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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 4
THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
HOW MUSSOLINI AND THE YELLOW BROTHER
GOT THEIR SHARE
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATION
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
I The Church's Record In Spain .................... 5
II Enter First and Second Murders
Under the Papal Banner ..................... 11
III Spain and the Catholic League ................... 16
IV Papal Cowardice in Abyssinia -- And Why ......... 22
V The Jap Gets a Gold Medal for His
'Chinese Incident' ......................... 28
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I
THE CHURCH'S VILE RECORD IN SPAIN
Some years ago I strolled on a summer day through the drowsy
streets of Toledo, an ancient city in the center of Spain. A
thousand years ago it was one of the richest and most populous
cities in Europe. More than a quarter of a million vivid,
prosperous, bright-eyed folk had filled its narrow streets and
bought luxuries from every part of the world in its teeming stores.
Such was the fame of its craftsmen that the "Toledo Blade" was
sought from end to end in Europe and is still famous in literature.
How high Spain would have risen if men had continued to build on
that superb foundation of that old Moorish civilization! But in
1923 I found only 30,000 folk, mostly poor and illiterate, living
within the ancient walls; and I smiled sadly, when, as I passed
along the almost deserted streets, a boy offered to show me where
his ancestors had hanged "those wicked devils the Moors." It is
worse today.
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THE VATICAN BURIES INTERNATIONAL LAW
It was the history of Spain and its Church in a phrase, Spain
inherited all the stupendous wealth and science of the Arab
civilization, one city of which could have bought up, ten times
over, all the cities of Christian Europe, and to this it had added
all the wealth it had acquired by the discovery of America. It was
literally choking with wealth by the middle of the sixteenth
century. And little more than a hundred years later it was the
poorest, most despised country in the world. About 5,000,000 folk,
most of them ragged and unkempt, eked out a poor living on soil
that had given rich sustenance to 30,000,000 Arabs and their
contented subjects. For this awful downfall, one of the saddest in
history, and for all the later disasters that fell upon one of the
most attractive peoples in Europe, the Black International is
supremely responsible.
By the beginning of the twentieth century Spain had raised its
proud head once more amongst the nations. It had a fine literature
and a rising prosperity. The cities that had shrunk within the
shell of ancient walls were bursting through these in the
exuberance of the life. The people smiled again, like the roses of
Seville in spring. They had for 80 years fought the strangle-hold
of the Church and had loosened if not broken it. A distinguished
literary traveller, Thirlmere, went intimately amongst the people
and wrote this verdict: "The Church knows that she is doomed in
Spain" (Letters from Catalonia, 1905, p. 437). Mr. Thirlmere ought
to have been more cautious. He ought to have added: "Unless she can
return to her old policy of violence and torture." She has
recovered it. Today Spain is back in the ragged Middle Ages, its
people begging food of other nations -- in a land which, with the
crude plows and other implements of a thousand years ago, had
richly nourished 30,000,000 folk and borne princely cities -- their
minds darkened, their hearts broken. And it is the work of the
Black International: of the bishops, priests, monks, and nuns, who
have returned to their old sleekness while the people have returned
to their poverty
In an earlier work I referred to certain evidence of
government by violence, indeed brutal violence, in Spain today. It
may not have appeared in the American press, owing to the Catholic
censorship, and it is material to compare it with the suave
professions of Catholic apologists and the beautiful words they
quote from Papal encyclicals. It is a simple account of the
experiences of a French girl, apparently a Catholic, of nineteen
who escaped from the purgatory of Vichy France into what she calls
the "hell" of Franco Span. It was published (as it makes no
reference to the Church) in the British News-Chronicle, a paper
that is very sensitive to Catholic influence, on September 24
(1941).
Mlle. X was arrested soon after she crossed the frontier and
was put in jail at Badajoz. She was lodged in a large room with
about 250 women, "an appalling mixture": prostitutes, thieves, so-
called Communists, etc. "Most of the prisoners were in rags,
filthy, and covered with vermin." There were no mattresses or
blankets for the night. After two days she was brought before the
Governor of Badajoz and, without trial or inquiry, sentenced to an
indefinite term of imprisonment. She claimed that she was of
British nationality, and a few days later, she was taken before the
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prison director: a "brute", she says, who bullied her for two
hours, told her she was "a dirty little liar" and sent her "back to
hell." Every evening all the prisoners were assembled in the
courtyard and compelled to sing the Falangist anthem and at the
close cry lustily: "Long live Spain. Up with Free Spain. Franco,
Franco, Franco." The jailers lashed with whips any woman who did
not join heartily in the chorus. The girl endured several weeks of
this and she was then taken before a British Consul to prove her
claim of nationality. She was removed to a jail at Seville, which
was "worse than Badajoz" (which she describes as hell), removed
back to Badajoz, and removed to Madrid, where she bad a solitary
dark and freezingly cold cell; and all the time officers "tried to
be as cruel as they could to me", jeering at her as a Communist spy
and assuring her she would never leave Spain. These Spanish
gentlemen had her before them standing for two to three hours every
morning. A girl in the next cell one day cried, "Live, live,
Liberty, Long live England". She was taken out and beaten, and
presently there were shots in the courtyard. every day such shots
were heard. One less of those who refused to bow to the Church.
I gather that this girl was not British, but the British
authorities humanely lied, and admitted her claim of nationality,
and rescued her. But think of the thousands of women and girls, and
the tens of thousands of youths and men, suffering this living hell
in the jails of Badajoz and Seville and Madrid and a hundred
others, after fighting heroically for three years in the cause of
freedom. And the Catholic press assures you, the Vatican Assures
all the world, and far too much of the world-press repeats the
assurance or refuses to disturb it, that Spain has now resumed its
beautiful, happy life in the arms of Mother Church; and won't you
please contribute for the alleviation of the misery which the
wicked Reds had brought upon the country. So it was in the
beginning -- or nearly 500 years ago, when the Church recovered
power -- is now, and never again shall be. Do you really wonder if
in the heat of the hundredth struggle against the Church in 1936-
1938 some of the men who knew the long record of brutality and knew
how the priests were using the callous and ambitious Franco to
recover their mastery of the jails, shot a few of them and trampled
on their 'sacred' vestments and other paraphernalia of their trade?
It is nearly forty years since I began writing on Spain and
its Church, and the truth which I told was not a collection of
obscure and disputed facts resting upon the testimony of Radicals
and Reds. My first scalding indictment of the Church and the
cleric-controlled state (The Martyrdom of Ferrer, 1909) was fully
endorsed and whole pages of it translated in the following year by
one of the most distinguished scholars of Madrid University,
Professor Simarro, in his voluminous study of the trial (El Proceso
Ferrer). What I claimed for the Arab civilization (The Splendor of
Moorish Spain 1935) is based upon the works of half a dozen Spanish
professors who are masters of Arabic and is no more than S.P. Scott
claims in America in his 'Moorish Empire in Spain.' And the
appalling story I gave of the struggle with the Church since 1814
is fully and truly told in such standard and conservative works as
the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. XI) and Major M. Hume's 'Modem
Spain' (in the Story of Nations series). Yet every time the long
blood-soaked struggle is renewed in Spain the public is puzzled and
is ready to admit every Catholic lie about the innocent Church and
its "satanic" enemies. I must repeat a few points.
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On the broad map of our chaotic world Spain seems to be of
limited importance. In the fevered and crowded chronicle of events
during the last five years its recent Civil War and the conquest of
it by that unholy alliance of Catholic armies and Nazi-Fascist
butchers seems to be just the third step -- after the disarming of
Austria and the rape of Abyssinia -- in the preparation of the
stage for the Nazi aggression. But in a study of the share of the
Black International in the world-tragedy it is supremely important;
and it is to Spain, with which it hopes to link Spanish America
once more, that the Vatican chiefly looks for the destruction of
our modern liberty and enlightenment by a bloc of Catholic powers.
As far as the last century is concerned it is not necessary
here to do more than repeat in a more definite form what I said in
the first book of this series: that in Spain, as in Portugal and
Italy. "Reds" have always been the clergy and their allies. The
revolution which put Franco in power in 1938 is the tenth major
revolution that has occurred in Spain since the days of Napoleon.
In six of these the people wrested power, in five cases out of six
without war, from the clerical-royalists. Every member of the
Bourdon dynasty of Spanish monarchs except Alfonso XII, who died
prematurely, has been ignominiously driven from Spain for his or
her crimes and vices at one time or other. In four counter-
revolutions the clerical-royalists recovered power, either by force
or by perjury or a mixture of the two. These four counter-
revolutions, in which the Church was as busy as the state, were
followed by official reprisals of so brutal a character that
between 50,000 and 100,000 unarmed Spaniards were executed or
killed in jail and many hundreds of thousands suffered agonies. The
six popular revolutions were, nevertheless, never followed by
official reprisals, and the spontaneous local outbreaks in which
the exploited workers burned churches and killed a few priests and
monks were checked by the authorities.
All that may be read in Hume's standard history of the
Cambridge Modern History, I have told the relevant facts in my
'Revolt in Spain' (1931) and given a condensed account in the
'Appeal to Reason' Library (No. 1). There is just one point of this
past history which I would recall, as Catholic writers are now apt
to say that all this butchery was perpetrated by the state, and
even that the clergy tried to check it. Major Hume, the highest
recent authority on Spain, describing the counter-revolution of
1822, says (Modern Spain, p. 256):
Modern civilization has seen no such instance of brutal,
blind ferocity as that which followed the arrival of Ferdinand
at Madrid. There was neither justice nor mercy in the
government of the besotted churchmen who surrounded the King.
