Christian World Revolution

I

THE political, economic, and intellectual order of the future will be determined by the outcome of the struggle between agnostic statecraft and living Christianity, which are contending for leadership the world over.

In this process of revolutionary transformation and revaluation of all values, victory will come to those who hold the confidence of the peoples and satisfy their thirst for justice, peace, and truth. With the reawakening of religious and spiritual forces, which we witness in our day, Christianity should be assured of ultimate triumph, if its leaders live up to the greatness of their task.

Conceived as a divine institution, the Catholic Church is beyond the storms of the ages, and in matters of faith and morals provides her children with an infallible guide. In all secular questions, however, the practical application of religious precepts has been left to individual reason. There is ample room, and liberty of action, for the most divergent opinions, even for heated discussion and enmity, as during the Spanish civil war, when Catholics the world over seemed divided into hostile camps.

When I analyzed Catholic temporal policy in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1938, the general confusion created by Fascism, which culminated in the international witches’ Sabbath of Munich, extended also into the ranks of Catholicism. The sham social program of Naziism and Fascism was by some mistaken for the Christian corporative state 104 which Pope Pius XI had advocated in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, and many were deceived by Hitler’s pose as defender of Christianity against Bolshevism. Catholics in many countries hoped that Hitlerism, though its despotic and totalitarian nature had been condemned by the late Pope, could be persuaded by ‘appeasement’ to abandon its policy of religious and racial persecution. The same hope may have prompted the German Bishops, in January 1937, to call upon the faithful to rally around the Führer in his defense against Communism.

In 1938, Catholic papers in England demanded that Czechoslovakia, a ‘bastion of Bolshevism,’ should be surrendered to the Nazis in order to preserve ‘peace.’ Resistance to Hitler and Mussolini on Spanish soil was denounced as aid to Communism.

Since Fascist lawlessness has plunged the world into war, a profound change has taken place. Catholic condemnation of totalitarianism of the Right, Naziism and Fascism, has become almost as general as the uncompromising rejection of Communism always was.

Pope Pius XII, in the first encyclical of his reign, Summi Pontificatus, of October 1939, sharply denounced the dangers of nationalism and totalitarianism, with their doctrines of racial or national superiority, their ruthless domination over the sacred rights of the family, the individual, and society.

When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, he apparently hoped that Catholic dislike for totalitarianism of the Left would override the aversion toward totalitarianism of the Right, and that those Catholics the world over who had been pro-Franco during the Spanish civil war might now become supporters of the anti-Soviet ‘crusade.’

However, when Pope Pius spoke to the world on July 6, it became manifest immediately that all Fascists-at-heart had hoped in vain. There was no endorsement, direct or indirect, of Hitler’s ‘holy war’ in the address. On the contrary, it denounced the persecution of the Church by forces of ‘black paganism’— which was aimed directly at Naziism.

Those who are acquainted with the viewpoint of the Holy Father — ‘Pastor Angelicus’ as he is called by the ancient prophecy of Saint Malachi — were not surprised at his determined stand. When I had the honor of being received by the then Cardinal Secretary of State in 1935, during a visit to Rome, I was struck, not only by his extraordinary and saintly personality, but also by his detailed knowledge of men and circumstances.

As the principle of liberty of action in temporal matters applies also to the individual or collective stand of members of national hierarchies, it would not have been impossible for the German or Italian Bishops to adopt a policy at variance with that of the Holy See, which is orientated on universal rather than national lines. Yet, to my knowledge only one high prelate of the Axis countries, the Archbishop Carlo Margotti of Gorizia, explicitly endorsed the ‘new order’ in a pastoral letter of July 1941, and asked for prayers to God to concede triumph to its ‘crusade’ against Soviet Russia.

The German Hierarchy, when they published their joint pastoral letter shortly after the start of the Russian campaign, not only refrained from any reference to the ‘holy war,’ but on the contrary asserted that in Germany ‘the very existence of Christianity was at stake.’ Count Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, one of the most outstanding members of the German Hierarchy, publicly denounced National Socialism in even more vigorous terms. He delivered a sermon in his see city to attack the high-handed flouting of the judicial processes by the Gestapo, ‘which will lead our German people and our country to ruin,’ and denounced the ‘danger-free’ victories won by the ‘secret police in the German fatherland over unarmed German men and unprotected German women.’ In a letter of protest addressed to the Nazi Minister Dr. Lammers, he called the Gestapo ‘the domestic enemy’ and asserted that the political course of Naziism would, according to the experience of history, lead Germany toward destruction by inner rottenness and decay.

