R. J. Grigaitis

This is the opening paragraph to an article I just read from LifeNews.com (http://www.lifenews.com/state4423.html):

Washington University has joined forces with Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Planned Parenthood of St. Louis to train abortionists. It is called the Family Planning Fellowship Program, and its stated goal is to “develop tomorrow’s leaders in reproductive health.”

The last two words made me stop and think: “Shouldn’t reproductive health involve reproduction?”

Cardiovascular health involves helping a heart pump blood throughout the vascular system. Any doctor that intentionally stops a cardiovascular system is not engaging in cardiovascular health, but murder.

Reproductive health involves helping the reproduction of human life. Any doctor that intentionally stops the reproduction process is not engaging in reproductive health. If a life is aborted, murder is committed.

I really didn’t think Barack Obama would become President of the United States of America. I didn’t think Americans would be so foolish. In particular, I thought  Catholic Americans would listen to their bishops who did everything they could to say not to vote for Obama without crossing the line of actually saying who to vote or not vote for. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Many of these “Catholics” don’t even know who their bishop is (if you do go to Mass, the name of your bishop gets mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer).

I thought the day Obama was elected president was a very black day in American history; however, I’ve since changed my mind. According to recent polling data, Obama has had a very positive effect on Americans. It seems that Obama’s radical anti-life stance on a number of issues has wakened up sleeping Americans to these issues. What they really didn’t have an opinion on before, they are now forming an opinion, and that opinion is turning out to be pro-life.

Obama is doing a great job of showing what evil is possible within American borders, and the American public is taking note. The only problem is they have to wait a little more than three years before they can do anything about it.

I hope Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012.

This is a letter I completed today. More information about the PepsiCo boycott can be found here: http://www.boycottpepsico.com

Frito Lay Canada
Consumer Response Center
P.O. Box 40
Cambridge, Ontario  N1R 5S9

Dear Sir,

I must first apologise for taking so long in writing this letter. I see that I created this document on April 13th, but it was not until now, some four months later, that I have found time to complete it.

I am apologising because for the last four months I have boycotted your products, along with all PepsiCo products, which was unfair of me since I did not inform you of my reason for this boycott. With this letter, I am rectifying my negligence.

Before I give you the reason for my boycott, I must say that I have been a big customer of yours; particularly of your Tostitos product. Tostitos have been a basic staple of my diet for many years. I do not think of them as snack food, but an alternative to bread and potatoes. I used to make Tostitos a part of between three and nine meals a week. Four months ago, I switched to the product of one of your competitors, which I consider an inferior product, so I am looking forward to the end of this boycott.

The reason for my boycott is your aggressive role in the culture war regarding homosexuality. I understand that PepsiCo believes it is acting for the good of society; however, I believe, as do many others, that PepsiCo is damaging society. I do not expect PepsiCo to change sides in this culture war, but I do expect you to take a neutral stance on this issue. Until PepsiCo takes a neutral stance regarding the homosexual issue, I will not buy any of your products, and I am encouraging others to join me in this boycott.

These are the specific actions I expect PepsiCo to take before I end my boycott of your products:

• Withdraw membership in the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (Ford, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart all withdrew from membership when asked to do so)
• Stop requiring employees to attend sexual orientation and gender identity diversity training
• Stop giving financial support to “gay pride parades”
• Stop funding homosexual organisations such as Human Rights Campaign and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
• Stop using TV commercials to promote the homosexual lifestyle

Just today I read in the news that a Tim Hortons franchise in Rhode Island pulled its sponsorship from a Marriage and Family Day organised by the National Organization for Marriage due to pressure from the gay and lesbian community. If the gay and lesbian minority can force Tim Hortons to remain neutral by pulling sponsorship for a group that supports the traditional definition of marriage, surely PepsiCo will listen to the majority and also become neutral by pulling support from groups that wish to redefine marriage.

Sincerely yours,
R. J. Grigaitis

I watched the movie  The Shoes of the Fisherman around twelve years ago, and from what I remember, I thoroughly enjoyed it. After learning more about the Eastern Churches and, in particular, the person whom the lead character of this movie is based on, I decided I would have a better appreciation for the story, so I bought the book. It was a well written book, but now that I’ve finished it, I feel that my time would have been better spent reading something more inspirational.

