The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
Mussolini was the man sent by Providence. – Pope Pius XI, 20 December 1926
Upon 7 November 1917, the Russian people carried through a revolution which placed the Bolshevik Party in power, and installed an anti-Capitalist regime in Russia. (The Czar had already been forced to abdicate the previous February.) The Russian Revolution set in motion a wave of social revolution which swept over the Western World, and in its (Communist) Russian form quickly took an openly anti-religious attitude in consonance with the Marxist materialist views officially professed by the Bolsheviks. (It must be remembered that in Czarist Russia the Orthodox Church was virtually a part of the Czarist autocracy.)
It is now evident in retrospect that the era of social revolution which began in 1917 has now succeeded the era of the French Revolution as the fundamental bugbear of the Catholic Church. In the twentieth century ‘Communism’ is mentioned in various Papal Encyclicals quite as much as ‘Liberalism’ was in those of the nineteenth century. But at first this was not apparent. There had been an enmity of long- standing between the rival theocracies of Rome and Moscow, and the Vatican at first welcomed the overthrow of the heretical and persecuting Czars; ‘A Divine judgement’, the then Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, told a visiting English Catholic.
But this feeling of good-will did not last long. The wave of social revolution promulgated by the Communist International spread too fast across the troubled postwar world and assumed too openly anti-religious forms. Rome soon came to the frame of mind in which she adheres today, in the calculations of the Papacy Communism came to occupy the place occupied in bygone ages by such former enemies of the Church as the Albigenses, the Calvinists and the Freemasons.
This change of attitude on the part of the Papacy can be dated officially from the accession of Pius XI (Achille Ratti) to the Papal Throne early in 1922. For this very able and ultra-reactionary Pontiff had been Papal Nuncio at Warsaw in 1920 when the Bolshevik ‘Red’ Army had advanced to the gates of the Polish capital.
Thereafter Cardinal Ratti devoted his life to fighting the ‘Red Peril’ from the Communist East. Since his election as Pope in 1922, the Church has energetically pursued his policy, which Ratti’s successor and former Secretary of State, Eugenio Paccelli (Pope Pius XII), is pursuing today with redoubled vigour.
Pius XI (1922 – 39) reorganised the Church in order to meet the Communist menace; in particular he was the founder of ‘Catholic Action’, to the activities of which it will again be necessary to refer. But at the time when Pope Pius commenced his new anti-Communist policy, ‘Catholic Action’ was barely hatched, and the official Catholic parties, like the German ‘Centre’ Party or the Italian ‘Peoples’ Party, were too much out of date and loosely organised to hope to make a successful stand against the highly-organised, fanatical and politically ruthless Communist Parties backed by the Russian Colossus.
‘New times, new manners’ – and old tactics! In this dilemma the Pope and his advisers fell back on the old Catholic tactic of making a ‘marriage of convenience’, of forming an alliance with a secular ally, and of using this ally as a ‘sword’ to eradicate contemporary ‘heresy’ by force. It should be pointed out that this tactic was not a new one, contrarily, it was the traditional tactic of the Papacy which it has actually used over and over again. The ‘Holy’ Roman Empire, the Norman Crusaders, the French and Spanish Kings, the ‘Holy Alliance’ are all cases in point. The Papal – Fascist alliance was of the same kind.
From 1922, the date both of the accession of Pius XI and of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’, to 1945, the date of the fall of the Fascist Empires in Europe and Asia at the end of the Second World War, we observe a complete era in Papal and, since the Vatican is a World Power, in world-politics, the era of Catholic – Fascist alliance.
The details of this still so recent, and in the Latin world still existing, era can be found set out with appropriate detail in Avro Manhattan’s important book The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century, more concisely in Dr LH Lehman’s recent valuable study The Vatican Policy in the Second World War, and perhaps the present writer may be permitted in this connection to mention his own earlier (1937) book The Papacy and Fascism. The appropriate details in the Roman – Fascist alliance can be found in these and similar books; here the necessary limits of space imposed by this short thesis limit us to a consideration of the fundamental philosophy and strategy of this alliance.
In the first place, there were several kinds of Fascism and the reactions of the Vatican towards each, and its consequent degree of collaboration towards each, differed considerably. To ignore such differences is merely to imitate the cruder type of Left-wing writers who use the word ‘Fascist’ as an indiscriminate term of abuse wherewith to brand anything they dislike; as in fact, a sort of universal ‘Esperanto’ of crime!
