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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
**** ****
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 19
THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH DOES FAR MORE HARM THAN GOOD
by Joseph McCabe
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
CHAPTER
I Progress in Catholic and Non-Catholic Countries ..... 1
II The Black International always in the Rear .......... 8
III The Wicked World Educates the Church ............... 14
IV The Contrast of Russia and Priest-Ruled Countries .. 19
V The Monstrous Attempt to Restore the Middle Ages ... 25
**** ****
Chapter I
PROGRESS IN CATHOLIC AND NON-CATHOLIC COUNTRIES
Throughout these ten booklets, in which I have shown that the
Church of Rome is the natural ally of the German, Japanese, and
Italians, I have asked the reader to see it as primarily a vast
economic corporation, the Black International, fighting for
survival, in an age in which educated people despise its doctrines
and all informed people loathe its methods. Whether any, or how
many, of this monstrous regiment of cardinals and bishops, priests
and monks, sincerely believe the medieval sophistication of ancient
Greek and oriental superstitions which they profess is here
entirely irrelevant. We are studying the Church as an institution
because we are trying to understand its action throughout the
world.
It admits that it seeks wealth and power but insists that this
is only in order that it may more effectively promote what it calls
the spiritual and eternal interests of men. With that pretext also
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
we are not concerned. The apologist will hardly expect us to admit
that it entered into an alliance with (in this order) Italy, Japan,
and Germany because it believed they would help it to look after
the soul's of men. Such a plea would raise a broad grin from
Cologne to Tokyo. Those nations sought wealth and power; so did the
Bleak International. They meant to secure and protect this wealth
and power by a regime of bloody tyranny; and the Black
International, which has for 800 years relied upon that method,
needed it more urgently than ever. The bandits wanted the
international influence of the Vatican to help to dupe the world
about their designs; and they promised it a very large share of the
spoils of victory by annihilating its critic's and recovering its
lost provinces for it.
After what we have seen that is as obvious as the Empire State
Building. Men of the Munich mentality as regards the Church of Rome
petulantly exclaim that it is a monstrous charge. Yes: and the war
and the Pope's share in it, the debasement of France by priest-
ridden traitors, and the horrors of the Spanish and Portuguese hell
are a monstrous reality. If these narrow-minded folk who think
themselves so superior to prejudice were to look facts in the face
they Would see that we accuse the Church of doing only what it has
done over and over again since the Albiginsian Massacre and the
founding of the Inquisition 700 years ago. They would find that the
Roman Black International is not the only spiritual army that has
prostituted itself for gold in our time.
In 1937 there was a Parliament of Religions at Calcutta. The
report of the proceedings in two fat volumes makes a materialist
like myself blush. Representatives of all the world's religions and
sects joined enthusiastically in the good work, and the speeches
glitter like Woolworth jewelry with nice phrases about the
spiritual and the Ideal, the sins of men and the wickedness of the
world, the lofty morality by which these folk are going to save the
race. As you will remember, the Japs had by this time completely
enslaved and debauched Manchuria and the north of China and they
were openly gathering for their next orgy of brutality. And not a
single one of these Asiatic word-spinners of the hundred beautiful
religions said one single word about it. One foreigner, a British
professor, ventured to say ten very mild words about it.
If you want to know why, though of course nobody did at the
time, it was not simply because people who live on these shining
heights find it difficult to see the common earth. It was mainly
because the Black International or Japanese Buddhism was doing in
Asia just what the Roman priests were doing in Europe and America.
We must not offend our Buddhist fellow-citizens.
Some of my readers will remember that in 1937, while these
spiritual folk were having their jamboree in Calcutta and the
world-press was following their beneficent work with admiration. I
published, through Haldeman-Julius, a booklet with the title
Imperialistic Japan and its Aims. I described how by that time the.
criminal plot of the Japs was so far from being secret that scores
of patriotic societies, some with millions of member's, publicly
boasted of it and gloated over realistic pictures and panoramas
exhibited in the stores of the cities, of the destruction of the
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
American fleet. I gave the evidence that the Buddhist priests and
monks, 150,000 strong, had been bought by the government and the
capitalists and were conducting an intensive campaign all over
South Asia to create a Fifth Column for the "Japanese Liberator's."
They had been bought in cash, just as the Vatican had been bought
by Mussolini, and, like the Vatican, they looked for even greater
profit when the job was done.
They earned their pay. Not only did they work up the Japanese
people to a fanatical enthusiasm for the plan of making themselves
rich by exploiting a third of the world but they created nests of
traitors from French Indo-China to the Persian Gulf. There were
10.000 Buddhist quislings in Rangoon alone and there were others in
key-positions all over Burma. Ceylon teems with them. For ten years
the work has proceeded under a very thin disguise of Buddhist
concern for the spiritual interests of men. Yet in a Parliament of
Religions held at Chicago in 1939 America had been emphatically
warned that these Buddhist priests had already grown fat on
imperialist gold.
While disreputable atheists and materialists like Haldeman-
Julius and McCabe, who told the world the truth, were very properly
ignored by all respectable folk these spiritual gasbags, who
blinded it to the realities of life, where loaded with laurels and
dollars. It is nice, and so profitable, to be profound and
spiritual!
However. Immense as is the work which I bring to a close with
this booklet I have no space to enlarge, upon even so important a
side-issue as the corruption of Buddhism (which was quite willing
in every age to entertain a business proposition) by the fine
imperialist's of Japan. It is enough that "our two great religions"
have made a mockery of every compliment, that every long-haired
idealist in America had lavished upon them. They have prostituted
themselves to the Butchers Union, while atheistic Russia, upon
which most of these idealists have poured abuse for the last twenty
years, has won a splendid tribute from a disillusioned world. But
I have still an important point to make in regard to the Church of
Rome to complete the explanation of its behavior.
In his recent work, 'You Can't Be Too Careful,' H. G. Wells
says: "The most evil thing in the world today is the Roman Catholic
Church." It is also one of the most respected things in the world
today, especially in America. But there is no mystery about the
respect, the power, even the adulation which it enjoys. It commands
about 10,000,000 votes, nicely bunched together for the most part
in certain states and at the disposal of the priests. It has
$4,000,000,000 invested, an income of about $1,000,000,000 and an
army of about quarter of a million paid agents of one kind or
other. It has a very large press and radio-service. It has about
5,000,000 auxiliary troops, open fanatics and secret intriguers,
sworn to promote "the welfare of the Church." It has immense
opportunities of rewarding loyalty, from a Papal Knighthood to a
job as janitor. It has a control of editors, politicians, writers,
libraries, cinemas, radio programs, owners of halls and theaters,
professors, booksellers, even the police, the public school's,
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
parole-boards, the mails, etc. It has . . . But maybe that will do.
What we had better ask is what excuse is made for themselves by the
politicians, professors, and others who chant the praises of "the
venerable Church."
You know it. They reply that the Church does good -- oh, an
enormous amount of good: so much, in fact, that it is one of the
foundations of the state. In a recent book (Mission to Moscow),
which the pious Mr. Gollancz spreads in England, Ambassador Davies,
discussing the vices and virtues of Russia, says that with all its
faults it must not be classed with Germany and Italy, as a
totalitarian state. Phew! Are there still folk who talk like that?
However, what Mr. Davies mean's is that the Russian state is, and
the Nazi state is not, "based upon the altruistic principles of the
Christian religion." If that is true of Russia -- if you will
pardon the supposition -- how far more true it must be of the
American civilization with its 100,000 parsons and its more
brilliant exhibition of those principles. And of the Churches which
render this inestimable service the Church of Rome is immeasurably
the greatest: the Church that regards all the others with
contemptuous tolerance and pronounces them rebellious and
ineffective offshoots of the age-old Church on which the sun never
sets.
In western stories, of which I am fond, I often read in
descriptions of cow-town of the "false front" of the bank. the
saloon, and the store. The phrase fits the Roman Church In America,
for it is, to Americans, the false front of the international Papal
Church. That is why so many Americans hesitate in face of the most
conclusive evidence to admit the charge we bring against the Black
International. Why, they say, this is the Church that first raised
the banner of religious freedom on American soil: the Church that
gave even Europe the idea of democracies: the Church that
periodically provides the whole world, in Papal encyclicals, with
a guidance on problems of the hour which the press reproduces in
letters of gold: the Church that gathers 350,000,000 happy and
virtuous folk, without distinction of class, color, or odor, under
its White mantle: the Church that promotes culture and exerts an
inflexible moral rule over the nations.
