Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (158 page)

The prolonged rule of Mexico's clericalist President Diaz provoked revolution in 1910, associated with a militant anti-Catholicism both popular and official. Churches were burned down or painted red, images destroyed and ceremonies mocked. The Church fought back for control of Mexican life: the Mexican bishops in 1914 anticipated Pope Pius XI's later move by proclaiming that Christ was King of Mexico. In retaliation a new constitution of 1917, while declaring in North American style the principle of freedom of worship for all, suppressed all Church primary education and placed drastic limits on what the clergy could do; monasteries and nunneries were forcibly closed. Education, as in the contemporary though far less violent conflict in the Third French Republic, was the chief focus for struggle, but public conflict between Catholics and anticlericals now punctuated all Mexican life. When a holy image was damaged in the stately cathedral city of Morelia in 1921, twelve people died in the resulting street violence.
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In 1926 the Primate of Mexico used the ultimate weapon available to him when he suspended all public worship, all sacraments, in protest against the crippling of the Church's activities, particularly its loss of control over schooling. Over the next three years before an uneasy truce there was all-out warfare between Church and Republic, in which thousands died. The Catholics who rose in rebellion against the victimization of the Church were nicknamed
Cristeros
from their Christ the King battle slogan
!Viva Cristo Rey!
The bishops had not expected or wanted this rising, and because they were soon mostly in exile and the clergy dispersed to avoid government violence, leadership of the rebellion came overwhelmingly from laypeople.

Cristeros
drew their support from those regions of Mexico where there was a long tradition of lay leadership in the Church, where local culture took for granted the synthesis between religious and local life created by the missionaries of the Counter-Reformation. Scorning the government's attempt to found a Mexican Catholic and Apostolic Church to rival the Catholic Church, they rallied to the Primate-Archbishop of Mexico's instruction that laypeople should preside at every form of Catholic rite (including, in emergency, confessions, marriages and baptisms), short of consecrating the eucharistic elements. The clergy were not always pleased at the resulting lay initiatives and loss of clerical control, but in the end the government saw that it could not outface this massive affirmation of Church life, even despite its own popular support from anticlericals. 'Those men drenched the earth with their blood, and if that wasn't enough, they gave their very lives to bring our Lord God back again,' was one proud
Cristero
reminiscence.
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The situation was like the early days of lay Korean Catholicism (see pp. 900-902), but on an enormously larger scale. One recent historian of these events points out what a distorted retrospective picture of the revolt was provided by John Paul II's canonization in 2000 of twenty-two
Cristero
priests and only three laypeople.
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In reality, the events of 1926-9 in Mexico set a precedent for the realignment of relationships between priest and parishioner which was to be such a striking feature of Latin American Catholicism in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (see pp. 975-6).

This was not the lesson which the contemporary Vatican drew from the conflict in Mexico, or from the other murderous confrontations between the Church and the Left which were simultaneously building up in Spain and Soviet Russia. Everywhere it saw the chief enemy of Christianity as socialism or Communism. The future of Europe was entrusted in 1919 to democracies, but of all the new states created by the victorious Allies, at the beginning of 1939 only Czechoslovakia was left as a functioning democratic republic, and it was about to be obliterated. The history of the interwar years is of democracy's steady subversion by authoritarian regimes. Some rulers were traditionalists trying to restore the past, such as Hungary's Catholic-dominated monarchy without a monarch, headed by the regent, Miklos Horthy, an admiral without a navy. Much more destructive were movements which despised the aristocratic past as much as they did bourgeois democracy, and espoused an extreme form of nationalism which degenerated into racism. Collectively they have taken their name from the Italian variant, which proved the most long-lasting, and which indeed seems still to have some life left in it: Fascism. The Catholic Church's record in regard to Fascists might charitably be regarded as unimpressive.

