CHAPTER TWENTY The British Empire, Europe, and the First World War

Concerned, as we are in this book, with the more critical issues of modern Catholic history, we need not delay over events in England after the age of Cardinal Manning (died 1892). After the great storm resulting from the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850 (see pp. 107–109) the progress of the Church in England, in Scotland, and in Wales, was steady if slow. It cannot be said that it fulfilled the hopes of those who expected a mass conversion movement as a result of what Newman called the “second spring” in the 1850s. The increase from about one to about two million Catholics, between the years 1860 and 1925, was only roughly proportional to the increase in the total population of the country. Conversions (impressive amongst intellectual groups, from the time of Newman to the time of Chesterton, and since), together with the large Irish immigration and the relatively large birth rate amongst Catholic families, were offset by the considerable numbers of those who lapsed. Manning’s confidence that the definitions of the Vatican Council would rally converts to a Church which so clearly knew its own mind was shown to be misplaced; dogmatic definitions, as Newman suspected, may have tended at first to be a hindrance to conversion rather than a help.

Resistance to conversion arose much more from the secularism, materialism, and indifferentism which were so characteristic of the late nineteenth century than from continued hostility on the part of anti-Catholic religious groups, whether Anglican or nonconformist. In fact, during the discussions which were held concerning the important Education Act of 1902, in the parliamentary debates which preceded its passage, and in many issues which arose afterwards as a result of it, the Anglican bishops and the Catholic bishops found themselves struggling side by side to secure the essential point, which was that there should be state assistance for Church schools of all kinds, and not merely state maintenance for nonreligious schools. The agreement on this matter (which was followed in principle in subsequent legislation) represented a very important victory for the Church, and placed

Catholic schools in England upon a fairer financial footing than the one on which they found themselves in contemporary France, or in the United States, though not so favourable a one as came to be adopted in Scotland or in Holland. But it should be recognised that the Act of 1902 was really a victory won by the Church of England, and that the Catholics could never have obtained such favourable terms as they did if they had been fighting in isolation for the few schools they then possessed. After 1902 the conditions of the educational conflict gradually altered somewhat, on account of the rapid increase in the number of Catholic schools, an increase which eventually brought their numbers about level with those of the Established Church. Since the Catholics insisted upon a degree of independence for their schools which the Church of England did not always require, they came, in some measure, to occupy the front line in this conflict.

The educational conflict was the most important one in a scene of relative peace. The main battle had been won when the hierarchy stood its ground in the face of the storm in the 1850s. Discriminatory legislation passed by Parliament during that crisis was gradually removed from the statute book; in the year 1927 it became legal for Catholic priests to appear in public in their cassocks or vestments, to hold processions, and to ring their church bells; and, thanks to the firm line taken by King George V, the coronation oath was amended in 1911 so as to delete its offensive references to the “superstition and idolatry” of the sacrifice of the Mass and of devotion to Our Lady and the saints. British representation at the Vatican, begun during the First World War, was continued afterwards; the enormous Catholic population of the British Commonwealth (some parts of which—e.g. Malta—are almost wholly Catholic) made this representation eminently desirable and useful.

In Scotland the hierarchy was not re-established until the year 1879, when Leo XIII created the archdiocese of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. The Faith had never been extinguished in the Highlands of Scotland, but the chief factor which contributed to its progress in the second half of the nineteenth century was the Irish immigration into Glasgow. By the Education Act of 1918 a solution was found to the educational problem more favourable to the Catholic schools than hadbeen found in England, for they were placed upon a footing of financial equality with those maintained by the State.

If the English and Scottish scenes were free from serious conflict after the 1850s, the same could certainly not be said of the scene across the Irish Sea.

We have had much occasion, in looking at the Catholic conflicts of the last two centuries, to notice the tremendous contribution of the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, and we shall observe the same phenomenon in more distant parts of the British Commonwealth. From the bloodstained soil of Castelfidardo, where they strove to defend the Papal States against the Piedmontese, to the shanties around Boston or Philadelphia, where they gave the “Know-Nothings” as good as they got from them, the Irish sustained their reputation as mighty fighters in the cause of the Church. Yet what was really more remarkable was that, after two centuries of persecution in their own small island-centuries during which every ingenuity of political and economic pressure was employed against them—they emerged, in the nineteenth century, not only with their faith unimpaired, but with a loyalty to Rome as strong as any to be found in the world. In a worldly sense, that loyalty had brought to Ireland nothing but material disaster; it was therefore the more striking that she showed so keen an appreciation of what it meant in a spiritual sense.

By a series of laws in the nineteenth century, beginning with the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, successive British Governments sought, with some success, to make amends for the past; but the measure which might have brought a lasting solution, namely Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of 1886, suffered shipwreck upon the rock of British conservatism and the alarm of Ulster. It should be recognised that after the disestablishment by the British Government, in 1869, of the Anglican Church of Ireland, the primarily religious causes of conflict between Ireland and England had been removed. True, a settlement which left the historic Irish Catholic churches in Anglican hands, and which required a payment of ten million pounds from the poverty-stricken Catholics in computation of tithe, was not calculated to sweeten the relations between the Catholic inhabitants and the remnants of the Protestant ascendancy. Nevertheless, the great struggle in Irish affairs after 1886 was—superficially at least—political. Gladstone’s 1886

Home Rule Bill had been defeated because neither the people of Ulster nor their British supporters were prepared to see Ulster merged in a union of all Ireland, in which power would pass to a Catholic majority at Dublin. And in 1914, when Asquith actually secured the passage of another Home Rule Bill through the British Parliament, the reaction in Ulster, and the desperate measures to which Lord Carson and others had resort, sufficed to prevent its being put into effect. So the outbreak of the First World War saw the situation unresolved. Catholic Ireland made a very large military contribution to that war, but she resisted the attempt of the British Government to introduce conscription in 1918. From that year until 1921 a savage war between the Irish Sinn Fein party and the British Black and Tans, a war involving horrors which the Irish hierarchy and the Pope did their best to mitigate, resulted finally in a peace, in December 1921, which set up the present Irish Free State (or Eire), enjoying legislative independence from Britain, and Northern Ireland (comprising Ulster, without two Catholic counties), which continued to send members to the Parliament at Westminster.

It cannot be said that this compromise, though it terminated a hideous conflict, and though it was warmly welcomed at the time, both by Pope Benedict XV and by the Irish hierarchy, has satisfied the country as a whole. The Catholics of the North—a very large minority, and in the rural areas often a majority—have felt that (for instance in education and in public employment) they have been severely discriminated against by the Belfast government; Protestants of the North, looking at some of the legislation of the Dublin government (for instance in relation to divorce, and to the censorship of immoral literature and films), have sensed a Catholic attitude which was certainly not their own, and in which they did not wish to share. This is a matter of historical fact. It is no part of the intention of this book to enter into the contemporary merits of a conflict which is very far from having been resolved at the time of writing; we are concerned with Catholic factors in history rather than with Catholic factors in current affairs. But of the struggle to date, it may be said that however strong the economic and political motives may have been upon both sides, however mixed the parties, however dignified and restrained the Church (all of them factors tending to obscure the underlying religious issue), it would be a strange diagnosis of the conflict which would not see its religious aspects as the most important ones.

Famines, particularly in the 1840s, were responsible, as we saw, for much of the Irish emigration to America. At an earlier date a still more distressful exodus had taken place when those Irishmen sentenced by the British Government for complicity in the uprising of 1798 were sent to Botany Bay in New South Wales. Amongst them were three priests, but they were not allowed to say Mass, and at the end of the Napoleonic wars the prison camps in Australia were without any pastors. Despite some heroic attempts on the part of individual priests, for months at a time, to run the gauntlet of governmental action, this position remained substantially unchanged until 1820, when the Colonial Office allowed one priest to be sent to Botany Bay and one to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). But neither of these was allowed to administer either to the convicts or to the orphaned children; it was only in 183o that Father Therry secured the removal of these disabilities, and only after Dr. Ullathorne (a Benedictine of Downside Abbey in England, and future Bishop of Birmingham) had arrived as vicar-general in 1833, that religious freedom and religious equality for Catholics were won. An Australian hierarchy was established in 1842, with another Downside Benedictine, Dr. Polding, as Metropolitan Archbishop of Sydney. In New Zealand a parallel development was taking place, the lead being taken by Irish immigrants and French and Irish priests, and in 1848 the dioceses of Auckland and Wellington were established.

From the point of view of the kind of Catholic conflicts discussed in this book, what is most interesting about the life of the Church in Australia and New Zealand is the way in which her leaders threw themselves with energy into the social question, espousing the cause of labour in the spirit of the encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. At much the same time as Cardinal Manning was befriending the London dockers, Cardinal Moran, at Sydney, was giving his support to labour in the great industrial strike of 1890. The Church came indeed to play a more important part in the labour politics of Australia in the twentieth century than she has played in those of any other country, and her influence in helping to preserve the labour movement from communism has been a paramount one.

Any general survey of the life of the Church in Africa or India would be beyond our purposes here. But it is relevant to notice now that the British Government, which held a dominant position in India, and also in South Africa—until the Union of South Africa acquired dominion status in 1909—maintained, at least from the 1830s onwards, an attitude of impartiality in religious matters. This impartiality, however, might often be hard to distinguish from indifference; nor was it always the case that Catholic missions were so favourably placed as Protestant missions. Ceremonial occasions, with any official flavour, were naturally the province of the clergy and the services of the Established Church, whilst the habit of the Protestant missions of agreeing amongst themselves upon distinct “spheres of influence” meant that the Catholic missionaries, who could not adopt the view that they should be excluded from any territories, were often regarded as uncooperative.

Nevertheless, the British tradition of non-interference was not without advantage to the Church, and many were the British governors and residents who came to admire the Catholic missionary orders, and to help them in so far as it lay in their power to do so. Moreover, the close association of the Church with the State, which characterised particularly the Portuguese but also the French and Belgian colonies, was not always an unmixed blessing to the Catholic missionaries in those territories. In the Far East, in particular, it meant that the nascent native nationalism, already beginning to turn against the ‘Western oppressor,” was liable to make no distinction between the officer of the State and the officer of religion.

But it is when we return again to the European mainland, at the dawn of the twentieth century, that we see most clearly the grave dangers to which too close an association with the State was liable to expose the Church. Nowhere were these dangers more evident than in Spain and Portugal. It would be tedious to recount the constant political disturbances which, in the nineteenth century, plagued both countries. But it is very relevant to notice that the close association between ruler and Church, in both countries, meant that, when the former was thrown out by a revolution, or was compelled to accept a “liberal” government which restricted his powers, the Church too had to suffer, in her religious congregations, in her schools,in her judicial courts, in her property. In Spain it so happened that the turn of the century was, in fact, a relatively quiet time. The very strong anti-clerical influence of the French Third Republic in the time of Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and Clemenceau, which so affected most of Europe, affected Spain at that date comparatively little, save on her northern seaboards—Bilbao on the Atlantic coast and Barcelona on the Mediterranean. King Alfonso XIII, who was crowned in 1902, was a religiously minded man; and, although the Cortes was subject to anti-clerical influences, he prevented any drastic attacks upon the Church; in 1919 he even felt strong enough to carry out the popular ceremony of consecrating the country to the Sacred Heart. But after 1923 he only ruled by sufferance, under the military dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, which had established itself to combat socialist and anarchist influences. When the general fell from power in 1929 the King’s own turn was soon to come (1931); and then the Republicans, with some strong Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist support, carried through anti-clerical policies of the traditional kind, which were not only directed towards establishing the whole programme of the secularist State, as it had been established in France, but were marked by a ruthlessness which was the prime cause of the reaction in many parts of the country in favour of General Franco in 1936, and of the bitterness with which the hideous civil war that followed was fought out. It may be true that the maintenance of Catholic beliefs, Catholic practices, and Catholic moral standards in Spain has owed much to the close association of Church and State; unfortunately this association has also meant that when the government has been overthrown the Church has had to suffer too. Strange as it seems in Anglo-Saxon eyes, the fall of a Spanish monarch or dictator has often meant the burning of convents and the rape of nuns.

