The Vatican As A Fomenter Of War

AMERICANS are being fed with false propaganda that the Pope is an ardent advocate of peace. They are even being led to believe that he is a staunch defender of democracy — at least that he has been at long last converted to the defense of democratic ideals. The irony of the matter is that, while gullible American Protestants are swallowing this propaganda, hook, line and sinker, the people in Catholic countries of Europe, free now for the first time in a decade to express their true minds, are not mincing words in their bitter accusations against the Vatican and its hierarchy for their reactionary and pro-Axis activities. Only Catholics who have suffered in countries dominated by the Catholic church are truly anti-Clerical and understand its policy.

In order to cover up its disastrous alliance with the Axis dictators in the heyday of their triumphs, the Vatican is now trying to convince Americans that its true policy involves no preference for any particular form of government, that, in the words of the late Pope Pius XI, it would ally itself “with the devil himself,” if it serves the welfare of the Catholic church. Replying to the syndicated columnist Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s charges that the Vatican has favored Fascism and failed to support democracy, the Jesuit Father Charles T. Conroy, of Westbaden College, Indiana, declared (N. Y. Post, January 30, 1945):

“The truth is that the Vatican is not primarily interested in forms of government as such… It is possible for a government to be a benevolent monarchy, even, perhaps, a benevolent dictatorship… The Vatican is not so much interested in the form in which the government holds its power, but it is tremendously interested in the way that power is exercised.”

This is the true, and shamefully unethical teaching of the Roman Catholic church — a subtle restatement of the old Jesuit principle that the end justifies the means. The Catholic church will bless and ally itself with any kind of powerful government, as long as it uses its power to support the political aims of the Catholic church. For this reason, it entered into solemn agreements with the ruthless regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito. And these agreements still remain in force on this first day of April, 1945, when the three big bloody dictatorships are going down in utter defeat, condemned and repudiated by all the decent-minded nations of the world. If the Papacy now begins to show favor to democratic countries, it will be merely because it hopes to use the growing power of these countries in its favor.

POPES TODAY, although they are sovereigns in their own right with a token army at their disposal, do not lead soldiers in battle as they did of old. Yet the Pope’s diplomats and representatives are mixed up in all the intrigues of war among the nations. In some countries, such as Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Pope’s nuncio is the “dean,” — the leader and highest ranking member — of the entire diplomatic corps. Any good European history will prove how much these Papal statesmen have had to do with the fomenting of wars in the past. Count Carlo Sforza, formerly Foreign Minister of Italy, gives authoritative information concerning the Vatican’s part in bringing on World War I, in his book, Contemporary Italy.

It is difficult to get Americans to believe that a so-called Christian church would actually foment war and its terrible consequences as part of its policy. That is because Protestantism has taken religion out of politics and developed exclusively its purely spiritual aspect. To the church of Rome, the slaughter and even torture of individuals by war and Inquisition may be a necessary and laudable act — if necessary to safeguard the Catholic people from contact with “heretics,” or to preserve and enhance the power of the church as a whole. This was re-stated, for instance, in the Jesuit magazine The Catholic Mind of last January in a defense of the Catholic church’s cruel laws against the Jews, and holds good also of its attitude toward Protestants. It declared:

“Full freedom to non-believers must be restricted when their activities interfere with Catholic worship or tend in some degree to contaminate Catholic truth.”

War with its suffering is a small matter in the eyes of the Catholic church compared to the danger of losing its undisputed control over the Christian world. It fanatically believes in its mission from God to be the sole religious teacher and guide of all men. It professes to regard all worldly happenings “sub specie aeternitatis,” (“under the aspect of eternity”) and the death of one or a million “heretics” who would imperil its eternal mission is not only excusable but a necessary and worthy part of its duties on earth. But having a mere token force of soldiers at the Vatican, the Catholic church must use the armies of governments in alliance with it to do the killing. Pope Leo XIII insisted with the late German Kaiser that “Germany must become the sword of the Catholic church.” The Kaiser failed in this, but Hitler twenty-five years after him very nearly succeeded. It was the Vatican that made possible the militarization of Germany toward the end of the last century. And it was the Vatican, as Count Sforza tells us, who gave its blessing to the first World War that was touched off at Sarajevo.

