Leo Herbert Lehmann (1895-1950) was an Irish author, editor, and director of a Protestant ministry, Christ’s Mission in New York. He was an accomplished priest in the Roman Catholic Church who later in life converted to Protestantism and served as the editor of The Converted Catholic Magazine. He authored magazine articles, books and pamphlets, condemning the programs and activities of the Roman Catholic Church.(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Herbert_Lehmann

1942 Second, enlarged edition.. April, 1944 Third printing, March, 1945

CHAPTER I. Jesuits, Jews and Freemasons

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand fully what has been taking place in the world for the past twenty-five years unless we are able to grasp the underlying significance of what appears on the surface. It is necessary to penetrate behind the scenes of day-today happenings and examine thoroughly the active forces and planned objectives which are responsible for all that has come to pass so quickly in the past few years.

The 19th century left us deplorably weak in true knowledge of the history of State-Church conflicts. The facts of human development since the Reformation have become so inextricably tangled, that we have ceased to try to unravel them. We content ourselves in America with a mere superficial knowledge of events, and the conclusions arrived at, far from helping us to get at the real truth, only drive us farther away from an understanding of the real meaning of these events. Too much emphasis has been placed upon the mere economic aspect of the world-situation. The ideological and theoretical origins of Nazi-Fascism, as a consequence, have been almost entirely overlooked. Research is necessary to show where social, political and religious conflicts cross one another. There is abundance of incontestable proof that the forces of religion, as represented by the Catholic Church, have succeeded in dominating the political and í field, and that there exists a close bond between them and the origins, methods and objectives of the whole Nazi-Fascist movement in Europe. Furthermore, this domination has already spread to America. History proves that in every attempt made during the past half century against the liberal progress of mankind, the Jesuit Order, as the leader of Catholic action, has played a decisive role. We can go even so far as to state that Nazi-Fascism had its origin in the Society of Jesus, and that, like other movements in the past analogous to Fascism today, it was planned to serve the traditional aims of the disciples of Ignatius Loyola.

As long as this reverse side of the conspiracy against democratic liberalism goes undetected, Fascism will survive. The defenders of democratic ideology will not be victorious until they come out openly against their real enemy—the Knights of the Black Crusade.

The Jesuits were once irrevocably expelled from the nations of Europe, and from the Catholic Church itself, by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, and the only refuge they could find during their forty years of banishment was with the impious Catherine of Russia. Sworn to obey and defend the pope in all matters, they were hard put to it (even as Jesuits) to find a way out of the dilemma of being proteges of a monarch who thumbed her nose at the pope— in order to protect them from his wrath. Not to be outdone, the Jesuits politely and diplomatically protested to Catherine for thus disobeying the pope. And having thereby satisfied the requirements of their oath, they proceeded with a clear conscience to accept her hospitality. The truth of the matter is, that the Jesuits are not so much sworn to protect any individual pope as such, but rather the institution of the Papacy. By this Jesuitical distinction they hold themselves free to resist any pope who fails to follow their dictates; nor would they lament if such a pope were “providentially” speeded on his way to heaven. It is they, in fact, who comprise the Papacy. Their unalterable aim is to restore the nations of the world to the control of the Catholic Church.

As recently as 1886, the public press spoke frankly and fearlessly about the menacing tactics of the Jesuits to secure this worldcontrol by the Papacy. The New York Tribune, of Sept. 19; of that year, in a dispatch from Rome reporting the serious illness of Pope Leo XIII and his subsequent rapid recovery, states that the London Times referred editorially to the report that Pope Leo’s close approach to death “was due to poison administered by the Jesuits.” It relates that, after his sudden recovery, the pope established a new policy in the Church towards the Jesuits, “and that this new line of policy is the price at which he was able to procure the antidote which they alone could supply.” The Tribune report goes on to say:

“Within three days of the recovery from his illness, the pope issued a Bull re-establishing all the privileges, immunities, exceptions and indulgences formerly accorded to the ‘Society of Jesuits’, and declaring null and void all documents which his predecessors have ever written against the order. The fact that Leo XIII restored the order to what it was in the days of its supreme power is more than enough to paralyze all hopes of a peaceful determination of the conflict between the Vatican and the Quirinal; for the Jesuits constitute the belligerent element of Catholicism, and are thoroughly ‘intransigent’ on the subject of the temporal power of the world escaping from the control of the church . . .”

Far be it from us to doubt the sincerity of the Jesuits and their followers in believing that the control of the world by the Catholic Church is the only solution for the ills of mankind. They are welcome to their conviction, and are free in the United States to propagate their teaching and carry out their activities towards that end. The traditional manner in which they carry out their designs, however, should be disturbing to all who strive to sustain the democratic ideology and the principles of freedom and tolerance cherished so highly in this country.

In order to obtain their objective, they spend all their energies (as Nazi-Fascism does) against the two forces they consider inimical to their cause—Judaism and Freemasonry. From its first founding, the Jesuit Order has battled, by every means, against these two, because they are the chief advocates of tolerance and freedom for all. By the ruthless elimination of Jews and Freemasons in so many countries of Europe, Nazi-Fascism has merely effected what the Jesuits have schemed and worked for during many centuries.

In France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Belgium and Italy, the Jesuits, for many years before Mussolini and Hitler, led the fight against the Jews and Freemasons. In each of these countries it was a Catholic priest (prototypes of Father Coughlin) who was the spearhead of Fascist attacks on both Judaism and Freemasonry. In France it was the Jesuit Father Du Lac, with his Ligue Nationale Anti-semitique de France; in Germany the Jesuit Fathers Overmanns, Muckermann, Loffler and Pachtler; in Hungary it was Father Adalbert Bangha, and Father Bresciana in Italy—all of these worked under the banner of Positive Christianity and Christian Front to fight Judaism and Freemasonry, in order to get the millions of unsuspecting non-Catholics to serve their ends. They all proclaimed a crusade for “The Christian Reformation of States and of the World.”1 Father Overmanns2 states that “the rock of positive moral Christian law”3 is the best foundation for the creation of organizations capable of reuniting the members of all Christian religions.

Father Hugger, S. J., shortly after the establishment of the German Republic, wrote (in Stimmen der Zeit, June, 1919, p. 171):

“We are facing a ruinous state of affairs. Once again the work of restoration will have to be accomplished by youth. Will the Congregations of Mary not go forth for the third time as the instrument of reconstruction chosen by Divine Providence?”

Hitler4 also identified his National Socialist Party with “Positive Christianity.” In his Mein Kampf he states that he imbibed his anti-Semitism and his hatred of Masonry from the Catholic Christian Social Party of Lueger, then Mayor of Vienna, when he went there as a young man. “By combatting the Jews,” he says, “I am helping the work of the Lord.”

This “Christian Reform of States”—which is also the subject of the late Pope’s famous encyclical Quadragesimo Anno—is nothing else but the establishment of the Fascist, Corporative State, in which neither Jews nor Freemasons will have any part. Needless to say, it is also anti-Protestant.

The Jesuit Fathers Pachder and Muckermann proclaimed the Fascist doctrines of Nazism before Hitler was heard of. Father Muckermann wrote prolifically in favor of racial eugenics and sterilization,6 and continued to do so even in spite of the condemnation of sterilization in the encyclical Casti Connubii of Pope Pius XI in 1929.

1 P. Loffler, S. J., Zur Jubelfeier der Marianischen Kongregationen Freiburg, pp. 21, 47: G. M. Pachtler, S. J., Der Stille Krieg gegen Thron und Altar. (The Silent War against Throne and Altar), 1876; P. Bresciani, S. J., The Jew of Verona and The Roman Republic, published in the Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica. Rome.
2 In Stimmen der Zeit (Jesuit magazine), Feb. 1918, p. 182 et seq.
3 For the Jesuits, “Christian” is synonymous with “Roman Catholic”.
4 Cf. Art. 24 of “The National Socialist Party Program”: ”Die Partei als solche tertritt den Standpunkt eines positiven Christentums.”
5 P. 70, 1931, German ed.
6 Cf. Muckermann, Hermann, S. J.: Volkstum, Staat nnd Nation—eugenisch gesehen (“The People, State and Nation — from the Eugenic viewpoint”) ; also his Rassenforschung und Volk Zukunft, Berlin, 1932, in which he expresses the desire that the doctrine of race will penetrate the national consciousness as a religion (p. 81).

Jules Michelet, the great French historian, in his Histoire de France, and the German historian Wilhelm Herzog,7 stress the fact that those who directed the anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair depended upon the instructions and, above all, upon the financial support of the Jesuits. The Croix de Feu and the Parti Francais in France, and the Catholic Rexist Party in Belgium also had the support of the Jesuits. The Libre Parole, anti-Semitic daily newspaper, was founded by Jesuit money and its treasury was constantly replenished by them.8 The anti-Semitic leaders of the Dreyfus Affair, which was a plot against the French Republic, were products of Jesuit schools or had Jesuit confessors. In France, as elsewhere, anti-Semitism and anti-Masonic campaigns took the form of “integrated Nationalism/’9 They called for expulsion of Jews and Freemasons, the overthrow of the French Republic, and the setting up of a “Nationalist State.” Henlein’s Party in Czechoslovakia, likewise, preached the doctrines of Othmar Spann, the theoretician of the Corporative State and a protege of the Jesuits. One of the first acts of Father (now Monsignor) Josef Tiso, when he became Nazi premier of Slovakia, was the destruction of all Masonic lodges.

In his Mein Kampf Hitler repeats these principles of the Jesuits against Judaism and Freemasonry like a well-trained parrot. All that he says against the Jews and the revolution in Germany after the war, about Zionism, Jewish exploitation of indecency and obscenity in literature, movies, theater and the press, their part in the organization of vice, prostitution and white slavery, was borrowed almost word for word from the official writings of the Jesuits. Everything he says, likewise, against the Freemasons— their fight for religious tolerance, their efforts to break down racial and religious barriers, as well as their alleged disloyalty to Germany during the world war—is in agreement with both the teaching of the Jesuits and of the popes in their encyclicals against Masonry. The Jesuit Father Bea,10 shortly after the revolution in Germany, wrote:

“The part played by many Jews at the time of the revolution . . . the Zionist movement … all this should be a lesson to those who take their religion and their country seriously to put themselves resolutely on the defensive. The increase of anti-Semitic literature and anti-Semitic organizations is evidence that the people are ready for the fight against Judaism.”

7 Der Kampf einer Republik—die Affare Dreyfus, p. 34, et passim.
8 Cf. Herzog, opus cit., pp. 27, 52.
9 Idem, pp. 26, 36.

As far back as 1911 Father Overmanns, writing in Stimmen aus Maria Laach, states:

“It is impossible to deny the harmful influence of the Jews “on the ideal which we desire in our literature. . . . The Jews make use of the great scope of their influence to spread corrupt and obscene principles and thus cause immense damage to the spiritual life . . . Everyone can see that they create many literary works which are inspired by vile and worldly ideas . . . the hooks of these writers are filled with the base pleasures of life, a vile sensuality and pure naturalism. The commercial sense of the Jews is not offended by the worst obscenities, white slavery, prostitution and immorality of all kinds . . . “

The popes before Hitler proclaimed all this in even more brutal terms. Pope Pius VII, who restored the Jesuits to the Catholic Church and the nations of Europe after the downfall of Napoleon in 1814, issued a Bull in 1821 against the Freemasons. He calls Freemasonry “a cancer and a deadly disease of society.” And the reason he gives is because Masonic Lodges uphold the idea of religious tolerance: “. . . they receive into their order all classes and all nationalities, and favor all kinds of moral codes and all forms of worship.”

The culminating point in the Vatican’s fight against Jews and Freemasons is to be found in the encyclicals of Popes Pius IX-and Leo XIII. Pius IX styles Masonic Lodges “Synagogues of Satan,” and accuses them of having fomented wars and revolutions which put Europe to the fire and the sword. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Humanum Genus (1884), calls Freemasonry “a work of the devil,” and “an impure epidemic.” He accuses Freemasonry of aiming to destroy the churches, the state, and the public well-being. He states that among the chief reasons why Freemasons, and democracy, must be condemned are the following:

10 In Stimmen der Zeit, (Jesuit magazine), 1921, p. 172.

“They teach that all men have the same rights, and are perfectly equal in condition; that every man is naturally free; that no one has a right to command others; that it is tyranny to keep men subject to any other authority than that which emanates from themselves. Hence they hold that the people are sovereign, that those who rule have no authority but by the commission and concession of the people, so that they can be deposed, willing or unwilling, according to the wishes of the people. Thus the origin of all rights and civil duties is in the people or in the State, which is ruled according to the new principles of liberty. They hold that the State must not be united to religion, that there is no reason why one religion ought to be preferred to another, and that all must be held in the same esteem.”

