Do not listen to the excuse that it was still the Middle Ages. Napoleon had made an end of that horror. Some now put Napoleon on a level with our modern dictators, but with all his faults he was a clean fighter, only in one case accused of murder (the Due d’Enghien), and he did magnificent work for Europe. He was a skeptic, of course, as Lord Rosebery shows in The Last Phase (1900), but he showered wealth and favor upon the Church - on the usual terms: the priests must keep the old Republicans quiet for him. Yet after his fall the bishops joined with the royalists in a White Terror which was more brutal than the Red Terror.
Catholics represent Pope Pius VII as a “martyr” under Napoleon. They do not tell how under this Pius VII, when Napoleon was beaten, tens of thousands of Liberals were martyred and under his three successors hundreds of thousands. Well, what were these Holy Fathers, of modern times, like, and what were they protecting? If you want a serious and unchallengeable answer look up that highly respectable and most weighty authority the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. X). You will find that Leo XII, who succeeded Pius - the Catholic Encyclopedia admires his “intelligence and masterly energy” - was a converted rake and a doddering old fool who was “hated by all, princes and beggars” (as the famous historian L. von Ranke who knew him, said) and his death was hailed by the Romans “with indecent joy” (the Prussian ambassador at Rome said). While he shot birds in the Vatican garden his troops, with a sanguinary cardinal in command, shot down his rebels, and many thousands of them suffered a living death in jails of a repulsive character.
At his death the cardinals, after invoking the light of the Holy Spirit, elected, to meet the grave problems of the new Europe, a man in the last stage of senile decay, drooling at the mouth as they wheeled him round the Vatican garden in his baby-carriage. The carnage of rebels went on. He soon died, and the fierce contest of cardinals for the holy office was renewed. The ablest candidate was Albani, but he was as notorious a roué that they thought the heretics of England and Prussia might make ribald remarks if they elected him Vicar of Christ, so they made him Secretary of State (and real ruler of the Church) and elected a monk, Gregory XVI.
Gregory was according to all Italian historians vulgar, sensual, and frivolous. As one of the more distinguished of them says, he absorbed himself in ignoble interests while the country groaned under misrule. It was widely believed in Rome that he was intimate with the wife of his valet, and he was notorious for his love of strong wine and candy. His horrible jails were crammed with rebels - 6,000 at one time - and the best blood of Italy was poured out or driven abroad. His ignorance was weird. He refused to admit even gas and railways into the Papal States, as if that meant that the devil got his foot in the door.
After fifteen years of this the cardinals elected what Catholics call a Liberal Pope, Pius IX. But when he found that Liberals wanted real freedom and a share in reforming his corrupt kingdoms, He fled in disguise and called upon the Catholic powers to kill his rebels for him. Then the jails were crammed again. In a villa at Civita Vecchia, which had once been enlivened by the orgies of medieval Holy Fathers, rebels with a life-sentence were chained to the wall and not released even for relieving themselves. So the brutality continued until the Italians bought off the Pope’s French protectors and took over, with an overwhelming vote of the inhabitants, the Papal Kingdom.
What was this kingdom (the Papal States) which they had shed so much blood to protect? There is no dispute amongst non-Catholic historians, and some Catholic historians agree, that it was the most corrupt, backward, vicious, and inept in Europe. The British ambassador publicly declared it “the opprobrium of Europe.” The leading monarchs of Europe in 1812 publicly warned the Papacy - which is now pressed upon us as the most profound and serene oracle on political morality - that unless it cleaned up its Augaean stable they would clean it themselves. Rome was described by a devout French priest as “the most hideous sewer that was ever opened up to the eye of man” and this is approvingly quoted by a Catholic historian in the Cambridge Modern History (X, 164) in which all this is admitted. The real ruler or Secretary of State. Cardinal Antonelli, who had been born in a peasant’s hut, died worth $20,000,000, and left a bastard daughter, the Countess Lambertini, clamoring for it.
South Italy, the Kingdom of Naples, was virtually an extension of the Pope’s Kingdom in respect of Papal influence; and it rivaled the Papal States in corruption and viciousness. Its monarchs, the Popes’ beloved sons, were veritable Neros. From 1790 to 1860 they slaughtered, sometimes with revolting barbarity, about 200,000 “Liberals.” And since the Kings of Spain and Portugal were just as servile to the Popes we are entitled to bring their misdeeds also under the heading of the “moral influence” of the Popes. Their “butcher’s bill” in 50 years was between 50,000 and 100,000. The savagery was so indiscriminate that no one can get nearer to the truth.
Well, well, the Catholic says, this is still ancient history - less than a century ago - and with the glorious pontificate of Leo XIII a new era was inaugurated; the era of those beautiful encyclicals on sociopolitical matters which are quoted in every Catholic apology that is put before the American public. For an understanding of the present situation it is very important to realize that there was no change of policy whatever at the Vatican. That is why I have given this very slight outline of the bloody history of the past, which is fully described in my earlier works. The policy of violence was merely suspended until it could once more be applied.
Leo XIII could not, if he wanted, maintain the vile practices of his predecessors. Italy and France witnessed a rapid growth of skepticism in high quarters after 1870 and would not tolerate Papal interference or advice. Poland was under Russia, which treated the Pope as an Italian monkey. Austria, brought down by its defeats was becoming very Liberal. The horrors of the dead Papal Kingdom and of Naples were told by hundreds of writers and orators in Europe and America. Moreover, the Vatican had begun to see remarkable possibilities of wealth in “converting” America and Great Britain, and the Catholics in those countries had as yet not the least influence on the press and education and could not have concealed atrocities as they now do. So the wolf put on sheep’s clothing for a few years.
