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28 page printout
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****
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THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 4
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
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HOW MUSSOLINI AND THE YELLOW BROTHER
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GOT THEIR SHARE
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by Joseph McCabe
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HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATION
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GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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**** ****
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CONTENTS
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CHAPTERS
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I The Church's Record In Spain .................... 5
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II Enter First and Second Murders
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Under the Papal Banner ..................... 11
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III Spain and the Catholic League ................... 16
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IV Papal Cowardice in Abyssinia -- And Why ......... 22
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V The Jap Gets a Gold Medal for His
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'Chinese Incident' ......................... 28
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**** ****
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I
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THE CHURCH'S VILE RECORD IN SPAIN
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Some years ago I strolled on a summer day through the drowsy
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streets of Toledo, an ancient city in the center of Spain. A
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thousand years ago it was one of the richest and most populous
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cities in Europe. More than a quarter of a million vivid,
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prosperous, bright-eyed folk had filled its narrow streets and
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bought luxuries from every part of the world in its teeming stores.
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Such was the fame of its craftsmen that the "Toledo Blade" was
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sought from end to end in Europe and is still famous in literature.
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How high Spain would have risen if men had continued to build on
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that superb foundation of that old Moorish civilization! But in
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1923 I found only 30,000 folk, mostly poor and illiterate, living
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within the ancient walls; and I smiled sadly, when, as I passed
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along the almost deserted streets, a boy offered to show me where
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his ancestors had hanged "those wicked devils the Moors." It is
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worse today.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
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It was the history of Spain and its Church in a phrase, Spain
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inherited all the stupendous wealth and science of the Arab
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civilization, one city of which could have bought up, ten times
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over, all the cities of Christian Europe, and to this it had added
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all the wealth it had acquired by the discovery of America. It was
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literally choking with wealth by the middle of the sixteenth
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century. And little more than a hundred years later it was the
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poorest, most despised country in the world. About 5,000,000 folk,
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most of them ragged and unkempt, eked out a poor living on soil
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that had given rich sustenance to 30,000,000 Arabs and their
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contented subjects. For this awful downfall, one of the saddest in
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history, and for all the later disasters that fell upon one of the
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most attractive peoples in Europe, the Black International is
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supremely responsible.
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By the beginning of the twentieth century Spain had raised its
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proud head once more amongst the nations. It had a fine literature
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and a rising prosperity. The cities that had shrunk within the
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shell of ancient walls were bursting through these in the
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exuberance of the life. The people smiled again, like the roses of
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Seville in spring. They had for 80 years fought the strangle-hold
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of the Church and had loosened if not broken it. A distinguished
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literary traveller, Thirlmere, went intimately amongst the people
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and wrote this verdict: "The Church knows that she is doomed in
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Spain" (Letters from Catalonia, 1905, p. 437). Mr. Thirlmere ought
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to have been more cautious. He ought to have added: "Unless she can
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return to her old policy of violence and torture." She has
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recovered it. Today Spain is back in the ragged Middle Ages, its
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people begging food of other nations -- in a land which, with the
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crude plows and other implements of a thousand years ago, had
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richly nourished 30,000,000 folk and borne princely cities -- their
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minds darkened, their hearts broken. And it is the work of the
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Black International: of the bishops, priests, monks, and nuns, who
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have returned to their old sleekness while the people have returned
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to their poverty
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In an earlier work I referred to certain evidence of
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government by violence, indeed brutal violence, in Spain today. It
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may not have appeared in the American press, owing to the Catholic
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censorship, and it is material to compare it with the suave
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professions of Catholic apologists and the beautiful words they
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quote from Papal encyclicals. It is a simple account of the
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experiences of a French girl, apparently a Catholic, of nineteen
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who escaped from the purgatory of Vichy France into what she calls
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the "hell" of Franco Span. It was published (as it makes no
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reference to the Church) in the British News-Chronicle, a paper
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that is very sensitive to Catholic influence, on September 24
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(1941).
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Mlle. X was arrested soon after she crossed the frontier and
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was put in jail at Badajoz. She was lodged in a large room with
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about 250 women, "an appalling mixture": prostitutes, thieves, so-
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called Communists, etc. "Most of the prisoners were in rags,
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filthy, and covered with vermin." There were no mattresses or
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blankets for the night. After two days she was brought before the
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Governor of Badajoz and, without trial or inquiry, sentenced to an
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indefinite term of imprisonment. She claimed that she was of
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British nationality, and a few days later, she was taken before the
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
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prison director: a "brute", she says, who bullied her for two
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hours, told her she was "a dirty little liar" and sent her "back to
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hell." Every evening all the prisoners were assembled in the
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courtyard and compelled to sing the Falangist anthem and at the
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close cry lustily: "Long live Spain. Up with Free Spain. Franco,
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Franco, Franco." The jailers lashed with whips any woman who did
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not join heartily in the chorus. The girl endured several weeks of
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this and she was then taken before a British Consul to prove her
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claim of nationality. She was removed to a jail at Seville, which
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was "worse than Badajoz" (which she describes as hell), removed
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back to Badajoz, and removed to Madrid, where she bad a solitary
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dark and freezingly cold cell; and all the time officers "tried to
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be as cruel as they could to me", jeering at her as a Communist spy
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and assuring her she would never leave Spain. These Spanish
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gentlemen had her before them standing for two to three hours every
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morning. A girl in the next cell one day cried, "Live, live,
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Liberty, Long live England". She was taken out and beaten, and
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presently there were shots in the courtyard. every day such shots
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were heard. One less of those who refused to bow to the Church.
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I gather that this girl was not British, but the British
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authorities humanely lied, and admitted her claim of nationality,
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and rescued her. But think of the thousands of women and girls, and
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the tens of thousands of youths and men, suffering this living hell
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in the jails of Badajoz and Seville and Madrid and a hundred
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others, after fighting heroically for three years in the cause of
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freedom. And the Catholic press assures you, the Vatican Assures
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all the world, and far too much of the world-press repeats the
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assurance or refuses to disturb it, that Spain has now resumed its
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beautiful, happy life in the arms of Mother Church; and won't you
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please contribute for the alleviation of the misery which the
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wicked Reds had brought upon the country. So it was in the
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beginning -- or nearly 500 years ago, when the Church recovered
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power -- is now, and never again shall be. Do you really wonder if
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in the heat of the hundredth struggle against the Church in 1936-
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1938 some of the men who knew the long record of brutality and knew
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how the priests were using the callous and ambitious Franco to
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recover their mastery of the jails, shot a few of them and trampled
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on their 'sacred' vestments and other paraphernalia of their trade?
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It is nearly forty years since I began writing on Spain and
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its Church, and the truth which I told was not a collection of
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obscure and disputed facts resting upon the testimony of Radicals
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and Reds. My first scalding indictment of the Church and the
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cleric-controlled state (The Martyrdom of Ferrer, 1909) was fully
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endorsed and whole pages of it translated in the following year by
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one of the most distinguished scholars of Madrid University,
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Professor Simarro, in his voluminous study of the trial (El Proceso
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Ferrer). What I claimed for the Arab civilization (The Splendor of
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Moorish Spain 1935) is based upon the works of half a dozen Spanish
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professors who are masters of Arabic and is no more than S.P. Scott
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claims in America in his 'Moorish Empire in Spain.' And the
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appalling story I gave of the struggle with the Church since 1814
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is fully and truly told in such standard and conservative works as
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the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. XI) and Major M. Hume's 'Modem
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Spain' (in the Story of Nations series). Yet every time the long
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blood-soaked struggle is renewed in Spain the public is puzzled and
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is ready to admit every Catholic lie about the innocent Church and
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its "satanic" enemies. I must repeat a few points.
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Bank of Wisdom
|
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
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On the broad map of our chaotic world Spain seems to be of
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limited importance. In the fevered and crowded chronicle of events
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during the last five years its recent Civil War and the conquest of
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it by that unholy alliance of Catholic armies and Nazi-Fascist
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butchers seems to be just the third step -- after the disarming of
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Austria and the rape of Abyssinia -- in the preparation of the
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stage for the Nazi aggression. But in a study of the share of the
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Black International in the world-tragedy it is supremely important;
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and it is to Spain, with which it hopes to link Spanish America
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once more, that the Vatican chiefly looks for the destruction of
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our modern liberty and enlightenment by a bloc of Catholic powers.
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As far as the last century is concerned it is not necessary
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here to do more than repeat in a more definite form what I said in
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the first book of this series: that in Spain, as in Portugal and
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Italy. "Reds" have always been the clergy and their allies. The
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revolution which put Franco in power in 1938 is the tenth major
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revolution that has occurred in Spain since the days of Napoleon.
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In six of these the people wrested power, in five cases out of six
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without war, from the clerical-royalists. Every member of the
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Bourdon dynasty of Spanish monarchs except Alfonso XII, who died
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prematurely, has been ignominiously driven from Spain for his or
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her crimes and vices at one time or other. In four counter-
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revolutions the clerical-royalists recovered power, either by force
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or by perjury or a mixture of the two. These four counter-
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revolutions, in which the Church was as busy as the state, were
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followed by official reprisals of so brutal a character that
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between 50,000 and 100,000 unarmed Spaniards were executed or
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killed in jail and many hundreds of thousands suffered agonies. The
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six popular revolutions were, nevertheless, never followed by
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official reprisals, and the spontaneous local outbreaks in which
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the exploited workers burned churches and killed a few priests and
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monks were checked by the authorities.
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All that may be read in Hume's standard history of the
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Cambridge Modern History, I have told the relevant facts in my
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'Revolt in Spain' (1931) and given a condensed account in the
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'Appeal to Reason' Library (No. 1). There is just one point of this
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past history which I would recall, as Catholic writers are now apt
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to say that all this butchery was perpetrated by the state, and
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even that the clergy tried to check it. Major Hume, the highest
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recent authority on Spain, describing the counter-revolution of
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1822, says (Modern Spain, p. 256):
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Modern civilization has seen no such instance of brutal,
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blind ferocity as that which followed the arrival of Ferdinand
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at Madrid. There was neither justice nor mercy in the
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government of the besotted churchmen who surrounded the King.
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The gallows was the sole instrument and argument by which they
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ruled . . . The frenzy of intolerance and cruelty spread from
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the preaching friars and ignorant nobles to the brutal mob. .
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. . It is a lamentable truth that much of the atrocities of
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this persecution was owing to the influence of the friars and
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the Church. A hideous ecclesiastical society, founded by the
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Bishop of Osuna and called "The Exterminating Angel", which
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spread its ramifications. all over Spain organized vengeance
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upon Liberals; every pulpit, every monastery, every royalist
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club, was a center of persecution.
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|
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
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4
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|
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
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|
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That Hume was no friend of radicalism is shown in his remark
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that they surpassed "even the most bloodthirsty wretches of the
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French Reign of Terror", and he has to confess that the man who
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"surpassed all previous efforts, even in this blood-thirsty reign"
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was the very pious and priest-ridden Count de Espana.
