As if Hugh O'Flaherty hadn't had enough grief from the media, last Monday there was a further blow. His esteemed uncle, Mgr Hugh O'Flaherty, was accused of being a Nazi spy.
It has long been argued that the Catholic Church in Italy was more than helpful to the Nazis during the last war, with reports of money laundering, supplying intelligence and failing to condemn atrocities throughout the Third Reich. The Kerryman, Vatican representative of the American Red Cross, was hailed as a hero for saving Jews and Allied POWs and a memorial was erected to him at Muckross park, and a sculpture is planned for Killarney.
On top of all his nephew's continuing troubles and just as the media was cooling down on his appointment to the EIB pending the outcome of Denis Riordan's appeal to the Supreme Court, reports hit the British papers on Monday that Mgr O'Flaherty tipped off the Germans about Allied invasion plans. The info came from British and US documents declassified last week, but such is O'Flaherty's reputation and the necessity at the time of keeping the Germans on side, it is not given much credence. The Guardian quotes Prof James Walston of the American University of Rome saying the evidence was weak that O'Flaherty, hero of the 1983 movie The Scarlet and the Black starring Gregory Peck, was a spy. In fact say some Mgr O'Flaherty was just an expert in the well-known Kerry skill of propagating disinformation.