The gallows was the sole instrument and argument by which they
ruled . . . The frenzy of intolerance and cruelty spread from
the preaching friars and ignorant nobles to the brutal mob. .
. . It is a lamentable truth that much of the atrocities of
this persecution was owing to the influence of the friars and
the Church. A hideous ecclesiastical society, founded by the
Bishop of Osuna and called "The Exterminating Angel", which
spread its ramifications. all over Spain organized vengeance
upon Liberals; every pulpit, every monastery, every royalist
club, was a center of persecution.
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That Hume was no friend of radicalism is shown in his remark
that they surpassed "even the most bloodthirsty wretches of the
French Reign of Terror", and he has to confess that the man who
"surpassed all previous efforts, even in this blood-thirsty reign"
was the very pious and priest-ridden Count de Espana.
It is enough that these horrors were perpetrated by an
intimate alliance of the clergy and the servants of a King,
Ferdinand VII who in his depravity is compared by historians to
Nero; and about the same time even worse butchery was being
perpetrated in South Italy by the same alliance of the clergy with
his namesake and rival in vice, Ferdinand of Naples. Both Kings had
recovered power by a most solemn oath on the Bible during Mass to
observe the Constitution -- Ferdinand of Naples had asked God to
strike him dead if he was not sincere -- and both were absolved
from their oaths the bishops and the Jesuits and encouraged to
wallow in blood. Eighty years later Alfonso XIII stood at the
perjured altar amidst the crowd of bishops and took this solemn
oath: "I swear before God and his holy gospels to maintain the
Constitution". And the priests were silent when the old fortress of
Monjuich again resounded with the cries of tortured men and the
reports of rifles: when Alfonso, to check the threatened revelation
of his theft of millions of dollars -- see Alfonso XIII Unmasked,
by the greatest Spanish writer of the time, Blasco Ibanez -- tore
up the Constitution and set up the dictatorship of the brutal and
dissipated General de Rivers. Spaniards know these things. After
the revolution of 1931 a splendid system of education was created,
and freedom of discussion carried the truth into villages and
workshops. Did some soldier, worker here and there, knowing these
things and seeing the priests conspiring with the perjured Franco
and the butchers of Germany, lose his temper and run his bayonet
through one or two of them? I should not be surprised. But remember
that at present we have only Catholic statement's about Red
outrages in the Civil War.
We know what Catholic literature is, but we have also here a
close parallel to guide us. The world-press was inundated with
similar Catholic stories of Red outrages after the Socialist-
Communist revolt of 1934. Fortunately, Spain had not yet passed
completely under the control of the Black International, and,
though some investigators like, Lord Listowel and Ellen Wilkinson,
were obstructed at every turn and soon politely conducted to the
frontier, others got through; and there were weighty and
unassailable Spanish investigations to which I will return later.
Here let me just quote an incident from Leah Manning's What I Saw
in Spain (1934).
The mother-superioress of a convent was pressed to testify
that her nuns had been raped by the Red's. As it was false, she
refused. I gather, in fact, that the only outrage committed was to
the delicate ears of the nuns, as the insurgent miners who had
taken over the convent as a hospital were not very refined in their
talk to each other. Probably many of the nuns were disappointed. A
Catholic will reflect that here at least I confess to the honesty
of a nun. As not always admitted that there are some good men
amongst the priests and plenty of good nuns the world over! The
more important question that any impartial reader will ask himself
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is whether this particular superioress, out of hundreds, is likely
to have been the only one to be pressed by the priests and Catholic
journalists to make a charge of outrages and reminded that the good
of the Church is paramount.
These stories remind us of that historian of the Russian
Revolution. L. Lawton, much quoted by Catholics, who tells how in
the Civil War of 1919-1921 the sadistic Bolsheviks slaughtered 1275
archbishops and bishops, when even the Catholic Encyclopedia
confesses that there were only about 80 in the entire country. But
we will return later to these things. Let me lead up briefly to the
immediate causes of the Civil War in Spain.
In view of its disreputable record the Bourbon dynasty was
irretrievably lost in Spain when, in 1931, Alfonso was compelled to
abdicate and fled for the frontier. For two years after that date
the opposition to the Republican government came overwhelmingly
from the Church. Municipal election's in Spain gave a little more
freedom of expression than general elections, which have been very
corrupt ever since the Conservative-Liberal alternation of crops
began to flourish in the parliamentary field. It was a striking
victory of the republicans and anti-clericals at the municipal
elections of 1931 that caused Alfonso, after a fruitless attempt to
get the army to fight for him, to tuck his tail between his legs
and run. The urban or educated Spaniard's had voted against, him by
three to one, and it was only in the cities that voting was free
and the counting of votes honest. Even in a pro-Catholic history
like Professor E.A. Peers's 'Spanish Tragedy' (1936) we find it
admitted that there, was "gerrymandering in the country districts
on a large scale." It used to be of the pleasantries of Spanish
political life -- it is this kind of thing that gives the country
so many anarchists -- to work out the results of elections some
days before the election.
Two points about these events of ten years ago must for the
stressed for the purpose of this inquiry. The first is that during
four weeks after the popular triumph there were not even isolated
outrages. I was not then in Spain but I verified this in the
'Times,' day by day and that paper was on the alert for Red
outrages. The people knew the whole ghastly 'story of the alliance
of Church and corrupt monarchy which I have outlined and they had
just escaped from a seven years' brutal dictatorship which had been
in the closest association with the Church. Yet it was not until
the twenty-eighth day after the election that the burning of
churches and convents began.
The second point explains why groups of young workers here and
there, dodging the police (who made every effort to check them),
then began to burn convents and churches; a very shocking thing, of
course, but compare it to the official Catholic reprisals of
earlier years which I described. In the Spanish illustrated papers
I saw photographs of the young incendiaries politely conducting
nuns and aged priests away from the burning buildings. Well, the
fact was that Cardinal Segura, head of the Spanish Church,
supported by his three leading archbishops, had issued a most
vituperate attack on the new government and summoned the country to
resist. He started the myth which, ridiculous as it was, the
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Catholic press has repeated ever since, that in some mysterious way
a small minority of what he called "enemies of the Kingdom of Jesus
Christ" had won a majority at the election (when, under Catholic
about 12,000,000 votes were cast). This is still written in spite
of the fact that the election had been one of the cleanest that
Span had ever had; that in the cities, where there was little or no
corruption, the voting was three to one against the Church (Madrid
90,000 to 30,000; Barcelona, 90,000 to 28,000, and so on) and that
the Church won only in the smaller town's and villages where
"gerrymandering on a large scale" is admitted by admirers of the
Church.
Segura was driven from Spain by the national flame of
indignation, and he went to talk matters over with Pacelli-Pius at
Rome. The Spanish clergy remained free to agitate for the impending
general election, which was to ratify the verdict of the municipal
election; the establishment of a republic and the disestablishment
of the Church. The result of the general election showed that there
had been no snap-vote and no intrigue of a minority. The anti-
clericals -- Liberals, Radicals, and Socialists -- won 315 seats,
the clerical-royalists 121.
The new government entered peacefully upon the work of framing
a Constitution. The Church was to be disestablished and the annual
subsidy to it abandoned; the Jesuits were to be expelled and monks
driven out of trade; divorce was to be instituted and secular
marriage recognized; 27,000 new schools were to be built. The worst
sting was the confiscation of the wealth of the Jesuits and some of
the orders. A Catholic prelate who (like so many priests) detested
the Jesuits and the monks, Msgr. Jose Veleda de Gunjado, had shown
that the monks and nuns had in their hands two-thirds of the money
and one-third of the real estate of Spain, yet the state had been
paying the Church annually more than it spent on education. The
elections proved that, as Azana said, Spain "had ceased to be a
Catholic country", and this state of things was intolerable. Month
by month the clauses of the new Constitution were carried by five
to one in the Cortes. The country was quiet, except for the shrieks
of the clergy and their dupes. The progress in education attracted
pedagogists from many lands, the prosperity of the country began to
rise, a fair progress was made with schemes of social betterment.
This in all sober history, is the regime of savagery, of
persecution of the majority by a small vicious minority, about
which you read in Catholic literature.
II
ENTER FIRST AND SECOND MURDERERS --
UNDER THE PAPAL BANNER
I have now fully vindicated what I claimed in the first book;
that the Black International, instead of having disowned the
violent and bloody policy of earlier years, still pursued it in the
one country, apart from Poland, where it was able to do so. I was
in the Canaries, returning from Australia, just after the Church
and King had set up the brutal General de Rivera as dictator in
1923, and men showed me where the pavement had been reddened with
the blood of anti-clericals. I was in Spain next year and saw the
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country cowering under the Dictator and the clergy smiling and
richer than ever. This continued until 1931; and we saw that the
anti-clericals in spite of the red record of the Church clung to
their tradition of humanity in their triumph.
This makes it all the more necessary to inquire closely how
the country fell back into the clutches of the Black International.
You know the theory of the Catholic press; in fact, at the time the
theory of almost the whole American press. The Catholic nation, it
said, was roused to a consciousness of its enslavement by a small
Red minority, and Hitler and Mussolini merely helped it to express
itself. This is made more comical sometimes by calling the wicked
minority "Communists". The Spanish Communists were so small a body
that they had only one representative in the 300 deputies of the
Left coalition in the Cortes! I may add that they had leaders of
high culture and character and often rendered humane service during
the war.