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It is enough that these horrors were perpetrated by an
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intimate alliance of the clergy and the servants of a King,
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Ferdinand VII who in his depravity is compared by historians to
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Nero; and about the same time even worse butchery was being
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perpetrated in South Italy by the same alliance of the clergy with
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his namesake and rival in vice, Ferdinand of Naples. Both Kings had
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recovered power by a most solemn oath on the Bible during Mass to
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observe the Constitution -- Ferdinand of Naples had asked God to
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strike him dead if he was not sincere -- and both were absolved
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from their oaths the bishops and the Jesuits and encouraged to
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wallow in blood. Eighty years later Alfonso XIII stood at the
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perjured altar amidst the crowd of bishops and took this solemn
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oath: "I swear before God and his holy gospels to maintain the
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Constitution". And the priests were silent when the old fortress of
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Monjuich again resounded with the cries of tortured men and the
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reports of rifles: when Alfonso, to check the threatened revelation
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of his theft of millions of dollars -- see Alfonso XIII Unmasked,
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by the greatest Spanish writer of the time, Blasco Ibanez -- tore
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up the Constitution and set up the dictatorship of the brutal and
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dissipated General de Rivers. Spaniards know these things. After
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the revolution of 1931 a splendid system of education was created,
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and freedom of discussion carried the truth into villages and
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workshops. Did some soldier, worker here and there, knowing these
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things and seeing the priests conspiring with the perjured Franco
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and the butchers of Germany, lose his temper and run his bayonet
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through one or two of them? I should not be surprised. But remember
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that at present we have only Catholic statement's about Red
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outrages in the Civil War.
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We know what Catholic literature is, but we have also here a
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close parallel to guide us. The world-press was inundated with
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similar Catholic stories of Red outrages after the Socialist-
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Communist revolt of 1934. Fortunately, Spain had not yet passed
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completely under the control of the Black International, and,
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though some investigators like, Lord Listowel and Ellen Wilkinson,
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were obstructed at every turn and soon politely conducted to the
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frontier, others got through; and there were weighty and
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unassailable Spanish investigations to which I will return later.
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Here let me just quote an incident from Leah Manning's What I Saw
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in Spain (1934).
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The mother-superioress of a convent was pressed to testify
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that her nuns had been raped by the Red's. As it was false, she
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refused. I gather, in fact, that the only outrage committed was to
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the delicate ears of the nuns, as the insurgent miners who had
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taken over the convent as a hospital were not very refined in their
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talk to each other. Probably many of the nuns were disappointed. A
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Catholic will reflect that here at least I confess to the honesty
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of a nun. As not always admitted that there are some good men
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amongst the priests and plenty of good nuns the world over! The
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more important question that any impartial reader will ask himself
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Bank of Wisdom
|
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
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5
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
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is whether this particular superioress, out of hundreds, is likely
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to have been the only one to be pressed by the priests and Catholic
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journalists to make a charge of outrages and reminded that the good
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of the Church is paramount.
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||
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These stories remind us of that historian of the Russian
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Revolution. L. Lawton, much quoted by Catholics, who tells how in
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the Civil War of 1919-1921 the sadistic Bolsheviks slaughtered 1275
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||
archbishops and bishops, when even the Catholic Encyclopedia
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||
confesses that there were only about 80 in the entire country. But
|
||
we will return later to these things. Let me lead up briefly to the
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||
immediate causes of the Civil War in Spain.
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||
In view of its disreputable record the Bourbon dynasty was
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irretrievably lost in Spain when, in 1931, Alfonso was compelled to
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abdicate and fled for the frontier. For two years after that date
|
||
the opposition to the Republican government came overwhelmingly
|
||
from the Church. Municipal election's in Spain gave a little more
|
||
freedom of expression than general elections, which have been very
|
||
corrupt ever since the Conservative-Liberal alternation of crops
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||
began to flourish in the parliamentary field. It was a striking
|
||
victory of the republicans and anti-clericals at the municipal
|
||
elections of 1931 that caused Alfonso, after a fruitless attempt to
|
||
get the army to fight for him, to tuck his tail between his legs
|
||
and run. The urban or educated Spaniard's had voted against, him by
|
||
three to one, and it was only in the cities that voting was free
|
||
and the counting of votes honest. Even in a pro-Catholic history
|
||
like Professor E.A. Peers's 'Spanish Tragedy' (1936) we find it
|
||
admitted that there, was "gerrymandering in the country districts
|
||
on a large scale." It used to be of the pleasantries of Spanish
|
||
political life -- it is this kind of thing that gives the country
|
||
so many anarchists -- to work out the results of elections some
|
||
days before the election.
|
||
|
||
Two points about these events of ten years ago must for the
|
||
stressed for the purpose of this inquiry. The first is that during
|
||
four weeks after the popular triumph there were not even isolated
|
||
outrages. I was not then in Spain but I verified this in the
|
||
'Times,' day by day and that paper was on the alert for Red
|
||
outrages. The people knew the whole ghastly 'story of the alliance
|
||
of Church and corrupt monarchy which I have outlined and they had
|
||
just escaped from a seven years' brutal dictatorship which had been
|
||
in the closest association with the Church. Yet it was not until
|
||
the twenty-eighth day after the election that the burning of
|
||
churches and convents began.
|
||
|
||
The second point explains why groups of young workers here and
|
||
there, dodging the police (who made every effort to check them),
|
||
then began to burn convents and churches; a very shocking thing, of
|
||
course, but compare it to the official Catholic reprisals of
|
||
earlier years which I described. In the Spanish illustrated papers
|
||
I saw photographs of the young incendiaries politely conducting
|
||
nuns and aged priests away from the burning buildings. Well, the
|
||
fact was that Cardinal Segura, head of the Spanish Church,
|
||
supported by his three leading archbishops, had issued a most
|
||
vituperate attack on the new government and summoned the country to
|
||
resist. He started the myth which, ridiculous as it was, the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
Catholic press has repeated ever since, that in some mysterious way
|
||
a small minority of what he called "enemies of the Kingdom of Jesus
|
||
Christ" had won a majority at the election (when, under Catholic
|
||
about 12,000,000 votes were cast). This is still written in spite
|
||
of the fact that the election had been one of the cleanest that
|
||
Span had ever had; that in the cities, where there was little or no
|
||
corruption, the voting was three to one against the Church (Madrid
|
||
90,000 to 30,000; Barcelona, 90,000 to 28,000, and so on) and that
|
||
the Church won only in the smaller town's and villages where
|
||
"gerrymandering on a large scale" is admitted by admirers of the
|
||
Church.
|
||
|
||
Segura was driven from Spain by the national flame of
|
||
indignation, and he went to talk matters over with Pacelli-Pius at
|
||
Rome. The Spanish clergy remained free to agitate for the impending
|
||
general election, which was to ratify the verdict of the municipal
|
||
election; the establishment of a republic and the disestablishment
|
||
of the Church. The result of the general election showed that there
|
||
had been no snap-vote and no intrigue of a minority. The anti-
|
||
clericals -- Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists -- won 315 seats,
|
||
the clerical-royalists 121.
|
||
|
||
The new government entered peacefully upon the work of framing
|
||
a Constitution. The Church was to be disestablished and the annual
|
||
subsidy to it abandoned; the Jesuits were to be expelled and monks
|
||
driven out of trade; divorce was to be instituted and secular
|
||
marriage recognized; 27,000 new schools were to be built. The worst
|
||
sting was the confiscation of the wealth of the Jesuits and some of
|
||
the orders. A Catholic prelate who (like so many priests) detested
|
||
the Jesuits and the monks, Msgr. Jose Veleda de Gunjado, had shown
|
||
that the monks and nuns had in their hands two-thirds of the money
|
||
and one-third of the real estate of Spain, yet the state had been
|
||
paying the Church annually more than it spent on education. The
|
||
elections proved that, as Azana said, Spain "had ceased to be a
|
||
Catholic country", and this state of things was intolerable. Month
|
||
by month the clauses of the new Constitution were carried by five
|
||
to one in the Cortes. The country was quiet, except for the shrieks
|
||
of the clergy and their dupes. The progress in education attracted
|
||
pedagogists from many lands, the prosperity of the country began to
|
||
rise, a fair progress was made with schemes of social betterment.
|
||
This in all sober history, is the regime of savagery, of
|
||
persecution of the majority by a small vicious minority, about
|
||
which you read in Catholic literature.
|
||
|
||
II
|
||
|
||
ENTER FIRST AND SECOND MURDERERS --
|
||
UNDER THE PAPAL BANNER
|
||
|
||
I have now fully vindicated what I claimed in the first book;
|
||
that the Black International, instead of having disowned the
|
||
violent and bloody policy of earlier years, still pursued it in the
|
||
one country, apart from Poland, where it was able to do so. I was
|
||
in the Canaries, returning from Australia, just after the Church
|
||
and King had set up the brutal General de Rivera as dictator in
|
||
1923, and men showed me where the pavement had been reddened with
|
||
the blood of anti-clericals. I was in Spain next year and saw the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
country cowering under the Dictator and the clergy smiling and
|
||
richer than ever. This continued until 1931; and we saw that the
|
||
anti-clericals in spite of the red record of the Church clung to
|
||
their tradition of humanity in their triumph.
|
||
|
||
This makes it all the more necessary to inquire closely how
|
||
the country fell back into the clutches of the Black International.
|
||
You know the theory of the Catholic press; in fact, at the time the
|
||
theory of almost the whole American press. The Catholic nation, it
|
||
said, was roused to a consciousness of its enslavement by a small
|
||
Red minority, and Hitler and Mussolini merely helped it to express
|
||
itself. This is made more comical sometimes by calling the wicked
|
||
minority "Communists". The Spanish Communists were so small a body
|
||
that they had only one representative in the 300 deputies of the
|
||
Left coalition in the Cortes! I may add that they had leaders of
|
||
high culture and character and often rendered humane service during
|
||
the war.
|
||
|
||
If you want a common-sense view of the tragedy in a few words
|
||
consider first the composition of the anti-clerical coalition. Most
|
||
of the deputies returned to the Cortes were Liberals (145) and
|
||
Radicals or Radical-Socialists (56). It is one of the painful but
|
||
inevitable facts of the struggle of democracy since 1848 that
|
||
whenever such a coalition as this wins a victory it splits up as
|
||
soon as constructive work begins. Liberalism, which had to that
|
||
time a very fine record in Spain, was still very powerful in the
|
||
cities, but it now had to face, as allies, a larger body of
|
||
Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists, and Anarchists. These had
|
||
been brought up in a tradition of hatred of the middle-class, and
|
||
in any case a split on the proposal to pass even moderately
|
||
collectivist legislation was inevitable. And the more advanced
|
||
workers, full of the mischievous principle that the proletariat
|
||
needs no help from any other class, were by no means averse to
|
||
irritating the Liberals. Government became very unstable and was
|
||
often changed. The Liberals, we shall see, for the most part
|
||
deserted the coalition against the Church, and their leader,
|
||
Lerroux, a grand fighter (as friends of his told me) in the
|
||
nineteenth century, but now a weakling, is strongly suspected of
|
||
accepting Catholic bribes.