Then the menace of the Reds began and gave them their opportunity. There was still only one country in which the “right to kill,” which was solemnly re-affirmed by Leo XIII, could be made the basis of policy. Spain was geographically isolated and few people abroad took much notice of it. In fact, in the last decade of the century the ruling and wealthy classes everywhere were beginning to sniff at this Red menace and would not inquire too closely. So in Spain the hierarchy, which was more intimately connected with Rome than that of any other country, began to cooperate with the corrupt state on the old lines. From 1895 to 1909, when Ferrer was murdered and I roused so much public attention that the policy had again to be suspended, hundreds of rebels were shot and thousands tortured in jail.
They were not “anarchists.” I became an intimate friend of one of them, Professor Tarrida del Marmol, who fled to London and was under sentence of death in Spain. He was a fine scholar and a Spanish gentleman of the best type, a man of aristocratic family. He loathed violence and was an anarchist only in the Tolstoian sense. His great crime was that he was a rebel against the Church. In the vile dungeons of Montjuich, where he was imprisoned, he saw what was done. Men were fed for days on salt fish and dry bread and refused water. Cords were tied tightly on their genitals. It was afterwards proved that most of the “anarchist plots” were police plots, and the Church was fully implicated. This went on under Leo XIII and Pius X, and it brings the Red Record of the Popes down to our own time. It continued in the only country in the world in which it could be continued.
II. Who is this Pius XII?
Eugenio Pacelli, a.k.a. Pope Pius XII, who never excommunicated Hitler nor condemned Mein Kampf to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. He reigned from 1939 to 1958 |
The present Pope, Pius XII, is hailed throughout the Catholic world as the Pope of Peace. Cardinal Hinsley explains in his introduction to The Pope Speaks (1940) that the beautiful motto of his ancient and aristocratic family is (translated): “Peace is the Fruit of Justice.” Yes; Mussolini has said that hundreds of times, with the accent on the word justice. Hitler merely wants justice and then he will give what is left of us peace. I am going to show that Pius XII above any other Pope of modern times, even Pius IX, is entitled to be called the Red Pope, the Pope of War.
One of the flatterers of “the venerable Church” has called him “the Greatest Neutral.” He never has been neutral. For at least five years he has openly called for war on Bolshevism in Mexico, Spain, China, and Russia. Does anyone suppose that he was thinking of ancient Jericho and merely wanted the priests to blow their trumpets? He was summoning Italy, Germany, Japan, and the United States to war. Leaving out the United States, which was unwilling to draw the chestnuts out of the fire for the Pope and Wall Street, in this slogan which Pacelli, as Secretary of State, sent echoing through the Catholic world he was shrieking for just that war on Spain, China, and Russia which we have seen.
I am sometimes asked what Catholic apologists reply to these very serious historical and actual charges which I make. They never reply. They forbid their people to read me, which is much easier. But do not Catholics regard that maneuver with suspicion? Listen. The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland published a cheap booklet by the Jesuit priest D. A. Lord with the title I Can Read Anything. It meets the natural wish of many Catholics to read both sides, and it takes the usual line that the books they are forbidden to read are filthy and mendacious but dangerously clever. Catholic young men and women are asked to be too sensible to “pit their minds” against “the trained, clever, brilliant minds” of the Church’s critics. And lest the Catholic should ask if the Church and its 350,000,000 followers does not include a few equally brilliant writers to reply, the priest goes on (p. 22):
And when they [the anti-Church writers} are utterly unscrupulous, as let’s say, Joseph McCabe is, and will twist any little bit of history to make a case, and pile yarn on yarn to construct a proof, and use fable for fact; and supposition for solid argument, what chance has the average reader against them?
The English Catholic Truth Society dare not publish this, because the British libel courts are the straightest in the world. In an Irish court I would get as much justice as a Jew in Berlin. So when folk in England write to ask for the Catholic reply to me, the officials send them an address in Dublin where they can get this cowardly little rag.
If anybody is unaware, which hardly seems likely, that the present Pope has for the last five or six years used all his influence to get Italy, Germany, and Japan to make war, respectively, on Spain, Russia, and China, which would mean a world-war, he will have ample evidence later. First let us see how this Red Pope became what he is.
Eugenio Pacelli comes of what is commonly called an ancient Italian noble family which had lost its wealth but not its piety. His father was a Papal lawyer and, as is usual in such cases, one son was destined for the clerical career. More than four-fifths of the inhabitants of the Papal States had voted to be transferred from Papal rule to that of the Kings of Italy but that meant nothing to the “democratic” Leo XIII. He was “the prisoner of the Vatican,” eliciting golden sympathy from America, and the Italian statesmen were robbers.
I do not suggest that Pius XII does not believe his theology, as probably half the clergy do not in one degree or other. No one is likely to know except himself what he believes. Priests hardy ever tell each other. Zeal is no criterion, however. The Catholic priesthood and hierarchy are an immense economic corporation centered in Rome just as Christian Science is, in its official framework, a business with headquarters in Boston. Naturally its members are zealous; and the more responsibility they have (which is won by the extent of their zeal) the more zealous they are. The Catholic who imagines its Pope and his cardinals regarding money as a mundane affair with which they have to soil their white fingers occasionally should hear two or three priests talking about them when they get to the second bottle.
But understand that I suggest nothing whatever about the Pope’s belief or unbelief. He has a job of work, and this was his apprenticeship for it. In college he discovered an ability for learning languages and a special zeal for learning Canon Law, so he was drafted into the Secretariat of State very soon after he became priest, and there he would find himself on the fringe of the mysteries of Vatican diplomacy. He also, being of noble birth, joined and became a professor in The Academy of Ecclesiastics of Noble Birth. Of course, the less said about that the better in America, where one has to protect the legend that all his life - when the great ones of the earth kissed his ring during his tours of the world, when he occupied a gorgeous suite in the Vatican as Secretary of State, and even now that he sits on the golden throne - his one ardent desire was that he could become a humble parish priest amongst the poor. He is an aristocrat to his finger-tips. He loathes democracy. He doubles Leo XIII (in his crooked diplomacy) and Innocent III (who virtually founded the Inquisition).