He ends his encyclical by inviting all the Catholic clergy as well as the whole lay world to exterminate the Freemasons without mercy.11

All this was the plan of Mussolini and Hitler as expressed and put into practice by Nazi-Fascism. Circumstances have permitted it to go farther than the popes and to carry its principles by propaganda, invasion and war, into the whole world. In undermining the position that Jews and Freemasonry acquired since the French Revolution, it threatens to destroy the entire work of political and religious freedom initiated by the Protestant Reformation. It thus serves the aims of the Roman Church and the Society of Jesus, founded chiefly for the work of Counter-Reformation. For both Roman Catholicism and Nazi-Fascism regard the ideas that came out of the Reformation and the French Revolution as the chief source of the evils of our time—evils which they trace for their origins to Rousseau, Calvin, Luther, John Huss and Wycliffe —to Paris, Geneva, Wittenberg, Prague and London.

All of this again is to be found in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” An examination of this matter in the next chapter will show conclusively that this infamous forgery is the work of none other than the disciples of Ignatius Loyola.

11 Father Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, Oct.-Xov. 1939, reiterated all this in a series of three articles entitled Freemasonry in the Scheme of Satan. They repeat the papal assertions that Freemasonry is allied with the Jews and Communists, and end by calling it, in the words of Pope Pius IX, “The Synagogue of Satan.”

CHAPTER II. The Jesuits and the Protocols of Zion

IT IS ADMITTED by all intelligent people that the so-called “Protocols of the Wise men of Zion” are criminal forgeries, and could never have been written either by a group of Jews or Freemasons. Yet their authorship remains unknown. The amazing part of it is that this fantastic fraud has succeeded in its planned objective– the ousting of all Judaic-Masonic influence in Central Europe by methods that would bring a blush to the cheek of a Torquemada. (Editors note: “Torquemada” may refer to a Spanish Dominican monk. As first Inquisitor-General of Spain (1483-98), he was responsible for the burning of some 2000 heretics.)

The contents of these alleged Protocols are well enough known, and have been broadcast by Nazi-Fascist (and Roman Catholic) agents in every country as verbatim reports—proces verbaux—of secret conferences at which certain Jewish leaders drew up plans for the formation of an invisible world-government. With the help of Masonic Lodges and the liberal, democratic, socialist and communist parties, these “Elders of Zion” are said to have conspired for the overthrow of all non-Jewish governments and to destroy all religions other than Judaism. Every despicable means to weaken Christian institutions is set forth by the imaginary leaders of this vast conspiracy.

All this is to be accomplished principally by means of the Masonic orders throughout the world, as the blind dupes and willing tools of this alleged super-imperialism of the Jews. Credit is claimed for the Jews in having instigated practically all revolutionary movements of the past century, assassination of rulers and heads of states, all the wars, civil, racial and international, and all the upheavals in and throughout the nations—from the Protestant Reformation to the economic conditions that resulted in our business depression. Behind it all there is pictured the cold calculation, the unscrupulous cunning and murderous fanaticism of these “Elders of Zion.” Protocol One tells of a vast army of spies and secret agents, well supplied with funds, who bore from within and create dissension and revolution in all countries. Support of anarchist, communist and socialist movements for the destruction of Christian civilization is outlined in Protocol Three; also the debasement and ruin of the currency system, leading to a world-wide economic crisis. Universal war against any nation or group of nations which fails to respond, is planned in Protocol Seven. Protocol Ten contains particulars how all morality is to be undermined and leading statesmen blackmailed, compromised and calumniated in order to force them to serve the ends of the conspirators.

The secret conclave, at which these monstrous plans were purported to have been drawn up, is said to have been held under the auspices of “one of the most influential and most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry”; they are also said to have been “signed by representatives of Zion of the Thirty-Third Degree.”

No group or organization could ever be as evil and satanic as these Judaic-Masonic “Elders of Zion” picture themselves to be. They are the apotheosis of the anti-Christ, and could have been conjured up only by theological minds imbued with the fearful expectation of the eventual coming of an anti-Christ.

It must be admitted that there, is a certain similarity between this revolutionary plan of action and the Bolshevist program that followed the assassination of the Czar of Russia and the overthrow of the Kerensky regime. But of the seventeen members of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet government at that time, only one, Trotsky, was a Jew. Neither have the Masons ever been the least bit influential in Russia, either under the Czar or the Soviets. A world-wide economic depression also has since happened, somewhat similar to that allegedly planned by these elders of Zion. By no means, however, have the Jews and Masons ever so completely controlled the world’s finances. They suffered as much as others as a result of the economic debacle in 1929.

The Nazi-Fascists, who have successfully exploited these Protocols to their great advantage, and who have used these criminal forgeries to attain their primary objective, might well be accused of their authorship. But their publication antedated the rise of Fascism by a quarter of a century, when Hitler and Mussolini were youngsters learning their multiplication tables in school, and Franco babbling his “Hail Marys” at his mother’s knee.

Now, authorship of an anonymous document is best discovered from the document itself—by the cause it favors and by the enemies it depicts. These will appear even if placed in reverse. A clear sample of this can be seen from such an analysis of a part of these Protocols of Zion which I have before me. It is a reprint from The Catholic Gazette, of February, 1936, a monthly publication of the Catholic Missionary Society of London, England. Space limits permit the quotation of only parts of this nefarious document.

The Judaic-Masonic conspirators are speaking:

When all this is placed in reverse, the following appears:

This is exactly what is taught in all Catholic schools. Every retreat and mission given to priests and lay people begins with St. Ignatius’ picture of “The Two Camps”—the Catholic Church led by God on one hill, and a combination of Protestants, Jews, Masons, communists, socialists and atheists on the other led by Satan.

And all of this is to be found again in Father Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine. In its issue of February 5, 1940, for instance, he reiterates that the Catholic Church is “the ideal Christian Front” and proclaims that all those opposed to, or not with, it belong to anti-Christian groups which will soon “appear incarnated in the person of Anti-Christ himself.” He says that “lay Christian leadership of social matters is to be condemned.” In the same issue a special correspondent of his magazine in Rome writes an article that the “Only Hope of Christian Europe Lies in Rome,” and that Europe can be saved only by the resoration of the Holy Roman Empire; that England, “who more than any other country now represents the neo-Judaic, anti-Catholic spirit,” will be destroyed by Germany and Italy. In another part of this issue, liberal Catholic priests, like Msgr. John A. Ryan, are called “Hireling Clergy” paid by left-wing revolutionary groups. Towards the end is a trick questionnaire which implies twenty answers aimed to secure a poll from its readers which will be condemnatory of democracy.

Although first published in Russia in 1903, the Protocols of Zion had their origin in France and date from the Dreyfus Affair, of which the Jesuits were the chief instigators. They were planned also first to take effect in France, by the overthrow of the “Judaic- Masonic” government of the French Republic. But the discovery of the gigantic fraud of Leo Taxil, who had been openly supported by the Jesuits, the concluding of the Franco-Russian alliance, along with the Vatican’s difficulties with the French government at that time, made it more opportune to have them appear first in Russia.

These Protocols of supposedly Jewish leaders are not the first documents of their kind fabricated by the Jesuits.

For over a hundred years before these Protocols appeared, the Jesuits had continued to make use of a similar fraud called The Secrets of the Elders of Bourg-Fontaine against Jansenism—an anti-Jesuit French Catholic movement among the secular clergy. The analogy between the two forgeries is perfect—the secret assemblage in the forest of Bourg-Fontaine; the plan of the “conspirators” to destroy the Papacy and establish religious tolerance among all nations; the alleged plot against Throne and Altar, and the setting up of a world-government in opposition to the Catholic Church. There is the same dramatization of the negative pole of the historic evolution of the world, in order to bring out, by contrast, the positive Christian [Catholic] pole, around which all conservative forces—the monarchy, the aristocracy, the army, the clergy—must gather to save the world from Satan’s onslaught.

Analyzing, therefore, the ends to be attained by these Protocols of Zion, the means to be employed, the forces depicted as evil and those to be considered good, we must reach the conclusion that only to those whose objectives these forgeries were clearly intended to serve, can their authorship be attributed.

CHAPTER III. The strange case of Leo Taxil

THE PRIME MOTIVATION of Catholic Action is its escatological complex that the Vatican, as God’s designated champion, must do open battle with the forces of Satan before the world ends. Present world trends have convinced Catholic leaders that the time for that Armageddon is fast approaching. In their minds there is not the slightest doubt but that ultimate and complete victory will be theirs. Neither have they any doubt as to who comprise these forces of Satan. They now name communism as the generic term for the objective at which the various forces aim who are on Satan’s side against the Catholic Church. And since they hold that all who are not 100 per cent with the Catholic Church are against it, liberals of all kinds are placed under the banner of communism. Leadership of these combined forces of evil is accredited to world Jewry and Freemasonry.

“The Protocols of Zion,” preceded by the like forgery of “The Secrets of the Elders of Bourg Fontaine,” have spread this belief among Catholics everywhere. Obvious forgeries though they are admitted to be, it is safe to say that nothing contributed more to the rapid victories of Fascism over the forces of liberty and tolerance than these alleged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As has been pointed out, they insidiously picture world Jewry and Freemasonry as conspiring to establish the reign of Satan on earth and, by contrast, the Catholic Church as the sole bulwark and only certain triumphant force against it. As employed by Nazi-Fascism in the past ten years, this fantastic but clever fraud has already succeeded in discrediting democratic institutions of government, even in the United States, and in glorifying the authoritarian rule of force and brutality.

No one can deny the chief role which the Catholic Church has played in these events and all that has led up to them during the past half century. Pope Pius IX1 calls Freemasonry “. . . the Synagogue of Satan … whose object is to blot out the Church of Christ, were it possible, from the face of the earth.” Pius X2 says:

1 Cf. Brief of Nov. 1865. These and other quotations have been published time and again in Father Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine, and in other printed and mimeographed brochures sent out from his Shrine at Royal Oak, Mich. One of these is called The Malist—For the Honest and Honorable, published at Meriden, Conn.

“So extreme is the general perversion that there is room to fear that we are experiencing the foretaste and beginnings of the evils which are to come at the end of time, and that the Son of Perdition, of whom the Apostle speaks, has already arrived upon the earth.”

As has been shown in a previous chapter, the popes of Rome condemn Masonry as in alliance with Judaism chiefly because it teaches tolerance of all religions and works for the establishment of popular government, secular education and international brotherhood. There is nothing too fantastic that the popes and Catholic authorities have not believed and propagated against Judaic- Masonic aims and activities. The most astounding and outrageous were the alleged revelations of the arch-imposter Leo Taxil towards the end of the last century. So successful was his deception of the pope himself and the whole Catholic world, that Father Herbert Thurston, S. J., is forced to deplore the fact that examples of “excessive credulity have been too lamentably brought home to our generation by the outrageous impostures of Leo Taxil.”3

Taxil’s real name was Jogand Pages, and he is described by Father Thurston (loc. cit.) as “the most blasphemous and obscene of anti-clerical writers in France.” He was once jailed for having published a book entitled Les Amours de Pie IX (“The Love Affairs of Pope Pius IX”). That was all before his conversion to the Catholic Church. It was then that he began to make alleged revelations about the Freemasons, and published a large number of books about them, each more astounding than the other. Sensing the Catholic Church’s demon complex, Taxil played this up with consummate art. In his many novels, which were published by the Catholic press all over the world, Taxil stressed the cult of Demonism, or what he called Satanisme. He pictured the Freemasons as practising this worship of the devil, and accused them of assassinations, sexual orgies and white slavery. He recounted that the Freemasons tried to get women into their power to the point of forcing them to have intercourse with the devil. As proof that Freemasonry was secretly controlled by the Jews, he revealed their alleged practices of Jewish rituals.

2 Cf. Supremo Apostolatus, 1903.
3 Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. VII, pp. 701-703.

The Catholic clergy everywhere were especially delighted with Taxil’s sinister novel Palladismus, the story of Diana Vaughan who, according to him, was the result of the union of her mother with a devil named Bitron. These fantastic revelations convinced many that the Catholic hierarchy were in direct contact with this daughter of the devil through the intermediary of Leo Taxil, now their protege. Pope Leo XIII received Taxil in private audience, gave him his blessing, assured him that he had read his books against the Freemasons with intense interest, and that his writings were of great benefit to the cause of the Catholic Church. I pass over the question many will ask as to how an infallible pope could be so completely deceived by one of the most outrageous imposters who ever lived. It was one time that the Jesuits too were outdone.