|
||
|
||
Further, the radical rump was composed of four mutually
|
||
antagonistic parties. The Anarchists, whose main principle was that
|
||
central government s always corrupt -- it always had been in Spain
|
||
-- and the Syndicalists, who wanted the chief functions of state
|
||
transferred to the unions (syndicates), would not vote at
|
||
parliamentary elections until it was too late. In 1934 a Socialist
|
||
government (or largely Socialist) had to crush a revolt got up by
|
||
these elements and the Communists. We shall see what happened, but,
|
||
while the existence of these masses of Anarchists and syndicalists
|
||
who did not vote makes the anti-clerical majority in 1931 even
|
||
larger than the election-returns make it, they were an element of
|
||
great danger until they agreed to form a Frente Popular (Popular
|
||
Front). It was then too late.
|
||
|
||
A third point is of almost equal importance. With that noble
|
||
un-wisdom into which enthusiasts have so often driven advanced
|
||
governments the Socialists prematurely granted female suffrage. Not
|
||
only were there in Spain 500,000 more women than men but Spanish
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
Liberals had, for selfish reasons, made the same blunder as the
|
||
French and resisted the modern movement for the emancipation of
|
||
women. They left them to the priests; and the priests raised their
|
||
neurotic mixture of thwarted sex and religion to fever heat in 1934
|
||
and 1935. There must have been smiles in Pacelli's gilded chambers
|
||
when the "Bolsheviks" enfranchised the women. Woman's place is the
|
||
home, except when her vote is of value the Church.
|
||
|
||
Meantime the Catholics got a leader, Gil Robles, of just the
|
||
type that was fitted to take advantage of such a situation. Imagine
|
||
Hearst and a Jesuit rolled into one. The Church was then organizing
|
||
Catholic Action everywhere, or getting its lay members to do work
|
||
(intrigue, journalism, bribery, intimidation. etc.) which the
|
||
public might not allow the priests to do. Robles, Jesuit-trained,
|
||
robust and unscrupulous, was a newspaper-owner, and he introduced
|
||
a new strident note into Catholic papers. With funds supplied by
|
||
the Catholic millionaire, Juan March, and the Church, he began to
|
||
organize "Catholic Youth"; with a leaven of the sort of scum that
|
||
Mussolini had attracted in Italy and Hitler in Germany. People
|
||
began to hear of Falangists, which is much the same as Fascists, or
|
||
Soldiers. The prospect, of a fight gives pep to any creed.
|
||
|
||
In 1933 the Constitution was passed, and the government
|
||
appealed to the country; and a wave of enthusiasm swept over the
|
||
Catholic world when it was announced that the Right had won 207
|
||
seats, the Left only 99 (including one Communist), and the wobbling
|
||
Center (Liberals) 167. It was not explained that the Right now
|
||
included 150 Agrarians sent by peasants amongst whom the late
|
||
government had promised to divide the confiscated religious
|
||
property and had been too slow about it, or that women now had the
|
||
vote. Robles knew that there had been no change of heart, and he
|
||
worked harder and more unscrupulously than ever. He drew Carlists
|
||
and royalists into his camp and encouraged the kind of rowdyism
|
||
that Mussolini had found attractive in Italy. He won Lerroux -- one
|
||
hopes that it was not by money -- and the Liberals split. Against
|
||
the agreement of Liberals and Socialists three Catholics were
|
||
planted in the cabinet, and the more radical workers began to
|
||
collect arms to meet a Liberal-Fascist coup. Lerroux became Premier
|
||
and declared the country in a state of war, and the workers of the
|
||
north raised the flag of revolt.
|
||
|
||
It was the usual pathetic failure. Addressing a large meeting
|
||
organized by the Communists in London at the beginning of the Civil
|
||
War, I had to listen to one of the leading Communist speakers
|
||
predicting that the victory of democracy was certain, because she
|
||
had just heard that the government had served out rifles to the
|
||
workers. Rifles -- and to untrained men -- in an age of tanks,
|
||
planes, and big guns! When will such people cease to think about
|
||
the barricades of 1848 or even about the Russian revolution of 1918
|
||
with its unique conditions? The poor men made a heroic fight, but
|
||
Foreign Legionaries and Moors were brought over and the peasant-
|
||
regiments of the army on which the clergy could rely were used. The
|
||
chief result was to accelerate the withdrawal of Liberals and give
|
||
more color to the clerical cry of bloody Bolshevism.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
Still the Catholics were far from having won Spain. Robles
|
||
called for the execution of leaders of the revolt, and the
|
||
government refused. Very promptly, as we shall see, Spaniards of
|
||
great authority and integrity had established that the stories of
|
||
Red outrages were fabrications and that real and disgusting
|
||
outrages had been committed by the Moorish troops, the Catholic
|
||
Civil Guards, and even by religious communities. But Robles got the
|
||
post of Minister of War, and Franco, Queips de Llano, and other
|
||
tools of the priests, were appointed to commanding positions in the
|
||
army.
|
||
|
||
In view of the seriousness of the situation, all radical
|
||
parties, united in a Popular Front, and at the election of
|
||
February, 1935, they -- though it is evident that at least more
|
||
than a million Anarchists and syndicalists still refused to vote --
|
||
proved that the educated Spanish people remained, in spite of all
|
||
the scares, anti-clerical. Robles's Right coalition won 165 seats,
|
||
the Liberals -- those that remained republican and anti-clerical --
|
||
52, and the Left, 256. Azana, the able Radical-Socialist leader,
|
||
became Premier.
|
||
|
||
This last free expression of the will of the Spanish people is
|
||
important because not only Catholic writers, but the press and
|
||
foreign statesmen, generally represented it as a victory for the
|
||
Right. This was done by a sophistical, indeed dishonest, quotation
|
||
of the votes cast instead of the seats won. British statesmen often
|
||
gave this as an excuse for their scandalous protection of the
|
||
intervention of the Germans and Italians. The vote's cast for
|
||
deputies of the Right were 4,750,000; for those of the Left,
|
||
4,536,000. But apart from the fact that women now voted -- and aged
|
||
nuns were carried to the polling station in litters -- and that the
|
||
Right coalition included Agrarians and Liberals who hated the
|
||
Church but dreaded Communism, we have not only to add the Liberal
|
||
vote (340,000) to the Left votes as far as the Church is concerned
|
||
but to take into account its immense number of Anarchists and
|
||
Syndicalists who still did not vote. It is enough to say that,
|
||
although no election was ever more fiercely contested, of a total
|
||
electorate of 12,548,000, less than 10,000,000 voted.
|
||
|
||
Broadly speaking, in any case, it was a scare-election, like
|
||
that which put Hitler in power in Germany. There was no longer a
|
||
clear-cut issue on the question of supporting the Church. The
|
||
tremendous fall in the Liberal vote sufficiently shows this. It was
|
||
a popular slogan of Freethinkers of the last century and the early
|
||
years of this that the destruction of superstition is "the greatest
|
||
of all causes." But when the economic issue was raised it was
|
||
discovered -- in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Spanish
|
||
America -- that the defense of the chance to make a fortune (which
|
||
not one in a thousand had any effective chance of making) was a
|
||
still greater cause. Let not the opponents of "the bloody
|
||
bourgeois" crow. In most countries they made a similar blunder in
|
||
abandoning the traditional Socialist fight against the Church. It
|
||
was, they said, converted; and it smiles today over spacious
|
||
cemeteries of their dead. Reform has to be won by concentrated
|
||
movements, but they must be united in an ideal that all reaction
|
||
must die.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
These facts and reflections give the answer to the Catholic
|
||
cry, which was lamentably accepted in the world at large, during
|
||
the Civil War, that the Spanish people had repented of the hasty
|
||
enthusiasm of 1931 and 1932, or had discovered that it had been
|
||
duped, that the Franco-Mussolini-Hitler combine was a force of
|
||
liberation. The Spanish people did not vote on the same issues in
|
||
1931 and 1935, and they were in large part not the same votes.
|
||
There were the women, who had been left to the priests because this
|
||
was supposed to help to keep them chaste while their husbands had
|
||
mistresses's or frequented brothels, and there was a new generation
|
||
of voters of the age to which Robles and the priests particularly
|
||
appealed.
|
||
|
||
But the chief fact to bear in mind is that the election-
|
||
figures themselves testify that the country was still in the
|
||
majority anti-Papal. The 4,750,000 votes cast for the Church
|
||
candidates, swollen by seared Liberals, disgruntled agrarians,
|
||
credulous dupes of outrage-stories, etc., were little more than
|
||
one-third of the electorate, or of the adult Spanish people. And,
|
||
like Hitler's push in 1932, it was a supreme effort. Other means
|
||
had to be sought, and the forces of the Right began at once to
|
||
organize them.
|
||
|
||
The Catholic (and at that time general) theory is that, seeing
|
||
the tide flow against them, the Reds began to murder their
|
||
opponents and plunge the country in an anarchy from which it had to
|
||
be saved. We have just the same plea in the case of Italy and the
|
||
glorification of Mussolini as its savior, and Professor Salvemini
|
||
has patiently and thoroughly proved that it is a tissue of lies.
|
||
What exactly happened in Spain we do not know. The confusion of the
|
||
Civil War, which soon opened, prevented any dispassionate Study of
|
||
the events which had immediately preceded it, and we can no more be
|
||
asked to accept statements about those events which were made under
|
||
the Franco regime than we can be asked to pay serious attention to
|
||
Fascist legends about Mussolini's early struggle and his thousands
|
||
of Fascist martyrs.
|
||
|
||
But so much is reliably known that even Professor Peers, the
|
||
pro-Catholic author of 'The Spanish Tragedy,' speaks of "an
|
||
epidemic of murder by gunmen, for at least some of which there was
|
||
an uncomfortably and rapidly growing suspicion that Fascism was
|
||
mainly responsible (p. 195). The phrase is inimitably professorial.
|
||
In the two chief incidents which were made the pretext for the
|
||
revolt the evidence is clear enough. A group of leading Socialists
|
||
coming out of a building in Madrid were shot down by gunmen. Can
|
||
there be a moment's serious doubt to which party the gunmen
|
||
belonged or by which they were hired? This led to the retaliatory
|
||
murder of a Catholic Falangist leader, and we shall equally not
|
||
hesitate to judge to which party the murderers belonged. Frango at
|
||
once declared that the country must be delivered and organized his
|
||
mercenaries, the Moors and Foreign Legionaries.
|
||
|
||
Robles had got Franco appointed to the command in Morocco
|
||
where he had under his hand the force, which, as experience in the
|
||
revolt of 1934 had proved, could be relied upon to fight, and fight
|
||
brutally for its paymaster whatever the merits of the cause. In the
|
||
south of Spain, which is much more Catholic (largely for business
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
reasons) than the Madrid and Barcelona regions, the command was
|
||
given to the brutal and fanatical Catholic Queipo de Llano, the
|
||
Spanish gentleman, who, in a broadcast from Seville during the war,
|
||
said that they would pound up the Bolsheviks to make mortar for the
|
||
rebuilding of the churches. As many more Catholic officers as
|
||
possible had been put in the higher commands in the army and navy.