In Portugal the crisis came sooner. By the year 1901 the religious orders had already been suppressed by law, though in practice their expulsion or liquidation had not always been carried out. French influence, like British, penetrated Portugal more easily than it penetrated Spain, and we find the very words of Waldeck-Rousseau used in the decrees of the Portuguese Government. By 1914 some of the furthest positions in anti-clerical legislation had been reached; all the religious orders had been proscribed, religious instruction had been banished from the schools, there were divorce laws, there was compulsory military service for priests, there was separation of Church and State, and diplomatic relations with the Vatican had been broken off. That all this should have occurred in a country in which 98 per cent of the population claimed to be Catholic is certainly remarkable. It was after the revolution of 1910, which expelled young King ManuelII and established the Republic, that the execution of the laws against the orders was seriously and severely undertaken; once again we are confronted by the phenomenon of an onslaught upon strictly religious bodies following upon a successful onslaught upon the centre of political power. With the emergence, after the First World War, of the quasi-dictatorial régime of General Carmona, and then of Dr. Salazar, the normal life of the Church in Portugal was restored; but the danger implicit in her association with the government remained.

The situation in France and Italy, during this dark night of the Church, has already been discussed in the last chapter, and her position in Germany in Chapter 18. But we need to remind ourselves of the important effects which occurrences in these major European countries would have upon their neighbours. Belgium, for example, found herself subject to two pressures: first, that exercised by Bismarck at the time of the Kulturkampf, which aimed at restricting the rights of Rome and which we have already noted; second, that of the France of the Third Republic. French influence in Belgium, on account of the common language and many common traditions, has always been strong, and it was not to be expected that the campaign conducted by Ferry, Combes, or Clemenceau would be without effect across the frontier. But in fact the Catholic party, before the First World War, maintained a small though diminishing majority in the Belgian Chamber, and the effect of that war, in which Belgium suffered all the horrors both of fighting and of occupation, was to unite people behind King Albert, and behind the heroic figure of Cardinal Mercier. The liberal and socialist agitation for a complete secularisation of the state schools, and cessation of the subsidy to the free schools, though strengthened by the adoption of universal suffrage after the First World War, made comparatively little headway until recent times and Belgium, in contrast to France, maintained and still maintains that free schools should not be at an undue economic disadvantage in relation to those of the State.

Perhaps the most surprising anti-clerical campaign in Europe at the turn of the century was the Los von Rom (Freedom from Rome) movement in Austria. ‘When it is remembered that, despite the policies of Joseph II in the eighteenth century, the Austrian Empire of the nineteenth century (the empire of Metternich, and of the Hapsburg revival after 1850) was always regarded as the chief mainstay, politically and religiously, of the papacy, it is rather surprising to find her causing such grave anxiety to Rome in the age of Bismarck. The fact was that, following her defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, her loss of the leadership of Germany, her expulsion from Italy, and the disappearance of the Papal States which depended upon her, the Austrian Empire was a changed power. She had become, through Bismarck’s skilful diplomacy, the dependent ally of her conquerors, encouraged to look eastwards and southwards, and to assume new spheres of influence in the Balkans. Always a racially and religiously mixed empire, its Catholic elements had been weakened by the loss of Italy and by separation from South Germany, and it was now subjected to the pitiless pressure of the pan-Germanism of Prussia. The Los von Rom movement was organised partly by the “Old Catholics” (who refused to accept the decrees of the Vatican Council) and partly by Lutheran and other Protestant pastors, strongly backed by German evangelical societies. But the vital spirit of it was pan-Germanic, and the tragedy of it was that it represented the perversion of an older, universal, outlook at Vienna—imperialist and cosmopolitan in politics, and Catholic in religion—to narrower nationalist and racial notions. We should not overrate its success. Those who were estranged from Rome were to be numbered in tens of thousands only. But it strengthened the hands of the government which, though Catholic, jealously preserved the traditions of “Josephism.” On the grounds that the Vatican Council had changed the constitution of the Church, the Emperor Francis Joseph denounced the Austrian concordat with Rome, and the succeeding decades saw marriage laws and education laws which introduced divorce and secularised the state schools. But these were the last days of that great empire which was heir to the Holy Roman Empire, and of that remarkable dynasty which had ruled at Vienna since the fourteenth century. By the Treaty of Versailles the great imperial city became the over-large capital of a tiny state of seven million inhabitants, and the victim of famine, while her historic provinces became small nation states which mostly fell in due course to the Communists.

        And what of the First World War itself?

It lies, of course, outside our scope to discuss it save in some of its consequences for the Church. Rome was mostly a helpless spectator while Catholics, in a struggle she had striven to avert, destroyed each other. Even good Catholics, even the best of them, were often victims of the age, taught for too long by their governments and by the spirit of the times that the interests of State or of race were paramount, that religion was a “private affair.” But at least enough has been said here already about what was happening at the turn of the century in Germany, in Austria, in France—everywhere to give the lie to the pretence that “Catholic governments” or “Catholic peoples” armed themselves and flew at each others’ throats. Responsibility for the First World War has been variously laid at the doors of the German, Austrian, Russian, French, and British governments; but just how far any of those governments could be called Catholic we have had occasion to observe.

The evils of conscription, that appalling modern legacy from Napoleon, had been denounced not merely by Leo XIII but by Pius IX before him. Leo, indeed, had emerged as an arbitrator in international disputes, being entrusted by Bismarck with the settlement of his dispute with Spain over the Caroline Islands in 1885; and, had the Italian Government not succeeded in preventing it, he would have been a participant in the Hague conference of 1899, which set up the Hague Tribunal, intended to settle international disputes. But the peculiarly anti-clerical atmosphere of the turn of the century was unfavourable to papal intervention, the deadly drift towards larger armaments and longer periods of conscription continued unchecked, and in August 1914 the First World War broke out. It is commonly considered that its outbreak killed Pius X, who issued his great appeal for peace on August z and on August zo was dead. His successor Benedict XV (1914—22) devoted himself throughout the war years to the relief of distress, and to trying to persuade the belligerents to state their aims so that these might be reconciled. But, although he was careful to maintain a strict impartiality, both sides accused him of favouring the other, and no government paid serious attention to his initiative of August 1917 whenhe proposed, as a basis for agreement, that Germany should evacuate France and Belgium, that the Allies should restore the German colonies, and that the remaining territorial questions should be settled by arbitration. The war at that date seemed to have reached a stalemate. Had the Pope’s proposals for peace been accepted, several million lives would have been saved, and it is hard to see what country would have been the loser; the United States would have been spared entry into the war, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia would probably have been averted.

At the end of the war the festering sore of the continued conflict between Church and State in Italy once more exerted its influence when the Italian Government prevented the participation of the papacy in the peace conference at Versailles. The League of Nations thus came to be formed without including representation of that government whose policies had been most consistently directed towards peace, or that ruler whose sacred office made him the most natural arbitrator and peacemaker. The treaty settlement itself, so largely the work of Clemenceau, was vindictive in character, and thus carried within itself the seed of its own destruction. In no respect was the peace settlement more seriously lacking in true statesmanship than in its treatment of Austria, a country reduced, as we have already seen, to a head (Vienna) without a body, rendered economically unviable, and soon ridden with famine.

Benedict stigmatised the position to which Austria was reduced as “absolutely intolerable.” He gave his blessing to the League of Nations—although it established itself without him, and at Geneva, the “Calvinist Rome”—and he continued to insist, as had his predecessors, that armaments and compulsory military service were the root of the evil, and just before he died he sent his blessing to the Washington disarmament conference of 1922.

As one surveys the period of the First World War and its aftermath one has the impression that even less than in the days of Napoleon did the governments of Europe pay any serious attention to Rome, that Benedict was even less likely to achieve anything to influence Clemenceau, or Lloyd George, or President Wilson, than Pius VII had been to influence Napoleon or Metternich. Napoleon had tried to bend the Church to his service, but at least he had recognised its power.

        And at the Congress of Vienna, unlike the Conference of Versailles, a papal delegate had not only been present but had been offered the presidency.

In truth, the decades which preceded the First World War had been dark, as we have seen, for the Church, on most of the continent of Europe, and elsewhere too. The immense pressure of the new nationalism and the allure of a new socialism had turned men’s eyes towards the State, whether to ask her for arms or for education. In a new sense the nation became the “norm,” and the essentially secular ideal of being a good American, Englishman, Frenchman, German, or Italian, tended to supplant the Church’s ideal of spirituality. And when the war broke out the passion for victory, or the passion for survival, obscured everything else; God was invoked, but He was the God of each warring nation.

But this was not the whole story, for in the flames of the war there was also being consumed much of the bitterness that had flavoured the feelings of Frenchmen, Italians, and the rest, when they contemplated the Church. They saw her now in the guise of priests by their side in the trenches, crawling through no man’s land to give absolution to the dying, of nuns nursing in the hospitals, and of a faith in the eyes of men which helped them to face death. They saw, too, much more clearly, how the Mass and the sacraments were prized by their Catholic comrades; moreover the doubts which had been raised about the patriotism and loyalty of Catholics, with their “double allegiance,” were silenced.

So, despite the disappointments of Benedict, the First World War did in fact mark the beginning of an extension of Catholic life in much of the West. The type of anti-clericalism which had disfigured the previous generation was very generally assuaged, and the new atmosphere made possible, for instance, the healing of the breach between Italy and the Vatican, achieved by Benedict’s successor Pius XI, the renewal of French and Portuguese representation at the Holy See, the establishment of British representation there, the return of the Jesuits to Germany, and the restoration of religious orders generally to France.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Americas in the Twentieth Century

It is something of a relief to turn once more from the bitter religious conflicts of Europe to the relatively freer air of North America. What was happening in the Germany of the Kulturkampf, in the Italy of Depretis, and in the France of M. Combes, amounted to no less than religious persecution. By the end of the century there was nothing of this sort left in North America.

In the New World, at the dawn of the new century, the fortunes of the Church were most hopeful in Canada, most doubtful in the United States, most disturbing in Central America.