It was perhaps not surprising that the succession of Italian clerics who became popes, mostly by training civil servants of an absolute monarchy, were no more inclined to natural sympathy with democracy than Pius IX had been a friend to liberalism. They did not speak with one voice. Pius X, who popularized the word 'Modernism' as a symbol of all that was anathema to good Catholics, swept up the reformist and democratic French Catholic youth movement
Le Sillon
in his antipathies and condemned it in 1910, with much trumpeting of the virtues of hierarchy. Benedict XV was in contrast charmed by
Le Sillon
's charismatic founder, Marc Sangnier. Not only did Benedict give no further publicity to his predecessor's fulminations, but he encouraged Sangnier's Christian Democratic activities in French politics. That allowed French Catholicism discreetly to develop political diversity in its activism over the next decades, giving it an escape route from its damaging associations with the losers in the Dreyfus Affair (see p. 827), which was to prove vital later in the twentieth century. Benedict's successor, Pius XI, went further, casting a cold eye over the beliefs and activities of Le Sillon's bitter enemy the royalist and anti-Semitic organization
Action Francaise
, to which Pius X had shown much favour.
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Pius's clear-sightedness in banning
Action Francaise
in 1925, in the face of shocked protest from reactionary French Catholics, was aided by the fact that its journalist-founder, Charles Maurras, was an open atheist, seeing Catholicism only instrumentally as an indispensable prop for his cloudy vision of a renewed and purified monarchical France. The long history of papal attempts to come to terms with the Third French Republic and the Vatican's suspicion of nationalism enabled the Pope to take a realistic view of the French situation.

Pius XI handled events in Italy less surely after Benito Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922. The
Duce
, Mussolini, might personally be an atheist no better than Maurras, but he was able to put his annexation of the Italian state to uses of which the Pope thoroughly approved, notably in suppressing the Communist Party. Fascism's forceful destruction of trade unions in the interests of Fascist-run corporate associations in industry and commerce was gratifyingly reminiscent of the corporatist tone of Leo XIII's
Rerum novarum
, sentiments which Pope Pius was soon to reaffirm in a commemorative encyclical of 1931,
Quadragesimo anno
('In the fortieth year . . .'). The Pope was an Italian patriot, and besides, the
Duce
patently wanted a deal to earn himself goodwill from Catholics. So in the Lateran accords of 1929, the Vatican State was born, the world's smallest sovereign power, the size of an English country-house garden, carrying with it a silver spoon in the form of 1,750 million lire, presented by the Italian government - rather less than had been on offer from the Italian monarchy to Pius IX, but still a very substantial sum.

The Pope handed over financial administration of this windfall to a suave and brilliant banker, Bernardino Nogara, naturally a good Catholic but just as importantly a fellow son of Milan, who demanded and was given a free hand in his investments. Thus unhampered by
Quadragesimo anno
or the Pope's other contemporaneous denunciations of speculative capitalism, Nogara gained more power in Catholicism than had been enjoyed by any layman since the Emperor Charles V or King Philip II of Spain. He turned the Catholic Church into what one Soviet journalist accurately described in 1948 as the 'greatest financial trust in the world'.
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Suddenly the Vatican could afford to be generous, and that was just as well, amid the catastrophe that unfolded during the decades after this profitable supping with the Devil.

Soon outclassing Mussolini's self-inflating Italian Fascism was the rise of an infinitely more evil variant on the Fascist theme, the German National Socialist ('Nazi') party. Adolf Hitler, born a subject of the Habsburg emperor, exploited the financial and political disarray of Germany's Weimar Republic, using uninhibited violence when it suited him, and profiting from the obtuse scheming of the traditional German Rightist parties. He came to power through a nightmare manipulation of voting figures and political alliances in Germany's democratic institutions. The final barrier to his abolition of those same institutions was removed by the overtrusting agreement of Germany's Catholic Party, the Centre (
Zentrum
), who in March 1933 decided to vote for an Enabling Act in the Reichstag, giving Hitler supreme power and suspending democracy. As the Nazis exultantly put into place the apparatus of terror for a totalitarian dictatorship, Rome's chief envoy in Germany, the future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, negotiated a concordat with Hitler which promised to preserve freedoms for the Catholic Church in the new 'Third Reich', putative successor to the Holy Roman Empire and the Hohenzollern 'Second Reich' of 1871. The price was the dissolution of the
Zentrum
and Catholic trade unions, and a ban on any political activity on the part of the Church's clergy. With the deal secured, Hitler soon revealed his contempt for the Church into which he had been born: the poison of Nazi black propaganda and violence was visited selectively on Catholicism, as it was in more thoroughgoing and vicious form on the helpless Jewish population, the central victims of Hitler's hatred.