|
||
Few of them had more military ability than Franco and de Llano, but
|
||
they were Catholic's, at least in profession.
|
||
|
||
This had been done while Robles, the friend of the Jesuits,
|
||
was Minister of War (May to December, 1935), a year before Franco,
|
||
on July 19, 1936, led his noble band of crusaders for the Holy
|
||
Faith, the half-savage and fanatically Moslem Moors and the scum of
|
||
the Foreign Legion, across the straits to the South of Spain, where
|
||
his fellow-conspirators waited, No serious writer hesitates to
|
||
conclude that it was done in preparation for a revolt against the
|
||
government and Constitution to which these Spanish gentlemen had,
|
||
and like Alfonso the Great, taken an oath of loyalty. The
|
||
government leaders, in fact said, when the rebellion broke out,
|
||
that they were fully aware of the plot and did not fear it. They
|
||
believed that the far greater part of the Spanish army was loyal,
|
||
and this proved to be the case in Madrid and many other places.
|
||
Their conduct seems feeble and incompetent unless we suppose that
|
||
they regarded a revolt, which they would certainly defeat, as an
|
||
opportunity to destroy the growing menace of the Falangists.
|
||
|
||
The early course of the war fairly justifies that expectation.
|
||
and one cannot say that they ought to have foreseen that Italy and
|
||
Germany would play the part of the First and Second Murderers.
|
||
Careful attention to Franco's pilgrimages to Berlin and Rome in
|
||
1936 might have warned them but we must admit that no one would
|
||
have expected France and Britain to look on placidly, and even give
|
||
most vital assistance, while German and Italian troops butchered
|
||
the heroic Spanish people and even, as in the bombing of Guernica,
|
||
coldly gave their airmen practice for the coming war on France and
|
||
Britain.
|
||
|
||
In the case of France Vatican influence counted very
|
||
materially. We shall see in a later book how close at this time was
|
||
the cooperation between the Vatican and what it called "the
|
||
government of Jews and Freemasons." For the shame and hypocrisy of
|
||
Britain's action, there is no excuse. The so-called Committee for
|
||
the Protection of Non-Intervention in Spain ought frankly to have
|
||
been called the Committee for the Protection of Intervention. The
|
||
very moderate supply of arms by distant Russia -- and even this
|
||
began only after the Italian intervention -- was made an excuse for
|
||
condoning the massive and indispensable assistance of Italy and
|
||
Germany. Nearer the truth was the plea that Mussolini "Could not
|
||
afford to see a Communist state established so near to Italy".
|
||
These French and British statesmen know now, to their cost, how
|
||
little they could afford to see a Fascist state created in Span.
|
||
But the plain truth which illumines the whole of that dark and
|
||
ghastly and stupid period of preparation, is that they did not want
|
||
to see a Socialist state set up anywhere, and, with all their
|
||
hypocritical professions, they murder the Spanish people, although
|
||
their Foreign Offices must have known that Communism was the
|
||
weakest element in the Frente Popular and there was no question of
|
||
following the Russian political model in Spain.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
III
|
||
|
||
SPAIN AND THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE
|
||
|
||
Whether or no Pacelli-Pius had from the start a further
|
||
intention than the restoration of the Church in Spain he clearly
|
||
saw it in time as part of a larger plan. For Mussolini, the
|
||
conquest of Spain was, part of his design of securing mastery of
|
||
the Mediterranean and cutting one of the main arteries of the
|
||
British Empire. For Hitler it was the removal of a possible menace
|
||
to his conquest of France and the possession of a bridge to Africa
|
||
when the time came to enslave the Italians as well as the French.
|
||
Blinded by their anti-Socialist zeal, no English statesman foresaw
|
||
this and realized of what enormous value to them in the coming
|
||
struggle against Fascism a democratic Spain would be. Pacelli
|
||
shared their "sacred fury" against Socialism, but the course of
|
||
events now gave him the plan of a bloc or League of Catholic Powers
|
||
by which he hopes to counteract Germany even if it is victorious,
|
||
and in any case to, in his own words, counterbalance the influence
|
||
of the American and British branches of his Church.
|
||
|
||
There is no need to wait for the tranquil post-war days to
|
||
get a just estimate of the action of the Black International in
|
||
Spain. Even if there were not a scrap of documentary evidence no
|
||
one with even an elementary of the Vatican and of modern Spanish
|
||
history could daub that the plot was concerted and carried out in
|
||
the closest cooperation with the Church, which would gain most of
|
||
all by the success of the revolt.
|
||
|
||
But there is plenty of evidence: not evidence of a secret
|
||
plot, but of the most open and enthusiastic support of the rebels
|
||
by the Spanish Church and the Vatican. There was nothing secret
|
||
about it. Whether Franco in his visit to Rome before the revolt
|
||
apprised Pacelli of his plans and asked the Papal blessing --
|
||
remember that this is just what the Irish rebels had done in 1916
|
||
-- does not matter. He was in the closest touch with the hierarchy
|
||
in Spain and as he raised the flag of revolt (and perjury) all the
|
||
Spanish bishops but three, who were in a delicate Position.
|
||
declared for him. Every priest and every convent welcomed the
|
||
rebels as they came along and helped them. It would be very
|
||
extraordinary if they had not done so, seeing that Franco came as
|
||
a crusader to smite the infidels, who, they said, had persecuted
|
||
them for five years. Catholics everywhere provided the mass of
|
||
traitors within the gates which has added a new term to military
|
||
literature: the Fifth Column.
|
||
|
||
But the Papacy or its Secretary of State very soon made a
|
||
declaration which identified it with the holy war from the
|
||
beginning. Bishops, priests, and nun, who had understood that
|
||
Franco and his had pious colleagues had corrupted the entire army
|
||
and had, in the expectation of speedy victory, declared themselves
|
||
prematurely, had to fly before the just anger of the people and the
|
||
government troops. It will be remembered that with all his Catholic
|
||
troops and Moslem fanatics, his jail-birds of the Foreign Legion
|
||
and his Irish Brigade, his Germans, and his Italians, Franco took
|
||
two years to conquer half of Spain: a very singular situation if it
|
||
were true that the anti-clerics were a minority. A large number of
|
||
bishops, priests, and nuns made their way to Rome, and on September
|
||
14, 1936, the aged them.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
The speech which was published, has none of the halting
|
||
senility of the Pope. It was a carefully-prepared address. lt would
|
||
in any case commit the Vatican to the side of the rebels as well as
|
||
the local hierarchy, but it is easy to recognize the accents of
|
||
Pacelli, to whose department the preparing of the address properly
|
||
belonged. It was this document written for broadcasting through the
|
||
Catholic to world, to which Pacelli was now appealing to work for
|
||
the extinction of Bolshevism in Spain, Russia, and Mexico. It was
|
||
published in England by the Catholic Truth Society with the title
|
||
'The Spanish Terror' and might be described as the bugle-call of
|
||
that war upon Bolshevism, which made the Church the intimate ally
|
||
of all the forces of privilege and of the vilest criminals in five
|
||
centuries of European history.
|
||
|
||
Frankly, though the press generally reproduced some of its
|
||
sonorous phrases with deep respect, it was ludicrous. "All that was
|
||
most fundamentally human and most profoundly divine" was being
|
||
trodden under foot. This is bad enough when we reflect on the
|
||
splendid human service that the Socialist-Liberal coalition had
|
||
rendered and the clerical Fascists have destroyed, but Some of the
|
||
priests and nuns must have had difficulty in refraining from
|
||
Smiling when the Pope included amongst the victims "the fruitful
|
||
activity of lives wholly dedicated to religion, to science, and to
|
||
charity." The morals of the Spanish clergy are notorious, but their
|
||
devotion to science must be a profound secret. All these holy
|
||
things were "assaulted, violated, destroyed" -- it reads like the
|
||
first sentence of a famous speech of Cicero's -- "in the most
|
||
ruthless and barbarous ways, in an unbridled and unparalleled
|
||
confusion of forces so savage and cruel", etc. There had been a
|
||
"satanic preparation" -- a perfectly childish representation of the
|
||
facts -- for "the flame of hatred and savage persecution" such as
|
||
the Catholic Church, and it alone, is so apt to experience. There
|
||
was, in fine, an attempt to "subvert established order of every
|
||
kind from Russia to China, from Mexico to South America."
|
||
|
||
The reader will not expect me to analyze this preposterous
|
||
stuff -- the Pope talks as if it were the anti-clericals Who had
|
||
revolted -- but he will reflect that it served Pacelli's purpose.
|
||
From the time of its distribution over the Catholic world and the
|
||
reproduction of its gorgeous phrases in the secular press it
|
||
prepared men to swallow every tale of Red outrages that the
|
||
Falangists cared to concoct; it made Catholics more blindly bitter
|
||
than ever against Russia; it put in a good word for the Pope's
|
||
Japanese friends; and it represented Hitler and Mussolini as
|
||
respectable crusaders who at great sacrifice, were striking a blow
|
||
for civilization. The Papal banner was the first foreign flag to
|
||
wave over Franco's diplomatic headquarters at Salamanca, and even
|
||
such ghastly massacres as that at Guernica did not receive a word
|
||
of disapproval. Catholic Portugal was encouraged to act as a
|
||
feeding ground for Franco's armies. American and British Catholics
|
||
poured their dollars or pounds into a common collecting box with
|
||
the bankers and stock brokers. Ireland and Poland -- pathetically
|
||
-- resounded with the slogan, "For God and Spain," and Duffy
|
||
pompously led his Irish Brigade to join the young English Tories
|
||
who were enlisted in a London hotel to serve under Franco. So mean
|
||
a disposition was create by the Pope's words that British Catholics
|
||
threatened to secede from the Trade Unions if the collection of
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
funds for loyalist Spain was not stopped, and Catholic mothers in
|
||
some places compelled the Cooperative Movement to abandon its
|
||
humane plan of sending milk to the half-starved Spanish children.
|
||
The activity of British Catholics materially helped to sustain the
|
||
government in that ignoble surrender to Hitler and Mussolini by
|
||
allowing unlimited intervention, for which it has paid so dearly;
|
||
and they felt no misgivings when the Vatican, asked to join in the
|
||
French and British protest against the beginning of the bombing of
|
||
civilians, replied that it must avoid even the suspicion of
|
||
interfering in polities!
|
||
|
||
At the time when the drowsy Pope spoke about the satanic
|
||
preparation and the unparalleled outpour of barbarism, phrases
|
||
which were simply an expression of Pacelli's bitter disappointment
|
||
at the failure of the rebellion -- no one seriously believes that
|
||
it would have won without the Italians and Germans -- there had
|
||
probably been a lot of rough treatment on both sides. The Moors
|
||
were furious at winning so little of the promised loot; the Spanish
|
||
people were furious because the Church again resorted to bloodshed,
|
||
and against a government returned to power by the majority of the
|
||
people after the priests had called up every Catholic voter in the
|
||
Republic. Some day we may know just what was done, on both sides,
|
||
in violation of what are called the usages of civilized warfare. We
|
||
cannot expect to learn this from Spain as it is today, but if any
|
||
man imagines that the priests and nuns just went on serenely saying
|
||
their prayers until the "sadistic" Reds burst in upon them he must
|
||
take his information from novels and Catholic newspapers.