In Canada, though language, history, and geography combined to keep the Catholics, mostly of French descent, apart from the Protestants, of British descent, yet the opening up of the West, and the penetration of the North, and the immigration of Irish Catholics were all helping to blur the sharp distinction. The North America Act of 1867, which conferred dominion status upon Canada, was political recognition of the fact that she was now one nation. The building of the Canadian Pacific railway, and the fur and whaling settlements on Hudson Bay, were pioneering adventures undertaken by Canadians of all faiths in common, the Irish or French Catholic alongside his Presbyterian or agnostic brother. And if state or city politics—Catholic at Quebec, anti-Catholic at Toronto—favoured the Church or put obstacles in her way, the growing economic development and expansion of the country, in which all alike were interested, militated against discriminatory religious policies, whether on the part of the federal government or in the new settlements. Furthermore, in a country whose population was increasing rapidly the Catholic element was increasing more than proportionately. Forty per cent of the population in 1911, Catholics were 43.8 per cent by 1941. In the decade preceding 1941 the total Canadian population rose by 10.5 per cent, but the Catholic population rose by 16 per cent. As the Catholics approached a numerical position from which it seemed likely they would become the absolute majority of the population, their status became safeguarded against all except isolated social and cultural groups, which preferred to maintain an ancient exclusiveness. After the Second World War the country was led for the first time by a Catholic Prime Minister of French-Canadian descent, Mr. St. Laurent; it is hardly necessary to add that the great federation which is Canada today is a country too deeply rooted, like the United States, in the concept of religious toleration, and of the separation of Church and State, for any group to feel fearful that a Catholic federal government might one day interfere with its liberties.

In the United States the progress of the Church after the turn of the century, though marked, was less certain than in Canada. Some superficial similarity may be seen between her position and prospects in the United States and in England. Just as in England, in the days of Cardinal Manning, there were many who confidently predicted that there would be a rapid increase in the number of conversions, that the logic of the Catholic position and the zeal of her protagonists would carry all before them, because the opposition was so divided, and often so unsure of itself, so in the United States the wide acceptance accorded to Gibbons or John Ireland, who were friends of Presidents, national and even international figures, led to a premature confidence that the strongholds of the opposition were crumbling. But in fact no landslide in the twentieth century occurred to carry with it the mass conversion of either the English or the Americans. In the higher ranks of American society, whether political, cultural, or financial, conversions were not very numerous, and opposition was tenacious.

Numerically speaking, certainly, the Church had made good progress in the United States. By 1990 there were twenty-five millions of Catholics, which was more than seven times as many as there had been in 1860; during the corresponding period the total population of the country had increased less than five times. Catholics had become at least one sixth of the total population, and incomparably larger than any other religious body in the country—almost as large as the rest of the actively churchgoing population as a whole. A number of factors had contributed to this growth: the continued immigration of the Irish, the very large Italian immigration in the decades leading up to the First World War (immigration into the United States was severely curtailed after that war), and the tendency of Catholics to have more children than non-Catholics. Conversions, though important, were not a major factor; moreover the lapsing of Catholics was inevitably not inconsiderable where mixed marriages were frequent and where education in non-Catholic schools was the lot of at least half the Catholic children. There was also the natural “pull” of his new homeland upon the immigrant, anxious to become as soon as possible a “good” and “accepted” American, and discovering that the average American was not Catholic. This factor should not be overstated; the loyalty of the German, Irish, and Italian immigrant to Rome was usually very marked, and was sometimes strengthened by his initial sense of isolation, when the priest might well be his only friend. All the same, as a newcomer seeking acceptance and recognition, the immigrant was hardly in a position to be a proselyte for the Faith.

If the size and the devotion of the American Catholic body had become impressive by the middle of the twentieth century, there were yet some grounds for disappointment concerning the impact of the Church upon the country as a whole. In some states—for instance Massachusetts—there might be a majority of Catholics, and they might exercise an important influence upon political, cultural, and social affairs. In others—for instance the Carolinas—there might be a very small minority, with almost no influence at all. In national affairs, whether in federal politics, in big business, or in education and the arts, it could not be said that their impact upon the life of the country had become what the optimists at the turn of the century had hoped or expected. The American Protective Association, that successor of the “Know-Nothings,” was no doubt only partially successful in its anti-Catholic objectives; it might succeed in keeping out a Catholic candidate here, in protecting an incendiary mob leader there; but the times of open violence or the cruder kinds of conspiracy were over. Opposition now took the form of a tighter-lipped chilliness. Gone were the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who was prepared to hobnob with Catholic archbishops; Woodrow Wilson was frigid, and scarcely even correct; neither Coolidge nor Hoover would run any risks. There was a traditional tendency for the Catholics to vote Democratic, supporting the party of the underdog; in New York and Boston there was a succession of Catholic and Democratic mayors. But when Al Smith, the popular Catholic governor of New York State, became the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1928, the Republican campaign against him pulled out all the stops of anti-Catholic hostility, assuring the electorate that a vote for Al Smith meant “a private telephone wire from the White House to the Vatican,” and that American freedom was at stake. Undoubtedly religion was a powerful factor in Al Smith’s defeat.

After the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 Catholic contacts at presidential level with political power became closer. There was much in the President’s New Deal which was in harmony with the teaching of the social encyclicals, while his growing determination to break down American isolationism led him to make some effort—resisted by Congress —to provide for diplomatic representation of the United States at the Vatican. Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War the President circumvented the congressional opposition by sending Mr. Myron Taylor to the Vatican State as his personal representative with ambassadorial rank.

Various explanations have been offered for the relative failure of the American Church to obtain quite the influence which her growing numbers and religious zeal seemed to war-rant. It has been said that her leaders were not of the calibre of Cardinal Gibbons or of Archbishop Ireland. It has been pointed out that there was complete decentralisation, no superior authority attaching to the premier see at Baltimore, each bishop remaining the supreme authority in his own diocese. We have been reminded how large a proportion of the Catholic population belonged to the poorest classes of the community, because they were the most recently arrived, and how great was the financial effort involved for Catholics in providing schools and colleges, with no help from the State, whilst contributing their share of the cost of the state schools.

It is not difficult to find reasons of this kind for a certain deficiency in worldly success on the part of American Catholics during this period. But worldly success is not the criterion of inner excellence, and the immense work of the American Church in providing religious education for her children, and social relief of all kinds for her unfortunates and sick, rightly ranks higher and has, indeed, met with something of the general recognition it deserves. And, if the numerous colleges and the great universities which the different orders have established have been distinguished more for their sound general education than for the higher flights of scholarship, it has first to be remembered that, as in other countries, the greatest scholarly achievements of individual Catholics have often been attained in non-Catholic colleges, whose faculties have shown an increasing infiltration of members of the Church, and secondly that the highest flights of scholarship and technical skill are only reached after a good general level of education has become established, whereas many of the Catholic colleges, even in 1930, were still young.

Though her progress had scarcely been alarming, opposition to the Catholic Church in most states of the Union continued to be marked, if intermittent, and some discerned something of a revival in this opposition after the Second World War. The principal line of attack was that the Church was “divisist,” that it tended to divide the loyalties of Americans, and so to weaken their patriotism. It was not difficult for Catholic apologists to point out, as Manning had pointed out to Gladstone, Windthorst to Bismarck, or indeed Pius VII to Napoleon, that there was no antithesis between loyalty to the Church and loyalty to the State. The Catholic record in both world wars had proved as much; true religion and true patriotism, so far from being antithetical, nourish each other; moreover no theistic religion could possibly accept the view that all morality or all higher truth derives solely from the community or from the State, though this was the real belief of those who claimed that the one thing needful was to be a “good American.”

Besides the fear of divisism there was the fear (as real in some quarters as the fears felt of old by the “Know-Nothings”) that the Church constituted a secret society with a despotic head who wielded immense power behind the scenes, and who might one day overthrow the Constitution of the United States. It was very difficult to convince those outside the fold that, so far from having a secret directorate, the Church in America lacked even the elements of a centralised authority, or that, did they but know the truth, her opponents would be far more scandalised at the want of agreement between the bishops themselves on fundamental matters affecting the welfare of the Church than they would be afraid of her united action. In reality, though it has involved some outward weakness, this diversity has constituted one of the most promising features of the Church in America. A body which embraced such divergent but vital elements as the silent Trappists, whose religious purpose caught the popular imagination in the books of Thomas Merton, the Jesuits (chief labourers in the vineyard of higher education), Dominicans, Franciscans, Benedictines, and Redemptorists; numerous orders of nuns; the charitable zeal of the Catholic Worker movement; or the practical endeavours of the Knights of Columbus—such a body drew its strength from the fact that it was truly a federation, a harmony of unlikes, united indeed on the supernatural plane by the wonder of the Faith, but only loosely linked on the earthly plane by the National Catholic Welfare Conference. And if the Church in America found herself at one time being condemned for being bolshevist (e.g. when the bishops’ programme, after the First World War, gave support to the labour unions) and at another for being reactionary or fascist (e.g. when some Catholics supported the late Senator McCarthy’s investigating committee) that was only as it should be in a body entirely free from political direction. And just as there had been no central religious or political direction, so there has been no central fund. The surprised householder in the residential quarters of the great cities, who has seen one spacious but outdated mansion after another falling into the hands of some religious community, has been tempted to suppose that a powerful financial corporation has been “buying up the district”; it has been hard for him to realise what self-denial and desperate shifts lie behind the new local venture.

Perhaps more central planning, more coordination, would have helped; but it could also be that the lessons to be learnt by the Church from the first half of the twentieth century in America are still the humble ones of patience and perseverance, which have necessarily played so large a part in her history in the past.

SOUTH AMERICA and MEXICO

When we step across the southern borders of the United States and enter Latin America we are back again in a world of Established Churches, and so of strong governmental interest in the Church, an interest which has all too often become governmental persecution of the Church.

The twentieth century has been a time of acute anxiety concerning the Church in Latin America, but the seeds of the trouble had been sown in the previous century and earlier. We have seen already how closely identified were Church and State in the Latin-American republics and dictatorships, and how this was a legacy deriving from Spanish colonial days—it can indeed be traced as far back as fifteenth-century Spain,when Ferdinand and Isabella acquired royal control over the Spanish Inquisition, and when the Spanish Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, allowed to the Spanish Crown virtual independence in Church affairs in the Spanish colonies. We have also seen how, after independence from Spain or from Portugal had been won by the year 182,4, the Church suffered from the reluctance of Rome to regard the Spanish Bourbon power as extinguished (causing her to support bishops appointed by that Crown), and then from the constant revolutions, many of them anti-clerical in character, which undermined law and order, deprived the Church of her property, banished the religious orders, and introduced the secularist legislation which was characteristic of contemporary European liberal revolutions. During the whole of this century the general tendency in Latin America was for there to be few vocations for the priesthood, and for the general standard both of the zeal and of the education of priests to be low. Very closely associated with the civilisation of Spain and of Portugal, both, of which countries had for long been in decline, and inheriting from the past too strong an identification with the traditional sources of power and wealth, the priests were too often ill fitted to understand, to civilise, or to lead the insurgent native populations released by the frequent revolutions, while difficulties of language and of race prevented missionary orders from other countries from entering Central or South America in any numbers.

But, while the health and vision of the Church in much of Latin America have often been in doubt amongst Catholic critics in recent decades, to outward appearance, at least, her hold upon the populations appeared to have been well maintained. Brazil, the most populous of the South American states, after becoming a republic in 1889, caused some anxiety when she separated Church from State and secularised education; but the new governments did not proceed to persecute the religious orders as such, and the country has enjoyed, in the twentieth century, cordial relations with Rome, and freedom for private Catholic schools to continue their work unhampered. Neither Peru nor Chile has been the scene of any sustained anti-clerical offensive, though both have had their disturbances. In 1920 President Leguia of Peru felt sure enough of popular support to go through the ceremony of consecrating his country to the Sacred Heart, thereby following the precedent set by Garcia Moreno, the saintly dictator of Ecuador, whose constructive régime had been terminated by his assassination at the hands of the anti-clericals in 1875.

