CHAPTER XI. REXISM AND CATHOLIC ACTION

NOWHERE has Catholic Action shown itself more in line with Nazi-Fascism than in Belgium where Leon Degrelle’s Rexist Party in 1940 came into its own. Pope Pius XI gave the Jesuit slogan Christus Rex1—”Christ the King”—to Catholic Action as the battle-cry for its crusade for Catholic Reconstruction of the social order. The same cry, Viva Christo Rey, was used by Franco’s Fascists in their war against the legitimate Republican government of Spain. It was the war cry of the fanatic Mexican Indians who were spurred on by the Jesuits to commit acts of sabotage against the Republican government of Mexico. It was also the cry of the Spanish Rebel officers who, with the help of their Moorish troops, tortured, violated and slaughtered nearly 15,000 men, women and children at Badajos.

The Rexists in Belgium claimed the honor of being the first fruits of Catholic Action, the “Christian Fronters” of Belgium. Their leader, Leon Degrelle—the Belgian peasants nicknamed him “Adolf” Degrelle—was won over to the movement by Monsignor Picard, when he was a student at the University of Louvain. He and all his assistants are products of Jesuit training.2 He became the great “lay apostle” of Catholic Action in the Jesuit drive to align the Catholic Church with Nazi-Fascist plans for the “new order” in Europe after the destruction of liberalism and democracy.

As the scope of Degrelle’s activities increased, his Christ-the- King movement was temporarily separated from Catholic Action in Belgium with the consent of the hierarchy. This maneuver was designed to give the Rexists greater liberty of action to work out Nazi-Fascist policies. Thereupon the apparently independent “Rexist Popular Front” was set up, ostensibly to fight “Jewish Communism,” much on the same lines as Father Coughlin’s “Christian Front” in America. Degrelle’s chief officer was the White Russian Denizoff, who was Secretary to the last President of the Council in the Czarist regime. Today Degrelle is Hitler’s right-hand man in Nazi-occupied Belgium where no signs of disagreement are apparent between the Catholic hierarchy and the Nazi invaders.3 He has organized his own storm troopers, formations de combat he calls them, and is fast bringing Belgium into close collaboration with Hitler’s new order. In a heavily censored dispatch from Liege to the New York Times on January 6, 1941, Degrelle said:

“We must make our choice now. We have faith in the Fuehrer as the greatest man of our times. Trust his spirit, his genius, and have faith in the Europe which he will build up. The youth of all Europe is today fighting shoulder to shoulder for a new order under German leadership. German weapons will win because they are defending a just cause Hitler saved Europe, and Belgium’s future could [several words missing] cooperation with the Reich.”

1 This slogan is from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.
2 “Leon Degrelle is a pupil of these gentlemen [the Jesuits]; so also are all his colleagues.”—R. A. Dior, in Le Vatican, Paris, 1937, p. 42.

There never was any secret about Degrelle’s collaboration with Hitler. In its issue of May 20, 1936, the Paris newspaper Le Temps called attention to the close relationship between the Rexist Party and Hitler’s National Socialism, and shortly before the Belgian elections in May, 1936, Degrelle went to Germany to “study” Nazi propaganda methods. After the example of the German Fuehrer (and Father Coughlin) he sought to gather around him all the discontented elements of the middle class. In imitation of Goebbels, he curried favor with the workers by appearing to side with strikers. The chief point of comparison, however, between Rexism and Nazi-Fascism is that both declared war on Catholic liberal tendencies, among both the clergy and the laity, with the aim of setting up the Jesuit, authoritarian control of Catholic activities. This was the real reason why Catholic Action was instituted by Pope Pius XI.

It is not out of place to repeat the underlying reasons for this desire to abolish all pre-Hitler Catholic politics throughout Europe —a thing the Jesuits for many years had ardently longed to see accomplished. As already pointed out, the old Catholic political parties had become intimately bound up with the liberal constitutions of States, wherein all parties and religions were able to coexist freely. Furthermore, the ideology of the liberal democratic State, with its principles of religious and racial tolerance, was broadening the political and social outlook of these Catholic parties. The fraternizing of the secular clergy with the laity in these political parties furthered the spirit of tolerance as opposed to the traditional intolerance of Catholic dogma.