Americans should remember these things when the Pope of Rome is glamorized in their controlled press as the personification of peace and democracy.

War As An Instrument Of Papal Policy By J. J. Murphy

HIGH-PRESSURE PROPAGANDA has been selling the Pope to the American people as the great champion of world peace — as the spiritual Father of Christendom who stands apart from politics and devotes himself solely to the maintenance of moral principles. European authors and statesmen, such as Count Carlo Sforza, who have had access to the secret archives of their countries, know this to he false. Nor has the refusal of the Vatican to open to the world its historical archives been able to hide what the New York Times openly and rightly called “the profound immorality of the temporal policy of the Church of Rome.” This war-making policy of the Vatican has involved the nations in endless intrigues by playing off one nation against another like pawns on a chessboard, as the following article clearly shows.

CLAIMING the exclusive right to be considered the living and infallible representative of Christ on earth, the Roman Catholic church wishes to be looked upon as an essentially spiritual organization solely devoted to safeguarding the moral principles of Christianity. It proclaims to the world its abhorrence of evil and undying adherence to changeless principles as opposed to expediency. It shudders in theory at the slightest defection from absolute right and dramatizes its purity by repeated quotation of Newman’s words:

“The Catholic Church holds it is better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one willful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.”

It is on these grounds of divine incorruptibility that the Catholic church demands the right to be an arbiter of world peace at the coming conferences of the United Nations and condemns beforehand all decisions that it does not help shape. But since even the worst perpetrators of evil have shouted from the housetops the holiness of their intentions and purposes, no one can quarrel with the public’s right to examine the claims of the Roman Catholic church in the light of historical facts. The saying of Christ, “by their fruits you shall know them,” still holds good of moral theories and pretenses.

Religion Of The Sword

Unfortunately for the Catholic church, its historical record does violence to its proud claims. It even lends credence to the accusation that these bold pretenses of virtue are but a mask for its political ambitions and intrigues. For on examination, we find that the most immoral practices of the Catholic church are not mere accidents of history but the logical conclusion of its fundamental dogmas. From its basic belief that it is the one and only true church of Christ to whom Christ gave “all power in heaven and on earth,” it logically lays claim to supreme authority in things spiritual and material and condemns all dissenters as enemies of Christ and destroyers of souls. In accordance with this, the cardinal who crowns a new Pope with the tiara pronounces during the ritual these words:¹

“Receive the tiara adorned with three crowns and know that thou art Father of princes and kings, Ruler of the world, Vicar of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

The Catholic church’s right not only to participate in politics but to render final decisions was openly taught by Pope Boniface VIII in an official papal bull, Unam Sanciam, which proclaimed the church to be a perfect political society, as superior to the state as the sun is to the moon which merely reflects its light. Speaking of this bull, the Catholic book, The Vatican as a World Power, translated from the German by Dr. George Shuster, says (page 197):

“The meaning of the bull [‘Unam Sanctam’] is contained in these sentences: the spiritual power [the Catholic church] has the authority to establish the worldly power, and to judge it when it is not good; and it is necessary to salvation to believe that all human creatures are subject to the Pope…

’Whoever admits the doctrine that the Catholic church is “the continuation of Jesus Christ” and the infallible teacher of his divine doctrines, must logically admit that anyone who dissents from its teachings perverts the truth and sins against the welfare of society. Nor can he quarrel with the statement of Catholic Encyclopedia (VIII, 36) that disbelief in the church’s teachings is a crime worse than treason that must be stamped out by physical punishment. This is what the Jesuit Cardinal Billot teaches in his seminary textbook on dogmatic theology: “God not only permits the Church to use force, but definitely prescribes it to her. There is no efficacious remedy against heresies but medieval laws.” ²

It follows from this that the medieval Inquisition, established and implemented by the Papacy, is the logical result of Catholic claims to be the “one church outside of which there is no salvation.” Of this same forceful defense of Catholic dogma through the Inquisition, Lecky in his book, The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (vol. I, p. 326), says that it “exhibits an amount of cold, passionless, studied and deliberate barbarity unrivaled in the history of mankind.”