It is not easy to find in South American history any correlation between anti-clericalism and “democracy” or “liberalism,” for governments have been very generally both anti-clerical and dictatorial. The pattern has been rather one of instability, dictator succeeding to dictator, generally after a revolution, and with many of the dictators only too ready to launch an attack upon the Church, either as the “evil genius” of their predecessors or as the scapegoat for their own deficiencies. The Church has, indeed, often found herself upon the “democratic” side, being anxious to curb the dictator’s “fascist” supporters, who have wanted to concentrate all power, educational, cultural, philanthropic, social, as well as administrative, in the hands of their political “boss.” In recent times in the Argentine the quarrel between the dictator, General Juan Perlin, and the Church, which began in October 1954 with an attack by Perlin of the traditional kind concentrated upon education, feast days, marriage laws, and the like, led on to the wholesale arrest of priests; and the Church, though by no means the instigator of the revolt which expelled him, was not unnaturally sympathetic towards the aims of the anti-dictatorial movement which did so.

But in one Latin-American state, Mexico, a campaign against the Church of very different scope and intent developed just before the outbreak of the First World War and persisted for more than twenty years; indeed it would be rash to suppose that, despite some improvement, the situation there has yet been resolved. It was directly inspired by the extreme anti-clericals of the French Third Republic, and its violent syndicalist elements were a part of something wider. The venom with which it was pursued is unique in the modern history of persecution in the New World and can only be compared with what has taken place in countries behind the Iron Curtain in Europe since the Second World War. It was a real “war to the death,” which reduced the priesthood to a handful of less than two hundred hunted men, under sentence of death for the crime of being priests, whose pitiful position has been most vividly portrayed in Mr. Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory. Essentially it was an ideological or religious war, inspired by the syndicalist-communist C.R.O.M. (Confederaciôn Regional Obrera Mexicana),which was the effective power behind the successive governments of the Presidents Carranza, Obregon, and Calles, although only the last named, who was President from 1924 to 1928 and exercised effective political power until 1934, was fully in sympathy with the more brutal side of its work.

The philosophy behind it was not merely materialist, in the Marxian sense, it also embraced a worship of violence for its own sake, of the kind that was taught by the father of European syndicalism, Georges Sorel —who inspired the young Mussolini.

It might be supposed that so violent an assault must have been provoked by the wealth or privileges of the Church in Mexico. But this was not the case. It had been the achievement of the earlier Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez (the leader who defeated Napoleon III’s attempt to make Maximilian of Austria Emperor of Mexico) to nationalise the whole of the Church’s property in the country, save only the ecclesiastical buildings themselves, and to close the monasteries in 1859; nor had the long presidency of his pupil Diaz (1876—1911) been a period when the Church had been enabled to recover anything of her position in the national life.

The men who rose in revolt against the Calles persecution, in 1927, and were called the Cristeros, were simple peasants, fighting in a desperate endeavour to save the Faith, for the new persecution had seized the Church buildings themselves and proscribed the priests. They had much in common with the peasants of the Vendée, who had fought during the French Revolution in the same cause; but whereas the men of the Vendée had, in the end, succeeded, the Cristeros went down to a very bloody defeat. The temper of the Calles régime was the temper of Fouché or Hébert, an ideological determination to extinguish the Catholic Faith as such. But to do it justice one should recognize that, although a merely gangster element played a large part in the destruction and murder, the government was motivated rather by the missionary purpose of implanting its own religion of materialism.

Mexico did not occupy a sufficiently important position upon the world political stage for events there to have extensive international repercussions. Rut since the quasi-Communist government of 1938 seized and nationalised the foreign-owned oil fields, the United States Government began to become concerned, and the British Government broke off diplomatic relations. The religious side of the story remained however generally ignored, and indeed very little realised. In the view of Pius XI the ignoring by the world of this Mexican persecution was due to

Such were his words in Divini Redemptoris, his lengthy encyclical on communism, issued in March 1937. In the same month he issued Firmissimam Constantiam, giving detailed advice to the Church in Mexico, as to how, through the charitable and apostolic endeavours of Catholic Action, the country might be recovered for Christ, and reminding her that, since it was no longer possible for her priests to be trained in Mexico, the Latin-American college at Rome was available for those who could reach it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Mussolini, Hitler, and Pius XI (1922—1939)

In each of the countries which participated in the First World War, the peace saw a tendency towards reconciliation with the Church. We have seen why this was so: the fellowship of the trenches, and respect for the way the Catholics practiced their faith; a religion which included pain and death within its central mystery could no longer be so easily ignored.

In no country were these influences stronger than in Italy, for no armies suffered greater hardships than did the Italian armies, ill clad as they were for the ice and snow of the Alps or for the festering heat of the plain of Lombardy, inadequately supplied with arms, and called upon to contend with the better-equipped Austrian and German armies possessed of a stronger military tradition. Innately Catholic, in spite of all that had happened since the days of Pio Nono, much of the young manhood of Italy now became outwardly as well as inwardly reconciled to the Church. Such men added greatly to the strength of the Christian Democrats and of Catholic Action. Some of them were now organised by that remarkable Sicilian priest, Don Luigi Sturzo, into a political party, the Popolare, a move made possible by the lifting of the papal ban upon Catholic participation in Italian politics. How strong was Catholic public opinion in Italy may be judged from the fact that, only founded in January 1919, the Popolare, in 1922, with 107 members, was only second in strength to the Socialists in the Italian Chamber. Their programme was partly religious and partly political. They wanted to see freedom for religious orders and for the schools, and a full return of Catholics into political life on every front; they also wanted decentralisation of the administrative system, with effective power for the different provinces of Italy, and proportional representation in the central Parliament.

But above all they were pacifists, their movement was a protest against the violence of all the different groups, from the extreme right to the extreme left, which were seeking to solve Italy’s postwar problems by violent action of one kind or another. For the postwar years were a time of bitter discontent in Italy. To the fearful suffering of the war itself had been added the disillusionment of a peace that gave the country much less than she felt she was entitled to; there was mass unemployment; and the parliamentary régime, to which the country was indifferent, showed no sign of possessing the power to meet the situation. Apart from the Popolare, only the violent elements were possessed of any effective backing in the country; on the one hand the Syndicalists and Communists, with some of the more extreme Socialists; on the other, and opposed to them, the National-Syndicalists, organised by Edmondo Rossoni, and the Nationalists, or “Irredentists,” whose pride was D’Annunzio—D’Annunzio, whose “mystique of blood” we have already met and who, after the war, became the hero of the hour because with his “legionaries,” in Garibaldian fashion, he seized for Italy the port of Fiume denied to her by the diplomats at Versailles.

Whoever will look beneath the surface of the confused events of the postwar period in Italy will see not a straight fight between Communists (representing the workers) and Fascists (organised by the employers), which is an oversimplified picture drawn for purposes of propaganda; he will see rather a situation in which violent groups were striving for control, some of them looking to a nationalist or patriotic solution of the country’s problems (as D’Annunzio did, or Rossoni’s National-Syndicalists), others looking to an Anarchist or Communist solution, being opposed in principle to the Italian State as such. These latter, who should properly at this date still be called Syndicalists (though they were generally coming to be called Communists) belonged to the left wing of the Socialist party and were associated with the violent seizure of the factories in October 1920, the event which most impressed itself upon the Italian imagination.

Mussolini, son of a Socialist blacksmith, and embracing the violent syndicalism taught by Sorel, came to adopt, like Rossoni, a nationalist or patriotic solution to Italy’s problems. But in 1920 he was still only the leader of a very small group of Fasci di combattimento. When, in January 1922, he allied himself with Rossoni’s group, he greatly strengthened his movement and gave it effective working-class support. Moreover, by that year some of the other claimants to power had been weakened. The Communist seizure of the factories had alarmed the country and had failed in its purpose. D’Annunzio had been driven out of Fiume by the Italian Government (which had secured legal international recognition of Italy’s right to the port) and had lost some “caste” to Mussolini,who was becoming increasingly the favourite of the Nationalists and the Irredentists.

By October 1922 there were three effective groups in the country, Mussolini’s Fascists, the Communists who looked to Moscow, and Don Sturzo’s Popolare. All three were represented in Parliament, as were other parties. But a time had been reached when Italians were not looking to parliamentary political parties, as such, but to groups which had strong local support in the country. Disillusionment with the parliamentary parties, with the administration, and with the police, was so universal that it has been said, with some show of reason, that the issue in 1922 was not whether the parliamentary régime could withstand the outside groups, but which of the outside groups would fill the evident vacancy.

This is an exaggeration. What however can be said with confidence is that, when Mussolini’s black shirts appeared outside Rome in October 1922 the King would not have been interpreting the popular will if he had used government troops to disperse them. The Fascists enjoyed the credit of having defeated the Communist offensive over the seizure of the factories, they enjoyed the credit of having lowered the red flags from public buildings all over Italy, of having reversed a situation in which the veterans of the World War were made to feel ashamed of having fought for Italy. The government of the premier, Facta, enjoyed no credit at all. If the troops had been turned against the Fascists it would have been the signal for civil war, and the most likely result would have been a Communist victory.

Don Sturzo, leader of the Popolare, later blamed himself for negotiating with the other political parties during the critical year 1922 and not boldly himself taking office. But it must remain doubtful whether it was really possible for him to do so. In southern Italy, certainly, the Popolare was supreme. But a party which was avowedly pacifist, which “turned the other cheek” when its buildings and property were attacked by the Communists or the Fascists, could hardly have taken over the government of the country at this juncture, when not only the Communists and the Fascists, but the still strong anti-clerical Liberals and Socialists, of different shades, were all opposed to it. Moreover the Popolare only enjoyed the qualified approval of the hierarchy and of the papacy. We have seen how anxious Leo XIII and Pius X had both been to ensure that Christian Democracy was properly under Episcopal control. We have seen how one of its leaders, Murri, had become an advanced Modernist. Sturzo had avoided that heresy; but he and his movement were widely regarded as “demagogic,” and even as a “white bolshevism,” to be compared with the “red bolshevism” of the Communists. These doubts on the part of the hierarchy may indeed have served to help the Popolare in the country, by placing it in the position of the German Centre party and demonstrating that it was free from “priestly control,” that it was a non-clerical Catholic party. But they did not help to put Don Sturzo into power, because for that the support of the King (who regarded him as a dangerous radical) and in some measure of the hierarchy also would have been needed.

Rightly or wrongly—and we must allow at least that the decision was understandable—the King decided that the choice really lay between Mussolini and the Communists, and he chose the former. It was not a choice which could be palatable to the new Pope Pius XI, since Mussolini was an avowed atheist and boasted of it; moreover his Fascists, when not fighting the Communists, were often enough to be found attacking the houses of the Christian Democrats or breaking up the meetings of the Popolare. Yet the Pope, like Victor Emmanuel III, was confronted with a choice of evils, and no greater evil than a Communist victory could present itself. Mussolini was preferred as the lesser danger. When, in the following year (1923), having got the Communists under control, the Fascists turned their attention more seriously to crushing the Popolare, a dangerous situation arose in which an all-out Fascist assault upon the Church was threatened. To avert this danger Don Sturzo resigned the leadership of the party and the challenge of the Popolare was over. Christian Democracy, as a political force, gradually disappeared from the scene until after the Second World War.