Like many, I saw this story as being prophetic of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The book came out in 1963 and the movie came out in 1968. Ten years after the movie came out, Karol Wojtyla became the first Slavic pope, as well as the first one to come from a Communist nation, both of which occur in The Shoes of the Fisherman. Even the names of Pope John Paul II and the protagonist of The Shoes of the Fisherman are similar: Karol and Kiril.

As I said many see the connection between this movie and the pontificate of Pope John Paul II; however, very few people seem to know the actual inspiration for The Shoes of the Fisherman: Major Archbishop Josyf Slipyj.

Josyf Slipyj was the Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Byzantine (Greek) Catholic Church between 1944 and 1984. A major archbishop has basically the same jurisdiction and autonomy as a patriarch without the actual title of patriarch. Technically, this title didn’t exist until 1963 when Pope Paul VI created this new office instead of establishing Archbishop Slipyj’s see as a patriarchate. Before 1963, Archbishop Slipyj had the same duties, but not as much authority and autonomy.

Such authority and autonomy allowed him to consecrate three bishops without approval of the pope. This annoyed some of the Roman Curia since such ordinations are illicit in Roman canon law (this is why those three bishops of the Pius X Society were excommunicated), but not in Eastern canon law. One of these bishops was Lubomyr Husar, who now holds the office that Major Archbishop Slipyj held.

The KGB offered to make Josyf Slipyj the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church if only he broke union with Rome. He refused, so they put him in a Siberian concentration camp for almost 18 years. In 1960, Blessed Pope John XXIII created him a Cardinal in pectore, and three years later succeeded in bringing him to Rome.

This real story is much more interesting and inspiring than The Shoes of the Fisherman. My favourite part of the movie is when Pope Kiril sneaks out of the Vatican and comes across a dying man in a Jewish community of Rome. When the man dies, Kiril begins chanting a Jewish lament in Hebrew. I don’t know if Josyf Slipyj would have done this, but I do know that his predecessor, Servant of God Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky, used to preach to the Jews in Hebrew. Unfortunately my favourite part of the movie, the chanting in Hebrew, is not in the book.

Instead of reading The Shoes of the Fisherman, I would have much rather read a biography of Josyf Slipyj or of Andrey Sheptysky. This is a plea to all Ukrainian historians that have a command of the English language: please write a biography about Major Archbishop Josyf Slipyj and one about Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky.

Remember the last few years leading up to the year 2000? Everyone was talking and worrying about the Y2K bug. I was quite confident back then, and still firmly believe today (although I haven’t looked for actual proof), that a lot of computer programmers made a lot of money by not doing much of anything. I doubt that there were more than a small number of Y2K bugs, and that they were very easily fixed or had negligible impact on business .

I was so confident of this that in 1997 I set the year on my computer at work to 2000. All of the software produced by the company I was working for handled it just fine. In fact, every piece of software on that computer handled it just fine except for one. It’s been 12 years now, so I can’t remember what that one piece of software was, but I do remember that it worked just fine except for displaying the wrong year. I also remember that this one bug would have no impact on my productivity or the productivity of the company I was working for.

Why am I bringing this up? Because there really is a bug that will actually make a large impact on productivity around the world and there is no easy fix for it. This bug will become a major problem on January 19th, 2038 at 3:14:07 Greenwich Means Time (or for you ISO geeks, 2038-01-09T03:14:07+00:00). That’s when the Unix timestamp runs out of seconds.

Now no one seems to be talking about it because very few people know much about computers, let alone what the Unix timestamp is. First of all, Unix and Unix-like operating systems (such as the many versions of Linux) are the main back bone of the Internet. Windows and Mac web servers will not save the day because most of them also use the Unix timestamp, so the Y2K32 bug will effect almost the entire World Wide Web.

The Unix timestamp is the number of seconds before and after the date January 1st, 1970. On January 19th, 2038 at 3:14:07 we run out of seconds.

This may seem like an odd date and time, but it makes perfect sense if you understand computers. Computers don’t count like humans. Computers only know 1 and 0; like a switch, “on” and “off” (actually, that’s all computers are, a bunch of switches). These 1s and 0s (or switches) are called bits. Eight bits are called a byte. If a number in a computer is only one byte in size, it has a range from 0 to 255, or if it is signed (can be negative), -128 to 127.

Here is an example of how a computer counts from 0 to 10 inside a byte:

0 : 00000000
1 : 00000001
2 : 00000010
3 : 00000011
4 : 00000100
5 : 00000101
6 : 00000110
7 : 00000111
8 : 00001000
9 : 00001001
10 :  00001010

Do you get the idea?

