The Evolution of the Papacy. Francis Ambrose Ridley 1949
The Church is an anvil which has broken many hammers. – Calvin
The present age is essentially the age of the decline of religion. The ancient animistic doctrine which in one shape or another has haunted the credulous imagination of an immature mankind is now at long last becoming dispelled in the growing light of knowledge. For our age, which has as its decisive characteristic the entry of the hitherto inarticulate masses into history, now witnesses for the first time the spread of irreligion amongst the masses. This represents an absolutely new phenomenon. For prior to the French Revolution, that greatest of historical events, scientific enlightenment and the atheistic and secularistic views of the universe and of society which accompany it, adhered exclusively to enlightened aristocratic cliques and to solitary thinkers who took their lives in their hands and lived obscurely, and, often enough, died violently.
The contemporary spread of irreligion amongst the broad masses of the people is, we repeat, something absolutely new, and it spells the doom of religion and of the Churches which embody it. Religion today can only continue to exist in the more backward areas of mankind. The further progress of humanity infallibly spells its doom.
The Churches themselves understand this very well. And the Church of Rome, the oldest and most experienced of them all, understands it perfectly well; the Papacy is, after all, not ‘infallible’ for nothing! Whatever it may or may not know about the next world, it undeniably knows a great deal about this one, it has had nineteen centuries of experience. We may, in fact, say that it is precisely this knowledge which determines its present, and will decide its future.
The greatest of all the many paradoxes in the constitution of the Papacy is to be found in the fact that whilst fundamentally a political institution, it is yet founded on a religious belief the loss of which would be fatal to it. Whilst the Popes themselves may regard Christianity as (in the words ascribed to Leo X) ‘a profitable superstition for Popes’ – and such undoubtedly it has been as a matter of historical fact – yet the Vatican is dependent on this belief. Rome would undoubtedly follow God into oblivion.
Consequently, the contemporary collapse of religious belief in all the more advanced areas in the world, which follows inevitably in the wake of economic industrialism, political Liberalism and secular scientific and historical education, inevitably spells the ultimate end of the Papacy. Only a speedy reversion to a Dark Age can now save the Church of Rome, and its leader, the Papacy. Otherwise it will surely face the doom which overtook its historic predecessors, the Pagan Priesthoods of Antiquity. The continued expansion of modern secular civilisation and its progressive democratisation amongst the masses who are just now consciously entering history for the first time, means the end of the Vatican, and the Vatican knows it! The Popes did not keep their stakes and inquisitors busy for centuries stifling such enlightenment as then existed for nothing. And it was not for nothing that already within the lifetime of our oldest contemporaries, Pope Pius IX proclaimed in his famous Syllabus of Condemned Errors (1864): ‘Let him be anathema who affirms that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to come to terms with progress, Liberalism, and with modern civilisation.’
And one can relevantly add, even if Rome were willing to compromise with modern civilisation, modern civilisation from its very nature, as a culture, the life-blood of which is scientific understanding, could not possibly compromise with the Vatican, founded as it is and always has been, upon a pre-scientific culture compounded of ignorance, misunderstanding and credulity in relation to the external universe and to the life of Man.
As the great Bradlaugh so far-sightedly proclaimed, ‘The final struggle will be between Rome and Reason’, the latter embodied in modern secular culture, and it will be a struggle to the death.
Today Rome is busily engaged in preparing for what she well knows is the final struggle, and all her present-day actions are determined by it. At present, the major part of her energies, in the Old World at least, are devoted to the event for which she is now busily exhorting the Catholic world to prepare: the coming ‘Crusade’ against Russia, ‘the war for Christian civilisation’ against Russian-inspired Communism.
For the political power of Russia, one of the two World Powers of our era, and the quasi-religious discipline, dynamism and fanaticism which are associated with the ideology of present-day Communism constitutes it as ‘Public Enemy No 1’ in the computation of the Vatican, and Rome traditionally believes in taking her enemies one at a time.
What successively Manichĉanism, Mohammedanism, Calvinism and Liberalism have been in the past, that is Communism today, the ‘heresy’ of the twentieth century; and Rome is mustering all her forces, and those of her secular allies, to fight it to the finish – her own or that of the rival ‘Church of Moscow’.
And she will stick at nothing to achieve her ends when her survival is at stake. Let no one have any doubt about that! There is no need to hark back to the ‘crusading’ armies of Simon de Montfort, the butcher of the Albigenses, the Duke of Alva or St Bartholomew’s Eve, one need only look at the methods by which the present Pope’s ‘beloved son’ General Franco came to power in Spain, with the worldwide backing of militant Catholicism in the Civil War in Spain (1936 – 39), and at the ruthless methods by which this same ‘Christian General’ still retains power today, with the whole power of the Catholic Church enlisted on behalf of his bloodthirsty regime. Incidentally, if Franco succeeds in his present attempt to secure admission to UNO as his fellow Catholic – Dictator Perón – has already done, it will be simultaneously a triumph, one of the most brilliant of Catholic diplomacy, and one of the greatest crimes even of our crime-strewn age; the ghosts of untold millions of Fascist victims would assuredly turn in their graves.