In the sense described, but only in that sense, it may be said that Rome connived at the Fascist victory. It is hard to see what alternative she had, but easy to see how she suffered at the hands of the new dictator. Mussolini was not, as Napoleon had been, a Catholic by early upbringing. The piety of his mother had been overborne by the scorn of his Socialist father. But like Napoleon he was a realist; finding himself ruling over a country still predominantly Catholic, he would try to reach an accommodation with the Church.

What made that accommodation well-nigh impossible was a clear conflict of ideology, which involved a clear conflict over education. Mussolini’s régime, like Napoleon’s, depended upon his securing control over the minds and spirits of Italians and winning from them a devotion which can only rightly be called religious. Fascism, however pagan, was certainly religious in character, because it demanded devotion, self-sacrifice, and complete self-surrender to the nation, the party, and the Duce. Mussolini himself defined it, in the Italian Encyclopaedia, as a “conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State ..

How were Italian boys, very many of whom had been notably indifferent about the new State, to be made to feel in this way towards it? By “moral teaching” in the state schools; by “doctored” Italian history; by entry, at the age of six, into the Figli della lupa (children of the wolf, the wolf which suckled Romulus and Remus); by proceeding to the Balilla, the Avanguardia, and, at the age of eighteen, to the Giovani Fascisti; by becoming at twenty-one, if they were found worthy, full-fledged members of the Fascist party proper.

Against this scheme of indoctrination Pius XI waged a ceaseless warfare. The foundation of it, the notion that, in comparison with the State, all individuals or groups had only a relative significance, he castigated as a monstrous inversion, a denial of the primary rights of the individual, the family, the Church, all of which came before the State, whose business it was to, protect them. As against the state monopoly of education, which allowed only a brief period of religious instruction to the Church, he claimed her right to run schools. As against the para-military youth clubs of Fascism he defended the cause of the Catholic clubs; especially dear to him were the Catholic boy scouts, whom he was compelled to dissolve in 1927. Even more important to the Church was Catholic Action, a world-wide movement launched by Pius XI and intended to enlist Catholic laymen effectively in societies for their mutual spiritual benefit, and that they might the better influence public life in a Catholic direction. Mussolini compelled the Pope in 1931 severely to curtail the scope of Catholic Action’s activities in Italy, excluding it from politics and from the corporations and syndicates which had replaced the trade unions. We have seen in Chapter 17 how the economic structure of the Fascist Corporate State was criticised by the Pope for tending to “substitute itself in the place of private initiative instead of limiting itself to necessary and sufficient assistance.” This was in Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anna, of 1931, which reiterated, in the face of the Fascists, the principles of Rerum Novarum. But much more striking was his encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno, of the following month (June 1931), which he had to smuggle out of Rome and publish in France. In it he denounced the “brutalities and beatings, blows and bloodshed,” the monopoly of youth “from tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a régime based on an ideology which clearly amounts to a real pagan worship of the State-Statolatry—which is no less in conflict with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction with the supernatural rights of the Church.” In this encyclical Pius XI specifically declared that the oath of blind obedience required by the régime from the members of its youth organisations was “unlawful.”

In the face of so violent an antagonism the measure of support which Mussolini certainly did, from time to time, receive from Pius XI may seem surprising. The two rulers shared, however, certain common objectives and certain common qualities. First and most important was the antagonism they felt towards communism, and their determination that it should not capture Italy. The victory of Lenin in Russia, and after him of Stalin, had given an edge to the teachings of Marx and Bakunin, which the Russian dictators amplified and expounded in new treatises which only underlined the materialist basis of the Communist philosophy of life, and the “necessity of atheism,” while the whole Western world was being shocked by the Russian anti-God campaign, with its ridicule of crucifixes and other holy symbols. When Pius XI and Mussolini both came to power in 1922 it was only a matter of months since not only Italy but Austria, Hungary, and even Germany had seemed likely to fall to communism; it was only natural that the Pope should have some sympathy, at first, for a régime which seemed likely to save Italy from such a fate.

The Pope and the dictator also shared a certain quality of political realism, which made it possible for them to do business together. Pius knew that the sixty years’ quarrel with the Italian State was a grave source of weakness to the Church in Italy; Mussolini knew that the same quarrel was a grave source of weakness to the State. Whereas previous Popes had been impressed by the brutality of the new State’s anti-clerical policies, and had supposed that its extreme political instability meant that it was unlikely to survive, the outcome of the First World War had shown that the Italian State was a reality, however weak, and, from the Church’s point of view, a reality preferable to either the anarchy or the communism which seemed to be the only alternatives in the peninsula. It was time to end an anomalous state of things and, after two years of secret and hard bargaining between Cardinal Gasparri (Pius’ Secretary of State) and Mussolini’s government, the Lateran Treaty of February 1929 created an independent and sovereign Vatican State and endowed it with some two billion lire—a smaller sum than the accumulated annual payments due to the papacy under the old Law of Guarantees of 1871 (and untouched by the Pope) but useful to meet the expenses of refitting the Vatican and building new administrative offices. To the Pope the important point was that he should be independent and sovereign; it did not matter how small his state was—indeed the smaller the better.

To the treaty was closely tied a concordat with Italy to govern the status of the Church in the country. Catholicism became once more the official religion to be taught in the schools. Catholic marriage became once more legal and sufficient; it was no longer necessary for there to be a civil ceremony as well. The status of the religious orders was safeguarded. Catholic processions were now protected, and the proselytising activities of Protestant bodies (but not of course their freedom of worship) were restricted. Nevertheless, as we have already seen, deep-seated causes of conflict remained, centering around Catholic Action and the Catholic schools. The Pope was not prepared to regard the doctrinal instruction given in the state schools as the limit of the Church’s legitimate educational activities. Mussolini was not prepared to allow Catholic Action (protected by the Concordat) to have any political scope. And he required the liquidation of the Catholic boy scouts and girl guides in favour of his own militaristic organisations.

All the same, the treaty and Concordat were sensible measures which recognised the fact that Italy was Catholic, and if the spectacle, so widely published in the press, of the Duce kneeling in front of the Apostle’s statue in St. Peter’s was rightly received with more reserve than Napoleon’s coronation in Notre Dame had enjoyed, it yet served a similar purpose.

Until his death in 1939 Pius XI continued to find Mussolini and his régime a dangerous ally, and one he was constantly driven to criticise and even to denounce; he is reported on one occasion to have likened dealing with Mussolini to dealing with the devil. Yet an ally on the whole he remained, because on the whole Mussolini’s enemies were also the enemies of the Church. Such, for instance, were the Freemasons, who had been for a century and more the most implacable enemies of the Church in Italy, and who now found the activities of their lodges, their banks, and their press curtailed by the Fascist régime. Such, across the Mediterranean, were the claims of the Coptic Church in Northeast Africa, which Mussolini indirectly helped to expose to Catholic influences, as a result of his encouragement of emigration, and of his conquest of Ethiopia in 1935.

But it was in Spain that the interests of the Church and of the Italian State most nearly coincided.

We have seen already in Chapter 20 the pass to which matters had come for the Church in Spain by the year 1936. It was not so much a matter of anti-clerical legislation of the customary kind, intended to secularise the life of the country —though the Republic had gone further in this direction than any previous Spanish régime. It was rather the violence of Anarchist and Communist mobs, especially in Catalonia, which led to the burning of churches on a scale not previously seen save in Mexico. The winning of power by a left-wing government with Anarchist elements in 1936 aggravated the situation, because the power of the State no longer stood in defence of the Church. When the civil war started, in July 1936, it was inevitable that the Church, in self-defence, should side with the Nationalist movement in support of General Franco. In their collective letter of the following July the Spanish bishops explained to their brethren throughout the world why the Church “in spite of its spirit of peace, and in spite of not having wanted the war nor having collaborated in it, could not be indifferent to the struggle.” As the struggle went on, the extremists on both sides necessarily grew stronger, and outrages were not confined to either. Neutrality, for Spaniards, became an impossibility. For the Church it was a simple issue of survival. By the year 1938, in Barcelona, whichhad become the republican capital, it had ceased to be a matter of isolated mob attacks upon convents or churches. It was the Paris of 1793 once again—only the bishop’s chapel was tolerated, the churches were closed, priests had to disguise themselves, and Mass had to be said in secret. Already in March 1937, in Divini Redemptoris, Pius XI had recorded; “Not only this or that church or isolated monastery has been sacked, but as far as possible every church and every monastery has been destroyed. Every vestige of the Christian religion has been eradicated, even though intimately linked with the rarest monuments of art and science! The fury of Communism has not confined itself to the indiscriminate slaughter of bishops or of thousands of priests and religious of both sexes; it searches out above all those who have been devoting their lives to the working classes and the poor. But the majority of its victims have been laymen of all conditions and classes. Even up to the present moment masses of them are slain almost daily for no other offence than the fact that they are good Christians or at least opposed to atheistic Communism. And this fearful destruction has been carried out with a hatred and a savage barbarity one could not believe possible in our age.”

Mussolini, on the other hand, was interested in the Spanish struggle for reasons of power politics as well as of ideology. The Popular Front Republican government in Madrid was unwelcome to him because it orientated Spain politically towards the Popular Front government in Paris, whereas previously the Spanish Government of Primo de Rivera had looked rather towards Rome. A friendly Spanish Government, which might provide him with submarine bases in the Balearic Islands, or on the east coast of Spain, was an important factor to him in his attempt to rival French and British naval power in the Mediterranean. But ideology probably mattered to him more. A left-wing government at Madrid, with Anarchist and Communist elements, at the same time as a Popular Front government in Paris, was a serious challenge to the ideology upon which his own régime rested, and it became more serious when Moscow interested herself in maintaining it there.

On the ideological side, then, the Pope’s and Duce’s views about Spain had much in common: both feared the Communists. But they did so for different reasons. Mussolini had little concern for the Church. Pius had little for Fascism—how little may be judged by his devastating encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, of March 1937 (the same month as his Divini Redemptoris on Communism), in which he assailed the Hitler régime in Germany.

It is of course inaccurate to use the word fascism, which properly belongs to the Italian movement, for Hitler’s Nazi régime. But by the year 1937, which we have now reached, the two movements had in fact grown closer together; for the Berlin-Rome Axis had become a working reality in Spain, and the two dictators were bringing their régimes into harmony—which meant that Mussolini was being compelled to adopt attitudes dictated by his more powerful partner. If a régime already brutal could properly be described as being brutalised, one would so describe the effect of nazism upon fascism. Amongst the early consequences of the new alliance was the persecution, for the first time, of the Jews in Italy. And another was a renewed hostility between Church and State—a hostility demanded by Hitler. For it was intolerable to the German dictator that his colleague across the Alps should be on friendly terms with the author of Mit Brennender Sorge.

