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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
**** ****
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 8
THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
HOW MUSSOLINI'S INVINCIBLE LEGIONS WERE BLESSED
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
CHAPTER
I No Tears Over Albania ................................ 1
II The Stab in the Back ................................. 7
III Greece, Not Being Romanist, Fights .................. 13
IV Catholics Hamstring Yugo-Slavia ..................... 20
V The Pipe-Dream of Mussolini and the Pope ............ 26
**** ****
Chapter I
NO TEARS OVER ALBANIA
Ten years ago that appalling greed which is the principal
dynamo of the barbaric energy that is wrecking the world expressed
itself in four plausible ambitions: those of Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, Imperialistic Japan, and the (spiritually) Imperialistic
Vatican. I say plausible because these ambitions were at that time
still restricted within such limits that they could be decked in
such pretexts (legitimate aspirations, racial unity,
overpopulation, etc.) as would provide a moral evasion for the
democracies whose real motive for inaction was the prospect of the
destruction of Socialism. Japan, which already had and openly
confessed an ambition to conquer and enslave all eastern Asia and
the islands of the Pacific hardly fits into this formula, but in
this series of booklets Japan occupies little space. We have only
to point to the fact, which may be verified in any work of
reference, that just when Japan began brazenly to exhibit its greed
and its callousness, the Vatican entered into diplomatic relations
with it which set the seal of a sacred cooperation upon its
adventures, and that on the eve (March, 1941) of the final, most
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
bloody, and most comprehensive extension of the conspiracy against
civilization the Pope gave a most cordial interview and a gold
medal to Japan's most crafty agent, Matsuoka.
Hitler ten years ago still kept his ambition within the frame-
work of Mein Kampf. The noble German race could not tolerate that
large bodies of its people should be in subjection to inferior
nations (Poland, France, Denmark, Czecho-Slovakia, Switzerland,
etc.) and must gather them into the Reich; and it was necessary for
the full and free development of this Greater Germany that it
should take the Ukraine from what the whole world then agreed with
him to regard as the disreputable and incompetent Bolsheviks. We
have seen how urgently the Vatican was moved by its own policy to
link itself with the adventures of Nazism. The German Catholic
Church was already the richest in the world, or tied for that
position with the American Catholic Church. It faced destruction if
it opposed the Nazis; it could expect an enormous increase of
wealth and power in the Greater Germany if it did not. Moreover,
the Nazis were bound to annihilate its deadly enemy, Socialism, in
Germany and, if they succeeded, in France and Russia. So the
present Pope, who knew Germany intimately and saw, as any schoolboy
could, that its program meant war at least with France and Russia,
and therefore also with Great Britain, helped the Nazis to attain
power and clung to them through years of shame until their prospect
of victory was dimmed by the heroic resistance of Russia and the
help of America.
All that, and how the Black International in Germany cheered
and blessed every ghastly extension of Hitler's greed when he
realized the incredible complacency of the western democracies, we
have seen. In this book I propose to consider in detail the
relation of the Vatican and the Italian Church to the Fascists: in
particular to the miserable adventurer who dreamed that he would
pass into history as the second Caesar and already finds his place
in it under the particularly odious name of the Jackal -- the
stinking, Blinking, cowardly beast that lets other beasts kill and
fattens on the corpses of their victims. This is the Pope's closest
ally and friend, the leader of the dreamed-of League of Catholic
Fascist powers.
In another booklet I have summarized the early career of this
gross type of adventures, the beginning of the Vatican's sordid and
venal alliance with him, and the way in which his first outrage,
the rape of Abyssinia, coincided perfectly with the ambition of the
Papacy to recover its control of the Ethiopian Church and was
effusively blessed by the whole Italian hierarchy while the Pope
remained tactically silent. From that time until 1939, the Jackal
got no pickings and saw himself sinking into vassalage to the more
powerful beast and his country despised throughout the world
without the compensation of plunder. Every meeting at the Brenner
or dash of his rabbit-brained son-in-law to Berlin was followed by
a harvest of glory and loot for Hitler -- alone. The warning in
Mein Kampf that Germany could never tolerate a second great power
in Europe was lost on him; and, while he joined gaily and coarsely
in every promise of clerical friendship which Hitler made to small
nations, to keep them quiet until he was ready to rob them,
Mussolini seems not to have reflected that Hitler's promises to
himself might be equally cynical.
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
During these years the Pope remained, we will not say on
cordial terms but at least in alliance with the treacherous
warmonger, and the Italian hierarchy and priesthood acclaimed every
step he took and every crude boast he made as enthusiastically as
the German bishops supported Hitler. Between the Mediterranean and
the frontier of Holland several hundred Catholic bishops and
quarter of a million priests, nuns, monks, and clerical agents did
what the Catholic apologist calls the beneficent work of his Church
in guiding the world, and almost without exception they were
servile in their flattery of the two dictators who were rapidly
dragging down Europe to the level of the savage. This chorus now
includes the bishops and priests of France, Belgium, and Holland as
well as those of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia,
Hungary, and Germany.
In the face of this situation the American Catholic plea that
we must relieve the Pope of responsibility for the action of local
hierarchies is seen to be ludicrous. One local hierarchy might at
some time be betrayed by its dread of offending its nation into a
morally indefensible position, and we should then expect the Papacy
to rebuke it as it rebuked the American bishops and archbishops in
1899. But here we have ten of the most important local hierarchies
of the Church united, under the eyes of the Vatican, for years in
praise and support of the worst evil that has befallen civilization
in modern times. Add the prelates and priests of the Latin-American
Republics and those who supported Japan in that country and China
and you have nine-tenths of the bishops and priests of the Catholic
world blessing corruption; and even in the remaining tenth many
speak very hesitatingly, if at all, for the cause of humanity and
civilization.
Let us distinctly understand that these priests and bishops,
encouraged by the Pope's refusal to censure or to break relations
with their brutal rulers, supported them in every step they took.
I have shown elsewhere that the whole Italian Church rejoiced
boisterously over the conquest of Abyssinia and that the Pope, who
is now said by Cardinal Hinsley to have called it a "barbarous
outrage", gave the supreme gift to womanhood of his Church, the
Golden Rose, to the Queen of Italy in her character of Empress of
Abyssinia. That easy piece of conquest had proved of great value to
the Church, but of practically none to Italy. The chief motive of
it had been the personal ambition of Mussolini to avenge a
humiliating defeat that the Italians had earlier suffered in
Abyssinia and to create something that he could call a Roman
Empire. One would not be surprised if he thought the Italian people
would in time put the purple mantle on his own shoulders.
Since that time he had waited impatiently for his share in the
Axis-loot, and at the beginning of 1939 he decided to add Albania
to the glorious new Roman Empire. In the midst of his preparations
the old Pope died and Pacelli became Pius XII. Partly in order to
obscure his alliance with the dictators Catholic writers have said
that Mussolini opposed the election of Pacelli. He wanted a
"religious" Pope -- a man who would attend exclusively to Church
matters and leave rulers and statesmen to act as they pleased --
not a "political" Pope like Pacelli. If anybody can point to any
act or word of Pacelli during the preceding ten year's as Secretary
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
of State which challenged Mussolini we might entertain the story.
There was no such act or word, except an occasional lament of
breaches of the Concordat; and these things never troubled
Mussolini or Hitler because they never weakened or disturbed the
loyalty of their local Churches. Papal policy went on without a
change. The man who had been the power behind the throne was now on
the throne.
As to the statement that the new Pope was greatly distressed
at the invasion of Albania, it is just one of those anonymous
extenuations of a Pope's blunders or crimes. Pius XII was crowned
on March 12 (1939), and the Italian troops crossed to Albania on
April 7. That date was Good Friday, and a pious churchman might be
annoyed at the choice; and a further possible annoyance was that
the Pope was busy preparing his beautiful Easter message on peace
which in the circumstances jarred on the ears of many. But it would
be sheer folly to suggest that the Pope did not know that Mussolini
was going to annex Albania. Month's of preparation are required for
an overseas expedition of half a million men with modern equipment.
At the very time when the Pope was crowned the tanks must have been
rumbling along the roads of Italy, and the men and material and
ships must have been gathering at Brindisi long before the date of
sailing. But to understand fully the relation of the Vatican to
that piece of imperialist filibustering we must know something
about the character of Albania.
It was little more than a word even to thoughtful people
before 1939 and was totally unknown to the millions. I confess that
I was myself surprised when, a few years earlier, one of the
pilgrims to my house, a cultivated and substantial young man who
was taking a post-graduate course at London University, told me
that he was an Albanian. An amazing illustration of the general
ignorance and lack of interest is seen in the Catholic
Encyclopedia, which was, of course, written many years before the
invasion. It gives estimates of the number of Albanians varying
from one to nearly two millions -- in a Supplement 20 years later
the figure is given as 850,000, which is not far wrong -- and says
that "the best of the population is Catholic." I may be wrong but
I doubt if the reader would understand from this that little more
than one-tenth of the population were Catholics, and that these
nearly all lived in a half-civilized condition in the mountains of
the north. The Catholic writer praises their virtue and then admits
that until recent time's they had a tradition of kidnapping
handsome Turkish girls and carrying them off to the mountains; but
I must add that they gave them the sacraments of (compulsory)
baptism and marriage before sleeping with them. The violent
passions that were displayed in their feuds were notorious
throughout south-eastern Europe. It was through these densely
illiterate and priest-ridden highlanders, the Mirdites and Shoshi,
that Mussolini began to engineer the "invitation" to him to take
over the country.
As the "conquest" was almost entirely won by bribery of the
Albanians and lying to their neighbors we should find the Vatican's
share in the responsibility comparatively mild and will not linger
over it. Briefly, Albania is an outlying fragment of the Turkish
Empire which in the fifteenth century took over the lands of the
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
old Greek Roman Empire. It lay on the very edge of the Greek world,
separated by a wall of religious hatred from the Roman world, and,
being in addition very mountainous, remained, like all countries
(Ireland, etc.) in that geographical position, very backward. The
Turks never quite subdued the primitive mountaineers of the north,
and they kept their Catholic faith all through the Moslem days. In
1939 there were about 700,000 Moslem in the country, 200,000
Orthodox (non-Roman) Catholics, and 100,000 Roman Catholics. The
Pope, as in the case of Abyssinia, looked to Italian rule to bring
under his control the 200,000 dissident Catholics and as many of
the Moslem as possible. One really finds it easier to believe that
the Pope on that Good Priday prayed very fervently for the success
of the Italian arms. And he had, as so often happens, a little
friend at court. The pretty Queen Geraldine was a Catholic, and
poor Zog little dreamed when he built a luxurious chapel for her a
few years earlier and gave her a suite of chaplains that soon he
would be flying over the hills with the crown jewels.
