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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 10
FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
HOW THE POPE KEEPS TO THE PLOT
WHILE THE WORLD CURSES IT
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
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CHAPTER
I Guilty or Not Guilty ................................ 1
II Will Catholics Disown the Pope ...................... 9
III Restoring the Corpse of the Middle Ages ............ 14
IV The Church in Democratic Countries ................. 21
V The Catholic Defence ............................... 26
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Chapter I
GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY?
We are living in the second most catastrophic period that the
race has suffered in the last 3000 years. It was then, three
millennia ago, slowly emerging from the ruin which the pioneers of
"the noble Aryan race" had wrought at their first contact with
civilization, and with the successive rise of the Phoenicians, the
Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans it was marching to the peak of
the ancient world. There were, too, very notable resurrections of
civilization in India and China. By the end of the 5th Century they
were all ruined and the race from rim to rim of the known world was
almost back in barbarism. We cannot compare our age with that awful
beginning of the Dark Age, but since then not one of the tragedies
that have cast their shadow upon a large area of the earth
approaches in magnitude of evil and volume of suffering the world-
wide degradation of our time. The Black Death, it is true, caused
more deaths and more suffering, but that was one of the calamities
which old legal language ingenuously attributed; to "the Act of
God."
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
Many will look round them in the cities in which they live and
wonder if my statement can possibly be true. Do we see reflected on
the faces and in the lives of the great majority such gloom as this
implies I live in a city which has felt the rain of death as no
great city ever did before -- have lived and worked in it through
all the hellish days and nights, never ever taking shelter -- yet
when I look round or read my daily paper I must smile at my own
statement, true as it is. The other day an auctioneer advertised
$200000 worth of wine and spirits at one sale. I heard a penniless
refugee of a year ago boasting of the costly shows she saw weekly
and the $500 fur-coat she was buying. Lines of folk a hundred yards
long wait to be admitted to see a good picture. Night-clubs and
bottle-clubs flourish, I am told, as never before, and only today,
when I took my daily five-mile walk, women appealed to me to
contribute to the fund to help "the poor Russians" . . .
Yet I repeat, and with the history of the world before my
mind's eye, this is the most dreadful age into which the race has
passed since the ruin of the Greek-Roman civilization. How many
people are at war -- and a war of giants -- today? About
850000000 on any count; and if you include India, as part of the
British Empire, and the Spanish American Republics which have at
least declared war, and the countries that are held back from war
only by the lash and gibbet of the conqueror, and the countless
which give all the help they can to the aggressive nations but call
themselves neutral, something like 1400000000 or three-fourths
of the race. You might almost say that the only people who are not
involved in the savagery are the savages.
The sun never looked down upon such a spectacle before.
In the terrible period of reaction and misery, after the fall
of Rome, which I admit to be greater than ours -- greater because
far more than half of the people in the civilized area perished and
the misery went on and deepened during two centuries -- not much
more than 50000000 people were affected. Today, however many may
escape sacrifices and burdens, more than ten times that number
suffer bitterly, tens of millions of them poignantly. But there is
a more important difference, and in a sense it makes our tragedy
the blackest in the historical record.
What happened fifteen centuries ago was that a terrible
drought had fallen upon western Asia, and in search of new pastures
mighty hoards of those diabolical horsemen the Huns invaded Europe
and forced the half civilized or wholly uncivilized Goths, Vandals,
Franks, etc. southward upon the Roman Empire. Our modern Huns and
their allies were trained in all the ideals, all the culture, of
the highest civilization. They deliberately stooped to savagery,
and they did this out of sheer greed. There have been glorified
bandits before -- the men we teach our children to admire as great
conquerors -- but this is the first time in history that a large
group of men of great ability have sat down to plot, with the
callous deliberation of master-crooks, the conquest and
exploitation of the greater part of the earth. If anybody doubts
whether that is a correct characterization of the directive group
in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo I am not inclined to argue about it.
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
The thesis of the ten booklets of which this is the last is
that these super-crooks, whose near-success will one day amaze
historians, had the cooperation and most valuable assistance of the
clergy of the Church of Rome, the Black International. That, I am
fully conscious, is an appalling charge. To readers who know the
Church of Rome only from its own literature and who may not have
read the preceding nine books, it will naturally seem a wholly
ridiculous and impossible charge. Even to those who are familiar
with my historical works and have read the mass of evidence in
these booklets will hesitate and wonder if it is not exaggerated.
For let me be distinctly understood. I do not merely mean that a
bunch of bishops here and there, fearing to run counter to the
patriotism of the people or to incur the anger of the rulers,
supported iniquity. I say that the whole Black International, from
the Pope to priests, is guilty. Naturally American Catholic bishops
censure the vile conduct of Japan and English Catholic bishops that
of Germany. What matters from the moral angle is that each country
that has committed outrages has had the full support of the
Catholic hierarchy and clergy of that country, and that the Pope or
the Vatican has been throughout in, friendly alliance with the
arch-criminals.
So let us summarize the evidence. The first point to bear in
mind, as I explained, is the cardinal importance of the spread of
Communism and Socialism from 1918 onward, especially from 1923 to
1933. It is no use pretending that statesmen, Foreign Offices,
editors, authors, and industrial or commercial leaders were totally
unaware of the plot that Germany, Italy and Japan were preparing.
It was, except as regards its final and most monstrous form, openly
stated in widely-read literature in those countries. But these
leaders of public opinion or action were themselves so alarmed at
the spread of Communism and Socialism in nearly all countries that,
since Hitler and Mussolini promised to check the spread of the
danger, they very culpably persuaded themselves to ignore the
broader designs of those quaint St. Georges.
In this very important respect the cooperation of the Vatican
with the aims of the Axis, by filling the public mind with lies
about Communists and recommending Fascism as a state-form, is
notorious; and the reason is just as notorious. Communism, starting
from Russia in its Militant-Atheist phase, swept far more folk out
of the Church of Rome than the Reformation had done. I have
estimated the loss of the Roman Church, mainly to Communism and
Socialism, at something more than 70000000 in 15 years and have
based that estimate on published statistics. So, after a few years
of diplomatic coquetry with the Soviet authorities, the Vatican
began to libel and assail Communism. In the Papal Encyclical of
1931 Quadragesimo Anno, it was described as a vile, degrading, and
criminal influence, and Catholics were forbidden even to adhere to
Socialism. The note became steadily more strident until it rose
above that of the bitterest anti-Communist political writer. The
foulest and trashiest libels of Russian and Spanish Communists were
endorsed, and from 1934 onward the Vatican, its voice echoing
throughout the whole Church, called for the extinction, clearly by
war, of Communism in China, Spain, Mexico, and Russia.
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
I am not a Communist and will say only that that system of
ideas has as much right to present its case to the public and seek
converts as any other creed or system. But the Vatican knew what it
was doing. Under cover of a zeal against Communism and Socialism
Hitler and Mussolini and all their lesser satellites in other
countries were diverting the eyes of the world from their larger
criminal aims and the Pope enlisted his whole Church in that
strategy. The most effective means of checking those aims of
Germany, Italy, and Japan would have been a practical alliance of
the United States, Britain, and France, and the Pope and his local
black legions did everything in their power to turn the people
against the idea.
Then, whether we consider step by step the march of infamy to
its present culminating point or examine the three bandit-powers
and their relations with the Vatican, we find the closest
cooperation of the Black International. The first step was the
annexation of Manchuria. For a moment it seemed to warn the
civilized world that its comfortable and respectable standards of
life were challenged by a new force, and there was a wide demand
for prompt and decisive action. But the guilt of Sir John Simon in
frustrating punishment in the sacred name of trade is not greater
than that of the Vatican, which ordered its representatives in
Manchuria and Japan to enter into friendly relations with the
bandits. These relations deepened until, just when Japan again
shocked, and ought to have warned, the world by seizing more of
China and fully exhibiting the treachery and foulness of its
methods, Rome exchanged ambassadors with Tokyo and stamped upon
Catholic literature everywhere a respect for Japan and a hatred of
Russia. Matsuoka, fresh from the concerting of the appalling final
plot in Berlin, was received with flowers and gold medals at the
Vatican.
We examined the successive steps in the preparation of the
world for the destruction of freedom, decency, and justice. The one
section of the Church that mattered, the Italian hierarchy and
clergy, rapturously applauded the rape of Abyssinia, on religious
as well as patriotic grounds, and the Pope, seeing how neatly
Catholics had persuaded the world to condone his refusal to condemn
that outrage, gave the greatest gift in his power, the Church's
supreme reward of virtue, the Golden Rose, to the Italian "Empress
of Abyssinia." The spread of barbarism -- I will show presently how
that is not too strong an expression -- over Spain was the next
step in the conquest of civilization by installments. Here not only
the close cooperation of the Spanish Church but the blessings of
the enterprise by the Vatican and the support of Catholics all over
the world are commonplaces of contemporary history. It was the same
in the extension to Austria. The Catholic Dollfuss, after a visit
to Rome, treacherously destroyed "the Socialist watch-dog." The
head of the Austrian Church, Cardinal Innitzer, welcomed Hitler and
ordered his people to bow down when he marched through the gates
they had opened to him. Catholic Students prepared the way for the
first invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, which has had the courage to
expel a Papal Nuncio, and Catholic Slovak priests actually begged
Hitler to tear up his solemn promises to England and France and
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
destroy the splendid little Republic. Catholics invited Mussolini
to invade Albania. Catholics betrayed Belgium and France to his
devouring hordes. Catholics rent the unity and sapped the strength
of Yugo-Slavia for him. . . .
Thus not only did the Pope never condemn a single one of the
outrages by which the super-crooks strengthened their position --
every word of Papal censure of Germany and Italy refers to
infringements of the rights of the Church or other religious
grievances -- but the local hierarchy applauded every act of
aggression, and even the hierarchy of the invaded country rallied
to the aggressor. There was only one exception. We saw substantial
reason to believe that the Pope knew in advance of the plot against
Poland, as he knew of the intention to invade Belgium and France.