|
||
|
||
We are, however, not without helpful material. Two years
|
||
earlier there had been, as I said, a minor war of the same
|
||
combatants, and the Catholic press and much of the secular press
|
||
had given terrible stories of outrages by Socialists and
|
||
Communists, There always have been such stories since the French
|
||
Revolution, and Catholics, being forbidden to read the truth, still
|
||
cherish some of the picturesque lies -- like that of the prostitute
|
||
on an altar of Notre Dame -- told by the refugee priests of a
|
||
century and a half ago.
|
||
|
||
After the suppression of the revolt of 1934, Lord Listowel and
|
||
Ellen Wilkinson went to Spain to investigate the stories. of
|
||
outrages. I had a talk with them after their return. They had the
|
||
written assurance of the President of the Republic Zamora (a
|
||
Catholic) and the Liberal premier Lerroux, that the stories of
|
||
outrage's committed by the anti-clericals were false, and when they
|
||
went to the supposed locality of the outrages to verify this, the
|
||
Catholic authorities prevented them, and, on the absurd pretense
|
||
that their inquiry so infuriated the people that their lives were
|
||
in danger, rushed them to the frontier. But in Spain itself the
|
||
boot was rather on the other foot. It was the champions of the
|
||
Church who had committed outrages; the Moors, the Catholic soldiers
|
||
or Civil Guards, and in some cases religious brothers. These
|
||
stories of Catholic brutality were severely investigated on the
|
||
spot by Professor Fernando de los Rios, an ex-Minister of
|
||
Education, Senior F.G. Ordas, a Liberal ex-Minister of Commerce,
|
||
and the lawyer Alvarez del Vayo, and they were found to be horribly
|
||
true. They made independent examinations and, unlike the retailers
|
||
of Red atrocities, they gave full names and places in their lengthy
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
reports. Mrs. Leah Manning has a digest of these three reports in
|
||
the appendix of her book, 'What I Saw In Spain' (1934), and she
|
||
tells how some of the stories of Red outrages were fabricated.
|
||
|
||
The best one can say, therefore, for Pacelli's scalding
|
||
rhetoric is that he had made no serious inquiry, but he inflamed
|
||
the entire Catholic world and so gilded the action of Hitler and
|
||
Mussolini in the eyes of the world in general that he is in a large
|
||
measure responsible for the failure of democracies to see what the
|
||
real and ulterior aim of those butchers was. On the other hand,
|
||
Pacelli, like every Catholic writer in the world, and a good many
|
||
others, perpetrated an utter absurdity and declined to notice it.
|
||
It is the contention that Spain is overwhelmingly Catholic, yet a
|
||
small minority of "satanic" folk carried every free election for
|
||
five years and held half the country for two year's against the
|
||
other half, and the fleets, air-fleets, tanks, and guns, of the two
|
||
most powerful nations in Europe! It is stupid to talk about Russia.
|
||
It did what it could, but for sheer geographical reasons it could
|
||
not do much.
|
||
|
||
Before the end of the war a reluctant press felt itself
|
||
compelled to speak admiringly of the heroism of the Spanish people.
|
||
Theirs, on the anti-clerical side, was a war of the common folk,
|
||
the workers and their wives and sons and daughters. They had no
|
||
mercenary foreign troops, for the French and British volunteers,
|
||
hampered in every way in their enlistment by their governments,
|
||
were comparatively very few, and there were still less Russians, as
|
||
was proved at the close. It was the people of Spain who held up the
|
||
Spanish, German, and Italian armies, backed by Portuguese Fascist
|
||
help -- that was why Franco had at once secured the Portuguese
|
||
frontier -- and British and American funds for two years. Yet the
|
||
same papers that told the story continued to repeat that Spain was
|
||
Solidly Catholic, though every loyalist soldier, every boy and girl
|
||
who helped them, was under the direst ban of the Church. And
|
||
Catholics continued, and continue, to drone about that remarkable
|
||
minority of Satanists who are supposed to have carried every
|
||
Spanish election for five years and then somehow contrived to get
|
||
the people to fight passionately for them for two years. The
|
||
miracles of Lourdes are pale in comparison.
|
||
|
||
Yet, in face of the most elementary common-sense, there is
|
||
hardly any lie that has been put out by the Vatican to cover its
|
||
policy of cooperation with crime and consecration of bloodshed that
|
||
has had a wider acceptance. I do not know whether George Seldes,
|
||
author of 'The Vatican,' is or is not a Catholic, but on this point
|
||
he beat the Jesuits, He says that there are only 30,000 non-
|
||
Catholics in Spain, and then he sees nothing to be explained in the
|
||
magnificent defense of the people of Spain under a shower of
|
||
anathemas from the Church! Then there is that quaint political
|
||
sport -- in the biological sense -- McGovern, the Catholic
|
||
Socialist Member of the British Parliament, the man who was chiefly
|
||
responsible for the abandonment of the anti-church policy of the
|
||
British advanced Labor; and his Church now gloats over the
|
||
destruction of Communism. He is supposed to have studied Spain on
|
||
the spot, and he is an honest man whatever you think of his
|
||
ability. He says that all but about one million of the Spaniards
|
||
are Catholics; which still leaves the tail wagging the dog for
|
||
seven years in a most mysterious way.
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
Curiously enough the Catholic writer who comes nearest to the
|
||
truth is a Jesuit, the Irish priest, Father Gannon. In the 'Irish
|
||
Times' (January 23, 1937), he said that there are "ten or fifteen
|
||
million Catholics" in Spain. Apparently he thought it wise to admit
|
||
how far the corruption of the innocent people by the sadistic
|
||
minority (as the Catholic, Sir P. Gibbs deliberately calls them)
|
||
had gone. The phrase "ten or fifteen" is rather loose even for a
|
||
Jesuit, especially when you are thinking of millions. Let us split
|
||
the difference and say that the priest claims only about 12,000,000
|
||
Catholics in Spain out of a total population of 29,000,000. We get
|
||
near commons-sense at last, and we will not quibble with so
|
||
generous an admission. The only interpretation of Spanish life from
|
||
1931 to 1938 that is not completely ridiculous is that the majority
|
||
of the Spaniards had quitted the Church. That, means a loss of at
|
||
least 15,000,000 and fully explains the policy of the Black
|
||
International in that country.
|
||
|
||
The Church shared the spoils, in fact got most of them. It was
|
||
restored to the despotic and parasitic position it had had before
|
||
1931, and the tinfoil Dictator, the most ridiculous specimen of the
|
||
brood in Europe, awarded it an annual subsidy of 65,000,000
|
||
pesetas. The country was and is, half-starved, reduced to
|
||
international beggary, but the Church has always been willing to
|
||
overlook that misfortune of its supporters. From all sides the
|
||
priests called for the rebuilding of their churches, seminaries,
|
||
monasteries, etc., and this made a further drain upon the slender
|
||
public purse. The remains of the dissipated General de Rivera,
|
||
whose character, Ibanez, had so ruthlessly revealed to the whole
|
||
civilized world, were transferred with gorgeous religious and
|
||
secular ceremony to the Escurial, the palace of the dead Kings of
|
||
Spain. If the flimsy structure of the new dictatorship lasts long
|
||
enough I expect to hear of him being canonized. Many young ladies
|
||
in Madrid and Paris will be interested.
|
||
|
||
Naturally all the fine work of the Liberal-Socialist coalition
|
||
was destroyed. It is one of the gems of the Papal speech which I
|
||
quoted above that the satanic Reds destroyed science, whereas, they
|
||
had done splendid work in restoring science in Spain, and a child
|
||
would know that the rebels and their priests would ruin this. The
|
||
system of education which had drawn hundreds of students of
|
||
pedagogy from all parts was abolished. Manuals of history of a
|
||
childishly mendacious character were substituted for the excellent
|
||
text books and priests and nuns had the run of the class rooms.
|
||
Whatever dropped and withered there must be money for "religion."
|
||
So greedy was the Church that by the end of 1940 there was bitter
|
||
murmuring against the priests among the Falangists, and Franco was
|
||
compelled to defy the Vatican over the appointment of bishops. It
|
||
only required this "quarrel over investitures" to complete the
|
||
restoration of the Middle Ages. But the Vatican won, of course.
|
||
Without German, Italian, and clerical protection, the Spanish
|
||
people, low as they have fallen, would sweep away the perjured
|
||
adventurer and his popin-jay brothier-in-law in a month. The army
|
||
is divided and in large part ripe for rebellion.
|
||
|
||
And the 15,000,000 who had quitted the Church? Turn back to
|
||
the French girl's narrative which I have quoted. Tens of thousands
|
||
of the rank and file of them are taken out of vile jails to sing
|
||
hymns and Fascist chants with a whip raised over their backs, while
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
the chaplain enjoys his bottle in the background. Hundreds of their
|
||
leaders who survived the war are buried like dogs. Still the firing
|
||
squads are busy all over Spain. The American Catholic must not read
|
||
these things. He is told that there are only 30,000 folk, who had
|
||
quitted the Church and they are "under restraint." He will find it
|
||
out when Fascism is destroyed and something more painful than the
|
||
"terrific propaganda" which Cardinal Hinsley foresees will fall
|
||
upon his Church in Italy. France, Portugal, Spain, and Spanish
|
||
America. The Pope knows it and stakes everything on the victory of
|
||
Fascism.
|
||
|
||
The Church linked Portugal with Spain in the Civil War. Here
|
||
again the record of the Black International is vile. To the middle
|
||
of the last century, Portugal had the same fate as Spain. A king of
|
||
disreputable character surrounded by fawning bishops, slew or
|
||
tortured tens of thousands of rebels against Church and feudalism.
|
||
But reform, or moderation set in earlier in that compact little
|
||
country than in Spain. When another disreputable monarch began to
|
||
play tricks in the early years of this century the middle-class
|
||
Liberals drove him out, set up a Republic and stripped the Church
|
||
of all its privileges. Then came the tragic dilemma -- feudalism or
|
||
Socialism, finance or freedom -- and before the specter of the down
|
||
the Reds, men took down their anti-clerical banners. Portugal
|
||
became a military dictatorship with the Church in full power once
|
||
more.
|
||
|
||
Under President General Cremona and Premier Dr. Salazar,
|
||
Portugal is what is humorously called a corporative state. The late
|
||
Pope, who knew as much about economics and sociology as a child in
|
||
a primary school does, gave the Catholic world one of those
|
||
Encyclicals which it admires so much, saying that Italy's
|
||
corporative state is the ideal for reconciling capital and labor
|
||
and honoring the Church. Naturally, you would not expect a
|
||
churchman to notice that this corporative state was a ghastly
|
||
failure, even economically, in his own country, Italy; that crime
|
||
was rising by leaps and bounds, and the schools were rotting. In
|
||
Portugal, where more than half the people are still pious,
|
||
illiterate, and densely ignorant, it was comparatively easy; and
|
||
the Jesuits, who had been expelled, were brought back to help. So
|
||
the corporative state was established. What did it matter to the
|
||
Papacy that, concentrating power over capital and labor in one pair
|
||
of hands, it was the ideal form of state for an aggressive
|
||
imperialistic dictator? Mussolini must have smiled.