Here again the interests of the imperialist adventurer and the
spiritualistic imperialist neatly coincided. Mussolini, already
conscious that the leading burglar had altered his plan of dividing
the spoils -- Hitler to have Europe north of the Danube and
Mussolini all to the south of it -- wanted at least to make sure of
Greece and Yugo-glavia as a bastian of his Medeteiranean and
African Empire. Some say that he surprised and annoyed Mussolini by
his "conquest" -- it cost him the lives of 12 men of his invincible
legions -- of Albania. Not likely. He knew of Mussolini's
preparations, for Italy swarmed with his spies, and he says that
when the time came to attack Greece and Yugo-Slavia the possession
of Albania, a few hours' sail from Italy, would be a great
advantage to both. To say that the Pope was not in their counsels
seems, as I said, ridiculous. Within a week of his coronation the
Pope had a visit from Clano and on the following day one from the
Prince of Piedmont. A survey of some such summary of the world-news
as that in Keesing's 'Contemporary Archives' will show that the
relations of the Vatican with the Italian government were
particularly good that year. In December Mussolini appointed a
formal 'ambassador at the Papal Court, and the year ended with the
sumptuous visit of the king and queen to the Vatican (December 21)
and the rare event of the Pope taking his Christmas greeting in
person to the palace, (28) as I have elsewhere described. Albania
did not ruffle a hair of the Pope's head.
We must, as I said, take into consideration that the conquest
was practically bloodless, the way having been so thoroughly
prepared with gold. In 1915 the Allied powers, looking for bits of
territory with which to bribe possible supporters like Serbia and
Greece, had decided to cut up Albania. Italy had saved it and in
time made it a nominally independent kingdom. Mussolini's
"patronage" became so onerous and ominous, however, that King Zog
became restless and it was decided to evict him and open one of the
gates to Greece. Everybody will remember how Mussolini's shrewish
daughter and her popinjay of a husband, who fairly clearly fancied
themselves as future empress and emperor, had white horses in
reserve for their triumphal entry into Athens. Not less eagerly did
the Pope look forward to that event as the beginning of his
conquest of the Greek Church and other National Catholic Churches
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which scorned Rome's claim of supremacy. But it will be well to
postpone to the last chapter a consideration of the grandiose plan
of an oriental counterpoise to the influence which the wealth of
the great democracies was giving them in the Church.
We should, however, notice in conclusion that while the
conquest of Albania was almost bloodless, it was won by such
corruption and perfidy that the Pope's virtual blessing of it again
puts him in the gang. It was by a lavish expenditure of money that
Mussolini, the man who wrote that war alone enobles a man,
prevented serious resistance and induced the "notables" of Albania
to desert Zog and offer the crown to the king of Italy. This was
sordid enough, but the deception of Greece and Yugo-Slavia, which
were alarmed to get the Italian army at their frontiers, was
revolting; if we can find any sympathy for any statesmen in Europe
who believed a word that the dictators said after five years of
lying and repudiation of agreements.
Roosevelt had asked the pair of arch-criminals to sign an
agreement to refrain from any aggressive movement for ten year's,
and Mussolini had, with an air of pain and sorrow, refused to sign
such a document on the ground that it was an insult to suggest that
he might have any such intention. There was a more direct and
brazen deception of Yugo-Slavia and Greece. Every statesman knew
that Mussolini's imperialist program demanded, not Albania, which
was of little value except as a route to Greece, but the Yugo-
Slavian coast of the Adriatic, to the north of it, which had
splendid harbors (in which the eastern coast of Italy is very
deficient) and was part of the old Roman Empire. Italy gave a
solemn assurance to Belgrade that the annexing of Albania need not
give it the least concern. The Greeks knew that Italy coveted the
island of Corfu, off the southern coast of Albania, and they and
the British asked for assurances. They got them in profusion; --
and it seems a mystery unless you keep in mind always that Italy
and Germany were destroying Socialism for the capitalists of the
world -- believed them. On December 10 the Grand Council of
Fascism, Mussolini's chief mouthpiece, gravely announced to the
world that it was "the desire of Italy to 'see order and peace
maintained and consolidated in the Balkan and Danubian areas", and
this would be better promoted by Hungary, Rumania, Yugo-Slavia, and
Greece refraining from entering into Balkan defensive alliance
which Britain and France urged them to form. They consented, and
Hungary and Rumania -- both in close touch with the Vatican --
began at once to drift into the German sphere of influence.
Under shelter of this camouflage-screen of lies the two
dictators, sure of peace on their eastern and southern frontiers,
pushed on their preparations for the great spring offensive in the
west. The Pope professed to believe the protests of Mussolini and
his Grand Council. He ended the year, as I said, although it had
witnessed the ruthless destruction of Catholic Poland, in a quite
exceptional round of chaste Christmas festivities and issued his
biennial essay on the beauty of peace. As Hitler had not yet
approached the major clauses of his program -- war upon Russia for
the Ukraine and upon France for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. --
I leave to others the analysis of the Pope's mind. My own
suggestions would be malicious. But one fact stands clear of all
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
guesses and conjectures. He had never passed one word of censure on
the gross deceptions and cynical breaches of the assurances given
to the world by his allies in 1939. By that time the reassuring
documents signed or issued by Japan, Germany, and Italy and
brazenly repudiated by later action -- often a few months later --
would have papered a commodious dining-room. Never has the Pope
condemned that perfidy of his allies which was making international
faith a lost quality of the wicked nineteenth century or one
reserved to the "impious" Bolsheviks.
Chapter II
THE STAB IN THE BACK
It will be part of the puzzle of our age to the future
historian to discover why anybody was ever taken by surprise by any
of the terrible outrages that, occurred every few months. The
program, of the great international bandits had been before the
world for years, and Hitler's program included, and emphasized in
many chapters of his book, a war of revenge on France, the recovery
of Alsace-Lorraine, and the truculent statement that France was so
degenerate, so debased with Negro blood, that it must be blotted
out forever from the company of European powers. To plead in
extenuation that Hitler never permitted a full foreign translation
of his book is childish. Every foreign office in the world and
large numbers of journalists knew its contents. For such follies as
Chamberlain accepting the word of Hitler that he had abandoned
those plans, or the French accepting a similar statement in an
interview which Hitler gave a French Fascist journalist, or almost
unanimous silence of the world-press there is, as I have repeatedly
said, only one explanation: so eager were they all for the
destruction of Socialism, which Hitler and Mussolini promised, that
they mistook the knife of an assassin for the scalpel of a surgeon.
If that is difficult to believe think out, if you can, some other
explanation; and study the action of the bankers and industrialists
of France today who are actually cooperating in a New Order that
merely postpones their annihilation.
Whether the Pope was surprised by the war in the west I have
discussed in other booklets. I could at that time quote no
authority to support me in my suggestion that the Pope was fully
informed of the plot before even the invasion of Norway. I told,
from the Papal newspaper itself, how Ribbentrop was sent to see the
Pope a few days before Hitler met Mussolini at the Brenner to
arrange the date of his intervention and how the Osservatore
reflected the joyous expectation of the Vatican that a very
important agreement was to be signed. The only plausible theory of
this is that Hitler wanted the cooperation, which he got, of the
Catholics of Belgium and France, and that the Pope demanded so high
a price for his services that a month of hard bargaining followed.
But the Italian Church and the Vatican emphatically endorsed the
action of the Belgian and French Catholic traitors -- Leopold,
Petain, Laval, Weygand, and Darlan -- and the Church gained
mightily in France. Within the last week or two the 1940 volume of
the Annual Register has appeared and that weighty and quite
impartial authority says, drawing upon "Vatican sources", that
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Ribbentrop told the Pope that "German soldiers would be in Paris by
June and in London by August". This was on March 11, 1940. Shirer
confirms that some hard bargaining between the Vatican and Germany
went on at this time. He says that Msgr Orsenigo, the Nuncio at
Berlin "had been quietly paying visits to the Wilhelmsstrasse for
weeks" (Berlin Diary, p. 234).
The Catholic has the consolation of knowing that the Pope
sacredly guarded the confidence that was made to him. At least I
assume the Catholic will regard that as a virtue. Britain and
France had declared war on Germany and must have expected attack.
The Pope alone knew, outside a narrow Nazi and Fascist circle, that
it was to be delivered at that time and in that fashion, so that it
would probably be fatal to France. But he virtuously kept the
secret to himself. Some folk, looking back on all the horrors that
followed and confronting all the horrors that may yet come as the
treachery of Vichy deepens, may even say that there are more
precious things than virtue; or that the Pope's firmness on this
one point while he virtually encouraged his three allies in years
of deceit, corruption, and savagery reminds them of an earlier
moralist who rebuked a man for straining at a gnat and swallowing
a camel.
We will not suppose that Pius XII knew all the methods which
Germany had used in preparing France for its baptism of blood and
transformation into a real Catholic country. There were even anti-
Nazi folk who blamed me when I suggested that it used the sexual
attraction of women as well as the zeal of priest's and priest-
ridden folk. But it is still doing this. I have before me an
article in which a man who has just come from Portugal describes
how that country is being prepared for bloodless conquest. Amongst
other things he says:
"A social layer has also been imported, including many-lingual
Aryan titled women whose morals are at the service of the Fuehrer.
The line is to attract the snub element among the Portuguese"
(London Evening Standard, November 4 -- the most conservative
evening paper in Britain).
