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.

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