If you want a common-sense view of the tragedy in a few words
consider first the composition of the anti-clerical coalition. Most
of the deputies returned to the Cortes were Liberals (145) and
Radicals or Radical-Socialists (56). It is one of the painful but
inevitable facts of the struggle of democracy since 1848 that
whenever such a coalition as this wins a victory it splits up as
soon as constructive work begins. Liberalism, which had to that
time a very fine record in Spain, was still very powerful in the
cities, but it now had to face, as allies, a larger body of
Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists, and Anarchists. These had
been brought up in a tradition of hatred of the middle-class, and
in any case a split on the proposal to pass even moderately
collectivist legislation was inevitable. And the more advanced
workers, full of the mischievous principle that the proletariat
needs no help from any other class, were by no means averse to
irritating the Liberals. Government became very unstable and was
often changed. The Liberals, we shall see, for the most part
deserted the coalition against the Church, and their leader,
Lerroux, a grand fighter (as friends of his told me) in the
nineteenth century, but now a weakling, is strongly suspected of
accepting Catholic bribes.
Further, the radical rump was composed of four mutually
antagonistic parties. The Anarchists, whose main principle was that
central government s always corrupt -- it always had been in Spain
-- and the Syndicalists, who wanted the chief functions of state
transferred to the unions (syndicates), would not vote at
parliamentary elections until it was too late. In 1934 a Socialist
government (or largely Socialist) had to crush a revolt got up by
these elements and the Communists. We shall see what happened, but,
while the existence of these masses of Anarchists and syndicalists
who did not vote makes the anti-clerical majority in 1931 even
larger than the election-returns make it, they were an element of
great danger until they agreed to form a Frente Popular (Popular
Front). It was then too late.
A third point is of almost equal importance. With that noble
un-wisdom into which enthusiasts have so often driven advanced
governments the Socialists prematurely granted female suffrage. Not
only were there in Spain 500,000 more women than men but Spanish
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Liberals had, for selfish reasons, made the same blunder as the
French and resisted the modern movement for the emancipation of
women. They left them to the priests; and the priests raised their
neurotic mixture of thwarted sex and religion to fever heat in 1934
and 1935. There must have been smiles in Pacelli's gilded chambers
when the "Bolsheviks" enfranchised the women. Woman's place is the
home, except when her vote is of value the Church.
Meantime the Catholics got a leader, Gil Robles, of just the
type that was fitted to take advantage of such a situation. Imagine
Hearst and a Jesuit rolled into one. The Church was then organizing
Catholic Action everywhere, or getting its lay members to do work
(intrigue, journalism, bribery, intimidation. etc.) which the
public might not allow the priests to do. Robles, Jesuit-trained,
robust and unscrupulous, was a newspaper-owner, and he introduced
a new strident note into Catholic papers. With funds supplied by
the Catholic millionaire, Juan March, and the Church, he began to
organize "Catholic Youth"; with a leaven of the sort of scum that
Mussolini had attracted in Italy and Hitler in Germany. People
began to hear of Falangists, which is much the same as Fascists, or
Soldiers. The prospect, of a fight gives pep to any creed.
In 1933 the Constitution was passed, and the government
appealed to the country; and a wave of enthusiasm swept over the
Catholic world when it was announced that the Right had won 207
seats, the Left only 99 (including one Communist), and the wobbling
Center (Liberals) 167. It was not explained that the Right now
included 150 Agrarians sent by peasants amongst whom the late
government had promised to divide the confiscated religious
property and had been too slow about it, or that women now had the
vote. Robles knew that there had been no change of heart, and he
worked harder and more unscrupulously than ever. He drew Carlists
and royalists into his camp and encouraged the kind of rowdyism
that Mussolini had found attractive in Italy. He won Lerroux -- one
hopes that it was not by money -- and the Liberals split. Against
the agreement of Liberals and Socialists three Catholics were
planted in the cabinet, and the more radical workers began to
collect arms to meet a Liberal-Fascist coup. Lerroux became Premier
and declared the country in a state of war, and the workers of the
north raised the flag of revolt.
It was the usual pathetic failure. Addressing a large meeting
organized by the Communists in London at the beginning of the Civil
War, I had to listen to one of the leading Communist speakers
predicting that the victory of democracy was certain, because she
had just heard that the government had served out rifles to the
workers. Rifles -- and to untrained men -- in an age of tanks,
planes, and big guns! When will such people cease to think about
the barricades of 1848 or even about the Russian revolution of 1918
with its unique conditions? The poor men made a heroic fight, but
Foreign Legionaries and Moors were brought over and the peasant-
regiments of the army on which the clergy could rely were used. The
chief result was to accelerate the withdrawal of Liberals and give
more color to the clerical cry of bloody Bolshevism.
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Still the Catholics were far from having won Spain. Robles
called for the execution of leaders of the revolt, and the
government refused. Very promptly, as we shall see, Spaniards of
great authority and integrity had established that the stories of
Red outrages were fabrications and that real and disgusting
outrages had been committed by the Moorish troops, the Catholic
Civil Guards, and even by religious communities. But Robles got the
post of Minister of War, and Franco, Queips de Llano, and other
tools of the priests, were appointed to commanding positions in the
army.
In view of the seriousness of the situation, all radical
parties, united in a Popular Front, and at the election of
February, 1935, they -- though it is evident that at least more
than a million Anarchists and syndicalists still refused to vote --
proved that the educated Spanish people remained, in spite of all
the scares, anti-clerical. Robles's Right coalition won 165 seats,
the Liberals -- those that remained republican and anti-clerical --
52, and the Left, 256. Azana, the able Radical-Socialist leader,
became Premier.
This last free expression of the will of the Spanish people is
important because not only Catholic writers, but the press and
foreign statesmen, generally represented it as a victory for the
Right. This was done by a sophistical, indeed dishonest, quotation
of the votes cast instead of the seats won. British statesmen often
gave this as an excuse for their scandalous protection of the
intervention of the Germans and Italians. The vote's cast for
deputies of the Right were 4,750,000; for those of the Left,
4,536,000. But apart from the fact that women now voted -- and aged
nuns were carried to the polling station in litters -- and that the
Right coalition included Agrarians and Liberals who hated the
Church but dreaded Communism, we have not only to add the Liberal
vote (340,000) to the Left votes as far as the Church is concerned
but to take into account its immense number of Anarchists and
Syndicalists who still did not vote. It is enough to say that,
although no election was ever more fiercely contested, of a total
electorate of 12,548,000, less than 10,000,000 voted.
Broadly speaking, in any case, it was a scare-election, like
that which put Hitler in power in Germany. There was no longer a
clear-cut issue on the question of supporting the Church. The
tremendous fall in the Liberal vote sufficiently shows this. It was
a popular slogan of Freethinkers of the last century and the early
years of this that the destruction of superstition is "the greatest
of all causes." But when the economic issue was raised it was
discovered -- in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Spanish
America -- that the defense of the chance to make a fortune (which
not one in a thousand had any effective chance of making) was a
still greater cause. Let not the opponents of "the bloody
bourgeois" crow. In most countries they made a similar blunder in
abandoning the traditional Socialist fight against the Church. It
was, they said, converted; and it smiles today over spacious
cemeteries of their dead. Reform has to be won by concentrated
movements, but they must be united in an ideal that all reaction
must die.
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These facts and reflections give the answer to the Catholic
cry, which was lamentably accepted in the world at large, during
the Civil War, that the Spanish people had repented of the hasty
enthusiasm of 1931 and 1932, or had discovered that it had been
duped, that the Franco-Mussolini-Hitler combine was a force of
liberation. The Spanish people did not vote on the same issues in
1931 and 1935, and they were in large part not the same votes.
There were the women, who had been left to the priests because this
was supposed to help to keep them chaste while their husbands had
mistresses's or frequented brothels, and there was a new generation
of voters of the age to which Robles and the priests particularly
appealed.
But the chief fact to bear in mind is that the election-
figures themselves testify that the country was still in the
majority anti-Papal. The 4,750,000 votes cast for the Church
candidates, swollen by seared Liberals, disgruntled agrarians,
credulous dupes of outrage-stories, etc., were little more than
one-third of the electorate, or of the adult Spanish people. And,
like Hitler's push in 1932, it was a supreme effort. Other means
had to be sought, and the forces of the Right began at once to
organize them.
The Catholic (and at that time general) theory is that, seeing
the tide flow against them, the Reds began to murder their
opponents and plunge the country in an anarchy from which it had to
be saved. We have just the same plea in the case of Italy and the
glorification of Mussolini as its savior, and Professor Salvemini
has patiently and thoroughly proved that it is a tissue of lies.
What exactly happened in Spain we do not know. The confusion of the
Civil War, which soon opened, prevented any dispassionate Study of
the events which had immediately preceded it, and we can no more be
asked to accept statements about those events which were made under
the Franco regime than we can be asked to pay serious attention to
Fascist legends about Mussolini's early struggle and his thousands
of Fascist martyrs.
But so much is reliably known that even Professor Peers, the
pro-Catholic author of 'The Spanish Tragedy,' speaks of "an
epidemic of murder by gunmen, for at least some of which there was
an uncomfortably and rapidly growing suspicion that Fascism was
mainly responsible (p. 195). The phrase is inimitably professorial.