One wonders if this new type of "vice-squad" includes some of
the dainty aristocratic ladies who did such good work for Hitler in
Paris before 1939. Even those of us who are not puritans find this
method of preparing the way for "glorious victories" revolting. No
trick is too dirty for the Pope's allies, On the same day comes the
news that Hitler's men are castrating bodies of the finest youths
of Czecho-Slovakia and that they have 10,000 British uniforms ready
for treacherous use in the East. The priests follow up the Gestapo
to castrate what they call men's souls.
A second method in which the Vatican cooperated with Italy and
Germany in securing the success of the war in the West was by
continuing to denounce Soviet Russia. Whether or no Hitler really
feared that Russia would move in the Balkans while he was busy in
the west, it is a fact that he and Mussolini and the Vatican used
this suggestion to divert the attention of the Balkan powers from
their real danger and bind Hungary and Rumania closer to Germany.
All through the winter of 1939-1940, when preparations were being
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
made for operations in the west, the conduct of the Fascists was as
crooked and deceptive as that of Germany and Japan. Mussolini
bellowed about the peace of Europe and the threat to it from
Russia. His people were solemnly assured, as they had been after
the annexation of Abyssinia, that unless Russia struck all that
they had to do was to make economic profit out of Germany's war
with France and Britain. It was said that Italy even offered to
sell planes to France but Hitler forbade it. On the other hand when
Britain held up German ships carrying coal to Italy the Italian
press was let loose in full fury upon it. Perfidious Albion was
said even to be at the back of the Russian menace and the Russian
seizure of part of Poland and Finland.
It is fortunate that we have not here to attempt to
disentangle the apparent confusion of the first quarter of 1940,
with Germany an ally of Russia on the one hand and with Mussolini,
its bitterest enemy, on the other. We know now, of course, that the
Russo-German agreement was a sham on both sides. The real tragedy
of it is that a just, and honest, not to say friendly, approach to
Russia on the part of Great Britain and France would have prevented
this postponement of Russia's intervention in the war and might
have averted terrible evils and sufferings from Europe. Russia, it
is true, did not consider itself ready for war in 1939, but neither
had Germany one-half the equipment which it would have in 1941,
with the forges of Europe pouring out steel and the fields growing
food for it from Poland to Belgium, from Scandinavia to Spain. A
crucial factor in the whole horrible development is that hatred of
Russia which the Papacy had done even more than the capitalists to
inflame in every part of the world.
In March, as we saw, the Pope was informed of the plan to
invade the West which had been maturing all through the winter. We
must assume that in the course of the heated argument in which
Ribbentrop assured the Pope that the German troops would be in
Paris by June he explained that the great barrier of the Maginot
Line, on which Britain and France relied to an amazing extent,
would be turned by an invasion of Holland and Belgium. Whether the
Pope was informed also of the coming intervention of Italy we do
not know. The story was put out, by one of the very useful
anonymous purveyors of information in the service of the Vatican
that when Mussolini at length approached a declaration of war on
France the Pope wrote him a letter begging him to refrain (New York
Times, June 5). Professor La Piana observes that "if this letter is
not another fiction like the mythical letter supposed to have been
written in 1914 by Pius X to the Emperor of Austria, the Duce must
have thrown it into the waste-paper basket, for on June 11 the
heroic gesture of striking the nation already defeated by Germany
was made", and the Vatican adopted "an attitude of complete
reserve". There has never been an official claim that such a letter
was written, and just one month earlier the Duce had shown how
little he respected the Pope's wishes by peremptorily and
successfully ordering him to discontinue publishing British war-
news in his paper.
But Professor La Piana (of Harvard), writing in the Nation in
March, 1941, goes on to show how, whatever reserve the Pope
maintained -- for a week or two, let me add -- the Italian Church
supported the action of Mussolini with its usual enthusiasm. The
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American paper's which reproduced Roosevelt's description of
Mussolini's action -- "the hand that held the dagger plunged it
into the back of its neighbor" -- did not speak of the joy of the
Italian Church. As if to excuse the Vatican in advance the Rome
correspondent of the New York Times (June 12) quoted from Vatican
sources -- "semiofficial" this time it seems -- that "the attitude
and responsibility of the Vatican are entirely separate from those
of the Italian clergy and the Italian Catholics". If there was one
national hierarchy in the world that was strictly controlled by the
Vatican it was surely that of Italy; and, in fact, the Italian
clergy were as strictly pledged as the Vatican never to take part
in polities, These agreements of the Church to avoid politics seem
always to have the unwritten clause "on the wrong side". The
Italian Church went beyond the bulk of the people of Italy, who
notoriously did not want war, in cheering Mussolini, but, since the
papers of France, Britain, and America could be relied upon not to
reproduce the words of the bishops, that was safe and profitable
interference in politics. But the Pope's words would probably be
reproduced in every country so he must keep "an attitude of
complete reserve".
On Catholic theory, and in any case, bishops and priests no
more approve injustice than Pope's do, but I need only quote one or
two instances from Professor La Piana's article. On June 16 the
Archbishop of Gorizia exhorted his people in a pastoral letter --
one of several issued at that time -- to "lift reverent thoughts to
the ever victorious King and Emperor and to the undefeated Duce:
may God bless and protect him." Cardinal Schuster, head of the
Italian Church, visited soldier's in the barracks at Milan and
"distributed blessed medals to bring luck to the Italian armies".
The Civilia Catholica, which is almost as much an organ of the
Vatican as the Osservatore, urged the soldiers to "shed their blood
for the cause blessed by their religion." On June 27th, when France
was prostrate in the dust, thirty Italian bishops gave away one of
the reasons for their joy, and one that must have been very active
in the Vatican. They urged the Duce to "crown the unfailing victory
of our army" by taking the Holy Land from French and British hands
and putting it, on the religious side, under the Pope. This, they
said, would fitly express "the harmony between the civilized people
of Imperial and Christian Rome". The shrines of the Holy Land are,
I need not recall, almost as profitable as Monte Carlo, which was
to have been, he thought, one of Mussolini's rewards, but we will
consider the oriental policy of the Vatican in the last chapter.
Note the reference in the letter of the Italian bishops to
"the civilized people of Imperial and Christian Rome". The rest of
the world used very different language about their enthusiasm for
Mussolini's action. We should, it is true, not regard the whole
Italian people as approving it, but the above quotations show that
the Catholics of Italy -- and of Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Brazil,
etc. -- joyously supported it. In America and Britain the more
Papal Catholics followed the Pope's example of "complete reserve"
for every decent non-Catholic about them considered that this act
alone justifies us in calling Mussolini the Jackal. Some writers
say that he incurred the anger and contempt of Hitler by holding
off from intervention until France was mortally wounded. I prefer
to think that they were in agreement, but at Mussolini's
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suggestion. As a member of the diplomatic corps in Rome said:
"Mussolini does not want to fight a sick man: he wants to gouge the
eyes out of a corpse." Some such language was used wherever tongues
and pens were free, and non-Catholic.
To the last moment Mussolini had maintained his policy of
craft and deceit. He continued to fool Britain with trade-talks.
When, in May, Roosevelt asked for a declaration of his intention,
he declared that he had no intention of entering the war. It is
true that as Germany bowled over country after country his press
began to complain of the "ring of steel" that the British command
of the Mediterranean drew round Italy and hymns of hate even for
children, began to be heard. But Ciano, the Jackal's pup, still
thought he was fooling the British representatives with trade-
talks, though as Chamberlain had now given place to Churchill
probably no one was duped. At the beginning of June the World Fair,
which had until that date been announced to be held in Rome, was
"postponed", and the sailing of Italian liners was canceled. And on
June 10 Romans were summoned not by blare of trumpets but by cards,
to come to the Palazzo Venezia to listen to the final lie. He
declared that "Italy has done everything possible to arrest this
terrible war" -- which he had jubilantly arranged with Hitler at
the Brenner a few weeks earlier -- but must now face "the risks (!)
and sacrifices" which the wickedness of France and Britain forced
upon it. He added, as if he luxuriated in lying: "I do solemnly
declare that I do not intend to involve other nations in the
struggle" and expressly called upon Yugo-Slavia, Greece, and Turkey
to "take notice of these words of mine". Witnesses say that the
great body of the people who were in the square heard him and
departed in silence, and a gloom settled upon Italy. But the
church-bells rang, and the bishops hung their consecrated garlands
on the bull-neck of the brutal adventurer.
The Pope's "complete reserve" lasted until Petain sat firmly
-- I mean was held firmly by Darlan and Weygand -- in the saddle,
and Catholic papers all over the world, even in England (as I
quoted), rejoiced at the glorious state into which the "heroic soul
of France" had passed, if a little tarnished in the wings.
Socialism, Communism, Freemasonry, and Freethought, which for 60
years, to the deep concern of the Vatican, had kept four-fifths of
the French people out of the Church, were swept away by the German
flood. By a sudden change which any observer in Europe would have
pronounced forever impossible a year earlier the government was
solidly Catholic, and decrees which transformed the country on the
lines of the Papal encyclical poured out from Vichy. It looked as
if England was now surely doomed -- even in friendly America the
betting was against its chance of survival -- and the brutal
soldiers who had effected this marvelous recovery of the Church in
Spain, Czecho-Slovakia, Belgium, and France had made good their
boast that they would settle the map of Europe and Germany's
domination of it for a century.
With the recovery of France and Belgium the Vatican had, by a
swish of the German sabre, turned 40,000,000 "bad Catholics" into
"good Catholics -- into men and women who must hide the truth in
their hearts and lie (attending church, etc.) with their actions.
Think of Italy, Spain, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and South America.
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What a miracle of Church-growth Pacelli had witnessed since he had
taken office in the Secretariat of State in 1929! Or ought we to
say, what a stupendous recovery of Church-power he had effected by
his alliance with Mussolini and Hitler? Can anybody doubt, in view
of this outcome of the invasion of the West, that he had in fact
known in advance of the plan and approved, if not assisted, it?