For a long time Leo Taxil enjoyed the easy success he had obtained by playing upon the credulity of the Catholic clergy and laity. Then came the great denouement—planned and carried out by himself, as it were, for the fun of it. In order to enjoy his victory over the Jesuits to the very last, he called a public meeting in Paris on April 10, 1894, and announced, to the consternation of his hearers, that all his activities, his books and pamphlets, as well as the story of Diana Vaughan, the daughter of the devil who had been converted to the Catholic Church, were nothing but a huge joke dispassionately concocted and executed by him. He quietly told them that Diana Vaughan was merely the name of his typist!

The interesting, and serious, point in the whole affair is the fact that it was the Jesuits who translated Taxil’s novels into German. The Jesuit Father Gruber, whose article on Freemasonry in The Catholic Encyclopedia is nothing but a rehash of what Taxil says about it, widely publicized all his books. And they continued to reassert that what he had written was perfectly in accord with actual facts, even after they had broken with him because of his dramatic expose of himself.4

4 Cf. Hoensbroech, Der Jesuitenorden, Vol. II, page 504.

And even to this day, in the United States, the Catholic Church continues to publish and broadcast Taxil’s frauds about Freemasonry and its alliance with world Jewry. The New World, official organ of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, in its issue of March 26, 1910, published an article entitled Freemasonry— The Open Door To Damnation, as defamatory and fantastic as anything Leo Taxil ever wrote. It was reproduced, as a sample of Catholic animus towards Masons and Jews, in the Souvenir edition of Life and Action during the Knights-Templar Conclave in August that same year. It states that “Jews are the master spirits of the Masonic craft,” that “Freemasonry was founded and organized by Jews in the vain hope of destroying Christianity,” that they plot assassinations of prominent men, even in America, and corrupt the judiciary to set murderers free. Reminiscent of Pope Leo’s condemnation of Freemasonry in his Bull Humanum Genus, is the following:

“A society that admits to membership Christians, Turks, Jews, Chinese, and every other species of barbarian, and amalgamates them— or the majority of them—into an army of infidels and atheists, must be animated and controlled by the malevolence and malice of the evil spirit. . . . There is no reason to doubt that a Christ-hating Jew is the head of the Masonic craft at this time—and at all times.”

There is no need here to stress the fact that, when it comes to attacks on Judaism and Freemasonry, Leo Taxil has nothing on Father Coughlin. This priest and his powerful supporters among the Catholic clergy and laity in America are copying the methods of Hitler and the other dictators who have ruthlessly obliterated Freemasonry and Judaism from all of Central Europe. In reality they are not so much imitators of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco as the successors of the Popes, the Jesuits and the Taxils who initiated the campaign half a century before Nazi-Fascism came into being. Its objective was, and is still, to destroy the effects of the Reformation and to re-establish the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

CHAPTER IV. The re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire.

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.

CHAPTER V. Hitler and the Catholic church

HITLER is a product of the Catholic Church. He has never renounced the religious doctrines nor condemned the political aims and aspirations of the Church into which he was born and baptized. Just as his father regarded the Catholic priesthood as the highest state to which anyone could aspire, so to him as a child the priest appeared as the ideal human being. In his autobiography Hitler says that he was deeply impressed with the religious ceremonies of the Catholic Church and was a member of the choir in his parish church. In his free time he took singing lessons at the nearby monastery. “This,” he says, “supplied me with the best opportunity to steep myself in the solemn magnificence of the brilliant feasts of the Church.”1

These early emotions never completely disappeared, and he has always remained conscious of the extremely suggestive value of ecclesiastical surroundings. Toward the end of his book he describes “the psychological conditions which tend to create that artificial and mysterious half-light in Catholic churches—the wax tapers, the incense …” In fact, in his Mein Kampf Hitler approves of everything particularly relating to Jesuit Catholicism as opposed to Protestantism. He approves of the indisputability of Catholic dogmas,2 of the intolerant attitude of Catholic education,3 of the necessity of blind faith,4 of the personal infallibility of the pope— imposed upon the Church by the Jesuits in 1870,5—and of the compulsory celibacy of the Catholic clergy. These are all matters that make Catholicism radically different from the other churches of Christendom. In an open and prophetic expression of his admiration for the Catholic Church, he says:

“Thus the Catholic Church is more secure than ever. It can be predicted that, as passing phenomena vanish away, she will remain as a beacon light amid these vanishing elements, attracting blind adherents in ever-increasing numbers.”

1 Cf. Mein Kampf, p. 4. 2 P. 293. 3 P. 385. 4 P. 417. 5 P. 507. 6 P. 513. See The Catholic Church in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’; 15c Agora Publishing Co. It was a priest, Father Staempfle, not Hitler, who really wrote “Mein Kampf.”

This enthusiastic declaration of the Fuehrer is not only an expression of the prophetic sense generally attributed to him, but the manifestation of a desire firmly rooted in his soul. Like all Catholics of Central Europe, he was educated to resist Protestantism—the historical enemy which has always endeavored to detach governments and peoples from the political and religious influence of the Church of Rome. Throughout his book he has no word of disapproval for the Jesuit campaign against ail forms of Protestantism. It is true, that, in places, he states that both Protestantism and Catholicism, as religious units, are of equal worth, so far as his National Socialism is concerned. But an analysis of his particular statements regarding the two religious systems immediately shows how closely he is bound to ultramontane Catholicism. In the matter of racism and anti-Semitism, Hitler clearly indicates his hostility to Protestantism. He says:7

“Protestantism opposes in an extremely vigorous manner every attempt that is made to rid the nation of its worst enemy; in fact, the position of Protestantism with regard to Judaism is more or less dogmatically fixed. But we have now come to a point where this problem will have to be solved; otherwise all attempts at the renaissance of Germany and national regeneration will be of no avail.”

It is true that Protestantism can never associate itself with Jesuit racism. The protest to Hitler by the German Confessional Church in 1936, makes this clear: “Anti-Semitism,” it says, “often provokes excesses that nothing can justify, and which are merely the result of hatred for the Jewish minority.”8

The identity of Hitler’s ideology with that of traditional Jesuit Catholicism cannot be denied; nor the fact that by ruthless persecution and armed might, in collaboration with the other Catholic dictators, he has forwarded the ultimate objectives of the Catholic Church. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar (the Catholic dictator of Portugal) ousted Jewish, Masonic and Protestant influence from all of Europe from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. In spite of this, however, many in America are still skeptical of any predetermined connection between Nazi-Fascism and Jesuit Catholicism. They point to the “persecution” of the Catholic Church in Germany, and to professions of faith in democracy by some Catholic spokesmen in the United States.

7 p. 123.
8 Cf. Basler National Zeitung, July 20, 1936.

There is here a case of obvious contradiction between reality and appearance. In the first place, Nazi opposition to the Catholic Church in Germany has been confined to its “liberal” elements, and Catholic leadership has always opposed these more than any others. The Jesuit party has long feared the infiltration of Protestant and liberal ideas into the German Catholic mind. During the post-war years, when Germany was a democratic republic, many of the ordinary secular clergy and some of the religious orders became enamored of the liberal, secularizing spirit. They formed the backbone of the Catholic Centre Party—which was the last bulwark against Hitler’s rise to power. But this last element of liberalism in Germany was dissolved by order of Pope Pius XI, as a stipulated condition of the Vatican’s concordat with Nazism; its leader, Klausener, was assassinated in the “blood purge” of June 30, 1934. The last liberal party in Italy also, headed by the exiled priest Don Sturzo, shared the same fate at the hands of the same Pope Pius XI. It is nothing new in Catholic history that religious and social reformers from within the Church should be the first to suffer its enmity. The heretics of history, delivered over to autocrat civil power for burning and imprisonment by the Church, are mute witnesses to this unchanging policy of intransigent Catholicism.

It can easily be seen that the identity of Jesuit political thought with the objectives of Nazi-Fascism makes it imperative to conceal it from the American public. Were it otherwise, the Catholic Church would suffer complete loss of its prestige in the United States—in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. It is not surprising, therefore, that the following evident contradictions may be noted with regard to Catholic Church propaganda:

1. Opposing views of Jesuit authors on actual questions concerning politics, economics, and even religious matters;

2. The adoption of national peculiarities in all countries, even in pagan lands;

3. The combatting of socialism with one hand and ottering it friendship with the other;

4. The favoring of chauvinist and nationalist views as well as of international pacific tendencies;

5. The making of eloquent declarations in favor of democracy, and at the same time seizing upon every possible means to undermine and wreck it;

6. The creation of situations apparently contradictory of one another.

Apart from this, there is nothing insincere on the part of intransigent Catholic leadership. The guiding forces of modern Catholicism are as sincere in their conviction as their predecessors of old that nothing good can come out of liberal political and social regimes. Liberalism in religion is anathema to them and their greatest enemy. They desire peace, but hold with the Nazi-Fascists that peace can come only by war, with all its appalling consequences, as a necessary evil. For by victorious war alone, they hold, can men and nations to be made to submit to the hierarchical idea of a world-order of states, races and individuals. Their conviction is that peace can come only from that “harmonious” acquiescence of men bound to their “natural place” in society and religion. From its apex, this pyramid of states is to be totally ruled by the theocratic institution of the Catholic Church, with the Pope of Rome as the Vicar of Jesus Christ and the sole mouthpiece of Almighty God.

Alone, and without well-planned direction, Adolf Hitler never could have accomplished what he did to this end. All the world is now convinced that he was no idle dreamer, nor just a poor paper-hanger, when he attempted his Munich Beer-hall putsch. His visions were realistically sketched out for him by those who directed him as a youth, and the grandeur of their ideas of a totalitarian world, symbolized by ritualistic ceremonies in cathedrals and churches, urged him to action.

When Hitler drew Austria into his hierarchic confederation, his action was greeted by Heils from Catholic Church prelates. After his bloodless absorption of Czechoslovakia and the land of the hated Hussites, there was rejoicing again within the Catholic world. A feeble, easily answered complaint from the Vatican followed his blitzkrieg that brought Catholic Poland again into the orbit of a centrally-controlled Europe. Definite refusal met the request of President Roosevelt, through his “peace ambassador” to the Vatican, that Pope Pius XII condemn Hitler’s invasion of Protestant Denmark and Norway.

Only short-sighted, idealistic Americans fail to understand that Hitler and the intransigent leaders of Roman Catholicism are one with Mussolini when he declared:

“Capitalism, parliamentarianism, democracy, socialism, communism, and a certain vacillating Catholicism, with which, sooner or later, we shall deal in our style, are against us.”

All of these, particularly the last, are the forces which the Jesuits and their counter-Reformation have fought against (and made use of) since the time of Martin Luther and his associates.

CHAPTER VI. The Catholic church and the corporative state

A FEW YEARS AGO, Americans considered it incredible that the Catholic Church could be officially in favor of the Fascist corporative state; much less that it could have been in any way responsible for the origin and spread of Corporatism. They refused to believe that the vaunted encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, of Pope Pius XI, was an endorsement of the Nazi-Fascist objective to discredit and destroy the structure of the liberal democratic state, and to set up, in its stead, authoritarian, hierarchical regimes. Yet, this encyclical embodied the whole aim of the Catholic Church for half a century before the rise of Fascism, namely, the total reconstruction of the then existing social order on Catholic- Fascist lines. The real title of this encyclical is: “On the Reconstruction of the Social Order,” and its plan is actually the ecclesiastical counterpart of the Fascist military onslaught against liberalism and democracy.

Americans heard Father Coughlin preach this for eight years, but merely shrugged their shoulders and took it for granted that his rantings were those of a crackpot and had nothing to do with the true aims and activities of the Catholic Church. It can now be seen that this plan of the Vatican, though camouflaged in terms to quiet the fears of Americans, was being carried forward officially by the Catholic Church in the United States as vigorously as in European countries.

In our first issue of The Converted Catholic Magazine,1 attention was directed to the plan as published under the auspices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and signed by 131 Catholic prelates and noted laymen. It advocated a change in the United States’ Constitution to permit the enactment of the recommendations of Pope Pius XI into American law. It praised the NRA (National Recovery Administration, an agency created by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 after congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act), which is now admitted as having been patterned on Fascist
Corporative lines,2 and which was abolished by unanimous opinion of the U. S. Supreme Court as destructive of American democracy. In spite of this, however, this plan of the Catholic Church says: “Had the NRA been permitted to continue, it could readily have developed into the kind of industrial order recommended by the Holy Father.”

1 Jan., 1940. p. 6.
2 Cf. John T. Flynn, in the N. Y. World-Telegram, July 12, 1940, where he states that, by the NRA, President Roosevelt, unwittingly, “attempted to introduce this feature of Fascism into our country”.
3 Feb. 8, 1940. The N.C.W.C. called it “the most important utterance made by the Catholic hierarchy since the bishops’ program of reconstruction of 1919”.
4 Cf. Richmond Times Dispatch, Feb. 9, 1940.

