… If anyone can verify this, please do: I heard that Bl. Pope Pius IX wove a crown of thorns with his bare hands, and sent it overseas—to Robert E. Lee. Is this true?
The ascertainable facts are as follows. Note, however, that the person involved was Confederate President Jefferson Davis, not General Lee. That much is certain.
(1) In May 1865, shortly after the end of the War of Northern Aggression, Jefferson Davis was confined extralegally (the politest description) in a victor's prison, where he was subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment for two full years. Sometime in 1866, Davis received a signed photographic portrait of Pius IX from the pontiff's hand; he inscribed it with a paraphrase of Matthew 11:28: "Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis, et ego reficiam vos, dicit Dominus."
(2) Sadly, there is
no hard evidence whatsoever that the pope sent Davis a crown of thorns woven by his own hands. Davis's widow, Varina, was the first to make the claim that the crown accompanied the inscribed photo; Davis himself never did. (NB: It hardly seems likely that Davis, who spoke and wrote of how deeply moved he was to have been sent the inscribed photo, would neglect to mention the crown of thorns had it been part of the papal missive.) What is more, the Vatican archives give no indication that such an artifact was sent to Davis, either by the pope or by anyone else in an official capacity.
The Confederate Museum in New Orleans displays the crown (or it used to, at any rate) and attributes its plaiting to Pius IX, but there is also good reason to think that Varina Davis wove the crown herself and, subsequent to her husband's death, "exaggerated" its provenience.
(3) It is a matter of no little interest that the most prominent "debunkers" of the crown story have been Jєωs, who are of course the primary exponents of the "South was evil,
evil,
evil" attitude toward American history generally and the so-called cινιℓ ωαr particularly (this is indeed now the Establishment's dogmatic view of the matter). They clearly have the most to gain by its dismissal from human memory. Note, too, that this is the very same subset of the human race that, when told that there is no docuмentary evidence whatsoever to support the Hitler government's alleged plan to exterminate first German then world Jєωry, invariably screams in response that the absence of docuмentary evidence just goes to show how secret and far-reaching and diabolical the plan actually was!
Yet if we mere Gentiles allow ourselves to think and behave as the Jєωs do, we become no different and, especially, no better than they are. So we ought to adhere to the rules of evidence, and in accordance with those rules, it should be concluded that the attribution of the crown of thorns to the hands of Pope Pius IX cannot be substantiated.
See
here and
here and
here for starters. The last of these is pretty thin gruel, but the final three italic paragraphs on the page more or less accurately summarize the central differences between what Jєωιѕн establishment "historians" and authentic scholars of the so-called cινιℓ ωαr have to say about its root causes.
Topic: The Confederate Flag - what it really means (Read 3342 times)