In the two chief incidents which were made the pretext for the
revolt the evidence is clear enough. A group of leading Socialists
coming out of a building in Madrid were shot down by gunmen. Can
there be a moment's serious doubt to which party the gunmen
belonged or by which they were hired? This led to the retaliatory
murder of a Catholic Falangist leader, and we shall equally not
hesitate to judge to which party the murderers belonged. Frango at
once declared that the country must be delivered and organized his
mercenaries, the Moors and Foreign Legionaries.
Robles had got Franco appointed to the command in Morocco
where he had under his hand the force, which, as experience in the
revolt of 1934 had proved, could be relied upon to fight, and fight
brutally for its paymaster whatever the merits of the cause. In the
south of Spain, which is much more Catholic (largely for business
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reasons) than the Madrid and Barcelona regions, the command was
given to the brutal and fanatical Catholic Queipo de Llano, the
Spanish gentleman, who, in a broadcast from Seville during the war,
said that they would pound up the Bolsheviks to make mortar for the
rebuilding of the churches. As many more Catholic officers as
possible had been put in the higher commands in the army and navy.
Few of them had more military ability than Franco and de Llano, but
they were Catholic's, at least in profession.
This had been done while Robles, the friend of the Jesuits,
was Minister of War (May to December, 1935), a year before Franco,
on July 19, 1936, led his noble band of crusaders for the Holy
Faith, the half-savage and fanatically Moslem Moors and the scum of
the Foreign Legion, across the straits to the South of Spain, where
his fellow-conspirators waited, No serious writer hesitates to
conclude that it was done in preparation for a revolt against the
government and Constitution to which these Spanish gentlemen had,
and like Alfonso the Great, taken an oath of loyalty. The
government leaders, in fact said, when the rebellion broke out,
that they were fully aware of the plot and did not fear it. They
believed that the far greater part of the Spanish army was loyal,
and this proved to be the case in Madrid and many other places.
Their conduct seems feeble and incompetent unless we suppose that
they regarded a revolt, which they would certainly defeat, as an
opportunity to destroy the growing menace of the Falangists.
The early course of the war fairly justifies that expectation.
and one cannot say that they ought to have foreseen that Italy and
Germany would play the part of the First and Second Murderers.
Careful attention to Franco's pilgrimages to Berlin and Rome in
1936 might have warned them but we must admit that no one would
have expected France and Britain to look on placidly, and even give
most vital assistance, while German and Italian troops butchered
the heroic Spanish people and even, as in the bombing of Guernica,
coldly gave their airmen practice for the coming war on France and
Britain.
In the case of France Vatican influence counted very
materially. We shall see in a later book how close at this time was
the cooperation between the Vatican and what it called "the
government of Jews and Freemasons." For the shame and hypocrisy of
Britain's action, there is no excuse. The so-called Committee for
the Protection of Non-Intervention in Spain ought frankly to have
been called the Committee for the Protection of Intervention. The
very moderate supply of arms by distant Russia -- and even this
began only after the Italian intervention -- was made an excuse for
condoning the massive and indispensable assistance of Italy and
Germany. Nearer the truth was the plea that Mussolini "Could not
afford to see a Communist state established so near to Italy".
These French and British statesmen know now, to their cost, how
little they could afford to see a Fascist state created in Span.
But the plain truth which illumines the whole of that dark and
ghastly and stupid period of preparation, is that they did not want
to see a Socialist state set up anywhere, and, with all their
hypocritical professions, they murder the Spanish people, although
their Foreign Offices must have known that Communism was the
weakest element in the Frente Popular and there was no question of
following the Russian political model in Spain.
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III
SPAIN AND THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE
Whether or no Pacelli-Pius had from the start a further
intention than the restoration of the Church in Spain he clearly
saw it in time as part of a larger plan. For Mussolini, the
conquest of Spain was, part of his design of securing mastery of
the Mediterranean and cutting one of the main arteries of the
British Empire. For Hitler it was the removal of a possible menace
to his conquest of France and the possession of a bridge to Africa
when the time came to enslave the Italians as well as the French.
Blinded by their anti-Socialist zeal, no English statesman foresaw
this and realized of what enormous value to them in the coming
struggle against Fascism a democratic Spain would be. Pacelli
shared their "sacred fury" against Socialism, but the course of
events now gave him the plan of a bloc or League of Catholic Powers
by which he hopes to counteract Germany even if it is victorious,
and in any case to, in his own words, counterbalance the influence
of the American and British branches of his Church.
There is no need to wait for the tranquil post-war days to
get a just estimate of the action of the Black International in
Spain. Even if there were not a scrap of documentary evidence no
one with even an elementary of the Vatican and of modern Spanish
history could daub that the plot was concerted and carried out in
the closest cooperation with the Church, which would gain most of
all by the success of the revolt.
But there is plenty of evidence: not evidence of a secret
plot, but of the most open and enthusiastic support of the rebels
by the Spanish Church and the Vatican. There was nothing secret
about it. Whether Franco in his visit to Rome before the revolt
apprised Pacelli of his plans and asked the Papal blessing --
remember that this is just what the Irish rebels had done in 1916
-- does not matter. He was in the closest touch with the hierarchy
in Spain and as he raised the flag of revolt (and perjury) all the
Spanish bishops but three, who were in a delicate Position.
declared for him. Every priest and every convent welcomed the
rebels as they came along and helped them. It would be very
extraordinary if they had not done so, seeing that Franco came as
a crusader to smite the infidels, who, they said, had persecuted
them for five years. Catholics everywhere provided the mass of
traitors within the gates which has added a new term to military
literature: the Fifth Column.
But the Papacy or its Secretary of State very soon made a
declaration which identified it with the holy war from the
beginning. Bishops, priests, and nun, who had understood that
Franco and his had pious colleagues had corrupted the entire army
and had, in the expectation of speedy victory, declared themselves
prematurely, had to fly before the just anger of the people and the
government troops. It will be remembered that with all his Catholic
troops and Moslem fanatics, his jail-birds of the Foreign Legion
and his Irish Brigade, his Germans, and his Italians, Franco took
two years to conquer half of Spain: a very singular situation if it
were true that the anti-clerics were a minority. A large number of
bishops, priests, and nuns made their way to Rome, and on September
14, 1936, the aged them.
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The speech which was published, has none of the halting
senility of the Pope. It was a carefully-prepared address. lt would
in any case commit the Vatican to the side of the rebels as well as
the local hierarchy, but it is easy to recognize the accents of
Pacelli, to whose department the preparing of the address properly
belonged. It was this document written for broadcasting through the
Catholic to world, to which Pacelli was now appealing to work for
the extinction of Bolshevism in Spain, Russia, and Mexico. It was
published in England by the Catholic Truth Society with the title
'The Spanish Terror' and might be described as the bugle-call of
that war upon Bolshevism, which made the Church the intimate ally
of all the forces of privilege and of the vilest criminals in five
centuries of European history.
Frankly, though the press generally reproduced some of its
sonorous phrases with deep respect, it was ludicrous. "All that was
most fundamentally human and most profoundly divine" was being
trodden under foot. This is bad enough when we reflect on the
splendid human service that the Socialist-Liberal coalition had
rendered and the clerical Fascists have destroyed, but Some of the
priests and nuns must have had difficulty in refraining from
Smiling when the Pope included amongst the victims "the fruitful
activity of lives wholly dedicated to religion, to science, and to
charity." The morals of the Spanish clergy are notorious, but their
devotion to science must be a profound secret. All these holy
things were "assaulted, violated, destroyed" -- it reads like the
first sentence of a famous speech of Cicero's -- "in the most
ruthless and barbarous ways, in an unbridled and unparalleled
confusion of forces so savage and cruel", etc. There had been a
"satanic preparation" -- a perfectly childish representation of the
facts -- for "the flame of hatred and savage persecution" such as
the Catholic Church, and it alone, is so apt to experience. There
was, in fine, an attempt to "subvert established order of every
kind from Russia to China, from Mexico to South America."
The reader will not expect me to analyze this preposterous
stuff -- the Pope talks as if it were the anti-clericals Who had
revolted -- but he will reflect that it served Pacelli's purpose.
From the time of its distribution over the Catholic world and the
reproduction of its gorgeous phrases in the secular press it
prepared men to swallow every tale of Red outrages that the
Falangists cared to concoct; it made Catholics more blindly bitter
than ever against Russia; it put in a good word for the Pope's
Japanese friends; and it represented Hitler and Mussolini as
respectable crusaders who at great sacrifice, were striking a blow
for civilization. The Papal banner was the first foreign flag to
wave over Franco's diplomatic headquarters at Salamanca, and even
such ghastly massacres as that at Guernica did not receive a word
of disapproval. Catholic Portugal was encouraged to act as a
feeding ground for Franco's armies. American and British Catholics
poured their dollars or pounds into a common collecting box with
the bankers and stock brokers. Ireland and Poland -- pathetically
-- resounded with the slogan, "For God and Spain," and Duffy
pompously led his Irish Brigade to join the young English Tories
who were enlisted in a London hotel to serve under Franco. So mean
a disposition was create by the Pope's words that British Catholics
threatened to secede from the Trade Unions if the collection of
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funds for loyalist Spain was not stopped, and Catholic mothers in
some places compelled the Cooperative Movement to abandon its
humane plan of sending milk to the half-starved Spanish children.