Hitler had been brought to power in Germany in 1933 by circumstances analogous with those which had brought Mussolini to power eleven years earlier in Italy; but the analogy should not be pressed too far. At elections which were still free he had won, in 1932, 230 seats in the Reichstag, or more than a third of the total, which was a far larger parliamentary following than Mussolini won before he seized power at Rome. True, this figure dropped to 190 at the next election, in November of the same year but, by allying with von Papen and the Nationalists, Hitler manoeuvred himself constitutionally into power in January 1933, and only in the subsequent election (March 1933) was he in a position effectively to influence the outcome by terror tactics. The previous four years had been a period of growing crisis in Germany, caused by the great depression, the mounting unemployment, and the rioting of the “Reds,” whose gains in the Reichstag had been only a little less spectacular than those of the Nazis. Dissatisfaction with parliamentary government, as it had been practised by the Weimar Republic (the postwar successor of Imperial Germany) was being felt both on the right and on the left; the call, as always on such occasions, was for a “strong hand.” To obtain full emergency executive powers under theconstitution it was necessary for Hitler to secure a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag; even after the elections of March 1933 he could only obtain such a majority with the support of the Catholic Centre party. The responsibility, then, of the Centre (representing a large proportion of German Catholicism) for the tragedy that was to follow was that, by voting these powers to Hitler, it enabled his dictatorship to begin.

In the light of what followed that is a very grave responsibility. But it did not seem so at the time. A Reichstag in which the strongest parties were the Nazis, on the one hand, and the Socialists and Communists on the other, was not a body which seemed likely to provide an executive capable of governing quietly in a parliamentary manner. As elsewhere in Europe the choice seemed to rest between the Right and the “Reds,” and if President von Hindenburg, the Grand Old Man of Germany, was prepared to swallow his social prejudices and call Hitler to power, that seemed to many a sufficient guarantee that he was indispensable to the maintenance of law and order.

Such was the line of thought of respectable small men of the middle class, the “backbone of Germany,” men who had always given their support to the Centre party, men who believed in the family, in order, in hard work, and who feared the Communists as the sworn foes both of Catholicism and of the whole social order. Hitler stood for Germany, for discipline, for effort—and against the “Reds.” That was enough for them—and, it should be added, for most of the German hierarchy too. And some of the more thoughtful Catholics were reassured by von Papen. Here was a man who was a zealous Catholic, of good family, who was willing to work with Hitler; and Hitler had made him vice-chancellor. Von Papen, they believed, would “civilise” the new chancellor and keep him on the rails.

That he would need some civilising could not be denied because was he not, after all, the author of Mein Kampf, that notably un-Catholic book, and had not the bishops, earlier on, felt obliged to excommunicate the leading members of his party? But the general attitude in 1933 was that power (especially with Hindenburg above him and von Papen at his side) would make Hitler responsible, that Mein Kampf was a youthful indiscretion, to be taken no more seriously now than were the young Mussolini’s atheistic diatribes as a revolutionary hothead in Switzerland. The excommunication was lifted in the same month as the full powers were voted, and von Papen proceeded forthwith to negotiate a concordat with Rome, which was completed with remarkable rapidity and signed in July of the same year. Cardinal Gasparri, who had negotiated the Lateran Treaty and concordat with Mussolini in 1929, had been succeeded as Pius XI’s Secretary of State by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) and to him belongs much of the credit for completing the new concordat. Ever since 1920, as nuncio first at Munich and then at Berlin, Pacelli had striven to secure a concordat with the Weimar Republic; but he had only succeeded in securing separate concordats with the governments of Bavaria and Prussia. The new concordat with Hitler’s Germany, so rapidly concluded, seemed a happy augury. It secured freedom for the Church in Germany to administer its own affairs, the State retaining the right of veto over episcopal appointments and requiring an oath of loyalty to the Führer. There was to be freedom of communications with Rome, freedom for the religious orders, permission to establish Catholic theological faculties at the universities, and Catholic public primary education.

On paper it was a good concordat, and Rome is not in the habit of refusing the opportunity of negotiating such instruments for the protection and regulation of the life of the Church. And although the papal Secretary of State already knew only too much about Hitler, he had also to consider that the Catholic vice-chancellor, von Papen, was pressing the negotiations, that Hindenburg was still Head of the State, and that the Centre party had given its support to the new government. He had reason to hope that the concordat might serve to strengthen the sane and moderate men who stood around the new chancellor. And if Hitler had no intention of abiding by it, why had he asked for it?

For Hitler the concordat had a certain prestige value. In a matter of months he had brought to a successful conclusion negotiations which had eluded the Weimar Republic for more than ten years. Moreover a gesture of friendship towards the Centre party was opportune. He needed its support in those early months. Nor did he seriously assail the Church until after the vote of the Catholic people of the Saar, in the plebiscite of 1935, had safely landed that territory in the German net. But the Centre party proved to have been deluded when it supposed that the new régime might be civilised. It wasnot the only group which suffered from that delusion, which was shared by sober senators of the United States and by cautious conservatives in England. The fact was that nobody quite believed that any government, once in power, could really attempt to carry out the programme of Mein Kampf.

Within five days of the signature of the concordat Hitler showed how irreconcilable were his racial theories with Catholicism when he promulgated a law for the compulsory sterilisation of certain classes of the community. In the following year he called to power the fanatical philosopher of Aryanism, Alfred Rosenberg, whose Myth of the Twentieth Century Rome placed on the Index. The government replied by suppressing the pastoral letter in which the German bishops refuted Rosenberg’s theories. Meanwhile the persecution of the Jews had begun, Cardinal Faulhaber, at Munich, was defending those “ancestors of all Christians according to the spirit,” in his famous sermons, and soon brave bishops, such as the heroic Galen of Munster, or Preysing of Berlin, were condemning not only the laws which forbade intermarriage between Aryans and Jews, but the whole horrid heresy.

Although there were not lacking those who continued to suppose that, by its emphasis on work, order, discipline, obedience, sacrifice, and the like, nazism could provide a temporal habitude for Catholicism, the truth was that, as Hitler came to give more scope to Rosenberg and Goebbels, so his mystique, in its more revolting elements of race, blood, and conquest, became more apparent, and the more moderate men with whom he had surrounded himself at the start disappeared into the background or right off the stage. By the year 1937, although German arms, alongside Mussolini’s, were helping to withstand the Communists in Spain, Pius XI issued Mit Brennender Sorge in condemnation of nazism. Printed secretly in Germany, it was read from the pulpits and it constituted, in the eyes of Germans and in the eyes of the world, the most serious public denunciation of Hitler’s régime and its ideals to which the dictator was ever subjected in Germany. The Pope spoke of “the vain attempt to imprison God, Creator of the Universe . . . within the confines of a common blood or a single race,” of “aggressive neo-paganism,” of a “war of extermination” waged against the Church. Hitler replied, in November 1937, by saying that “recognition of the importance of blood and of race raises itself today above a humanist conception of the world . . . it is a victorious idea which is spreading like a wave across the entire world.”1

So much for the conflict on the absolute plane of beliefs. On the practical plane of action it demonstrated itself in attacks upon Catholic Action, in all its branches, and especially in its youth clubs, which were not to be allowed to compete with the Hitler Youth; in violation of the concordat in respect of Catholic education and the freedom of the religious orders; in flagrant interference with liberty of speech, the press, and communications with Rome. Yet it was not until the Second World War had actually broken out that Hitler could be said to have waged a Kulturkampf. Wholesale imprisonment and execution of priests did not begin till then, and there still remained those who thought that an accommodation was possible. Such were von Papen, who had become ambassador at Vienna, and, amongst the Austrians with whom he was in contact, Cardinal Innitzer and the Chancellor Schuschnigg. The Anschluss, by which Hitler in March 1938 swallowed up Austria, was applauded by Cardinal Innitzer, whose indecent haste in recommending the new régime to the faithful earned him the rebuke of Rome. The anti-Catholic campaign which followed the Anschluss in Austria was directed primarily towards converting the Austrians from Catholicism to Nazi beliefs; for this reason it was directed against Catholic education, from the primary schools up to the universities.

A distinction maybe noted here between the Nazi campaign and that of Bismarck. Whereas the latter had believed in the value of the Church and was concerned to gain control over it, so as to make sure that it gave support to his régime, Hitler’s personal standpoint was fundamentally antithetical to Christianity as such. If he spared the churches and allowed the Mass to continue to be said, thereby deceiving many Catholics as to his real intentions, it was only because he felt he could not yet afford their outright opposition.

With the outbreak of the Second World War the pace of persecution quickened. The Catholic schools were closed and the Catholic press was suppressed. In the rapidly overrun territories of Poland (almost wholly Catholic) convents, monasteries, and seminaries were closed and their occupants, together with hundreds of the secular clergy, were sent to the.notorious concentration camp at Dachau. By March 1945 there were 1493 priests, from all over the Reich, at Dachau alone .2

It is small wonder that when the one serious attempt to get rid of Hitler was organised, in July 1944, some of the leaders amongst the conspirators were Catholics and the chief amongst them, Colonel von Stauffenberg, fervent in the Faith. And with them stood Lutheran and other Protestant leaders. Informed Christian leaders knew by then what has since been brought to light by the Nuremberg trials, namely that the proscription of the Churches, required by Nazi ideology, was to be pursued after victory with the aid of “evidence” of the unpatriotic activity of priests, which the Gestapo was already collecting.

Potentially the Nazi threat to the Church was as serious as any it had encountered; but just as that had not been apparent in 1933 so, even during the Second World War, the full rigours of persecution were not released save in Poland, the Poles being treated as an inferior, subject people, and their religion as requiring no respect. In France, Belgium, and Holland, where the Nazi aim was to enlist cooperation, priests as such were not proscribed, while in Germany, although very many were sent to concentration camps, we do not find the archbishops and bishops generally imprisoned, as many were by Bismarck, though we need not doubt that their turn would have come at the end of a successful war.

The result of these tactics was that many good Catholics, believing the constantly reiterated warning that their country was in danger, and that Hitler was an instrument sent for her salvation, to safeguard her from communism, saw it as their duty to give to his government the obedience to which all legitimate authority is entitled; and many of them died, alongside their fellows in the Russian snows, or in Siberian prison camps, without ever having understood the destiny which their Führer held in store for their Faith.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Communism, Peace, and Pius XII (1939—1956)

The end of the Second World War brought with it major changes in the political balance of the world. The United States of America and the Soviet Union emerged as the two strongest powers, with Great Britain a rather uneasy third. Eastern Europe, as far as Berlin, Vienna, and the Balkan Mountains, fell under the control of Moscow, while the victory of the Communists in China brought the most populous country in Asia under a Communist government, and into friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Since the land forces of Russia were incomparably stronger than those of any other power, an ominous challenge in Europe and in Asia was set up at a time when the strongest traditional armies on the two continents, those of Germany and Japan, had gone down to total defeat.

From the point of view of Britain, France, and the other governments of western Europe, the situation was made much more serious by the fact that Communist parties emerged in the West, and notably in Italy and France, large enough to constitute the principal opposition parties in those countries, and even likely, in Italy at least, to win political power. It was a very much more serious situation than had arisen after the First World War. Moreover these parties were encouraged by the might of Russian arms, now thrust right into the centre of Europe.

The danger implicit in allowing such a situation to develop had been more evident to the British war leader, Winston Churchill, than to the American President, Franklin Roosevelt. It is no part of the purposes of this book to enter into the controversies, which will not for long be resolved, concerning the “bargain” struck between Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in 1945, or concerning Churchill’s dislike of the plan to invade southern France, in preference to an invasion of the Balkans, though it is relevant to notice here that a successful Balkan invasion might well have had an important effect, after the war, upon the position of the Russians in eastern Europe. What we need to consider is the important fact that eastern Europe was “liberated” by the Russian armies, which madelittle use of local resistance movements. The heroic Polish uprising, for example, at Warsaw, was left isolated to be crushed by the Nazis, although the Russian armies were on the doorstep in overwhelming strength. The leadership in occupied eastern Europe was to be Russian leadership, a military control responsible to Moscow. It goes without saying that this was not what the Western powers wanted but they were compelled, in 1945 at Potsdam, to accept it.