So cautiously had this plan been advanced in the United States, that it was not until the Roman Catholic hierarchy, in 1940, issued its pronouncement on “The Church and the Social Order”3 that the press could safely headline the news that “The Catholic Hierarchy Advocates Corporative System for the U. S.”4 Strange to say, there was then no public outcry. And even now, when patriotic Americans are turning the searchlight of suspicion on every sign of political and economic subversion, the greatest Trojan Horse of them all continues to tower unmolested in the very shadow of their searchlights. In newspaper offices, this Trojan Horse of Jesuit Catholicism is still regarded as the feared and untouchable “sacred cow.”

The misconception that the corporative system is purely an economic matter, has blinded the American press and public to the real aim behind Catholicism’s advocacy of it. Corporatism is indeed the economic ingredient of Fascism. But it is also the essential element of Fascism, since the corporatives make a parliament or congress unnecessary. For these corporatives are the means through which the “Leader” exercises his dictatorial will. It was precisely because the Supreme Court judged that, by the NRA, Congress had abdicated its powers and was thus paving the way for Fascism, that it took vigorous action against it. The entire ideology of Fascism and Nazism—in social, economic, educational, religious and military’ matters—is contained in the corporative system. Corporatism is Fascism.

The Roman Catholic bishops, though cautiously, have spoken nonetheless as plainly in favor of Nazi-Fascist ideology as the Catholic hierarchies of Italy, Spain and Germany. Like Hitler and Coughlin, they start from a standpoint of “positive Christianity,” and call for “a comprehensive program for restoring Christ to His true and proper place in human society,” for “a reform of morals and a profound renewal of the Christian spirit which must precede the social reconstruction.” Implicit in this is the customary anti- Semitic and Fascist condemnation of the “Masonic-Judaic plutodemocracies” as resting upon an immoral, un-Christian foundation.

It was in this same way that the Roman Catholic bishops of Italy, Spain and Germany supported the rise of Fascism and Nazism in their respective countries. In their pastoral letter from Fulda on August 30, 1936, the Catholic hierarchy of Germany solemnly declared to their people:

“There is no need to speak at length of the task which our people and our country are called upon to undertake. May our Fuehrer, with the help of God, succeed in this extraordinary difficult work . . . What we desire is that belief in God, as taught by Christianity, will not be overcome, but that it be universally recognized that this faith constitutes the only sure foundation upon which can be built the powerful and victorious bulwark destined to hold back the forces of Bolshevism…”

All doubts as to the whole-hearted support of Hitler’s program from the beginning by the Catholic hierarchy in Germany are cleared up by a perusal of the discourses and writings of Bishop Aloysius Hudal, Rector of the Collegio Teutonico in Rome and one of the closet consultors of the Holy See on German and Austrian affairs. In his book, The Fundamentals of National Socialism, he repeats the contents of many of his allocutions to the German colony in Rome. The following is a sample:

“Let us see, for example, how interesting are some of the objectives of the National Socialist program: popular unity as opposed to everything that can disrupt; language as the nation’s spiritual bond; consciousness of Germany’s historical destiny; the sentiment of race consciousness; the attempt to solve the Jewish question; assurance of pure German breeding; destruction of parties; culture of the family, and the ideal of the large family considered as a matter of honor and national pride; the militarization of the nation . . . ; a new system of instruction and education; the corporative idea; the aristocratic principle of government by a Leader. . . . Above all, the German people are indebted to this spiritual movement for the slow destruction of the idealogy of the Rights of Man, upon which the edifice of Weimar was founded, as well as for destruction of faith in formal juridical constitutions, of the dialectics of parliamentary procedures . . . and of democracy”.

In order to prove the identity of interests between Catholicism and Nazi Socialism, Bishop Hudal5 quotes from the Catholic German historian, Joseph Lortz of Minister, who, in his work, History of the Churches,6 shows that Catholicism and Nazi-Socialism agree on the following points:

“1. Both are mortal enemies of Bolshevism, Liberalism, and Relativism, that is to say, of the three deadly maladies from which our age is suffering, and which fiercely attack the work of the Church. The essential ideas of Nazi Socialism, together with the principle of liberty bound to authority, correspond exactly to the ideas that Popes Gregory and Pius IX endeavored to impose upon the 19th century, in face of a world which called itself progressive, and which received their teachings with sarcastic smiles. To this is added their common fight against Freemasonry.

“2. Their common fight against the Godless movement; against public immorality; against the stupid doctrine of equality, which is destructive of life; their fight for a rational and fertile structure of human society as desired by God, and for the corporative structure of the state as proposed by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI (Quadragesima Anno); their common fight against a mode of life that is unnatural and deprived of all healthy traditions as encountered in great modern cities and workmen’s localities.

“3. By its principle of authority and government by a Leader, a principle upon which all national life rests, National Socialism combines the German and the Catholic attitude towards human life.

“4. Most important of all: National Socialism is a confession of faith; opposing, as it does, unbelief and destructive doubt it has convinced all classes of society that the outlook of the believer is not, as liberalism has taught, an attitude of inferiority, but one that carries man towards the total accomplishment of his destiny. And although the Catholic Church should never identify itself with any movement, it cannot afford to mists the opportunity of gratefully accepting the help of this powerful ally in the fight which she is carrying on against atheistic rationalism.”

This Catholic historian calls attention to the fact which American observers have failed to note, that Nazi-Fascism is but the outcome of events in which the Catholic Church has played a decisive role for centuries. He says that National Socialism is the “fulfilment of destiny,” and goes on to say:

5 Op cit p. 236 et seq.
6 p. 291 et seq.

“It was born originally out of the most profound tendencies of the epoch, of which it is the crowning act. Undoubtedly, we now have the right to speak of an essential transformation, of the birth of a veritable new era, the accomplishments of which will remain, A new epoch has opened which will serve religion and the Church, and which will be extraordinarily well armed to carry on the fight against atheism.”7

This, and much more, is quoted by Bishop Hudal to prove the fundamental identity of the aims and purposes of Catholicism and Nazi-Socialism. The Catholic bishops in the United States cannot afford to be as frank in supporting Nazi-Fascist ideology in this country. They cannot but admit, however, that their fellow-bishops in Nazi-Fascist countries have been correct in their analysis of the benefits which this anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideology will bring to the organization of Roman Catholicism.

7 Franz von Papen, a papal Knight and Hitler’s most successful henchman, declared in Der Volkischer Beobachter of January 14, 1934: “The Third Reich is the first power which not only recognizes, but which puts into practice the high principles of the Papacy.”

CHAPTER VII. The greatest Trojan horse of them all

A CLEVER MASQUERADE has always been characteristic of the political activities of Jesuit Catholicism. Jesuitry is a word in all our dictionaries that is defined as synonymous with subtle duplicity, indirection and disingenuousness. History is witness to the undeniable fact that the Jesuit Order, founded in 1540 for the express purpose of counter-Reformation, has excelled in the art of Machiavellian duplicity.1 It is an organization founded on military lines to fight for the political restoration of the Roman Papacy, and is the only order in the Catholic Church that binds its members by special oath for this purpose. It uses the deep-seated religious needs of the human heart in order to carry out a plan which is patently political and reactionary from the point of view of social matters.

This is a fact that must be borne in mind today in order to understand what is behind the onslaughts of what is known as Nazi- Fascism against the liberal constitutions of Protestant democratic countries. Present-day events appear as a mass of contradictions and confused paradoxes which, if they are to be fully understood, require a most acute analysis. In order to uncover the real forces which are playing for high stakes in the game, it is not sufficient to examine the mere surface of things as they happen. It is necessary to discover who is pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Otherwise we reach, not the real culprits, but only the puppets pushed out in front by their political masters to cover up and bear the brunt of the initial attack.

All the efforts so far made in America to fight the forces of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, in order to safeguard the gains of liberalism and democracy, have been frustrated by the fact that few have been aware that their chief strength lies in their ideology. Only now is it being slowly realized that they can never be overcome by fighting them merely along the lines of economic interests. But all that comes under the name of Fascism will never be successfully met until it is further fully realized that the essential foundation of its ideological factors is rooted in the past. Americans will never win out against it unless and until they bring to light the activating forces set in motion, long before Mussolini and Hitler, for the express purpose of arresting and eventually destroying the progress that followed upon the Protestant Reformation and the American and French Revolutions. Nazi-Fascism is not merely “Kaiserism with bad manners.” It is the spearhead of a hidden force which set out long ago to impose a new ideology upon the post-Reformation world.

1 Cf. the well-known Jesuit slogan: “Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”- “Be suave in manner, aggressive in act”.

Religion, which has always been used by ambitious oppressors to serve the ends of their political power, is the mask to conceal their scheme of action. Although religion is the most sacred of man’s needs, it is the easiest and most effective cloak to hide a poisoned dagger from an enemy. It has always been used by political Catholicism as a Trojan horse with all the appurtenances of war safely concealed within its flanks. This is especially the case in liberal democratic countries like the United States, where a wealthy and powerful organization like the Church of Rome is safeguarded not only against open attack but even against mild and just criticism. American tolerance, leaning backwards, has forced a rigid policy on leading newspaper offices and bureaus of public information to treat the Church of Rome as a “sacred cow.” Just as the Trojans unsuspectingly accepted the mysterious horse thrust within their gates by the wily Greeks, so too has America stood in awe of the “sacred cow” of Catholicism and has never dared even to question its presence. Americans are justly fearful of being accused of religious bigotry and intolerance, since they have long prided themselves as guaranteeing religious liberty and freedom of expression to all comers. They have been thus without means to justify an open investigation of an organization suspected of concealing dynamite that, touched off by other dangerous forces, may explode in their midst and destroy the very Constitution that has enabled them to remain secure and prosperous themselves and tolerant to the Catholic church itself.

Observers in America’s ivory towers have been blinded to the real facts behind the present upheaval that threatens to wipe out every vistage of post-Reformation liberalism from the world. This is due in great part to that subtle duplicity which has enabled Jesuit Catholic forces to pave the way for, and cooperate with, Nazi- Fascism’s successful efforts to impose on the world an entirely new ideology, while at the same time making it appear in Protestant countries that the Catholic Church is on the side of democracy, is, in fact, one of the main bulwarks of democracy. Its real aim and purpose, however, can be known only by an examination of its activities before and since the rise of Fascism.

The Jesuits take a solemn oath to fight a crusade for “Catholic restoration,” the success of which has always depended first on the complete destruction of Protestantism and its increasing liberalizing effects on political and social life for the past four hundred years. For it was Protestantism that undermined the political power of the papacy in the past. It made religion a matter of individual choice; it liberated the individual from the authoritarianism of kings and popes; it freed the civil state from ecclesiastical interference; it caused non-Catholic governments to deny outright the vital claim of the Church of Rome to be, by divine right, a universal, independent entity and superior to all other forms of government; it took away from the Church of Rome direct control over all the institutions that go to make up the life of man—marriage, education, charitable, cultural and recreational activities. It is now accused by Catholic spokesmen as being the instigator of communism and atheism and the ally of world Jewry and Freemasonry.

Space permits only a very brief summary of the counter-Reformation activities of Jesuit Catholicism which led to the rise and present successes of Nazi-Fascism against the liberalizing effects of the Protestant Reformation. The Thirty Years War, the murderous reign of the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the bloody attempts at Catholic restoration in England, are visible, and terrifying examples of the anti-Protestant activities of the Jesuit Order in the past. It was they who instigated the Dreyfus Affair as a means to overthrow the French Republic and thus nullify the effects of the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848. For these, in the Jesuit view, were also the result of the Protestant Reformation.

“The Revolutions of 1789 and 1848.” says the Jesuit Father Hammerstein, 2 “were the result of the Reformation. And today we are faced with a choice of an alternative: either to live in a Socialism during these last years of heresy [Protestantism] or to infect public life with the principles of Christianism, that is to say ‘Catholic principles.’ Anything else is but half-measure.”

Hitler himself admits that he was helped by the methods of the Jesuit counter-Reformation to carry on his ideological war. His use of brute force against all opposing convictions and philosophical opinions is the result of the fact, as he says,3 that “I made a rigorous analysis of analogous cases which are to be met with in history, especially in the domain of religion.”