3 In their joint pastoral letter of October, 1940, the Catholic bishops of Belgium instructed their people as follows: “It is doubtless necessary to recognize the occupying power as a de facto power and to obey it within the limits of international conventions.” (Quoted from the Jesuit magazine America, Feb. 22, 1941.)

On the other hand, it must also be remembered that in Germany the two Catholic political parties, the Center Party and the Bavarian Popular Party, because of their close religious connections with the Catholic Church, had met with strong opposition from the Protestant part of the population. As a consequence, the continued existence of these parties threatened to compromise the aim of Catholic Action, which was to use Germany as the instrument to effect its counter-Reformation designs. It was thus necessary for the new Catholic policy to camouflage itself as a national movement, and make itself appear as the only party representing the nation as a whole.

It can thus be seen why the abolition of the pre-Hitler Catholic political parties in Germany had the approval of the movement for Catholic Reconstruction. Here is what Gonzague de Reynold has to say on the point:4

“The Center Party, which Hitler fought with all his might, was forced to commit suicide. But it was a party which had already shown signs of deterioration, which had made many mistakes and upon which the young people were turning their backs . . . The news that soon they could take part in real Catholic Action, without any addition of party politics, aroused great enthusiasm.”

For the very same reason the Rexist Party in Belgium, direct offspring of Catholic Action, likewise declared:

“All Catholic parties are the result of a fixed historical situation, and have advantages and disadvantages for the Church. “When these historical situations cease to exist, Catholic parties lose their reason for existence. This applies equally to the Catholic party in Belgium. Up till now differing opinions could be had as to their usefulness and their right to existence. Today, however, they are anarchronisms, as were the Center Party in Germany and the Popular Party in Italy.

“The Catholic Party did not understand the new ‘historic mission’; the confessional movement did not transform itself into a national movement. Because of these deficiencies it had to disappear like all other parties. The Rexist Party will now take up the defense of Catholic and ecclesiasiteal interests. It does not only intend to defend the Church, but also to take the whole religious question out of politics. It will effect this by means of the Constitutional guarantee of the rights of the Catholic Church and by drawing up a concordat to regulate the relations between the State and the Church.”5

4 Cf. L’Europe Tragique, p. 333.
5 Cf. Vaterland, Lucerne, Aug. 14, 1936.

Thus, according to this new Catholic policy, there is to be no apparent separation between Catholic Action and the Nazi-Fascist thrust for the establishment of its “new order” in Europe. To the Rexist Party was assigned the task of regulating the relations between the Catholic Church and the Fascist State in Belgium by means of a concordat, as was done in Germany through Von Papen and the present Pope Pius XII, then papal nuncio to Germany.. This “new historic mission” of the Church of Rome, initiated by the Lateran Pact and Concordat of 1929 between the Vatican and Fascist Italy, calls for collaboration with the Nazi-Fascist dictators, unhampered by any questioning or interference from the people or the lower clergy. Liberal principles and popular freedom have to be crushed out as completely in the Church as in the State.

“We in America are only now beginning to see clearly how the noose was formed to strangle all forms of liberalism and democracy in pre-Hitler Europe, in order to make way for the Nazi- Fascist hierarchical grouping of nations and individuals in a sort of revived Roman Empire of the German Nation. And the real motivating force behind it all has been the thrust of the Jesuit counter-Reformation, ante-dating all the dictators, which aimed to crush out of existence the hated liberal principles of the Protestant democracies. It has indeed been an ungodly combination that worked together to accomplish this objective: Catholic Reconstruction movement of Pius XI; Italian Fascism; Hitler’s National Socialism; French anti-Semitic Leagues; La Roque and the Cagoulards; Belgian Rexism; the Hungarian racist movement of Father Bangha; white Russian association; Croatian associations—whose hand appeared in the assassination of King Alexander of Serbia and French Foreign Minister Barthou; Slovene separatists led by the Jesuit Father Anton Koroshetz, who worked his way to the Presidency of the senate in Yugoslavia; the Catholic prelates and politicians of old Austria—Mgr. Seipel, Dollfuss, Schussnigg, et al.; the priest-politicians of Slovakia, Carpatho-Ukraine and Bohemia— Fathers Hlinka and Tiso; not forgetting Franco and his Fascist Generals in Spain and the Laval-Petain cliques in France. All of these worked closely together and were interlinked with the Catholic Church in working towards the same end—the destruction of the post-Reformation structure of Europe and the world.

But the end is not yet.

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