The activity of British Catholics materially helped to sustain the
government in that ignoble surrender to Hitler and Mussolini by
allowing unlimited intervention, for which it has paid so dearly;
and they felt no misgivings when the Vatican, asked to join in the
French and British protest against the beginning of the bombing of
civilians, replied that it must avoid even the suspicion of
interfering in polities!
At the time when the drowsy Pope spoke about the satanic
preparation and the unparalleled outpour of barbarism, phrases
which were simply an expression of Pacelli's bitter disappointment
at the failure of the rebellion -- no one seriously believes that
it would have won without the Italians and Germans -- there had
probably been a lot of rough treatment on both sides. The Moors
were furious at winning so little of the promised loot; the Spanish
people were furious because the Church again resorted to bloodshed,
and against a government returned to power by the majority of the
people after the priests had called up every Catholic voter in the
Republic. Some day we may know just what was done, on both sides,
in violation of what are called the usages of civilized warfare. We
cannot expect to learn this from Spain as it is today, but if any
man imagines that the priests and nuns just went on serenely saying
their prayers until the "sadistic" Reds burst in upon them he must
take his information from novels and Catholic newspapers.
We are, however, not without helpful material. Two years
earlier there had been, as I said, a minor war of the same
combatants, and the Catholic press and much of the secular press
had given terrible stories of outrages by Socialists and
Communists, There always have been such stories since the French
Revolution, and Catholics, being forbidden to read the truth, still
cherish some of the picturesque lies -- like that of the prostitute
on an altar of Notre Dame -- told by the refugee priests of a
century and a half ago.
After the suppression of the revolt of 1934, Lord Listowel and
Ellen Wilkinson went to Spain to investigate the stories. of
outrages. I had a talk with them after their return. They had the
written assurance of the President of the Republic Zamora (a
Catholic) and the Liberal premier Lerroux, that the stories of
outrage's committed by the anti-clericals were false, and when they
went to the supposed locality of the outrages to verify this, the
Catholic authorities prevented them, and, on the absurd pretense
that their inquiry so infuriated the people that their lives were
in danger, rushed them to the frontier. But in Spain itself the
boot was rather on the other foot. It was the champions of the
Church who had committed outrages; the Moors, the Catholic soldiers
or Civil Guards, and in some cases religious brothers. These
stories of Catholic brutality were severely investigated on the
spot by Professor Fernando de los Rios, an ex-Minister of
Education, Senior F.G. Ordas, a Liberal ex-Minister of Commerce,
and the lawyer Alvarez del Vayo, and they were found to be horribly
true. They made independent examinations and, unlike the retailers
of Red atrocities, they gave full names and places in their lengthy
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reports. Mrs. Leah Manning has a digest of these three reports in
the appendix of her book, 'What I Saw In Spain' (1934), and she
tells how some of the stories of Red outrages were fabricated.
The best one can say, therefore, for Pacelli's scalding
rhetoric is that he had made no serious inquiry, but he inflamed
the entire Catholic world and so gilded the action of Hitler and
Mussolini in the eyes of the world in general that he is in a large
measure responsible for the failure of democracies to see what the
real and ulterior aim of those butchers was. On the other hand,
Pacelli, like every Catholic writer in the world, and a good many
others, perpetrated an utter absurdity and declined to notice it.
It is the contention that Spain is overwhelmingly Catholic, yet a
small minority of "satanic" folk carried every free election for
five years and held half the country for two year's against the
other half, and the fleets, air-fleets, tanks, and guns, of the two
most powerful nations in Europe! It is stupid to talk about Russia.
It did what it could, but for sheer geographical reasons it could
not do much.
Before the end of the war a reluctant press felt itself
compelled to speak admiringly of the heroism of the Spanish people.
Theirs, on the anti-clerical side, was a war of the common folk,
the workers and their wives and sons and daughters. They had no
mercenary foreign troops, for the French and British volunteers,
hampered in every way in their enlistment by their governments,
were comparatively very few, and there were still less Russians, as
was proved at the close. It was the people of Spain who held up the
Spanish, German, and Italian armies, backed by Portuguese Fascist
help -- that was why Franco had at once secured the Portuguese
frontier -- and British and American funds for two years. Yet the
same papers that told the story continued to repeat that Spain was
Solidly Catholic, though every loyalist soldier, every boy and girl
who helped them, was under the direst ban of the Church. And
Catholics continued, and continue, to drone about that remarkable
minority of Satanists who are supposed to have carried every
Spanish election for five years and then somehow contrived to get
the people to fight passionately for them for two years. The
miracles of Lourdes are pale in comparison.
Yet, in face of the most elementary common-sense, there is
hardly any lie that has been put out by the Vatican to cover its
policy of cooperation with crime and consecration of bloodshed that
has had a wider acceptance. I do not know whether George Seldes,
author of 'The Vatican,' is or is not a Catholic, but on this point
he beat the Jesuits, He says that there are only 30,000 non-
Catholics in Spain, and then he sees nothing to be explained in the
magnificent defense of the people of Spain under a shower of
anathemas from the Church! Then there is that quaint political
sport -- in the biological sense -- McGovern, the Catholic
Socialist Member of the British Parliament, the man who was chiefly
responsible for the abandonment of the anti-church policy of the
British advanced Labor; and his Church now gloats over the
destruction of Communism. He is supposed to have studied Spain on
the spot, and he is an honest man whatever you think of his
ability. He says that all but about one million of the Spaniards
are Catholics; which still leaves the tail wagging the dog for
seven years in a most mysterious way.
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Curiously enough the Catholic writer who comes nearest to the
truth is a Jesuit, the Irish priest, Father Gannon. In the 'Irish
Times' (January 23, 1937), he said that there are "ten or fifteen
million Catholics" in Spain. Apparently he thought it wise to admit
how far the corruption of the innocent people by the sadistic
minority (as the Catholic, Sir P. Gibbs deliberately calls them)
had gone. The phrase "ten or fifteen" is rather loose even for a
Jesuit, especially when you are thinking of millions. Let us split
the difference and say that the priest claims only about 12,000,000
Catholics in Spain out of a total population of 29,000,000. We get
near commons-sense at last, and we will not quibble with so
generous an admission. The only interpretation of Spanish life from
1931 to 1938 that is not completely ridiculous is that the majority
of the Spaniards had quitted the Church. That, means a loss of at
least 15,000,000 and fully explains the policy of the Black
International in that country.
The Church shared the spoils, in fact got most of them. It was
restored to the despotic and parasitic position it had had before
1931, and the tinfoil Dictator, the most ridiculous specimen of the
brood in Europe, awarded it an annual subsidy of 65,000,000
pesetas. The country was and is, half-starved, reduced to
international beggary, but the Church has always been willing to
overlook that misfortune of its supporters. From all sides the
priests called for the rebuilding of their churches, seminaries,
monasteries, etc., and this made a further drain upon the slender
public purse. The remains of the dissipated General de Rivera,
whose character, Ibanez, had so ruthlessly revealed to the whole
civilized world, were transferred with gorgeous religious and
secular ceremony to the Escurial, the palace of the dead Kings of
Spain. If the flimsy structure of the new dictatorship lasts long
enough I expect to hear of him being canonized. Many young ladies
in Madrid and Paris will be interested.
Naturally all the fine work of the Liberal-Socialist coalition
was destroyed. It is one of the gems of the Papal speech which I
quoted above that the satanic Reds destroyed science, whereas, they
had done splendid work in restoring science in Spain, and a child
would know that the rebels and their priests would ruin this. The
system of education which had drawn hundreds of students of
pedagogy from all parts was abolished. Manuals of history of a
childishly mendacious character were substituted for the excellent
text books and priests and nuns had the run of the class rooms.
Whatever dropped and withered there must be money for "religion."
So greedy was the Church that by the end of 1940 there was bitter
murmuring against the priests among the Falangists, and Franco was
compelled to defy the Vatican over the appointment of bishops. It
only required this "quarrel over investitures" to complete the
restoration of the Middle Ages. But the Vatican won, of course.
Without German, Italian, and clerical protection, the Spanish
people, low as they have fallen, would sweep away the perjured
adventurer and his popin-jay brothier-in-law in a month. The army
is divided and in large part ripe for rebellion.
And the 15,000,000 who had quitted the Church? Turn back to
the French girl's narrative which I have quoted. Tens of thousands
of the rank and file of them are taken out of vile jails to sing
hymns and Fascist chants with a whip raised over their backs, while
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the chaplain enjoys his bottle in the background. Hundreds of their
leaders who survived the war are buried like dogs. Still the firing
squads are busy all over Spain. The American Catholic must not read
these things. He is told that there are only 30,000 folk, who had
quitted the Church and they are "under restraint." He will find it
out when Fascism is destroyed and something more painful than the
"terrific propaganda" which Cardinal Hinsley foresees will fall
upon his Church in Italy. France, Portugal, Spain, and Spanish
America. The Pope knows it and stakes everything on the victory of
Fascism.
The Church linked Portugal with Spain in the Civil War. Here
again the record of the Black International is vile. To the middle
of the last century, Portugal had the same fate as Spain. A king of
disreputable character surrounded by fawning bishops, slew or
tortured tens of thousands of rebels against Church and feudalism.
But reform, or moderation set in earlier in that compact little
country than in Spain. When another disreputable monarch began to
play tricks in the early years of this century the middle-class
Liberals drove him out, set up a Republic and stripped the Church
of all its privileges. Then came the tragic dilemma -- feudalism or
Socialism, finance or freedom -- and before the specter of the down
the Reds, men took down their anti-clerical banners. Portugal
became a military dictatorship with the Church in full power once
more.