But it was not until after “World War I that the active plan for Catholic restoration began to take shape. Before the coming of Pope Pius XI, in 1922, the Catholic church had been forced into a more or less defensive position towards the liberal spirit of modern times. But with the election of this admittedly pro-Jesuit and pro-Fascist pope, Mussolini and Hitler also appeared on the scene, and in combination with them the Catholic church took the offensive. The following, from the historical work of Karl Boka,4 an ardent supporter of Catholic restoration, is to the point:

“At this decisive moment the Pope seized the reins and took into his hands the unified control of all fields of endeavor in which his predescessors had distinguished themselves. This was the beginning of Catholic Action of far-reaching importance, of the entrance of the church into the fight, into the battle for moral and religious renovation, and for the reform of social institutions. And this intervention had for its end the destruction of the liberal spirit of the 19th century and the triumph of the Christian Idea.”

Since then we have witnessed Catholicism’s open support of every step taken by Nazi-Fascism to impose authoritarian regimes upon all peoples: its active cooperation in the systematic oppression exercised by the Fascist regime in Italy itself; its secret agreement with Hitler’s National Socialism (the Vatican was the first to recognize Hitler’s regime); its support of Mussolini’s shameful conquest of Ethiopia and even of Japan’s invasion of China; its open alliance with Franco in his rebellion against the Spanish Republic; its joy at the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany and the obliteration of democratic Czechoslovakia; its part in the final triumph of Leon Degrelle’s Rexist Party in Belgium and its fulsome praise for the French Fascist State which under “good Marshal Petain,” took the place of the defunct French Republic. After Pearl Harbor the Vatican accepted General Ken Harada as Ambassador from Tokyo to the Holy See.

2 In his book, The Church and the State, p. 132. published before the first world war in England, when he was professor of Canon Law at Dutton Hall.
3 Cf. Mein Kampf, p. 186.
4 Staat und Parteien. p. 75, Max Niehams Verlag, Zurich and Leipzig.

The full account of events in Germany from 1918 till the rise of Hitler to power has yet to be written. But it cannot be denied that they were cleverly maneuvered to their outcome by the machinations of Jesuit diplomacy. The owning classes, whose liberalism was less an expression of ideal convictions than of material interests, were gripped with the fear of the growth of socialism under the Weimar Republic. By clever propaganda, Roman Catholic forces succeeded in convincing them that an hierarchical church was their best protection against the attacks of the “lower classes.” On the other hand, they used the anti-liberalism of German socialists to prove to these latter that political Catholicism and the socialist movement, both opponents of this liberalism, could form a solid basis for common action in the domain of political action.

The coalition between the Social-Democrats and the Catholic Center Party was the result of this maneuver; in reality it was an unconscious submission of the former to Jesuit Catholicism, which was thus enabled to use Catholic democratic politicians and the anti-Jesuits for its own ends. It was so cleverly done that the real aim of the Jesuits was not realized until Pope Pius XI dissolved the Catholic Center Party and thus left the way clear for Hitler’s rise to power. In all this, Hitler had the cooperation of Monsignor Kaas, the real head of the Catholic Center Party. The role played by former Chancellor Briining, the political leader of the Party, is as obscure as that of his ill-fated colleague Schuschnigg. The present pope, Pius XII, was papal nuncio in Bavaria at that time and was well known to have been an enemy of the German Republic. After Hitler came to power he was sent as nuncio to Berlin and immediately drew up a concordat between Hitler and Pope Pius XI. Shrewd Franz von Papen, a favorite protege of the Jesuits, also played an important part in preparing the way for Hitler’s final victory over the Social-Democrats and all other parties in the Reichstag.

And if we look closely into present happenings in our own Western Hemisphere we cannot fail to note a cautious, yet aggressive pro-Fascist and anti-liberal trend in all official Catholic utterances. American democracy’s greatest danger is Fascist penetration of the Latin-American Republics, whose way of life has always been controlled by the Church of Rome. Evidences are plentiful that this Nazi-Fascist penetration has the support of the Catholic Church.5 The Catholic press in the United States ridiculed and openly resented the attempt of the United States to “impose its will” on the Pan-American Conference held at Havana in 1942 to countract Nazi-Fascist efforts in South American countries. The close observer will not fail to note the pronounced anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, anti-British and pro-Fascist tone of official Catholic periodicals and newspapers. They also pooh-poohed any need of compulsory military training in this country, and instructed the Catholic people to write to their senators and representatives in Washington to protest against efforts to pass the Burke-Wadsworth bill. They accuse the Jews and the Masons and liberal organizations of being the real “fifth columnists” against whom Mr. Hoover and his FBI should take action.6 Montreal’s Catholic Mayor Houde in 1940 openly defined Canada’s law requiring national registration for home defense, and urged the citizens of Canada’s largest city to disobey the law.

Political ecclesiasticism, which thus makes use of man’s need of religion to serve its thirst for power, forfeits the right to be called religious.

5 Cf. N. Y. Times’ report from Bogota, Colombia, June 3, 1940.
6 For confirmation of these facts, see issues of the Jesuit magazine America, N. Y. Catholic News, Brooklyn Catholic Tablet, Social Justice, et al. for 1940-41.

CHAPTER VIII. Nazi socialism and Catholic restoration

CATHOLIC ACTION, instituted by Pope Pius XI, is a generic term for Catholic reform and reconstruction—the restoration of Catholicism to the position of authority which it held over the nations before the Reformation. It has a two-fold object: a purge of liberal elements within the church itself, and the complete destruction of Protestantism and its liberalizing effects in those countries which threw off the yoke of the papacy in the past. Catholic Action was brought into being coincidentally with the rise of Nazi-Fascism, and was later consolidated by the Lateran Pact with Mussolini in 1929, and by the concordat with Nazi Socialism in 1933. It gained its objectives to a large extent in Europe through the military might and fifth column methods of its Nazi-Fascist partner.

It can be safely said that Nazi-Fascism and Jesuitism, the two greatest reactionary forces in the world today, are but two facets of the same unity—one civil, and the other ecclesiastical. For an authoritarian civil State cannot function properly without the help of an authoritarian ecclesiastical system. It is nonetheless true, though not sufficiently recognized, that a free electoral State is impossible without the spiritual support and nourishment of a free church.

Nazi-Fascism’s anti-Semitic ideology, its anti-Masonic and antidemocratic activities, its propaganda methods, the hierarchical structure of its organization, and even its war program, were copied from the Jesuit Order. The crusades of the Middle Ages also began with persecution of the Jews, and were preceded by a purging within the church itself. Likewise a brutal cleansing within Catholicism preceded the wars of religion instigated by the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its object was to rid Catholicism of the heretical Protestant influences which had arisen within the church’s organization before and after Martin Luther’s time. It is in the light of these events that Nazi Socialism’s fight with all the churches in Germany must be regarded. On the one hand, it was an attempted purge of recalcitrant elements within the Catholic Church which had been infected with liberal and Protestant ideas during the post-war years in Germany under the Weimar Republic. On the other hand, it was a fight against Protestantism and its liberal institutions which had been afforded still greater scope for development after the fall of the monarchy in 1918. The fight was carried out, in both instances, according to the traditional methods of Jesuit strategy.

Many Americans, however, do not see it in this light. They think only of the fact that the Hitler regime in the beginning interned Catholic priests in concentration camps because they refused to obey his dictates; that heads of religious orders were brought to trial for smuggling money out of the country; that some of the members of religious orders were arrested and found guilty of crimes against morals; that some priests were imprisoned for allegedly harboring communists; that the Hitlerites turned against Cardinal Faulhaber, Cardinal Innitzer and the Bishop of Salzburg; that public school education was taken out of the hands of the priests in Austria; that the Catholic Center Party was annihilated and its members persecuted; that its leader, Dr. Klausner, was assassinated on June 30, 1934, in Hitler’s “blood purge.” These and other facts are at times cited to show that Nazi Socialism seems to be actively opposed to the Catholic Church. They are, however, merely facts whose real significance is hidden beneath the surface. In reality, they are not indications of a war against the Catholic Church as a whole, but only against certain groups opposed to a corresponding plan of reconstruction and Fascist regimentation instituted at the same time by Pope Pius XI within the church itself. Hitler, Goebbels, von Papen, and the greatest part of the highest officials in the Third Reich are Catholics by birth and education.

The popular confusion about the relations between the Catholic Church and Nazi Socialism is due to the fact that few people have any precise knowledge of the inner workings of the Catholic Church. They have been led to believe that Catholicism is a rigidly uniform system. The truth of the matter is that it is not the wonderful unity that it is generally supposed to be. Like all natural and historical phenomena, the Catholic Church is also subject to the law of polarity and philosophical contradictions. It has always had its conservative, reactionary element pitted against opposing liberal groups. In order, therefore, to understand fully the status of the Catholic Church in relation to Nazi Socialism it is necessary to know the details of these opposing tendencies and forces within the church’s organization. History alone can furnish the key to the mystery.

An outstanding Catholic historian, Josef Schmidlin, draws a clear picture of the different factions which existed within the Catholic Church towards the end of the 19th century, and how victory for the intransigent Jesuit party led to the rise of Fascism. The following, from his History of the Popes of Modern Times,1 is to the point:

“The history of the Popes during the 19th century presents a succession of divergent systems following each other like a game of opposites and of warring forces striving for the mastery, with first one side winning and then another. On one side are the zealots striving in an intransigent and intolerant manner to preserve fixed traditions and orthodoxy, and who take a hostile attitude towards the progress of modern civilization and the liberal victories that followed on the great revolutions, which are the unremitting enemies of the [Catholic] Church, the State and the principle of authority. On the other side are the liberals who, actuated by a more equitable political sense, endeavor to break free from the traditional restraints bound up with the ideas of old, and who try to reconcile themselves with modern progress in order to live in peace with liberal states and governments, and to integrate the church, as a spiritual force, in contemporary civilization.

“From the beginning this war-like game of opposites has been going on within the Roman Curia, and especially within the College of Cardinals. It is most evident in the papal conclaves which become the stage for this play of divergent tendencies, which are afterwards openly expressed in the attitudes of successive pontiffs. For the popes support one or the other of these tendencies and personify them by the conduct of their internal and foreign policies after mounting the papal throne.”

Thus it can be seen that the Catholic Church has been torn between two main irreconcilable factions, corresponding to the two opposing ideologies of Fascism and Democracy, which are warring to the death at present all over the world. They are two distinct parties whose effects are felt in all ecclesiastical groups in the church. They are particularly active during times of papal elections, and at all times go beyond the field of religion and profoundly affect political and social affairs. Their effect can easily be seen in every phase of social and political life in the United States.2

1 Vol. III, p. 1.

The fight between these two opposing factions has been increasingly evident since the time of the Encyclopedists. The spirit of progress had developed so strongly in the 18th century, even within the Catholic Church, that Pope Clement XIV was able to succeed, where other popes had failed, in completely suppressing the Society of Jesuits which represented, then as now, the intolerant and intransigent element of Catholicism. In spite of Pope Clement’s irrevocable decree, however, the Jesuits were again restored to power by Pope Pius VII after the fall of Napoleon in 1814.’3 But the liberal Catholic groups, which recognized to a certain extent the victories won by the French Revolution, managed to exist side by side with the Jesuit reactionary group which has always regarded the liberal progress of civilization as something pernicious and diabolic. The progressive groups did all they could to bring the teachings of the church into line with modern philosophic doctrines, and thereby incurred the increasing enmity of the Jesuit faction. They showed themselves skeptical of relic and saint worship and of religious sentimentalities in general. Moreover, they made no secret of their hostility to the Jesuits. The Benedictine Order, long ante-dating the Jesuits, greatly angered the latter by their efforts in promoting what is known as the “Liturgical Movement”— a return to Evangelical Christianity and an attempt to cleanse Catholic worship of modern innovations and superstitions, such as wonder-working devotions to the saints. They aimed this especially at the Jesuits’ pet devotion of the “Sacred Heart,” which has since been outdone, however, by more modern fads like the Little Flower devotion. The Jesuits fought back by their usual underhand methods of playing on the fears of bishops and secular priests and even by sending members of their order, disguised as laymen, to spy on the Benedictines, as was done at the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Laach near Cologne.

2 Cf. The Catholic Church in Politics, a series of six factual articles by L. H. Lehmann in The New Republic, Nov.-Dec., 1938.
3 The Jesuits lost heavily during their 40 years of banishment. Before their suppression they controlled practically all educational work in European Catholic countries. In 1749 they had 639 colleges with up to 2,000 students in each; in France alone they had 40,000 students.

A severe blow to the hopes of liberal Catholic groups was the Syllabus of Errors decreed by Pope Pius IX at Jesuit insistence. One of these “errors,” in particular, fairly took the ground from under the feet of those who had striven for a more progressive and liberal Catholicism. In complete accord with traditional Jesuit intransigence, Pope Pius IX solemnly condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, liberalism and modern civilization.”