The right of the Catholic church to punish heretics was not an accidental distortion of its teachings in medieval times. It is still taught in the Latin textbooks on dogmatic theology used today in American Catholic seminaries. The Holy Office of the Inquisition is still the most powerful bureaucracy in the Roman Curia. It did not stop inflicting corporal punishment in the Middle Ages, but continued to do so, wherever it could, right into the last century, namely in Spain, Mexico, the Philippines and the Papal States. Heresy was declared a political crime. The Cambridge Modern History (XI, 706) notes that in 1850 there were 8,800 “political prisoners” of this kind in the small Papal States alone.

Throughout the 19th century, one Papal encyclical after another was issued to condemn in scathing terms both liberalism and democracy in Belgium, France, Bavaria, Austria, Spain and Italy. This fight of the Vatican against civil liberties extended right down to the present, as is admitted by Catholic statesman Count Carlo Sforza, Foreign Minister of pre-Fascist Italy, in his recent book, Contemporary Italy:³

“And the new Pope, Pins XI, like Pius X, was not only hostile to ideas of liberty… To those who warned him that dealing with faithless and lawless demagogues is always dangerous, he replied: ‘I know it, but at least they don’t believe in the villainous fetish of liberalism.’”

“A distrust shared in common, a common hatred, constitute stronger bonds than those of common sympathies, and the Catholicism of Pius XI shared one hatred in common with Fascist chiefs — the hatred of political liberty.

Repudiation Of Peace

The doctrine that the Catholic church has the right to use physical force to attain its ends holds as true in the realm of international politics as it does in the case of heretical individuals. In other words, the Catholic church approves of war as a means of securing for itself greater political power. In spite of wordy distinctions between a “just” and an “unjust” war, it has never forbidden a single war that might redound to its profit. On the contrary, it has frequently urged on the belligerents or cooperated with them by connivance, open or secret — by the intrigues of Vatican diplomacy or the approval of their Father Confessor. Count Sforza says (p. 56), “Naturally the Bourbons, like the Savoys, violated their constitutions… they had confessors to absolve them.”

Since the Treaty of Westphalia, which put a legal end to the open political power of the papacy in 1648, the objective of the Vatican has been to continue the counter-Reformation to the point where a reestablished Holy Roman Empire would wipe out the last vestige of liberal, Protestant Europe. The Popes realistically faced the fact that this could be done only by warfare. In our own times they did their best to undermine the League of Nations and sneered at plans for peace. Sforza (p. 205) remarks of Pope Benedict XV in the First World War:

“He long resisted the pressures of those who recommended putting to the service of peace the ‘high moral authority of the Holy See.’ With his habitual tone of sarcasm he used to reply, ‘Authority? Strange that they should talk so much of it…’”

As late as May 23, 1920, when he issued his encyclical, Pacem Dei, Benedict XV completely avoided mention of the League of Nations as if it did not even exist. In later years his successors used their influence over DeValera and numerous small Catholic nations of Latin America to vote against every League proposal that would have strengthened its authority, such as the boycott of Fascist Italy during the rape of Ethiopia.

Not to mention two World Wars, to which we shall refer later, the horrible Thirty Years’ War that devastated Europe is a terrifying instance how the Jesuits instigated continuous warfare for a whole generation to attain their purpose. It is with such uses of war in mind that one must read Rome’s reprobation of pacifism. Father Walter Farrell, in his work on the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, A Companion to the Summa (III, 123), lays down the law for Catholics:

“That war, under some circumstances, is justified is not a mere philosophical opinion; a Catholic is not free to embrace or reject it. It is a solemn doctrine of the Church; in fact, time and again through the ages, the Church through Her councils and Supreme Pontiffs, has urged men to wage war.”

Unethical Self-interest

The Catholic church’s claim that it adheres at all times to the same moral principles is ludicrous in the light of history. It practices today in its parish banks the very principles of money lending that it anathematized in the Middle Ages, to give only a single instance. In politics it followed a similar pattern. It never failed to reject a moral principle in matters of politics, if it stood to gain by the deal. Its conservative principles against revolutions, that it championed in Europe throughout the last century in defense of outworn monarchies, were thrown to the winds when it saw’ in the Franco revolution a chance to overthrow the duly elected regime of a liberal, Republican government in Catholic Spain.