Whether he was asked to persuade the Poles to make no resistance,
since this was an important move toward that extinction of
Bolshevism in Russia which he desired above all, we have as yet no
evidence. But even when the Polish clergy, the most profoundly
Romanist in the world, sent him word of the infamies perpetrated
upon their people by the Germans, he took the sting out of his
censure by coupling the Germans and the Russians (who had on the
contrary, every reason to be humane and generous) in the guilt for
these barbarous outrage's.
If, on the other hand, we prefer to study the direct relations
of the Church with the aggressor-powers we shall find ourselves
impelled to use even stronger language. I have throughout spoken of
them as the Pope's allies, and the spectacle which the world
presents today gives point to the phrase. We boast daily that
almost the entire free civilized world is with us in our war upon
Japan, Germany, and Italy. No one will call Sweden, Switzerland,
and Turkey free; and of the Latin American Republics only the more
priest-ridden now refuse to speak out. But the Pope is not with us.
He is bound by treaty (Concordat) to the three powers which the
free world calls the enemies of the human race. You may object that
France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Slovakia, Eire, and Rumania are
not with us. No; they are with the Pope. Significant, isn't it?
I have shown in detail in what sense the Pope is an ally of
Italy and Germany. The triumph of crime in Italy, the consolidation
of the power of Mussolini, was not complete until he signed a
treaty with the Vatican and granted the Church a vast sum of money
(about $90000000) and nearly all the privileges it wanted. Until
the present Pope became Secretary of State there was still very
acrid quarrelling. There have been quarrels since -- always about
the Church's rights -- but Rome has seen the amazing sight of
Mussolini kneeling for the Pope's blessing and the Pope crossing
Rome (after Italy's treachery in regard to Yugo-Slavia) to exchange
greetings with the king and queen. What is more, whether you can in
any country in the world relieve the Pope of blame for what his
bishops in that country do -- a point we will examine presently --
you certainly cannot in the case of Italy. Yet the Italian
hierarchy has without exception blessed everything that Italy has
done in the colossal attempt to enslave the world to a brutal
standard of life, from the lying pretexts for the invasion of
Abyssinia to that repulsive scene, which I described, of Italy
entertaining the Greek minister's while its troops burst across the
frontier.
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
Worst of all is the case of Germany. Whether or no Hitler
would in time have attained power without the assistance of the
Church he did in fact attain it with the help of the Pope. In
giving the ample evidence of this I mention with reserve the charge
of Fritz Thyssen, the industrialist who financed the Nazis, and a
Roman Catholic, that -- in the words of the title for an article he
wrote in the Arbeiterzeitung -- "Pius XII, when Nuncio, carried
Hitler to power." My attention has since been called to the fact
that Cavalcade (September 28, 1940) gave the gist of the article
and there is no reason to doubt it. It seems that the Nazis deluded
Pacelli into thinking that they were going, not only to exterminate
the Socialists and Communists who were ruining the Church -- and
what did the Church ever care about the foulness of the means by
which its enemies were exterminated? -- but to set up a "Christian
Corporative State" on the Italian model, the Roman Church ruling
the west and the Protestant Church the east. I gave the evidence of
Von Papen, another Catholic, and other unimpeachable witnesses that
in fact the Vatican ordered German Catholics to drop their
opposition to the Nazis, deserting their Jewish and Socialist
allies, and that this encouraged the Nazis, who were profoundly
discouraged by their failure in November 1932, to try again and
succeed.
From that time, nine years ago, the Nazis have compiled a
record of brutality, treachery, dishonor, and greed that is without
equal in civilized history and have completely debauched their own
country. After the first of these outbreaks of savagery, the
slaughter and pillage of Jews, Socialists, pacifists, etc., the
Vatican signed a very friendly Concordat with the Nazi government,
and it has clung to this agreement, and repeatedly begged Hitler to
make it more real and intimate, all through the nine years of
barbarity. It had not a word to say about the Blood Purge, though
in this leading Catholics were butchered, and it warmly applauded
German action, including such infamies as Almeria and Guernica, in
Spain.
But I need not survey the record of monstrosity. The different
attitude of the Vatican to Russia, as it peacefully and humanely
built up a great civilization, and Germany, as it waded through
blood and loot and treachery to the attainment of its supreme
greed, damns it for all time. The Russians were vile, savage,
infamous, etc. The Germans heard only the mild censure, and then
only when they hurt the Church, that they encouraged paganism (from
the religious angle), idolized the state (instead of the Church),
and did not carry out their agreement with Rome.
The Catholic apologist whines that the Vatican had to consult
the "spiritual interests" of the followers in Germany. I can hardly
imagine a more pitiful confession that, contrary to what its
American apologists say, it cares nothing about human interests.
But we will consider that point adequately anon.
Hitler cared little about the rare and very mild complaints of
the Papacy. His spokesmen completely ignored them as a rule. He
could, in any case, always keep Papal pronouncements out of the
German press. Even the few Catholic papers that survived were under
strict Nazi control. The only matter that would draw the attention
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
of the German authorities would be if the German hierarchy and
clergy interfered with loyalty to Hitler or condemned any of his
acts except his cavalier treatment of the Church, which amused or
delighted four-fifths of the nation.
I gave abundant evidence that the German bishops did not
merely refrain from criticism on any other than ecclesiastical
matters but they flattered Hitler to his teeth and applauded every
outrage he committed. They fully accepted that bastard monstrosity
born of the megalomania of the neuropathic leader and the greed of
the German people, the plan to conquer and exploit at least the
greater part of the earth. Swallowing every insult and snub,
cringing before the exposure of the shame of their virtuous
monasteries, they begged Hitler to permit them to cooperate in the
foulest and most stupid of his outrages, the attack on Russia, and
in the petition for this purpose which they addressed to Hitler
they repented the exact language used by the Pope. From the
language of prelate after prelate, which I have quoted, one would
think that their minds are as brutalized as those of the younger
Nazi soldiers. That, of course, is not true. The explanation is
that every consideration of human honor and decency must be
sacrificed to the essential aim of the Black International: the
power and wealth of the Church.
My readers will, I feel sure, think me justified in claiming
that I have read as much literature -- Catholic and non-Catholic,
even German until the war cut off the supply -- on this subject as
any other writer in America or Britain. Well, I have not yet seen
a line in which any German cardinal, archbishop, or bishop had
rebuked Germany's crimes against man and against civilization. The
epithets criminal, beastly, barbarous, and infamous were reserved
for Russia. What a record for a body of consecrated men during nine
years of bestiality!
I, in an earlier book carried the story of the German
hierarchy and the Nazis as far as the fall of 1940 and must here
show that no change occurred in the following year. In August 1940,
we saw, an unusually large gathering of the German bishop's met at
Fulda (the Washington of the Church) and drew up resolutions which
the Vatican ordered them to keep secret. The German press reported
that it got copies of them, and they were fulsome congratulations
to Hitler on his great triumph in the west, to be published when it
was completed by the fall of Britain. The British Catholic press
(Tablet, September 21) said that "very important and positive
decisions had been reached which will result in a much closer
reapproachment between the Church and the Reich," and it pointed
out that the chief speaker, who closed the conference, Msgr.
Garkowsky was the bishop appointed by Goering to represent
Catholics on the State Council.
But Britain refused to be bludgeoned into surrender, and the
Pope forbade publication of these "very important decisions." In
December the Catholic press. (Herald, January 31, 1941) announced
that their bishops were to meet at Berlin "for exceptional
purposes," and this announcement was coupled with a warning that
unscrupulous rulers had a way of misusing ecclesiastical
utterances. On March 30 the Vatican radio reported, with approval,
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
that the Archbishop of Freiburg had warned German Catholics in a
pastoral letter that there were anti-religious tendencies on every
hand: that the Nazis had set up a National Church in Slovakia and
proposed to do the same in Germany, and that their "pagan
tendencies" had found expression in Alsace, Austria, and Sudeten
Germany.
On July 8 the London Times referred to a letter which the
bishops of Germany had ordered to be read in all churches. As it
condemned Nazi paganism British Catholics claimed that here was the
whole German hierarchy united in censuring Hitler. We are quite
aware that the Church more than once scolded the Nazis for
infringing its own rights as on other purely religious grounds, but
the Times pointed out that this letter by no means relieved the
guilt of the Church. It referred to the attack on Russia and said
that it was "a struggle of world ideologies, a battle against
inequality, and a fight against the disintegration of Christianity,
so that a victory over Bolshevism would be equivalent to the
triumph of the teaching of Jesus over that of the infidels." The
full Papal note and support of Hitler restored, you see, now that
he was again pushing victoriously forward. But because there was
some criticism of the Nazis in the letter many bishops refused to
sign it, and many priests refused to read it from their pulpits.
As to the Pope himself, he left it to those useful
unauthorized organ's to explain his ambiguous attitude. The Vatican
correspondent of the International News Service said that he
protested vehemently against the treatment of the Church in Germany
and added this rich observation, which was certainly compiled in
the Vatican:
"Only the deepest desire to avoid even involuntarily creating
the impression that the Church favors the enemies of Germany or
permitting a mistaken notion that the Holy See wishes to take
advantage of a delicate war-time situation has restricted the
Pontiff from a more open and vigorous expression of his profound
unhappiness over the situation in Germany."
When Russia "persecuted religion" there was no need whatever
for restraint; when Germany, after eight years of bestiality,
persecutes the Church one has to remember that a Pope is neutral
and not free to use strong language.