Pacelli made such progress in the department that at the comparatively early age of 41 he was sent out on a very important mission. Pope Benedict XV, who had notoriously intrigued with the Germans and the Austrians against the Italians, during the war recollected that he was a Pope of Peace when, in 1917, it became doubtful if the Germans would win. He then wanted to have the world-prestige of bringing it to a close, and he sent Pacelli as Nuncio (ambassador) with plans of peace to Germany. Pacelli was announced as Nuncio to Bavaria, but within a week he was in Berlin seeing the Chancellor. He even saw the Kaiser, who told him to take his plans home because he was sure to win the war. Why does not the Pope rather, he said, detach Italy from the Allies and link it with Austria, as they are both Catholic countries? Because, said Pacelli, there is a very strong patriotic movement in Italy in favor of continuing the war led by a fiery young journalist named Benito Mussolini. The Pope’s biographers say that the Kaiser told Pacelli to take no notice of “that scum” but to go ahead and detach Italy from England. It is a neat little picture.
The gaunt, grim, swarthy young Nuncio next year saw the fall of the Kaiser and the riots in Munich. He met the “mob” with simple heroism, of course — in Catholic literature — but the important point is that this was the beginning of his knowledge and hatred of the Reds. He remained in Munich until 1925, so he saw, with what feelings he has not told us, the rise of a similar “scum” in Bavaria and the comic-opera “March on Berlin,” when Hitler made the record run of his life - backwards. In 1925 he was sent as Nuncio to Berlin, and as this was the beginning of the best period in recent German history, the five years of peace and comparative prosperity under a Liberal-Socialist coalition Pacelli must know better than any man in Italy that the excuse which was later made for Hitler in the world-press, the flattery under shelter of which the Nazis created their formidable power, the plea that they had saved Germany from chaos and distress, is a lie.
As part of the evidence, if evidence is required, that Pius XII has only one aim in all his policy - not the peace of the world but the power of the Church - the twelve years he spent in Germany are important. He acquired a thorough knowledge of German, though he speaks it (and French) with a marked accent, and as far as German affairs are concerned he has never been at the mercy of bigoted and muddle-headed Vatican officials. He saw the years of confusion after the War end in a working compromise and a new Germany rising cheerfully from the ruins. Lamentable as the feud of Communists and Socialists was, it was a domestic squabble and did not seriously disturb the national economy after 1924; and the Catholic Church had more freedom and prestige than ever. Pacelli knows as little about economics as he does about history and science, but at least he was intelligent enough to see, during his four years in Berlin, that under a predominantly Socialist rule Germany was making all the progress that could be expected with so crippling a debt, and it was not internal confusion but its share in the world-slumps and the cessation of fat loans from America and Britain from the end of 1929 that led to the comparative distress of 1930-32 of which the Nazis took advantage. We shall see that Pacelli at one time (1934) in a fit of temper wrote the sharpest condemnation of Hitler that ever came from a clerical pen. He always loathed Hitler as a plebeian upstart and an apostate from the Church, even when he was compelling the German bishops to bow humbly before him and beg to be allowed to have a share in his dirty work. But Hitler promised to make an end of Socialism, and that - not (outside of Russia) Communism or Bolshevism - is the Big Bad Wolf in the eyes of the Vatican. Socialism has a consistent anti-Papal tradition, and to oblige its wealthy supporters the Vatican has been compelled for half a century to condemn it as immoral on the ground that private ownership is a right based upon natural moral law.
It was, however, not until Pacelli had left Germany that the Nazis showed any prospect of ever attaining power, and he regarded them as a vulgar and disorderly rabble led by a bunch of unsavory apostates and “pansies.” Three years later he would, as Secretary of State, compel the proud German hierarchy, against their very decided will, to greet Hitler as the Savior of Germany and the White Hope of the Church. Let us remember, that Pacelli did not act from ignorance. He was less innocent than Chamberlain. If he had any ability at all - and he has considerable ability - he knew Germany thoroughly. Will Catholics call it a wicked suspicion if we assume that this observer of events, who lived eight years in Munich and four in Berlin, had read Mein Kampf? He knew the program: the glorification of the German race, the domination of Europe, the annexation of the Ukraine, the massacre of the Jews, the annihilation of France - in a word, war on a stupendous scale. Catholics do not obtrude today his intimate knowledge of Germany.
Achille Ratti, a.k.a. Pope Pius XI, who signed the concordat with Mussolini establishing the Vatican State. He reigned as pope from 1922 to 1939, dying on 10 February 1939. |
He was recalled to Rome in the summer of 1929 while Germany was still cheerfully recovering and the Catholics cooperated amiably with the Socialists and Liberals. Pacelli had been head of the diplomatic corps at Berlin. The French ambassador had the real right to that position and the Papal ambassador no right. But the Germans hated the French too much to let the honor fall to them. It is another point to hear in mind about this pre-Hitler Germany, which Pacelli helped to ruin, that it genially tolerated a Papal Nuncio at the head of the diplomatic corps and a Catholic Chancellor in the Wilhelmsstrasse. German Catholics had never before seen such things.