The history of the Catholic Church entered a new phase with the proclamation of the dogma of the personal infallibility of the pope, which was also railroaded through the Vatican Council (1870) by the machinations of the Jesuits. This was the severest blow of all to the liberal elements, and certain groups hostile to the Jesuits followed Doellinger out of the church and established themselves as the Catholic Christian Church. But the vast majority of those who had fought the Jesuits and opposed the dogma of infallibility bowed their heads and submitted with resignation. Bishop Fitzgerald of Little Rock, Arkansas, held out till the end and voted against it. Archbishop Kenrick of St. Louis and five other American bishops left the Council and returned home without voting.

From that time the forces of reaction fought on, invisible from the outside, but all the more effectively because they worked by intrigue and trickery. The popes themselves often aided this underhand working—at times they covered up the real intent of the Jesuits and, at other times, they restrained them lest their excessive zeal should wreck the Vatican’s other political maneuvers. In order to prevent the news of the increasingly bitter controversies waged at papal conclaves from reaching the public, Pope Pius XI imposed an oath of perpetual silence on everyone connected with them in the future.

All these developments paved the way for the Vatican’s ecclesiastical support for the coming Fascism. There followed a rapidly increasing trend in Catholic action in favor of rigorously authoritarian, conservative and solely hierarchical policies. Apparent yielding to contrary policies in democratic countries did not in any way affect Rome’s fixed goal. It merely served to help its attainment, since it was able to employ what are now known as fifth column methods by using to its own purposes freedom of speech and religious tolerance in those countries. Once democracy and freedom of speech have been obliterated by military might, as in Nazi-Fascist controlled countries in Europe, the real authoritarian and intolerant nature of Jesuit Catholicism comes to light. It immediately proclaims itself the ecclesiastical counterpart of civil dictatorship. What has happened in France since its capitulation to Hitler and Mussolini is a clear case of this. Likewise in Germany the Catholic bishops in 1940 decreed a solemn oath of loyalty to Nazi Socialism,4 and in Slovakia in the same year the governmental structure of that country was publicly and officially declared to be a combination of Nazi Socialism and Roman Catholicism.

Catholic historians do not trouble to deny that the success of Fascism is to a great extent due to the reactionary policies of the late Pope Pius XI. Josef Schmidlin,5 already quoted, in spite of his prudence in the matter, states:

4 A Vatican dispatch to the N. Y. Times of Sept. 17, 1940, stated that the pope had decided that it was more ependient to defer official pronouncement on this pledge till the end of the war.
5 Op. cit., p. 3.

“This conservative heritage appears not only by the fact that the Pope (Pius XI) allied the church to the Fascist state, but also by the fact that he seeks to deprive the clergy and Catholicism of all political activity and strongly supports Catholic Action, which is based upon the principle of an absolute hierarchy.”

Schmidlin also points out that liberal Catholic groups during the reign of Pius XI placed their last and only hope in the election of a liberal pope to succeed him. By the selection of the aristocratic, conservative Cardinal Pacelli as Pius XII, that hope was forever frustrated.

The Fascist policies of the Vatican can be seen from the following four points:

1. In the application of “modern” methods of political action, that is, fascist methods,

2. In the opposition to the one-time Catholic (popular) political parties.

3. In the distrust of the lower clergy, because of its too tolerant attitude toward pre-Fascist ideas of individual rights and liberties.

4. In the creation of a movement of restoration, Catholic Action, entirely dependent upon Vatican bureaucracy.

Much of the mystery of Vatican relations with Nazi-Fascism can thus be solved. Persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany has been directed only against those elements which did not entirely submit to the ever-increasing centralization of authority in Church and State. To this end the Vatican helped to crush out the Catholic popular parties both in Italy and Germany and centralized all political matters in Rome. This insured to the dictators freedom from popular interference on the part of Catholics; it established a more complete dictatorial regime within the Catholic Church itself; it enabled the Vatican to enter into secret concordats with fascist countries already existing, and with democratic countries, like Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal, after the destruction of their democratic governments by revolution and blitzkrieg. Finally it left the way dear for complete harmony and unity between Nazi-Fascism and Jesuit Catholicism.

CHAPTER IX. Hitler’s fight against the churches

THE FULL STORY of the rise of Nazi-Fascism has still to be written. When it appears it will surprise most Americans to discover the part played in it by the Christian Churches— Protestant as well as Catholic. For Nazi-Fascism was as much a product of the Churches as of the State, and a movement towards religious as well as political and social authoritarianism. European Catholic historians immediately recognized it as the final act in the Jesuit plan of counter-Reformation instituted exactly four hundred years before—in 1940.

Americans will never fully understand the real aims and activities of the Church of Rome so long as they continue to look at Catholicism from our American point of view. On this side of the Atlantic attention has been focussed mainly on attempts of a few “liberal” Catholic spokesmen to integrate their Church with the American way of life. These are sincere in thinking that Catholic authoritarianism can be reconciled with the liberal, tolerant principles of American democracy.¹ But the Church of Rome has its roots in Europe; there its metaphysic was first established. It is therefore to its background and activities in Europe we must look if we want to judge what its real nature is. It is the policy determined upon “beyond the Alps” in Europe that directs and guides the Catholic Church even in America. Well-meaning Catholic spokesmen in the democracies are permitted to voice their liberal views, but their wishful thinking has never had any effect in really bringing the Catholic Church into line with our American democratic way of life.

¹ Cf. for example, the article of Rev. John F. Cronin, S. S., Rome—Ally of Democracy! in the magazine Common Sense for October, 1940.

This issue has been bitterly fought out in Europe between Nazi- Fascism and the Christian churches. As far as Europe is concerned the fight is ended—with victory on the side of Nazi-Fascism and Catholic ultramontanism. In Italy, Spain, Austria, Poland, Portugal, France and Belgium, Catholicism alone was involved. In Germany, however, both the Protestant and Catholic Churches have played their respective parts. There the struggles were as bitter, and purges as bloody, within the Churches as within the State. They were more severe and bloody within Protestantism than Catholicism; many more liberal Protestant leaders than Catholic were liquidated or put out of the way in concentration camps. By refusing to make any concessions to Nazism, the Evangelical Protestant Churches are said to have actually paved the way for the success of the “German Christian” movement. These “German Christians”—Protestant Fascists—professed to consider it necessary to submit to a spiritual leader in order to free Protestantism of liberalism and rationalism. They thus became one with the Catholic Fascists who, in keeping with the Catholic Action crusade of Pope Pius XI, were purging every taint of liberalism and democracy out of the Catholic clergy and were bringing the Catholic Church in Germany into line with pure Vatican absolutism. Gonzague de Reynold, ardent Jesuit Catholic reformer, in his book L’Europe Tragique,2 states:

“A real fight has been waged within Protestantism. The Evangelical Protestants refused to make any concessions and established a confessional church in opposition to that set up by the state . . . We are on the threshold of a religious schism. These are the final repercussions of the Reformation. We are witnessing a phase of dissolution [of Protestantism]. Many German Protestants believe that to reject a purely religious authority like the Papacy, would constitute a danger to the church and to Christianity.”

In order to understand what happened to the Catholic Church in Germany, it is necessary to go back to the time of Pope Leo XIII, well known for his unrelenting antagonism to the liberal constitutions of states.3 In order to counteract the increasing influence of 19th century liberalism on Catholic countries, Pope Leo XIII urged on Catholic leaders throughout the world the formation of Catholic political parties. He thought that if such Catholic parties took an active part in parliamentary politics they would, by securing the balance of power, succeed in obtaining victory for the Church. He even hoped that these Catholic political parties would eventually obtain a large enough majority, by democratic means, to enable them to seize complete control of governments. What actually happened, however, was the very opposite. The Catholic parties gradually came under the influence of their liberal opponents and copied many of their ideas. Thus in Italy the Catholic party became the “popular” liberal party headed by the now-exiled priest Don Sturzo; in Germany it became the liberal “Center” party.

2 P. 329.
3 Cf. Great Encyclical Letters of Leo XIII—also The Converted Catholic for October, 1940, p. 19.

This liberal influence of Catholic parties became so great that the Holy See began to regard Catholic political trends as a grave danger which actually threatened the juridical and political unity of the Church itself. These Catholic parties became infiltrated with the liberal spirit of the French Revolution of 1789. The ideas of the rights of man, of religious tolerance, of freedom of conscience, of speech and press, were adopted by a great number of Catholic politicians and by many of the lower clergy.

So pronounced had this trend of popular Catholic politics become in the United States, for instance, that when Alfred E. Smith was nominated for the Presidency in 1928, the Vatican and Catholic bishops in Europe were shocked to hear that Mr. Smith had been prompted by priests to proclaim these principles to be, not a mere matter of “favor” (as he first stated) but also a matter of “innate right.”4 This was rank heresy, and, after Mr. Smith’s defeat at the polls in 1928, the Vatican rebuked those who had advised the former Governor of New York to proclaim doctrines so contrary to official Catholic teachings.

By the end of the First World War, the Catholic political parties had begun to lose the importance which they had, in the eyes of the Vatican when it first brought them into being. They became so integrated with democratic States, founded as they were on political compromise, on tolerance and the idea of equality, that it was confusing to note the alliances made by some Catholic parties with bourgeois groups and by others with socialist groups. It had become apparent that the control of Catholic politics was being lost by the Holy See in Rome. Pope Leo XIII’s plan had miscarried, and had proved a boomerang against the real aims of the Church as he had proclaimed them. Catholic political action had acquired an independence that made it a menace to. rather than a docile instrument of, the Vatican. Liberal Catholicism, in fact, which, to all appearance, had received its death-blow by the decree of papal infallibility towards the end of the 19th century, had taken on a new lease of life by means of the very Catholic political parties which had been established and sustained by Pope Leo XIII to oppose the hated liberal constitutions of democratic States.

4 Cf. Alfred E. Smith’s reply to the Open Letter of the late Charles C. Marshall in Forum Magazine, March, 1928; also Mr. Marshall’s able work The Roman Catholic Church in the Modern State.

This is how the Vatican saw it after the First World War, and the conclusions which it drew from its observations in the matter were the first steps towards the rise of what we now call Fascism.

Many of the non-Jesuit religious orders in Germany, notably the Franciscans and the Benedictines, started movements which displeased the Vatican. The “Liturgical Movement” of the Benedictines; their attempt to establish contact with the Oecumenical Evangelical Movement, and their effort towards a reunion of all Christian Churches; the attitude of the Patres Unionis (“Fathers of Unity”) who were even prepared to modify the dogmas of papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception in order to help their work of reunion; their open and secret negotiations with groups in the Anglican Church under the guidance of the late Cardinal Mercier—all these liberal reform movements were regarded as tainting the lower clergy and the intelligent laity with the heresy of liberalism and Protestantism. The Vatican regarded its authority as gravely menaced by it all, and determined to wage relentless war against this growing liberalism in political and spiritual matters.

It should not be surprising that Rome became disturbed at the prospect of a revival of the Lutheran Reformation. It was particularly marked in Germany. Friedrich Heiler5 has the following to say on this point:

“These recent tendencies of Catholicism have spread to a great extent in Germany. German Catholicism is in fact a particular kind of Catholicism, due to the fact that it has been subject, continually if not visibly, to the influence of the reformed churches of Christendom, and has constantly absorbed certain features belonging to Evangelical Christianity.”

5 Professor at the University of Marburg, in his work, Im Ringen um die Kirche, p. 175 et seq.

But the democratic States were the most powerful in the world at that time. The Catholic political parties had become too strong to be stopped by mild protests or even by encyclical letters from Rome. Repressive action, carried out by the help of authoritarian secular regimes, was necessary. Thus the two great opposing factions within the Catholic Church became locked again in a gigantic struggle: one possessing the Evangelical Catholic idea, deep-seated as of old in the hearts of true Christian believers; the other, the coldly imperial, sectarian and intransigent Roman Party, represented by the Holy See under the domination of the Society of Jesuits.

It is in the light of these facts that Hitler’s “campaign against the churches” must be viewed. Neither Hitler nor the Jesuits could forgive priests and bishops in Germany who sided with the cause of liberalism and democracy during the Weimar Republic. It was against them that the acts of Catholic repression were directed. Hitler and Pope Pius XI acted in concert to destroy every vestige of liberalism in Germany: the one in social and political life, the other in the sphere of religion. By dissolving the Catholic Center Party, the Pope removed the last obstacle to Hitler’s rise to power, and also deprived the Catholic people and clergy in Germany of any say-so in political matters. He had done the same for Mussolini in Italy by the dissolution of the Partito Popolare and the exiling of its priest-leader Don Sturzo. By his Catholic Action he concentrated all Catholic political power in the Holy See. Thenceforth, the Vatican was free to make arbitrary concordats with the Fascist dictatorships.