The whole present policy of the Papacy is centred upon the coming ‘crusade’. In Rome, heavy with the memory of the centuries, they take long views. The coming anti-Communist crusade takes its place in the archives of the Vatican along with those earlier crusades against the successive enemies of the Church which we have enumerated above.
But Rome prepares for all eventualities, including defeat – that is, of course, temporary defeat – for the Papacy; the self-styled ‘Pilgrim of Eternity’ can never admit that its defeat can ever be permanent and final, for such an admission would mark the Church as what it actually is, a product of time and not of eternity, of earth and not of heaven. Nonetheless, there are signs available for those who can read – between the lines – that Rome herself is unsure of the result of the approaching clash.
It is to this unsureness that we may ascribe the persistent rumours that the Papacy is about to quit Communist-infested Rome for some safer seat. Had Communism won the Italian General Election on 18 April last, we were credibly assured that the exodus would already have eventuated to either Madrid or Buenos Aires. But the Church won its Italian opening round in its struggle with Communism.
Still more it can be discerned in the frantic eagerness that Rome is now displaying to acclimatise Catholicism in other continents besides her traditional but now precarious headquarters, Europe.
It is to this last desire that we must ascribe certain epoch-marking recent developments within the Catholic Church; the creation of Chinese cardinals and African bishops – the extraordinary solicitude manifested by the Vatican for the conversion of Japan – a desire which has produced some curious and diverting twists and turns in Papal policy. To the same cause must be ascribed the now official policy of concentrating in every missionary country upon the development of a ‘native’ clergy as an essential condition for the establishment of national Catholic Churches in non-European lands.
All such developments when viewed as Rome herself views them, in the grand perspective of world strategy, can only mean one thing: the centres of world power, in the opinion of the Vatican, are shifting from decrepit Europe. To keep pace with the times, the Vicars of Christ must move too. Had St Peter, the ‘first Pope’, been advised of future developments, he would have made his way to America and not to Rome! His future successors may well be Americans. For the post-Reformation Italian monopoly of the Papacy seems to be about to end.
For there can be no doubt at all that it is towards the Western Hemisphere, to the ‘New World’ originally presented by the Papacy to the Catholic Powers, Spain and Portugal, that Rome is looking for her salvation today. Rome makes her own, today, the historic words of George Canning about ‘calling in the New World to redress the balance of the Old’.
At present, the Vatican’s ‘marriage of convenience’ with Fascism has been succeeded by the present alliance with the American plutocracy of Wall Street. It is the USA that is cast for the role of ‘Crusader No 1’ when the ‘crusade for Christian civilisation’ does eventually get going. The Cross today depends for its effective survival upon the monopolist of the atomic bomb, and a Protestant monopolist at that, with a Federal Constitution which wholly ignores the supernatural.
That is, Anglo-Saxon America, the present greatest World Power, Rome’s chosen ‘sword’ against ‘godless Russia’. But there is also Catholic America as well in the Latin South; probably the Vatican’s most ambitious project today is concerned with Argentine, the Clerical-Fascist Empire of Perón, which is Latin America’s greatest power. By means of a vast immigration scheme, confined to Latin and Catholic races, administered by a Priest and blessed by the Church, Perón aims to build up Argentina as a World Power.
Perhaps the ambitious Dictator and his Vatican backers dream already of the coming centuries when the Catholic South will succeed the Protestant North as the master of the Western Hemisphere, or even as the leading World Power! Perhaps even too as Rome’s successor as the headquarters of world Catholicism.
Be that as it may, Rome is today preparing for her coming struggle with the Communist ‘heresy’ upon which her very existence depends. If she loses, she is finished. But even if she and her secular backers win, she will only have obtained a respite, and probably only a brief one. For her fundamental enemy is not Communism, but that modern secular civilisation of which Russian Communism is only one form, and not, we hope, either the last or the best.
Sooner or later Rome must destroy that civilisation if she wishes to survive at all. If in order to destroy that inimical civilisation it will be necessary to destroy civilisation itself – well and good – so much the worse for civilisation.
Rome has faced Dark Ages before; the last one made her fortune, and in this respect history may repeat itself. Rome may again return to power on the ruins of human culture. At least, this is her sole remaining chance of survival. She must now kill civilisation, or else civilisation will certainly kill her.
Civilisation will have to kill her. For Rome is tenacious of life. We may, indeed, say of the Roman theocracy what Lenin once said of the Moscow theocracy of the Czars: ‘It will never die naturally; you will have to kill it.’