That is the false front. In these 20 booklets I have taken you
behind it and shown you the real Church of Rome. Its apologists lie
outrageously about it. They lie about its political and ethical
principles, its history and its law, its numbers and its quality,
its plots and its open action. They dare not allow the press today
to let the world know the truth about the social condition and the
action of the Church in a score of countries from Bolivia to Japan.
I have proved all this.
In my long literary career I have written books in strange
conditions -- in the smoking rooms and Marconi cabins of liners, in
crowded apartments-houses or on the sunny beach, in the bed-rooms
of hotels of all grades -- but I never before wrote, as I have
written these 300,000 words, on a battlefield. The National
Library, in which I delve for material, is charred and battered and
almost deserted and the books for which I call come to me sometimes
disfigured by fire or water or fail, and evermore fail, to come...
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
But you can guess all that. I say that in spite of all this these
twenty booklets are from beginning to end just statements of fact,
on incontestable evidence, and they prove that the Catholic Church
is, if not "the most evil thing in the world," certainly the most
treacherous and mendacious.
It may seem that I have reserved to the last the question
which will seem to many the most important: the question what the
Church is worth to the world on a balance of services and
disservices. But I have been replying to that question all through.
Many folk say that they do not care what the Church did in the 4th
Century, or the 13th or the 16th; and there is so much blood and
dirt on the pages of medieval history that Catholics often
encourage that feeling, or they would at least like you to believe
that the services they claim -- usually by a gross perversion of
history -- to have rendered were due to a noble spirit which is
ever fresh in the Church, while those immense splotches of blood,
those vast areas of servile squalor, and those equally vast areas
of priestly and monastic corruption were just temporary and local
foulings of the garments of the Church in the mud of a wicked
world. If you fancy that that childish stuff is really not written
today dip into any Catholic book that deals with these matters.
We might leave the past of the Church in its smelly historical
tomb if Catholic apologists would let us, but they will not. They
lie heroically about its history, and it is vital to an
understanding of the Black International that we should know that
its writer's lie habitually. In this connection their lies take the
shape of claiming that the Church rendered massive services to
civilization, and it is largely on the ground of these fictitious
services that they demand consideration today.
Moreover, the Church boasts, and on the whole justly, that it
never changes. It is a strange boast in a world that decidedly
grows in wisdom and sheds innumerable errors as it advances, but it
does at all events justify us in judging what the Church does today
by what it did in the Middle Ages, when it was perfectly free to
carry out its principles. When modern Popes are stung into
indiscretion they use just the same language as medieval Popes did,
as we found Plus XI doing in his open letter to Cardinal Gasparri
in 1929. The Canon Law, which is kept in a dead language so that
priests alone can read it, makes the same monstrous claim of a
power over life and death as the medieval Popes made. The
bestiality which the Pope encourages in Spain and Portugal today is
the same as Popes encouraged a century ago in the whole of Southern
Europe and in all Europe during the Middle Ages.
No, it is folly to ask us to let dead Popes bury their dead.
This work, however, is concerned with the Church today, and there
is so much to be said about it that I have to avoid history or
confine my short excursions into it within the strict needs of my
present task. So to the question whether the Church has done good
in the past and the race is indebted to it I just say bluntly that
practically every claim it makes is fictitious, as I have
exhaustively shown in earlier works, and on balance we must say
that it has retarded the advance of European civilization by many
centuries.
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
I must say a little more than this in regard to what I call
the modern period. I believe that when scholarship and literature
are again free, when the disgraceful power over them of the Black
International is broken, historians will date the beginning of the
modern age from the outbreak of the French Revolution, The broad
ideal of a just life was then clearly formulated. The revolutionary
armies carried it, with their symbolic tricolor, as far as the
southernmost tips of Italy, Spain, and Portugal and Napoleon's,
armies bore the ensign of at least a liberal civilization to the
bounds of Europe. Naples and Madrid were for a time more advanced
than London. Latin America throbbed with a new passion.
From that age to ours the outstanding event of history has
been the long-drawn battle for those ideals, and Rome has
throughout been on the side of our enemies. Ever since the bloody
shambles it countenanced, if it did not inspire, in Naples in 1794
the Black International has allied itself with every power, however
corrupt and brutal it was, that took the field against those who
were fighting for the elementary rights of man, for freedom and
democracy. What has happened in the last ten years is simply that
the Vatican, which had been compelled for half a century to profess
in democratic countries that it was reconciled with the new age --
in America alone the Black International has the effrontery to
claim that the Church is the actual source of modern ideals --
became convinced that it had found more powerful allies than ever
in the fight against liberalism, and the war which began in 1798
and in one country or other (especially Spain) has been almost
continuously maintained, has entered upon a new and terrible phase.
That is the key-idea that you must keep clearly in mind if you
want to understand the relation of the Roman Church to the world-
war. It is an idea of crucial importance in estimating the world-
situation but no journalistic oracle in the United States dare say
it, while what we may call the literary and ethical oracles who,
discuss the more profound aspects of the situation will put forward
any fantastic theory, from the growth of materialism to the
diversion of the Gulf Stream, rather than risk offending Catholics
and injuring their own prestige and circulation, by telling the
plain truth. That this is the plain truth I have shown, as regard's
the last ten years, in these 20 books and for the earlier phase in
larger works, The True Story of the Roman Catholic Church and The
A peal to Reason Library.
A third work would be of very considerable use to the modern
reader, especially in America, where, apart from the one or two
brushes with Britain, the historical development has encouraged a
real cultural isolation from Europe as fir as our present theme is
concerned. An American writer who visited me some years ago
confirmed me in my suspicion that there is no good and adequate
work available on the mighty struggle in Europe in the 19th Century
against the clerical-royalist-capitalist attempts to kill what
survived of the best ideals of the French Revolution. For that
matter there is today no work published in England, for it would
have to tell the ghastly truth about the Church, and in both
countries the Black International uses its new power, not merely to
exclude the truth from literature and education but to see that
false versions of the story of man from 1789 onward are imposed
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
everywhere. In the absence of such a work I can but reiterate that
from 1794 (in France and Italy) until its present alliance with
Fascism (in Spain and Poland, for instance) the Church has allied
itself with brutal oppressors and enemies of freedom, as I have
abundantly proved in earlier works, and sum up the evidence given
in this series of booklets in regard to the last ten years.
It is useful to take a broad view before we look at the
situation more closely. The alleged service of the Roman Church in
promoting civilization can be very soundly tested from this broad
viewpoint. Just glance at the leading countries of the world and
note in each case what we -- the great majority of men and women in
the best-educated countries -- would assign as the grade of its
civilization and what proportion of the people the Roman Church
claims to control; and to allow for the present appalling confusion
or violent distortion of conditions we will survey the world as it
was in 1939 and regard only countries where the Roman Church is
substantially represented.
Granting that total wealth or size is not of itself a
criterion of civilization there would be general agreement to name
these ten countries as having attained the highest rank: the United
States, Great Britain, Russia, France, Switzerland, Holland,
Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Argentina. In none of these countries
does the Roman Church command the allegiance, of more than one-
sixth of the population except Holland. where its members and
political representatives are one-third of the whole -- still not
enough to have Influence on the general character -- and Argentina,
where, however, the constructive class is (or was until 1935)
mainly skeptical (and probably still is). Argentina is, in any
case, the one, power whose place in this list would be disputed.