The Vatican has switched back and forth with every wind, according to its own selfish interests and without the slightest regard for principle. In 1874 the papacy forbade Catholics in Italy to participate in democratic government by holding office or even by voting in the elections. Four years later it confirmed this order by the famous Non Expedit decree. In 1918 it revoked this decree and cooperated with Father Luigi Sturzo, a life-long priest politician, in establishing a democratic political party, the Partito Populare. Less than 10 years later it cooperated with Mussolini in the establishment of a dictatorship with a church-state union and disowned Father Sturzo by letting Mussolini force him into exile. Now that Fascism has been overthrown, the Vatican is preparing to use Father Sturzo again to reestablish the Partito Populare in one form or another.

In the same expedient way the Vatican first established the Center Party in Germany, then double-crossed it under Bismarck. It cooperated with it again, only to sell it out to Hitler in the early 1930’s. Of this latter betrayal, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, former Deputy Director of the Office of War Information, in the New York Post, of January 30, 1945, tells the following facts:

“In Berlin in 1932 and 1933 I watched with fascinated horror the democratic Catholic Center Party slowly abate its resistance to the Nazis, with Msgr. Kaas, its titular head, slowly yielding to arguments from Rome until the final capitulation to Hitler which opened the door to Ger- many’s attack on the human race.”

The way the Vatican sought its selfish ends by double-crossing its own coworkers and its own Catholic political parties is similar to the way it broke its word to nations. As we shall see below, it begged Protestant Germany to be the ‘temporal arm’ of the Catholic church; when a little while later it felt that it had more to gain by uniting with France and Russia against Germany, it broke its pledge without a scruple. Later, when Germany grew stronger, it reversed itself once more and allied itself with German militarists first by an unwritten agreement, later by a written ‘secret agreement’ in the Concordat with Hitler.⁴

In the Roman church’s immoral policy of expediency there are no real principles, except that ‘whatever benefits the church is right.’ Michael Williams, ardent Catholic apologist and ranking member of Catholic Action in this country, has repeatedly justified the Vatican’s alliance with Mussolini and Hitler by quoting the words of the late Pope Pius XI, that he “would negotiate with the devil himself if the good of souls demanded such action.”⁵

That is about the size of it. The papacy will make a deal with evil men and the most Godless nation, if it thinks it can increase its power by doing so.

This immoral, opportunist principle is the compass of the policy of the Jesuits, whose General, known as the ‘black Pope,’ controls the Vatican court and bureaucracies. If any one, Pope or cardinal, stands in the way of the Jesuits, he either yields as did Pius IX who changed from a liberal to a die-hard reactionary, or it is just too bad for him. As they drew toward the end of their lives several Popes seemed to regret that they had followed the dictates of the Jesuits, but before they got a chance to mend their ways they passed away, often very unexpectedly. After the death of Leo XIII, his Secretary of State, Cardinal Rompolla, was practically imprisoned in the Convent of Santa Maria. Sforza (201) tells that only one of the Vatican diplomats dared to visit Rompolla where he “lived in solitude and abandonment.” Pope Benedict XV began to veer from support of German militarism when he first took office. With this in mind he appointed a trustworthy friend to the Secretariat of State. What happened to change his policy is clearly implied by Humphrey Johnson in his book, Vatican Diplomacy (p. 13):

“Pope Benedict XV chose his old friend, Cardinal Ferrata, to fill the post of Secretary of State, a step that created a favorable impression in France. A month later, Ferrata succumbed sud- denly to a painful internal malady, which set in circulation… the time-honored rumors of foul play.”

Count Sforza (343) tells how the late Pope Pius XI had a change of heart shortly before he reached his end, and how intent he was on warning the faith- ful against the Nazi-Fascists into whose clutches he had delivered them. “The last two days of his life were devoted to writing a speech… intended to tell them that the dangers were equally serious from both sides.” But he was never given a chance to publish it. Sforza relates that on his deathbed his last words were, “Let me have another day; I have such an important duty to fulfill.” Pius XI never got “another day” to publish an encyclical that might have ruined the carefully laid plans of the Jesuits. That was the last that was ever heard of the proposed encyclical.