The last cutting I have is from the London News-Chronicle
(October 5, 1941). It says that Ribbentrop has seen the Papal
Nuncio at Berlin and offered "a structural change in the attitude
of the Third Reich to the Catholic Church" if the Pope will rouse
all Catholics against "the Anti-Christ Russia," and that the Nuncio
loftily refused even to send the offer to Rome. Perhaps: Russia was
proving to be made of sterner stuff than the Pope's dear children
in Belgium and France. But do not too hastily draw upon your fund
of old saws and quote "When the devil was sick" or "Rats desert a
sinking ship." Hitler has still a few Papal cards like Spain and
Portugal and the French fleet up his sleeve. Meantime note two
things. First the Pope and his hierarchy have supported the Nazis
through nine years of success and infamy; second, there is a
remarkable correlation between the variations in the ardor of
support and the ebb and flow of Hitler's fortunes.
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
Chapter II
WILL CATHOLICS DISOWN THE POPE?
I am not one of those who conceive the situation to be that we
are fighting Hitler and Mussolini or even the Nazi and the Fascist
parties. It remains to be seen how far this is true in the case of
Japan but in Europe we are fighting a prodigious aggregation or
organization of brain-power. It works behind the Nazi front. It
includes the very able military leaders that Germany can always
produce but is much more than this. War-time jibes at the
intelligence of the German nation are always silly. It at all
time's commands the services of a very large body of men of equal
ability and vigor, using every advantage that science can give
them. They -- scientists, engineers, economists, businessmen, etc.
-- are now massed behind an enterprise that promise's incalculable
profit if it succeeds. To defeat it will require a closer
cooperation and more intense application of British and American
ability than we have yet seen.
But defeated it will be and probably -- if you will not smile
at the act of faith of one who knows nothing of military matters --
within a year, now that we have the mighty aid of Russia. How will
the Church of Rome face the world then? Will it use its muzzling
influence on the press in every country to prevent the public
perceiving that there is anything to discuss? How many folk know
one tenth of the facts which I have given in these booklets?
That will be the policy which the Church will attempt to
follow but probably it will lay too great a strain in the easy-
going spirit of our generation. Your neighbor may not know the
facts I have given but he has his moments of reflection and in one
of these it will occur to him that he has never read a word of
condemnation of all the brutality and treachery of the last five
years from the man whom Catholics press upon us as the ideal moral,
if not intellectual, ruler of the world. He may have read lately
how some Catholics predict, for 1942, a concerting of plans "for
the defense of our Christian civilization" between Washington,
London, Moscow and Rome! If that does not make people open their
eyes and use their minds we had better drop the illusion that we
are capable of self-government.
In an earlier booklet I quoted the head of the British
Catholic Church warning his followers to be ready for a formidable
attack on Catholicism when the war is over. How will he and his
like meet it, That "aged and ailing Pope" slogan, which has so
often been used, will be of no avail. In this crisis of the world's
affairs the Church of Rome has had one of its youngest, ablest, and
most vigorous Popes; and his virtual control of the policy of the
Church began at the beginning of 1930 and has covered the whole
long period of unrebuked bestiality. Nor would it be of the least
avail to plead that he was misinformed. Being an Italian and in the
highest position (for these matters) in the Church for eleven
years, to say nothing of his years of training, he knows Italy and
Fascism as well as any Italian or foreign statesman in the world.
But, we saw, he also knows Germany and Nazism at least better than
any other non-German prelate in the Church. Further he reads and
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FASCIST ROMANISM DEFIES CIVILIZATION
speaks more languages and has traveled and lived in more countries
than any other Pope of recent modern times. No, stupid as some of
his public utterances (about Russia, Spain, Mexico, Communism,
etc.) seem to be, he has not based his policy upon wrong
information.
Seldes quoted some years ago evidence that in Romanist higher
clerical circles in America there was already some discussion of
the idea of deposing or over-ruling him. At that tune the Catholic
press still remembered what it had said about him during his long
stay in America in 1936; his love of democracy and the American
spirit, his good mixing -- I do not remember whether he drank beer
out of a bottle in a workers' lunchroom like the heroic Halifax --
his ideal of freedom, and so on. Probably the prelates knew better.
He loathes democracy. He is an aristocrat by birth, temperament,
and conviction. But he can at any time discover, as Leo XIII did
after quarter of a century of attacks on democracy, that the Church
has nothing to do with whether a state chooses to be democratic or
not. It is true that in the first encyclical he compiled for the
late Pope he insisted that the Corporative State, the very essence
of which is servility to the state and Church authorities, is the
ideal, but he never mentioned democracy.
The discussion as to whether the discredited Church will make
a scapegoat of the Pope is waste of time. Even in America, where
the apologists put over more mendacious accounts of Church history
and teaching than in any other country, the deposition or rebuke of
a Pope would shake Catholicism and invite a dangerously critical
interest. The most that is conceivable along that line is that
apologists will affect an attitude of naive astonishment and say
that even non-Catholics ought to know that a Pope's blunders do not
compromise the Catholic Church or discredit a single line of its
teaching. There have actually been priests who claimed it as a
proof of the divinity of the Church that it survived so many
blunders and sins of its Popes! But that takes us into a deeper
matter which I postpone.
The chief line foreshadowed in actual Catholic literature is
that the Pope has been, and ought to be, ideally neutral, since as
head of the universal Church he must be above national differences
and therefore above international quarrels, whereas the hierarchy
of a particular country has no such obligation. Let me repeat that
these are not booklets about the Pope but about the Black
International. At the same time apologists will find it rather
difficult in America to make any capital out of this Great Neutral
sophistry. They have for half a century been assuring folk that it
was just the opposite; that since the Pope is above all national
differences he is the ideal moralist to censure, not only
international crimes but national crimes of such magnitude and so
bound up with patriotism that you could hardly trust the censors
within that country to condemn them or expect an impartial judgment
from the nationals of another country. Further, and far more
gravely, the summary of facts which I gave in the last chapter does
not simply present the Pope as failing in his duty from an
excessive regard for neutrality. It shows that he gave very
valuable assistance to the arch-criminals, and often precisely in
the perpetration of their crimes; to Japan in China, to Germany in
Austria, Spain, Czecho-Slovakia, France, Yugo-Slavia, and Russia!
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The Catholic controversalists' idea of the Church is that
anything that commands general respect in it is the Church and
anything that is vicious or sordid is not the Church. For our
present purpose, however, the Church may be divided into three
sections. First are the Pope and the body of the Italian prelates
who run the Church as literally as a bunch of men in Boston run the
Christian Science movement. The Pope is theoretically an autocrat.
In practice he must act with the Italian cardinals and archbishops,
the board of directors, so to say. As such boards do, they find it
expedient to admit a few outsiders but take care they are always in
a minority and settle most affairs between themselves apart from
the formal board-meetings. Nothing irritates Roman Catholics in
Britain so much as a Protestant practice of calling their Church
"the Italian Mission." But no other description of it is more apt.
The Italian clique run the Church in Britain and America just as
the heads of an international trading enterprise in New York
control foreign branches.
The second section consists of the various national
hierarchies (bishops and archbishops), each of which is permitted
to have a few decorative heads with the title of cardinal but no
influence on broad Church policy and certainly no power to
challenge a Pope, and the ordinary clergy who do the work under
them. The third section consists of the laity, whose main function
is the financial support of the clergy, hierarchy, and the Italian
oligarchy. They are held together in submission to the clergy by an
extraordinarily fraudulent literature, which is protected by the
doctrine that they incur the penalty of hell if they read
criticisms of it, a very lavish use of social and recreational
inducements, and the sacerdotal theory or the dogma that the clergy
have received a 'Special "Sacrament" called Holy Orders.
This theory has greatly promoted the comfort that reconciles
the priests to their theoretical celibacy -- "They are called
Fathers, and they often are," said Erasmus -- by drawing a sharp
line, if not a curtain, between clergy and laity. In recent years
however, it has been found expedient to delegate to the laity many
functions which the priest used to discharge outside his Church.
Catholic Action, this new development, means Catholic lay action.
It started originally as a proof that the Church is not so anti-
democratic, as its critics allege, but the clergy soon found that
the laity could undertake tasks for the Church which they
themselves cannot undertake without suspicion, and that same sort
of militant work greatly promoted their loyalty. In Spain these
guerrillas of the holy war, as one might call them, played a very
important part in preparing the way for the rebellion. In France
they made the strength of the Fascist movement which weakened the
country and intrigued its way to power in the hour of humiliation
and confusion. In America and Britain they intrigue with statesmen
and in popular political organizations, provide speakers for parks
and street-corners, invade journalism and work for the Church on
their papers, and get themselves elected or appointed to offices in
which they can promote the interests of the Church. They would be
genuinely outraged if you said that they are dupes of the clergy.
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This vast organization enables apologists to meet as far as
words go many of the charges against the Church or to maintain with
an air of bland assurance, that, for instance, it never interferes
in polities. If you appeal to its twenty years opposition to
republicanism in France, that was Pope Leo XIII not the Church,
they say. It was the Vatican, not the Church, that intrigued with
British statesmen to settle their troubles in Ireland (Seldes, The
Vatican, p. 272). On the other hand, when an Austrian cardinal
writes "Hell Hitler" or an Italian bishop exults in the brigandage
of his country, the Church is not involved. It is just a local
clerical patriot blowing off a little hot air.
In the present demoralization of the world apologists take
advantage of this multiplicity of organs to exonerate the Church
from guilt. Since the body of the clergy in any country are
notoriously under the strict supervision of their bishop's the
common trick is to distinguish the acting of national hierarchy
from that of, Rome; though, as we saw, there has been some tendency
in view of the blatant alliance with the Axis of the present Pope
to say that the hierarchy represent the Church and he does not.