If we keep going to 255 we get 11111111. If we add 1 to 255 we go right back to 00000000 because we run out of space in the byte, which has only eight bits (or digits). Likewise, if we subtract 1 from 0 we get 255, or 11111111.

If this byte is signed (can be negative), the computer interprets the first bit as a negative sign. Thus, 255 becomes -1.

Here’s some signed examples

-128 : 10000000
-127 : 10000001
-2 : 11111110
-1 : 11111111
0 : 00000000
1 : 00000001
2 : 00000010
126 : 01111110
127 : 01111111

Now that you know how to count like a computer, lets take a look at the Unix timestamp. The Unix timestamp is not just one byte but four bytes. That means that it’s made up of 32 bits.

Here’s what a 32 bit signed number looks like (I put in some spaces so it’s easier for humans to look at):

-2147483648: 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
-2147483647: 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
-2 : 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1110
-1 : 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111
0 : 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
1 : 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
2: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0010
2147483646 : 0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1110
2147483647 : 0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111

This means that 2,147,483,647 seconds after midnight of January 1st,1970 is 7 seconds after 3:14 am on January 19th, 2038. One more second wraps us around to 2,147,483,648 seconds before midnight of January 1st,1970, which is 52 seconds after 8:45 pm on December 13, 1901.

As I said, there is no simple solution to this problem. The timestamp can be made unsigned (always a positive number), which would be good until the year 2106, but this would be incompatible with current systems.  Many newer systems use a 64 bit timestamp, which is good until the year 4,292,277,026,596. However, this doesn’t solve  the problem of hundreds of millions of 32 bit systems; many of which are embedded systems that can’t be upgraded. Some file formats also use a 32 bit timestamp. Most people want to keep their data longer than the next 29 years, so this is a major concern.

That’s right. It will be less than 29 years before this all happens. I’ll be almost 69, so as long as I print everything I want to live longer than I do, I should be safe. I think I’ll get rid of my computer when I’m 68 and only read books.

I’ve been asked two questions concerning Hitler’s relationship with the Catholic Church that seem to demonstrate the Church’s culpability in the Holocaust: Why wasn’t Hitler excommunicated from the Catholic Church? And, why wasn’t Mein Kampf put on the Index of Forbidden Books?

It is true that Mein Kampf was never banned by the Catholic Church; however, this does not mean that the Church approved of the book. Mein Kampf was examined by the Vatican for three years before deciding not to ban the book. They had more than enough reason to ban the book, but they had a good reason not to, as well as something better than simply banning the book.

Although the Church did not approve of Hitler, he did come to power legally; thus, the best thing the Church could do was to get Germany to sign a concordat to secure certian rights of the Church within Germany. Banning a book written by the chancellor of Germany would not have been a wise diplomatic move, and would have likely hindered getting the concordat signed. Getting Germany to sign the concordat, however, gave the Church the right to do something better than banning Mein Kampf. Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern), was a direct assault on the Nazi ideology and a critique of Mein Kampf. It was not written in Latin, which is the usual language for papal encyclicals, but in German. Without any pre-announcement, copies were smuggled in to Germany and read from the pulpit of every Catholic church in Germany on Palm Sunday (Mass was two hours that day).

Mit Brennender Sorge was the first official denunciation of Nazism made by any major organisation, and because of the concordat that the Nazis had signed with the Catholic Church four years earlier, Catholic priests could legally read it from the pulpit. This did not stop Nazi reprisal, but it did help. The Catholic Church was not able to make such a massive affront to the Nazis again; however, the French did air drop 88,000 copies of Pius XII’s 1939 encyclical, Summi Pontificatus (On the Unity of Human Society), over Germany as Ally propaganda.

These two encyclicals make it very clear that the Catholic Church did not approve of Hitler or the Nazis; however, some say the Catholic Church could have taken an even further step in opposition by excommunicating Hitler.

Excommunicating Hitler would have been pointless. He left the Catholic Faith when he left his parents’ home. His own description of his religious beliefs was as “a complete pagan.” Nonetheless, any Catholic priest could have refused the sacraments to him because he would have been excommunicated ipso facto due to his numerous crimes. There is no evidence that Hitler ever attempted to receive the sacraments after his childhood, and since the only reason for excommunication is to help a sinner recognise the gravity of his sin, thus leading him to seek forgiveness, it would have achieved nothing in Hitler’s case.