The increasing persecution of German Catholicism, now embracing one half of the total of ninety-six million inhabitants of ‘Greater Germany,’ proves that its resistance against Naziism is general. Priests are called up for army duties, contrary to the provisions of Canon Law and previous practice in Germany, in such numbers that a serious shortage of clergy is expected. All Catholic publications, which since 1933 had enlarged their distribution by seven million readers, have been suppressed. Of the Catholic faculties of Germany only two, Munich and Vienna, are still functioning. The suppression of 20,000 Catholic secondary schools has deprived over three million pupils of religious education.

The moral strength and courage with which German Catholic prelates are resisting persecution and waging their war on despotism have put the Christian people into the foreground of the fight for liberation. In this they are strengthened by the close alliance that today exists between Catholics and Protestants. Lutherans are looking to Catholic bishops for guidance, while Catholics are offering prayers for Pastor Niemöller, the imprisoned Protestant martyr.

II

Not only in Germany but in all Nazioccupied countries the Catholic and Protestant peoples are suffering increasing persecution. Today Hitlerism is not any more, as some believed for a number of years, a primarily Jew and Red baiting system; it is an organized drive to wipe Christianity from the face of the earth. This I consider providential, for it has made Christianity everywhere the leading factor in the coming revolution of the enslaved. It is widening the rift between the Nazi Party and the German Army, which according to many reports, recently confirmed by Dr. Jan Masaryk, is looking with increasing alarm upon the Gestapo crimes in the occupied countries. Men like Bishop Count von Galen would probably not be in freedom any more were it not for the influence of some Army leaders. If these leaders should ever decide to oust the Nazi régime from power, they may hope that the popular support enjoyed by Catholic and Protestant opponents of totalitarianism will afford a basis for a coming deNazified government.

Catholic priests — Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, states in a report to the Holy See — by their example of courage and devotion to their people are looked upon as natural leaders also by Protestants and Jews. In Holland, the Hierarchy has decreed that no one belonging to the National Socialist Party or its affiliates, or known to support it to any considerable extent, shall be admitted to the sacraments. Cardinal Van Roey, Primate of Belgium, has excluded the Rexists and called upon the people to redouble their determination and resist moral repression.

In France, the Pétain government has caused a conflict of conscience for Catholics. Since the beginning of the century, when Church and State were strictly separated and public education laicized, Church and Government had been at odds. When Marshal Pétain, a friend of General Franco, became head of the State, there was a possibility that the French Church would see in him a champion of her cause, particularly as he himself was anxious to win active Catholic support. Though his régime was authoritarian, he renounced the principle of a single state youth organization that in Italy and Germany had set Church against State. Education was to become religious once more, and the laicist attitude of the Third Republic towards marriage and family was abandoned.

But as the French Church is closely bound to the people, she has not been willing to identify herself with a régime which in all other aspects has become increasingly totalitarian. The Catholic organizations on whose support Pétain had counted have been directed by the Hierarchy to confine their activities to purely religious, apostolic, and social aims exclusive of any partisan politics. This was reported by the Osservatore Romano of August 13, 1941, and was interpreted in Rome to mean that the French Hierarchy clearly wished to dissociate itself from the present régime.

Individually, members of the Hierarchy have even gone further. The Bishop of Montauban publicly called the appointment of Admiral Darlan ‘a fatal mistake for our country.’ Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyons and Primate of France, Archbishop Jules Saliège of Toulouse, Bishop Delay of Marseille, to mention only a few, take every opportunity to demonstrate their adherence to the fundamental principles of the dignity of man. Thus, when the synagogue of Marseille was shattered by a bomb thrown by French Fascists, the Bishop made public a letter to the Grand Rabbi of Marseille in which he characterized the outrage as a ‘criminal attack against which every religious person must raise his voice, and pray for its prompt punishment.’

III

While neither in England nor, with certain exceptions, in America do Catholics harbor illusions about the nature of the Nazi-Soviet war, there is strong ideological apprehension against the alliance with Russia. However, a policy of practical coöperation has been sanctioned in England by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hinsley himself, in the following statement to a Catholic member of Parliament: —

‘Our country with our allies is fighting against the immediate Nazi attempt to subjugate Europe. No one who knows how antichristian the ideas and the practices of the Nazis are will for one moment be deceived by Hitler’s latest pose as the champion of European civilization, or think that it has become in any way less vital to resist his attempt to enslave the continent.’

