Review of Current Religious Thought: September 14, 1962

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” rhapsodized Wordsworth on the French Revolution, “but to be young was very heaven.” A trace of the same exultant note can be found in WCC circles here in Paris. Never has the ecumenical star shone so brightly. The Central Committee has just recommended for membership seven new churches, and has been happily discussing the prospect of sending observers to the Vatican Council. At the local Church of Scotland on Sunday I heard a sermon on “Thou art Peter,” to which a Roman Catholic could have breathed Amen. Meanwhile Cardinal Bea said in England: “The fundamental issue is the teaching of the Church.… Here is the deepest challenge which divides us. If this problem is solved there will not be great difficulty in admitting a Papal infallibility.” Here again is that monumental presumption that in church unity discussions Rome is negotiating from a position of strength.

To criticize any of the current trends is unfashionable, but I’ll risk it, for I’ve just been reading Edmond Paris’ The Vatican against Europe, published in London by P. R. Macmillan. Born a Roman Catholic, Paris investigated the official version given of certain historical facts, and produced this volume which is a model of patient research, cross-checking, and scrupulous documentation. Ecclesiastical circles tried to smother it, happily without success.

Paris shows how since Charlemagne the Papacy has leant upon the Germans as a secular arm to impose its authority. He quotes from René Boylesve’s Feuilles tombées: “Are you then surprised at her [i.e. Rome’s] predilection for Germany, despite the latter’s crimes? The Church and Germany? But they are sisters. Both love themselves for themselves alone and are hypnotized by their own powers; both exercise dissimulation and hypocrisy.” The mass of evidence produced by Mr. Paris is positively frightening.

In Germany, it is shown how Hitler was voted full rights in 1933 when German Catholics heard that the Pope himself was “favourably disposed” towards Hitler; thus Catholic youth organizations combined with those of the Nazis. The Concordat made between the Vatican and Germany was carried out under the aegis of Msgr. Pacelli (the future Pius XII) who was in Munich during the rise of Nazism. This Concordat gave the State the right of veto over episcopal nominations, and required the bishops to swear allegiance to Hitler. After his election Pacelli was referred to as “the German Pope.” His entourage, his confessor (Msgr. Bea, now cardinal), were German, and he regarded Germany’s role as the “sword of God.”

Steadily, country by country, Paris exhibits his terrible proof. In Italy, secret negotiations between papal agents and Mussolini put the dictator in power; in 1929 the Lateran Treaty effected the union of Fascism and the Papacy, and ensured the clerical blessing when poison gas was later used against Christian Ethiopia. In Austria, the “Christian” chancellors succeeded one another, beginning with the Jesuit, Msgr. Seipel, and ending in 1938 with the country’s absorption by Hitler when eight million Austrians swelled the ranks of German Roman Catholics. In Belgium, Catholic Action nurtured a local Nazism which paved the way for Hitler. In Spain, the Vatican recognized Franco in 1937 and later decorated him with the Supreme Order of Christ. In France, the hierarchy in 1939 urged the faithful to “collaborate” with Hitler whose war Cardinal Baudrillart declared was “a noble undertaking.” A side-glance is directed at Father Coughlin and the Christian Front movement in the United States, and at Father Walsh and Senator McCarthy. One year after Pearl Harbor, La Croix, greeted by Pius XII as the organ of “pontificial thought,” said: “It is very understandable that these states [Germany, Italy, Japan] should have agreed to establish a front against a danger which, particularly in the West, is threatening civilization and our Christian ideals.” Eight months later it said: “Nothing good can come of the intervention of troops from across the Channel and from the other side of the Atlantic.” On another occasion the editor-in-chief declared that “the New Order will bear the imprint of the Christian character.…”

Most pathetic of all is the account given by Paris of the Roman Church’s share in war crimes in the present Yugoslavia, where 600,000 Serbian Orthodox and Jews were massacred with the approval of clerical members of the Croatian Parliament, including Msgr. Stepinac. In addition, 240,000 Orthodox Christians were forcibly “converted.” Though Stepinac was in 1946 sentenced to 16 years’ hard labor for war crimes, Paris comments: “The wondrous deeds of the Archbishop of Zagreb could not fail to bring their reward: the Cardinal’s hat.” Referring to the massacred, Paris says: “If Abel has a bad press in the heart of the Roman Catholic Church, Cain on the contrary has always been the subject of an endless mansuetude there.”

Other clerical war criminals include Msgr. Tiso, prelate Gauleiter of Slovakia, who held that Catholicism and Nazism were “working hand in hand” to refashion the world. (Tiso was hanged in 1946 after conviction by the Prague Tribunal.) Oswald Pohl, Nazi official who ordered the concentration camps to be equipped with gas chambers, also received the apostolic blessing from Pius, and the comforting words: “Unjustly condemned by men, thou shalt find thy reward in Heaven. This I assure thee.” On the Nuremberg verdict on Franz von Papen, privy chamberlain to Pius XI, L’Ordre de Paris comments: “It is both painful and shameful to have to say it, but von Papen’s acquittal is Pius XII’s condemnation.” Von Papen had claimed that the Third Reich was the first power in the world to put into practice “the lofty principles of the Papacy.” So far was the Vatican from disowning such sentiments that in July, 1959, John XXIII nominated him again as privy chamberlain. Documentary evidence is adduced also of how the Vatican sheltered and financed other fleeing war criminals.

Mr. Paris’ book should be required reading (as well as Hans Küng’s much vaunted The Council and Reunion) for travelers on the Rome Express, so that what the Vatican is as well as what the Vatican says should thunder in their ears.

Remembering how Wordsworth’s touching faith in the French Revolution vanished when he realized its true nature, we are ultimately confronted by the question: What price are we prepared to pay for ecumenicity? “The claims of the Roman Catholic Church,” says Professor J. W. Draper of New York University, “imply a rebellion against modern civilization and an intention to destroy it, at the risk of destroying society itself. To be able to submit themselves to these claims, men need the souls of slaves!” It is mere wishful thinking to suppose that Vatican policy has changed just because a friendly priest invites us to tea.

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