Eugene Pacelli, the present Pope Pius XII, did not share his predecessor’s last-minute change of conviction. “He has always been known for his strong German leanings” Kees van Hoek, his official Catholic biographer, is forced to admit. The wiliest Roman diplomat of a century, Pius XII is the apple of the Jesuits’ eye. After spending 12 years in Germany and knowing Hitler at first hand, he signed the Vatican-Hitler Concordat with enthusiasm. He has refused to declare it void, and has lived up to its ‘secret clause’ by striving ceaselessly to effect a ‘negotiated peace’ for the defeated Nazis and, when that proved hopeless, by pleading for their pardon. As the Patriarchs of the Orthodox church, recently meeting in general council, declared with unmistakable reference to him and his Vatican agents:

“There are the voices of those who call themselves Christians calling for forgiveness of infanticides and traitors. These people expose themselves to the same blame as the Fascists who are drowning in the blood of their victims.” (New York Post, Feb. 6, 1945)

The Sell-Out Of Catholic Nations

The following brief review of salient points in the history of the last century will show how the Jesuits and their papal figureheads ruthlessly played politics for their own selfish interests, even to the point of selling out Catholic nations. Never was political conduct less inhibited by thoughts of morality.

The history of Poland is a good example of a Catholic nation held in subjugation for centuries, much to the satisfaction of the Vatican. The Pope’s only interest was to use his power over the illiterate Poles as a pawn in his political bargaining with the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. In the historical excerpt that follows in illustration of this point, Pope Leo XIII was secretly double-crossing Germany, with which he had an oral alliance, because it was upholding the independence of Italy, while the Freemasons ruling France had promised him a restoration of the Papal States. The well-known historian Rene Fulop-Miller narrates the facts in his book, Leo XIII and Our Times (pp. 116-17):

“During the 1880’s the danger of a clash between Russia and Germany became an increasingly important factor in determining the course of the foreign policy of various cabinets, and with rare skill Pope Leo XIII at once contributed to use this situation for his own purposes.

“The coming war would have to be fought on the soil of the old Polish kingdom partitioned between Prussia and Russia, and it might be a matter of decisive military importance whether the Poles rose against Russia… This depended in very considerable measure on the influence of the Catholic clergy on the Polish people. Pope Leo XIII now gave the Russian Foreign Minister Giers to understand that he might he prepared to use his influence with the Poles in a direction favorable to the Czarist government, and again, as with France, the ‘papal card’ won the game…

“Although the Polish party at the Vatican did everything in its power to prevent the Pontiff from throwing his influence on the side of the Czarist regime, the Pope sent instructions to the Polish bishops [in Russian Poland] that they were to ‘impress upon the faithful the duty of obe- dience to the secular power and of docility toward the ruling authorities,’ and to see that no Catholic in Russia entered ‘any societies which are working for revolution in the State or for the disturbance of peace and security’… At the same time, the ‘Curia’ did its utmost to cement the rapprochement between Russia and France and to dissipate the mistrust of that democratic Republic which still existed in conservative St. Petersburg.”

It was at this time that Leo XIII wrote his encyclical, Sapientiae Christianae, to ingratiate the Vatican with democratic France — the same France that one Pope after another had denounced in the most violent language ever since the French Revolution of 1789. At this same time Leo XIII was vilifying Italian democracy, after forbidding Catholics to even vote in the elections. This policy of the Pope to condemn democracy in one country while praising it in another was as typical of the unprincipled papacy as was his plotting with French heretics and Russian schismatics for the destruction of Catholic Italy, that had at last attained nationhood and recognition by the Triple Alliance. Leo XIII betrayed his native Italy for the sake of gaining political power for the church. Count Sforza tells how “he dreamed of the destruction of Italian unity which, he thought, should be dissolved into a federation of little Italian ‘republics’ under the presidency of the Pope. He dreamed of a departure from Rome followed by a triumphal return after a victorious war waged by Austria-Hungary against Italy — an idea that Francis Joseph had the good sense to reject.” “The entire political activity of his pontificate was but a long series of efforts which created difficulties for Italian foreign policy, first in Vienna, then, with more apparent success, at Paris.”6

After having maintained the cruel dictatorship of the Habsburg emperors for generations over the enslaved Catholic peoples of Croatia, Slovenia, Bohemia and other Slav nations, the Vatican’s pretended dismay over the present-day fate of Poland and Lithuania is sheer hypocrisy. How carefully the Vatican cooperated in the enslavement of these peoples is clearly shown from the following passage of a Roman Catholic catechism in use in Austria under the Habsburgs. It is quoted from Catholic Count Sforza’s above-mentioned book, page 64:

“Q. — How should subjects behave toward their sovereigns?