That is easily-answered. Do the apologists mean that the majority
of bishops and archbishops of their Church would have had the Pope
act otherwise? Apply that test and the sophistry disappears. There
is only one point on which they expressed any criticism or reserve
about the Pope's conduct; his refusal to pass judgment on the rape
of Abyssinia. But they soon fell into line and supported his
subsequent actions. The whole of the Catholic press, clergy, and
hierarchies applauded the treaties with Mussolini and Hitler. We
decline to be impressed if the Catholic prelates of Britain, for
instance, fell into silence about the German treaties when they
declared war on that country. They continued to support the
alliance with the Italian Fascists until they were at war with
Italy. And the American cardinals and prelates maintained their
support generally until the Pope's proud Japanese ally dealt
America so foul a blow. The hierarchies have a very poor case
against the Pope, and the two elements together supremely represent
the Church.
A more familiar trick, which has even been used in the Pope's
paper the Osservatore Romano, is to plead that aberrations on the
part of the hierarchy of a particular country do not compromise the
Church. Next we have, in the first place, the right to presume that
a course of conduct pursued by the Catholic priests of any country
during several years has the full approval of the Papacy. If the
conduct is likely to arouse disgust or criticism in other countries
we do not look for the publication of Papal letters or other
messages supporting it, unless, as in the case of the Spanish
rebellion, only a minority of radical folk condemn the policy. But
we need no evidence. The Vatican has its international bureau
(congregations) in Rome and its Nuncios (ambassadors) in every
capital to keep it fully informed. No one would, in fact, for a
moment suggest that the Papacy is not fully aware of the language
in which German and Italian bishops have thoroughly approved the
successive steps taken by the Nazis and Fascists in their
diabolical attempts to get world-powers.
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It is not we who say that the Pope is bound to correct any
such moral aberrations. It is the Catholic apologist who says it.
It is his boast that there is a unique moral authority in his
Church which makes it far more valuable to civilization than other
Churches, and he means that it has rigorously controlled agencies
in every land and surveys the world with a moral sense that cannot
be adulterated by national interests. The Church of England, he
says, is bound to have a British outlook; the Protestant Episcopal
Church of the United States an American outlook; the Lutheran
Church a German outlook. But the head or central station of the
Roman Church sees no national boundaries and is serenely
independent of national prejudices in its judgments. And since it
is the local clergy in each country who interpret Catholic
doctrine, on both faith and morals, to the people, one of the chief
functions of the Vatican is to see that they apply it in all its
purity. The miserable subterfuge that the Pope is merely
overlooking a little patriotic weakness in the German or the
Italian hierarchy when it blesses crime on a monstrous scale and
criminals immeasurably more guilty than the murderers or rapers of
individuals is an abandonment of all claim to moral authority in
the Church of Rome.
We may go further and say that corruption in the national
hierarchies is even more discreditable to the Church of Rome than
corruption at the Vatican. I need not linger in explaining that. It
is from their priests, who are rigorously controlled by the
bishops, that Catholics have to expect sound moral judgment on
collective as well as individual problems. Not one Catholic in
hundreds even reads the Encyclicals which the Popes issue about
once a decade, and most of those who do require the guidance of a
priest or a Catholic writer on the meaning of these lengthy and
jejune documents in which a few grains of medieval "wisdom" or
amateurish statements on modern problems are diluted in gallons of
Latin verbiage. It is very little different with the addresses,
etc., of the Pope which appear more frequently in the Catholic
weekly. In actual life it is from the religious instruction of
early years, continued in the priests' sermons, that the Catholic
forms his judgment.
And this "Catholic point of view," which the apologists rate
so highly that the Church demand's special consideration of it from
the legislators at Washington, has no more unity, no more real
catholicity (universality), than that of any other creed. On the
greatest social-moral issues, the really vital issues, of our time
-- the amount of freedom and tolerance to grant, the suppression of
greed and violence, the desirability of peace -- you get practical
unanimity in the Protestant Episcopal Church or the Church of
England, the Baptist or the Methodist Church, whether its members
live in America, Europe, Asia, or Africa. But in the Church of Rome
you have a monstrous moral discord. The German, Italian, or
Japanese Catholic is taught by his priests to support
enthusiastically just what the American or British Catholic
denounce's as diabolical. The ideal given by his priests to the
Spaniard or the Brazilian, even the French or the Austrian, today
would, if those countries were Protestant, draw the bitterest
invective or the most self-satisfied irony from the Catholic
apologist. Which, he would ask, is your Protestant morality, and
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what judgment does it pass on five years of revolting outrage from
the bombing of Guernica or the rape of Abyssinia to the treachery
of Japan? But all these monstrously conflicting voices on the
gravest issues are Catholic not Protestant or atheistic. In other
words that world-wide expansion in which the apologist takes such
pride is one of the greatest moral weaknesses of his Church, and
the claim that it has a supreme, cosmopolitan oracle who keep the
teaching pure and harmonious is a brazen misstatement.
Indeed, it is not only a matter of the Church, in its most
representative organ's saying one thing in Vichy and another in
London, one thing in Washington and another in Rome, Berlin, or
Tokyo. In the same land, within the limits of the same patriotic
influences, the voice wavers and changes like that of the Vicar of
Bray; and this applies forcibly to the Vatican itself. But this
will be seen more clearly after the next two chapters have been
read. Here let me finish with this question of which element of the
Church really represents it and whether that element can be
repudiated by the others.
It is the same Church of Rome in every element, and the fact
that it speaks a radically different moral language in its separate
elements only proves again that the main aim of the Black
International is pursued without scruple. To the lower clergy as
the Black International we must not only add the monks, nuns, and
teaching brothers but every paid worker; every Catholic teacher,
journalist, organizer, secretary, and lay propagandist. The whole
of Catholic Action, from the Knights of Columbus, to the Falangists
of Franco's black army, should be counted in it. Petain and
Weygand, Leopold and Laval, are part of it. Below all their discord
they follow a consistent purpose, the aggrandizement of the Church,
which means the protection or increase of the power and wealth of
the Black International. From above one maxim seeps down to the
lowest and most hoodwinked stratum of workers. It is called "the
good of the Church," and this is unctuously explained to be the
good of the world in the highest sense. What we outsiders, who
outnumber Catholics by six to one in America and nearly thirty to
one in Britain, reply to this excuse for "Catholic Action" we shall
see in the final chapter.
Chapter III
RESTORING THE CORPSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES
How did the Vatican hope to profit by its alliance with the
Axis powers? Even those who might hesitate to agree that the Black
International always seeks its own aggrandizement in its policy
will not question that it did so in supporting Italy Germany, and
Japan. They offered the Vatican certain advantages. If any American
Catholic were to plead that the Vatican supported them simply
because it approved of their "ideology" he would have to admit that
from the start the Vatican condemned democracy and was opposed to
liberty as it is understood in democratic lands. The first alliance
was with Italy, and no dictator was louder or more scornful in his
denunciation of democracy, freedom, and liberalism than Mussolini.
Fascism, he said, "marched to victory over the rotting corpse of
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freedom." And the second most outstanding principle of his ideology
was his glorification of war and his claim that peace corrupts a
nation. He had very many admirers in other lands, it is true, but
they expressly condemned these principles of his and professed his
real merit in their eyes was, of course, his persecution of
Socialism and Communism -- only to admire his efficiency; and with
this supposed virtue of Fascism the Vatican had nothing whatever to
do. This applies fully to Germany also, for Hitler's essential
appeal to the nation was to substitute Nazism for democracy and to
expand Germany by wars of conquest. Japan was equally anti-
democratic and even more bent upon wars of aggression.
I need not repeat the evidence that the Vatican was fully
aware of this. Nazism developed under the very nose of the present
Pope when he was Nuncio for eleven years in Munich and Berlin. As
he has lived in Italy, in the highest official capacity of the
Vatican since the end of 1929 he is equally aware of every facet of
Fascism. Whatever defects you may attribute to the Vatican's
intelligence-service you cannot doubt its full acquaintance with
the aims of the Axis powers. What, then, attracted it to and kept
it bound up to this day with these bloody-minded anachronistic
forces?
In the first place, of course, their promise to destroy
Socialism and Communism which were, as I amply proved, ravaging the
Church even more rapidly than modern middle-class culture was. And
in this the Vatican shrewdly calculated that it would have the
sympathy and support of those elements of the democracies, wealth
and the ruling class, which alone matter to it. They are much too
refined and humane to sanction the principle of bloody persecution
or violent suppression, but this did not oblige them to shed tears
when the Fascist powers applied the principle to Socialism and
promised to extend it to that pestilential swamp, Soviet Russia.
That is the chief reason why British and American Catholics found
nothing wrong in the Vatican's alliance with super-crooks until the
scoundrels double-crossed them and turned upon themselves.
The Vatican had always courted the applause of these classes
and of the ruling class everywhere by condemning Socialism. Even in
America, where medieval Italian principles are dressed in
dungarees, so to say, the Church's condemnation of Socialism was
sustained. You may remember Msgr. Ryan fulsomely assuring America
that Socialism was so clearly immoral that if Rome ordered American
Catholics to submit to a Socialist government they would
conscientiously refuse. A very golden sentiment! But if the Church
never interferes in politics what is the basis of this heroic
attitude? It is, the apologists say -- and the Pope lays down in
condemning Socialism in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno -- that
private ownership is a moral right and the refusal of it is
therefore against the moral law. I could write a pleasant page on
the topic. What is the range of this moral principle? Every in
Russia folk own a good many things personally, while even in
America very large numbers of men and women who are far from
immoral consider that the private ownership of, for instance,
monition industries is very seriously wrong. But we will not linger
by the way. The Church of Rome fabricated the moral principle of
private ownership so as to prove to governments and wealthy folk
that its influence over 200000000 people could be very useful to
them.