There would be general agreement to put these countries at the
lower end of the scale; Poland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Eire,
Brazil, and most of the smaller South American Republics. In these
the Church claims the great majority of the people and certainly as
regards the constructive forces they are Catholic countries. They
are all Fascist, as none of the above ten are, but, for the moment
I am looking at what by general agreement would be called their
grade of civilization. The place of Hungary might be disputed, but
it is only little more than half Catholic and its dictator is not
a Catholic. Czecho-Slovakia as a whole was in the highest class,
but events have shown that the progressive qualities were in non-
Catholic Bohemia, and that Catholic Slovakia is at the level of
Poland. I have omitted Mexico, which on the ground of recent
accomplishment (reduction of crime and illiteracy, social
legislation, etc.) I should be disposed to put in the first class,
because its place would be warmly disputed. But one thing is not
open to dispute: whatever progress has been made in the last 20
years was due to an anti-Catholic body of statesmen and supporters.
Germany must be left out of account unless we go back to pre-Nazi
days, but even then Catholic's were a one-fourth minority and they
are In large part responsible for the triumph of Nazism and ruin of
the country. In Belgium the forces are about equal, and the grade
of civilization corresponds.
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You will see the full significance of this if you recall that,
as I said, all these countries entered upon the great race, as we
may call it, of the last 150 year's with much the same equipment of
ideals. The Revolutionary and the Napoleonic armies, beating a path
for French literature, made those ideals familiar from Portugal to
Sweden, and Latin America was awakened from one end to the other by
the echoes of the struggle. Even Ireland had quite a notable body
of Deists and humanitarians (Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, and many
others) amongst its educated men in the last years of the 18th
Century. It has none today or not one who dare open his lips, and
the country remains, with all its political and religious pride,
poor, squalid, ignorant, and of inferior general character. in
other words, every country in which the influence of the Papacy was
paramount failed to advance in the path that was indicated by those
new ideals of civilization which we all regard as sound. But the
countries in which Rome had no such influence or where, as in
France, it lost its power, joined the predominantly Protestant
countries in advancing to the higher rank. That is the first reply,
and it is perfectly sound from the sociologleal angle, to the claim
that the Roman Church promotes civilization.
Chapter 11
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL ALWAYS IN THE REAR
In this general survey I have repeatedly referred to the
ideals of freedom and democracy. For most of us these are partial
expressions of the modern spirit, the demand for justice, which, in
alliance with the advance of science, has lifted the ten countries
I named to the highest rank. The attempt of Catholic writers in
various countries to represent them as mere political claims, or
even as a liberalism, that the world has tried and found wanting,
are mere excuses to cover the Vatican's alliance with Fascism or
the Fascist Encyclical of the Pope Quadragesimo Anno. It must be
understood, however, that I have not assigned these 20 nations
their place in the scale of civilization on that test. If one
proposed to do this it would be simple and accurate to say that all
Catholic countries are now Fascist and all democratic countries are
non-Catholic. But it is more convincing if we apply a broader test
of civilization.
The Catholic apologist would define the service of his Church
by saying (first and chiefly) that it defends the family, that it
trains all people whom it can influence in general moral character,
that it preaches and insists upon justice, individual and social,
and that it is zealous for education and philanthropy. And since,
he would say, the family is, according to very many if not most
sociologists, the foundation of the state, the particular zeal and
rigorous measures of his Church, which distinguish it in an age of
growing laxity, must especially recommend it to the statesman and
the social student.
Piffle, as usual. The Roman Church has three distinctive
features in its teaching about the family. First, it insist that
its priests, monks, and nuns shall not marry and shall not have any
recognizable families; and since the implication of this is that
sexual commerce has some sort of taint even where it is licensed
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one does not see how we can speak here of the Church guarding this
particular foundation of the state. Secondly, it alone amongst the
Churches -- in fact, it shares this distinction only with a few
groups of the lowest savages on earth -- forbids divorce; and since
this harsh restriction of human rights has either, as in Catholic
countries, to be alleviated by the general use of mistresses or
brothels, or it amounts to a positive deterrent from marriage, we
again fail to perceive any service, and no statesman of any of the
leading civilizations has any respect for the Church's teaching on
this point. The law of divorce which now exists in every
civilization except those of lower grade that are subject to the
Pope is based upon the collective recognition of social experience
and upon a mature adjustment of the rights of the individual and
the needs of the state. The Catholic opposition to it professes to
be based upon some words of an ancient Jewish prophet of which we
have two contradictory versions in the records and which other
Christian Churches, of equal scholarship and greater sincerity,
find compatible with divorce. It is in any case really based, as I
showed, on the fierce determination of the Popes of the early
Middle Age's to get complete control of life. On such frivolous and
anti-social grounds does this particularly strident claim of the
Church to render human service rest; and our contempt deepens when
we find the Church playing fast and loose with its "indissoluble
marriage" when its own interest or profit is involved, as I showed
in my analysis of the clauses of the Canon Law and the practice of
the Papal Courts.
Thirdly, the Black International boasts that it renders a
unique service to the state because it is the only Church or
institution that condemns, and very fiercely condemns birth
control. The Black International is as usual, out of date. For the
last ten years it has shared that distinction with the criminal
leaders of the Italian, Japanese, and German people. They wanted
soldiers and the excuse of over-population to cover their
imperialist greed. The Black International wanted more contributors
to its treasury and, as priests have admitted, to beat rival
Churches by outbreeding them. The clerical opposition to birth
control is, in fact, such an obvious piece of priestcraft and has
so little foundation even in their own weird and wonderful theology
that they confess (as I quoted), the Catholic laity in America are
to an alarming extent ignoring their sulphuric orders and
restricting their families: which makes their "social" argument
look rather anaemic.
The apologists have recently been encouraged by the appearance
of a new school of opponents of birth control whose leaders and
statements are not religious. These professors and their learned
lady friends recognize that the old opposition was based upon a
demand for as many soldiers as possible and that the industrial and
professional markets are, in normal times and in capitalist
countries, already overcrowded. They say that the really sound
scientific plea is that the birth rate is so far falling out of
balance with the death rate that there will soon be a debilitating
preponderance of old folk over young. They do not take into account
the fact that science and common sense are steadily raising what we
may call the vitality-period of men and women. I could write
caustic pages on my own recent experience in being rejected (as one
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
in senile decay) from all departments of the British national
effort by men whose laziness, short hours, and easygoing methods
are notorious, But I have space only for one point. France has
practiced birth control for more than half a century almost as much
as America or Britain does today. But it was not old men who let
France down. It was a few Catholic old men, who were pushed into
office by these priests who are so concerned about the vitality of
civilization, Catholic adventurers like Laval and Bonnet, and
younger statesmen who were seduced by Catholic mistresses.
In short, all this rhetoric about Catholic marriage and the
social welfare is hypocritical claptrap, and every statesman and
social student knows it. Every state finds in time its equilibrium
on grounds of experience in sex-matters. Sex-laws and restrictions
that are based upon ancient philosophic's or religions, ultimately
upon more ancient taboos and superstitions, merely distract
attention and hamper the social activity. Apologists for them have
to repeat outdated and thoroughly exposed statements about the ruin
of older civilizations by vice. Five year's ago most folk would
have said that the two most vigorous nations were the German and
the American, and both enjoyed an advanced degree of sexual
freedom. Today we should say that Russia and America are the most
vigorous nations. But according to the priests the American people
are only restrained from a monstrous parade of sex, in their books,
pictures, and theaters, by the severe paternal cheek of the clergy,
while Russia has always had a liberal divorce law and for quarter
of a century has denied that marriage is a sacrament and birth
control a sin.
For reasons -- reasons of self-interest -- which I discussed
in an earlier book Catholic apologists have always put this sex and
marriage-business in the forefront of their statement of claims. It
more or less excises the absurd official virginity of their
priests, monks and nuns: It evokes a golden echo in the hearts of
rich widows and spinsters: and it really does mark a distinction
between the Church and "the world." In theory, that is to say. And
not only is the theory itself an antiquated ethic rehabilitated for
priestly purposes, so that those who profess to lead civilization
are far in the rear of modern thought, but in practice Catholics
are no more "moral" than other folk. I leave it to my readers'
knowledge of American life what the situation is in America, saying
only that I have a very extensive familiarity with the best
American fiction of a realist character and that I have made
extensive inquiries during the two years (at intervals) I have
spent in America. But for "Catholic countries" you may take as
typical the pleasant exaggeration which Byron wrote when he saw a
statue of the Virgin Mary in a Portuguese city: "Well do I ween the
only virgin there." He had probably made inquiries.