|
||
|
||
We may take it that Pacelli was the chief author of the
|
||
Encyclical 'Quadragesimo Anno' (1931) in which the Pope summoned
|
||
all Catholic countries to adopt the form of the corporative state.
|
||
They were then a ragged regiment; Italy, Poland, Eire, and (more or
|
||
less) Hungary. To these Pacelli in 1934 added Austria and in 1935
|
||
most of the Republics of South and Central America. When he saw
|
||
Germany and Italy guaranteeing the success of his plot in Spain,
|
||
and Portugal had bowed to the Papal orders in 1934, he began to
|
||
dream larger dreams. He worked, we shall see, in Yugo-Slavia, to
|
||
prepare the way for Mussolini's legions and win at least a Croatian
|
||
Church for the Vatican. He courted France and encouraged the
|
||
Rexists in Belgium. His dream took the shape of a bloc or League of
|
||
Catholic corporative states, very docile to the Black
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
International, spanning the planet, following Mussolini's
|
||
"victorious eagles" eastward, ready in time to check either a
|
||
German Nazi empire in north Europe or a democratic Anglo-American
|
||
combination.
|
||
|
||
IV
|
||
|
||
PAPAL COWARDICE IN ABYSSINIA -- AND WHY
|
||
|
||
The Catholic writer Teeling (The Pope in Polities) is
|
||
generally understood to have made a protest in the name of Catholic
|
||
democrats against the anti-democratic policy of the Vatican. He is
|
||
not very emphatic on any point except the Papal attitude to the
|
||
conquest of Abyssinia, and he is far from satisfactory on the
|
||
point. He says that Catholics "sighed in vain" for a Papal
|
||
condemnation of Mussolini's crime, but "the poor old man" was
|
||
content with a refusal to bless the war, as Mussolini pressed him
|
||
to do, or to restrain the Italian Church from blessing it.
|
||
|
||
It is something to have a Catholic writer admitting that all
|
||
the world condemned Mussolini except the Pope" (p. 130). The
|
||
Catholic press generally tried to twist vague Papal words into a
|
||
condemnation. But it is misleading to talk about the "poor old
|
||
man." Pacelli was the director of the Papal policy, and there was
|
||
nothing vague or evasive about it. For ages the Vatican has cast a
|
||
covetous eye on the Ethiopian Church. The existence of a branch of
|
||
Christianity which had as much right to call itself Catholic as
|
||
that of Rome and was equally Apostolic in its foundation, has
|
||
always been a challenge and a reproach to the Vatican, but it was
|
||
little use dreaming of getting the submission of the Greek Church.
|
||
At the Russian Revolution, we shall see, there was some hope of
|
||
inducing the atheistic new rules to sacrifice to the Vatican the
|
||
rich and populous branch of the Greek Church in that country, and
|
||
for Years the Papacy courted the Hammer and Sickle as eagerly as it
|
||
later courted the Swastika. The hope died, but the Vatican kept its
|
||
eye on such independent branches of the Church as that of Ethiopia.
|
||
|
||
This was the bait which Mussolini dangled before the Pope in
|
||
1934. By the "gentleman's agreement" he had made with the Pope in
|
||
1929, he had, he supposed, secured Papal support in advance for his
|
||
imperial adventures, but the whole world was so shocked in 1934 by
|
||
Mussolini's obvious preparations to attack Abyssinia, so disgusted
|
||
that his "invincible legions" chose the weakest possible opponent,
|
||
that the Vatican had to consider its position in America and
|
||
Britain. The solution of the difficulty was Pacellesque, if I may
|
||
coin the word. Let the Pope pose as a moral coward; a poor old man
|
||
who was bewildered by the sudden development -- so bishops said in
|
||
America -- and its menace, and let the entire Italian Church
|
||
boisterously support Mussolini and secure the unanimous support of
|
||
the nation. The Vatican tried at a later stage to explain the
|
||
situation by saying that the Italian hierarchy and clergy acted in
|
||
this as Italians, not as representatives of the Church, and there
|
||
were Catholics in America who repeated this miserable subterfuge.
|
||
As if it were not one of the very strongest claims for the moral
|
||
influence of the Catholic Church that on any moral issue it
|
||
sublimely ignores national limitations and judges them in the light
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
of eternal principle alone! You might as well imagine the police of
|
||
Washington consorting with criminals under the window's of the
|
||
White House as the Italian hierarchy acting on so delicate an issue
|
||
without Papal instructions.
|
||
|
||
As to the Pope himself, which really means Pacelli, we will
|
||
not waste time discussing whether he condemned the war, especially
|
||
when we have Catholic writers saying that he did not, until someone
|
||
quotes a clear and verifiable word of condemnation. The editor of
|
||
the British Catholic paper (Catholic Times, July 17, 1936),
|
||
challenged by the Protestant Bishop of Durham, replied: "I grant
|
||
you that throughout these months of crisis the Holy Father has said
|
||
no word in favor of the League of Nations nor in favor of that
|
||
united stand against Italy, which was so much desired in this
|
||
country." Cardinal Hinsley, it is true, says in his Preface to
|
||
Rankin's eulogy of Pacelli, 'The Pope Speaks' (1940), that in his
|
||
presence the Pope, before the invasion of Abyssinia, spoke of "all
|
||
my efforts to prevent the barbarous tragedy." What a pity Hinsley
|
||
did not quote the words six years earlier and spare Catholics in
|
||
America and Britain so much pain and humiliation! And what a pity
|
||
Mussolini did not hear that the Pope was talking of his grand
|
||
imperialist design as "barbarous."
|
||
|
||
Cardinal Hinsley does not think it necessary to explain why a
|
||
Pope who privately thought the invasion of Abyssinia barbarous had
|
||
not one word of public condemnation of it. He could be very
|
||
eloquent on events far away in Spain, of which he could have no
|
||
exact knowledge and on events still farther away and more difficult
|
||
to check in Mexico, Russia, and China. They hurt the Church. But on
|
||
an outrage which was organized under his nose, a tragedy which was
|
||
so notorious that all the world except himself condemned it, he had
|
||
nothing to say as a world-oracle. It would hurt the Church if he
|
||
said it.
|
||
|
||
Once or twice he tried the tactics of that other famous
|
||
oracle, the ancient oracle of Delphi. On July 28, 1934, speaking
|
||
(domestically) on a saintly missionary who had worked in Abyssinia,
|
||
he glanced at the war-talk and said that he "hoped for peace,
|
||
truth, justice, and charity." On August 28th he had to address a
|
||
body of Italian Catholic nurses, many of whom were destined for the
|
||
war-zone, and he could hardly ignore it. He said, with a calculated
|
||
vagueness that Delphi never surpassed, that while folk abroad
|
||
described it as "a war of sheer conquest and nothing else", which
|
||
would certainly be an "unjust war", the Italian authorities said
|
||
that it was a war of defense against Abyssinian aggression and to
|
||
find room for some of Italy's surplus population (for which the
|
||
priests were even more responsible than Mussolini). He ended in a
|
||
mumble that God would find a way to a just peace. Italian Catholics
|
||
rejoiced that the Pope had endorsed Mussolini's motivation of the
|
||
war and we shall see that archbishop's declared it to be a war of
|
||
defense. American and British Catholics boasted that he had
|
||
denounced the war of conquest.
|
||
|
||
It occurred to some that if there is a particle of truth in
|
||
the Catholic claim for the Papacy it was the Pope's duty to go
|
||
beyond abstract principles which everybody recognized and say in
|
||
plain Italian whether Mussolini's enterprise, which had not the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
least ambiguity in the eyes of the rest of the world, was or was
|
||
not criminal. Pacelli therefore had an explanatory note put in the
|
||
Osservatore, (August 29) saying that surplus population was "not by
|
||
itself a ground of war", which left matters just as they were.
|
||
American Catholics felt that all the gorgeous claims that their
|
||
apologists had made for the Papacy were stultified, and Price Bell
|
||
of the 'Chicago Daily News' was instructed to get the truth from
|
||
the Pope's own lips. He wrote a moving four-page article on
|
||
"interview" in 'Liberty' (October 19, 1935), but had to confess
|
||
that he had not got a word on Abyssinia from the Pope. One gathers
|
||
that he had just paid the usual fee from $10 upward, according to
|
||
the size of the crowd -- to be admitted to a reception.
|
||
|
||
Pacelli knew that, after a little grumbling behind closed
|
||
doors American and British Catholics would, in their own interest,
|
||
submit to anything that the Pope said or did, so he let him pose to
|
||
the outside world as a moral coward and effectively satisfied
|
||
Mussolini by a glorious unity of the Italian Church in support of
|
||
the war. Professor Salvemini has collected the utterances of 7
|
||
cardinal archbishops, 23 archbishops, 44 bishops, and 6 archbishops
|
||
with titles abroad. It is almost enough to quote from the Papal
|
||
organ, the 'Osservatore' (August 22, 1935), the fact that from the
|
||
Eucharistic Congress at Teramo a telegram was sent to Mussolini in
|
||
the name of 19 archbishops and 57 bishops saying: "Catholic Italy
|
||
thanks Jesus Christ for the renewed greatness of the Fatherland
|
||
made stronger by Mussolini's policy." Will anyone suggest that the
|
||
dispatch of this telegram and the Publication of it in the Papal
|
||
newspaper were contrary to the wishes of the Pope and his vigorous
|
||
Secretary of State, the real and very despotic ruler of the Church?
|
||
|
||
The prelates continued all through the war to keep Catholics
|
||
-- and practically all Italians were now compulsory Catholic --
|
||
loyal to Mussolini. They gave a most unctuous consecration to a
|
||
shameful war of aggression, barbarously conducted, and openly
|
||
represented it as a gain to the Church. In a diocesan letter of
|
||
October 15, 1935, the Bishop of Nocera explained that Ethiopia was
|
||
uncivilized be cause it was not subject to the Pope and the war
|
||
would be a great blessing for it:
|
||
|
||
It is a People which, having became detached from Rome,
|
||
can cannot get full benefit of the Christian ideas: which has
|
||
not been able, therefore, to produce those beneficial
|
||
conditions to which the West of Europe owes its greatness.
|
||
Roman Catholic Italy has the duty of bringing to populations
|
||
deprived of them its principles of equity, charity, and
|
||
fraternity. We pray God that he should use Italy as His divine
|
||
instrument for the evangelization of the whole world.