Actually there were three kinds of Fascism, and the attitude of the Papacy differed markedly towards each. Firstly, there was the Clerical-Fascism, Catholic in environment, ideology and inspiration, of Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal, of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in prewar Austria, of Perón in the Argentine, and of Pétain in (Vichy) France: with all these 100 per cent Catholic regimes, past and present, the Vatican was and is 100 per cent united, ideologically and politically, for they all represent the beau ideal of Roman sociology, its ‘Christian Corporate State’.
Secondly, there was the type of Fascism, personified by Mussolini’s Italy, which arose in a Catholic atmosphere, but was largely inspired by the non-Catholic ideals of pre-Christian Pagan Rome. On the whole, the Vatican worked cordially with Mussolini, the quotation at the head of this chapter testifies to that! And we do not forget the Lateran Treaty (1929) which restored a modified version of the Temporal Power and replenished the Vatican treasury, but notwithstanding there were certain clashes between the two totalitarian regimes. The Papacy heartily approved of Mussolini’s wholesale extirpation of the parties of the Left, it kept quiet about the murder of the Socialist leader, Matteotti, and it backed up the Italian conquest of ‘heretical’ Ethiopia, and, of course, the Italian intervention in Spain.
But there was friction over the Fascist monopoly of education, the Pope did not like the Fascist high-handed suppression of his pet movement ‘Catholic Acton’, and the Papacy never completely trusted Mussolini; after all, he had once been an atheist – a habit which sticks! – and had once written that excellent little Anarchist pamphlet entitled God Does Not Exist.
Last, but in power politics the reverse of least, there was non-Christian Fascism; entirely pagan in Japan, largely pagan in Hitler’s Germany. Although the German Dictator repeatedly declared his admiration for the historic role of the Catholic Church, and even though the Nazi movement itself originated in Catholic Bavaria, we must not forget that there was a strong openly anti-Christian Pagan wing of Nazism, and in its marriage and family ethics the Nazi Reich was flatly opposed to Catholicism.
In the case of Pagan Fascism, the Church probably limited its approval to the destructive aspect of Fascism, in which Germany was its most potent ‘sword’, it backed Hitler against Communist Russia and Liberal France, and Japan against Chinese Communism. But the positive ideals of the Cross and the Swastika differed too widely to be permanently harmonised. Had Hitler won his war and succeeded in his gigantic gamble for world power, as far as the Vatican was concerned there would probably have been a struggle for power, the Nazi ‘Third Reich’ would probably have repeated the stormy history of the ‘First Reich’, the Holy Roman Empire. However, history never allowed the question to rise.
The elemental reasons for the Catholic – Fascist alliance are obvious enough. In my book The Papacy and Fascism, I have cited nine fundamental aspects of human action and thought in which the two authoritarian systems run parallel. [1]
Here it will be sufficient to mention the more important points of identity, or close similarity.
Both Fascism and Roman Catholicism are authoritarian, the infallible Pope and the Dictator who is always right, intolerant of opposition, and backward-looking in their social ideals. Both find their ideal in the Past, both are anti-evolutionary in practice and theory; above all, both have the same enemies, the forward-looking movements in ethics, in economics and in politics, and both are totalitarian and seek to dominate every sphere of human life. The Gestapo and the Japanese Law against ‘dangerous thoughts’ are the Fascist equivalents of the Inquisition.
Such are the main causes for the Clerical – Fascist alliance which lasted from 1922 to 1945. One further point may be added: both Catholicism and Fascism are essentially demagogic in their tactics. Here the Church and, in particular, the Jesuits were first in the field. Fascist strategy and propaganda owe much to their Jesuit masters. Hitler and Goebbels, in particular, well qualified for honorary membership of the famous Order founded by St Ignatius Loyola, ‘For the greater glory of God’ – and counter-revolution.
However, the great Fascist gamble failed. The Papal ‘sword’ failed to subdue the Communist, Liberal and secular foes of Holy Church. In 1945 the Papal ‘marriage of convenience’ with Fascism was ended by death. But the Vatican did not perish with its secular ally. With the matchless tenacity in which Christian Rome recalls its Pagan original, the Church in the post-Fascist world continued its search for new weapons with which to lay low the secular enemies of the ecclesiastical Empire of the successors of the Cćsars.
1. FA Ridley, The Papacy and Fascism: The Crisis of the Twentieth Century (London, 1937), pp 166-68.