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In our age of confusion it is difficult to trace contemporary
developments but as far as I can discover this was at first the
chief feature that led the Vatican into alliance with Italy,
Germany, and the Spanish Falangists. Its connection with Japan is
different, since it had in that country no large body of Catholics
which was being disrupted by Communism. But there is one secret
about its bargain with Japan. If it would use its influence to keep
America and Britain amiable and oblivious of the need of warlike
preparation until Japan was ready to strike it would be rewarded
with most-favored-nation (or sect) treatment for its missions in
Japan and all territory conquered by it. It took the promise as a
hint at a monopoly of the Christian missions, and it richly
deserves the anxiety which the most recent laws on foreign
religions cause it. Japan meant, of course, to suppress
Christianity completely in Eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands
once its conquest was accomplished.
In the case of Germany at first the Vatican contemplated only
the suppression of Socialism and Communism, to which it was loosing
millions of its subjects, and an assurance that its own
institutions would be respected. The Nazis, probably with a good
laugh over a bottle of wine behind the muncio's back, solemnly
promised to respect Catholic schools, seminaries, charitable
institutions, newspapers, and associations; all of which they have
ruined. All that one need say about that is that for once the
Vatican surprises us. Pacelli, who saw the early development of the
Nazi party at Munich and the later development in Berlin, certainly
knew the character of its leaders. What surprises us is the low
degree of intelligence which it betrayed in trusting their
promises.
In the case of Italy the promise made to the Church was far
larger and has been much better kept; which is no proof of virtue
but reflects the fact that the Vatican now rules the majority of
the nation -- not one-sixth of it, as in Germany -- and could make
serious trouble. The Vatican knew that the Fascists would find it
very difficult ever to take back the political independence granted
to it and the greater part of the $90000000 that went with this.
But I explained that the Concordat gave the Church even greater
advantages, since Mussolini needed the Pope's help far more than
Hitler did. It gave the clergy a great increase of income, a
religious control of the schools, and the incorporation in the
civil law of very important clauses of the Canon Law. The Church
received a very high price and has been scrupulously honest in
doing what it contracted to do; the Papacy was not to say a word
against any of the brutalities perpetrated by Italy and was to
allow the bishops and clergy to tell the people that they were
glorious victories both for the state and the Church.
The Papal ambition or plan to profit by the conquests of the
greedy and callous adventurers grew with the growth of their
programs. Hitler's program in 1932 did not read beyond the Ukraine
in the east and Alsace-Lorraine in the west. Mussolini's program
was still confined to the recovery by war of Savoy, Corsica,
Dalmatia, Malta, and Tunisia. As we saw, the amazing supineness and
obtuseness of the western democracies encouraged the growth of
these programs until Germany and Italy were to share the Old World
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with Japan and make a shot at the New World. They still found the
Pope's soporific influence in France, Britain, and America very
useful and they encouraged him to cultivate imperialistic dreams of
his own. In the wake of these noble conquests of the world he was
going to bring under the Vatican larger stretches of the earth than
any other Pope has dreamed of since the 16th Century.
This great Catholic League of Nations was to have three
sections. One was the Iberian section, bringing into at least a
cultured and spiritual unity Spain, Portugal, and all the Latin-
American countries. The idea is known in Spain and much discussed
as "Hispanidad." Literally it means "Spanishness" or the Spanish
spirit. Spanish Catholicism is such a beautiful and lofty thing --
don't laugh just yet -- that it must smooth out Portuguese
idiosyncrasies, when Hitler has annexed Portugal to Spain, and must
embrace all America from Ciudad Juarez to Tierra del Fuego. In
October (1941) the Spaniards established a Council of the Spanish-
Speaking World, and the Falangist papers quite seriously gave
President Roosevelt a warning to keep his hands off South and
Central America. The London press reported them in November saying
that "Roosevelt's tutorship is unsolicited" and that "Spaniards are
the only ones entitled to look after Spanish America." Franco has
found it necessary to give in public a comical assurance that he
has no secular designs on territory in South America; that Spain's
"hegemony" will be purely cultural and religious.
I do not know how far Catholics prevent these insolent
pleasantries from appearing in the American press, but the Vatican
and the Spanish hierarchy and government are portentously serious
about the idea, and Franco is stupid enough, in spite of his modest
words to think that when German Fifth Columnists have destroyed the
existing governments in Latin America Hitler will allow Spain to
annex them. The idea is directly inspired by the language which the
Papacy addressed to the Spaniards during and after the Rebellion.
On April 16, 1939, Pope Pius XII broadcast a message -- reproduced
by his biographer Rankin in The Pope Speaks, (1941, p. 145) -- in
the course of which he Said:
"The nation chosen by God as the principal instrument for the
evangelization of the New World and as the impregnable bulwark of
the Catholic faith has given the loftiest proof to the champions of
the materialistic atheism of our age that above everything stand
the eternal values of religion and the spirit."
Perhaps it is necessary to explain that he means the glorious
victory of Franco over what he would call the rebels. I am not in
these books underrating the ability of Pacelli but such language
betrays a mental squint that makes him totally Unfit to guide large
bodies of men. He completely ignores the fact that it was Germany
and Italy who for their own purposes took up a handful of Spanish
rebels and Moorish mercenaries and conquered Spain for Franco, and
he quite solemnly represents the bravery of Franco's Spanish troops
as a lesson for the Russians who, without a single foreign soldier,
have beaten the greatest military power of all time fighting on a
single front!
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The whole idea is, in fact, so fatuous and based upon such a,
mass of lies and legends that it would not be worth discussing
except as an illustration of Catholic culture and mentality. Franco
himself told his followers after the victory that they were going
to restore the glories of the Catholic Spain of the Conquistadors,
of Ferdinand and Isabella and all the other grand Castiliai
monarchs. That is, in fact, the main idea of Hispanidad; and it
rests upon as gross a fabric of historical untruth as you will find
anywhere.
We acknowledge the valor in fighting of the medieval Spanish
Knights -- except, significantly, that great Catholic hero
Ferdinand, who never fought for a thing if he could get it by lying
and treachery -- but with that virtue they shared all the vices of
the knights of the so-called age of chivalry. They were densely
ignorant, licentious, brutal, and dishonorable. They conquered the
Moors taking one province at a time during three centuries, only
with the very considerable assistance of knights and soldiers --
hundreds of thousands of them -- from other lands, and loot was the
guiding star of them all. As to the Castellan dynasty which the
final conquest put on the throne of Spain half its members were
selfish, sensual, and stupid, and the other half blind with
fanaticism; and it would be difficult to say which type did the
more harm to Spain. It is at all events a notorious historical fact
that they ruined Spain in little over a century. It had inherited
the brilliant civilization of the Arabs, to which it added the gold
of America, but in two centuries its population fell from
30000000 to about 7000000 and it was despised as the poorest
and most ignorant country in Europe. Of the Bourbon dynasty of
Catholic monarchs in the 19th Century it is enough to say that they
were the most selfish and licentious in Europe, and every member of
the dynasty was expelled from Spain by the people except Alfonso
XII, who died prematurely of consumption brought on by his
excesses.
This beautiful Hispanidad slew more unarmed democrats to
protect its own corruption and the Church, in the 19th Century than
any other country in Europe except Naples, and with a ferocity that
Naples did not surpass. This "nation chosen by God" presents today
the most sordid spectacle in the world, apart from countries
overrun by the Axis troops (the Pope's allies), of injustice and
brutal intolerance. In a previous booklet I gave the report of a
French Catholic girl on the brutality with which men and women
"suspected of Communism" -- which means anybody but a loyal Spanish
Catholic -- are treated in the jails, British and American
Protestants also are vilely treated. The American Protestant
Defense League has issued a bulletin on the subject. It says that
30 Protestant ministers have been expelled and will probably be
executed if they return; that two-thirds of the workers of the
Spanish Gospel Mission have been either executed, exiled, or
imprisoned; that four-fifths of the Protestant churches and schools
have been closed; and that no Spaniard who does not attend mass can
get employment.
That is real Hispanidad, as it is understood by Franco and the
Vatican; the noble Spanish Spirit which the Catholic papers, and
too many others, treat so respectfully. It is just a system for
protecting wealth and the Church by every brutal and unscrupulous
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means. The latest neutral observers who have contrived to visit
Spain and survive consistently report that the poverty and misery
of the mass of the people are horrible, but the hotels and
restaurants for the rich in Madrid are as gay and well-supplied as
ever. These "noble" Catholic landowners, these highly polished
"gentlemen of Spain," have always regarded the workers as beasts of
burden. They have less contempt for a beggar than for a worker. And
this is the high Catholic culture that they are, they think, going
to spread over America from El Paso to Patagonia!
I am not taking this dream of Franco and the Vatican seriously
but showing the utter stupidity and falseness of things which they
take seriously. The plan does, as little credit to the intelligence
as it does to the moral sentiments of the Vatican. It confirms
every charge which I have made in these booklets, and the idea of
invading America with such a culture, which Franco Certainly hopes
to follow up with political control under a restored Spanish
monarchy, may help the American public to demand an end of the
representation of the United States or its President at the
Vatican.
This idea of a Spanish Union from the Philippines to Barcelona
has grown out of an earlier idea of a bloc or League of Catholic
powers. When France and Belgium were "liberated" from their non-
Catholic governments by the Germans the Vatican saw at once the
possibility of uniting them to Spain, Portugal, and Italy as a
Catholic bloc. The Pope, we saw, sent a feeble letter of Sympathy
to Leopold -- the man who had betrayed it -- on the invasion of
Belgium "against its wish," and the Osservatore said something
about a German "ruthless war of extermination." This "unauthorized"
utterance annoyed the Italians at the time, but the Pope was silent
about the far worse invasion of France and his relations with
Germany were not severed. There was, in fact, ample evidence, as we
saw, that the passing of France and the French Empire under the
priest-ridden Petain was very welcome to the Vatican and, as is an
axiom in Catholic theology, "if you approve an end you approve the
means to it"; which is only to be distinguished by a microscope
from "The end justifies the means." To France, once more Catholic,
Italy, Spain, and Portugal would be added and Poland, in so far as
Germany permitted a restoration, Hungary, Slovakia, and the
detached Catholic provinces of Yugo-Slavia; a bloc of countries
with a total population of about 150000000, all living under the
drastically intolerant Catholic law.