In America, shortly after the invasion of Russia, prominent Catholic members of the Fight for Freedom Committee issued a statement to the press favoring aid to Russia, on the ground that Hitler was the first enemy. This constitutes another noteworthy change of attitude as compared to Spanish civil war days, especially in view of some of the signatories.

The Committee received indirect support from Bishop Joseph P. Hurley of St. Augustine, who, just previous to his consecration, had spent six years as an important official of the Holy See at the Vatican State Department. Denouncing Naziism as the chief danger, Bishop Hurley gave wholehearted endorsement to the foreign policy of the Administration, which at that time had already made public its program of aid to Russia. Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, while retracting nothing that separates Catholicism and Communism, took the same stand, and so did many other Catholics.

However, it is safe to state that these spokesmen represent a minority of Catholic opinion. The majority of the American clergy, the Catholic press, and probably also of Catholic laymen continue to be opposed to collaboration with the Soviet Union. A nation-wide poll recently conducted among the Catholic clergy by the Catholic Laymen’s Committee for Peace showed that, at least among the 38 per cent who answered the questions, 90.2 per cent were ‘not in favor of the United States aiding the Communistic Russian Government.’

In the controversy of American Catholic opinion on this issue, the Vatican would make no move one way or another to influence it. But Civiltà Cattolica, organ of the Italian Jesuit Fathers, reiterated that the Holy See did not consider the Russian campaign as a crusade of any sort.

Hope has frequently been expressed that Russia might return to Christianity, or at least put into practice the provisions of her Constitution of 1936 that guarantee freedom of religion and worship. The recent move by President Roosevelt to induce the Russian Government to establish true religious freedom met with enthusiastic approval among American leaders of all denominations. It is unfortunate that Vice Commissar S. A. Lozovsky, acting as official spokesman for the government, contented himself with pointing to the respective article of the Soviet Constitution, which has so far remained theoretical. The keen disappointment that this statement produced both in Washington and among the American people no doubt influenced the outcome of the Catholic poll on aid to Russia.

The religious situation among the Russian people, though, is different from the official attitude of the government. Competent observers like the exiled Russian scholar Anatole V. Baikaloff, a frequent contributor to the London Catholic Herald, or Helen Iswolsky, daughter of the Czarist Foreign Minister, assert that nowhere in Russia are the forces of religion extinguished, and that the government has lost the moral fight with religion over a period of twentythree years.

The Russian Church, in spite of all the persecution it has suffered, sided openly with the people against the aggressor when the country was invaded. Metropolitan Sergius, Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, read Solemn High Mass in the Cathedral of Moscow, filled to capacity, while thousands crowded the square outside waiting to receive benediction. Prayers for the victorious defense of the national soil were ordered in all churches of the country.

The reconquest of Russia for Christ will be more likely if the social program of Christianity is pushed forward without compromise. If the Russian workers and peasants received the gospel of social justice and human dignity, the hope should not be wholly fantastic that the banner of Christ may be raised again on Russian soil.

The poll of the Catholic Laymen’s Committee for Peace also revealed that 91.5 per cent of the replies received did not favor the United States’ engaging in a shooting war outside the Western Hemisphere. This Catholic policy of nonintervention has sometimes been interpreted as either a leaning towards Fascism or an outgrowth of Irish sentiment that does not love Hitler more but England less.

I have carefully scrutinized the main Catholic publications in the United States and talked to a cross section of Catholic priests and laymen. My conclusions are identical with those reached by the prominent American scholar Professor Theodore Maynard, who has recently made a most critical analysis of the situation. It is the pro-Franco stand of many American Catholics in the Spanish civil war and publications like Father Coughlin’s Social Justice, with its antiSemitic undertone, that have left the impression that American Catholicism is pro-Fascist. Of course, there are Catholic Fascists, just as there are Protestant and even Jewish Fascists. But the overwhelming majority of American Catholics have clearly recognized that Catholicism and Fascism are incompatible, whatever some may have thought about a possible modus vivendi a few years ago. Father Gerald Walsh, S. J., of Fordham University, has with admirable clarity put the problem into this fundamental formula: As Jesus Christ is the only God-man Catholics recognize, the quasi-divinization of a Führer in Germany, of a Duce in Italy, of a Caudillo in Spain, and all sorts of ‘god-men’ in other parts of the world, is an aberration from the Christian faith; it is hardly less damaging to society than the neopagan conception of state omnipotence and economic absolutism.