It was too late for Rome to go back. Pius XI, increasingly horrified by reports from Germany, did what he could. He issued an encyclical directed in German to Germany,
Mit brennender Sorge
('With burning anxiety'), which was successfully smuggled into the country to be read simultaneously from every Catholic pulpit on Palm Sunday 1937; it denounced the harassment of the Church and condemned the presuppositions of Nazi racism. The encyclical was one of the few nationally coordinated public acts of defiance of the regime before it fell in 1945; yet it did nothing to alter the steady crescendo of wickedness which was Nazi foreign and domestic policy. Since the days of the
Kulturkampf
(see pp. 837-8), German Catholics had trumpeted their loyalty to the German state, while carving out their own devotional space within German society. The protection of that space was what they had expected from the 1933 Concordat; they had no second strategy when they discovered that Hitler was not Bismarck and that the Concordat had proved worthless.
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The best that the Pope could do was to work behind the scenes to separate Fascist Italy from Nazi Germany, and passively express his profound disapproval when Hitler visited Mussolini in 1938. The Pope was away, there were no decorations on Rome's churches and the Vatican Museums were closed. That was a different sort of papal silence to that which had greeted Mussolini's invasion of Christian Ethiopia three years before (see pp. 891-2).
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Rome still saw Communism as a greater representative of evil than Fascism. In that same Holy Week of 1937 which sent
Mit brennender Sorge
to Germany, a papal encyclical addressed to the world,
Divini Redemptoris
('Of the Divine Redeemer'), denounced Communism in far stronger terms than German congregations had heard expressed against Nazism. It was a movement which among much else 'strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse'. At the time, the imbalance of approach seemed a reasonable if depressing calculation, contrasting Nazi harassment of the Church with the wholesale destruction and death being visited on Christianity in the Soviet Union - and also in Spain. There, the Pope was actively supporting an attack on a democratically elected government by forces strongly backed by Fascism.

The Spanish case is one of the most tragic alignments of the interwar papacy, and yet one can see precisely why the Vatican should turn against the Republican government. The Spanish Republic set up on the fall of the monarchy in 1931 mimicked amid a raft of social and economic reforms all the anticlerical policies with which the Church was familiar from Latin America and Republican France: an end, for instance, to religious education and to state financial support for church upkeep or clerical stipends. Without fully considering the effects of their actions, the Republicans charged destructively over the small certainties of everyday Catholic life, infuriating large numbers of ordinary Catholics who might not otherwise have had any special animus against the Republic or nostalgia for the exiled King Alfonso XIII. Worse still, Catholic demonstrations of outrage provoked still greater fury among anarchists and socialists. Quickly, in 1931, the burning of church buildings began.
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Now battle lines were drawn, and once more the newly emerged image of Christ the King became the figurehead for the political Right, as had already happened not merely in Mexico but also among militant Catholics in Belgian politics.
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Electoral gains for a new Spanish Catholic party in 1934 provoked fury from anarchists and socialists; attacks on church buildings were now accompanied by the killing of clergy. When the parties of the Left won elections in 1936, a group of army leaders, now in alliance with a mushrooming 'Falangist' movement inspired by Fascism, determined to overturn the result by force. Among them was a primly Catholic little general from Galicia, Francisco Franco, who had been sent in semi-disgrace to the Canary Islands because of his political activities, but who eventually emerged from the rapidly moving events as chief commander. Arranging Franco's crucial flight to take command in Morocco, and providing an alibi for the British-hired plane's true purpose, was a John Buchanesque British MI6 officer, Major Hugh Pollard, undertaking this as a freelance operation because he was a devout Catholic (as well as an enthusiastic admirer of Nazism and Italian Fascism). Pollard, who subsequently publicly and indignantly defended the Nazi obliteration bombing of the Basque capital Guernica, was proud of having fulfilled 'the duty of a good Catholic to help fellow Catholics in trouble'. He was duly decorated by a grateful Franco when the Nationalists had rolled back the defenders of the Republic with Hitler's and Mussolini's military assistance.
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