Doubtless the Vatican clings to the illusion, though it pales
before the reality of events. Petain soon found that the French
people compelled him to withdraw some of the measures which the
clergy had got him to pass. Possibly the Pope, who must have known
that Hitler is pledged in his book to bring France down in the
dust, had an uneasy feeling that when Hitler no longer needed to
make a show of moderation in his dealings with France there would
not be much of it left. Alsace-Lorraine, the most Catholic part,
would certainly go. Savoy, with Nice and Monte Carlo if not a
larger stretch of the French coast, would go to Italy; and it is
credibly reported that the Nazis have a plan to annex the
industrial north of the country to a German-controlled Belgium.
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Poland, always terribly poor, would be but the ghost of a beggar
before Hitler relinquishes it, if he ever did. lt was even possible
that Italy and its new province's would pass under the control of
Germany.
Hence this enfeebled and uncertain plan of a European bloc,
which might check Hitler even if he were victorious, had to be
strengthened by Hispanidad and an extension of Vatican control over
the east. I dealt with the latter at some length in an earlier
book. Doubtless the Germans, who handed out promises as glibly as
the fraudulent money (printed in Holland) which they use in France,
promised the Pope that when they had conquered all the countries in
which the Greek or other Oriental Catholic Church predominated they
would replace this with the Roman. That would mean a very large
extension of the Vatican's influence eastward to match the Spanish
extension westward.
It is unnecessary to say that all this depended essentially
upon the use of force. No Catholic is more skeptical about the
efficacy of prayer or argument in these mass conversions than a
Roman prelate. But the good Germans would keep their promises; and
they would indeed find the Pope and his agents far more useful in
keeping oriental peoples submissive than the national hierarchies
and clergy whom they were to displace. Not counting Russia and its
180000000 people this displacement of the Greek Church would give
Rome 50000000 new member's.
Moreover, the Vatican was promised a very rich prize in the
religious control of Palestine. A very impartial British daily, the
Manchester Guardian, published the details of the compact with the
Vatican. Italy was to have the secular rule of Palestine and the
Vatican a religion monopoly, the entire Jewish population being
transferred to a reconquered Abyssinia. It has been suggested that
Syria would then be, as far as secular rule is concerned, ceded to
Turkey on condition that it maintain its neutrality in the war. If
it seems incredible that the Pope should enter into a compact with
Turkey -- it is really far less strange than its alliance with
Japan -- I may recall that there have recently been singularly
amiable exchanges between Moslem (or atheist-ruled) Turkey and
Papal Rome. The Herald-Tribune (June 15) published the news, from
its Istanbul correspondent, that the Pope had just sent as a gift
to the Turkish Prime Minister a copy of a map of the vast Ottoman
Empire of the 16th Century made by a famous Italian geographer of
that time. What did the Pope expect in return? His gold medals and
golden roses are given always for services rendered or favors to
come.
Let me, finally, recall that I am not stating what advantages
the Papacy would derive from a victory of the Axis but what
advantages were promised to it or that it thought it would derive.
The first and greatest profit, the destruction of Socialism and
Communism, was certain. The democracies were not of the least use
to Rome in removing that deadly menace. They were too soft to use
violence or were misguided enough to trust argument and persuasion.
The Axis powers in their own interest would make a drastic end of
Communism and Socialism, and they were quite willing to go on to
suppress Freemasonry and every critical movement that Rome hated.
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On the second point, the extension of its power in addition to the
recovery by force of its apostates, the Vatican gambled. The Axis
powers might keep their promises. Rome might be able to restore the
corpse of the Middle Ages in the 20th Century.
Chapter IV
THE CHURCH IN DEMOCRATIC COUNTRIES
I am not going to waste time in discussing the sheer folly of
trusting the word of men who for years have made lying a normal
part of their procedure, and I leave it to the reader to apply his
own epithets to a gamble of this sort; a gamble, in effect, that
stakes the lives of millions, the liberty of tens of millions, and
the elementary well-being of hundreds of millions against a
possible profit to the Black International. I have not much space
left to consider two points of some importance; how the Vatican
contrived to keep Catholics in the democratic countries loyal and
Submissive while it thus allied itself with their deadly enemies,
and what Catholic apologists have to say in defense of its action.
In so far as the first question refers to France, which we
must count one of the leading democracies until its collapse, we
have seen the answer. Rome rendered very important services to the
French government, such as checking the chronic rebelliousness in
Alsace-Lorraine and condemning some of the leader's of the
Royalist-Fascist movement. We may easily grant that no Frenchman
could be expected to foresee, the disgraceful part that Catholics,
like Petain and Laval would play in a time of crisis. French
statesmen in making concessions to the Church and discouraging the
very powerful and very vocal anti-clerical movement that had
flourished before 1914 thought that they were securing the unity of
their country in case it was ever threatened by Germany. There was,
of course, far too much trust in the Maginot line and the Belgians,
but we cannot blame the French for not being aware of their
appalling danger from Catholic Fifth Columnists. It is clear that
even patriotic Catholics did not foresee this. Amongst the refugees
from the Vichy rule, for instance, is Jacques Maritain, the leading
and very orthodox Catholic writer of modern France. We must
remember, too, that a number of Catholic Royalist-Fascist writers
attacked the Papacy very warmly, and this helped to throw dust in
the eyes of democrats. Paul Courcoural's work, La fin de la
querelle (1929) is a bitter attack on the Vatican, and he quotes
several other Catholic critics. One of the points made by these
critics was that the Vatican, and he quotes several other Catholic
critics. One of the points made by these Catholic critics was that
the Vatican displayed grave in incompetence in allowing itself to
be duped by governments.
In Great Britain the Catholic defense would be that if the
press generally and the leading statesmen not only failed to point
out any danger in Fascism and Nazism but habitually paid
compliments, until Munich, to those movements and their leaders one
cannot blame Catholics for failing to see anything wrong in the
Vatican's alliance with them. Up to a point we must admit the
defense, at least as far as the general body of British Catholics
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are concerned. But we are not here concerned with the general body
of Catholics in any country. We are studying the action of the
Black International which rendered such service to the Axis powers
and helped to bring such appalling evil upon the race. As to the
hierarchy and the clergy in Britain and America -- for this
consideration applies to both countries -- I have quoted passage
after passage which Shows that they fully shared the principle, or
lack of principle, on the strength of which the Roman obligarchy
and the bishops of Italy and Germany supported iniquity. Whatever
the laity knew or did not know -- and we may at least say that
educated men and women amongst them are unintelligible to us if
they imagine that a Church which forbids them to read critics is
likely to tell them the truths which the critic's do -- the higher
clergy at least knew perfectly well that the Vatican entered upon
most cordial relations with Japan after the rape of China, that it
signed a Concordat with the Nazis while their hands were red with
innocent blood, that it saw the Italian hierarchy under its eyes
applauding one Fascist outrage after another, and so on.
On an earlier page I quoted the saying of Cardinal Hinsley
that Mussolini certainly had grave faults but he must be supported
lest graver evils happen. He plainly meant that the Vatican must
continue in alliance with the Fascist party -- must, through the
Italian bishops and priests continue to keep the people loyal to
Mussolini and approve all his actions (except infringements of the
Concordat) -- because if Mussolini fell Socialism might seize power
in Italy. That is just the sentiment that has inspired the policy
of the Black International through ten years of increasing
demoralization. "The good of the Church," the protection of its
power and wealth, is above all other considerations.
It was the same in regard to Germany. The horrible outrages on
Jews, Communists, Socialists, etc., were still being discussed with
loathing throughout the world in the summer of 1933 when Pacelli
signed his Concordat with the Nazis. That agreement stifled
Catholic criticism of the moral character of Nazism and was
welcomed with obsequious language, as a new triumph of the Vatican,
a new German pilgrimage to Canossa, in the Catholic press of
Britain and America. Next year was the Blood Purge, the murder
without the pretence of a trial of distinguished Catholics who were
lumped together with pimps and pansies, and the Catholic press was
remarkably restrained. In short, until Germany forced war upon
Britain itself, or clearly showed after Munich that it would
probably do so, the British Catholic hierarchy and the press they
controlled had little criticism of Germany except in regard to its
"persecution of the Church." To close Catholic schools and
institutions when a monstrous epidemic of vice had been detected in
the priests and brother's who controlled them invited the gravest
censure; to dissolve Catholic associations or fraternities and
sororities after solemnly promising to respect them was an outrage.
But that the German bishops, under orders from the Vatican, should
forbid Catholics to help to keep out of power a party, with
malodorous leaders, which was pledged to destroy the democratic
constitution, to let loose a flood of criminals and sadists upon
the Jews and Communists, to educate the nation deliberately for
war, seems to have been a matter almost of indifference to the
Catholic press of Britain and America.
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A well-known British Catholic propagandist, Christopher
Hollis, wrote in the Catholic Herald (November 15, 1940):
"In America it is very easy, for instance, to publish accounts
of the persecution of the Church in Germany in the non-Catholic
press, but it is almost impossible to get Catholic publishers of
papers to print anything of the kind."
You will smile at the hit at the American Catholic press. By
that time Britain was not merely at war with Germany but had
suffered murderous raids which had stirred whatever was left of
free conscience in the world. So the British Catholic papers were
quite willing to tell how the Nazis persecuted the innocent Church.