If Churchill had harboured few illusions about Soviet intentions, it was even more certain that Pope Pius XII had harboured none at all. Although he had eschewed any criticism of Stalin or his régime whilst Russia had been fighting for her life, he knew much better than Roosevelt that the Communist aim was a Communist Europe, controlled from Moscow, and that the Soviet Government would not voluntarily stop the advance. And he knew, too, what this would mean for religion.

As Secretary of State since 1930, the future Pope had been the right hand of Pius XI, a ruler who had understood where the greatest danger lay, and who had consistently denounced the persecution of religion in Russia, in Spain, or in Mexico, and had exposed the menace implicit in Communist and “fellow-travelling” teaching. Despite his robust attacks upon the Nazi ideology, and his indignation at Fascist statolatry, Pius XI, together with his Secretary of State, had never lost sight of the fact that, as Chief Shepherd of the Church, the Pope must keep his eyes upon the main menace to the flock, and already Pope and Secretary could see clearly enough where this was to be found.

But as the danger of war, in 1938 and 1939, had grown greater, they were also bound to strive, by all the means at their disposal, to preserve peace. This was Pius XII’s first preoccupation, in that fateful first year of his pontificate, which was the year 1939. Those who wanted to see him denounce the régimes of Hitler and Mussolini more openly and more immediately than his predecessor forgot that his overriding aim was, by avoiding openly taking sides between the Western powers, to reach a position from which he might hope to be able to help to negotiate a just settlement between them. It would have been useless, as well as wrong, for him to take sides, in advance, on the international issues at stake between the Western powers, although he had gone so far in the previous summer, when still Secretary of State, as to administer a stinging rebuff to the two dictators, when they met in Rome, by withdrawing with the Pope to Castel Gandolfo.

Now, as Pope, in pursuit of peace, he endeavoured in May 1939, through his nuncios in Paris, London, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, to promote a five-power conference to settle outstanding disputes about the Polish Corridor, and about the various points at issue between Italy and France. It was the only kind of initiative which could hope to relieve the crisis. But already the Vatican was becoming aware that serious negotiations were on foot between Hitler and Stalin, and these it was that precipitated the war and settled the fate of Poland. A last-minute appeal by the Pope, on July 30, having failed, there remained for the moment no more that the Vatican could do save to denounce the treatment of Poland, together with the coercion by Russia of the Baltic states, and to strive to avert a conflagration in the West. He concentrated chiefly, now, upon striving to keep Mussolini from joining in; in this endeavour he undoubtedly had the support of most of the Italian people. It was also an endeavour in which he had the valuable assistance of Roosevelt’s personal representative at the Vatican, Myron Taylor, who arrived at the end of the same year.

In his Christmas message the Pope placed before the world, while the conflict was still confined to the East, his five-point plan for a peace. Avoiding specific territorial proposals, such as had been included in Benedict XV’s proposals of 1917, he enunciated what he considered should be the principles of a general settlement: assurance to all nations, great or small, of their right to life and independence; delivery of the nations from the slavery imposed upon them by the armaments race; international institutions for maintaining peace; revision of treaties by peaceful methods; an appeal to all Christians, whether within the Catholic fold or without, to accept as their common ground the principles of justice and charity, under the Law of God, proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount. A year later, in the London Times, the leaders of all the Churches in England specifically endorsed the Pope’s principles—an unprecedented event.

The fall of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France to Hitler in the summer of 1940, and the entry of Mussolini into the war, brought to nothing the Pope’s endeavours, and there was even some talk of his having to remove to Canada, as Rome became surrounded by belligerentforces; he determined, however, to remain. In June 1941 came Hitler’s invasion of Russia and for three years, at least, in the overriding interests of peace, the Pope was silent about the Communist persecution of Christianity, since the Russian people very evidently were the victims of Hitler’s aggression. But his forbearance was ill requited, for Moscow, with an eye upon the Catholics of eastern Europe, whom she intended to incorporate within the Soviet system, was already, in 1943, striving to depict the Roman Church as the friend of the Fascist aggressors and the foe of peace. It was a singular accusation; but in the excitement of war it gained some credence, and even official American opinion was concerned by the Pope’s refusal to agree with Roosevelt that the Soviet tyranny was not so fundamentally inimical to religion as was Hitler’s. It was also surprised by his dislike of the war aim of “unconditional surrender,” agreed by the allies at the Casablanca Conference of 1943, an aim which seemed to Pius to be not only un-Christian but calculated to prolong the war by causing the beleaguered European central powers to fight to the last.

By the end of the European war the fate of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Yugoslays, and the peoples of the Baltic states, oppressed by Communist tyranny, cried aloud at Rome for pity, nor could the Pope fail to heed. But the rulers of the Western powers (some of which had gone to war for the defence of Poland) can scarcely be blamed for their reluctance to turn from their costly defeat of one tyrant to the still more difficult task of trying to drive out another, and a stronger, from the lands he had occupied. It was only possible to contain the colossus, and this the successors of Roosevelt and Churchill set themselves, with delayed determination, to do. While Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, and Vishinsky, the Soviet delegate at the United Nations, obstructed every attempt to reach an international agreement, Stalin retained powerful armies in eastern Germany and around Berlin. But every further encroachment was resisted; the Western powers had at last begun to realise that they were entering upon a period of “cold war” and Churchill, though no longer in power, used his eloquence to arouse Americans and Englishmen to a more vivid appreciation of that sinister construction which he aptly named the “Iron Curtain.”

For Rome the Iron Curtain was no novelty. There had been an iron curtain, spiritually speaking, screening Russia in the days of Gregory XVI and the Tsar Nicholas I. Nor had other powerful rulers hesitated, elsewhere, to impose prohibitions upon the Church’s free communication with Rome. Such iron curtains had been erected by Napoleon, by Bismarck, and by some of the revolutionary governments in Latin America. But the iron curtain around eastern Europe after 1945 was more impenetrable, and behind it whole Catholic populations became, in the Pope’s phrase, the “Church of Silence.”

The persecution was naturally most rigorous in those territories which were incorporated within the Soviet Union proper, namely the eastern provinces of Poland (seized by Stalin in 1939) which became part of the Soviet republics of the Ukraine and of Byelorussia; the Carpatho-Ukraine, a territory seized from Czechoslovakia and incorporated in the Soviet Ukraine; and the three incorporated Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. A large proportion of the Catholics in these territories were Uniates, using the Greek rite; by dint of imprisoning the Uniate bishops and finding pliant parish priests, the Soviet Government (following the precedent set by Nicholas I) secured the separation of these bodies of Catholics, once more, from Rome, and their union with the Orthodox Church; in this way nearly four million Catholics in Poland alone were lost. This was a technique less easily applied to those of the Latin rite, but the Latin priests, particularly in Lithuania (an almost wholly Catholic country), were expelled in hundreds on fabricated charges. Many were taken to Siberia; the more fortunate found their way to the West, and Pius XII founded the Lithuanian Ecclesiastical Institute to minister to their needs and to confirm them in their Faith.

The technique of separating the Uniates from the other Catholics and merging them with the Orthodox Church was also pursued in Rumania, which lay outside Soviet territory proper. It was facilitated by the Orthodox Patriarch of Rumania, who worked in close collaboration with the restored Patriarch of Moscow. By restoring the patriarchate of Moscow in 1943 the Soviet government had effectively provided itself with an instrument which, despite its own atheist principles, it could use to advantage in its endeavours to weaken the influence of Rome in eastern Europe. Not only would it facilitate the transfer of the Uniates, but it would tend to prevent the Orthodox from allying with the Catholics in a common defence of Christianity. Once again we may observe the Communist dictatorship at Moscow pursuing the traditional policies of the Tsars, for it was an ancient habit of Russian rulers to use their very compliant patriarchs in support of their own political purposes.

By 1950 the Pope, on account of what was happening in Rumania, was obliged to withdraw his acting nuncio from Bucharest. Meanwhile the persecution of the Church was proceeding in all the countries nominally independent but behind the Iron Curtain. In Yugoslavia, under Marshal Tito, and especially in the Catholic province of Croatia, priests were executed, imprisoned, or driven into exile or into hiding, and religious education ceased. The popular Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb was accused, on account of his impartial assistance to all refugees, of collaboration with the Germans and was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment; the hope of better days for the Church when Tito subsequently quarrelled with Stalin was not realised. In Hungary, a Catholic country, the primate, Cardinal Mindszenty, was arrested in January 1949 and condemned in February to life imprisonment as a result of a trial which attracted the horror and amazement of the whole world. Aware that his Communist opponents would have resort to what we now call “brain-washing,” the cardinal, protesting his innocence, warned the world in advance that human frailty might lead him into statements which would seem confessions of guilt. By the end of his trial he was a changed man and had, indeed, given utterance to a confession of the kind he had foreseen he might be induced to make. As a gesture of protest against this shocking affair the whole diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican expressed its sympathy to the Pope.

It should not, however, be supposed that Catholic leaders could necessarily count upon the support of Rome in whatever course of action they chose to adopt. Where there had been reason for the Pope to doubt the propriety of their action, as in Austria at the time of the Anschluss, or later in Croatia, where it was alleged that some of the Orthodox had been coerced into becoming Catholics, or in Slovakia, where Monsignor Tiso was made President in Hitler’s time, Rome made no attempt to defend those against whom it was felt that there might be a legitimate political or religious grievance. Cardinal Innitzer, at Vienna, was rebuked, the Croat régime was reminded that conversion was a matter of conscience, not of compulsion, and when Monsignor Tiso was executed, after the war, for collaboration with the Germans no protest was made by the Vatican, although many thought that the execution was mere political retribution. But where the hierarchy were simply doing their duty in fostering the Faith and insisting upon the rights of the Church, they could count securely upon Rome and upon the prayers of the faithful throughout the world. When the Communists acquired control over Czechoslovakia in 1948 the Archbishop of Prague, Joseph Beran, was put under house arrest, and the government tried to institute new bishops without reference to Rome. But Beran, like Mindszenty and Stepinac, could rely upon the Pope, who continued to recognise him as the lawful ruler of his see and refused to recognise any appointment, in substitution, by the government.

In Poland, the largest and most Catholic of the quasi-independent countries behind the Iron Curtain, the Communist government, set up by the Russians and recognised, perforce, by the allied powers (but not by the Vatican), concentrated its efforts upon trying to drive a wedge between the Vatican and the Church. In the delicate matter of the western territories awarded to Poland after the war, at the expense of East Germany, Rome was represented as supporting the Germans, although she remained neutral in the matter of the political boundaries, and the Pope’s only offence was to express his sympathy with those who found themselves forcibly evacuated on account of the changes.

