John XXIII didn’t mediate in the October 1962 Cuba crisis but the credentials obtained by this fake claim helped him realising something else, writes Sandro Magister (October 18).
He obtained the liberation of the metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the later Cardinal Joseph Slipyj (+1984), held since 1945 in a Soviet prison. Slipyj arrived in Rome in February 1963.
On March 7, 1963, John XXIII received Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestija, and his wife Rada who was a daughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the de facto head of the Soviet Union.
Now the bombshell: The Vatican news reports hushed up this audience and the the Secretariat of State under Cardinal Cicogniani (+1973) withstood John XXIII's request to make it public.
John XXIII wrote in his diary: “I deplore and pity those who are lending themselves in these days to unmentionable games. ‘Ignosco et dimitto’.”
According to Arthur Schlesinger (A Thousand Days. John F. Kennedy in the White House), US President Kennedy …More