This morning, by sheer accident, I found the postings of a Frenchman with the screen name "Nicolianor" who claims to know from divine revelation that Pius XII lost the office in 1950.
Call this French person a crackpot if you will ( he thinks sedevacantism is heresy and that there is some Pope on Earth now, though I didn't really care to investigate that ), but without claiming divine revelation, I have questioned Pius XII and believed that the time 1949-1951 is significant for a long time now. It does my heart good to see someone else who smells a rat when it comes to Pius XII, no matter how off base in other matters. Nicolianor is right on top of these contradictions of Pius XII.
And boy howdy, has he done his homework! He dug out the obscurest of the obscure of Pius XII's allocutions, this one called "Allocution to the Colony of Marches at Rome," whatever that is. I could get paranoid here. If anyone remembers the post I wrote about Pius XII's bizarre speech in praise of bees -- a Freemasonic symbol -- here he is talking about a colony. Colony? Bees? Are these occult clues, secret hints to those in the know, or just coincidences?
Here is the website where the speech is contained, alas, only in French. But I'll translate the relevant portion, and those who read French can confirm I'm not trumping up evidence --
http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerusonline/pt/hv.htm#cgPius XII,
Allocution a la Colonie des Marches a Rome, 23 March 1958:
"Il y a des gens, en Italie, qui s'agitent parce qu'ils craignent que le christianisme enlève à César ce qui est à César. Comme si donner à César ce qui lui appartient n'était pas un commandement de Jésus ; comme si la légitime et saine laïcité de l'Etat n'était pas un des principes de la doctrine catholique ; comme si ce n'était pas une tradition de l'Eglise, de s'efforcer continuellement à maintenir distincts, mais aussi toujours unis, selon les justes principes, les deux Pouvoirs ; comme si, au contraire, le mélange entre le sacré et le profane ne s'était pas plus fortement vérifié dans l'histoire quand une portion de fidèles s'était détachée de l'Eglise."
Translation: "There are people, in Italy, who protest because they think that Christianity takes from Caesar what is due to Caesar. As if to give to Caesar what belongs to him doesn't belong to a commandment of Jesus; as if the legitimate and healthy secularism of the state wasn't one of the principles of Catholic doctrine; as if this wasn't a tradition of the Church, to work continually to distinctly maintain, although also always united, according to just principles, the two Powers; as if, on the contrary, the mixing of the sacred and the profane wasn't confirmed strongly in history when a great number of the faithful detached themselves from the Church."
I'm not sure this is heretical so much as just covertly in line with the revolutionaries, like a speech of Father Ratzinger. There are several ways to read it, if you try to give him the benefit of the doubt, which believe it or not, I did --
a ) Is he talking about Protestants when he mentions this large group of faithful who "detached themselves from the Church"? If so, what does that have to do with the secularism or "laicite" of the State? Protestants don't consider themselves secular.
b ) Is he talking about pagan Rome, pre-Constantine, when the Church had to co-exist with a secular government? Then who are the large group of faithful who left the Church? The Arians? They weren't secular either, and they certainly weren't healthy.
c ) Is he talking about the French Revolution and the government that resulted from that? Again -- not healthy. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was condemned. If he is talking about the French Revolution, he was a heretic.
( d ) If you wanted to stretch, you could say he is talking about a nation that is the
indirect result of a defection from Catholicism, like America. But this isn't "healthy" either and Leo XIII explicitly did not approve of our system of government, though accepting it as a bitter necessity.
THEREFORE -- The two statements about the large group of faithful who detached from the Church, and the healthy and legitimate secular governments, cancel each other out. The only way to defend him is that he was speaking about two different subjects entirely, yet he placed them together which leads the reader to draw certain conclusions.
More --
* The Church did not promote "healthy" or unhealthy secularism even in pagan Rome, it just made do with its predicament.
* We are not in the time of the early Church and a little thing called Constantine happened. Since then the Church has constantly repeated that religious liberty is an error, and thus that secularism is an error.
**********
To repeat, I'm not sure if this speech of Pius XII is heretical. Each individual sentence taken in itself appears to be orthodox, but when you try to put them together in any sensible way, it doesn't work. Almost any interpretation you can give just happens to lead to heretical or erroneous conclusions -- sound familiar? Yep, just like VII.
If it is heretical it's because he calls secularism "healthy." You can call it "legitimate," but I have strong doubts you can call it "healthy." It also unquestionably points forward to what would be "taught" by Vatican II -- in this case, to Dignitatis Humanae, once again adding more proof to the pile that Pius XII was accelerating the takeover of the Church, intentionally or not.