Pacelli’s patron, the Secretary of State Cardinal Gasparri, was now 80 years old and unfit for office. He seems to have marked out Pacelli as his successor, and he brought him back to the Vatican for a few months of final training. Even Catholic literature is a little confused here. Pacelli became Secretary of State, which is the highest position in the Church after that of the Pope, in February, 1930. In 1931 a gossip-paragraph appeared in the Italian press to the effect that it was expected in Rome that the new Secretary of State was about to be dismissed and old Gasparri reinstated. Clearly the old men were conspiring against Pacelli, but the same Catholic writers who say that it was because he was too lenient to Mussolini had already said that Gasparri had always been in favor of alliance with that brutal adventurer. We will return to the point in a moment, but it will be useful first to run a cursory eye over the ten years’ activity of Pacelli as Secretary of State.
Adolph Hitler, a Catholic in good standing to the bitter end. His book Mein Kampf, not being “offensive to the Faith or Catholic morals,” was never placed on the Index. |
He took up residence in the gorgeous suite of rooms, with heavy gilt furniture and magnificent decorations, in the Vatican Palace. Just at the time when the Pope [Pius XI] and Mussolini, who had in the previous year signed the infamous compact by which (in effect) the Papacy undertook to condone all Mussolini’s crimes in return for $90,000,000 and a royal independence, had begun to quarrel fiercely, as crooks are apt to do over the bargain. Pacelli smoothed out the quarrel, got the Duce to bend his knees in St. Peter’s, and got the Pope to have a cordial chat with him. So Mussolini was safely launched on his bloody career.
In the same year, 1931, Japan seized Manchuria and began to debauch the Chinese. While all the world looked on with disgust at the brigandage, Pacelli accepted the overtures of Japan and the more Japan advanced and became a menace to half the world, the deeper Pacelli made the Vatican’s alliance with the callous and unscrupulous bandits. In 1932 Hitler made his supreme bid for power and failed, and Pacelli then ordered the German hierarchy to withdraw their opposition to him so that he secured power and entered upon his career of blood.
In 1934 Pacelli went to South America to preside at a Eucharistic Congress and saw the heads of each Republic and their bishops; and by a remarkable coincidence, if you can think it that, Fascism began to sweep the country, rebels against the Church went to jail in tens of thousands, and the Germans and Italians in South America entered upon their audacious plans. In the same year the Christian Socialists of Austria, after their leaders had visited the Pope, treacherously crushed Socialism and prepared the way for Hitler. In the same year Mussolini began the slaughter of Abyssinia and the whole Italian Church made whoopee, and at the end the Pope gave the Queen of Italy as Empress of Abyssinia the Golden Rose, which is the highest mark of Papal approval.
In 1936 General Franco visited the Vatican, and his revolt, which had the most open and solemn blessing of the Papacy, was the first serious step of the Axis brigands in their projected campaign. In 1938 Hitler annexed Austria with the full support of the Austrian Church, which is one of the most docile to the Vatican in the world. In the same year the Sudeten Catholics at one end of Czecho-Slovakia and the Slovak Catholics at the other betrayed their country and put Hitler in a position to defy the rest of Europe and prepare for his insane attempt to dominate the world.
A remarkable ten-year record for the Pope of Peace, the Greatest Neutral, the Friend of Democracy, and the Black International which carried out his instructions! Pacelli-Pius’s ruling idea throughout has been the extinction of Bolshevism by the peaceful bombs and bayonets of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese; to which in furtherance of the work of peace, he now wants to add the bombs and bayonets of Vichy France, Franco Spain, Salazar Portugal, and Horthy Hungary.
III. His Glorious Ally Mussolini
It was on March 12, 1939, that Eugenio reached the summit of his ambition and was crowned in St. Peter’s. Next day a man who lived on the frontier of Italy and France sent to the most respected newspaper in Great Britain, the Manchester Guardian, a letter which it - and probably it alone of the British or American press - had the courage to publish. The writer reminded people that March 12th was also the last day for Jews to remain in Italy. He described from personal observation the appalling sufferings of the 70,000 Jews who, robbed of their goods, were racing for frontiers which to a large extent were sealed against them. He saw old men, women, and children panting up the Alpine slopes to France and says that the Italian carabinieri and frontier-troops had “orders to facilitate their migration if necessary with the help of a bayonet.” He saw elderly folk “collapse on the way up the vast acres of the Italian slope”; little children “stagger, their feet bleeding, into the frontier villages”; women try to throw themselves under the traffic when the French at last put up the barriers; babies abandoned or lost by the wayside.
This had gone on for a week and it was continuing in a last frantic rush of the robbed Jews while the bells of St. Peter’s and all the churches in Italy rang out joyously over the sunny land. What did the Pope of Peace do? The writer of the letter says that the Italian carabinieri and soldiers were so moved that they forgot their instructions about the bayonet and carried children tenderly to the frontier. What did the Pope do? Nothing: except receive the splendid congratulations of Mussolini and his ministers. Catholic biographers boast that during the week which followed his coronation Pacelli-Pius, sinking under the burden of work, slept only three hours every night. Very heroic, but a little puzzling, because as Secretary of State he had been doing just that work for ten years. Why the arrears? But what did he do for the Jews, for the crushed and bleeding democrats of Italy, for the heart-broken and suffering Czechs? Nothing, just nothing.
The Italian problem had been the first to engage Pacelli when he became Secretary of State. In 1911 Mussolini and his cut-throats were, as the Kaiser had said, “scum.” They were atheists, republicans, and gangsters until 1921. Then, to the surprise of many, Mussolini asked Cardinal Ratti for permission for the Black Shirts to make a solemn procession to the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Milan Cathedral and the cardinal “gladly accepted and gave them a place of honor,” says the Catholic Teeling (p. 106). Next year was the march on Rome (with Mussolini 100 miles away) and the Duce pompously declared St. Peter’s and all church property under his special protection and ordered a thanksgiving service with the King in attendance, at one of the principle churches of Rome for the salvation of Italy. From Scum to Savior of his Country in two years!