Consider also the subsequent course of events in France. The
Germans used the armistice-conditions, to which Petain had
consented with an express, if childish, reliance on the "honor" of
the German commanders, with all the treachery and brutality which
were now a normal part of their behavior. "Armistice-commissions",
consisting of soldiers in mufti, gestapo men, engineers, looters,
etc., were sent to every part of the French empire to prepare the
way for the occupation which they had sworn they did not
contemplate. They plundered France, down to its door-knobs and
bath-taps, from Metz to Marseilles. With mocking courtesy they paid
useless paper for the silks and scents and wines of which they
stripped the stores of France to send to their wives and friends in
Germany. They appropriated half the food-supply, cattle, and
poultry and, while they gorged on them, told the half-starved women
and children to apply to America or draw upon French Africa, and
then took 60 percent, in addition of what was imported. They
brought vast numbers of their own women and children to feed on
France and to laugh at the humanity of British bombers who would
spare French civilian towns. They compelled the workers, under
threat of starvation, from Belgium to Bordeaux, to make munitions
for use against the only nation which was trying to deliver them.
But perhaps such matters cannot concern a Pope whose mind is
occupied with higher things; though we do seem to have heard of him
sending, when it suited the interest of the Church, Red Cross
supplies to the East. What else did the Germans do? They applied in
ten-fold force that brutal and immoral doctrine of Prussian
militarism, that ten innocent civilians must be murdered if one who
is guilty cannot be detected. The world was deeply stirred by these
batches of murder in fifties, but the Pope and the French bishops
were silent; and the priest-ridden Petitin was content to appeal to
the French people to "stop these criminal outrages against the
troops of occupation!" It is true that we get the usual
unauthorized report that the Pope protested through his Berlin
Nuncio, but we have grown a little cynical about these reports.
The Pope and the French bishops were still silent when Germany
pressed Petain to tear off the one rag of "honor" he had kept at
his surrender: his vow that he would never under any circumstances
hand over the French fleet or French ports in Africa for use
against Britain. Petain's Catholic colleagues are in favor of it,
and the prelates, the guardians of the honor of Catholic France,
are not interested. That is politic's. As I write the news comes
that a number of the common priests of France are stung to attack
their bishops for their cooperation with this corrupt and cowardly
gang at Vichy: a gang which, with German collaboration, uses every
device to spread hatred of England and may soon crown their infamy
by causing the ugliest and most revolting of all the evil
outgrowths of their policy: war between France and England. Already
Moslem writers in Turkey are commenting with cynical disgust on the
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prospect, which seems to them to open, of the fleet of Christian
Britain and America at war with the fleet of Christian France in
the Mediterranean; the prospect of a Church-ruled France spending
its blood on behalf of the power which has always been its
bitterest foe and under its present rulers is sworn to annihilate
France! In view of Hitler's repeated words about France and what he
is actually doing in Poland and Czecho-Slovakia one would very
seriously expect the castration of Frenchmen on a ghastly scale
when the war is over. And the Pope keeps to his policy of "complete
reserve" and permits (or directs) his Black International in France
to support cordially, because they are useful to the Church, the
miserable or stupid Vichy gang who thus betray the high honor of
France and the first principles of civilization.
Chapter III
GREECE, NOT BEING ROMANIST, FIGHTS
Mussolini was troubled by the disgust with which the better
elements in Italy itself regarded his vile conduct in regard to
France. His servile press attempted to excuse it by a campaign of
lies about France and Britain, while thoughtful folk still had
fresh in their minds the treacherous negotiations which he had
Ciano conduct with Britain until the last moment. The Black
International of Italy applauded his act with their customary
fervor, but we have the assurance of one neutral visitor after
another that the urban and better-educated Italians loathe him and
his entanglement with Germany, which alone now saves him from
destruction. From the year in which, for a heavy bribe, he
sacrificed his convictions and the dearly-purchased liberties of
Italy to begin the destruction of Socialism for the Church, throne,
and capitalism he has brought misery upon the beautiful land.
That is not rhetoric. It is a cold summary of the statistics,
published by the Italian government itself year by year and found
in any good reference-book to which we look for a more reliable
estimate of a country's social and economic health than we are
likely to get from political partisans. They show that Italy is a
land of poverty staggering under a stupendous load of internal
debt.
Two things only, apart from debt and crime, can boast of
growth in Italy under Mussolini: the Church and the Army. The
Church has incalculably more power and much more wealth than it has
had at any time since 1870. Through its cooperation with Fascism it
has acquired a supremacy which any educated Italian before 1929
would pronounce, whether he was Catholic or not, absolutely
inconceivable in modern Italy. It's medieval Canon Law, which was
regarded as dead, is embodied in the civil law and it controls
education. It has seen the deadly enemies against whom it was
fighting a losing battle -- Liberalism, Socialism, Communism,
Freemasonry, and Freethought -- fall under the blood-dripping
fascist axe. Small wonder that it loyally carries out the contract
of service which it signed in 1929 -- to use all its influence to
keep the Italian people obedient to their Fascist masters.
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You may have noticed little indications of secrecy, of hidden
motivation, in those references to British or American intrigues to
get Italy out of the war that one sees occasionally in the papers.
This furtiveness does not mean only that international capital
wants to be sure that Socialism will not, as Cardinal Hinsley
predicted, succeed to the power of Mussolini. It means that
American and British Catholics fear still more the consequences to
the Church of such a revolution. In no other country in the world
can Socialists chant with deeper historical sincerity: "Our Flag is
red with martyrs' blood." Some day they may be so wicked as to
retaliate. You see, they are without "the restraints of religion".
Mussolini thought that he could disarm the anger of his
freethinking Fascist follower's at this restoration of the medieval
powers of the Church by making Italy a formidable military nation
and restoring the Roman Empire. The second line of his original
appeal to the country, after the proposal to destroy Socialism, was
that Italy had been scurvily treated at Versailles because the
other powers regarded it as too weak to give any trouble. In point
of fact it had been treated more generously than its services in
the last war merited, but Mussolini soon found that if you roar a
lie loud enough it has the accents of truth. He has spoken and
written in praise of war -- any war -- more crudely than Hitler and
has demanded floods of babies to make great armies. Not that he has
any military ability. He never led anything but a mob with cudgels
against a weaker mob. It is a fiction that he was wounded in the
last war, and, while Hitler can certainly boast that he led the
start of the Nazi march on Berlin -- even if he has to liquidate
any man who recalls that he ran like a hare at the first shot --
Mussolini remained 200 miles away from the Fascist march on Rome,
until he heard that there was no shooting. However, the army,
acting with the throne and capital, had put him in power, and he
set out to drain Italy of its scanty wealth to equip his invincible
legions.
It is one of the most pathetic chapters of his story. In the
old democratic days when we used to argue whether a strong man
would not rule the state, better than the many-headed some of us
were willing to entertain the idea that, at least, he would be more
effective in the military field. Italian soldiers are as brave as
any but somehow they have written a sorry page of military history.
They will hardly boast of the conquest of Abyssinia, which reminds
us of a squad of gunmen firing into kids on the streetwalk,
especially as the upshot was to present the half-starved people
with a desolation, and now they have lost even that. In Spain on a
famous occasion they fled like rabbits before the Spanish workers.
In Albania they were even worse humiliated, and on "Our Sea," the
Mediterranean, their ships scurry to port at sight of an enemy. It
has become a joke that the Italians excel in all speed-records.
They wait until France is in agony to declare war on it; and they
then learn, when they ask for their share of the loot, that even
the Germans have a contempt for the military machine that Mussolini
has created.
So Mussolini, seeing his demand of Corsica, Savoy, Malta,
Tunisia and the Suez as far as ever from being satisfied, seeing
his new empire of sand and rock slipping away, decided to start on
Greece. He proceeded loyally on the lines of the New Order, the New
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Chivalry. We saw that when he attacked Albania he gave a most
solemn assurance to the Greeks that he did not covet and would not
try to get a single square mile of their territory. In September
(1939) he renewed this assurance in a diplomatic correspondence
with Athens. But after his cowardly attack on France and his
failure to get a single advantage from it he had to find some way
of restoring his prestige. Some writers suggest that he was jealous
of Hitler and wanted to show that he could win glorious victories
without Hitler's advice or help. Doubtless he had some such idea,
but he met Hitler at the Brenner on October 4 and quite certainly
discussed with him the war he was to begin only three weeks later.
In this age of "invincible might," when you want to smooth the
way for the legions as much as possible, you do not "declare war".
Some think that that is a practice of the Age of Chivalry, the
spirit of which has been suffocated by our modern skepticism and
materialism. Rubbish. The Middle Ages were a time of equal
treachery and brutality. It was in that dreadful 19th century that
nations used to give each other warning that they were going to
war, and it is precisely to the standards of the Age of Chivalry,
slightly adulterated with Nordic valor -- this may give three
hours' notice, during the night, that it is opening fire -- that
our Clerical-Fascist age has returned. It is true that since the
Italian people themselves had to be prepared, Mussolini got his
press to belch journalistic fire at the Greeks and writhe over the
"atrocities" the Greeks were committing; and as the Greeks had not
at that time any idea of the ease with which they could sweep the
Italians before them they nervously disproved the lies and tried to
disarm the wrath of Italy.
There was considerable strain but certainly no one thought of
war when the Italian minister at Athens sent out invitations for a
very festive reception of Greek ministers and foreign
representatives at the Italian Legation on the night of October 27.
If I here go into detail a little more than usual you will
understand what sort of thing it really was that the Italian
archbishops and bishops boisterously approved, as usual, and the
Pope did not recognize as deserving of censure. The dance was in
full swing when, at 2:30 a.m., the Italian minister politely
explained to his Greek guests that he must leave them for an hour.
All the Greek ministers were present except General Mataxas, the
Premier, and, as the Italian minister was absenting himself to
deliver a virtual declaration of immediate war on them one will
probably have to search long in recent history to find a parallel
to this infamy of the Pope's ally.
At 3 a.m. he presented himself at the house of General Metaxas
and handed him an ultimatum, of the kind Hitler had several times
delivered. It reaffirmed all the lies about atrocities and said
that unless the Greeks accepted this charge and handed over certain
strong strategic positions of theirs "to the Albanians" by 6 a.m.
(three hours later) they were at war with Italy! When Metaxas asked
what these strategic points were the Italian minister said that he
did not know. Thus do invincible legions, unlike effete
democracies, begin their wars. The invasion of Greece, which was
fully prepared, began at once; and the whole free world rejoiced
when, three weeks later, they heard that the Italians had been
swept out of Greece and were making for the sea.