Under President General Cremona and Premier Dr. Salazar,
Portugal is what is humorously called a corporative state. The late
Pope, who knew as much about economics and sociology as a child in
a primary school does, gave the Catholic world one of those
Encyclicals which it admires so much, saying that Italy's
corporative state is the ideal for reconciling capital and labor
and honoring the Church. Naturally, you would not expect a
churchman to notice that this corporative state was a ghastly
failure, even economically, in his own country, Italy; that crime
was rising by leaps and bounds, and the schools were rotting. In
Portugal, where more than half the people are still pious,
illiterate, and densely ignorant, it was comparatively easy; and
the Jesuits, who had been expelled, were brought back to help. So
the corporative state was established. What did it matter to the
Papacy that, concentrating power over capital and labor in one pair
of hands, it was the ideal form of state for an aggressive
imperialistic dictator? Mussolini must have smiled.
We may take it that Pacelli was the chief author of the
Encyclical 'Quadragesimo Anno' (1931) in which the Pope summoned
all Catholic countries to adopt the form of the corporative state.
They were then a ragged regiment; Italy, Poland, Eire, and (more or
less) Hungary. To these Pacelli in 1934 added Austria and in 1935
most of the Republics of South and Central America. When he saw
Germany and Italy guaranteeing the success of his plot in Spain,
and Portugal had bowed to the Papal orders in 1934, he began to
dream larger dreams. He worked, we shall see, in Yugo-Slavia, to
prepare the way for Mussolini's legions and win at least a Croatian
Church for the Vatican. He courted France and encouraged the
Rexists in Belgium. His dream took the shape of a bloc or League of
Catholic corporative states, very docile to the Black
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International, spanning the planet, following Mussolini's
"victorious eagles" eastward, ready in time to check either a
German Nazi empire in north Europe or a democratic Anglo-American
combination.
IV
PAPAL COWARDICE IN ABYSSINIA -- AND WHY
The Catholic writer Teeling (The Pope in Polities) is
generally understood to have made a protest in the name of Catholic
democrats against the anti-democratic policy of the Vatican. He is
not very emphatic on any point except the Papal attitude to the
conquest of Abyssinia, and he is far from satisfactory on the
point. He says that Catholics "sighed in vain" for a Papal
condemnation of Mussolini's crime, but "the poor old man" was
content with a refusal to bless the war, as Mussolini pressed him
to do, or to restrain the Italian Church from blessing it.
It is something to have a Catholic writer admitting that all
the world condemned Mussolini except the Pope" (p. 130). The
Catholic press generally tried to twist vague Papal words into a
condemnation. But it is misleading to talk about the "poor old
man." Pacelli was the director of the Papal policy, and there was
nothing vague or evasive about it. For ages the Vatican has cast a
covetous eye on the Ethiopian Church. The existence of a branch of
Christianity which had as much right to call itself Catholic as
that of Rome and was equally Apostolic in its foundation, has
always been a challenge and a reproach to the Vatican, but it was
little use dreaming of getting the submission of the Greek Church.
At the Russian Revolution, we shall see, there was some hope of
inducing the atheistic new rules to sacrifice to the Vatican the
rich and populous branch of the Greek Church in that country, and
for Years the Papacy courted the Hammer and Sickle as eagerly as it
later courted the Swastika. The hope died, but the Vatican kept its
eye on such independent branches of the Church as that of Ethiopia.
This was the bait which Mussolini dangled before the Pope in
1934. By the "gentleman's agreement" he had made with the Pope in
1929, he had, he supposed, secured Papal support in advance for his
imperial adventures, but the whole world was so shocked in 1934 by
Mussolini's obvious preparations to attack Abyssinia, so disgusted
that his "invincible legions" chose the weakest possible opponent,
that the Vatican had to consider its position in America and
Britain. The solution of the difficulty was Pacellesque, if I may
coin the word. Let the Pope pose as a moral coward; a poor old man
who was bewildered by the sudden development -- so bishops said in
America -- and its menace, and let the entire Italian Church
boisterously support Mussolini and secure the unanimous support of
the nation. The Vatican tried at a later stage to explain the
situation by saying that the Italian hierarchy and clergy acted in
this as Italians, not as representatives of the Church, and there
were Catholics in America who repeated this miserable subterfuge.
As if it were not one of the very strongest claims for the moral
influence of the Catholic Church that on any moral issue it
sublimely ignores national limitations and judges them in the light
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of eternal principle alone! You might as well imagine the police of
Washington consorting with criminals under the window's of the
White House as the Italian hierarchy acting on so delicate an issue
without Papal instructions.
As to the Pope himself, which really means Pacelli, we will
not waste time discussing whether he condemned the war, especially
when we have Catholic writers saying that he did not, until someone
quotes a clear and verifiable word of condemnation. The editor of
the British Catholic paper (Catholic Times, July 17, 1936),
challenged by the Protestant Bishop of Durham, replied: "I grant
you that throughout these months of crisis the Holy Father has said
no word in favor of the League of Nations nor in favor of that
united stand against Italy, which was so much desired in this
country." Cardinal Hinsley, it is true, says in his Preface to
Rankin's eulogy of Pacelli, 'The Pope Speaks' (1940), that in his
presence the Pope, before the invasion of Abyssinia, spoke of "all
my efforts to prevent the barbarous tragedy." What a pity Hinsley
did not quote the words six years earlier and spare Catholics in
America and Britain so much pain and humiliation! And what a pity
Mussolini did not hear that the Pope was talking of his grand
imperialist design as "barbarous."
Cardinal Hinsley does not think it necessary to explain why a
Pope who privately thought the invasion of Abyssinia barbarous had
not one word of public condemnation of it. He could be very
eloquent on events far away in Spain, of which he could have no
exact knowledge and on events still farther away and more difficult
to check in Mexico, Russia, and China. They hurt the Church. But on
an outrage which was organized under his nose, a tragedy which was
so notorious that all the world except himself condemned it, he had
nothing to say as a world-oracle. It would hurt the Church if he
said it.
Once or twice he tried the tactics of that other famous
oracle, the ancient oracle of Delphi. On July 28, 1934, speaking
(domestically) on a saintly missionary who had worked in Abyssinia,
he glanced at the war-talk and said that he "hoped for peace,
truth, justice, and charity." On August 28th he had to address a
body of Italian Catholic nurses, many of whom were destined for the
war-zone, and he could hardly ignore it. He said, with a calculated
vagueness that Delphi never surpassed, that while folk abroad
described it as "a war of sheer conquest and nothing else", which
would certainly be an "unjust war", the Italian authorities said
that it was a war of defense against Abyssinian aggression and to
find room for some of Italy's surplus population (for which the
priests were even more responsible than Mussolini). He ended in a
mumble that God would find a way to a just peace. Italian Catholics
rejoiced that the Pope had endorsed Mussolini's motivation of the
war and we shall see that archbishop's declared it to be a war of
defense. American and British Catholics boasted that he had
denounced the war of conquest.
It occurred to some that if there is a particle of truth in
the Catholic claim for the Papacy it was the Pope's duty to go
beyond abstract principles which everybody recognized and say in
plain Italian whether Mussolini's enterprise, which had not the
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least ambiguity in the eyes of the rest of the world, was or was
not criminal. Pacelli therefore had an explanatory note put in the
Osservatore, (August 29) saying that surplus population was "not by
itself a ground of war", which left matters just as they were.
American Catholics felt that all the gorgeous claims that their
apologists had made for the Papacy were stultified, and Price Bell
of the 'Chicago Daily News' was instructed to get the truth from
the Pope's own lips. He wrote a moving four-page article on
"interview" in 'Liberty' (October 19, 1935), but had to confess
that he had not got a word on Abyssinia from the Pope. One gathers
that he had just paid the usual fee from $10 upward, according to
the size of the crowd -- to be admitted to a reception.
Pacelli knew that, after a little grumbling behind closed
doors American and British Catholics would, in their own interest,
submit to anything that the Pope said or did, so he let him pose to
the outside world as a moral coward and effectively satisfied
Mussolini by a glorious unity of the Italian Church in support of
the war. Professor Salvemini has collected the utterances of 7
cardinal archbishops, 23 archbishops, 44 bishops, and 6 archbishops
with titles abroad. It is almost enough to quote from the Papal
organ, the 'Osservatore' (August 22, 1935), the fact that from the
Eucharistic Congress at Teramo a telegram was sent to Mussolini in
the name of 19 archbishops and 57 bishops saying: "Catholic Italy
thanks Jesus Christ for the renewed greatness of the Fatherland
made stronger by Mussolini's policy." Will anyone suggest that the
dispatch of this telegram and the Publication of it in the Papal
newspaper were contrary to the wishes of the Pope and his vigorous
Secretary of State, the real and very despotic ruler of the Church?
The prelates continued all through the war to keep Catholics
-- and practically all Italians were now compulsory Catholic --
loyal to Mussolini. They gave a most unctuous consecration to a
shameful war of aggression, barbarously conducted, and openly
represented it as a gain to the Church. In a diocesan letter of
October 15, 1935, the Bishop of Nocera explained that Ethiopia was
uncivilized be cause it was not subject to the Pope and the war
would be a great blessing for it:
It is a People which, having became detached from Rome,
can cannot get full benefit of the Christian ideas: which has
not been able, therefore, to produce those beneficial
conditions to which the West of Europe owes its greatness.
