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As brotherfrancis indicates, the communists were making great inroads with the blue-collar workers. Emphasizing St. Joseph as a laborer is actually not a bad idea when it comes to drawing these people back to the Church, reminding them that the Church is where laborers should go for support, not the communist party.

But this could be taken too far. In the first half of the 20th century you had the "labor priests," priests who would go work in industrial and gritty jobs with workers, and the lines were becoming too blurred. The danger was that the priest would identify himself so much with his work that his priestly dignity would be affected.

These are the kinds of things that were happening at the time. It's all very ambiguous.

Capt. McQuigg said:

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As for Pope Pius XII wanting to somehow hijack the communists by, what?, becoming one?  Do we defeat the devil by following the devil?  Is this a benevolent form of me tooism?  Communism reduces man to a tool in a toolbox.  It's to be rejected, not embraced.  I'm not saying Pius XII is guilty, just that there are so many "what about that?" type questions.  Raoul76 went over the top and he rightfully apologized but his error was in overreaching.  

Thanks for your understanding, Capt. McQuigg. I do or did indeed have a habit of such. Looking back over my post, it looks like it was written by a raving lunatic; except at the same time, I do understand what I was thinking. It was just, as you say, over the top.

Pius XII is an intriguing topic. I think his papacy will always be subject to the debate: Did he compromise or did he bend just enough to keep things going for another decade or so?

Respect for the Popes is essential, and I clearly hadn't learned what "respect" is at the time I wrote the original post. However, I still think there are many troubling things about Pius XII's papacy, that cannot just be explained away by his undoubted skill at politicking.

He seemed to have gone beyond the call of duty in changing aspects of the Church, at a time when it was already fragile. He put Bugnini as the head of a new liturgical institution. Worst of all, he failed signally to carry out Lucy's Fatima request, and I am often baffled by how Pius XII is hailed as the "Fatima Pope" despite this. For people who grew up in the 50's or were born then, there is much affection for Pius XII -- and frankly, I'd call it blind affection.

There ARE disturbing facts about this papacy. It was a very unique and strange papacy, with Pius XII churning out paper after paper about the most far-flung subjects. I have long been troubled by the Christmas Message of 1944 where he calls for an international organization to stamp out war. He was the Pope, so I'll say no more except that I don't follow his thinking on this one...

When you factor all this in, the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker becomes a bit troubling. But I still have to give him the benefit of the doubt. In itself, there's nothing wrong with it. That is the point. If it was some kind of secret code to the Masons and communists taking over the Church, God knows and will punish those involved. But I cannot, and do not, assume that it was.

Mr. Raoul76,

There seems to be some disappointment in your above comment that Catholicism failed during the last century to live up to the standards of abstract rationalism of the Anglican Church.  For example, Catholic liturgy has never tried to maintain a rigid standard set by intellectual research like many High Church ("Orthodox") Anglicans have done.  Our liturgy has always moved spiritually upwards in a single direction into higher and higher levels of the divine.  The liturgical developments of Pope Pius' reign were simply the latest achievement in this steady climb and had nothing to do with the later replacement of Catholic liturgy by an essentially alien and Jєωιѕн liturgical heritage under Paul VI.  Once again, Bugnini himself was practically a nobody and only a bureaucrat who went whichever way the wind blew at the time.  Obsessing over Bugnini completely misses what was happening in the Catholic liturgy of those times.  Bugnini was virtually nothing, just another  bureaucratic cipher of the Roman Curia who was so skillful at what he did that every occupant of the See of Peter needed his services.  Irregardless of what those services were specifically, whether for good or for ill.  The evils of the Novus Ordo were the creation of Paul VI and should be placed at his door alone.

Fatima was the foremost religious devotion of the Axis Powers on the Eastern Front and Lucy's request very largely applied to the reign of Pope Pius XI before Russia had begun to spread her errors throughout the world.  Pope Pius XII did what he could to fulfil Lucy's request but by then it was too late.  The errors of Bolshevism had already been cast to the winds.  Again, blaming Pius XII for what Pius XI had failed to do in time is only beside the point.

Then you mix together the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker with what was actually troubling during those days:  The Worker-Priest movement of Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard of Paris.  Cardinal Suhard was the actual "stormy petrel" among the hierarchy of those days, not Pope Pius XII.  All your worries should be directed at him, not at the Bishop of Rome who was reflecting the Catholic mainstream of the time in Nationalist Spain, Ireland and Argentina.  St. Joseph the Worker had to do with the Founder of the Spanish Falange Miguel Primo de Rivera and with the Irish Republic, not with the Communists of the time.  Again, we Catholics have our own heritage of concern for the working class and don't have to go hat in hand to the Reds for instructions in social justice.

The troubling actions of the Worker-Priests permitted by Cardinal Suhard is also a problem quite separate from the later ecclesial cataclysms of Paul VI.  Unlike Paul VI, Cardinal Suhard was actually a well-meaning anti-Communist who at least had the courage to attempt to meet the genuine spiritual needs of the extremely atheistic French working-class of the early 1950s.  That truly had nothing to do with any Communist sympathies by Cardinal Suhard or his own assistant bishops.  The Worker-Priest movement was a complete disaster because the French Communist Party was then too powerful for the compassionate efforts of Cardinal Suhard to succeed and the Allied Powers were also too soft on Soviet Russia to stop the rapid spread in those days of the errors of Russia throughout the world.  This included the then powerful rise of the French Communists and hence their relentless subversion and corruption of the Worker-Priests.

But any serious blame for the tragic failure of the Worker-Priest movement should fall on the many actual Communist sympathisers among the Western Plutocracies of those days, not on the perhaps excessively daring Cardinal Suhard and certainly not on the saintly Pope Pius XII.  In my opinion we can clearly distinguish between the villains and the victims of those years and see that the genuine Masonic abettors of Stalinism then were names like Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Nikita Khruschev and (sorry to shock) John Kennedy, but in no way the innocent Pope Pius XII then happily reigning in the Vatican.  

If truth be told Eisenhower was dangerously inconstant in his anti-Communism as well and, although this writer has absolutely no sympathy for the Masonic John Birch Society, they weren't altogether wrong about Eisenhower.  So even the loathsome Birchers were partially right at least that one time when they had troubling doubts about President Eisenhower.  But Pope Pius XII and his obedient servants?  

Perish the thought.  Never!!!