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It sounds, perhaps, rather cheap to say: The Greeks, not being
Romanists, fight, I am, of course, thinking mainly of the contrast
with Belgium and France, not foolishly suggesting that Catholic
soldiers are less brave than others. But there is another aspect of
the matter, and it concerns us here. The treachery of Belgium and
France was, we saw, mainly due to a few highly-placed Roman
Catholics who are, to say the least, in very good odor at the
Vatican. In Greece there were no Roman Catholics in positions of
influence, and the support of the Vatican was entirely on the side
of the invaders. There was no Petain or Weygand to recommend the
abject surrender of the Greek army, no Level to corrupt the
politicians and induce them to listen to the traitors, no Darlan to
present the bitterest enemy of the country with its fleet, no
cardinal-archbishop to murmur to the people: God wills it. So the
Greeks fought, and with a heroism which surprised even those of us
who thought we knew them.
It will be convenient to reserve the Vatican's policy in the
East for adequate treatment in the last chapter of this book, but
a few words must be said here about its application to Greece. The
main Christian body in eastern Europe -- broadly, east of a line
drawn from the Adriatic to the Polish-Russian frontier -- and
nearer Asia calls itself "Orthodox Catholicism" and, whereas it
used to be ruled by the Patriarch of Constantinople, it has broken
into a number of national Churches (Serb, Bulgar, Rumanian,
Russian, and Greek). The name itself suggests that, as we shall see
later, the Churches differ from the Roman only in trifling points
of doctrine and, in fact, consider themselves more orthodox than
the Roman. When I say "trifling" I speak of course, as an Ishmael.
The chief point of difference, which stirs passions to white heat
and has led to the shedding of much blood, is whether Jesus (who
foresaw the 1700 years of bitter conflict) did or did not mean the
Roman bishops, when such a thing came into existence, to rule the
whole Church. The Greeks repudiated the claim as soon as it was
raised in the second century and have repudiated it, on every note
of scorn, anger, and disdain, ever since. And during the whole
period there was a corresponding eagerness at Rome to bring them
into subjection. By centuries of experience the Vatican knows that
argument is useless, since its claim rests on a tissue of lies, and
it has at all times looked to national disasters to compel the
orientals to compromise with their faith.
We moderns are inclined to regard these things as lingering
follies of the Middle Ages, like astrology or occultism, and
impatiently ignore them, but they are vitally relevant to the
question of the Black International and the War. As I will show
later, Rome has looked to the East more covetously than ever during
the last half century when the growth of the democratic element in
the Church owing to its position in the United States, the British
Empire, France, and pre-nazi Germany disturbed the essentially
oriental mind of the Vatican. I travelled extensively in Greece
about Seventeen years ago and noticed that the French, who were
then cooperating closely with the Vatican, were surprisingly busy
with indirect proselytism. Even in very backward Crete French nuns
had opened schools. The kind of education they gave was, of course,
ludicrous. There is in Candida a museum of quite exceptional
interest but when I ask one of these French-educated young women
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where it was, she said: "What is a museum?" It is a pure Greek
word, and she had lived within half a mile of this famous museum
all her life! The whole purpose of the education was to inspire
respect for France and the Roman Church.
How the French, under the direction of the Vatican, lost all
the ground they had gained, turned the respect of the Greeks into
hatred, and made way for the Germans, by helping the Turks to
defeat the Greeks I have explained elsewhere. Constantinople was at
that time under an International Commission. The Turkish troops
were fenced off a score of miles away, and Constantinople, without
any sort of real force or authority in it, lay open to the large
Greek army which I saw preparing to march upon it from Adrianople.
But the Vatican was very strongly opposed to the Greeks taking over
the ancient metropolis of oriental Christendom, as this would have
given the heads of the Greek Church a commanding position, in the
Orthodox world. At this time, we must remember, the Orthodox Church
was in ruins both in Russia and Turkey, and the heads of the Greek
Church were as eager to reorganize and control them as the Vatican
was.
Such was the situation in Greece before the war. The Vatican-
French treachery had made the Greeks more bitter than ever against
Rome, and in 1940 there were only about 35,000 Roman Catholics in
the entire population of 6,300,000. The Vatican now looked to Italy
to promote its ambition to secure religious control of the East,
and its interests so closely coincide with the greed of the
Fascists that we are not surprised that in this case we do not get
even one of those unauthorized claims that the Pope sent a letter
of protest to the King of Italy about the repulsive treachery of
the attack on Greece. He very studiously said nothing.
I am not in these booklets trying to drag in the Vatican at
every step. There is no need for straining the evidence or starting
suspicions. When we tell all the facts, as so very few papers or
writers do, we find that there is not a section of the world-
battlefield in which the interests of the Papacy do not coincide
with the aim of the brutal aggressions of the Axis. That is a
simple issue and easily proved. The recklessness of procedure is on
the part of Catholics who ask us to believe that, while there is in
fact this coincidence, the Pope is far too austere and mindful of
the interests of civilization to take advantage of it. We have seen
the opposite in every chapter.
But the hope of Mussolini and the Pope that Greece and the
route to Egypt and the East could be secured without the
intervention of the Nazis, who would as usual take nine-tenths of
the spoils, broke against the splendid spirit of the Greeks. On
November 18 Mussolini again summoned the Roman people to the
Palazzo Venezia and roared to them that his legions were marching
to victory. They were, as all the rest of the world knew, marching
-- and very smartly -- in the opposite direction and were beginning
to lose even Albania. One wonders what would have happened, and how
much the world-tragedy might have been shortened, if the Yugo-Slavs
had joined the Greeks at that time and the British had moved more
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swiftly and generously to their aid. A splendid barrier of
mountains stretched from the Adriatic to the Aegean, and what the
Greeks, Serbs, and British did with comparatively weak forces in
1941 shows what might have been done while the Greeks were still
fresh in 1940.
Am I going to drag in the Vatican here also? There is no need.
It is impossible to ignore its work when you consider all the
facts. It was the Vatican, acting, through the Catholic Croats and
in the closest association with Mussolini, that prevented, or
played a very important part in preventing, the unity of Yugo-
Slavia, which, after the expulsion of the pro-German Regent, was
effected too late to save the country. That we shall see in the
next chapter, but a few words must be said about the base conduct
of Hungary and Rumania -- and with certain reserves we must add
Bulgaria -- which enabled Hitler to move gigantic forces to the
very frontier of Greece and Yugo-Slavia while still protesting that
he sought only to maintain peace in south-eastern Europe.
Hungary, which has saddened it's admirers, of whom I count
myself one, by licking the jack-boots of Germany and lying down to
be trodden on by its troops in their treacherous march eastward, is
in effect a Catholic country, and its Catholic hierarchy has been
for some years in the closest touch with the Vatican. It therefore
lays no strain upon our judgment to find evidence of Roman
influence on its rulers.
The Magyars, a very estimable people and superior to the
Rumanians, Serbs, and Bulgarians by their long absorption of
Austrian culture, are, as everybody knows, of Asiatic origin, but
their subjection to Austria during centuries enabled the Roman
Church to capture most of them. Catholics are, it is true, only 65
percent of the population, but Protestants are only 35 percent, so
that the Catholic hierarchy has almost a monopoly of ecclesiastical
power, and this is significant in a land that is still
overwhelmingly religious. In the year 1937 the Church held its
great international festival at Budapest, and Cardinal Pacelli went
in person to preside, The fact that it is an unusual honor for the
Papal Secretary of State to make much a journey shows what interest
Pacelli had in the Church's policy in that country, and not even a
more solidly Catholic country ever received the Pope's
representative more ceremoniously. The dictator, the fleetless
admiral, Horthy, is a Protestant, but he lodged Pacelli in the
royal palace, and the foreign correspondents commented on the
cordial friendship that ensued.
It was the time when the simple-minded Mussolini's belief that
Hitler was leaving to him the control of Austria, Hungary, the
Balkan countries, and the Near East was being rudely disturbed.
Hungary, which had followed his model of dictatorship, had for
years looked to him. Now that Hitler had annexed Austria it had
reconsidered its interests and drawn nearer to Germany; and with
Germany Pacelli was, we saw, pressing hard at that time for an
ever-closer alliance. Horthy dragged his country into an
enthusiastic cooperation with Germany in the destruction of Czecho-
Slovakia; and the Vatican, we also saw, was equally interested in
that shameless outrage.
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For historical reasons into which I cannot enter here the
Magyars hated the Czechs as much as they hated the Russians, and
they would need little persuasion from Pacelli to throw open their
roads, rails, and river to the men who were going to crush
Bolshevism in Russia, which was the ostensible aim at that time of
Germany's thrust eastward. They hated also the Serbs, and in this
case no one who has travelled from Budapest to Belgrade over the
immense fertile country they lost to Serbia can fail to sympathize
with them; though the chief guilt must be allotted to the
Versailles Conference. When, therefore, Mussolini so pitifully
failed in his campaign to win Greece for Italy and the Vatican and
Hitler proposed to shift his victorious armies from France -- no
foreigners had hailed the miserable Vichy group more loudly than
the Catholic Magyars -- they strewed his route with flowers. The
first stage in the Papal crusade for the extinction of Bolshevism
in Russia was opening. We will, of course, not forget that Horthy
and his sleek supporters were just as anxious for political reasons
to see the central shrine of Socialism destroyed and that they have
made great profit by their alliance with Germany. Yet the
coincidence of the interest of the Church of Rome and its paramount
position in Hungary must be equally recognized. A few years after
the close of the last war, travelling through Hungary, I found the
Magyars looking to the British more than to any other country in
Europe. German gold and ecclesiastical intrigue have changed all
that.
Bulgaria and Rumania have, like Greece, very small and
powerless Roman Catholic minorities: 45,000 in 6,500,000 in
Bulgaria and about one million out of 15,000,000 in Rumania. More
than 80 percent of the inhabitants of each country belong to
national branches of the Orthodox Church which broke away from the
Greek Patriarchate at Constantinople in the nineteenth century.
Their interest from our present viewpoint is that they are sections
of that vast world of anti-Papal Catholicism which the Papacy hopes
to control through the victories of Hitler and Mussolini. I could
quote evidence from the Osservatore that there was much activity of
Rumanian and Hungarian bishops at the Vatican, but we will not be
tempted to exaggerate their influence.
