The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
Kill them all, my son, at the Last Day God will know how to distinguish between them. – Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, Papal Legate and Inquisitor in the Crusade against the Albigenses (1209)
The fall of the Fascist empires at the end of the Second World War put an end to the grandiose dreams entertained by the Papacy of exterminating with fire and sword the contemporary forces of social progress. Nonetheless, the Church survived. And except south of the Pyrenees the Papacy no longer appears before the world as the ally of Fascism. However, this is not to imply that it has given up the ghost and has resigned itself to inevitable dissolution, quite the contrary! The Vatican has never been more active in world affairs than it is today.
The chief political weapon in the hands of Rome today is the international organisation of ‘Catholic Action’, the movement founded by Pope Pius XI; no doubt as a counter-blast to the current advance of Communism, Socialism and other enemies of the Church on the terrestrial plane. The movement itself is closely bound up with its founder’s cult of ‘Christ the King'; that is, it exists to promote the reign of the Church in this world.
Its founder himself defined ‘Catholic Action’ as the ‘Apostolate of the Laity in the service of the hierarchy’, a somewhat long-winded definition which is more infallible than intelligible! Actually, ‘Catholic Action’ may be defined as an organisational basis for Catholic politics rather than as a political party in the ordinary accepted sense. To borrow an expression from contemporary Socialist organisation, ‘Catholic Action’ may be broadly described as the political and social ‘International’ of militant Catholicism; here again, the Church and the Jesuit opportunists who lead it have known how, yet once again, to borrow from the arsenals of their secular opponents.
The late Mr Lloyd George once used an analogy in relation to the Protestant Churches and the political parties which we may find helpful in defining the contemporary role of ‘Catholic Action’. The famous Nonconformist once compared the relationship of the Churches with the political parties as that of a power station which radiated currents of spiritual energy throughout the political field. This metaphor is applicable to the relationship of ‘Catholic Action’ with Catholic politics and to political parties with a Catholic basis.
Such parties are today found all over the Western world. For, we repeat, political Catholicism was never more active than during the post-Fascist era (1945 – 48). For, except in the Iberian Peninsula, Rome has now dropped Fascism like a hot brick. In an age such as ours, whose conspicuous feature is professedly a universal adhesion to democracy – a name which today covers a multitude of sins and meanings – the Church of Rome, the oldest enemy of democracy in the world, has gone all democratic too; after all, even the God-Emperor of Japan, a more ancient religious leader even than the Vatican, has been transformed overnight by atomic democrats from a deity into a Democrat!
Similarly, the Church of Rome is now represented in the political arena by whole congeries of ‘Christian Democrats’ and similar parties. And the secular ‘sword’ of the Church against what now more than ever before is the chief bugbear of the Vatican, Russian Communism, is no longer Fascist Germany, but Democratic (with a capital ‘D’) America.
There is an apposite story told of that famous clerical diplomat, ex-Bishop Talleyrand. One fine July day in 1830 he was watching the fighting in the streets during the Parisian revolution which overthrew the Bourbon Monarchy. Suddenly he turned and exclaimed, ‘We are winning!'; when asked who ‘we’ were, he replied, ‘I don’t know yet!’
One might almost call this reply the classic motto of clerical diplomacy and of political Catholicism. The Vatican will support anyone or anything upon the sole condition that it will look after the interests, both secular and spiritual, of Rome. And that is nowhere more evident in Papal diplomacy than today. Yesterday, pro-Fascist, today, pro-Democrat, the Vatican remains consistently pro-Catholic.
Today, the Vatican, under a host of pseudonyms and political nom-de-plumes, holds or shares power in half the countries of Europe and Latin America, besides being by no means a negligible force in (ostensibly) Protestant America, Britain and Australasia. And for a totalitarian regime like that over which the Papacy presides, to hold political power is essential for the effective guarantee of its ethical and religious ideologies. The history of such totalitarian regimes as Catholicism itself, Islam (Mohammedanism) and Hinduism, proves this up to the hilt.
In contemporary Europe, west of the so-called ‘Iron Curtain’, the Vatican represents today the most powerful ideology; in fact Communism and Catholicism represent, undoubtedly, the two most powerful forces in contemporary Europe – not to mention the hardly less powerful influence wielded by Catholicism throughout the Americas, and its not inconsiderable influence in Australasia. What an anti-clerical French writer has aptly described as ‘The Church of Moscow and the Church of Rome’ divide between them by far the greater part of the European continent.