But it was hard for the Communist government at Warsaw to make headway so long as Cardinal Hlond, the Archbishop of Warsaw, remained alive, for he had been a prisoner of the Germans and nobody could doubt his Polish as well as his Roman loyalty. After his death in 1948 the government made more progress and, although it would be absurd to suppose that there was a danger that the papal authority would be denied by the Church in Poland, yet an agreement was reached, without consultation with Rome, between the Polish hierarchy and the government in April 1950, and the Vatican (which still recognised the Polish Government in exile) could only express its astonishment at the news. By this agreement the supreme authority of the Pope in matters of faith, morals, and jurisdiction was explicitly recognised, but in other matters the episcopate was stated to be subject to the direction of the Polish State. The heart of the agreement was the statementthat allegiance to the new government was incumbent upon the faithful; resistance to it was stated to be “criminal.” The traditional rights of the Church in education and the like were “guaranteed,” but with reservations which left the government as free, in practice, to interfere in the interests of “security” as ever Napoleon’s Organic Articles had left the French Government. Less than six months had passed before the Polish hierarchy found itself compelled to protest against numerous violations of the agreement. But the Communist masters at Moscow were well satisfied, and in August 1950 they procured a similar agreement in Hungary. Under the aegis of the “Orginform,” established in the same year to undertake the training of those entrusted with the special task of dispelling the Faith (for which purpose they would pose as priests), an all-out effort was made by the Communists to sow religious confusion in eastern Europe generally, in particular by undermining allegiance to the Pope. It was a campaign which Pius endeavoured to meet by reaching the faithful directly, through the Vatican radio, there being no other reliable means of communication left.

Since 1950 the battle has continued. In that year the apostolic delegate was expelled from Moscow and his church (used by the embassy staffs) was entrusted by Stalin to a compliant nominee from Latvia. Archbishop Stepinac, released from prison by President Tito, but kept under house arrest, was not allowed to attend the Consistory of January 1953 to receive his cardinal’s hat, and the Yugoslav Government made the dignity conferred upon him the opportunity to break off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. The primate of Poland, Archbishop Wyszynski, created a cardinal on the same occasion, was likewise prevented from attending, and a few months later he was arrested. Cardinal Mindszenty remained in prison. In Hungary there was a brief break in the clouds at the time of the revolution of October 1956, and Cardinal Mindszenty was released. A few words of peace, and of pardon for his enemies, and the clouds from the Carpathians descended once more, in the shape of Russian tanks, and the Church of Hungary became once again a part of the Church of Silence. Whether, in Poland, the Gomulka revolution, effected in the same year, was to bring any alleviation remained to be seen, though the release of Cardinal Wyszynski, who was allowed to visit Rome, seemed a hopeful sign.

It is against this sinister background of silence in eastern Europe, together with equally sinister news from Asia, where Catholic missionaries and religious orders (even the silent Trappists) were being expelled from Communist China, from Indo-China, and from Northern Korea, that we should set papal policy since the Second World War if we wish to understand it aright. This Communist-atheist crusade was the latest, and in some ways the most brutal of those which the Church had been called upon to face.

        How was she to confront it?

Not, certainly, by a “Holy Crusade.” But, equally certainly, not by unconditional surrender. Peace, assuredly, but not peace at any price, not peace at the price of the extinction of her spiritual liberty in Asia and Europe. By prayers for Russia; by appeals to what was common to Orthodox and Catholics alike, such as devotion to the Blessed Virgin, a mutual devotion of which the Pope reminded those Russians who could hear him, to whom he appealed in the name of Christ and of His Mother, without mention of Rome. But also by warning those whom the Communists sought to seduce in western Europe of the degree of their danger, of the utter incompatibility between communism and Christianity.

Clearly it was a prime duty for the Pope to warn Western Christendom of the danger in which it stood. And especially was this warning necessary for the Italians. Italian communism, forced underground by Mussolini, had burst into life with the anti-Fascist reaction of the liberation movement, in which Catholics and Communists found themselves fighting together to free northern Italy from the Nazis and from the puppet régime of a Mussolini kidnapped from Rome and installed on the shores of Lake Garda. In this “war of the partisans” men who called themselves Communists played a vigorous and a courageous part, but their final victory left a vacuum in authority. Mussolini had fallen, the King was discredited, and the country was under the control of allied military commanders. To whom should Italians turn?

Sometimes to Communist leaders, sometimes to the Pope—sometimes, oddly enough, to both.

The popularity of a Pope who had saved Rome from the fighting, who had befriended refugees of all sorts in the Vatican City, and who had worked tirelessly for the relief of suffering was not in question; more than anybody else he seemed

to speak for Italy. And in the countryside a Communist mayor and a Catholic priest, in the early postwar period of reconstruction, might well find themselves labouring together, both good Italians and proud of the Pope, the only men who could get on with the job of rebuilding a shattered town. But this “little world of Don Camillo” soon became part of the big world of the Russian Army, the Cominform, and the Orgill-form, on the one side, and of the Catholic faith on the other, and the choice between the Cross and the Hammer-and-Sickle could no longer be avoided. In the face of the Communist offensive it became necessary for the Pope to make it clear that if the Italian Communist party were truly a part of international communism, whose headquarters were at Moscow (and its leader Palmiro Togliatti made no secret of this), then no Catholic could possibly belong to it, or assist it, on pain of excommunication. Such was the purport of his decree of July 1949, a decree intended to defend the West from the menace from the East. But this decree, which to some seemed harsh, was not designed to make life impossible for Catholics behind the Iron Curtain. That collaboration of Catholics with Communists in those territories was often inevitable, the Pope was well aware; he was therefore careful in his decree to state that what was condemned was “conscious and free” membership or collaboration. Those who lived under the shadow of Moscow, who were far from free, were left at liberty to receive the sacraments where they were fortunate enough to be able to do so.

The Italian Communist party was the largest Communist political party in the West and second only in size, in Italy, to the Christian Democratic party. But the Communist party in France was also very formidable, and in both countries there were times, in the late ‘40s and early ‘5os, when it seemed possible enough that a Communist government might emerge. The extent to which the Pope’s resolution was responsible for preventing that from happening is incapable of being determined, but the influence of the Vatican in this matter must have been considerable.

There were, however, other powerful influences which helped to save freedom in the West. One was the resolution shown by President Truman, and also by the British Government, in organising that airlift which prevented the Russians from excluding the Western allies from Berlin. Another was

the immense generosity of the United States in taking the lead in organising a vast system of relief and reconstruction in war-shattered Europe. There was also the North Atlantic Treaty, with its rapidly organised international forces. But perhaps the most important was the emergence in Italy, Western Germany, and France of political leaders, in the persons of De Gasperi, Adenauer, and Schuman, all of them Catholics and all of them possessed of courage and ability, who were determined to work for European reconstruction on the basis of liberty and mutual help through new international organisations. This joint endeavour on the part of the Christian Democratic parties was derided by the Communists, and by some of the Socialists, as a “bourgeois hypocrisy,” intended to safeguard the propertied classes, and there was talk of an unholy alliance between American capitalism and the Vatican. In reality, however, these postwar governments, basing their policies on the maintenance of free institutions, both political and economic, did not prove unmindful, particularly in Italy, of the plight of the poor; and although it would be absurd to suppose that they were in any political sense inspired by the Vatican or “represented” it, or that Catholics were not perfectly free to support other parties and very often did so, it is yet true that these leading statesmen were genuinely Catholic, were nurtured in the concepts of Rerum Novarurn and Quadragesimo Anno, and were inspired with a zeal to save Christendom by a closer Western unity.

The various associations formed to revivify the West and to defend her against Communist aggression, such as the Council of Europe, the Western European Union, the Schuman plan, and the Atlantic Treaty, naturally received the fullest support of the Vatican, since the Pope saw in them the best hope of peace and of the salvation of the Christian religion. Nor did he neglect any opportunity which presented itself for helping to foster a closer international unity. Upon all international conferences which met at Rome, whether those of the Parliamentary Union or of the postal workers, of the scientists or of the historians, he would impress, in the many addresses he gave, the paramount concern of the Church for international understanding and peace. And the same objectives inspired his association of the Church with the various cultural agencies of the United Nations, such as UNESCO. Yet his enthusiasm for the chief postwar international agency for peace, the United Nations, was necessarily qualified by the fact that itembraced such strong Communist elements, the sincerity of whose intentions could hardly convince him. From the start this was apparent, with the exclusion of the very name of God or of the divine order of being from the Charter, and with the exclusion not only of the Vatican State from membership (although she had unique experience of endeavours for international understanding) but also, for long, of many Catholic states, such as Austria, Italy, Portugal, or Ireland. And the permanent presence of the Soviet Union on the Security Council, with a veto which could paralyse action, seemed likely to frustrate the effective action of the new body. It was not quite the kind of organisation which the Pope had envisaged in his peace proposals of 1939. But that did not prevent his giving it, from the time of its foundation at San Francisco, such support as it permitted him to give—hismessages of good will and his prayers.

It is, of course, impossible as yet to see in their true perspective these recent years since 1945; that will only be achieved with the passage of time. But it would have been unrealistic to ignore altogether in this book the contemporary scene, in which can so plainly be perceived problems and struggles the same in kind as those we have been tracing in earlier generations.

        The same in kind, yet with an important difference.

The earlier struggles of the Church in modem history had been waged to keep her alive and united in the face of the omnicompetent State and the passions of a parochial nationalism. Napoleon and Bismarck had been concerned to bolster their régimes by trying to secure spiritual as well as temporal control. But they differed from Lenin and Stalin in that they were Christians, however loosely they sat to orthodoxy, and although they were preoccupied with limited, temporal empires of this world. Similarly the “Know-Nothings” in America, in so far as they were not merely selfish in their purposes, were concerned about what they believed to be the “national interests” of their country. But they, too, generally confessed Christianity of one kind or another, they did not despise the message of the Cross, as such, but, mistaking the nature of the Church, they resented her presence on their soil because she was “ruled by a foreigner,” and because she claimed certain rights even against the State.

        The reason why the Communist challenge is more radical

is that it not only persecutes the Church as “divisist” but denies the basic truths of Christianity altogether, regarding all supernatural religion as “superseded” and “degrading.” And this is something new. One can, of course, find plenty of intellectual precursors of the Communists as far back as the age of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and earlier; what one cannot find before the twentieth century is such beliefs exercising sovereign power for a generation and more over millions of people, through despotic governments.

The nearest parallel is to be found in the French Revolution. While Fouché and Hébert held power, and the provinces of France were imitating the Parisian Feast of Reason, and the Mass was forbidden, and sacrilege was encouraged, it is clear that an attempt on a great scale was being made to root out Christianity, as such, and not merely to persecute the Church for being divisist. But that persecution was not everywhere enforced, and in scarcely any parts of France did it last for more than six years. There was not time to indoctrinate a new generation in the schools with anti-Christian beliefs before Napoleon restored Christian education. But the new ideas have already determined the character of the teaching in the Soviet schools for forty years.

Had Lord Macaulay lived to see this fifth great challenge to the Church, the challenge of communism in the twentieth century, he might well have been inclined to rate it as even more dangerous than those previous four challenges which, following Ranke, he isolated so clearly and described so vividly in words which we quoted in the first chapter. But he would not have despaired of seeing the barque of Peter riding the tempest. Indeed he would have noted that, on this last occasion, the nature and reality of the danger, which concerned civilisation as well as the Church, had been widely and rapidly recognised and met in the West. Not so rapidly as at Rome, and not before much had been lost. But widely enough, it may be, to ensure that the free nations, together with that Church whose independence is a part of their own freedom, ‘° may survive the storm.

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