It may not be without interest to the reader to point out that
the Black (Orthodox) International in Rumania and Bulgaria is quite
as bad as its Roman counterpart. In both, countries the priests
have been silent while, in the last ten years, the freedom which
the people had won by their revolt against Turkish rule has been
strangled by Fascism, and in both the great body of the clergy are
as gross as they were in Russia before the Revolution. I liked the
Bulgars better than the Serbs when I moved amongst them, but the
face's of the peasants in a crowd in which I was packed one holiday
are still vivid to me in their sheer animality. We hear of no
clerical protests against the appalling outrages these Bulgar
peasants have committed in the villages they have taken from the
defeated Serbs and Greeks. For decades they have given, unrebuked,
free rein to the most violent inter-racial passions and religious
hatreds.
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The leading authority on religion in this part of the world,
Stephen Graham, himself a devout member of the Church of England,
which has tried for years to outstrip Rome in getting reunion with
them, assures us (Stephen Graham's News-Letter, July, 1941) that
the Rumanian priests are as gross as those of Russia were in
Tsarist days, yet that they and their people were disgusted with
the political -- I would almost say Romanist -- subservience of the
higher ecclesiastical authorities. The picturesque Carol adopted
Fascism on Italian lines in 1939 and Nazism of the German type or
an iron tyranny, in 1940. He demanded and got the support of the
bishops. Graham says:
"Both clergy and laity were angered and disillusioned by the
subservient attitude of the higher ecclesiastical administration to
the misdeeds of the government, which, indeed, reached such a point
that the Church approved from the pulpit terrible murders and
horrors which had been unknown hitherto in the political history of
Rumania" (p. 3).
The Rumanian Church had so strongly supported the murderous
Iron Guard that the blackguards actually pressed it to canonize the
notorious Codreanu! This passage is taken from a religious news
sheet, the chief aim of which is to win an admiring interest in the
Orthodox Churches.
The Balkan problem -- the Balkan Cauldron experts have called
it for years -- is very complicated, and Versailles made it far
worse by its transfers of territory from one to another. All the
Balkan and Danubian countries feared Germany, but the fate of
Poland, and later Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium warned them
what to expect. They preferred the unheroic virtue of the Swiss and
Swedes who boast that they have kept out of the war. "Why should we
disturb you", a German recently said to one o these Swiss boasters,
"when you provide us with 4,000,000 slaves who feed themselves?"
Ingloriously their capitalists put on fat from war and food
supplies to Germany and close their eyes to what would happen if
Germany won. One thing only could have saved the Balkans: a loyal
and determined League. But the languid efforts of France and
Britain to secure it were mocked by the customary vigor, ability,
and unscrupulousness of the German effort to prevent it. Until 1940
this job had in the main been left to the Italians, and I have
shown how the Black International worked with them. This was most
notable of all in Yugo-Slavia upon which, and Greece, the armored
divisions of Germany now converged along the friendly route
provided by Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria.
Chapter IV
CATHOLICS HAMSTRING YUGOSLAVIA
The uncouth name Yugo-Slavia -- the land of the "Southern
Slavs" -- had to be coined by Versailles for the state, the bundle
of very varied and conflicting Slav provinces, which it created as
a reward for Serbia for its loyalty in the last war. It is true
that the overwhelming majority of the 14,000,000 people are Slavs,
but when you remember that the bitterly antagonistic Poles and
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Russians are both Slavs you smile at the idea that this slender
racial bond must make for brotherhood. Blood may be thicker than
water but it has no priests to chant its virtues. It is far feebler
than the influence of a creed in an illiterate and priest-ridden
population.
And Yugo-Slavia might be called a natural battle-ground of
creeds. The Serbs -- they dislike the common practice of calling
them Servians as the word is derived from the Latin for "slaves" --
the main body of the population and the highest (or least backward)
in culture, belong to a Serb Orthodox Church, a national branch of
the oriental Christianity which spread over Europe from
Constantinople to Russia and the Balkans. They form about half (48
percent) of the population but are the ruling class and have
certainly been autocratic in their treatment of the provinces which
were annexed to their kingdom by Versailles on the specious ground
that they were once part of the ancient kingdom of Serbia and their
people are of the same race as the Serbs. The real reason was, as
I said, that during the last war the Allied statesmen had made
lavish promises of territory to keep Serbia and Greece from
submitting to Germany. The Germans and Italians now, naturally,
posed as the redeemers of oppressed national fragments from "the
injustices of Versailles", and the Italians have inflamed the
rebellious feelings of the minorities (whose territory they wanted
for Italy) almost from the date of Mussolini assuming power.
But what concerns us here is that to the racial subdivision
there was added the far fiercer flame of religious hatred, the feud
of the Orthodox and the Roman Churches. On this the Italians
relied, and they had the very zealous assistance of the local and
the Italian hierarchy and the Pope. I have described the historic
line of separation of the Latin and Greek Churches as running,
broadly, from the Adriatic to the Russo-Polish frontier, which is
the general line, in the south, of division of the Latin and Greek
halves of the old Roman Empire. But the Latins always claimed the
land (Dalmatia) to the east of this which is now a province of
Yugo-Slavia and is as resolutely sought, on account of its good
harbors by the Italians. East of this again are the non-Serb
provinces of Monte-negro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Slovenia. These
became part of the Turkish Empire in Europe, and the population of
Bosnia is still mainly Moslem. But at the break-up of the Turkish
Empire in Europe they passed to Austria-Hungary, and, though they
hated it, its priests "converted" large numbers to the Roman faith.
It is in this northern fringe of Yugo-Slavia, from the sea to
Slovenia, that the 5,000,000 Roman Catholics, as against the
7,000,000 Orthodox Catholics of Serbia, live. You have a useful
analogy in the case of Irish Catholics being controlled by English
Protestants, but in Yugo-Slavia the Romanists were much nearer in
number to the Orthodox, and their next-door neighbor, Italy, was a
great power that had every interest in inflaming the religious
quarrel with the Serbs. Of late years the next neighbor, Hungary,
has also intrigued to recover control of the provinces, and its
Catholic clergy have been just as interested as the politicians.
The situation is, as will now be understood, very complicated,
and the kingdom of Yugo-Slavia has been so unstable since 1919 that
many experts predicted that the next European war would originate
there. It will be remembered that it was the assassination of an
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Austrian Archduke in that region which gave the Kaiser the pretext
for starting the war of 1914. What the experts and the papers
always hesitate to point out, however, from fear of Catholic
reprisals, is that the Roman Church was just as much interested is
Mussolini in detaching these Catholic regions from the rule of the
Orthodox clergy and bringing them under Catholic Italy and Hungary.
This intrigue naturally became more active as the Vatican
enlarged its ambition and began to dream of taking over the various
sections of the Orthodox Church itself. As we shall see, the only
difference in point of doctrine, the manner of the "procession" of
the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, is one of which these
illiterate masses cannot have even the glimmer of an understanding.
I doubt if you would get even one in 10,000 educated American
Catholic's to give you an intelligible idea of the dogma. The hard
core of resistance is to the Pope's claim of authority, and this is
not a matter of argument. Count Sforza tells us in one of his works
that when he spoke to the Serb Patriarch about the Roman attempt's
to effect a union that prelate replied: "There is only one obstacle
-- the vanity of the Bishop of Rome". In such cases Rome has always
found political power much more effective than persuasion.
Mussolini was put in power by the army and the capitalists of
Italy in 1924, and it was part of the program by which he had won
a large and empty-headed following of ex-soldiers that he would win
that part of Yugo-Slavia of which, he said, the Versailles
Conference, had cheated Italy. Very widespread unemployment had
followed the demobilization of the army, and the unscrupulous Duce
easily traced this to the evil conduct of Versailles. Italian
intrigues on the other side of the Adriatic was doubled after the
infamous bargain of the Vatican with the Fascists in 1929. By 1932
there were bloody riots against the pro-Italians in Yugo-Slavia,
and the religious element in the intrigue was so obvious that in
1933 the Jesuits and certain congregations of nuns were suppressed.
For the last ten years, in fact, the bitter quarrel of Croats and
Serbs which did more than anything to weaken the defence of the
country has been so patently religious as well as political that
the leading authority, Stephen Graham, an Anglo-Catholic, says
(Stephen Graham's News-Letter, March, 1940) of the struggle of the
Croats: "This is a Catholic movement and has to some extent
affinity to Rome and Budapest." He later explains this "affinity"
to mean that the movement was subsidized by Roman and Hungarian
gold, and he declares that half the bitterness is due to the feud
of the Roman Catholics and Orthodox Catholics: in other words, to
the greed of the rival branches of the Black International for
wealth and power.
Into the maze of Yugo-Slav politics which arose from this
situation I must not enter. Suffice it to say that the Serb
government, which was more than half-Fascist, relying on electoral
corruption and a muzzled press, was violently assailed by a
combination of Serb radicals and agrarians with the Catholic
Croats. This gave the Vatican an opportunity for one of those
underhand interferences in politics which, though heatedly denied
by Catholics at the time, transpire by the dozen in later history.
Just as the Church had offered to sell -- to procure in return for
advantages to itself -- the docility of Irish Catholics to England
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and of Polish Catholics to Germany, as we read in the official life
of Leo XIII, or as it offered to keep the Alsace-Lorrainers docile
to France, so it would use its Black International in Croatia to
damp the fires of the agitation if the Serb government would grant
its requirements. Pacelli was now Secretary of State and the
characteristic author of this proposal.
All through history the Papacy has made these secret
agreements with monarchs, while its local priest's posed as ardent
supporters of the people's patriotism. It makes a mockery of the,
parrot-cry that the Pope never interferes in politics. Political
activity is turned into a pure moral duty by recalling to the
people, when it is in the interest of the Church, such texts as
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" or "Be ye subject
to the higher powers." It is the duty of the Church to enforce the
words of Jesus and Paul.
The Concordat was secretly signed by Pacelli and the heads of
the Serb government in 1935. It gave the Roman Church a number of
new bishoprics and raised some bishops to the rank of arch-bishops.
