The Last Few Months of His Excellency Gerald P. O’Hara Papal Representative in Communist Romania in Three 'Cold War' Archives

• In Event: Cold War Archives and Religion: Methodologies in Hidden, Secret, and Silenced Archives

Abstract

With the opening of the Pio XII archival collections in the Vatican Archives a group of documents that speak of the early beginnings of the Cold War became accessible to researchers. Speaking not only to the plight of the Catholics in the new communist regimes of East Central Europe these documents offer the other side of a discourse that is seldomly seen in the secret police archives, that of the surveilled institution. Following the presence in three “Cold War Archives” of the story of the Gerald O’Hara the American Catholic Bishop and papal representative in communist Romania just before he was expelled from the country and any official communication with the Vatican of the Romanian state was cut, I will place these archival documents in dialogue. Added to the Romanian secret police archives on the Catholic problem in Romania and the Romanian Nunciature documents in the Vatican archives is a third collection of documents found in the US National Archives, those of the American diplomatic core in Romania in the 1950s. A player in the religious Cold War or not, the American bishop was not only a subject of the Vatican but also one of their ideological ally, the United States. This triangulation of the story will allow a look into the archival “truths” and the problems the researcher is confronted with researching them.

Author

• Anca Maria Sincan, Romanian Academy (Romania)