Behind the Dictators A Factual Analysis of the Relationship of Nazi-Fascism and Roman Catholicism by L. H. LEHMANN
CHAPTER IV. THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
Contents
EUROPE’S TRAGEDY, in Catholic opinion, is due to the breaking up of its great papal-controlled confederation of states by the Protestant Reformation. All the efforts of the Catholic Church since have been directed to the work of counter- Reformation—to re-establish the political and social order of pre- Reformation times. That order of states was hierarchical, not democratic, and was ruled at the top by the dual sovereignty of Pope and Emperor, by the union of Church-State authority. The political and social order that resulted from the Reformation, both in Europe and America, is regarded by the Catholic Church as pagan and anti-Christian; they give it the name of “pseudo-democracy.”
This is to be found in all official Catholic writings and is the burden of all papal encyclicals. The Jesuit weekly America,1 for instance, tells us that the evils of our present time are to be ascribed to this “pseudo-democracy, which is pagan in its remote origins and leads to an inhuman wage system, an uprooted proletariat and pauperism.” It goes further to say: “Protestant, rationalist, and now definitely anti-Christian in its inspiration, its logical fruit is Socialism,” and calls for “a return to an integral social order, the principles of which are still preserved in our languid memory of the great medieval experiment.”
Few realize how intense is the hatred of official Roman Catholic spokesmen for the American democratic way of life. This same Jesuit magazine America (which advertises itself as “the most influential Catholic magazine in the United States”) published the following in its issue of May 17, 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor:
1 April 13, 1940.
“How we Catholics have loathed and despised this Lucifer civilizaion, this rationalist creation of those little men who refuse to bend the knee or bow the head in submission to higher authority . . . Today, American Catholics are being asked to shed their blood for that particular kind of secularist civilization which they have been herocially repudiating for four centuries. This civilization is now called democracy, and the suggestion is being made that we send the Yanks to Europe again to defend it. In reality, is it worth defending? What’s the sum and substance of it all? All the Yanks in America will not save it from disintegration. Unless a miracle occurs, it is doomed—finally and irrevocably doomed. The New Order in Europe will be either a Nazi or a British totalitarianism, or a combination of both . . .
“American democracy is disintegrating, crumbling from within. Fatigue, disillusionment, disgust, the unbearable tension in society, the fear of war and the fear of bankruptcy, the absence of security, the technological revolution which has gone far beyond the instruments of social control, deep-rooted, anarchistic hatred of a social order, which has too long denied the principle of social justice, the revolt of the masses and the levelling of all values, the absence of any common ethical basis—these are but a few of the multiple factors in the decline which is now upon us . . .
“Leadership in this crisis will not come from the laity. It will not come from the bottom of the Catholic pyramid. It will come only from the top, from the Hierarchy. The Christian Revolution will begin when we decide to cut loose from the existing social order, rather than be buried with it.”
Whatever opinion the Catholic Church may now express about Hitler and his Nazi-Socialism, it stands 100 per cent with him and the other fascist dictators in this avowed objective of destroying the political and social order that came out of the Reformation and substituting therefor an integral, positive-Christian hierarchical confederation of states, similar to that which existed before Protestantism disrupted the authoritarian order of things in Central Europe. Hitler laid it down in article 24 of his National Social Party Program that “the Party as such starts from the standpoint of a Positive Christianity.” This is specifically a Jesuit principle of action, with the ultimate objective of inducing all Christian sects to unite with the Catholic Church for a “Christian reform of states” —the establishment of an hierarchical grouping of corporative states entirely devoid of Jewish, Masonic and Protestant influence. Bishop Hudal2 and other German prelates have pointed out the identity of the fundamentals of National Socialism and Catholicism. Father Coughlin and his Jesuit supporters preach the same in this country. To date, Hitler’s blitzkriegs are accomplishing in fact everything set forth in his ideological concepts for a “new order” in all of Europe after his ruthless extermination of Judaism and Masonry.
2 Die Grundlagen des Nationalsozialismus, p. 18.
For centuries Vatican policy has based all its hopes for the restoration of its dominion over the nations of Europe upon a strong, militaristic Germany that would cleanse the Continent of all British Protestant influence from the West, and, above all, safeguard it from Russo-Slavic invasion from the East. A Greater Germany, in other words, must be made again the center of a revived Holy Roman Empire.
It is significant that Pope Leo XIII urged this very plan upon the late Kaiser Wilhelm II during the latter’s last visit to the Vatican. The Kaiser, in his Memoirs,3 vividly describes the colorful and solemn setting in which the interview took place, and says that he jotted down what was said for future reference. What interested him most was Pope Leo’s insistence that, by war, if necessary, the Holy Roman Empire should be restored, and that to this end “Germany must become the Sword of the Catholic Church.” Following are the Kaiser’s own words:
“It was of interest to me that the Pope said to me on this occasion that Germany must become the sword of the Catholic Church. I remarked that the old Roman Empire of the German nation no longer existed, and that conditions had changed. But he stuck to his words.”
Hitler succeeded the Kaiser and by Germany’s military might wiped out from all of Europe popular government, Freemasonry, and all the democratic freedoms against which Pope Leo XIII and other nineteenth century popes fulminated their condemnations.