The lower clergy in Germany did not yield without a struggle. Many defied both Hitler and the Pope. Some priests were imprisoned. Even when the pristine ardor of Cardinal Innitzer for Hitler and Nazi Socialism showed signs of cooling, hostility was engineered against him. Catholic schools, mostly under the care of liberal, non-Jesuit religious orders, were closed; some heads of these anti-Jesuit religious orders were punished for attempting to save their funds by smuggling them out of the country. In the press of America this was called “Hitler’s persecution of the Catholic Church,” and served to conceal the common purpose of Nazi Socialism and ultramontane Catholicism. There were some mild protests from Rome but no adverse action. Even the closing of Catholic schools in Austria went almost unprotested. These were regarded by the Vatican as but a small loss compared to what was gained by the elimination of disobedient priests and their liberal views. The Nazi-Vatican concordat continues to hold and function.

With the extinction of liberal Catholicism and the imprisonment of liberal Protestant leaders, Vatican absolutism was triumphant. Of supreme satisfaction to the Jesuit Catholic faction was the knowledge of the apparent dissolution of Protestantism in Germany, and the fact that the pro-Nazi Protestant “German Christians” were forced to realize, as Gonzague de Reynolds points out, that “to reject a purely religious authority like the papacy would constitute a danger to the Church and Christianity.”

CHAPTER X. National socialism and Catholic action

CATHOLIC ACTION—the crusade for Jesuit-Catholic Reform— has the following characteristics:

1. Its direction, as laid down in Pope Pius XI’s Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, is explicitly entrusted to the Society of Jesus.

2. Its aims are: the extermination of the hated liberal spirit of the 19th century; the formation of a world crusade against socialism and communism; the success of the counter-Reformation.

3. The means to obtain these ends are: the annihilation of the old Catholic political parties, which became impregnated with the “democratic ideology, and the purging of the secular clergy, the religious orders and the laity in so far as they persist in holding to non-Jesuit opinions in matters of ecclesiastical policy.

4. The most suitable political regime to assure the success of this crusade for Catholic reconstruction is the hierarchical, authoritarian form of the Fascist state or of Nazi Socialism.

The secular clergy of the Catholic Church in Germany and other European countries have always secretly fostered a democratic tradition, and for many years considered it their principal task to live in peace with Protestantism and the liberal institutions of the modern world. For this reason they constituted the chief obstacle in the way of the Catholic Reconstruction Movement initiated by the late Pope Pius XL They were not friendly to the idea of the corporate state, to the plan of the new crusade, nor to the Vatican’s aim to set up complete papal absolutism. Unlike the Irish-dominated clergy in America, the Catholic clergy of France and of Germany and other European countries have never fully identified the pope himself with the seat of power in Rome. They acquiesced in taking their religion from Rome but not their politics, nor in accepting the Vatican’s direction of extra-spiritual matters in their respective countries.

In modern times, the European Catholic clergy veered increasingly to the idea that it was advisable to encourage Christian tolerance and friendly relations with all religious sects, even with those who belonged to no Church. Many were persuaded that the day would come when all the Christian Churches could be united on a basis of a universal Evangelical reform within the Catholic-Church. This liberal reform would be aimed at the overthrow of the “jurisdictional” papacy, with its unscriptural, political Roman Curia and its claims to ecclesiastical absolutism; it would be a reform against papal imperialism, against Jesuit-fascist discipline and overlordship. It would aim to set up an “Evangelical” Papacy which, freed of political ambitions, would act as a center of Evangelical unity for all Churches of Christendom. This would indeed be true Catholic reform—a second Reformation, the setting up of Evangelical Catholicism. It would mean the purging of medieval accretions of doctrine and liturgy and. of course, the complete banishment again of the Jesuits from the Church and the world, as was accomplished by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.

All such aims and plans for a liberal, Evangelical reform, however, fell within the explicit condemnations of religious tolerance and the liberal, democratic idea by Jesuit-controlled popes during the past 150 years. The late General of the Jesuits, Wernz, in his treatise on Canon Law,1 says:

“As concerns the relations of the Catholic Church with other religious associations, there is no doubt that all religious associations of unbelievers and all the Christian sects are regarded by the Catholic Church as entirely illegitimate and devoid of all right of existence. These organizations are formally rebels against the Church. As a consequence, he is in grave error who believes that the different religious sects, such as, for example, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Orthodox Catholics, constitute legitimate parts of a universal Church of Christ, and that they are in some way collateral branches of the Catholic Church, or sister Churches.”

Against this hope for true Catholic, reform that would have brought about a tolerant, Evangelical Catholic Christian Church, the Jesuits swept the field for an absolutely totalitarian set-up in Catholicism to go hand-in-hand with the Nazi-Fascist regime in the secular order. On their side they had Hitler himself who, as far as condemnation of religious tolerance is concerned, has always shown himself to be a better Catholic than the ordinary European priest and many bishops. In Mein Kampf he upholds and approves of the dogmatic intolerance of the Vatican party in the Catholic Church; like the Jesuits he regards religious tolerance as an effective instrument for the establishment and support of the liberal aims of the Jews and Freemasons;2 his chief cause of complaint against the clergy of the Center Party in Germany was that they had allowed themselves to become convinced of the idea of tolerance, and that they had made alliances with these deadly enemies of the Christian religion; he holds that his principal task is the combatting of this deplorable situation from which religion has suffered so much.3 He also condemns Protestantism for persisting in its tolerant attitude towards Judaism; he adds, however, that

“the believing Protestant who belongs to National Socialism could exist side by side with the fervent Catholic without his religious convictions being in any way affected thereby”.4

This yielding of Catholics to the liberal tendencies of religious tolerance was regarded by the Jesuits as the “Protestantizing” of Catholicism; to correct this they deemed that drastic, punitive measures were imperative. The late Jesuit Cardinal Billot expresses true Jesuit contempt for this yielding of the secular clergy to liberalizing tendencies, and also advocates the severity that should be meted out to them, when he speaks of

“the poor little parish priests who fill the greater part of our religious magazines and periodicals with their speeches, seeking thereby to create a new apologetic to take the place of the miracles which the 20th century no longer understands. There are but two replies to make to this: the first is the whip . . .” 5

This is in perfect keeping with Mussolini’s symbol of the fasces or bundle of rods, such as he and his Nazi partner have so ruthlessly employed to scourge Europe of every vestige of liberty and tolerance. Thus, Hitler’s program of Catholic “repression” is but the carrying out of the Jesuit punitive measures, and a part of the plan for Catholic reform against those members of the Catholic clergy in all countries who have opposed Jesuit hegemony over Catholic affairs.6 Catholic Action, like Nazi-Fascism, ostensibly started out as a crusade against Godless communism which, the Jesuits say, is but the radical application of the Protestant principle of the separation of Church and State. They hold that communism is the extreme of Protestantism predicted by the Jesuits since their founding by Ignatius Loyola to fight the Reformation of Martin Luther, and is the result of the wrong principle that the internal life of the individual is the only place where he should be allowed to seek satisfaction for his religious needs. The Jesuits therefore launched their new offensive principally against Soviet Russia, the first country since the Wars of Religion that seriously threatened to undermine their work of counter-Reformation. They have found it more menacing to their aims than Protestant England was in the 16th and 17th centuries. By completely separating the State from the influence of all forms of religion, the communists have tried to make religion a purely private matter and by this means to effect the complete liberation of the individual and the conduct of civil affairs from all ecclesiastical influences. Because of this, the Jesuits identify Protestantism and democracy with socialism and communism and seek to destroy them together with all movements to the left of Fascism and Nazism.

1 Cf. his Jus Decretalium. Vol. 1. p. 13.
2 German edition, p. 345.
3 Ib,, p. 294.
4 Ib., p. 632.
5 Die erste ist die Peitsche . . .” in Hugo Koch’s Katholizismus und Jesuitismus. p. 53.
6 The German bishops, the Catholic Popular Association and the Center Party opposed the re-entry of the Jesuits into Germany in 1910. Because of this the Jesuits regarded the German bishops as “recalcitrants”; cf. Hoensbroech, The Jesuit Order, p. 248.

Catholic Action, similar to Nazi-Fascism, will not be content with any half-hearted reform in Catholicism. Just as a brutal war campaign against democratic nations has been deemed necessary in Nazi-Fascist policy, so a brutal cleansing within the church, even at the risk of some loss to Catholicism as a whole, is a necessary part of the Jesuit program of Catholic Reconstruction. Gonzague de Reynold, one of the most ardent zealots of the movement, whom we have already quoted in these pages, frankly admits that the wiping out of these Protestant tendencies (liberalism and socialism) constitutes the first problem of religion, namely, of Roman Catholicism, and that the new “Christian regime” which will come about as a result of this desired Catholic Reconstruction of the social order, will have to be Fascist, since, as he says, “Fascism has been the only successful attempt to create a new regime.”7 The Italian socialist, L. Segni,8 confirms this when he states that

“Fascism is an epiphenomenon in keeping with the evolution of the Catholic Church as directed by the tactics of the Jesuits.”

7 Cf. L’Europe Tragique, p. 93.
8 In his book, L’Esprit du Fascisme, p. 15 et seq.

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.

CHAPTER XII. Pro-Germanism of Pope Pius XII

IT IS NOT generally known that the reasons which led the Allies to exclude the pope from the Peace Conference after the First World War were connected with the activities of Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII.

HIS TWELVE YEARS IN GERMANY

Monsignor Pacelli’s life has been divided between his native Italy and Germany where he spent twelve crucial years. Nuncio in Munich in 1917, he has dealt with the Kaiser and with the Republic, with revolutionary committees and Nazi conspirators. He was a friend of Friedrich Ebert, first president of the German Republic, and an intimate of Germany’s monumental Hindenburg under whose presidency he concluded a concordat with Prussia. He witnessed Hitler’s tempestuous beginnings in Munich and the machinations of his agents in Berlin. Viscount d’Abernon, Britain’s first ambassador to the Weimar Republic, in his Memoirs calls Pacelli “the best informed man in the Reich.”

His mission in Munich in 1917 was not the starting point of his German career. Even before the first world war, Monsignor Pacelli had been Papal State Secretary Gasparri’s most trusted expert on German affairs. It was no mere chance that in the very first months of the war he was stationed in Switzerland where he started with great devotion, tact and zeal, a truly Christian and humanitarian movement—the exchange of prisoners of “war. Yet, while there he had frequent contacts with the Kaiser’s propaganda chief, his old acquaintance Matthias Erzberger, for years a leading member of the Reichstag’s Catholic Center Party. It was with Matthias Erzberger in Switzerland that Pacelli engaged in the negotiations which deeply shocked Italy’s liberal Government, and which accounted largely for its opposition to the Vatican’s participation in the peace settlement.

* This article was published in The Converted Catholic Magazine for April 1943. The author, Pierre L’Ourson, was for many years connected with the League of Nanons in a responsible diplomatic capacity.

All his life Eugenio Pacelli has taken an active part in one of the most secret and complex intrigues of our time: the patient struggle of the papacy to regain and extend its temporal power. In this struggle, for the last seventy years, whenever a major issue of international politics was at stake, the Vatican has hitched its star to the Germanic juggernaut.

HIS TIE-UP WITH FASCISM

The Lateran Treaty in 1929 between the Vatican and Mussolini restored the sovereignty of the pope and allied the Vatican to the Italian Fascist Government. It also brought about a world-wide coordination of authoritarian powers of the corporative and nationalistic type, and the eventual entrance of Italy into the camp of Nazi Germany. Thus in 1940, after the fall of France and the proclamation of Marshal Petain’s Fascist French State, it looked as if in the present World War Vatican policy had gained substantial progress where it had failed in the previous one.

At the end of this war, when delegates of all countries will gather in an international peace conference, the pope, for the first time in more than a hundred years, will again be represented as a ruling monarch—provided that his miniature State is still intact. He expects to exercise considerable authority, although as a temporal ruler his influence will be less than that of Pope Pius VII at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Today, as Chief of State of Vatican City he possesses only a formal, juridical status. But he will have real power because of his self-assumed status as “Chief of Christendom,” a notion cleverly introduced, for more than ten years, into public international discussions and, after centuries of obliteration, re-admitted even in non-Catholic countries. As “Chief of Christendom,” the pope would take rank above all other Chiefs of State—just as the papal nuncio on the continent of Europe as well as in Latin America automatically becomes “dean” of the diplomatic corps.

“CHIEF OF CHRISTENDOM”

The idea of a Chief of Christendom, himself also a Chief of State, presiding over an assembly of Chiefs of State, is a medieval conception which has no place in our twentieth-century democratic world. It has been revived for political reasons, and unless denounced, will prove a dangerous challenge to freedom and progress. For just as the equality of individuals, the equality of nations is a fundamental principle of democracy.