Apologists obstinately insist that Irish girls are remarkably
chaste," though I have for 30 years given proof and bitter
complaints of English Catholics (including leading priests) that
the Irish girls are sent to Britain to drop their burdens and keep
down the record of illegitimate births in Eire. A New York attorney
writes me, or wrote me 30 years ago when I took up the question,
that the same complaint was made in the New England States. Sanger
says in his History of Prostitution (1919 edition) that on personal
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
interrogation of 2,000 New York prostitutes he found that 977 (706
of whom had been born in Ireland) had had Catholic parents, and had
been brought up as Catholics. The Catholic Times (May 31, 1924)
quoted Canon Hughes, one of the highest Catholic authorities,
saying that 60 percent of the prostitutes of Liverpool -- one of
the most Catholic and most vicious cities in England -- were Irish
and only 30 percent English. Ten years later another Catholic
expert, Mrs. Ellison, stated in a book that the situation is the
same in the cities of London, Glasgow, and Newcastle (big centers
of Irish immigration). A leaflet on the subject issued by the
Protestant Truth Society (British) gives a mass of Catholic
testimony and replies to the charge that illegitimacy is 3.4
percent in Protestant Ulster and (for the above reasons) only 0.7
in Catholic Connaught that it was at the time 9.30 in Belgium,
14.89 in Austria, 15.67 in Bavaria, and 50.00 in Guatemala. Since
emigration was checked the Irish have not boasted so much. I quoted
an editorial in the Irish Times (June 12, 1937) describing a
disgraceful official record of sex-crimes in County Clare which is
in Connaught!
This chastity-talk is not only outdated from the ethical and
sociological angle but it supported by a remarkable variety of
untruths. And if it is suggested that the real service of the
Church lies in promoting morals or character in the broader sense
the reply to just as devastating. This plea is just a relic of the
old and purely rhetorical assertion that a religious basis is
required for sound conduct. The sufficient reply is that, I have
repeatedly shown, the general level of character in the leading
civilizations has risen in the same proportion as Church influence
has decayed. For the moment we are not concerned about cause and
effect. The fact is enough. As my friend Mr. E.S.P. Haynes, a
distinguished London attorney, has written -- and he is approvingly
quoted by Julian Huxley in his Religion Without Revelation (P. 52):
"If morality did really depend on other worldly sanctions, the
religious changes of the last fifty years would by now have
dissolved society at large." What has happened is much the same as
with the old superstition that it is unlucky to pass under a
ladder. People now see that a good reason for not doing it is that
the man who does not keep clear of a ladder raised against a
building is apt to get drips of paint or bricks dropped on him. In
the same way they discover that sound moral law is a sanitation-
regulation of the social life.
The irony of paying attention to the Romanist version of the
old apologetic, which is the noisiest of them all, is that the
Papal Church promotes sound character even less than the other
Christian Churches. Middle-class folk, to which class most writers
belong, argue on these matters in the most slovenly fashion. Their
acquaintance with Catholics is confined to their class, and in this
they meet many Catholic men and women of admirable character. So,
they lazily conclude, Catholicism molds character. Middle-class men
who are not puritans have insisted to me -- two of them were
attorneys -- that they find Catholic girls easier to persuade or
less in need of persuasion than other girls. But let us remember,
the nature of the Church as I analyzed it. Of the 100,000,000 or so
adult subjects of the Pope at least 80,000,000 have not the least
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
resemblance to the middle-class American or British Catholic. Half
of them are imperfectly civilized Latin Americans (with Cuba and
the Philippines) and most of the remainder are illiterate or poor
and ignorant Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Slovaks, etc.
The general level of character in a nation is an elusive
factor but it is fairly determined, if we make allowances for
police-conditions, by the volume of crime. Criminal behavior in the
extreme form of unsocial conduct, and the number of criminals is a
good indication of the amount of unsocial conduct generally. If,
therefore, we find, as we do, that Catholic countries are more
criminal than non-Catholic, and that as a mixed country a quite
disproportionate number of the criminals are Catholics, we must
conclude that the Church is no more effective in inspiring sound
social behavior than in securing the chastity about which it talks
so much.
I have given a few statistics in book No. 13. As Catholics are
apt to contest this I may add a few more. In No. 23 of his
Questions and Answer (p. 87) Haldeman-Julius gives, from a book by
a Catholic prison chaplain (Fr. Leo Kalmer, Crime and Religion) a
most damning series of figures. The priest ascertained from his
colleagues the percentage of Catholics in 36 American
penitentiaries and the result extends to the whole of America the
truth disclosed in the figure's I gave for Sing Sing (48.50 percent
in Joliet, 46.92 in San Quentin, 57.31 in Auburn, 63.64 in
Wethersfield, etc.). Analysis by the Rev. L.B. Lehmann brings out
the fact that in 28 states, in which Catholics are 17 percent of
the population, they are 33 percent of the criminals. The whole
article in Haldeman-Julius' book should be read.
The only other mixed states for which exact comparative
figures are available are the Commonwealth of Australia and the
Dominion of New Zealand. In the case of Australia the figures are
particularly interesting because the Roman Church has as much power
there as in America and is just as blatant in its claims. It is 36
years since I first reproduced the full figures relating to crime
and Catholicism in that country, and I have brought them up to date
every few years. They are as damning as those of America, yet
Catholics continue to claim in the most brazen manner that they
guard the foundations of the state by promoting character.
The Queensland State Schools Defense Fund issued a leaflet
quoting the figures from the official publications. This showed
that in Victoria in 1936 the Catholic prisoners numbered 2,164,
whereas since the Catholics are only 18 percent of the population,
their ought to have been only 754 Catholic prisoners if their moral
quality was equal to that of non-Catholics. In New South Wales they
had 454 prisoners instead of the 145 to which their percentage of
the population entitled them. In Queensland the disproportion was
the same. In the Commonwealth Catholics, mostly Irish, had three
times the number of criminals they ought to have had if they were
as good as and no better than their neighbors. As Catholics in
Queensland had just published a new demand for the preferential
treatment of their schools, the Protestants retorted humorously
that they ought themselves to receive preferential treatment in the
matter of taxation because they maintain extra police and jails to
look after Catholic criminals.
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
In 1937 Archbishop Mannix, the bitter muddle-headed Irishman
who in his very Christian hatred of England used all the influence
of the Church to induce Australian's to confine themselves to their
pleasures and dollar-making while Britain fought and suffered for
ideals -- until the hideous face of the Japs appeared on the
horizon and Australia cried frantically to America and Britain for
help -- made one of his usual attacks on the public schools of
Australia. They were demoralizing even Catholic boys. He said this
in Melbourne (Victoria). Shortly afterward's the Report of the
Victorian Children's Courts for 1937 was published. Of 973 child
delinquents it appeared that 582, or 37.4 percent were Roman
Catholics; and Catholics are only 18 percent of the population of
Melbourne.
That is typical of the value, of these loudly-shouted claims
of Catholic apologists. They know that none of the papers will test
the claims by statistical or historical facts, and that letters to
the press which do this will be suppressed as "offensive to
Catholics." The Protestant Watchman of New South Wales in 1941.
published, an analysis of the space given in the four daily papers
of Sydney to Catholic and Protestant affair's respectively. In a
period of three months the Roman Catholics got 491 inches, the
Church of England 280 (if we count out a large photo with the queen
in it), and the Methodists and Presbyterians 186. Is Sydney a
Catholic city? Far from it. The Roman Church controls only 17
percent of the population: the Church of England 40 percent: the
Methodist and Presbyterians 14 percent. But the arms of the Black
Octopus are everywhere, strangling freedom and truth, from the
office of the cabinet minister or the trade union to the editorial
office and the public libraries.
Most countries do not now publish the figures of the religious
professions of criminals, and full figures of crime in Catholic and
non-Catholic countries are not so easily obtained as one would
suppose. Few sociologists or criminologists omit to mention the
Church, and prominently, amongst the agencies which make for social
sanity and stability, but, though it will be understood that my
acquaintance with such literature is not complete, I do not know
one of them who dares to follow this up by examining the statistics
of crime and the profession's of criminals or the religious status
of the various countries.