The condemnation of Naziism by American Catholics during the last three years has become increasingly vigorous. The reports of the National Catholic Welfare Conference news service on Nazi persecutions of Church and religion in Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the other occupied countries are carried by the whole Catholic press, and there are frequent editorials and articles on the same subject.

As far as the ‘Irish sentiment’ is concerned, its existence is undoubtedly a powerful factor, though only in Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, and a few other places does it represent anything like a majority view. This sentiment is not identical with a desire for genuine peace which insists on the overthrow of the dictatorships. It is purely nationalistic and would change overnight if Ireland were invaded by the Nazis. As things stand now, it results in an advocacy of appeasement, instead of aiming at peace between liberated nations. Appeasement is the very last thing that German Catholics would want. They have not been fighting, suffering, and bleeding for years for their convictions to be told in the end that they must range themselves with the Nazis.

Equally immoral is the attitude of those who consider that ‘this is none of our business; we are too far away to be in danger.’ It would be the negation of Christian brotherhood and of the very dogma of the unity of all in Christ.

IV

Genuine peace, on the other hand, is the strongest revolutionary program. It is in fact the only means for overthrowing Hitlerism from within by mobilizing the German people against their oppressors. Genuine peace is more than the cessation of hostilities. It must be a concrete conception of a freer, a happier society, in which, according to human knowledge, the recurrence of new despotic movements will be precluded. The vision of it must be so real, and the hope for its realization so mighty, that it will drown the roar of the guns, until the longing of all the enslaved has forced it into being. The Christian peoples, Catholic and Protestant alike, know that, while politicians of all kinds are still thinking in terms of yesterday or indulging in vague generalities, it is the living Christ only in whom there is freedom, and a new beginning.

When Pope Pius XII, on Christmas Eve of 1939, announced his five-point program for such a peace, his leadership was accepted by Christians of all denominations. It is today the tie that unites Germans and Frenchmen, Slavs, Italians, and Anglo-Saxons. Nowhere did these five points receive such enthusiastic and unanimous response as in Great Britain. In a move unprecedented for four centuries, the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council, joined their names to that of Cardinal Hinsley, Primate of the Catholic Church in England, to give public endorsement to the Pope’s peace program. Since then, the General of the Salvation Army, representatives of the Unitarian Church, and the heads of churches in Armenia, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Nomay, Sweden, and Switzerland have associated themselves with it in England.

These five points are, in short: First, the assurance to all nations, great or small, of their right to life and independence, with reparation of any infringement of these rights, not by the sword, but by the rules of justice and equity. Second, delivery of all nations from the slavery of armaments. Third, avoidance of past errors in creating or reconstructing international institutions, and establishment of some juridical institution to guarantee loyal fulfillment, or, in case of recognized need, revision and correction of peace conditions. Fourth, satisfaction of the real needs and just demands of nations and populations, even, where it appears necessary, by means of an equitable and covenanted revision of existing treaties. Fifth, development of a sense of responsibility in the peoples and those who govern them; cultivation of a hunger and thirst for justice; and guidance by universal love, which is the essence of the Christian ideal.

Bishop Bell of Chichester, a high dignitary of the Anglican Church, added a most constructive suggestion to make this peace program practically effective. In his book Christianity and World Order he proposes the formation of a permanent Christian Consultative Body, at Rome itself or at some other place acceptable to the Holy See, over which the Pope or his representative should preside, while certain of the great churches of the world — for example, the Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican confessions — would send their own accredited representatives.

In the United States, too, Catholicism has been most active in working on the interpretation and the possibilities of practical realization of Pope Pius’s program. A report on America’s peace aims, issued by seven committees of the Catholic Association for International Peace, insisted on the necessity to plan the peace in advance, as military victory alone would not automatically ensure a peace based on justice and charity. An International Bill of Rights, to be accepted by all nations, was suggested by Father Wilfrid Parsons, S. J., of the Catholic University of America, in an appendix to the report. It should incorporate, besides the provisions of the Pope’s five points, a code of civil liberties; guarantees of economic and political security for every person in the world, and of the rights of labor — especially decent working conditions, a living wage, reasonable hours, and the abolition of child labor and other economic inequalities; and the right of preventing the toopowerful aggregation of capital within the nations, as well as unlimited selfregulation of international economic activities, not subject to any law.