The Church would have formally excommunicated Hitler if she felt that it would have had some positive effect, and, in the interest of both Christian and Jewish lives, the Church chose not to ban Mein Kampf.

It looks like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper put a consecrated host in his pocket after Archbishop André Richard gave It to him during the funeral Mass for former Governor General Romeo LeBlanc. Watch the video below:

It seems that some devout Catholics are outraged by this and want a public apology. I even read one headline on the internet that said, “Canadian PM Commits Sacrilege.” Sacrileges have been committed and public apologies should be made; however, Mr. Harper is not guilty of sacrilege and he should not be the one to apologise.

For a person to be guilty of committing a sacrilege, he must be aware that what he is doing is a sacrilege. It looks more like Mr. Harper may have been extending his hand to shake Archbishop Richard’s hand. When he was given the Body of Christ, he accepted It, not wanting to look like he didn’t know what he was doing. Since he really didn’t know what he was doing, he didn’t consume It; at least, not as long as the camera was on him. Mr. Harper, like many who visit a Roman Catholic church, is not guilty of anything other than not knowing what Catholics do at a Mass.

The problem is not that Mr. Harper didn’t know what to do, but that he was put in a situation that should not have happened. Communion in the hand while standing has never been officially approved by the Church. It is only allowed where an indult has been granted. While many Roman Rite bishops have made standing the norm for receiving Communion and receiving in the hand or on the tongue  as optional, no pope has ever approved it. In fact, every pope that mentions it has discouraged it, if not condemned it.

If we turn the clock back only forty years, Mr. Harper still wouldn’t know what he was doing, but he would have been in a much different situation. All Catholics would have processed to a Communion rail, where they would have knelt down and then received Communion on the tongue. Most non-Catholics, such as Mr. Harper, would have been too intimidated to do anything other than stay in the pew. If they did go forward, it would have been very difficult to commit sacrilege. As it is, sacrilege is very easy, both intentionally and, as in Mr. Harper’s case, unintentionally .

On June 18, 2008, I left the following comment on Doug and Adele’s blog Journey to Therese:

Men are only a temporary necessity until women have a better technology. In the future, women will be able to clone themselves with the DNA of another woman’s egg. They’ll both have the the X chromosomes so there won’t be any more men. Face it, women will win the battle of the sexes!

I first heard of such an idea when I was in high School (last year was my 20 year reunion). LifeNews.com reports today that we’re one step closer to making this science fiction a reality.

It seems that scientists have created a human sperm using embryonic stem cells. Of course the embryonic stem cells came from an aborted child that was created with a naturally occurring sperm. However, if a number of sperm were created from one aborted child all of them could be used to fertilise a number of eggs in vitro. Once these children are implanted in to a woman, the most viable one or two could be left to live while the rest are all aborted to make more sperm. Do this over and over again and there will be no more need for men. The battle of the sexes would be over.

More seriously, judging by all the cloning results so far, if a child is ever brought to term using this method, he will have too many birth defects to live very long. Why do scientists want to cause so much unnecessary suffering and death?

Since, as my last post states, there are no photographs of Eugenio Pacelli and Hitler together, either before or after Pacelli became pope, the next best thing to discredit Pope Pius XII is a photograph of Hitler with the man that succeeded Pacelli as Papal Nuncio to Germany. Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo held this office from 1930 to 1945, which meant it was his job to represent the Vatican to whatever German government was in power. At first, it was the Weimar Republic, the president of which was Paul von Hindenburg (the photograph in my last post was of Pacelli leaving a birthday reception for von Hindenburg). Soon after von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the Weimar Republic gave way to the Third Reich, and it was to Hitler and his government that Archbishop Orsenigo had to direct all Vatican negotiations and diplomacy.

As the chief Vatican diplomat in Berlin, Orsenigo had opportunities to voice Vatican concerns directly to Hitler. Below is a photograph of one such occasion:

I received an e-mail from someone with a version of this photograph where everyone is cropped out except Orsenigo and Hitler.  Along with the picture is this text:

On April 20, 1939, Archbishop Orsenigo celebrated Hitler’s birthday. The celebrations, initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) became a tradition. Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send “warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany” and added with “fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.”

(Source: Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell)

It is interesting to note the the source of this picture and text. The British edition of Hitler’s Pope has the photograph found in my last post on the cover with a caption dating the picture March of 1939. As I explained, this date is false. The cover of the American edition doesn’t give this false date, however, the picture has been doctored in such a way that this false date appears possible. I concluded that the doctoring of this photograph was not accidental, but a deliberate attempt to deceive people. Thus, the text that accompanies the above picture is questionable at best.