The article "Homicide" in the Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences has a little merit in this connection. It quotes Ferri's
table showing the reduction of it in recent times in five of the
leading European countries by giving the percentage per 100,000 of
the population:
Germany 1.0 in 1865-85 and 0.6 in 1906-10
France 2.4 in 1827-31 and 1.4 in 1911-15
England 8.1 in 1856-60 and 0.7 in 1906-10
Spain 9.4 in 1881-85 and 5.2 in 1911-15
Italy 12.2 in 1871-75 and 4.1 in 1911-15
Italy, remember, was despotically ruled by the Papacy until
1870 and had an appalling record of crime to reduce. I may add that
crime doubled in a few years after the Fascists usurped power in it
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and was not reduced when the Vatican made its corrupt bargain to
share the control. Spain and Italy were both predominantly Catholic
in the last century when they had such a high record of the gravest
crime, and the modern sociologist scorns the excuse of "the hot
blood of the south." I question the figure for Germany, as there
was no "Germany" only a number of separate states -- until 1871.
Bodis (in Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics) gives this percentage
of trials for murder in 1876-84: United Kingdom 12, Germany 14,
France (still mainly Catholic) 23, Spain 105, Hungary 107, Italy
134. Add these to the figures I gave in No. 13, and you get such a
reply to the claim that Romanism promotes a high standard of
character that you wonder that any apologist has the effrontery to
make it.
But all Catholics make it, and very emphatically, because it
is the only excuse they can provide for the politicians,
professors, and writers whom, in one way or other, they get to
praise the Church and denounce critics. If this claim is so
decisively disproved by the only exact test we can apply -- the
volume of crime in Catholic lands and the proportion of criminals
in mixed lands -- so decisively that no sociologist in America
thinks it prudent to discuss the matter, where must we look for
even a plausible bit of color for it? The language of Papal
encyclicals and the gorgeous comments of apologists on them suggest
that there might be more sincerity in the claim that the Church is
more effective in inspiring social justice. We will defer the
examination of this to the next chapter, but the reader will be
prepared to smile. Social justice in Italy, Vichy France, Spain,
Portugal, and Brazil as compared with America, Britain, Russia,
Denmark, Sweden, or Switzerland! It sounds like a bad joke.
But what other test can we apply? Is the great 'service of the
Church that it provided, or moved the authorities to provide, free
education for the children of the workers? See the table of
steatitic of illiteracy which I gave in No. 13 (p. 21). They are
more damning than the statistics of crime or illegitimacy. Our
search for these massive social services of the Church begins to
remind us of that naughty definition of metaphysics -- looking in
a dark room for a black cat that isn't there. Let us, in order to
be quite just to our Catholic fellow-citizens, approach the subject
in a different way.
Chapter III
THE WICKED WORLD EDUCATES THE CHURCH
This ghastly war and the Fascist-Catholic conspiracy that led
to it interrupted an unsteady and unequal but very real and
Substantial advance of civilization in Europe and America. If my
readers are not tired of my giving proof of that, I am. I have
routed the Lippmanns and Spenglers who Strangely persuaded so many
to doubt it. I have riddled the sophistry of the novelty-monger and
pseudo-idealists who ranted that in our race to get ahead we had
created a monster of the Frankenstein order or had let the
cultivation of our intelligence outrun our cultivation of
character. The revelation of the share of "our two historic
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
religions" in drenching the planet with mud and blood ought to make
these prophets of the spiritual feel small, but I notice in the
American press that they are as cocky as ever, and our Joads in
Britain orate at Empire Pageants. These people have nearly a
monopoly of the after-the-war planning which absorbs all our finer
spirits just now. They would return to just that distracting
activity of theirs under cover of which Japs and Germans shifted
the attention of the world from the real evils that menaced it.
The world was making a very creditable progress on most lines
of a real advance of civilization, though it was checked by the
interests of wealth and religion, until the privileged folk and
their politicians were duped into thinking that the Black and Tang
(or yellows) were merely accumulating power in order to annihilate
the Reds. This progress became appreciable about 1870, when the
United States settled down after the Civil War and Europe
triumphed, in most countries, over the vicious clerical-royalist
reaction that had followed the fall of Napoleon. Briefly, the
period characterized not merely by an advance of from 1870 to 1914
was characterized, not merely by an advance of applied science
which more than doubled the wealth-reducing capacity of a nation
but by the employment of a very large part of the new wealth to
create systems of universal free education, an immense
multiplication of free libraries, the establishment in most
countries of fully democratic political regimes and the
enfranchisement of women, factory-legislation, schemes of old-age
pensions and health and unemployment insurance, sanitation, re-
housing, and other measures which doubled the average expectation
of life, a considerable growth of temperance (or temperateness),
and great reduction of crime, the doubling (generally) of real
wages, the enormous improvement of hospitals and services for the
distressed, and the spread of an anti-war sentiment.
Some say that that is a materialistic conception of progress.
Most men and women in 1914 would have said that they did not care
a damn what you called it but that -- if they read a candid account
of life before 1870 -- the world, in spite of its lingering
defects, was a very much better place to live in. But let me again,
in passing, point out the humbug of this "spirit" and "matter"
business.
I have just been reading, dreary as the occupation was, one of
those numerous recent works on the beauty of modern high-brow
Buddhism and how it will save the world. Out of the mush of
Verbiage I picked the general statement that the Supreme aim of
Buddhism is "the extinction of suffering." Funny. That is exactly
the supreme aim of atheists and materialists. I pointed out years
ago that progress is not to be judged by some misty goal in the
clouds but by the success of a nation in reducing suffering. And
while a certain number of people in every generation can be
persuaded to lessen the risk of suffering for themselves by
despising the wicked world and its wine, women, and song, and
retiring to a semi-nudist colony to contemplate their navels --
which seems to be Buddhism -- it seems to us atheists and
materialists far better to remove or reduce as much as possible the
sources of suffering (disease, poverty, war, ignorance, etc.) for
millions of people.
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Talking of our navel-contemplators, I fancy you will find a
little irrelevance well worth inserting here. I do not know whether
you ever came across a priceless book published nine years ago by
Professor T. O'Conroy. It ought to have been reprinted in 1938 and
scattered by the million over America, at the time, when the Japs
were spending millions a year in lying propaganda. O'Conroy lived
in Japan, teaching in one of the leading universities, for 15
years. He married an aristocratic Japanese lady and was more
intimately admitted to Japanese life than any other white man. And
in 1933 he wrote this scalding indictment of the nation, showing
that for corruption, cruelty, and unscrupulousness the Japs could
not be beaten. Buddhism, he shows, fully shared this corruption,
though it was at that time -- the government had not yet invited it
to prostitute itself to the national greed -- a fat, indolent, and
useless body. But what I want to quote is an illustration of its
corruption which he gives (pp. 87-8) and which, sensational as it
is, like the similar revelation in German monasteries, I have not
seen reproduced or referred to since in American literature or
journalism.
A few mile's from Tokyo was a large and rich monastery of what
was understood to be the very strictest sect of Buddhist monks.
They were so holy that they closed their doors against the wicked
world and wanted to be alone. But in their extensive grounds there
was a home for feeble-minded women, tended by the good monks, and
a rumor spread in Tokyo that numbers of these unfortunates were
just unwanted wives whose husbands paid the monks to take them
over. A Tokyo paper organized a raid in 1928, and though the police
at once suppressed it, published an amazing story. The Buddhist
monastery was a colony of sadists, just as the German Franciscan
friars were found to be colonies of sodomists. When the raiders
burst in they found the monk-keepers gambling and squabbling with
blood-splotched paper money, while the women, half mad or half
dead, lay about, mutilated, exhausted, fouled with the monks'
excrements. Women were chained even in the temple, and rape, sexual
mutilation, and ignominy were but a few of the foul performances
that took place." And this is the second greatest "spiritual"
religion of our time: the religion over which our idealists and
scorners of materialism go into ecstasies!