Benito Mussolini, whom Pius XI and Pius XII helped come to power and hold it. When he expelled the Jews from Italy, newly crowned Pius XII muttered not a word of disapproval. |
There is no secret about it. It is one of the most painful features of the American literature of the subject that the respected head of a great university, Nicholas Murray Butler, dupe of American Catholics, lent his pen (Looking Forward) in that glorification of Mussolini which was so useful as a smoke-screen to the Fascists while they prepared for war. Professor Salvemini (Under the Axe of Fascism, 1936) has given Dr. Butler a chastisement such as few scholars ever give each other for his gullibility in accepting Catholic lies shoot the “confusion and ruin” caused by the Communists from which Mussolini saved Italy. The author Seldes shows that Mussolini later confessed that he invented the Communist bogie to help the loan he had floated in America. The danger was Socialism, which was conquering Italy, and so politicians, royalists, generals, and industrialists put Mussolini in the saddle.
But in spite of this powerful support of throne, army, and capital the seat in the saddle remained very insecure for seven years. Mussolini had not dared to extinguish the democracy for which Italians had fought so nobly from 1790 to 1870. Liberals and Socialists were powerfully organized and, as in Spain, commanded the majority of the votes in the cities, where the most intelligent and the best-informed of the Italians lived. When, in 1924, Mussolini was believed to have had the most respected leader of the Socialists, Matteotti, removed by murder - his public utterances on the murder were so gross and callous that his guilt seemed clear - so many turned against him that at the elections of 1920 his power was ominously shaken. He needed just one element to turn the scale in his favor.
The peasants and a certain number of the urban workers were organized in a powerful Catholic Democratic movement. The Pope had, as in Germany and Austria, allowed this bastard Socialism to grow up under their eyes as one way to check the loss of so many millions to the Socialists and Communists. These Catholic Democrats fought the Fascists as truculently as the Communists did and, while they equally detested the Socialists end Liberals and would not cooperate with them, they at least represented further millions in opposition to Mussolini.
Both sides, Blackshirts and Black International, saw that they must sooner or later enter into alliance against Socialism, and Mussolini’s backers, the throne, army, and capital, insisted on it. Mussolini, as I said, ordered a superb thanksgiving service in church for his accession to power and presented a very valuable old library to the Vatican. He then complained to the Vatican about the conduct of the Catholic democrats under the priest Sturzo. The priest disappeared because of obscure Fascist threats of reprisals against the Church, Seldes says (The Vatican, p. 331) and the party was weakened. But the opposition went on and Mussolini made little progress. The Vatican knew the strength of its hand and wanted a price that Mussolini feared his followers would never agree to pay.
Seldes says that the revelation of the Pope’s prestige in America at the Chicago Eucharistic Congress in 1926 at length stirred Mussolini to bold action. It was more probably the menace of the Italian elections. Secret negotiations began at that time but the Pope’s terms were so exorbitant that they dragged out for two years. In 1926 Farinacci, Mussolini’s bulldog and leader of the anticlerical Old Guard of the Fascists, publicly declared that the alliance was necessary. Mussolini, he said - Seldes gives his words - was ready to deal with the Pope “in return for the moral support of the Vatican for his policy.” What the policy was every child knew - the final extinction of liberty in Italy and, as a minimum, the recovery of Savoy and Corsica from France, Malta from England, and Dalmatia from Yugo-Slavia - and, instead of talking about peaceful recovery by negotiation Mussolini was thundering about his millions of bayonets whenever he opened his elegant mouth.
In 1928 the Maltese got up a kind of revolt against Britain. There was a trial of strength between the civil and the clerical authorities, and the Premier, Lord Strickland, though a Catholic, bitterly resented the interference of the clergy in the elections. It was proved that they even used the confessional to intimidate voters. Mussolini watched with great interest, and, when the British Government in the end began its historic policy of appeasement and Strickland was sacrificed, the Duce had a new proof of the utility of the Church. A high Anglican official in Malta at the time informed me, privately, that the Governor of the island, who let down Strickland, was “grossly deceived by the Papal Delegate, Msgr. Pascal Robinson”; and he added “more mischief-making in Dublin.” The Black International won first blood for Mussolini.
A proud Mussolini poses with Vatican prelates after concluding the 1929 concordat giving the popes a bundle of money and the Vatican State, while giving him a license to kill - or butcher as was often the case. |
So the fascists had to swallow the conditions, and in 1929 the Blackshirt and the Blackmailer signed their compact. The Pope got nearly $100,000,000, the independence and sovereignty of the Vatican City, the control of all Italian education except in the universities, and the enforcement of the Canon Law, the establishment of the Church and endowment of the priests. The Duce got a free hand for the complete destruction of democracy in Italy and the silence of the Pope while he murdered democrats and set out on his glorious campaign to make an empire by selecting weak countries for aggression.
This was the year of Pacelli’s return to Rome, but his biographers are not lavish with detail at this point and do not enable us to say definitely - and I refuse to go on suspicions - what, if any, share he had in this sordid business. I have to recall it, as briefly as possible, because it was the first great triumph of the Black international in our time, and it was one of the most important steps in the advance of the brigands toward the realization of their plot. It finally established the power of Mussolini. It caused Catholic papers and writers (and sympathizers like Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler) to take the lead in that praise of Fascism in Italy - had not the Pope blessed it? - which was of the greatest importance to the brigands in preparing their armaments, And it gave Mussolini’s imitator in Germany the idea that after all it would pay to come to terms, hypocritically, with the Black International.