|
||
|
||
One can say these things in a country where the Black
|
||
International controls education. A bishop ought at least to know
|
||
that until the 15th century the Abyssinian Church had had no
|
||
connection whatever with Rome; that submission to Rome was then
|
||
imposed from Portuguese as a condition of their help in saving the
|
||
country from the Moslem; and that it led to a grave demoralization
|
||
of Abyssinia and was fiercely rejected as soon as possible. And
|
||
note carefully the hope of the Black International that God will go
|
||
on to choose Italy to "evangelize" -- that is to say, bring into
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
submission to the Vatican -- the whole world. We know how it was
|
||
evangelizing Abyssinia; with poison gas, bombing natives, and
|
||
massacre (as at Addis Ababa). The interesting point is the allusion
|
||
to Pacelli's growing Plan of a league of Catholic powers.
|
||
|
||
A fortnight before this the Archbishop of Taranto had said
|
||
Mass in a submarine and given an address to the officers and men.
|
||
They were, he said, fighting a war of defense -- was there ever a
|
||
more brazen apology? -- not conquest, and it would not only relieve
|
||
Italy of over-population and supply it with raw material, but it
|
||
would lead to "the expansion of the Catholic faith". It was
|
||
therefore "a holy war, a crusade". The archbishop was worse than
|
||
the bishop and the cardinal-archbishop, Sehuster, of Milan, bead of
|
||
the Italian Church was worse than the archbishop. Speaking on
|
||
October 28 he said, as quoted by Salvemin:
|
||
|
||
The Italian flag is at this moment bringing in triumph
|
||
the Cross of Christ in Ethiopia to free the road for the
|
||
emancipation of the slaves, opening it at the same time to our
|
||
missionary enterprise.
|
||
|
||
Apart from their lies about Red outrage one can at least
|
||
understand the action of the Spanish prelates in supporting Franco,
|
||
but these Italian prelates, the nearest to Rome and the most
|
||
rigorously controlled by the Vatican, consecrated the crime of
|
||
their dictator and their Papal Secretary of State with all entirely
|
||
nauseous mixture of greed for the country and greed for the Church.
|
||
I saw two of the picture postcards that then circulated in Italy.
|
||
One bore a map of Abyssinia showing treasures of corn, gold, oil,
|
||
etc., in different regions. The other was a tank taking a statue of
|
||
the Virgin to the Abyssinians.
|
||
|
||
So it was to the end. When, in May, 1936, the Italians entered
|
||
Abbis Ababa and Mussolini announced victory, the church bells rang
|
||
everywhere and the churches were illuminated and decorated. There
|
||
was one exception, St. Peter's. Its bells rang -- because peace had
|
||
come, of course -- but it was not illuminated. The fox retained his
|
||
cunning, and probably Mussolini grudgingly allowed that he had to
|
||
save his face as well as he could in Britain and America. It had to
|
||
suffice that the Pope blessed "the triumphant happiness of a great
|
||
and good people for a peace that will further and will initiate the
|
||
true European and world-wide peace" (News Times and Ethiopia News,
|
||
October 31, 1936), and that the bishops fell over each other in
|
||
hastening to congratulate the Duce and his "defence of Christian
|
||
civilization". Not a word was said when Graziani perpetrated one of
|
||
the foulest massacres of this foul period as when the butcher's
|
||
butcher-son published a book glorifying war as such and explaining
|
||
what fun it was to drop bombs on natives.
|
||
|
||
Italy did little for Abyssinia. Production fell, and a mere
|
||
title of the surplus population of Italy which was supposed to be
|
||
panting for room beyond the seas would go to Africa. The Italian
|
||
authorities made no haste to educate the natives, and such
|
||
industries as were set up were reserved for Italians. Abyssinians
|
||
were not allowed to become artisans. They were to be the hewers of
|
||
wood and the drawers of water. Make all allowance you like for
|
||
Italy's lack of capital, of which Mussolini had drained the
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
country, but the truth cannot be obscured, Mussolini wanted only
|
||
two things: the "glory" of founding an Italian empire and a
|
||
backward country for Italian's to exploit. And in 1937, the
|
||
'Osservatore' announced, the Pope blessed this enterprise by
|
||
awarding the Golden Rose, the supreme honor that the Papacy has for
|
||
mere women, to the Queen of Italy as Empress of Abyssinia.
|
||
|
||
He had ground to do this. Whatever else Italy failed to do for
|
||
the Abyssinians it spent a vast sum in giving them the treasure of
|
||
the Papal faith. At government expense priests, monks, and nuns
|
||
were shipped out and chalets and houses built for them. There is an
|
||
account of it all in the 'International Review of Missions,'
|
||
(January, 1937, p. 103). The Vatican sent out a set of Ethiopian
|
||
type and a press, and Italian Catholic papers told how the natives
|
||
eagerly pressed for the good words. Protestant missionaries found
|
||
that they might as well pack up. Moslem and Christian had hitherto
|
||
shown a mutual toleration. Now they were set against each other
|
||
Whatever the state gained or failed to gain by the conquest of
|
||
Abyssinia the Church was determined to profit. All this, the
|
||
Catholic protests, follows inevitably from Catholic principles. So
|
||
much the worse for those principles; though we seem to have heard
|
||
a hundred times that the Church emphatically disowns the maxim that
|
||
the end justifies the means.
|
||
|
||
It is impossible to write these chapters on the action of the
|
||
Black International in Spain and Italy without irony and
|
||
repugnance, and many will find that it raises a problem about the
|
||
attitude of the American Catholic layman. As far as Spain is
|
||
concerned there is little to explain. His daily paper spoke of the
|
||
Reds probably in the same language as his Catholic weekly.
|
||
Bolshevism was growing like a poisonous plant in Spain, and
|
||
practically all the world wanted it eradicated. There was, it is
|
||
true, that intriguing paradox which I have discussed; how the Red
|
||
tail -- and such a small one -- had succeeded in wagging the
|
||
Catholic dog for seven whole years. But when there is a question of
|
||
smiting Bolshevism, you do not notice these trifles.
|
||
|
||
In the case of Abyssinia the situation was very different. The
|
||
whole world, outside Eire, Poland, and a few other potato patches,
|
||
condemned Mussolini, and the facts were not in dispute. Such
|
||
writers as Seldes and Teeling make it clear that there was some
|
||
dissatisfaction in the body of the Catholic laity, but the tone of
|
||
the Catholic press and the utterances of the hierarchy show that it
|
||
did not reach very far. Yet you find it impossible to believe that
|
||
the Catholic men and women whom you meet in business or at the club
|
||
or a friend's house, are so docile to their priests that they will
|
||
read without a shudder the shocking language of the Italian
|
||
prelates I have quoted, or be easily persuaded that turning
|
||
Oriental Catholics into Roman Catholics throws a mantle of justice,
|
||
if not nobility, over Mussolini's enterprise.
|
||
|
||
I cannot here go deeply into this matter, but I may make one
|
||
point. The relation of a Catholic to his priest is not the same as
|
||
that of a Protestant to his minister. Periodically he hears a
|
||
sermon on the priesthood, and the gist of it is that, if he accepts
|
||
the creed at all, he must regard the priest as something totally
|
||
different from any other minister of religion. The preacher insists
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
that he shall not look to the priest as a man -- his intelligence
|
||
and even his character do not matter -- but to his office and
|
||
powers. He can turn bread and wine into God (in the Mass) and can
|
||
forgive sins. He has, whatever his personality, been endowed with
|
||
tremendous supernatural powers. You may find this difficult to
|
||
follow, but a Catholic is as strictly bound to believe these things
|
||
as to believe in God. That medieval superstition, on which the
|
||
Church still literally insists, is the root of the power of the
|
||
priests. That is why, for instance, they can do what no other
|
||
ministers can do, such as to forbid a Catholic to read any
|
||
literature that criticizes the Church or its teaching, and in this
|
||
way they protect the superstition which is the root of their power.
|
||
Catholicism is not a collection of beliefs. It is an organic whole,
|
||
and you cannot be a Catholic and question a single "article of
|
||
faith." If in addition to this you remember the tremendous hypnotic
|
||
force wielded by the Church, corresponding very closely to the
|
||
German boasting of Aryan blood or the Italian boasting of
|
||
Mussolini's infallibility you will begin to understand. But it is
|
||
not a case of "to understand all is to forgive all." Your
|
||
conclusion is more apt to be: Away with the whole damn lot -- to
|
||
give a rough translation of Voltaire's polite phrase.
|
||
|
||
V
|
||
|
||
THE JAP GETS A GOLD MEDAL FOR HIS
|
||
'CHINESE INCIDENT'
|
||
|
||
It is one of the consequences of this doctrinal mentality of
|
||
the Catholic that he can be persuaded to accept propositions which
|
||
to you and me look childish. I am, of course, speaking of the
|
||
general body of Catholics and am quite aware that you will meet a
|
||
man here and there who seems fairly liberal; though you will find
|
||
that either he is not liberal at all on these dogmas which the
|
||
Church, for reasons (as they are the basis of the power of the
|
||
clergy), declares indispensable, or he is a Catholic only
|
||
nominally. One such proposition is that the Catholic faith is so
|
||
unique, so profoundly important for this life and the next, that
|
||
when there is a prospect of getting further millions of men to
|
||
accept it, he, in spite of his having the same sentiments as we
|
||
have, agrees to wars, executions, imprisonments without trial,
|
||
compulsory hymn-Singing and jailers'
|
||
whips. After all, the Church has "the right of the sword" over
|
||
these people. That is an indispensable article of the creed.
|
||
|
||
A second proposition which is relevant here is -- this will
|
||
seem incredible to any who are not familiar with Catholic
|
||
literature -- that the Catholic accepts the belief, on which the
|
||
priests insist, that his Church is hated and persecuted by wicked
|
||
men with a rancor that other Churches do not experience. It is a
|
||
sheer legend, but very useful to the clergy. For the last fifty
|
||
years at least the Catholic Church has been treated by non-
|
||
Catholics with an indulgence, even an admiration, which has enabled
|
||
it to secure by intrigue, a power far out of proportion to the
|
||
number of its members in democratic countries. In Catholic doctrine
|
||
-- again indispensable doctrine -- a large part of the explanation
|
||
of this legendary hatred is the devil. Naturally he hates, and
|
||
moves bad men to hate, that which is holiest . . . I feel that I
|
||
ought to apologize for talking like this to educated men and women,
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
24
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
but believe me, that is the ordinary Catholic mentality. And it is
|
||
in virtue of this proposition that Bolshevism is in the Catholic
|
||
mind associated with the devil, and he is ready to cry for its
|
||
extinction in Russia. Spain, and Mexico. You will not be so
|
||
churlish as to remind him that he is really calling for aggressive
|
||
war.
