jew born in Warsaw who managed relations between European Jewry and the Vatican’s pro-Jewish faction.

The “secret talks” between Morlion, Heschel (and his associates), and Bea may well constitute the true hidden driving force behind Nostra Aetate; indeed, while traditionalist cardinals fiercely opposed this “Judeo-Christian oxymoron,“ Bea supported it ”theologically” (albeit quite superficially) in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica (with substantial and fundamental backing from John XXIII and Paul VI), and Morlion leveraged his American intelligence network to provide a safe haven for discussions between Judaizers and Modernists in Rome as early as 1961—a full year before the opening of Vatican II.

On May 22, 1962 (five months before the opening of the Council…), Rabbi Heschel drafted a memorandum titled “The Improvement of Relations Between Catholics and Jews” on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, which was officially presented to Msgr. Bea. This document called for the condemnation of theological anti-Judaism; the elimination of the doctrine of deicide; the recognition of Talmudic Judaism as a living religion, despite the absence of a Temple, priesthood, and sacrifice; and the rejection of Catholic proselytism directed at Judaism.

Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Ernesto Ruffini, along with Monsignor Luigi Maria Carli, fiercely attacked this memorandum. Through Morlion’s intelligence networks, Heschel met with Bea and sharply criticized him for failing to carry through the revision of Jewish-Christian relations, having reached a compromise with Cardinal Ottaviani. It was then that Paul VI intervened personally and toned down the amendments Ottaviani had insisted upon… Heschel was satisfied with the result…

By the early 1970s, with the disaster of Vatican II by then a fait accompli, Pro Deo no longer served any purpose and… was cast aside like an old shoe by Jewish high finance.

Don Curzio Nitoglia

English adaptation by Francis Goumain