ROME – Yesterday Crux carried two stories which, at first blush, appear unrelated. The first concerned the latest Ukrainian backlash against Pope Francis’s praise of “Great Mother Russia,” while the second covered the discovery of a previously unnoticed bit of anti-fascist graffiti from the WWII years in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
Yet pushing beyond the headlines, the two stories do actually have something in common: To wit, they point to mounting concern among Pope Francis’s advisers and allies that just as his predecessor Pius XII has been pilloried as “Hitler’s Pope,” something similar could befall Francis down the line vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin.