It authorized priests to give Roman Catholic instruction to their
children in the public schools and undertook to enforce legally the
promise of an Orthodox partner to a mixed marriage that all
children of the marriage should be Roman Catholics even if the
Orthodox parent repented of having given the promise. It even
embodied in the civil law the provision of the Canon Law that a
Catholic priest could not be condemned in the ordinary civil court
for certain grave offenses. It was a monstrous price to pay for a
promise that the Croat and Slovene and Dalmatian priests would be
ordered to drop their political encouragement of the rebels and use
their influence to cheek the agitation. When, in fact, the terms
leaked out there was such widespread indignation that the Serb
government dared not present the Concordat to Congress for
ratification. The Croats themselves realized that it was an attempt
to sell their patriotism and resented it. When at length, in 1937,
the government, seeing the gathering gloom in Europe and the need
for political unity, presented to Congress a Bill based upon the
agreement with the Vatican, there was a procession of bishops and
priests through the streets of Belgrade, and the Holy Synod
excommunicated the Premier and all who voted for the Bill.
The Concordat was never ratified but these facts will be
enough to convince any man of the justice of the title of this
chapter. Even when autonomy was granted to the Croats in 1939 the
religious feud continued. The situation of the country gave the
greatest concern in spite of the soothing assurance's of the pro-
German Regent. Austria had gone and the fatal wound been inflicted
on Czecho-Slovakia in 1938. The black shadow of German militarism
crept nearer, and the statesmen of the western democracies hugged
their policy of appeasement like little girls hugging a pretty
doll. Mussolini struck in Albania, and Hitler completed the
destruction of Czecho-Slovakia and began to talk about Dantzig.
Schacht, Germany's economic wizard, came to Yugo-Slavia and bound
it to Germany by arranging a monopoly of half its trade. Yet, in
spite of the reiterated statements of Italy and Germany that Yugo-
Slovia was not in the least danger the wiser of its statesmen saw
through the trickery and tried in vain to unite with Hungary,
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Rumania, Bulgaria, and Greece for self-protection. There were
nominal adhesions, but signed and sealed international compacts
were by this time a dollar a dozen in Europe. German penetration
increased. The invasion of "tourists" went on, and the Fascist
Regent Paul advised the formation of a complete Corporative State.
I must confine myself here to the share of the Black
International in prolonging the period of discussion and weakness
until it was too late to save Yugo-Slavia. The leader of the
Catholic Slovenes was, like the leader of the Catholic Slovaks in
Czecho-Slovakla, a political priest, Father Koroshits, and he was
so open a Fascist that he got himself appointed Minister of
Education in the Serb government. The Croats continued throughout
1940 to agitate for independence and began to look to the Germans
as deliverers from the tyranny of the Serbs. When, in April, the
Germans occupied the Croat provinces and they declared themselves
independent of Serbia, the declaration was followed by a band
playing "Deutschland Uber Alle's" (Annual Register).
The war was as repulsive in its beginning as all other
enterprises of the leaders of that New Order with which the Church
co-operates everywhere. Too late the Serbs realized the treachery
of the Regent and dismissed him (March 29, 1941). Germany and Italy
(which had been effusive in its professions of friendship
throughout 1940) fabricated the usual atrocity stories and posed as
the saviors of the poor down-trodden minorities. Historians will
one day raise a question of the sanity of this age of ours. Who,
they will ask, could be deceived by this trickery after four or
five un-scrupulous uses of it? Why make any excuse at all if you
mean to violate international law by deceiving your opponent until
the last hour? What can be the mentality of men who think that
neutrals must not say a word about the vile and unprecedented
outrages they commit because they blandly describe it as "total
war"? And what shall we say of bodies of Christian clergy and their
bishops who will not even whisper that their "total war" is just a
reintroduction of savagery into warfare and who excuse their own
cowardice or self-interest on the plea that they are prevented by
their sacred office from interfering in politics?
The blow was launched on April 12. There are military expert's
today who wonder whether Hitler did not make a fatal blunder in
engaging in the very costly campaigns in Yugo-Slavia and Greece
instead of advancing upon Russia in the spring: which is equivalent
to saying that he had not even the shadow of a military excuse for
his ghastly treatment of the two small countries. Certainly they
would not have deserted their neutrality if he had pushed on to
Russia through Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. If the plan was to
level a route to Turkey and the East it has obviously miscarried.
However, we are here concerned with the share of the Black
International.
There have been men and women of honor in all ages who have
refused to accept any profit or advantage from a dishonorable act.
The Papacy and the Black International never did. They at once
consolidated their gain in respect of the first of their aims: the
detachment of the Catholics of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slovenia.
Croatia was relinquished to the Italians who created a kingdom for
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one of their princes and let the Roman Church get busy everywhere.
So brutally was the work done that the highest authority was
conferred on a man, Anton Pavelitsch, who was notoriously a leader
of a gang that specialized in the kind of murder that is politely
called assassination. A French court had found him guilty of
implication in the murder of King Alexander and had sentenced him
to death. He had escaped and lived under the protection of Italy
until the day of his usefulness to Italy and the Church arrived.
Under this Catholic ruffian the Romanist priests at once
entered upon the same kind of brutal coercion of members of the
Orthodox Church as the Polish priests had conducted in the Galician
Ukraine. In November a British paper that is usually careful not to
offend Catholics, the News Chronicle, reported as follows:
"Four bishops and 100 priests of the Orthodox Church at
Noshia, Croatia, have been murdered, it is stated. The Patriarch
Gavrilo has been ill-treated and imprisoned in a monastery at
Belgrade, and the Archbishop of Zagreb has been whipped and
banished to Belgrade. The Serbian priests have been replaced by
Bulgarians. The Hungarians also are stated to have hanged a number
of priest."
This news gets through because not a word in it suggests to
the general reader that the Church of Rome is responsible for these
murders. In the light of the explanations I have given my readers
will have no difficulty. They will readily understand that the
Bulgarian priests who were substituted for the murdered Orthodox
priests were certainly not priests of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church
which is as hateful to the Vatican as the Serb Orthodox Church.
They were Bulgar Roman priests who had to be brought in because the
Croats are bitterly opposed to Italians. Notice also the reference
to the Catholic Hungarians. Only a few months before Hungary had
signed a pact of lasting peace and eternal friendship with Yugo-
Slavia. Now its priest-ridden peasant soldiers behave like savages
to the Slavs who belong to the wrong Church.
I, as, I said, do not drag in the Church. You cannot lift a
corner of this veil of tragedy that lies upon Europe without
finding its ministers there, and always on the side of the Axis and
its Catholic satellites. The Church, Catholic papers and orators
tell you, is, and must be, neutral. Isn't it a singular thing that
wherever we turn we find it supporting the forces of barbarity and
drawing profit from their victories? A strange neutrality! The
plain truth is that it is neutral, and very scrupulously neutral,
only as regards the support of the forces that in the name of
civilization are trying to cheek the hordes of savagery. But we
shall see this more plainly if we devote a chapter to the
coincidence of the aims of the Church and those of its White
Knight, the Italian Jackal.
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Chapter V
THE PIPE-DREAM OF MUSSOLINI AND THE POPE
My experience in lecturing to skeptical audiences in Britain,
especially when questions are invited after the lecture, is that no
part of my message to them is so apt to be challenged as my
indictment of the Roman Church. I very commonly find myself
contradicted by Freethinkers, sometimes lecturers or writers on
Freethought, who try to persuade the audience that from the
circumstances of my earlier life my knowledge is less broad than
theirs or that I have a "complex" in regards to the Papacy. They
are apt to protest, with an air of superior knowledge or
liberality, that "one Church is just as bad as another." How any
man can say anything so stupid when, as even school-children know,
the Church of Rome adds a score of absurd doctrines (confession,
indulgences, transubstantiation, etc.) to those doctrines which are
common to all the main branches of the Christian Church and most of
these doctrines are notoriously medieval fabrications for the sole
purpose of enhancing the power of the priests it is difficult to
understand. But the man who protests that he means that all
Churches are equally bad in practice or in their mischievous
influence on life betrays how scanty and superficial is his
knowledge of history and his analysis of contemporary life,
The general public, relying for most of its information upon
a press which is compelled by Catholic influence to suppress large
numbers of facts of vital importance, can be excused for ignorance
of the particular mischievousness of the Black International. That
religion is of great importance in maintaining the standard of our
civilization is a cliche of modern editorials and is unfortunately
stated too often in recent sociological manuals; and to this is
very often added a special tribute to "the venerable Church of
Rome", its "august head", and its international organization of (on
the latest claim I find in a Catholic Directory) 360,000,000
Catholics. Hence such charges as I here bring against the Black
International seem to a member of the general public strange and
strained. He had understood that it was just a question whether the
Pope could or could not be expected to censure Hitler or Mussolini,
and, in fact, that the Pope had frequently censured the former. I
have shown that in ten years of increasing menace to civilization
the Church has never censured either of the master-bandits except
when they refused to carry out their promises to itself, but it is
far more important to realize yet almost totally hidden from the
general public that the ambition of the Papal Church coincides in
a remarkable manner with the ambition of the arch-murderers and
fully explain its cooperation with them.
This has appeared at each step we have taken in the present
booklet, and it will be well in conclusion to make it our direct
theme for a few pages. The ambition of the Black International
coincides in two directions with that of the gangsters who
terrorize half the world today. The first point is that the Papacy
deeply desires that, extinction of Socialism which Fascists and
Nazis have accomplished in a score of countries and promise, if
their armies are victorious, to accomplish everywhere. I have shown
this, and will further enlarge on it in a booklet on Russia. But I
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would remind the reader how this consistent and essential policy of
the Vatican is only a continuation of the policy of violence it has
sustained since it acquired power in the fourth century. From the
reawakening of Europe in the twelfth century to the French
Revolution it has had millions of victims; and of the half-million
unarmed men and women who have been put to death for demanding
democracy in the state and freedom of discussion in religion
between the French and the Russian Revolutions all but a few
thousand were done to death by Catholic authorities cooperating
with and instigated by their priests. That fact alone makes a
mockery of the foolish cry that "one Church is as bad as another".
