CHURCH AND STATE

Press, Volume LXXV, Issue 22636, 15 February 1939, Page 10

CHURCH AND STATE

Pius XI and the New Nationalism

CONFLICT WITH FASCISM AND NAZISM

(SPBCIXIIL* wkittsn fob thb pbess.) IBy L.R.H.]

.Only a little while before his death’Pope Pius XI declared in strong terms his- abhorrence of the latest Fascist decrees—those applying in Italy something of the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Government in Germany. It was one of the last of a long series of protests put forward with unflagging vigour by the head of an international Church in conflict with the claims of nationalism in its most extreme form.

Shortly before Mr Chamberlain and Lord Halifax paid their visit to Rome, where they saw Pope Pius XI as well as Signor Mussolini, a foreign commentator writing in the “New York Times” expressed the view that the visit of the English statesmen to the Vatican City was of special meaning, as a symbol of the growing recognition that the clash in ideologies in Europe was tending to becoine a clash between the forces of the new paganism and of established religion. The stand that the Pope took since the totalitarian States first began putting into practice their views of the functions of the State, some parts of which cannot be reconciled with Catholic doctrine, seems to justify that writer’s claim. The Situation in Germany

ciety and before the State. The State should perfect the activities of the family in full correspondence with the desires of the father and the mother, and it should especially respect the Divine right of the Church in education.

“We cannot admit that in its educational activities the State shall try to raise up conquerors or encourage conquests. What one State does in this line all the other States can do. What would happen if all the States educated their people for conquest? Does such education contribute to general world pacification. . . . On this point we are riot merely intractable, we are uncompromising. just as we would be forced to be uncompromising if asked; ‘How many does two plus two make.’ Two plus two makes four and it is not our fault if it does not make five or six or 50. When it is a question of saving a few souls and impeding the accomplishment of greater damage to souls., we feel courage to treat with the devil in persan. And it was exactly with the purpose of preventing greater evil that we negotiated with the devil some time ago when the fate of our dear Catholic scouts was. decided.”

The many breaches of the Vatican Concordat with Germany which hsfve occurred on the German side, culminating in recent years in active persecution of religious orders, make dismal reading to most Catholics; but not so dismal a picture is the vigour of the resistance made to Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church by Catholics within that country, and by church leaders both in and out of it. with Pope Pius as their leader. In days when the personal dignity of Herr Hitler has been so susceptible to foreign criticism, and governments have had to be careful of the slightest word or gesture which might hurt dictatorial prestige, the vigour of the Pope’s outspoken words when Hitler came to Rome was refreshing. Nor can the Nazi regime, nor those Fascists in Italy who seek to impose on the Church in their country their own conception of the functions of the State, as against the rights of the family and the individual, nor the rulers of Communist Russia, whose bitter enemy he was, hope for any relaxation of the Catholic attitude now that the spiritual and temporal leader of the church’s crusade for so many years is dead.

(In 1927, when Mussolini forrhed his Balilla for the political and military education of young Italy, he rushed through a Royal decree abolishing all Catholic boy scout organisations in places of less than 20,000 people. The Pope replied by abolishing the whole organisation, and Seldes quotes a letter to Cardinal Gasparri in which the Pope explained that he had to yield to force and that the scouts still remained “the apple of my eye.”) Two years after the Lateran Pact there was a fortnight of violence against Catholics through Italy and particularly in Rome itself. The riots followed claims by Fascist newspapers that the newly-formed Catholic Action sought to seize power in Italy. The Pope replied with an encyclical, which, Seldes relates, had to be published in Prance because of the strict censorship in Italy. Recounting instances of “brutalities and beatings, blows and bloodshed,” the encyclical, “Non Abbiamo Bisogno” is a remarkably strong attack ,on Fascism. Again , is listed the Church’s opposition to “a conception of the State which makes tin young generations belong entirely to it,” and to “a semblance of religion which cannot in any. way be reconciled with the doctrine and practice.” So that even in his own country Pope Pius did not always find the peace that he so fervently wished for the world and the Church. But if he - did not find, peace it ‘wilX be a verdict of historians• that he was a" pacifist who fought valiantly to maintain the causes he thought were just, . and who won'thereby the respect of millions, outside those other millions , of faithful within his own Church.

