I guess I read the first post from Romanov fan differently than everyone else. I thought he asked if there were any documents at the Vatican regarding the Tsar's murder not that Catholics murdered the Pope.
He asked about "
the Vatican Documents on the Tsars murder", not "Vatican documents on the Tsar's murder". I think Romanov_Fan's first language is English and he could have meant "the alleged documents...", but of course the use of the definite article is very tricky for for most people with a Slavic first language: I am person from the Russia.... etc :-)
He would have used it as an excuse to rout out the radical elements within the Church. Not out of sympathy for the IF or for Russian citizens in general, but under the guise of protecting the citizens of the United States from the growing communist threat.
It is actually food for thought to consider when the US went from being positively hostile to monarchs (including the Pope), equating monarchs with despots and likely to be won over by anti-monarchist rhetoric to the period when Americans started to equate monarchs with the established capitalist order. Perhaps around WW1 / the Russian Revolution?
It's a good question. I get the feeling that Elizabeth II's ascendancy was the clincher. American's have been infatuated and affectionate towards the British royal family since at least that time (1950s), and it reached its highest point during Diana's era (1981-97) in the public spotlight.
In a nation of immigrants, could it perhaps also have to do with the point when there no longer was a large group of first-generation European immigrants who had experienced reactionary, oppressive monarchism in their homelands (Russian Jews, Italians, Irish, Swedes, pre-1905 Norwegians, Dutch and Germans), but mostly second- and third-generations who viewed their ancestral homeland's monarchies in a more nostalgic light and / or looked to the more progressive forms some of those monarchies had evolved into.
I know for instance that Norwegian (and Swedish) immigrants in the US usually had little sympathy for the reactionary, Swedish Bernadotte dynasty who ruled Norway-Sweden before 1905, because it represented the top of the oppressive, class-based poor-house they were fleeing from. But ever since WW2 Norwegian-Americans in Minnesota etc. have been happy to receive visits from (the national and democratic) post-1905 Norwegian RF. I suppose the same applies to Swedish-Americans too.
