Part III
The Real New Deal
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Throughout most of its history, Anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States was as American as apple pie, and the prospect of any kind of meaningful cooperation with the Vatican was anathema and politically unnecessary. However, the geopolitical considerations of the aspiring hegemon would demand a more sophisticated relationship with the religious juggernaut, and a different approach to the concept of separation of Church and State.
Few understood this better than Franklin Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, whose father had been funding Protestant missionary projects in Central and South America since the early 1930s to gather intelligence on indigenous communities sitting on valuable resources under the guise of preaching the gospel. But, compared to the Catholic Church, Rockefeller’s religious ploy fell a few centuries short of expertise and state-level infiltration.