In point of fact numbers of American papers also had complained of
such persecution. Cardinal Mundelein never failed to get a hearing
for his maledictions of the Nazis. What excites our disgust is not
that many Catholic papers refused to censure Germany even when it
persecuted religion but that none of them, until their countries
were at war with that country, attacked it for the immeasurably
worse things of which it was guilty or warned the race, of which
they professed to be the surest guide, what Germany, Italy, and
Japan were preparing for it. Press, clergy, hierarchy, and Vatican
all worked together, and on a common principle: the good of the
Church.
The situation in America was in some respects worse than in
England, even when we have made allowance for the very large number
of Germans, Italians, and Irish in the Catholic body. The bishops
and the educated Catholic's knew their Vatican quite well. It had
airily and publicly censured them in 1899 for claiming that
Catholic principles could be reconciled with modern thought. The
quarrel which followed within the sacred enclosure gave the
parochially-minded Italians a new idea of the importance of America
and, as the Catholic Teeling says "from that day to this no Pope
has spoken out." He adds an explanation which, if it came from my
pen, would be called wantonly provocative and malicious. This
strict Catholic, in good order at Rome, says:
"The reason would seem to have been that America has provided
an ever-increasing supply of funds and an ever-increasing supply of
missionaries" (The Pope in Politics, p. 150).
So for the last thirty years American apologists have been
permitted to present Catholic teaching to the public in a form that
would have made the old Italian cardinals gasp with horror. Not
only is the Church of Rome tolerant of other religions (when it is
in a minority) but it is the very author and originator of the idea
of religious toleration, which was born in Catholic Maryland; which
is, as I showed in the Appeal to Reason Library, a lie in every
syllable. Not only was its teaching consistent with American ideas
of liberty and democracy but the great Catholic theologians of the
Middle Ages really inspired what we call these modern ideas. I am
not sure if I have not read works by American priests in which it
is "proved" that Adam's, Jefferson, and Washington -- they do draw
the line at Paine because they think he was an Atheist -- derived
their sentiments from Aquinas and the Jesuit Suarez! I have made
merry with all this elsewhere.
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This sort of thing continued during the years when the Vatican
maintained intimate relations with the Fascists and Nazis and
imposed a Fascist form on every Catholic state it could influence.
No one seems to have seen the joke when Seldes, in his learned work
on the Vatican, boasted: "There is no guillotine, no elected
Chamber, in the state of Vatican City." No one questioned Pacelli,
when he visited the United States in 1936, about the sequel to his
visit to South America in 1934, when democracy was murdered in
nearly every republic and the leaders of the men who advocated it
were tortured in jail. No one asked why the beautiful democratic
principles of the Church were trampled under foot in Quebec, which
is far more Catholic than Italy or Spain.
The summit of the irony is reached when, Germany and Italy
having entered upon a truculent and utterly unscrupulous war for
the destruction of liberty and democracy everywhere, the Catholics
of America were the least disposed of all the citizens to help to
cheek them. It became a stereotyped phrase of the press that the
Catholics were "the core of the isolationists." What you probably
called a splendid struggle for the preservation of democracy,
freedom, and every element of decency in our civilization most of
the Catholic bishops, priests, and papers swept aside as a stupid
squabble of these Europeans about their respective idealogies. The
powerful Jesuit organ America attacked President Roosevelt and
demanded that no munitions for Britain should be made in America.
The British Catholic Herald repeatedly published such messages as
this from Washington:
"The main obstacle to pro-British sentiment, and one which has
been giving the greatest concern to the authorities at Washington,
has been the attitude of American Catholics" (November 15, 1940),
and January 3, March 14, etc., 1941).
In the following summer (Reynolds News, June 29, 1941), the
very impartial H.N. Brallsford, who was then in America, reported
it as strong as ever. In the British press Cardinal Dougherty,
Cardinal O'Connell -- were they unable to shed their Irish
bitterness even in a grave crisis of civilization? -- and other
leading prelates were said to be urging that Britain should be left
to its fate.
My American readers will know more about all this than I do,
but, while we were aware that many Catholics, even some bishops, in
America were so disgusted at this callous belittlement of a mighty
struggle for civilization, the spectacle of the great majority
urging a denial of help to Britain while the most acute observers
in Washington doubted if it could survive alone and the cause of
civilization over half the world would go down with it, was too
much even for the British brand of the Black International. It
relaxed its censorship of the press and for once let a fact which
was gravely discreditable to the Church go through.
That this attitude was inspired by the Vatican became quite
clear when Russia was drawn into the war. The Catholic opposition
to helping Britain was intensified. William Broun, Washington
correspondent of Reynolds News, the only quite honest and
independent Sunday paper in Britain (though, like all the others,
subject to Catholic influence), cabled (October 12) this news and
added:
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"In fact, those who wanted the triumph of reaction and Fascism
in the Civil War in Spain now want to see Fascism triumph in
Russia. That is to be expected."
In other words, we have, as I said, one consistent and
inexorable policy underlying all the superficial variations of
clerical action in various countries; the good of the Church. Many
very gravely doubt whether Britain, standing alone and making
blunder after blunder under its Conservative leaders, could
possibly have held its ground if Russia had fallen and Japan
intervened. All the sophistry with which the Irish prelates of
America and Australia and the Catholic naval and military leaders
of France decked their sheer hatred and jealousy of England cannot
conceal what would have been the consequences to Europe, Asia, the
northern half of Africa, and possibly of South America, of such an
event.
Yet the one development that promised to save Britain and
civilization, the challenge of Russia, not only gave new strength
to Catholic isolationism in America but actually caused British
Catholics to waver and fumble for new formulae to reconcile their
Papalism and their patriotism. They had laid down in advance that
there must be no alliance with the hated Bolsheviks. On May 31,
1940, when the question of an approach to Stalin was being
discussed, the Catholic Herald had said, flamboyantly:
"Far better to go down with our honor intact than clutch at a
filthy straw."
To such depths of stupidity and indifference to human welfare
had the Vatican's ten year crusade against Russia dragged the
Catholic world. One of the very few Catholic members of the House
of Commons spoke in public of Nazism and Bolshevism as two evils
and added: "We are not fighting the one which is the worst." In the
first months of the Russian war Catholics were a sorry spectacle.
In England, where they had to have some regard for public feeling,
they soon found the stupid formula that they would support the
government in sending all possible help to Russia but it must be
understood that they were not allying themselves with Communism or
Atheism! In Canada Catholic's organized a strike in one of the
vitally important monition-enterprises. In Eire the chief Catholic
weekly, the Standard, said:
"Those who do not want a German victory must now reflect on
the social and religious implications of a Russo-British victory."
In New Zealand the Catholic organ (Zealandia, July 3, 1941)
fierily attacked Churchill's promise to help Russia -- help Russia
to relieve England's grave peril remember! -- and said that it
betrayed "a mentality which it is hoped does not indicate the
opinion of the majority within the Empire" and that "to aid Soviet
Russia even against our common foe is to invite the curse of God
upon ourselves." Could fanaticism further go? Or could you have a
more flagrant illustration of its deadliness to man's welfare?
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A week ago I might have been tempted to close this chapter
with an hilarious paragraph on how the Pope, after winding up his
Catholic followers during ten years to a hatred of Russia which has
made them opposed or very feebly Sustain the policy of their
democratic governments in a time of crisis, seems to be deserting
them. I quoted the words attributed to the American envoy, who had
an hour's private talk with Pius XII before he left Rome; the
statement that the Pope recognized in private that while Germany
was thoroughly corrupt, Russia was merely good with the wrong sort
of goodness. We had had quite a string of messages (unauthorized)
from places where Mr. Myron C. Taylor, on his leisurely way home
had chats with Spanish and Portuguese authorities and with Catholic
officials from Eire and Vichy. One day we learned that the Pope was
about to bless democracy; the next day that he had refused Mr.
Roosevelt's request that he should do so. Meantime Japan has flung
all its forces and its unscrupulous cunning on the side of the
Axis, and the Pope is again the Great Neutral.
Indeed his very latest pronouncement is, in spite of all its
diplomatic twists, pro-Axis. I am writing this on Christmas Eve,
and I am interrupted by the arrival of the evening paper. It runs
the heading, to please Catholics, "The Pope attacks oppression."
And the very first line of his Christmas message speaks of "the New
Order" as an established or certain-to-be-established fact, while
the last line rejoices in "the admirable spectacle of valor in the
defense of the Latin soil." Will any priest suggest that Britons,
Americans, Dutch, or Russians are defending Latin soil somewhere?
Or that it is they who claim to establish a New Order? The rest of
the message is the usual panegyric of liberty (as practiced in
Spain or Italy) and justice. Mussolini would certainly say his
withers are unwrung. Hitler will probably use his copy for shaving-
paper. Such is the position of the austere, serene, inflexible,
single-toned oracle of the Church of Rome in the gravest crisis
that has fallen upon the world for fourteen centuries.
Chapter V
THE CATHOLIC DEFENSE
I am, alas, unable to threaten my readers with eternal torment
if they read the other side, so I always anticipate it, especially
as it usually provides a lot of good clean fun. This is one of the
times when it does. Naturally the defense is not yet fully
formulated. There might be no need for one. General Leonard Wood
once told me, as we drank beer together in the Harvard Club, that
during the Civil War an adjutant rushed up to General Grant, who
was sitting on a fence chewing a straw, and almost breathlessly
told Grant that some necessary transport had not arrived. "Well,"
said Grant, calmly, "if we win we won't need it, and if we lose --
well, I guess we won't need it."
The first and feeblest defense is that the Pope is not and
never was, an ally of the Axis powers. Bunk. Japan was one of the
first of the three to approach Rome, after the rape of Manchuria,
and there is not the least ambiguity about its position. There was
no need whatever to make a request at Rome for a controller of
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Catholic missions in Manchuria. That is a matter of routine.