But, whatever share Pacelli may have had in drafting the treaty of alliance with Mussolini, he had a full share in securing that the alliance was not wrecked. The Fascist Party was still so bitterly anti-Papal that Mussolini had, in soothing his followers, to use language which the Pope angrily described (in the Osservatore, May 30) as “heretical, and worse than heretical.” The Pope spoke publicly of the possibility that he would repudiate the Treaty, and in that case, he said, “Vatican City itself would fall together with the state that is dependent on Vatican City for its being” (same letter in the Osservatore). The Catholic world and the world-press were alarmed. If Mussolini fell, they said, Socialism would capture Italy. As Cardinal Hinsley, head of the Church in Britain, said at a later date, Fascism was “in many respects unjust” but it “prevented worse injustice - if it goes under, God’s cause goes with it.” (Catholic Times, October 13th, 1935) God’s cause is, in the mouth of a cardinal, the power of the Church; and the end justifies the means.
Pacelli to the rescue. Old Gasparri, who was stirring the Pope to resist, was pushed aside, and the Saint George who wanted to save the world - the world of wealth and privilege - from the Dragon Socialism donned his shining armor. Friction continued, of course. Most of the leading Blackshirts hated the Pope, and the Pope and his new secretary of State heartily hated them. But the alliance was indispensable. Mussolini now roared like any sucking dove about the beauty of religion. “I wish to see religion everywhere in the country,” he said; “let us teach the children their catechism” (Manchester Guardian June 19, 1931). He, as I said, publicly prayed in St. Peter’s. Cardinal Gasparri at the Eucharistic Congress of 1922 hailed him as “the man who first saw clearly in the present world chaos” the man who is “getting the State to work in accordance with the moral law of God” (Catholic Herald, September 15, 1932). The friction was reduced and the world was officially assured that the last Census had proved that 99 percent of the Italians were Catholics.
It was an insincere alliance. The organization of lay dupes known as Catholic Action now gave Mussolini trouble. He demanded that the Pope check it, and something seems to have been done, but secretly Pacelli got the Pope to write glowing praise of the international Catholic Action and knowing that in spite of the sacred independence of the Vatican City Mussolini’s spies watched it closely, he sent the document by two priests to Paris for publication.
The old trickery of Vatican diplomacy was cultivated. When, as in the case of the annexation of Austria, local prelates, who would not dare to stir a finger against Papal policy, acted in support of the Axis, the Vatican Radio would announce to the World that the Pope disapproved. When this angered Axis supporters they were assured that the radio message was unauthorized and sent out without consulting the Vatican. Sometimes the Papal newspaper, the Osservatore, was used and, to please both sides, was then declared unauthorized. Neither the Radio nor the Osservatore would dare to send out or print, an unauthorized message on an important point. Foreign correspondents in Rome received telephone messages from the Vatican which were later declared unauthorized. Ambiguous utterances, as in the case of Abyssinia, were put into the mouth of the Pope, and Axis Catholics were encouraged to read them one way and democratic Catholics to read them in the opposite way.
And every Easter and Christmas the beautiful message of Peace rolled out, while between those festivals the Catholic world was inspired everywhere to demand war on Spain, Russia, China, and Mexico.
There was another aspect of the alliance. While Cardinal Gasparri assured the Catholic world that Mussolini was “getting the state to work in accordance with the moral law of God” and Cardinal Hinsley was warning it that “God’s cause” would be lost in Italy if Mussolini fell, it was open to anybody to ascertain what social improvement, if any, the Duce had actually accomplished. Reference books like the Statesman’s Year Book which were in every good library gave year by year time official Italian returns of crime, education, production, trade, debt, etc.
It is astonishing today to reflect how very few people thought of testing in this simple and positive way what truth there was in the almost universal press admiration of the efficiency and national service of Fascism. It must, at least, seem astonishing to any man who does not accept my suggestion that Mussolini’s work in crushing a great Socialist movement was so appreciated in the world-press that it would not inquire whether his boast of efficiency was true or not. It reproduced everything that its correspondents in Italy, generally Catholics, cared to send it about finer rail-services (on some lines), new buildings, great farms on reclaimed land, and so on, and it refused to see in works of reference which were at every editor’s elbow that production was decaying and the internal debt (chiefly due to forced loans) was increasing at so formidable a rate that bankruptcy loomed ahead—unless Mussolini brought off, and brought off successfully, the aggressive war he promised his people and founded an Italian Empire by murdering and looting other peoples.
On the religious side it was worse. The only definite test whether a nation is or is not getting more in accord with “the moral law of God” is to examine its criminal statistics. In the Papal States, before the Kingdom of Italy had been established, there had been no statistics of any sort, but not a single authority questions the statement of contemporary Italian statesmen and foreign visitors that crime and corruption were appalling. Italy then, from 1870 onward, had a very fair success in reducing crime, though the success was not nearly so great as in less-Catholic countries. But from the time of the accession to power of Mussolini crime increased amazingly. Convictions rose from about 500,000 a year in the period which Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler describes so darkly, the Socialist-Communist-Liberal period (before 1923), to 800,000 a year in the period of Mussolini’s remarkable efficiency.
It makes it rather worse that this was due to some extent to the poverty and distress he had brought upon both the workers and the middle class while the Church, as I said, got an enormous accession of wealth. Other causes were the impoverishment and prostitution of education and the preparation of the people for the wanton bloodshed of aggressive war. It was at the very time when Pacelli, the future Pope of Peace, was bringing the Pope and the Duce to have a cordial meeting in the Vatican that Mussolini was writing the most official statement of the nature of Fascism for the new Encyclopedia Italiana (article, “Fascismo”):
When Fascism looks to the future, the general development of humanity, apart from considerations of present politics, it rejects the idea that perpetual peace is either possible or desirable. It repudiates Pacifism, which means a renunciation of struggle, a refusal to make sacrifices. War alone raises the energy of man to the highest pitch and impresses a seal of nobility upon the nations which have the manliness to undertake it. All other trials of strength are substitutes which never prove a man’s worth by confronting him with the alternative of life and death.