Roman Catholic Italy has the duty of bringing to populations
deprived of them its principles of equity, charity, and
fraternity. We pray God that he should use Italy as His divine
instrument for the evangelization of the whole world.
One can say these things in a country where the Black
International controls education. A bishop ought at least to know
that until the 15th century the Abyssinian Church had had no
connection whatever with Rome; that submission to Rome was then
imposed from Portuguese as a condition of their help in saving the
country from the Moslem; and that it led to a grave demoralization
of Abyssinia and was fiercely rejected as soon as possible. And
note carefully the hope of the Black International that God will go
on to choose Italy to "evangelize" -- that is to say, bring into
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submission to the Vatican -- the whole world. We know how it was
evangelizing Abyssinia; with poison gas, bombing natives, and
massacre (as at Addis Ababa). The interesting point is the allusion
to Pacelli's growing Plan of a league of Catholic powers.
A fortnight before this the Archbishop of Taranto had said
Mass in a submarine and given an address to the officers and men.
They were, he said, fighting a war of defense -- was there ever a
more brazen apology? -- not conquest, and it would not only relieve
Italy of over-population and supply it with raw material, but it
would lead to "the expansion of the Catholic faith". It was
therefore "a holy war, a crusade". The archbishop was worse than
the bishop and the cardinal-archbishop, Sehuster, of Milan, bead of
the Italian Church was worse than the archbishop. Speaking on
October 28 he said, as quoted by Salvemin:
The Italian flag is at this moment bringing in triumph
the Cross of Christ in Ethiopia to free the road for the
emancipation of the slaves, opening it at the same time to our
missionary enterprise.
Apart from their lies about Red outrage one can at least
understand the action of the Spanish prelates in supporting Franco,
but these Italian prelates, the nearest to Rome and the most
rigorously controlled by the Vatican, consecrated the crime of
their dictator and their Papal Secretary of State with all entirely
nauseous mixture of greed for the country and greed for the Church.
I saw two of the picture postcards that then circulated in Italy.
One bore a map of Abyssinia showing treasures of corn, gold, oil,
etc., in different regions. The other was a tank taking a statue of
the Virgin to the Abyssinians.
So it was to the end. When, in May, 1936, the Italians entered
Abbis Ababa and Mussolini announced victory, the church bells rang
everywhere and the churches were illuminated and decorated. There
was one exception, St. Peter's. Its bells rang -- because peace had
come, of course -- but it was not illuminated. The fox retained his
cunning, and probably Mussolini grudgingly allowed that he had to
save his face as well as he could in Britain and America. It had to
suffice that the Pope blessed "the triumphant happiness of a great
and good people for a peace that will further and will initiate the
true European and world-wide peace" (News Times and Ethiopia News,
October 31, 1936), and that the bishops fell over each other in
hastening to congratulate the Duce and his "defence of Christian
civilization". Not a word was said when Graziani perpetrated one of
the foulest massacres of this foul period as when the butcher's
butcher-son published a book glorifying war as such and explaining
what fun it was to drop bombs on natives.
Italy did little for Abyssinia. Production fell, and a mere
title of the surplus population of Italy which was supposed to be
panting for room beyond the seas would go to Africa. The Italian
authorities made no haste to educate the natives, and such
industries as were set up were reserved for Italians. Abyssinians
were not allowed to become artisans. They were to be the hewers of
wood and the drawers of water. Make all allowance you like for
Italy's lack of capital, of which Mussolini had drained the
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country, but the truth cannot be obscured, Mussolini wanted only
two things: the "glory" of founding an Italian empire and a
backward country for Italian's to exploit. And in 1937, the
'Osservatore' announced, the Pope blessed this enterprise by
awarding the Golden Rose, the supreme honor that the Papacy has for
mere women, to the Queen of Italy as Empress of Abyssinia.
He had ground to do this. Whatever else Italy failed to do for
the Abyssinians it spent a vast sum in giving them the treasure of
the Papal faith. At government expense priests, monks, and nuns
were shipped out and chalets and houses built for them. There is an
account of it all in the 'International Review of Missions,'
(January, 1937, p. 103). The Vatican sent out a set of Ethiopian
type and a press, and Italian Catholic papers told how the natives
eagerly pressed for the good words. Protestant missionaries found
that they might as well pack up. Moslem and Christian had hitherto
shown a mutual toleration. Now they were set against each other
Whatever the state gained or failed to gain by the conquest of
Abyssinia the Church was determined to profit. All this, the
Catholic protests, follows inevitably from Catholic principles. So
much the worse for those principles; though we seem to have heard
a hundred times that the Church emphatically disowns the maxim that
the end justifies the means.
It is impossible to write these chapters on the action of the
Black International in Spain and Italy without irony and
repugnance, and many will find that it raises a problem about the
attitude of the American Catholic layman. As far as Spain is
concerned there is little to explain. His daily paper spoke of the
Reds probably in the same language as his Catholic weekly.
Bolshevism was growing like a poisonous plant in Spain, and
practically all the world wanted it eradicated. There was, it is
true, that intriguing paradox which I have discussed; how the Red
tail -- and such a small one -- had succeeded in wagging the
Catholic dog for seven whole years. But when there is a question of
smiting Bolshevism, you do not notice these trifles.
In the case of Abyssinia the situation was very different. The
whole world, outside Eire, Poland, and a few other potato patches,
condemned Mussolini, and the facts were not in dispute. Such
writers as Seldes and Teeling make it clear that there was some
dissatisfaction in the body of the Catholic laity, but the tone of
the Catholic press and the utterances of the hierarchy show that it
did not reach very far. Yet you find it impossible to believe that
the Catholic men and women whom you meet in business or at the club
or a friend's house, are so docile to their priests that they will
read without a shudder the shocking language of the Italian
prelates I have quoted, or be easily persuaded that turning
Oriental Catholics into Roman Catholics throws a mantle of justice,
if not nobility, over Mussolini's enterprise.
I cannot here go deeply into this matter, but I may make one
point. The relation of a Catholic to his priest is not the same as
that of a Protestant to his minister. Periodically he hears a
sermon on the priesthood, and the gist of it is that, if he accepts
the creed at all, he must regard the priest as something totally
different from any other minister of religion. The preacher insists
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that he shall not look to the priest as a man -- his intelligence
and even his character do not matter -- but to his office and
powers. He can turn bread and wine into God (in the Mass) and can
forgive sins. He has, whatever his personality, been endowed with
tremendous supernatural powers. You may find this difficult to
follow, but a Catholic is as strictly bound to believe these things
as to believe in God. That medieval superstition, on which the
Church still literally insists, is the root of the power of the
priests. That is why, for instance, they can do what no other
ministers can do, such as to forbid a Catholic to read any
literature that criticizes the Church or its teaching, and in this
way they protect the superstition which is the root of their power.
Catholicism is not a collection of beliefs. It is an organic whole,
and you cannot be a Catholic and question a single "article of
faith." If in addition to this you remember the tremendous hypnotic
force wielded by the Church, corresponding very closely to the
German boasting of Aryan blood or the Italian boasting of
Mussolini's infallibility you will begin to understand. But it is
not a case of "to understand all is to forgive all." Your
conclusion is more apt to be: Away with the whole damn lot -- to
give a rough translation of Voltaire's polite phrase.
V
THE JAP GETS A GOLD MEDAL FOR HIS
'CHINESE INCIDENT'
It is one of the consequences of this doctrinal mentality of
the Catholic that he can be persuaded to accept propositions which
to you and me look childish. I am, of course, speaking of the
general body of Catholics and am quite aware that you will meet a
man here and there who seems fairly liberal; though you will find
that either he is not liberal at all on these dogmas which the
Church, for reasons (as they are the basis of the power of the
clergy), declares indispensable, or he is a Catholic only
nominally. One such proposition is that the Catholic faith is so
unique, so profoundly important for this life and the next, that
when there is a prospect of getting further millions of men to
accept it, he, in spite of his having the same sentiments as we
have, agrees to wars, executions, imprisonments without trial,
compulsory hymn-Singing and jailers'
whips. After all, the Church has "the right of the sword" over
these people. That is an indispensable article of the creed.
A second proposition which is relevant here is -- this will
seem incredible to any who are not familiar with Catholic
literature -- that the Catholic accepts the belief, on which the
priests insist, that his Church is hated and persecuted by wicked
men with a rancor that other Churches do not experience. It is a
sheer legend, but very useful to the clergy. For the last fifty
years at least the Catholic Church has been treated by non-
Catholics with an indulgence, even an admiration, which has enabled
it to secure by intrigue, a power far out of proportion to the
number of its members in democratic countries. In Catholic doctrine
-- again indispensable doctrine -- a large part of the explanation
of this legendary hatred is the devil. Naturally he hates, and
moves bad men to hate, that which is holiest . . . I feel that I
ought to apologize for talking like this to educated men and women,
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but believe me, that is the ordinary Catholic mentality. And it is
in virtue of this proposition that Bolshevism is in the Catholic
mind associated with the devil, and he is ready to cry for its
extinction in Russia. Spain, and Mexico. You will not be so
churlish as to remind him that he is really calling for aggressive
war.