Catholic propagandists in the United States, despite expressed opinions to the contrary, have not been unaware of this identity of interests between Nazi-Fascism and Catholic aims, and diplomatically, but definitely, have been striving for their realization. Hitler’s early conquests in Austria and Czechoslovakia were applauded as “a natural re-adjustment in Europe” by the Catholic Justice Herbert O’Brien of New York, in an article featured in the New York Herald Tribune of March 29, 1938. Needless to say, his opinions are not solely his own, but were obviously dictated to him by official Catholic authority. Taking occasion to warn the United States from participating in war on the side of England and France, Justice O’Brien stated that such a war would be unjust since its objective would be “to oppose certain political adjustments and changes in Central Europe resulting in economic and nationalistic confederations which had existed for generations before the great world conflict . . . and also to resist that great confederation of small groups which, up to the breaking out of the great world war. had enjoyed, under the beneficent sway of the Hapsburgs, commercial prosperity, independence and peace.” He goes on to say:
3 See, The Kaiser’s Memoirs, by Wilhem II, translated by Thomas R. Ybarra, p. 211, Harper & Bros. 1922.
“The opposition to this adjustment of the German peoples with some of the groups of the old Austrian Empire . . . comes from England and France. These two nations have expressed their bitter resentment over these changes as a disturbance of the ‘balance of power’ in Europe, and are fearful that Germany, in union with a re-united Austria, will place the German peoples in the ascendancy with ample force to maintain this position, and, by alliance with Italy, terminate Britain’s sole supremacy of the Mediterranean and directly affect its sole future control of India and Egypt and the African British colonies.”
He wrote that “dismemberment of the Austrian Empire was the most tragic blunder of the twentieth century. When England and France chopped up Austria they ruined Europe.” He applauded Hitler’s success in destroying Protestant British hegemony in Central Europe and in securing a return to the political and social set-up of the corporate union of states in a revived Holy Roman confederation:
“What America is witnessing is the normal reunion of these several parts into the original, living structure. It had to come. It could not be blocked. In justice to the 100 million people in Central Europe, why should anyone try to prevent it?”
He uncovered the whole pretense of official Catholic opposition even to Hitler’s religious and racial persecutions as well as to his “protectorates” over non-German nations as follows:
“It happened with Hitler. It would have happened without Hitler, and in spite of Hitler. And with the inclusion of these non-Germanic groups, Hitler’s anti-religious and racial persecutions must terminate and vanish. Hitler will pass away, but the great re-established union, together with religious liberty, will survive.”
What the Catholic Church is hoping and working for as a result of the present death struggle between the fascist and democratic blocs is the re-establishment in Europe of the “Real State,” a rigid hierarchical system wherein inferiors are subject to superiors. In this system each individual, like a cell in a body, must humbly submit to his fate and occupy his “natural place” which is allotted to him from birth and have no desire to get away from it. This basis of social structure is not only anti-Jewish, but also anti-Protestant. It corresponds exactly to the system of the Jesuit Order itself as founded by Ignatius Loyola, the essential point of which consists in an hierarchical structure of ideas, and is characteristic of all Catholic political thought.4 The hierarchical, as opposed to the Protestant democratic system, holds that the different races constitute the hierarchical steps in a cosmic system which no one has the right to change or modify either by individual or collective will.
The Jesuit Father Muckermann, in his many works on race hygiene, fully explains this ideology which is at the basis of all the aims and acts of Nazi-Fascism. Mixture of races, he holds, produces “inharmonious” descendants who have difficulty in allowing themselves to be absorbed into a national unity. It is well known that mixture of races brings forth strong individualities; and these in the Jesuit view, would disrupt the static “harmony” they desire among peoples and nations, as well as nullify the gregarious instinct which the Jesuits endeavor to foster. In their view “harmony” is a state where each one places himself humbly and voluntarily in the organic niche appointed for him by the supreme authority without any “diabolic inharmonious” desire to leave it. This is the way the Jesuit Order itself is built up, and this is the ideal Catholic aim for states and groups of states in the political and social order. It is the organic, static, hierarchical, integralist, corporative system of Nazi-Fascist teaching, which is already in effect in many countries of Europe. It is in direct opposition to the disintegralist, dynamic, liberal, free, democratic concept of political and social order.
4 Cf. Rene Fulop Muller, Macht und Geheimnis der Jesuiten, p. 41; also his Rassenheirarchie als Kirchliche Lehre, pp. 42, 204.
The Jesuit Order has its “Aryan paragraph” corresponding exactly to that of Hitlerism. Its Constitutions contain six impediments against reception into the Order, the first of which is Jewish descent up to the fourth generation. If Jewish descent is discovered after a candidate’s admission, it prevents his “radiation.” This Aryan paragraph first appeared in the statutes of the Order in 1593, was confirmed in 1608 and is to be found in the latest official edition published in Florence in 1893. General councils of the order have many times proclaimed that Jewish descent must be considered as “an impurity, scandal, dishonor and infamy.”5 Suarez, noted Jesuit theologican, also states that Jewish descent is an impurity of such indelible character that it is sufficient to prevent admission into the Order.6
This identity of interests between Nazi-Fascism and Jesuit Catholicism in the matter of opposition to the mixture of races and religions is something that cannot be denied. And this ideology is the prime cause of the war that is devastating the world at the present time. Hider, the fanatic, has already gone a long way to bring it to realization. If he succeeds in making it permanent, the “new order” which he has vowed to bring about in Europe will be what the Catholic Church has been strenuously working for during the past four centuries. As a result, Europe will be entirely free of that “pseudo-democratic liberalism” so hateful to official Catholicism. With or without Hider, as Justice O’Brien says, it had to come. And its beginnings could only have been accomplished by the ruthless war now being waged by Nazi-Fascism—a fact which its Jesuit proponents have fully realized during their centuries of counter-Reformation activities. But it is only by facing this fact, and forgetting Roman Catholic propaganda in our daily newspapers, that we can understand why a victory for an authoritarian Germany, not its crushing defeat by the democratic Allies, has been fervently desired by the Vatican.
5 Institutum 8. J., p. 278, 302; also Jesuit Lexicon, p. 939.
6 F. Suarez, Tractatus de religione Societatis Jesu, p. 34.