“A. — Subjects should behave toward their sovereigns exactly as slaves toward their masters.

Q. — Why should they behave like slaves?

“A. — Because the sovereign is their master and his power extends over their property as over their persons.”

Tie-Up With German Militarists

The loud and shallow praise of democracy now on the lips of the Roman hierarchy looks pathetic in the light of the ‘infallible’ papal declarations of the last century, which the Catholic church has never retracted. They are summarized by Charles Guignebert, distinguished historian of the University of Paris. In his book, Christianity, Past and Present, (p. 452) he says of Pope Pius VII, who reestablished the Inquisition in Spain at that late date in modern history, and of Pope Gregory XVI who died a quarter of a century later:

“He seized upon the slightest pretexts to show his hostility to all liberal principles and all ideas deemed ‘revolutionary.’ He entered special protest against the political institutions of France, which by their guarantee of religious toleration to all, dared to place ‘the Holy and Immaculate bride of Christ, the Church outside of which there is no salvation, upon a level with heretical sects and even with Jewish perfidy.’

“Pope Gregory XVI in a document that gives us a foretaste of the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, the Mirari Vos encyclical, declared war (1) upon modern forms of society founded upon liberty of conscience… and (2) upon liberty of the press, ‘which cannot be sufficiently execrated and condemned,’ for by its means all evil doctrines are propagated, and (3) upon liberty of scientific research.”

A penetrating analysis of the reactionary principles of Catholicism is found in the symposium published in 1941 by a group of well-known American liberals under the title of The City of Man:

“In more recent years its Syllabus of Errors, the start of a second counter-Reformation challenging the liberal world that has risen from the Reformation and the Renaissance, played into the hands of political and social obscurantism. Its spiritual totalitarianism was exploited as a tool… of political and social enslavement.”

The great reactionary and militarist power of Europe in the last Century was Germany. Pope Leo XIII was determined to forge a union with it. Kaiser Wilhelm II in his autobiography, The Kaiser’s Memoirs, (p. 211), says of Leo XIII: “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.”

For a while Leo XIII vied with Bismarck in a struggle for power and attempted to double-cross him, as narrated above. Eventually the reactionary principles and love of power they shared in common brought them together. Leo XIII overruled the Catholic Center Party in Germany and forced it to endorse Bismarck’s program for the militarization of Germany, known as the Septennate Bill. The flagrant immorality of this deal that has spelled war and disaster for three generations cannot be more aptly expressed than in an editorial of the New York Times of February 8, 1887, that stated in part as follows:

“All is grist that comes to the mills of Rome. The collision between the spirit of military absolutism and the spirit of Parliamentary liberty in Germany, a contest watched with the deepest interest all over the world, and whose issue will be potent in molding the history of Europe for years to come, is viewed by the Pope merely as a welcome opportunity to improve the condition of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany.”

“One sentence of [Catholic] Dr. Windthorst’s address reveals with pitiless and perhaps unintentional frankness the profound immorality of the temporal policy of the Church of Rome. ‘The Pope’s advocacy of the Septennate Bill,’ said Dr. Windthorst, ‘was independent of the merits of the measure, and arose from reasons of expediency and from political considerations.’

“It would be difficult to frame a more accurate analysis of the Papal motives, while at the same time indicating a more sweeping denunciation of the Papal policy. Liberal principles, the right of popular government, the German constitution and its guarantee of Parliamentary institutions, says the Pope, may go to the dogs, if we can secure some further modification of the laws which relate to the Church, and so improve the condition of the Papacy in Germany.”