This great emphasis laid on the importance of the social problem in assuring universal leadership to Christian thought is characteristic of the break with outlived forms of economic and social thinking. At the end of the war — Jacques Maritain, the great Thomist scholar, has stated — the old ideologies of capitalism and socialism will be left far behind.

‘It is not enough to outlaw the Communists,’ he said in the Dublin Review of January 1941, ‘in order to be through with Communism. Nothing will have been accomplished as long as men have not resolved, and resolved in a way that conforms with human dignity and liberty, the problems made manifest by Communism.’

The economic system of the future, outlined by the social encyclicals of the Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, calls for control of industry exercised jointly by employers and workers, under supervision of the State, democratic according to general Christian principles. The workers should be made to participate in the management and the ownership of the enterprise, and the wage contract should be supplemented by a share in the profit.

There are twenty-one major Catholic periodicals in the United States today devoted entirely or partially to social reform, and the number of books and pamphlets written on the subject by Catholics is impressive. Labor schools are conducted by the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (a high percentage of the members of the two main labor unions, CIO and A. F. of L., are practising Catholics), and several dioceses have established social-action schools for the training of their clergy.

In 1940 and 1941, as indeed in earlier years, a great many Catholic conferences dealing with industrial and social problems were held all over the country. These were not confined to theoretical discussion. The participants — priests, scholars, laymen, labor and trade-union leaders, and industrialists — concentrated on working out practical solutions, both in general and in the specific branches of industry.

However, all the practical work for peace, social justice, and a union of the nations to overcome war, Fascism, and exploitation would remain in the air, were it not supported by a profound change in the moral and spiritual attitude of all peoples in the world, particularly among the young. It is in the soul of man that the Christian revolution has already begun, and it will be up to the statesmen and educators to lead it to victory.

American students, in a world where all material standards have become uncertain, are eager to find values not at the mercy of economic and political crises. These crises, they said to me, can only be overcome by a religious integration of our thought and life. This has been my experience at all of the thirty-five universities and colleges, of which only four were Catholic, where I have been teaching and lecturing since 1935.

There are certainly more than material reasons for the fact that the questions of individual immortality, of reward and punishment, should be major problems to the young generation. In normal times, death seems far away to youth; today, it is all around them. ‘Where are they now?’ a student once said to me, pointing to the headlines which told of young English and German pilots shot down in flames.

Many who but a few years ago would have been interested solely in athletics or the daily events of college routine are now raising the question of the ultimate object of life, and I have noticed Dante’s Divina Commedia and Thomas àa Kempis’s Imitation of Christ in a good many hands.

There is no ‘escapism’ or disdain for the exact sciences in this leaning of the young towards Christian philosophy. They are rediscovering, in our technical age and in their own way, what Saint Thomas Aquinas proved seven hundred years ago for the relationship between philosophy and theology: not only that they are compatible, but that they supplement each other.

The reported conversion to Christianity of Henri Bergson, once an agnostic, whom many have hailed as the greatest philosopher of our time, is perhaps the most perfect symbol for the spiritual trend of our days. ‘He revealed to me,’ writes Georges Cattaüi, a friend of the late philosopher, himself a convert to Christianity, ‘that he believed in the divinity of Christ; even more, that he recognized the power of the sacraments.’ ‘Christianity,’ Bergson had said, ‘transforms everything it touches, simply by making it Christian.’

What millions must have felt without being able to express it was thus put into one sentence of classic simplicity. The world of modern man, built upon agnostic reason, is falling to shambles, and there arises with irresistible power a new reality that will transfigure the humble and the lofty alike.

When, some months ago, I asked a young English friend of mine, now serving with a London regiment, what he felt about the future of our countries, and whether he saw hope in the midst of despair, this is what he answered, quoting a verse from W. B. Yeats: —

This could also have been written by many young Germans and Americans I have met in recent years.

If their knowledge of forces greater than death, war, and hatred, and more powerful than the remedies tried by the previous generation, shall become the common good of all, those are not hoping in vain who through the darkness and the ruin of our time perceive the coming of a world-wide Christian revolution.