The Pope Did It?

[L Verge]

If you live in the Washington area, you have been constantly hearing announcements about the Papal visit next week and warnings to avoid traffic jams at all costs. Pope Francis arrives at Joint Base Andrews this coming Tuesday for a two-day visit in our capital city.

A staff member just handed me a lengthy article related to the Pontiff's visit that was carried in the September 9 edition of the Washington Times. Since it is a history lesson related to the Lincoln assassination, I'm going to share it with you (don't kill the messenger) because I bet it will stir a bit of debate:

"In August 1861, Abraham Lincoln met in the White House with Charles Chiniquy, a former Roman Catholic priest and confidant whom Lincoln (as a lawyer) had victoriously defended years earlier in litigation. Chiniquy warned of an assassination plot. Lincoln replied, 'The nations who read the Bible, fight bravely on the battle-fields, but they do not assassinate their enemies. The Pope and the Jesuits, with their infernal Inquisition, as the only organized power in the world which have recourse to the dagger of the assassin to murder those who they cannot convince with their arguments or conquer with the sword...I feel more and more, every day, that it is not against the Americans of the South, alone, I am fighting, it is more against the Pope of Rome...that we have to defend ourselves...This civil war seems to be nothing but a political affair to those who do not see, as I do, the secret springs of that terrible drama. But it is more of a relgious than a civil war...To keep her ascendance in the North as she does in the South, Rome is doing here what she has done in Mexico, and in all the South American Republics; she is paralyzing, by a civil war, the arms of the soldiers of Liberty. She divides our nation, in order to weaken, subdue, and rule it.'

"In a subsequent meeting, Lincoln added, 'I conceal what I know, on that subject, from the knowledge of the nation; for if the people knew the whole truth, this war would turn into a religious war, and it would, at once, take a tenfold more savage and bloody character; it would become merciless as all religious wars are.'

"Brigadier General Thomas Harris served on the military commission that investigated (and thus examined all witnesses and evidence related to) Lincoln's assassination. Perhaps for reasons mirroring the thoughts of Lincoln, Harris waited until after Chiniquy's insights became public in the 1886 best-selling book, 50 Years in the Church of Rome, before in 1897 expressing his own, full understanding of events, in Rome's Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

"In 1867, the U.S. Congress banned the funding of diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and did not formally resume until 117 years later, 1984."

Reference that last paragraph, I remember asking years ago if the diplomatic relations were banned as a result of the harboring of John Surratt, Jr. No one ever gave me an answer.

More questions: Did Lincoln really make those charges against the Catholic Church, or did Chiniquy compose the lines for his diatribe against the church? If Lincoln actually expressed a similar thought, does that mean that he was among the many anti-Catholic bigots in the U.S. (and I'm not Catholic)? I just don't see Lincoln throwing the religious angle into the war, but I'm not an expert on Lincoln.