The agreement between the Vatican and Germany for a counter-Reformation of liberal Europe almost brought about war in 1904. It came a decade later. Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, ally of Germany and “the most Catholic of all sovereigns,” started the world conflict. The satisfaction that the Vatican felt at the declaration of World War I is best expressed by Count Sforza, a Catholic who knows the inner secrets of European politics. On page 186 of his book, mentioned above, he says:

“A legend more tenacious than history was formed, in 1914 and afterward, regarding Pope Pius X’s attitude toward the Habsburg aggression toward Serbia. This legend shows Pius X praying and fighting against the outbreak of the war, horrified to see Christianity divided into two enemy camps, and dying of grief at the invasion of Belgium and all the horrors of war unchained. The truth is quite otherwise…

“As soon as the danger of war became evident, Count Palffy, Austrian Charge d’Affaires at the Vatican, several times informed Pius X’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Merry del Val, of the intentions and the ‘duties’ of the Dual Monarchy. The Cardinal’s replies were deposited in the diplomatic correspondence of the Austro-Hungarian Embassy, correspondence that I have seen.

“In these conversations the Secretary of State spoke expressly in the name of the Pope who, he declared to the Austrian representative, deplored that Austria had not earlier inflicted on the Serbs the chastisement they deserved.”

Elsewhere (p. 105) Count Sforza relates:

“It is not strange that the Protestant armies of Germany seemed to Pius X the instrument chosen by God to punish France. When death surprised him on August 20, 1914, he was absolutely certain that nothing in the world could prevent the complete defeat of the French; and in his naivete he said: ‘Thus they will understand that they must become obedient sons of the Church.’”

Pope Pius X was succeeded by Benedict XV, a hunch-back cardinal who was elected Pope by one vote… which he would not have received if he himself had voted for the principal rival candidate. Space does not permit the retelling of how this Pope worked with Matthias Erzberger, German propaganda chief and diplomat, through Msgr. Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII), to carry out German directions to effect a ‘negotiated peace.’ These details and the treaty drafted by Germany that would have reestablished an independent Vatican State are given in an article on the pro-Germanism of Pope Pius XII in the April, 1943, issue of The Converted Catholic Magazine. The intervention of Benedict XV in favor of Germany is abundantly confirmed in the second volume of the papers of Robert Lansing, secretary to President Woodrow Wilson.

Conclusion

In the field of international politics the record of Vatican diplomacy is criminal and blood-stained. This is more particularly true since the rise of Fascism and Nazism. For this reason, on February 10, 1945, 1,600 Protestant clergymen of national reputation went officially on record in a statement addressed to the ‘Big Three’ leaders at the Crimean Conference in Yalta opposing involvement of the democracies in any deal with the Vatican or other church group. They indicted the Vatican’s warmongering with the Axis dictators as follows:

“Supporting Mussolini in Italy, Dollfuss and Schusehnigg in Austria, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, and Detain in France, the papacy has thrown its weight into the scales of the present human struggle on the side of the enemies of democracy.”

For the past five years, The Converted Catholic Magazine has recorded and fully documented the facts of the Vatican’s tie-up with Fascism, though at first there were few who believed us. Now that the truth is becoming known, it is not enough merely to stand aghast at the shamelessness of the Vatican’s warmongering in the past. All must resist its demand to shape the future of the postwar world, and put an end at long last to the Vatican’s activities as a disturber of international peace.

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1. Quoted from the official National Catholic Almanac for 1942, page 171.↩
2. Quoted from G. G. Coulton, The Death Penalty for Heresy from 1184 to 1921, page 88 .↩
3. Pages 338-9. Other page references to Count Sforza are in this same book, published in 1944 by E. P. Dutton &, Co., New York. See our list of ‘Recommended Books.’↩
4. Catholic Wm. Teeling, an intimate of the men who signed the Vatican- Hitler Concordat admits the existence of the “secret clause,” in his book, Crisis for Christianity, page 128. Its existence is also confirmed by H. W. Blood-Ryan in his hook, Franz von Papen, page 223.↩
5. This quotation is from the N. Y. Times of last February 22. Mr. Williams quoted these words of Pope Pius XI also in the Brooklyn (N. Y.) Eagle of February 21, 1943.↩
6. Contemporary Italy, p. 34 and p. 100.↩