Like the monasteries in the Catholic provinces of Germany and
the more Catholic republics of South and Central America and the
Philippines, these Buddhist monasteries -- O'Conroy says that
decent Buddhist priests told him that 60 to 80 percent of their
body were corrupt -- illustrate what is always likely to happen in
medieval conditions; that is to say, wherever the monastery is
surrounded by a drowsy or drugged population of believers free from
the taint of heresy. It was the normal condition of Catholic
monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, and it lingered, as in
Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Spanish America, and the
Philippines, wherever this parasitic Catholic atmosphere lingered.
This is the first broad proof that the Church was taught sense and
virtue by what it calls the wicked world or the materialistic age.
An examination of the progress and the causes of social reform
in each country would clinch this proof, but obviously a
satisfactory treatment of that subject would require a large
volume; and, as it is one of those inquiries that the Church does
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
not like, no historian or sociologist has taken it up and there is
no work to recommend to the reader. I have, as some readers will
know, not only given a large amount of material for the study in
previous works but have written one in which enough of the evidence
is condensed to satisfy any candid inquirer (How Freethinkers Made
Notable Contributions to Civilization, Haldeman-Julius Co. 1938).
In this work I examined the record of progress, particularly during
the last 100 years, in respect of the struggle for freedom,
education, social and political rights, the emancipation of woman,
philanthropy, and general improvement, and I showed that, while in
those days religious folk, though by no means so lenient to
Catholics as they now are, at least thought them an immeasurably
larger and more respectable body than freethinkers, yet fully one
half the pioneers in all reforms were freethinker's and none were
Catholics.
You wonder what Catholic apologists, loudly claiming that the
Church leads in progress and civilization, say to that. The answer
is: Nothing, as far as I can discover. I have several times quoted
a very popular apologetic work, published under the patronage of
heads and professors of several American universities, entitled The
Calvert Handbook of Catholic Facts. It ought to say "of Catholic
Rhetoric" or "Catholic Lies." It makes the usual generalized claims
but, as the Church must have exerted this mighty influence on
progress and civilization through definite individuals, the leaders
of chief workers in reform-movements, I look for the names of these
-- and find none. There is a lot about Catholic relatives of
Presidents, rich Catholic men of business, Catholic diplomatists,
Catholic judges, and so on, but for every Catholic named as a
worker in reform-movements I will undertake to name a hundred
skeptics.
There is in the book an article on Catholics who contributed
to American civilization in particular or civilization in general.
It names Sobieski, whose monument is Poland, Ferdinand and
Isabella, whose monument is Spain, and the discoveries of America,
who would have gone to the stake if they had not professed
Romanism. That covers the later Middle Ages. Then we have a Father
White, who is said to have set up the first printing press (from
England) in America, another who was great at shorthand in its
infancy, another who invented a balloon; and another who (getting
the idea from England) built the first railroad in America. Two or
three are credited with naval and military distinction, and there
is the usual bunch of great Catholic scientists (Pasteur, Fabre,
etc.) most of whom were skeptics. There are the men who wrote
"Maryland" and "The Conquered Banner," the architect of the White
House, the man who sold the estate for it, and the man who planned
the city of Washington (a "majestic plan"). There you have the
sweepings of three centuries, from Europe as well as America. They
do not represent a small body of Quakers or still smaller body (at
that time) of freethinkers but the biggest religion in the world.
Did anybody ever say that no Catholic ever won any sort of
distinction, even in shorthand, ballooning, or writing songs? We
are familiar with Catholics writing any sort of tripe for their own
hypnotized people, but this sort of thing is written for non-
Catholic Americans and has the patronage of Nicholas Murray Butler
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THE FRUITS OF ROMANISM
and the President of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. The
great work for civilization was achieved from 1870 onward. How many
of these illustrious Catholics fall in that period? Only the
balloonist as far as I can see. We may admit that gas and hot air
are entitled to clerical respect, but what the Catholic apologist,
claims is the inspiration of our progress in education, the
reduction of social service. How many of crime, and poverty, and
suffering these brilliant men figure in those fields? Not one.
Let us try another way. As the Jesuits are supposed to have
inspired Jefferson and Adams, who loathed Jesuits and their creed
as much as Haldeman-Julius does, perhaps it will be claimed that it
was the subtly compelling influence of Papal encyclicals that
permeated the world and somehow fired large bodies of men and women
(mostly skeptics) to devote their lives to ridding the world of its
medieval evils and miseries. This would be very singular when we
reflect that of those who are supposed to be the closest readers of
the encyclopedias, the priests, not one -- unless you want me to
count Father Coughlin -- figures in the long list of reform-
leaders, and not one Catholic layman is found in any list of, say,
the hundred leading social workers of the 19th Century. The
influence of religion on leader's of reform is one of those studies
which our sociologists carefully avoid, though most of them give
religion a high-place in the list of inspirational agencies, but I
have made the research elsewhere, and the grotesque scratchings in
the byways of history of the Calvert Handbook confirm me. The Papal
encyclicals moved the world to great deeds and through atheists and
Quakers! Really, apologists ought not to advertise so blatantly
what they think of Catholic intelligence.
But what are these grand encyclicals (or "to the whole world")
letters of the Popes on social matters. Even a Catholic would beg
me not to go too far back, so let us begin about the beginning of
the modern progressive period. Pius IX (of "Blessed Memory," the
Catholic writer always adds, though Italians who knew him have
written some funny things about him) opened the series in 1864 with
the encyclical Quanta cura and the Syllabus. Your apologists now
never mention it. He, having still at that time the reactionary
French emperor to protect him against the wicked Italians, scorched
the whole reform-movement with the choicest Papal invectives. He
put "liberalism," which we now call pink tea, on a level with
Satanism, which is several notches lower than rape.
Then came the great encyclical-writer Leo XIII. He was as fond
of writing encyclicals as Churchill is of writing speeches. Two of
them are still gorgeously praised -- and falsely interpreted -- In
American Catholic literature. But just keep your eye on the dates
and the historical background. Leo won the tiara in 1878, when the
reform-movement was full on in Europe. America he knew only as a
raw outpost of civilization -- I suspect he knew it mostly from
Dickens's Letters and Martin Chuzzlewit -- and he had many a brush
with its bishops, but he did follow social and political movements
in Europe. Yet it was not until thirteen years after his accession
that he issued the first encyclical which the most ingenious
apologist can call socially inspiring. He had not been silent. In
1878 he had issued an encyclical cursing Socialism root and branch.
Next year he had imposed the medieval "philosophy of Aquinas on the
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Catholic world. In the following year he had thundered at the
world, which was reforming its marriage-laws, that divorce was a
mortal sin (except in the ingenious form in which rich Catholics
can get it from Rome). In 1881 he pointed out, apropos of the
assassination of the Tsar, that these appalling outrages were due
to the decay of religion (not, of course, to the bestiality of the
Tsarist regime), and in 1884 he put Freemasonry Under the ban. In
1885 he issued the Immortale Dei, which Ryan still applauds as a
fine democratic appeal; and I have shown that it is nothing of the
kind. In 1888 he savagely attacked the claim of religious freedom
and liberty of discussion. It was not until 1891, when he saw
Socialism gaining ground rapidly at the expense of the Church, that
he issued the one encyclical, Rerum novarum, which Catholics claim
to give a lead in social reform; and the only "revolutionary"
sentence in it was the statement that the workers must have a
living wage. (which he refused to define), which had been a
platitude of liberal literature for half a century. And in his last
beautiful messages to the world he retracted this and died
sputtering the most reactionary sentiments.
I pass on the next two Popes. Ryan does not quote them. They
were stuffy and ill-informed reactionaries all their lives. And in
1931 the late Pope, or the present Pope writing in his name issue
the Fascist encyclical Quadragesimo anno which the British and
American hierarchies dare not translate into English! It opened the
blatantly Fascist, conspiratorial, warmongering career of his
"holiness" Pius XII.
Need I point the moral? The Papacy was throughout the whole
period the enemy of progress of the rights of the people. It was
just compelled for a time to temporize because it looked even to
these owlish Italians priests as if democracy had won its war and
the world was adopting the liberalism in social matters which the
Popes scorned. Yet even when concessions had to be made to check
the leakage of millions of workers from the Church they took only
the feeble form of saying that if the French people really insisted
on having a republic they might, provided it kept the Catholic
Church established by law and that capitalists must grant their
workers a "just wage," which it was left to them to determine.