Hence the Vatican's beautiful friendship with Japan and
positive hatred of Russia. We will consider in a later book the lie
which is used to give an odor of sanctity to this hatred, the claim
that Russia persecutes religion, but by 1934, when the British
government had officially reported to the contrary, as we shall
see, any ground for a charge of persecution had disappeared. Yet
when, in that year, Russia applied for admission to the League of
Nations, the Vatican whipped up its representatives at Geneva to
oppose the application. I will deal at length with the matter
later, but it is necessary here to point the contrast. Pacelli
stirred every nerve to get a great civilization, which already had
the finest record in Europe of humane service and social
betterment, publicly insulted and represented as a nation far
inferior to Mussolini's Italy or Piludski's miserable Poland (which
was at the time very seriously persecution religion). On the other
hand, he drew nearer to Japan. Russia had long discarded the idea,
which some had had, of spreading Socialism by aggressive war. It
was, if only in its own interest, very earnest for the peace of the
world. But it was damned and vituperated by Rome. Japan was just as
clearly aiming at, indeed already engaged in, a disgraceful
aggressive war. The Vatican took it to its bosom.
The point arises here because just in that year there was some
prospect of war between Russia and Japan, and Catholics everywhere
loudly proclaimed that, should it occur, they would side with
Japan. "In the event of a war between Japan and Russia," said an
editorial in one of the leading British Catholic papers, (Catholic
Times, November 23, 1934) "Catholics would sympathize with Japan,
at least in so far as religion is concerned, so let us beware of an
Anglo-American 'bloc' against Japan involving us on the side of
Russia." These apologists for a bad case find it difficult to write
plain English. The editor obviously means that British and American
Catholics would hope on religious grounds -- that is to say, for
the profit of the Church in China and Japan -- to see Japan beat
Russia. We do not think less of sympathy with crime because its
motive is said to be religious. It is only one mare of a hundred
proofs that the interest of the Church, which always the means the
interest or profit of the Black International, is different from
and often opposed to the interest of the race.
In the second book I described the beginning of the alliance
of the Vatican with Japan. The country had just taken the first
step in a monstrous plan of aggression and exploitation which must
have been known in every Foreign Office in the world, and its
conquest of Manchuria was sternly condemned everywhere. The French
were, as we shall see, then playing a dangerous game, for which
they now pay so dearly, with the Vatican, and -- I quoted this on
French clerical authority -- the advised the Japs to apply to the
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Pope for recognition. As the idea was put to the Japanese by French
missionaries, you may wonder whether the initiative did not come
from the Vatican; but you will have to be content to wonder, as the
beginning of the negotiations is left in obscurity.
It was not difficult to persuade the Japs to apply to Rome.
Most of the educated and ruling men of Japan are atheists of the
type who regard religion as a very useful institution -- for women
and workers, In 1871, when the Europeanization of the country
began, they sent a large and unique deputation to Europe to study
Christianity and report whether it was a more 'suitable -- that is
to say, more effective in securing the docility of the masses --
religion to give to their people than Buddhism. Lafeadio Hearn
tells how their report on the influence of Christianity in its own
field was so poor that they abandoned the idea, but much water had
gone down to the sea since 1871. One change was that the Pope was
again a secular as well as a spiritual monarch, since Mussolini had
created the state of the Vatican City, and the mixture of small
sovereignty and vast international religious power gave him a
unique position.
We saw what happened. Even Pacelli dare not, while the whole
world was inflamed against Japan, pledge the Pope as a temporal
ruler to alliance with Japan, but he appointed a Vicar Apostolic
"to negotiate with the government of Manchukuo about religious
affairs." Other powers might sacrifice their trade-interests to
their principles by declaring that they would have no truck with a
bloody usurpation, but the interests of Catholic missions are too
sacred to be sacrificed for mundane considerations. Whether there
was an understanding that the Vatican promised to work to prevent
the League of Nations from applying sanctions to Japan, as it later
worked for the exclusion of Russia, we do not know. The Vatican
does not issue a Blue Book -- not even a Little Blue Book -- when
it has completed a deal. Few would trust the book if it did.
What we do know, however, is enough. The representatives of
the Vatican in Manchukuo and Japan worked so amiably with the army
and the government that by 1934 the French Catholic writer I quoted
was able to boast that "no Japanese prince or mission now passes
through Rome without paying its homage to the Sovereign Pontiff."
Incidentally, French trade in the East benefitted very happily.
American Catholics raised their familiar cry of libel of Holy See,
wicked suspicion, etc., when the growing intimacy was mentioned in
the press, and it transpired that the news had came from the
clerical officials (whose pockets are always wide open) of the
Vatican City pres's bureau that negotiations were in progress for
an exchange of ambassadors between Tokyo and the Papacy. There was
more indignation and surprise that people should malign Holy Church
so much; and on May 5, 1935, the Papal organ, the 'Osservatore,'
joyously announced that the Pope was sending a representative to
Tokyo and the Mikado sending an ambassador to the Papal Court.
You make short work of all the Catholic sophistry, about this
ominous development if you consider the run of events at the time.
The world at the conquest of Manchuria had evaporated. Trade-
interests had again beaten principles. Sanctions against Japan had
not been imposed, and the trading nations were on friendly terms
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with the Jap and willing to take his word, as they would take
Mussolini's word after Abyssinia and Hitler's word after Austria,
that absolutely no further advance would be attempted; while all
three adventurers were quite openly dangling before the eyes of
their respective peoples a program of conquests that promised
wealth to every class in the nation.
The case of the alliance of the Pope and his Yellow Brother"
was the worst of all. At the beginning of the century Count Hayashi
(Secret Memoirs, 1915), had written that "Japan must keep quite and
lull suspicion and wait her day; then not only put the meddling
powers out but meddle herself." After 1930, with the growth of an
aggressive Fascism in Europe and a general profession of admiration
of its efficiency, the Japanese concluded that they need not keep
quiet in their own country; they could not, indeed, if they were to
educate their people in the ground plan of dominating Asia. One of
the most spluttering firebrands was Yosuke Matsuoka. He had been
educated in America and was a Christian, so he was very useful for
lulling suspicions abroad, especially in America, but he was very
patriotic in Japan. Upton Close in his book, 'The Challenge,'
translates an article which Matsuoka published in 1933. It
coruscated with gems like this: "The mission of the Yamata race is
to prevent the human race from becoming devilish ... The one
nation not subject to the universal law of decline is that which is
ruled by a divinity and a permeated by the spirit of the Gods ...
the fated time has come to effulge its benefits to the world". Not
very Christian, but plain enough. At the following New Year,
Japanese stores displayed gorgeous paint-and-pasteboard panoramas
of Japan's coming victory, the sinking of the American fleet, etc.
This was the symphony of events which accompanied the
negotiations in Pacelli's opulent chambers in the Vatican. Let us
charitably suppose that in 1935, Matsuoka earnestly assured Pacelli
that Japan would not steal another acre of Chinese soil, that
Pacelli was simple-minded enough to believe him, and that the
highly favored Catholic missionaries in Japan did not report to the
Vatican that the entire country, including the Buddhist and Shinto
priests, was joyously chanting the national anthem of domination of
the East. A Catholic can probably believe that, although the
steeling of Jehol from China had already followed the stealing of
Manchuria. But in 1935 the sacred representative of the Papacy in
Tokyo would find it one of his first duties to report that, under
cynically mendacious pretexts, the Japanese were moving south over
China proper. By June, 1935, they had appropriated a further vast
area of China. In November, 1936, they tried to set up a puppet
government for five whole provinces besides Manchuria.
In short, from that day to this, it has been one long story of
conquest officially described in the most brazen language. It was
not a war, but an "incident" -- thus escaping the economic
inconveniences of a war -- it was for the "cooperative prosperity"
of China, Japan, Europe, and America, it was just a police measure,
and so on. And all the time it was exultingly represented in Japan
itself as the mere beginning of a career of conquest that would
enrich every class in the country. It was, further, a war conducted
with the full bestiality of the methods of the Pope's allies.
Brutality to civilians in actual fighting was supplemented by
brutality after conquest. The Chinese subjects were debased with
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dope and exploited mercilessly. Soldiers and officers used Chinese
women as Goths and Vandals had never used Roman Women. A Chinese
lady told me of an incident reported to her by her family in China:
an old woman in the occupied zone traveling from village to village
was raped six times in a few hours by soldiers of the nation which
is "ruled by a divinity and permeated by the spirit of the gods."
. . .
By 1941 the whole diabolical plan was clear. Japan's service
was to be to draw off a very large part of the Russian forces to
the East while the "crusade" destroyed Russia in Europe. We now
know -- if anybody required any evidence -- that the Russian
campaign was decided and plotted very early in 1941 after the
failure to reduce England by aerial bombardment or invasion, which
was originally intended to precede the attack on Russia. Matsuoka;
the Versatile was sent to Europe. He visited Hitler and Mussolini;
and the 'Osservatore' (March 31, 1941) told with pride how he
visited Pope Pacelli. Did he carefully conceal from Pacelli that
the war for the extinction of Bolshevism, the bloodiest war in
history, the most ardent desire of the Pope, was to be launched?
That Japan, besides its designs in Southern Asia and its bestiality
in China, was to help by destroying Russia and threatening to
intercept American supplies? Believe that if you can. the Vatican
organ tells us that at the close of their cordial interview, the
Pope presented Matsuoka with a gold medal; and Matsuoka declared in
the Italian press that his talk with the Pope was "the prettiest
moment in my life."
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