|
||
|
||
Hence the Vatican's beautiful friendship with Japan and
|
||
positive hatred of Russia. We will consider in a later book the lie
|
||
which is used to give an odor of sanctity to this hatred, the claim
|
||
that Russia persecutes religion, but by 1934, when the British
|
||
government had officially reported to the contrary, as we shall
|
||
see, any ground for a charge of persecution had disappeared. Yet
|
||
when, in that year, Russia applied for admission to the League of
|
||
Nations, the Vatican whipped up its representatives at Geneva to
|
||
oppose the application. I will deal at length with the matter
|
||
later, but it is necessary here to point the contrast. Pacelli
|
||
stirred every nerve to get a great civilization, which already had
|
||
the finest record in Europe of humane service and social
|
||
betterment, publicly insulted and represented as a nation far
|
||
inferior to Mussolini's Italy or Piludski's miserable Poland (which
|
||
was at the time very seriously persecution religion). On the other
|
||
hand, he drew nearer to Japan. Russia had long discarded the idea,
|
||
which some had had, of spreading Socialism by aggressive war. It
|
||
was, if only in its own interest, very earnest for the peace of the
|
||
world. But it was damned and vituperated by Rome. Japan was just as
|
||
clearly aiming at, indeed already engaged in, a disgraceful
|
||
aggressive war. The Vatican took it to its bosom.
|
||
|
||
The point arises here because just in that year there was some
|
||
prospect of war between Russia and Japan, and Catholics everywhere
|
||
loudly proclaimed that, should it occur, they would side with
|
||
Japan. "In the event of a war between Japan and Russia," said an
|
||
editorial in one of the leading British Catholic papers, (Catholic
|
||
Times, November 23, 1934) "Catholics would sympathize with Japan,
|
||
at least in so far as religion is concerned, so let us beware of an
|
||
Anglo-American 'bloc' against Japan involving us on the side of
|
||
Russia." These apologists for a bad case find it difficult to write
|
||
plain English. The editor obviously means that British and American
|
||
Catholics would hope on religious grounds -- that is to say, for
|
||
the profit of the Church in China and Japan -- to see Japan beat
|
||
Russia. We do not think less of sympathy with crime because its
|
||
motive is said to be religious. It is only one mare of a hundred
|
||
proofs that the interest of the Church, which always the means the
|
||
interest or profit of the Black International, is different from
|
||
and often opposed to the interest of the race.
|
||
|
||
In the second book I described the beginning of the alliance
|
||
of the Vatican with Japan. The country had just taken the first
|
||
step in a monstrous plan of aggression and exploitation which must
|
||
have been known in every Foreign Office in the world, and its
|
||
conquest of Manchuria was sternly condemned everywhere. The French
|
||
were, as we shall see, then playing a dangerous game, for which
|
||
they now pay so dearly, with the Vatican, and -- I quoted this on
|
||
French clerical authority -- the advised the Japs to apply to the
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
25
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
Pope for recognition. As the idea was put to the Japanese by French
|
||
missionaries, you may wonder whether the initiative did not come
|
||
from the Vatican; but you will have to be content to wonder, as the
|
||
beginning of the negotiations is left in obscurity.
|
||
|
||
It was not difficult to persuade the Japs to apply to Rome.
|
||
Most of the educated and ruling men of Japan are atheists of the
|
||
type who regard religion as a very useful institution -- for women
|
||
and workers, In 1871, when the Europeanization of the country
|
||
began, they sent a large and unique deputation to Europe to study
|
||
Christianity and report whether it was a more 'suitable -- that is
|
||
to say, more effective in securing the docility of the masses --
|
||
religion to give to their people than Buddhism. Lafeadio Hearn
|
||
tells how their report on the influence of Christianity in its own
|
||
field was so poor that they abandoned the idea, but much water had
|
||
gone down to the sea since 1871. One change was that the Pope was
|
||
again a secular as well as a spiritual monarch, since Mussolini had
|
||
created the state of the Vatican City, and the mixture of small
|
||
sovereignty and vast international religious power gave him a
|
||
unique position.
|
||
|
||
We saw what happened. Even Pacelli dare not, while the whole
|
||
world was inflamed against Japan, pledge the Pope as a temporal
|
||
ruler to alliance with Japan, but he appointed a Vicar Apostolic
|
||
"to negotiate with the government of Manchukuo about religious
|
||
affairs." Other powers might sacrifice their trade-interests to
|
||
their principles by declaring that they would have no truck with a
|
||
bloody usurpation, but the interests of Catholic missions are too
|
||
sacred to be sacrificed for mundane considerations. Whether there
|
||
was an understanding that the Vatican promised to work to prevent
|
||
the League of Nations from applying sanctions to Japan, as it later
|
||
worked for the exclusion of Russia, we do not know. The Vatican
|
||
does not issue a Blue Book -- not even a Little Blue Book -- when
|
||
it has completed a deal. Few would trust the book if it did.
|
||
|
||
What we do know, however, is enough. The representatives of
|
||
the Vatican in Manchukuo and Japan worked so amiably with the army
|
||
and the government that by 1934 the French Catholic writer I quoted
|
||
was able to boast that "no Japanese prince or mission now passes
|
||
through Rome without paying its homage to the Sovereign Pontiff."
|
||
Incidentally, French trade in the East benefitted very happily.
|
||
American Catholics raised their familiar cry of libel of Holy See,
|
||
wicked suspicion, etc., when the growing intimacy was mentioned in
|
||
the press, and it transpired that the news had came from the
|
||
clerical officials (whose pockets are always wide open) of the
|
||
Vatican City pres's bureau that negotiations were in progress for
|
||
an exchange of ambassadors between Tokyo and the Papacy. There was
|
||
more indignation and surprise that people should malign Holy Church
|
||
so much; and on May 5, 1935, the Papal organ, the 'Osservatore,'
|
||
joyously announced that the Pope was sending a representative to
|
||
Tokyo and the Mikado sending an ambassador to the Papal Court.
|
||
|
||
You make short work of all the Catholic sophistry, about this
|
||
ominous development if you consider the run of events at the time.
|
||
The world at the conquest of Manchuria had evaporated. Trade-
|
||
interests had again beaten principles. Sanctions against Japan had
|
||
not been imposed, and the trading nations were on friendly terms
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
26
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
with the Jap and willing to take his word, as they would take
|
||
Mussolini's word after Abyssinia and Hitler's word after Austria,
|
||
that absolutely no further advance would be attempted; while all
|
||
three adventurers were quite openly dangling before the eyes of
|
||
their respective peoples a program of conquests that promised
|
||
wealth to every class in the nation.
|
||
|
||
The case of the alliance of the Pope and his Yellow Brother"
|
||
was the worst of all. At the beginning of the century Count Hayashi
|
||
(Secret Memoirs, 1915), had written that "Japan must keep quite and
|
||
lull suspicion and wait her day; then not only put the meddling
|
||
powers out but meddle herself." After 1930, with the growth of an
|
||
aggressive Fascism in Europe and a general profession of admiration
|
||
of its efficiency, the Japanese concluded that they need not keep
|
||
quiet in their own country; they could not, indeed, if they were to
|
||
educate their people in the ground plan of dominating Asia. One of
|
||
the most spluttering firebrands was Yosuke Matsuoka. He had been
|
||
educated in America and was a Christian, so he was very useful for
|
||
lulling suspicions abroad, especially in America, but he was very
|
||
patriotic in Japan. Upton Close in his book, 'The Challenge,'
|
||
translates an article which Matsuoka published in 1933. It
|
||
coruscated with gems like this: "The mission of the Yamata race is
|
||
to prevent the human race from becoming devilish ... The one
|
||
nation not subject to the universal law of decline is that which is
|
||
ruled by a divinity and a permeated by the spirit of the Gods ...
|
||
the fated time has come to effulge its benefits to the world". Not
|
||
very Christian, but plain enough. At the following New Year,
|
||
Japanese stores displayed gorgeous paint-and-pasteboard panoramas
|
||
of Japan's coming victory, the sinking of the American fleet, etc.
|
||
|
||
This was the symphony of events which accompanied the
|
||
negotiations in Pacelli's opulent chambers in the Vatican. Let us
|
||
charitably suppose that in 1935, Matsuoka earnestly assured Pacelli
|
||
that Japan would not steal another acre of Chinese soil, that
|
||
Pacelli was simple-minded enough to believe him, and that the
|
||
highly favored Catholic missionaries in Japan did not report to the
|
||
Vatican that the entire country, including the Buddhist and Shinto
|
||
priests, was joyously chanting the national anthem of domination of
|
||
the East. A Catholic can probably believe that, although the
|
||
steeling of Jehol from China had already followed the stealing of
|
||
Manchuria. But in 1935 the sacred representative of the Papacy in
|
||
Tokyo would find it one of his first duties to report that, under
|
||
cynically mendacious pretexts, the Japanese were moving south over
|
||
China proper. By June, 1935, they had appropriated a further vast
|
||
area of China. In November, 1936, they tried to set up a puppet
|
||
government for five whole provinces besides Manchuria.
|
||
|
||
In short, from that day to this, it has been one long story of
|
||
conquest officially described in the most brazen language. It was
|
||
not a war, but an "incident" -- thus escaping the economic
|
||
inconveniences of a war -- it was for the "cooperative prosperity"
|
||
of China, Japan, Europe, and America, it was just a police measure,
|
||
and so on. And all the time it was exultingly represented in Japan
|
||
itself as the mere beginning of a career of conquest that would
|
||
enrich every class in the country. It was, further, a war conducted
|
||
with the full bestiality of the methods of the Pope's allies.
|
||
Brutality to civilians in actual fighting was supplemented by
|
||
brutality after conquest. The Chinese subjects were debased with
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
27
|
||
|
||
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
|
||
|
||
dope and exploited mercilessly. Soldiers and officers used Chinese
|
||
women as Goths and Vandals had never used Roman Women. A Chinese
|
||
lady told me of an incident reported to her by her family in China:
|
||
an old woman in the occupied zone traveling from village to village
|
||
was raped six times in a few hours by soldiers of the nation which
|
||
is "ruled by a divinity and permeated by the spirit of the gods."
|
||
. . .
|
||
|
||
By 1941 the whole diabolical plan was clear. Japan's service
|
||
was to be to draw off a very large part of the Russian forces to
|
||
the East while the "crusade" destroyed Russia in Europe. We now
|
||
know -- if anybody required any evidence -- that the Russian
|
||
campaign was decided and plotted very early in 1941 after the
|
||
failure to reduce England by aerial bombardment or invasion, which
|
||
was originally intended to precede the attack on Russia. Matsuoka;
|
||
the Versatile was sent to Europe. He visited Hitler and Mussolini;
|
||
and the 'Osservatore' (March 31, 1941) told with pride how he
|
||
visited Pope Pacelli. Did he carefully conceal from Pacelli that
|
||
the war for the extinction of Bolshevism, the bloodiest war in
|
||
history, the most ardent desire of the Pope, was to be launched?
|
||
That Japan, besides its designs in Southern Asia and its bestiality
|
||
in China, was to help by destroying Russia and threatening to
|
||
intercept American supplies? Believe that if you can. the Vatican
|
||
organ tells us that at the close of their cordial interview, the
|
||
Pope presented Matsuoka with a gold medal; and Matsuoka declared in
|
||
the Italian press that his talk with the Pope was "the prettiest
|
||
moment in my life."
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
|
||
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
|
||
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
|
||
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
|
||
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
|
||
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
|
||
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
|
||
that America can again become what its Founders intended --
|
||
|
||
The Free Market-Place of Ideas.
|
||
|
||
The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
|
||
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
|
||
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
|
||
us, we need to give them back to America.
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
28
|
||
|