Did Pacelli initiate a tradition to celebrate Hitler’s birthday each April 20? He couldn’t have done it personally because, as I stated in my last post, Pacelli left Berlin never to return four years before Hitler came to power. He could have initiated it from Rome. If he did, he would have needed approval of Pope Pius XI, who died February 10, 1939.

Would Pius XI approve an initiative to celebrate Hitler’s birthday? Judging by correspondence between Orsenigo and the Vatican, the answer would be no!

In 1936, Orsenigo asked instructions regarding an invitation from Hitler to attend a Nazi Party meeting in Nuremberg, along with the entire diplomatic corps. Pacelli replied, ”The Holy Father thinks it is preferable that your Excellency abstain, taking a few days’ vacation.”

In 1937, Orsenigo was invited along with the diplomatic corps to a reception for Hitler’s birthday. Orsenigo asked the Vatican if he should attend. Pacelli’s reply was, “The Holy Father thinks not. Also because of the position of this Embassy, the Holy Father believes it is preferable in the present situation if your Excellency abstains from taking part in manifestations of homage toward the Lord Chancellor,”

In Hitler’s much publicised visit to Rome in 1938, Pius XI and Pacelli refused to meet with Hitler by leaving Rome a month early for the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo. Pius XI’s remarked, “The air in Rome makes me ill.”

The Vatican was closed, and the priests and religious brothers and sisters left in Rome were told not to participate in the festivities and celebrations surrounding Hitler’s Visit. On the Feast of the Holy Cross, Pius XI said from Castel Gandolfo, “It saddens me to think that today in Rome the cross that is worshipped is not the Cross of our Saviour.” (He was referring to the swastika.)

If this was the attitude of Pius XI and the future Pius XII (Pacelli), why was Orsenigo photographed at a birthday reception for Hitler on April 20, 1939? The answer is simple, this date is as reliable as the rest of the text with it. This photograph was actually taken at a New Year’s reception in Berlin on January 1, 1935.

What would Orsenigo and Hitler talk about on such occasions? We may not know what they were talking about in this photograph, but we do know that on May 4, 1939, Orsenigo voiced Pius XII’s concerns on what appeared to be an imminent war. Hitler showed little interest. Hitler gave the same response (or lack of) in November of 1943 when Orsenigo spoke on Pius XII behalf about the status of persecuted peoples in the Third Reich, apparently referring to Jews.

On these two occasions, Orsenigo met no success; however, diplomacy did have some affect, at least early on. A key to this diplomacy was the Reichskonkordat, which I mentioned in my last post. I found this photograph of the signing of this concordat online, along with the following text:

The Concordat between the Vatican and the Nazis

Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (later to become Pope Pius XII) signs the Concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican at a formal ceremony in Rome on 20 July 1933. Nazi Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen sits at the left, Pacelli in the middle, and the Rudolf Buttmann sits at the right.

The Concordat effectively legitimized Hitler and the Nazi government to the eyes of Catholicism, Christianity, and the world.

There is some truth in this text, but only a selected portion of the truth. The goal of getting this concordat signed was not to legitimise Hitler and the Nazi government, but to secure the rights of the Church in Germany. Pacelli had been working for such a concordat since the 1920s, but was unsuccessful. When Hitler came to power, he accepted the concordat proposed to the Weimar Republic to gain international respectability. However, the concordat helped the Jews more than it helped the Nazis.

The concordat gave priests and bishops the right to speak out against moral wrong doing, so they were able to legally condemn Nazism as time went along. It also prohibited Catholic priests and bishops from joining the Nazi Party. (Protestant ministers were not protected in both of these regards.) Most importantly, the memorandum accompanying the ratification to the concordat specified that “Jews must be treated with Christian Charity.”

Five months after the concordat was signed, the Austrian bishops stated the following in a letter:

The concordat recently concluded between the Holy See and Germany does not mean that the Catholic Church approves of the religious errors of Nazism. Everybody knows how tense is the situation between the Church and State in Germany. . . . The Catholic Church has never agreed with the three fundamental errors of Nazism, which are first, race madness, second, violent anti-Semitism, and third extreme nationalism.