To recognize one Chief of State as senior and permanent hierarchical chief of all other States would be to set up an authoritarian world monarchy, even though the term ‘monarchy’ may not be used. Caesar Augustus in ancient Rome refused the unpopular title of king and preferred to be called “Imperator,” a dignity which the Roman Republic used to bestow temporarily upon a Supreme Commander appointed in a national emergency. Hitler played the same trick in Germany. It would have been easy for him to have had himself crowned Emperor. Instead, he found it more expedient to leave the Constitution of the Weimar Republic legally in force and to assume the less conspicuous name of Fuehrer or Leader—the “Mein Fuehrer” standing for the old-fashioned “Your Majesty” or “Sire.”

Protestant nations, it is to be hoped, will not accept this new international slogan of a “Chief of Christendom” which the Holy See is trying to smuggle into general acceptance. Whatever the illusions of clerical politicians who believe in the re-establishment of the supra-national rule of the papacy, their schemes are bound to work to the advantage of imperialist Germany.

Recent statements by Mr. Elmer Davis as well as Vatican diplomatic activity seem to indicate that the Axis Powers are seeking the mediation of the Holy See. If the Government of the Protestant Kaiser tried to enlist the support of the Vatican, there is no reason why Hitler’s predominantly Catholic Greater Germany should refrain from appealing to the pope, now that even the most fanatical Nazis can no longer hope to conclude the war by a crushing Axis victory. The last time the pope’s collaboration in post-war arrangements was made impossible by Article 15 of the Secret Treaty of London between Italy and the Allies. This explicit exclusion of the pope from the Peace Conference has ever since been branded by Catholic politicians as a villainous maneuver of international Freemasonry. They still point to the absence of a delegate of the Holy See at Versailles and Neuilly in 1919 as the deeper cause for the failure of the Peace Treaties and of the League of Nations.

TREATY OF LONDON

The real history of Article 15 of the Treaty of London and the reasons for the exclusion of the pope from the Peace Conference have never been fully understood in this country. The American public does not know that Italy demanded and that the Allies agreed upon the exclusion of the pope from the future peace settlement because they had evidence that some of the most prominent clericals at the Holy See were favoring the Central Powers, and had for months discussed and planned a secret German proposal to reconstitute in Rome a Papal State with internationally guaranteed access to the sea.

Only in face of the irrefutable fact that, in the midst of a terrible war, Vatican politicians were abusing the Christian peace apostolate of the Supreme Pontiff to further their temporal interests and to extend their power, even at the expense of their native land— these papal politicians were all Italians—did the Allies agree to Italy’s demand. Although from the beginning of the war it was obvious that the sympathies of the Vatican could not be with Protestant England, anti-clerical France and Orthodox Russia, Allied statesmen—some of them devout Catholics—found it hard to believe that papal diplomacy would place its political interests before those of millions of French and Belgian Catholics who had become victims of German aggression.

MATTHIAS ERZBERGER

The story of Germany’s collaboration with the Vatican in the last war has been told, as so often before, by a devout Roman Catholic who had himself been on the inside of the intrigue and who, vain by nature and bitter from disappointment, spoke out when he felt that he had been abandoned by his former associates. Our witness is none other than Matthias Erzberger, leading member of the Catholic Center Party, militant German imperialist in 1914, Germany’s foreign propaganda chief until 1917 when he promoted the Reichstag’s famous peace resolution, Imperial Under-Secretary of State, leader of the German armistice delegation, Minister of Finance and one of the Fathers of the Weimar Republic. He was assassinated in 1921 by young German nationalists, a few months after the publication of his outspoken book, My Experiences in the World War.1

SECRET VATICAN TREATY WITH GERMANY

One of Erzberger’s chief objectives was to secure diplomatic immunity and extra-territorial rights for the Holy See. As early as October, 1914, a few weeks after his appointment as chief of foreign propaganda, he suggested the establishment of a small neutral Papal State in that part of Rome which lies on the left bank of the Tiber, with a corridor to the sea and a port. His negotiations finally led to a draft treaty “regarding the recognition of the temporal power of the Pope.” This treaty, he says, had the approval of “competent personalities of the German Foreign Office.” The first version was submitted by Erzberger and his friends in Vatican circles in the beginning of 1915. It was formulated with characteristic thoroughness.

1 Erlebnisse im Weltkrieg, von Reichsfinanzminister A. D. Matthias Erzberger, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart & Berlin, 1920.

The following extracts of this secret treaty are from Erzberger’s book (pages 127ff.):

The temporal power of the Pope is recognized by the High Contracting Powers as extending over a territory including Vatican Hill and a strip of land connecting it with the Tiber and with the railroad to Viterbo and to be designated as Church State . . .

The church State is permanently independent and neutral. Its independence and neutrality are guaranteed by the High Contracting Powers.

Sovereign of the Church State to the Pope. During the vacancy of the Apostolic Chair the sovereignty is exercised by the College of Cardinals.

Citizens of the Church State are: Papal legates, nunzios and internunzios, members of the Papal Court, officials of the administrations and palaces of the Church State, members of the Palace guards as well as ecclesiastics permanently residing in the Church State . . .

The Kingdom of Italy pledges to render the Tiber navigable for oceangoing ships with draught of five meters, along the border of the Church State and thence to the sea, within two years from the ratification of the present treaty.

Papal ships can at all times navigate on the Tiber to and from the sea without being subject to the authority of the Italian State. Should Italy be at war or should it, for other reasons, deem necessary to close the Tiber waterway to general traffic, a channel is to be kept open for Papal ships, and river pilots are to be placed at their disposal. Papal ships shall be treated by the High Contracting Powers as extraterritorial in peace and in war and not subject to interference by a foreign power . . .

The Kingdom of Italy will pay to the Holy See within six months after the ratification of the present Treaty the sum of 500,000,000 Lire, to cover the cost of the Papal Court and of the administration of he Church State.

The sovereignty of the Church State includes finances and jurisdiction.

Diplomatic representatives of foreign powers accredited to the Holy See enjoy within the territory of the Kingdom of Italy the same privileges and exemptions as diplomatic representatives of the same rank accredited to the Kingdom of Italy … In case of a state of war or a break in diplomatic relations between the Power they represent and the Kingdom of Italy, they have to take residence in the Church State . . .

The High Contracting Powers, after the ratification of the present Treaty, will invite all those powers which are not signatories of this treaty to recognize the temporal power of the Pope over the territories designated in Article I as well as the extra-territorial status af Papal ships as provided in Article V.

This Treaty shall be ratified as soon as possible. Ratification documents will be deposited with the Holy See. The Treaty enters into force on the day on which ratification documents have been deposited.

It is not astonishing that the liberal Government of Italy should have resented this planned infringement of their country’s sovereignty by Germany and the Vatican. Nor was this all. Germany has never given without receiving. Only indirectly does Herr Erzberger inform his readers of the assistance which Germany had received and was to receive from the Holy See.

INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC COMMITTEE

After Italy entered the war on the side of the Allies, Erzberger, as the Kaiser’s chief of propaganda, organized in collaboration with an emissary of the Papal Secretary of State, an International Catholic Committee in which each country was represented by five or seven delegates. Its object was to urge upon all belligerents that the territorial independence and the political freedom of the Holy See should be guaranteed in the future peace. This International Catholic Committee and several of its sub-committees met repeatedly in Switzerland and Holland. Its chief purpose was to explain the German viewpoint to the world. Erzberger tells us that the high official of the Roman Curia with whom he negotiated in Switzerland was in charge of the exchange of prisoners of war. He was Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the present Pope Pius XII.

PAPAL PEACE OFFENSIVE

Negotiations between Erzberger and Pacelli continued throughout 1916. In June of that year Erzberger was “asked by the German Secretary of State to inform the Vatican that the German Government was willing to accept the good services of the Pope in the matter of peace and would appreciate them.” He at once consulted with his “friend, the representative of the Papal Secretary of State in Switzerland” [Pacelli], who believed that the time had come for “winning the peace.” But after the Vatican peace move had produced its first results, it was checked by a parallel intervention of the German Foreign Office through Spain. The results which Berlin wished to obtain in 1916 were only of a diplomatic and psychological nature. Germany was in fact merely trying to disintegrate the home front of the Allies and to obtain a clear picture of the political situation in the Allied camp. The Papal peace move thus suited the Kaiser’s purpose.

In 1917, after Eugenio Pacelli had been appointed nuncio in Munich, Wilhelm II became more outspoken in his demands. According to Pope Pius XII’s official biography by Kees van Hoek (published in London in 1939 by Burns, Oates & Washburn, Ltd., publishers to the Holy See), the Kaiser told Monsignor Pacelli “that the Pope should mobilize the Episcopate all over the world in a moral peace offensive and begin by using his special influence on Catholic States by promoting [a separate] peace between Italy and Austria.”

JESUIT PROPAGANDA AMONG PROTESTANTS

Erzberger’s propaganda mission ended shortly after Pacelli had taken up residence in Germany. With laudable frankness Erzberger tells us (page 7) that he had been assisted by “a number of Jesuit priests who rendered us extremely valuable services in enlightening foreign countries.” Nor were these propaganda activities limited to Catholic circles. It should be of interest to Protestants in America to discover that this prominent Roman Catholic politician, working hand in glove with the highest dignitaries of the pope, also organized what was known as “Weekly Evangelical Letters.” These letters were edited by Dr. Deissmann, Professor of Protestant theology at the University of Berlin and were addressed especially to American Protestants. “Professor Deissmann,” says Erzberger, “was very skillful in drawing up his mailing lists . . . We adapted the contents of these letters deliberately to American interests . . . Professor Deissmann had reason to be satisfied with the response. The Secretary General of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, representing thirty evangelical church organizations with 125,000 communities, maintained close relations with him.” This gentleman might not have done so, had he known that these “Weekly Evangelical Letters” were financed and—in the last instance— directed by propaganda chief Erzberger and his Jesuit assistants.

Erzberger’s assassination in 1921 had been planned for some time. The young fanatics who killed him were only the instruments of others who wished to eliminate this man who knew too much, who already had said too much and who had been too closely connected with events in which the promoters of the present World War saw Germany’s humiliation.

PACELLI’S POST-WAR ACTIVITIES

Monsignor Pacelli’s stay in Germany lasted in all more than twelve years. He was in Munich under the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic which he fought, and at the time of Hitler’s first putsch in 1923. When France occupied the industrial Ruhr Valley because Germany refused to continue reparations payments, the Nunzio, though not accredited to Prussia, ostentatiously flew from the Bavarian capital to Duesseldorf in the Prussian Rhineland, and induced his friend Achille Ratti, then Pope Pius XI, to publish an open condemnation of the “Ruhr adventure.” In 1925 he obtained a concordat with Bavaria, a concordat with Prussia in 1929, after his appointment as nuncio in Berlin, and in 1933 the famous concordat with the whole of Hitler’s Germany.

“Cardinal Pacelli,” wrote Kees van Hoek, his official Catholic biographer, in 1939, “has always been known for his strong German leanings.”

Thus it is that Germans and Italians now have good reasons for looking forward hopefully to Pius XII’s mediation on their behalf. For his past history shows that, instead of condemning Hitler whom he knew well during the seven years of his stay in Munich, he negotiated a concordat with the Nazis just as he tried to negotiate one with the Kaiser’s Germany during the last war. He fears German radicals as much as his predecessor feared the Bolsheviks. Like Pius XI, he is connected with the Fascist bourgeoisie through his family. His uncle, a famous banker, was the founder and guiding spirit of the Banco di Roma, one of Italy’s greatest banks and investment houses. His brother, Francesco Pacelli, who drafted the Lateran Treaty with Fascism, had more than a hundred secret conferences with Mussolini before the treaty was signed.

The Papacy undoubtedly can and will survive the present Fascist set-up in Italy, but in the lifetime of Eugenio Pacelli it will continue to support Italy’s vested interests and will continue to remain pro- German under any kind of a regime, provided it is not anti- Catholic.

Today, Papal diplomacy is again busy behind the scenes. Judging by its record in the last war and by the personal leanings of the present Pope and his Jesuit advisers, the Curia is not the disinterested and elevated tribunal which it is made to appear to Americans. The Pope, too, has a political axe to grind.

By propagating the idea that the Pope as “Chief of Christendom” is to be dean and arbiter in the future peace conference, clerical politicians, however, may render disservice to their cause. Protestants as well as Orthodox Catholics, who do not believe in any “Chief of Christendom,” might come to learn that the Allies in London in 1915, after all, were not so ill-advised.