That was taught to every child in every school in Italy. Didn’t the Vatican know it? Are we supposed to find documentary proof that the Vatican knew what was going on in every part of Italy?
Pacelli had come from Germany where he had seen Socialism as a mighty power already in control of more than one-third of the country, dreaded by the Catholic hierarchy because, though the Social Democrats now worked with the Catholics, they drew millions from the Church, dreaded by imperialists, militarists, industrialists, and landowners. He came to Italy where he saw how just such a powerful Socialist organization had been completely destroyed as it was from 1928 onward by just such a coalition of royalists, industrialists, militarists, and landowners taking up a brutal spearhead resembling the German Nazism and consolidating its position by an alliance with the Church just as in the good old days of the early nineteenth century. His grand idea, war on Socialism, gradually took shape. How in its interest he kept the Pope silent and the Italian Church wildly patriotic when Mussolini began his imperial brigandage in Abyssinia we shall see later. Other problems meantime confronted him and the Black International.
IV. He Organizes the Plot in South America
Pacelli-Pius was rightly selected for the Papacy as the ablest cardinal in the Church of Rome. That does not imply genius. Half of these cardinals would not successfully run a large grocery store. Pacelli has considerable ability. He is also the most widely-informed cardinal on the world-situation. Pacelli has traveled more than any. Besides spending twelve years in Germany he has made three visits to England, traveled all over North and South America, and visited France, Hungary, and other countries.
Upon which boast of his biographers we may make two comments. First, that in very few of his acts can any apologist make the excuse of ignorance or misinformation, the common Catholic excuse for Papal misconduct. Matsuoka might deceive some people with his bland assurances that his country sought “not the good of Japan but the good of humanity” and (in the spring of 1941) that it had “not the slightest idea of taking advantage of the misfortunes of France,” but he no more deceived Pius XII than he deceived Stalin. The Pope knew well that Japan was pledged to a course, in its selfish interest, which would lead inexorably to war with America and Great Britain. So it was in every other part of his policy.
The second comment is that, instead of flowers springing up wherever Pacelli trod, as is told of holy men in earlier ages, the path might generally be traced by blood and misery. The violence had occurred in Italy before he returned to it, but he took care that it was not relaxed. He compels the Church in Germany to help to power the most dangerous psychopath in Europe. He goes to South America, and his visit is followed by the triumph of Fascist violence nearly everywhere. He goes to the United States, and there is a fresh demand for the extinction of Bolshevism in Mexico and Russia. He goes to Paris in 1937 and France prepares to betray Czechoslovakia and, when the time comes, to betray itself. He goes to Hungary in 1938 and it is ready to see Austria and Czecho-Slovakia enslaved and to march itself against Russia and help in every way the destroyers of civilization.
The visit to South America was in 1934, when the usual excuse for Papal intrigue was given: he must preside at the Eucharistic Congress at Buenos Aires. Twenty years, even thirty years ago, the priests of Buenos Aires would not have dared to hold such a function. The historic conflict of the Blacks and the Whites in Latin America had ended in an incomplete but considerable victory for the Liberals. The middle-class was substantially skeptical. In 1906 the Freethinkers of South America held a Congress in Buenos Aires. The delegates crowded the Teatro Argentine. Argentinians of high position (Vice-Admiral Howard, Soto and Alvarez of the Council of War, etc.) supported them. The Presidents of Guatemala and Uruguay sent telegrams of congratulations in the name of their republics. The Women’s Committee, of fifty members, included some of the most brilliant writers in South America. The leading papers treated the Congress with respect
And in 1934 the public men of Argentina were falling over each other to kiss Pacelli’s ring. What had happened? The Reds, of course. Socialism spread through South America with extraordinary rapidity after the last war, and the news of the revolution in Spain in 1932 gave a powerful impetus to the movement. So impartial an observer as the famous woman traveler Rosita Forbes said in 1933 after a prolonged visit that “it is possible that the organization and methods of Soviet Russia may be destined to provide the machinery necessary to liberate the South American Republics” (Eight Republics in Search of a Future, p. 7.) In Peru, she found that “the educated youth of Peru is in the hands of Moscow.” A minister who introduced an anti-Communist law in the Chilean Congress was compelled to resign, and the government refused to recognize degrees granted by Catholic universities. An American merchant who had lived 25 years in Chile reported that “Communism of the intellectual type” was very widespread. The Alianza Popular Revolutionaria Americana (Apra) swept the continent, and its leader would have become President of Peru but for Black corruption of the vilest kind. The Rev. Dr. McKay, a Protestant missionary in the Argentine, said that the Trade Unions turned out any worker who supported the Church, that the workers now commonly called a man they wanted to vituperate “you poor Christ” (equivalent to the American “son of a lady-dog”), and that one of their leaders said publicly that the sound of the word God made him spew. I was editing the Militant Atheist in 1933 and gave plenty of details of this sort.
Pacelli to the rescue. At the time Pacelli was still an obscure emissary of the Vatican whose position as Secretary of State was, according to the Italian Press, not very secure. How bitterly we pay for not watching the Black International more closely! In South America, as in America and Britain and Italy and Germany, there were Socialist leaders who said that the fight against the Church was over - some wanted friendly alliance with it — and all attention must be concentrated on the politico-economic struggle. And in the whole of South America as in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Czecho-Slovakia, etc., within a year or two Socialism was bloodily trodden underfoot and the Church was triumphant.