As our author aptly comments in this connection: if one takes away from the contemporary map of Europe those lands not subject to either Catholic or Communist influence, one is left with only Turkey, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries.
Today, chiefly through the agency of ‘Christian Democratic’ Parties (outside the Iberian Peninsula), political Catholicism governs in the interests of Rome, either solely or in coalition, Italy, France (De Gaulle’s victory there would intensify clerical rule), Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Austria and the ‘Benelux’ countries. Political Catholicism also represents the dominant force throughout Western (non-Russian) Germany. In Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, political Catholicism is the illegal but only real opposition to the otherwise totalitarian rule of Moscow and its henchmen.
In a Europe in which Capitalism and the bourgeoisie are discredited by their ‘collaboration’ with Fascism, whilst Social Democracy is in a state of decay, political Catholicism is unquestionably the most powerful non-Communist force. It is America’s most powerful European auxiliary in its approaching clash with Russia for the unchallenged domination of the whole world.
And the list just given only comprises Europe. In Protestant America, Rome is a potent social and political force. In Catholic (Latin) America, she appears to be still the dominant ideological and social force everywhere, except in the sturdily anti-clerical Republic of Mexico, perhaps the most progressive country in our contemporary world.
Whilst in South America, Rome is today engaged in a Napoleonic strategy, of which the Perón dictatorship is the secular ‘sword’, to build up the Argentine, the greatest power in Latin America, upon the basis of militant Catholicism into a World Power, into the ‘USA’ of the next (twenty-first) century.
Consequently, when in the opening months of 1949, Pope Pius XII, himself a shrewd professional diplomat and a politician rather than an ecclesiastic, looks out upon World Catholicism under the dynamic inspiration of ‘Catholic Action’ and of political Catholicism which springs from it, he has no reason to feel dissatisfied, for Rome is still a World Power after centuries of Liberalism and Secularism have done their worst – or best!
However, whilst the Western sky is bright, that in the East becomes ever more menacing. For Communism, which already in 1846 Pope Pius IX had found occasion to denounce, by 1949 has grown from a humble acorn into a massive oak, and one has only to open any Catholic newspaper today to see that Rome regards Russian-inspired Communism as the pre-eminent heresy of our era, the ‘Calvinism of the twentieth century’ as I have elsewhere termed it.
All over the Western world today, what Robert Louzon (cited above) has described as the conflict between the ‘Church of Moscow’ and the ‘Church of Rome’, is in full spate. Nor is this description of Rome versus Moscow one merely figurative in character, for the two totalitarian creeds that today contend for mastery all over the Western world, Catholicism and Communism, have more than a little in common, for if its whole history demonstrates that the Church of Rome has many of the characteristics of a political party, it is equally obvious that Russian Communism has many of the characteristics of a Church.
Dogmatic intolerance, unquestionable obedience, tortuous casuistry are common to both rival creeds, as is also the famous ecclesiastical motto, ‘the heretic is worse than the infidel’. It is not only at Rome that this last maxim is understood and practised, the successive heresiarchs of Communism from Trotsky to Tito know it to their cost. And Moscow, no less than Rome, knows too that in the world of power politics, ‘the end justifies the means’. Both the ancient practice of the Vatican and the modern practice of the Kremlin illustrate this famous axiom of the Jesuits.
Today, the Papacy is looking Eastward, and already she proclaims the ‘holy war’ against Moscow, as against Jerusalem in the Middle Ages and also against Protestant England in the epoch of the Spanish Armada. And since this ‘holy war’ for religion must, willy nilly, be fought with the weapons of an atomic science that may well leave a ruined civilisation in its wake, so be it! Better to ruin civilisation, better to ruin humanity itself, than to tolerate the poisonous weed of heresy. Who lives if the Church dies? Better a dead mankind than a heretical one!
When the rain of atomic death shrouds the East in its fiery mist, the bells of the Vatican will ring in triumph as at the news of the Massacre of the Protestants on St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572. And the Papacy will raise the old crusading battle cry ‘Deus Vult’ ('It is the Will of God’), as once over the Crusaders of Peter the Hermit and over the destroying hordes of the most Holy Inquisition which exterminated the Albigenses.