What do I mean then, you will ask, by saying that the wicked
world educated the Church? The Popes apparently, never were
educated in sound views of social ethics. What I mean is that in
America, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy a social-democratic
movement (without the capital letters) spread in the Catholic world
after 1900. Quite bold books appeared, and there were "social
experts" and all sorts of novelties. What was the inspiration?
Evidently it did not come from the Papacy. Had local hierarchies
and their Ryans and Williams a finer appreciation of the
implications of the faith than the Holy-Ghost-inspired Pope's and
all the great theological geniuses of the Middle Ages?
Enough of this nonsense. The plain truth is that after leaving
it to non-Catholics for a century, when the work was heart-breaking
and the penalty often death or jail, to break the paths of social
and humanitarian reform, the local Black International in some
countries concluded that in the interest of the Church they must
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join in the work. It was a death-bed repentance. But the patient
recovered. That is to say, the Black International, which for a
time had despaired of life on the old lines of privilege and
autocracy, saw a new hope in the rise of Fascism and became
convinced that it was going to conquer the world. So the death-bed
confession of sin was torn up in Rome and in all countries that
passed under the pirate-flag, and it is only in one or two
countries like America and Britain, where democracy may survive and
may even regain the world, where in any case Catholics are a
minority and must behave like the Japanese in California or Oregon,
that one still hears how freedom and democracy are grand old
Catholic ideas conveyed to a wicked and despairing world by the
august, and fearless, and un-compromising encyclicals of the Popes.
Chapter IV
THE CONTRAST OF RUSSIA AND PRIEST-RULED COUNTRIES
While the services rendered by the Church to civilization are
as hard to find as the black cat in a dark room, the services it
rendered to the repulsive forces which have attempted to wreck
civilization are as plain as the peaks of the Rockies. The
alliances contracted by the Vatican with Italy, Japan, and Germany
are events of recent history like the New Deal or the Atlantic
Charter. The dates and terms of the agreements are public property.
But one service requires special consideration: the organization of
the entire resources of the Church to engender hatred of Communism
in general and of Russia in particular.
This service began, explicitly as far as the documents I have
seen tell us, in 1936, though the Vatican had begun its furious
attack upon Communism and even, in effect, its appeal for a crusade
against it, much earlier. From 1919 to 1924 the Pope was, we saw,
straining, every nerve to get on friendly terms with Soviet Russia
so as to bring under his control the Orthodox Church when its
leaders were scattered. The Russians repeatedly detected the
Catholic clergy in treachery and in 1924 closed the country against
missionaries from Rome. So in December of that year Pius XI, who
had hitherto in great charity kept in check his hatred of
Communism, attacked it in his Consistorial Allocution (December 18)
and called the attention of all "heads of "governments" to the
danger of it. He, in fact, coupled Socialism with Communism as
equally dangerous. In 1931 he, we saw, ordered all Catholic states
(in encyclical Quadragesimo anno) to adopt the Fascist state and
sternly forbade Catholics to take up either Socialism or Communism.
He said that Communism had brought "massacres and ruin upon Eastern
Europe." This attack on Russia seems to have been taken up or
fostered by his representatives everywhere, as on December 30,
1932, the British Daily Worker said that "the clergy of all creeds
and denominations are, with religion as their pretext following the
lead of the Pope in his call for a crusade against the U.S.S.R."
The direct and more pointed attack began, however, in 1936,
shortly after the outbreak of Franco's rebellion in Spain. We must
remember that Italy and Germany were not at that time open allies
of Franco, and America and Britain had not declared their attitude
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to what everybody still called a rebellion. But there was no
reserve at Rome. In a blistering and most untruthful attack on
Communism, which he represented as the aggressor in Spain, the Pope
spoke of it as a force that was attempting to subvert established
order of every kind from Russia to China, from Mexico to South
America." From this year onward he appealed repeatedly for "the
extinction" of Bolshevism in Spain, Mexico, and Russia, and, as we
saw, "he holy cry for blood was taken up in the Catholic section of
every country.
When the Czecho-Slovakian crisis, which might be called the
first stage of the world-war, arose in 1938 the service that the
Vatican and its Black International in every country had already
rendered the imperialist thugs by this propaganda was apparent.
Joint action at once by Britain, France, and Russia would have
strangled Hitlerism in its cradle and put a cheek to the ambitions
of Japan. But Britain was under obligation only to support France,
and France was persuaded by its Catholic politicians and military
leaders, the present Vichy crowd, that Russia could not be trusted
to keep its word: in reality, that active partnership with so
disreputable a power and helping it to cheek the strength of
Germany must not be undertaken by France. As late as 1940 British
generals of the stuffy Tory type were saying: "We may have to ally
our selves with Russia, but God forgive us." That contemptuous
attitude the Black International fed in every country for ten
years, to the very great profit of the bandits.
We admit the double root of this hatred of Russia, or the
capitalist and the Catholic roots, but we have to recognize this
difference: that the capitalists, who make no pretence of moral
principle, are honest opponents of a dangerous rival system,
whereas the priests, who profess to be the moral saviors of a
wicked world lie about their motives and by their action run the
risk of bringing upon civilization precisely that ruin which they
untruthfully accused the Communists of contemplating. The Pope's
outburst in 1936 which I quoted in an earlier book and which was
clearly written by the present Pope as Secretary of State, was a
tissue of untruthful charges. Instead of trying to "subvert
established order of every kind" by "an un-parallel confusion of
forces so savage and cruel as to have been thought utterly
incompatible" -- whatever the last phrase may mean -- Russia had by
1936, as the whole world knew, wrought a miracle of the creation of
order out of chaos. In 1923, as a result of the European War, the
Civil War, and the great famine, Russia had been reduced to a
condition of disorder and misery which had not been seen in Europe
since the end of the Thirty Years War (1648). The restoration began
in earnest a few years later, and by 1936 the most respected writer
of Britain and America reported, with a few reserves, that the
Soviet government had, especially in regard to the reduction of
crime and the establishment of social order, won a remarkable
victory.
Apologists in America had generally, to be less wild than the
Pope in their indictment of Russia, but they were reckless enough.
The old lies about the massacre of priests and the persecution of
religion flourished in Catholic literature from year to year; in
fact, there is good ground to believe that the official
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representatives of America demanded assurances on the latter point
when they began to negotiate with Russia about military aid. The
conspiracies in which some of the leading Bolsheviks were involved
were eagerly snapped up as proof that the country was ruled by a
murderous bureaucracy, whereas we now have the weighty assurance of
Duranty (with a reserve in one case) and Ambassador Davies that the
men were certainly guilty. Davies himself repeats a perennial libel
in saying that the Russians are lamentably inefficient as compared
with the Americans and the British. He has had the cruel experience
of seeing his book appear, with this reproach, just at the time
when the world had proof before it daily of the relative efficiency
of the British and the Russian military machine.
There are two plain reasons for the sacred fury of the Church
against Russia, and the first is entirely discreditable. It is
because the attack upon Russia brought the Black International into
line with wealth and privilege in accordance with its old and
unwavering tradition. For an attack upon the Communist political
system the Church has no ground whatever since it declares that it
never interferes in politics. And when it plans its attack on
economic ground's it recognizes that it can make no distinction
between Communism and Socialism, since the degree of socialization
is not a matter of moral principle. But its claim that any moral
principle at all is involved is ludicrous. Ryan is very eloquent on
the moral right of private ownership: he is, in fact so sure of it
that he says a Socialist government would be a violation of moral
law, and Catholic Americans would be justified in rebelling against
it. Piffle. A people has a right to choose its economic form just
as well as its political regime. The apologists who talk like this
are simply saying to the world's capitalists: The Church of Rome is
your friend so help to protect it from further decay.