Between 1933 and 1939, Pacellie issued more than fifty protests of concordat violations, mostly over the treatment of the Jews. In these protests, the language used regarding violations against the Jews was virtually identical to the language used regarding violations against Catholics.

Another important feature of the concordat was that the Church had standing to protect and object to the maltreatment of Catholics. The Church used this to protect Jews by issuing false baptismal certificates. A few Jews were actually baptised, but for the most part, they were issued the certificates without being baptised.

As these historical facts suggest, Catholics were discouraged from honouring Hitler, both by Pope Pius XI and by Pope Pius XII. When possible, Vatican diplomats, such as Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli and Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, did everything they could to protect Catholics, Jews, and anybody else persecuted by the Nazis. In attempting to secure such protection, these Vatican diplomats had to negotiate face to face with Nazis, including Hitler himself. To suggest that such diplomacy with the Nazis was collaboration is utterly ridiculous. Unfortunately, by simply putting deceiving captions under actual photographs, many are misled.

In an e-mail discussion with someone, I was told, “Just do a google and you will see many pictures of the Pope and Hitler together.” The implication is that if they were photographed together, they must be collaborators, or the very least, on friendly terms. This, of course, is a faulty argument because before Eugenio Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, he was papal nuncio to Germany. This meant that it was his job to represent the Vatican to whatever German government was in power.

Expecting to find something vaguely incriminating I’d have to explain, I did a Google search of images with the query «Hitler pope» and got a lot of hits. I went through the first 32 pages of images, and didn’t find a single picture of the pope and Hitler together. What I did find was this photograph, along with a number of copies of a doctored version:

According to some sources, this is a photograph of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, leaving the presidential palace in Berlin in March 1939. He is supposed to be leaving a meeting with Hitler. You can’t miss the profile of Pacelli, but the date must be wrong because Pacelli was elected pope on March 2, 1939. He would have been in the conclave the day before, so it would have been impossible for him to be in Berlin in March of 1939.

It is obvious that the two soldiers on either side of the staircase are Weimar soldiers and not Nazi soldiers, so the photograph must have been taken before 1933. The doctored version of this photograph fixes this discrepancy by cropping the nearest soldier out of the picture, and blurring the rest of the photograph so that one can’t tell if the other soldier is a Weimar soldier or a Nazi. The helmets are similar, so once the farther soldier is blurred, it’s easy to mistaken him as a Nazi.

Another mistake that is easy to make when the photograph is blurred is to think that the chauffeur saluting Pacelli is an SS officer. To help this deception, the open car door is also cropped out.

The car door itself is also a hint to the actual date of the photograph because it has square corners. This is typical of the 1920s. By the 1930s they were rounded. In addition to making the chauffeur look like a saluting SS officer by cropping out the car door, it hides the fact that that car pre-dates the Third Reich. It would be very unusual for a diplomat, such as a papal nuncio like Pacelli, to be chauffeured around in an old car.

It is very revealing that although the doctored version of this photograph is blurred, Pacelli’s unmistakable face is not blurred in the least. In the original, you can make out all the faces, but in the doctored version, only Pacelli’s face is clear. This could not be an accident. Whoever doctored this photograph wanted to deceive people.

This photograph was actually taken in October of 1927. Pacelli, as papal nuncio to Germany, was leaving a birthday reception for Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic. This is twelve years before Pacelli became pope, and six years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

Another interesting fact is that Pacelli never actually met Hitler, even though Pacelli was the first papal nuncio in Berlin and was in Munich at the same time as Hitler. Pacelli was appointed nuncio to Bavaria in 1917, and since there was no nuncio to Prussia or Germany, he was the Vatican representative to the entire German Empire. After World War I, Pacelli was one of the few foreign diplomats to remain in Munich. The night of the Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch in 1923, the only member of the Bavaria cabinet that was not at the Bürgerbräu Keller was Franz Matt, who was having dinner with Munich Archbishop Michael von Faulhaber and Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli. In 1925,  the German nunciature was moved to Berline, and in 1929 Pacelli left Germany never to return. This was four years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. When Pacelli signed the  Reichskonkordat for the Vatican in 1933, Hitler didn’t sign it, but sent his vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, to Rome to sign for Germany. This is why there are no photographs of Pacelli and Hitler together. Due to the timing of diplomatic appointments, they never had a chance to meet.

The doctoring of this photograph, and the incorrect historical information that sometimes accompanies it only demonstrates the lengths that some hateful men will go to discredit a very good man.