France, already rotten with Catholic intrigue, advised the Japs (I
showed) to get into friendly and increasingly intimate relations
with the Vatican so that it could use its Black International to
damp in every country the anger and suspicion the Japs had
incurred. The influence of Catholic agents and the Catholic press
is the main cause why Japan could steal province after province of
China and heap up forces for its pernicious designs without rousing
the world.
Mussolini had already approached the Vatican and signed the
famous Treaty and Concordat (1929). Again there is not the least
ambiguity. Mussolini's position was very insecure, and his
royalist, military, and capitalist backers insisted that he should
come to terms with the Pope, who could secure for him the absolute
obedience of half the country in addition to his Fascist quarter.
The Pope, who drove a hard bargain, got mighty advantages for the
Church, but Mussolini got from him an absolute security of his
position as a dictator and the enthusiastic support of the Italian
hierarchy and the virtual acquiescence of the Pope himself in all
his crimes. He could afford to let the Pope save his face with
American and British Catholics by keeping silence. All that he
wanted was the unity and enthusiasm of the nation. The bishops saw
that he got them.
Germany approached the Vatican through Von Papen (and probably
Thyssen) in 1932. It came with a blatant program of aggression in
its hands, and it dipped these hands deep in blood before it signed
the Concordat. By that Concordat the Vatican got promise that the
Nazis, who were out to destroy all freedom but their own, would
grant remarkable liberties to the Catholic body. What did the
Vatican promise in return? Nothing? Don't make us laugh in so
serious a time. It promised that the Church would "keep out of
politics"; which meant, as in Italy, that the Pope would never pass
any moral judgment on Hitler's program, methods, and crimes, and
that the Black International in Germany would fully support them.
We have seen the promise fulfilled. Peevish complaints about non-
observance of the Concordat do not count especially when they are
accompanied by assurances that there is not the least intention of
weakening Hitler's authority in the minds of Catholics.
This alliance of the Papacy with the arch-criminals during ten
years, and still more the intimate alliance with them of the
Vatican-controlled hierarchy of each country, rendered them a most
valuable service in diverting attention from their corrupt
characters and criminal aims. How could they be even suspicious
characters when the Pope and the Holy Church gave them this
guarantee of respectability? This service was doubled by the Pope
reserving all his moral invectives for Russia and concentrating
suspicion upon it. And this provides the answer to the second
defense of the Black International; that it is concerned with
interests of men which are so vital that any "temporal" -- call
them human -- evils that may ensue from its policy of promoting
those interests above all cannot be taken into account.
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These controversies are apt to become fights with words, like
men belaboring each other with inflated bladders containing dry
peas. Let us be realistic. Three out of four of us regard these
"spiritual interests" and "eternal salvations" as no more real than
astrological predictions. In fact, if you set aside -- not because
we look down on them but because they do not matter in this
connection -- the tens of million's of churchgoers, colored folk
and others, who know no more than they do, the great majority of us
do not care one little damn about their heavens and hells, and if
any body of officials like the Black International is prepared to
endanger our peace and security, our prosperity and liberty, to say
nothing of tens of millions of lives and billions of dollars of
wealth that the world sadly needs, in the name of these ancient
illusions the sooner they are excluded from public life the better.
Cotton Mather was a philanthropist in comparison with them. They
may hug and polish their little souls as much as they like in their
darkened chapels. No one proposes to interfere with them. But it is
time that the men and women of a modern community understood the
situation clearly, and that the millions of vague individuals who
live on the fringe of the Church or feel its social influence, who
call themselves Catholics but smile at the heaven-and-hell
business, stood out boldly for life and freedom. They now see the
price they pay for supporting the Black International.
All quite sincere Catholics, which means little more than half
of the nominal body, from the Pope to your Catholic neighbor would
make this other-world appeal their main defense. Less than 100
years ago their fathers made it a ground for the persecution, where
they had the power, of even Protestants. There was no salivation
outside the Church of Rome. It is amazing to read the daring
language in which their apologists today concede that there may be.
Not, of course, if one is a Communist and Atheist. That is why any
kind of violent suppression of Communism is in the real Interest of
the race! It is true that the teaching of the Church here happily
harmonizes with the sentiments of the privileged class, but that .
. .
Let me shift to another line of thought which is less apt to
induce biliousness. It is not in virtue of these moth-eaten dogmas
that the Pope and the Catholic clergy got the ear's of statesmen
and such prestige in the press that they are able to exert so
disastrous an influence. The cry is that "religion" is one of the
chief foundations of the life of an orderly community. With that
crudeness of thought that characterizes nearly all politicians on
all subjects but polities they profess to believe that the Churches
are the source of whatever respect we have for justice, social
decency, and neighborly behavior. And amongst these Churches the
Roman has with its authoritative head and its international
organization, a unique position. It can render mighty social and
civic service, and we must, we are told, not be surprised if in its
zeal to render those services it at times blunders, or is tricked
by crooked statesmen, or overlooks dangers that do not properly
belong to its sphere.
I trust you admire bow I can talk like a Jesuit or a literary
nun. I learned the craft fifty years ago. Seriously, this third
line of defense, though the most likely to be presented when the
need for apology becomes urgent, is the worst bunk of all. For this
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simple reason, I have just filled ten little books with proof that
the Church of Rome instead of inspiring a love of justice and peace
during the last ten years has, for its own corporate purposes,
dulled the world's sense of justice and seriously helped to divert
its attention from the threat to its peace. This is not rhetoric.
The attitude of Catholics, as reflected in their press and the
utterances of their bishops, the whole world over has been that
since their Holy Church and Holy Father could not possibly ally
themselves with iniquity, the Axis powers could not be as corrupt
as some represented, and those aggressive programs to which a few
of us have tried to draw attention for the last five or six years
must be just adolescent dreams which they have outgrown.
What in the name of common-sense is the use of proving to us
that the Church of Rome and its Papacy could render most valuable
service to the state and to what it calls our life here and now
when in the gravest crisis of our lives, if not the gravest in
history, it does not say one single word of approval of the forces
that are trying to save civilization but consistently gives most
important assistance to the forces that would, if they prevailed,
destroy civilization in the sense in which all decent and sensible
men have come to understand it?
Let us be as realistic as you like and leave rhetoric to
priests, politicians, and editorial writers. In what way could the
Church of Rome serve the race in a social-moral respect? Only by
sternly and explicitly denouncing, not crime in the abstract but
the men who commit it and warning the race that they are dangerous.
And what is the actual record which we have surveyed? During ten
years of open preparation for the most ghastly of crimes, ten
year's of steadily increasing perpetration of crime, the Pope has
done nothing whatever but bless the abstract virtues of peace and
justice, knowing perfectly well that the arch-criminals professed
to aim at giving the world perpetual peace -- when they have all
the guns -- and appeal every day to the "justice" of their cause
and the "legitimate aspirations" of their people. Of the seven
leading nations on whom the peace of the world and the maintenance
of such justice as our social and political order embodies mainly
depended -- America, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, and
Japan -- the last three alone betrayed, indeed openly paraded, an
intention to disturb the peace of the world, to destroy such
political justice as we have won, and to trample upon such
restraining decencies as we have been able to incorporate in
international law. I have shown that the Pope never said one single
word of condemnation of those three powers; that he, on the
contrary, entered into and maintained the most friendly relations
with them, thus helping to divert the suspicions of the world from
them; that even when the struggle began all his references to peace
and justice (including this latest Christmas message) were so
framed that they confused the criminals and the police together in
whatever censure they implied; and that the only explicit and
violent attacks he made were upon the one power, Russia, that had
the greatest interest in peace and could do most to save
civilization.
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Further, in what way could a Pope's message have the effect
which is so fulsomely attributed to it? Only when his local agents
in any country, the hierarchy and clergy, consistently and
explicitly applied it to the leaders or ruling class of that
country. Well, they were, we saw, certainly consistent -- in
blessing the crimes and the criminals. If that sounds rhetorical
quote me one single instance of a German bishop censuring the foul-
minded Nazis or an Italian prelate censuring the Fascists on any
ground other than their refusal to pay the Church the full price
they had contracted to pay the Church for its support. Naturally
one swallow would not make a summer. It happens that after this
elaborate survey of the whole period I do not know a single
instance. But I have given a hundred proofs, including collective
letters of the whole episcopate, that the German and Italian
hierarchies, individually, and officially, applauded every
"conquest" of their bloody-minded rulers and never warned their
people that their leaders were bringing an historic shame upon
them, Add the conduct of the hierarchy and clergy in Spain, in
Hungary, in Vichy France, in Slovakia, in South America and you
have the real picture of what the Black International has done for
the world.
But, says the apologist finally, and tearfully, the Church
would have been persecuted and rendered helpless if it had not
acted thus. If I were a Catholic I should be inclined to say: Would
to God that it had been persecuted and rendered helpless! The world
might not be in so desperate a plight. And what about this vast
library of Catholic literature in which we read how it is so
inflexible in its moral principles that in all ages its priests go
to the stake rather than compromise; that it thrives on and is
purified by persecution, and so on?
Enough of this trashy verbiage of apologists. We men and women
of the modern age want only to know the facts and we need no priest
and no Pope to tell us what to think about them. You will probably
think three things. Firstly, that this scandalous cowering under
the Catholic threat which prevents the press and our literary
oracles from telling the truth about what is happening calls for
serious consideration. Secondly, the respect which our politicians
and statesmen pay to the Church of Rome and its "venerable Pontiff"
is scandalously opposed to the interests of the nation and the
race. Thirdly, that the apologists of the Catholic Church in
America are particularly and scandalously untruthful. It is an
economic corporation seeking to protect its wealth and power at any
cost to the race. The 200000000 Catholics are just its feeding-
ground. It has now sold civilization for thirty pieces of silver,
and what will happen to it when we have prevented the devil from
reaping the fruit of the bargain must surprise no man.
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