Not only was “the menace of Bolshevism” destroyed in South America but the Church got between ten and twenty million apostates bullied into silence and their leaders flung into jail. Figures are farcical in Latin America. In Mexico a high official warned me privately that their published statement that their population consisted of 4,000,000 Indians and 12,000,000 Mexicans might be turned the other way round. A careful recent estimate is that there are 90,000,000 Indians in South and Central America. Few people seem to realize that these provide about one-third of the total number of the Pope’s real subjects. As in Mexico, the majority of them would turn against the priests as soon as they got encouragement to do so from their government. The situation was closely parallel to that of Russia. Within another ten years the great bulk of the 90,000,000 would be lost to the Vatican. Are we asked to think that Pacelli scrupulously avoided political maneuvers that promised to avert that tragedy? Remember the Irish revolutionaries confiding their plot to the Pope; remember Dollfuss, Franco, Henlein, and all the others.
But we are concerned with actualities. The cream of the Indians, of the millions of workers of such mixed blood that it is time we dropped these racial distinctions, are the industrial workers. The majority, we saw, had abandoned Rome. Add the university youths and a large number of their professors and other middle-class men and Liberals of the old school, and it will be seen that Rome had to envisage an actual secession of between ten and twenty millions. They are now back in the fold — on paper. They are bullied into silence and their most active representative are in jail. By the end of 1935 there were 10,000 political prisoners in jail in Brazil alone. Yes, says the Catholic, the scum who had recently organized a rebellion. So it was reported in America, But the very impartial British Annual Register (1935) which gives the above figure adds: “Among these were university professors and many other distinguished Brazilians belonging to the best society” (p. 312). They were victims of the Black International.
And by one of those blunders into which the brutality and callousness of the agents of these Fascist governments are always betraying them we learned that this Church-Wealth coalition is not only using force but, as it has always done, using it savagely. The Brazilian police arrested as spies two ladies of the British aristocracy, Lady Hastings and Lady Cameron, who were visiting Rio. Viscount Hastings wrote a letter to the London press (News-Chronicle, July 14, 1936) on what they saw. It contained such things as:
In the prison they saw men and women who had been so badly beaten that they could only move with the greatest difficulty; a man’s wife had been beaten insensible in front of him to make him confess; the hands of another man had been mutilated by having iron spikes driven underneath the nails... The day before my wife and sister were arrested, the American boy Victor Baron was found dead in prison after ‘questioning’...
Immutable Rome! So it was in France in the thirteenth century, all over south Europe in the nineteenth, in Spain forty yeas ago, and is now in many countries. If a mere working man, or even a professor, had reported these things, most people would say “Red lies.” There is obviously some use in aristocrats.
In Mexico the struggle with the Church and the attempt of Catholics in America to get intervention, which would certainly mean war and annexation, had begun long before Pacelli became Secretary of State. I am tracing the action of the Black International not of Pacelli alone but I have written this earlier history so fully elsewhere that I will not return to it. I need repeat only about the acute conflict of 1926 that I was then in Mexico and saw with what remarkable indifference the people accepted what was mendaciously called the persecution of the Church, and read articles by Mexican Catholic journalists in the leading Havana paper a little later expressing deep disgust with the lies (executions of priests, etc.) sent by the priests to the Knights of Columbus, who zealously enlarged them and circulated them in Wall Street. If you want a Catholic (or at all events pro-Catholic) witness to this close alliance for years of American Catholics and Wall Street read George Seldes’ The Vatican (1934, pp. 278-86). There was, of course, an outcry, and the American Catholic bishops published a letter denying that they were working for armed intervention. They merely felt it their duty to “sound a warning to Christian civilization that its foundations are being attacked and undermined.” God, they said, would find a way to destroy the evil. By priests blowing trumpet I suppose. A thinner pretense of pacifism it would be hard to find. It has a Japanese ring.
Pacelli did not go to Mexico, but the brilliant Church-Fascist success that followed his visit to South America had echoes in the north. In 1935 F. V. Williams, Al Smith’s publicity agent, had a revolting article in Liberty (Aug. 24) calling for intervention. A Mexican Catholic annihilated his statements in the Forum, in fact, they had been answered in advance by various visitors to Mexico (World-Telegram, June 8, 1935, etc.) The Catholic Teeling also admits that Catholics intrigued at Washington to get intervention and that Msgr. Burke served as intermediary.
It is, at all events, true that from 1936 Pacelli included Mexico in the list of countries in which he invited the great powers to “extinguish” Bolshevism. It was so clearly a war-program that I have never read even a Catholic attempt to give his words, the slogan he sent through the whole Catholic world, any other meaning. An innocent young nun or a Lord Halifax might suggest that he meant “extinguish it by prayer.” Is that what he meant when he sent Cardinal Faulhaber to beg Hitler to allow the Church to cooperate with him in the good work? It was a war-program; a call to, as it has proved, the bloodiest war in history. So who are the real Reds?
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he color chosen by the Popes is White. Their flag, it is true, is White and Gold, to remind us that they are Kings and need a royal revenue of a billion a year, but that is, they say, necessary to a ruler of the world. Their personal color-theme is white, a flowing white cassock and a white-silk skull-cap: symbols of their purity of life and purpose and their never-ceasing efforts to keep the world in peace and tranquillity. The vast economic organization over which they preside, the Black International, takes its name from the black-garbed clergy. For more than a hundred years after America had embodied the elementary rights of man in a Constitution the priests called the claim of those rights in other countries Liberalism and waged a bitter, blood-soaked fight against it. This was the historic battle of the Blacks and the Whites (Liberals).