The attitude-of the church is clearly laid down; and the successor to Pope Pius—whoever it may be, and it is notoriously difficult to 'forecast the result in a papal election—will certainly follow the same line of . string opposition to acts by any government which are irreconcilable with Catholic ” doctrine. s-

Every reader of the cable news knows the uncompromising struggle in recent times between Herr Hitler and the German Catholics. John Gunther has thus described Hitler’s attitude to religion: “To Hitler the overwhelming first business of the Nazi revolution was the unification, ' the gl*»iehsrhal— (co-ordination)- of Germany. He had one driving passion, the removal from the Reich of any competition, of whatever kind. The Vatican, like Judaism, was a profoundly international (thus non-German) organism. Therefore —out with it.”

But in spite of anti-Cath'olic and anti-clerical propaganda, in spite of such open acts of persecution as the recent attack on Cardinal Faulhaberin his own cathedral, the aim of “out with, it” is far from being fulfilled Even at Christmas time, according -to the cables, the attempts of the Nazis to have a purely national, pagan feast, in place of’ the traditional religious festival that was so much a part of the old Germany failed dismally. The people went to their churches, and in their homes it was the Nativity they celebrated, and not the brain-child of someone at the Department of Propaganda.

The Pope was held in high esteem in Italy, and that fact was well known by -Mussolini. After the clash over youth education in 1932, when the i Pope expressed the strongest views in the strongest language, n Duce came to terms. He went to the Vatican, knelt to the Pope, and, John Gunther believes, took Holy Communion. Since • then relations have been more amicable. John Gunther declares that II Duce has lately become very religious (in his . earlier Socialist days he was an atheist), and it is certain that the Pope’s hold on the affections of the people of Italy has not lessened. But in spite of the more cordial relations with Fascism, Pius did not refrain at any time from the strongest criticism of what he considered in Fascist .policy to be irreconcilable with Christian principles. Seldes says that it was no secret in Rome that the Pope, like the King of Italy, remained antiFascist, and quotes Pius XI as saying, “nothing built on force can ever endure.” Whether or not that is true, it is at least certain that the impact of Fascism in no way shook the adherence of the Church and its leader to Christian principles. The long list of encyclicals issued in the last pontificate proved that.

The Godlessness of Soviet Russia, too, and the glorifying there of the State, with its consequent assumption of rights that must belong to the individual, the fgmily, and the Church, in the Catholic view, has been consistently and strenuously opposed by the Vatican. Priests throughout the world have preached against it, the Pope himself has attacked it in encyclicals, and in the democratic countries whatever steps possible have been taken to ensure that Catholic workingmen and trade unionists, in whose welfare. Pope Pius had a lively interest, were not exposed to Communist influence.

The Lateran Treaty

One cardinal of the 63 present members of the College of Cardinals—two deaths in September increased the number of vacancies to seven—will soon be appointed to succeed Pope Pius XI. There are 28 non-Italian cardinals, and the remaining 35 are Italians. But the cardinal who succeeds to the See of St. Peter must follow his predecessor in the line of strong resistance to whoever seeks to give the State the authority that the Church claims belongs to the individual and to Vatican diplotnacy, in a world of sharply contrasting ideologies, must occupy a more and not a less important place, and the new Pontiff will have as difficult a responsibility as have had any of his predecessors.

In his native Italy, too, in recent years Pope Pius played an important part in opposing certain aspects of Fascist internal policy. Partly due to the impression created by the signing of the Lateran Treaty in 1929, and partly because of the extremely close surveillance Signor Mussolini keeps on the dispatches of foreign newspaper correspondents from Rome, little hc(s been heard of the relationship between Church and State in the decade—almost to a day—since the signing of the treaty that restored temporal power to the Pope and created the Vatican State.

Even a few weeks after the treaty, according to the American journalist and writer. George Seldes. whose “The Vatican: Yesterday—To-day—To-mor-row” is a standard work, and who more recently has written a savagely critical biography of Mussolini, II Duce was making speeches, which accorded ill with the spirit of the treaty on which the ink was scarcely dry.

The Pope made a reply now famous, an address to the professors and pupils of the College of Mondragone. Beginning with an attack on the Fascist principle, he said, according to a report oted verbatim by Seldes: “The State should interest itself in education, but the State is not made to absorb and annihilate the family, which would be absurd and against nature because the family comes before so-