And if the leader will recall the facts I gave in the first and
second books of this series -- that Catholic countries almost alone
support the enemies of the human race today, that they are
themselves on the Pope's recommendation or approval practically all
Fascist, and so on -- he will have a much clearer understanding of
the world-situation. But I have space only to deal with the common
aim of Mussolini (and now of Hitler) and the Pope, and this again
is to a great extent rooted in Rome's real hatred and dread of
democracy.
In their survey of the conflicts of national aims during the
last hundred years historians very commonly use a German phrase
(Drang nach Osten), to express a fundamental cause of clashes. It
means "the drive to the East" and, since what we call the Far East
is shut out from the horizon of European powers by the vast
wilderness of eastern and central Asia, it means an urge to expand
south-eastward in Europe: the lure of the sun, the blue sea, and
the warm fertile lands that the Greeks felt 3000 years ago, that
led even Napoleon into a rash adventure, and that has been an
important factor in European polities ever since. Germany at the
close of the last century impelled Russia to adventures in the Far
East (and its first clash with Japan) so as to divert its ambition
from Greece, Turkey, and the Near East, which Germany itself
coveted.
Mussolini's dream of restoring the Roman Empire necessarily
included this expansion. He began, we saw, by dangling before the
eyes of the more thoughtless Italians a promise that he would get,
by war a few provinces (Dalmatia, Corsica, Malta, etc.) that ought
to belong to Italy. When he saw how supinely the western world
tolerated the growth of his army and his ambition he dreamed of
becoming an Augustus or a Diocletian. The Roman Empire once spread
over the Balkans, Egypt, and Asia Minor as far as Persia. The new
eagles of the new invincible legions would advance along the same
routes.
What concerns us is that the Papacy even more cordially
supported him in his larger and more mischievous ambition than in
the earlier. The Vatican was little interested in the transfer of
Dalmatia, Savoy, and Corsica, which were already Catholic, but the
dream of an Italian Empire such as Mussolini now imagined was a
very different matter. Just such a dream had fascinated the Vatican
itself for nearly a century. It was called the reunion of the
Churches, but the Vatican knew from painful experience of the
futility of its missionaries that it would accomplish nothing
without compulsion. It had in recent years an emphatic assurance of
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this. The Poles, as I explained elsewhere, took over several
million Orthodox Catholics in the provinces which Versailles took
from Russia for them, but argument about the supreme position of
the Pope was found to be entirely useless and the most savage
persecution had to be employed to persuade some of them that the
Pope is the real Father of All Christians.
Greek and other oriental Catholics had, as I said, for the
most part repudiated the Pope's claim ever since it was fabricated
in the second century, but Rome had never despaired of securing
their submission. By the Middle Ages these easterners were so
hardened in their anti-Roman faith that argument was useless, and
the Popes had to look out for political opportunities. Thus
Innocent III, the greatest of the Popes, promised to overlook the
appalling behavior of his Crusaders in the thirteenth century --
instead of going to "the Holy Land" they took Christian
Constantinople and robbed and desecrated its churches -- if they
would secure the submission of the Greek Church to him. When the,
Turks in the fifteenth century swept over the Greek Empire and the
Greeks appealed to the Pope to rouse Christendom to a new Crusade
he tried to make it a condition that the Greek Church should first
submit to him. The Turks mastered the whole of the Greek empire and
for several centuries suspended communication between East and
West, but when, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the
Turks had degenerated -- that is to say, their Sultans and ruling
class degenerated, for the Turkish people were as robust and decent
as ever -- while the peoples of Europe got modern armaments and
detached province after province from the Turkish Empire, the
ambition of the Papacy revived.
It was then that Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia won
their independence of the Turks and the higher clergy in each
decided, in harmony with the patriotic movement, to declare their
independence of the Patriarch at Constantinople (the Greek Pope)
and set up the national Greek (and Russian), Rumanian, Bulgar, and
Serb Orthodox Churches. Since no such thing as a Church, much less
a supreme head of the Church, is contemplated in the New Testament
-- the text about Peter and the Church is, of course, a late and
ridiculous interpolation -- they had the right to do so, but we
should understand that it is just these rival ambitions of the
higher clergy in each country that prevent union. The Roman Church
likes to call it "reunion" but the Churches were united on the
basis of Papal supremacy which Rome declares essential. The
statement on the subject in the Catholic Encyclopedia, that in the
early ages all churches in East and West acknowledged the supremacy
of the Roman bishops is the high-water mark of "Catholic Truth",
for it is exactly the reverse of the truth. In doctrine there is
only one major point that divides the Latin and oriental Catholics,
and no one but a trained theologian can understand the verbiage in
which the difference is expressed. According to the Latins the Holy
Ghost "proceed's" from (but is co-eternal with) the Father and the
Son, but according to the Greeks from the Father only. Ask the most
cultivated or most zealous of your Catholic friends what that means
and, if you do not give him time to consult his Encyclopedia -- ten
to one his priest cannot explain it -- yon will be entertained.
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This break-up of the Turkish empire and of the spiritual
kingdom of the Greek Pope stirred the Vatican to a new hope. Leo
XIII began 70 years ago to make preparations for the conquest of
the eastern Churches, of which only small fragments here and there,
called Uniates, were subject to Rome. Benedict XV resumed the work
in 1917, when the Turks were hard pressed by the Allies, and the
late Pope Pius XI took a most ardent interest in the work. Special
colleges and sections of the Congregation of Propaganda at Rome
prepare priests for the great work of taking over. But the Vatican
is aware that there is not the least prospect of winning the
easterners by argument and it, as in all previous ages and as in
the "reunion" of its tens of millions of apostates in Italy, Spain,
France, and Spanish America, bases its entire hope of a spiritual
conquest upon a political or military conquest of the Balkan
countries and the Near East by some power with which it has an
understanding. There are in these countries, apart from Russia, to
which I will devote a special book, about 50,000,000 Catholics and
only about 7,000,000 of them acknowledge the Pope. It is, surely,
now as plain why the Pope never condemned the brutal invasion of
Greece and Yugo-Slavia as why he never condemned the treatment of
France.
The British Catholic writer W. Teeting (The Pope in Politics)
gives another reason, and it is sound, though American Catholics do
all in their power to suppress it. He says of the late Pope (whose
policy the present Pope inspired and continues):
"The Pope is himself temperamentally more interested in the
question of Reunion with the Eastern Churches and with conversions
in the mission field. He had hoped during his Papacy to arrange
such a Reunion with the Orthodox Churches so that the growth of
democratic Catholicism in the New World would be counterbalanced"
(P. 3).
It is not a question of the temperament of any Pope -- for
that matter Pius XII is far more aristocratic than Pius XI was --
but of the permanent policy of the Black International, and it is
misleading to place so much stress on the New World. Teeling points
out that the New World or America has come in the course of modern
developments to have 400 Catholic bishops against 650 in Europe and
says that the Vatican fears that this democratic New World may come
to have the majority. That is misleading because the great majority
of the 400 American bishops are in the Latin Republics -- there are
only 140 in the United States -- and they dread democracy and
loathe Socialism (its inevitable offspring in Vatican eyes) as much
as the Pope does. At the very time when Teeling wrote his book they
were cooperating with the secular authorities in a truculent
suppression of democracy in nearly every Republic of South and
Central America, and we know how they loathe it in Mexico.
Look at it this way. There are still about 280 bishops in Ital
and more than 150 in France, Spain, and Portugal, and they, like
the Spanish-American bishops, have cooperated in the complete
destruction of democracy in their countries. The Catholic bishops
of Germany and Belgium have done the same. But the Vatican has no
hope of seeing an anti-democratic attitude in the 320 archbishops
and bishops of the United States and (except Quebec) the British
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THE POPE AND THE ITALIAN JACKAL
Empire, for it would ruin the prospects of the Church in those
countries if they let it be known that it is anti-democratic. They
must even toll the grotesque lie -- since the Church obviously
supports Fascism in every country where it has power -- that the
Pope loves democracy and Catholic principles are in perfect harmony
with it; What the Church loves is the gold of democracy -- of
America and Britain -- but he and the miserable brood of Italian
bishops who fatten on it fear that, as they must continue to create
new bishops and cardinal's in these profitable, but poisonous
(democratic) sections of the Church the Italian monopoly of power
and wealth is in danger and the essentially authoritarian teaching
of the Church is menaced. For a time they saw the danger increase
as the Church in France, Germany, and Italy had to meet the needs
of the new age by starting Christian Socialist or Catholic
Democratic movements, as I have elsewhere described. That danger is
happily (from the Papal viewpoint) removed by the truculent
establishment of Fascism, but the future is uncertain. Hence the
need of a counter-balance by bringing in the Greek and other
eastern Churches with their innumerable bishops and archbishops.
In this the Vatican betrays once more how false is that
reputation for psychology and "insight" which its propagandists
have won for it. It is building upon a theory of the psychology of
the Slav and of the oriental which has long been discredited. It
was common in the last century to say, and it is still far too
often said by literary men, that the Slav and the oriental mind is
docile, passive, and naturally submissive to authority. Not only
does the modern science of psychology reject these old superficial
theories of racial psychology but recent developments in Russia,
China, and India ought to have taught every man how nonsensical
they are. It is just as absurd to credit the Vatican with broad
outlook and penetrating insight. These Italian parasites are a
bunch of Chinese mandarins who are an anachronism in the modern
world.
It, at all events, explains the coincidence of the policy of
the Vatican with that of the Italian jackal. The Pope refuses to
condemn he rape of Abyssinia -- a monstrous moral outrage -- though
British and American Catholics clamor for a condemnation, and, at
the very time when Cardinal Hinsley assures them that he heard the
Pope call it a "barbarous outrage", the Pope bestows the Golden
Rose on the Queen of Italy as Empress of Abyssinia. He get's his
"unauthorized" agents to say how he was disturbed by Mussolini
forcing the gates to the East (Albania) and does not say a word
about Yugo-Slavia and Greece, but his whole Italian hierarchy
boosts the campaign, and his priests and nuns follow in the wake of
the barbarized soldiers. He is following the whole Drive to the
East with the liveliest hope and expectation. He is not a Man of
Blood like Mussolini or Hitler. In the time-honored fashion of the
Roman Church he gets "the secular arm" to shed the blood for him.
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