The second and stronger reason is the tremendous loss which
the spread of Communism had inflicted upon the Roman Church. I gave
the facts in the first book. The press and most writers conceal
them and leave the fierce hostility of Rome to Russia not very
intelligible and cover up the vast amount of harm that the Vatican
did by spreading it's hatred over the world, yet Rome itself is
much more ready to admit this motive than to talk about its support
of the capitalist system. It, of course, does not speak of losses.
With its usual complete indifference to truthfulness it invites the
world to unite against Russia because it "attacks religion." All
criticism of the Catholic Church or telling the people the truth
about its history and its aims is "an attack" but criticism by the
Church of other Churches or philosophies is, however acrid and
untruthful it may be, just a kindly warning to the world of the
dangers that surround it.
We may readily admit that for many years the Soviet government
gave every assistance to the voluntary organization that opened the
eyes of the people, but this official cooperation had ceased at the
time when the Vatican was shrieking about attacks on religion, and
in the other countries (Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Spanish
America, etc.) in which the advance of Socialism and Communism
detached tens of million# from the Roman Church there was certainly
no official encouragement of the movement. The mechanism of
propaganda was a substitution of facts for lies, of knowledge for
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ignorance. The policy of the Church when the Fascist reaction began
in each country sufficiently proves this. It closed the schools,
suppressed freedom of discussion, and strangled literature; and it
filled the jails with the men and women who had been most prominent
in exposing the clergy, and it had, and continues to have,
thousands of them labelled Communists and shot.
We talk about the blindness of men in the red haze of war, but
the third year of this most terrible of all war's has been, to the
intense mortification of the Black International, a year of
illumination. Self-interest has, of course, helped the British and
Americans to surmount the prejudices that have been pumped into
them by press, pulpit, literature, and the cinema for 20 years, but
it will hardly be questioned that the magnificent conduct of the
Russian people has been the main fact that opened the eyes of folk
to their great qualities and the soundness of their system. Right
until the hordes of Nazi tanks, set free by the absence of any
opposition on the western front, were within a few hours run of
Leningrad and Moscow, Britons and Americans were whispering that of
course the Russian people would not fight with real devotion and
the requisite energy for a government that usurped power, treated
them despotically and mercilessly, and robbed them of their
previous religion. Novels, the class-books of so many millions,
still circulated in which the Commissars and leading officials were
represented as sadistic monsters who lived on champagne, caviar,
and Christian virgins.
History has rarely seen such a revulsion of sentiment, such a
triumph over two decades of priestly and aristocratic slander, as
has happened in the last six months. Conservative leaders now speak
in public about "our noble Russian ally," and deputies from Russia,
who only six months ago were admitted at the back doors, so to
speak, are received with royal hands. And it is only in the last
few months that the press or most of it -- many papers still crab
at Russia and frown on the popular enthusiasm -- has supported the
change of heart. In England most of the cinemas still treat Russia
as a power which it would be indecent to obtrude upon the notice of
a Christian people. Bands at Anglo-Russian functions are forbidden
to play the Communist national anthem, and rich if small
organizations continue to publish the old libels. But, the facts
have for the vast majority of people swept away the long-standing
prejudices as the first warm rains of spring wash away the snows.
The next step will be for the public to reflect how it has
been systematically duped over a long series of years. The share of
the Black International in this has been so conducted that most
people are unaware of it, but the truth slowly emerges and Rome
shudders. The Pope, we saw, already puts out rumors that in his
intimate circle he, from the first, drew a sharp distinction
between what he blamed in Russia, which was virtuous on the wrong
grounds, and what he blamed in Germany and Italy. But no one has
read a line in which he gave a straight moral condemnation of the
Fascists and the Nazis -- he never blamed more than their
interference with the Church and the attempt to annihilate Catholic
Poland -- whereas the Catholic authorities themselves translated
and circularized the vicious, vitriolic speech on the Communists of
Spain, Mexico, and Russia, which he delivered on September 14,
1936, (The Spanish Terror).
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Into whatever contortion the Black International is driven in
the next few years the world is confronted today by a situation
which sets in a glorious light all that the Pope cursed and casts
a shade of ignominy and cowardice upon all that he blessed. Russia
shines, and even China wins honor and admiration: the two chief
countries in which the Pope had seen the activity of the devil:
Spain, the Land which his shining Catholic crusaders were going to
deliver from bondage and misery, is a country of spectral forms and
general mourning, a land in which innocent men face the firing-
squad daily, while the priests wax fatter, and the Catholic
"nobles" and politicians do actually carouse in Madrid as the
Bolshevik leaders were represented by the Pope's agents as doing in
Moscow.
Portugal, we saw on the authority of a writer whom American
Catholics had imprudently recommended as veracious, is a country in
which priest-ridden jailers use the vilest tortures that were used
in the ages of faith: in which decades of Liberal work for the
education and elevation of the people have been trodden under foot,
and the dictators are richly rewarded by Rome because they declare
that they are ruling Portugal on the lines of the Pope's beautiful
(but untranslated) encyclical.
Italy, dragged at the heels of Hitler's bumping chariot, is in
so pitiful a condition that it wins the sympathy of its democratic
enemies. From his own Vatican windows the Pope looks out upon a
people that in a very high proportion curses the man whom the
Vatican, by a sordid bargain, confirmed in his usurped power.
London, the bombed and ravaged city, is gay with confidence, well
fed, richly entertained at nights, reflecting the summer sun on the
faces of its citizens. Rome is beggared and dejected, despised and
bullied by the men who invited it to share the conquest of the
world.
Vichy France is sullen and simmering. The myth that it was
somehow ruled against its will by a posse of Jews, Atheists, and
Freemasons and would, under such men of piety as Laval and Petain,
flock cheerfully to the churches, is exploded. From Normandy to
Savoy people sigh for deliverance from the regime of Catholicism
and dishonor, rusticity and penury, which has been forced upon
them. The French people have provided most of the $10,000,000,000
worth of loot that the blond beasts, whom the Black International
persuaded the French to admit, have dragged in French cars on
French petrol into Germany. Never since its earliest history has
proud France fallen so low as it is today, and it shudders to think
that it may not have reached the end of its humiliating surrender.
No people in the world today respects France -- except priest-
ridden Quebec.
Belgium lies under an almost impenetrable cloud, earning its
dry bread only by working for the master whom it has for quarter of
a century hated more than any other on earth. Austria has perished.
It is again the despised southern fringe of the German Reich. The
Croats, who were persuaded by their priests to betray their
country, fight the men to whom they betrayed it because they were
the Pope's allies. The Slovaks who were similarly persuaded to
complete the ruin of the country in which they had, enjoyed freedom
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and social welfare now melt away on the battlefield of Russia.
Latin America, the huge conglomeration of states which at the wave
of Pacelli's white hand declared itself Catholic, once more, is
rent and bewildered. The Pope's allies, the people find, had
plotted to ruin them and now hang about their shares with murderous
intent. And Germany and Japan, on whose success the Pope had
gambled the whole security of his Church, seem to have reached the
peak of their victories and have begun the decline that leads to
the pit in which the fully developed strength of America, Russia,
and Britain is bound to bury them.
Chapter V
THE MONSTROUS ATTEMPT TO RESTORE THE MIDDLE AGES
The treacherous irruption by night of Japan into the war has
transformed it into the phenomenon which has been forecast, with
heavy foreboding, for 20 years -- a world-war. Almost the entire
civilized world is now involved in it. A few powers -- Sweden,
Switzerland, Turkey, and Argentina -- are genuinely neutral, but,
however clearly we may understand the difficulties of their
position, no one regards it as an honorable distinction. The rest
of the civilized world is divided into countries which live under
the most hated emblems the world has seen for many centuries -- the
Swastika and the Rising Sun (for Italy writhes under the former of
these) -- and countries which are sworn to bring them down to the
dust.
Apart from Latin America, which is, as I said, distracted
between its Papal assurances and the discovery of the perfidy and
brutality of the Pope's allies, all Catholic countries fall in the
first category. Their national flags where they still have any,
are, if not deeply stained with dishonor, generally regarded with
contempt or a pity that is tinged with disdain. There can be few
more miserable statesmen in the world than Eugene Pacelli, or His
Holiness Pius XII. Ten years ago he pledged his Church to a belief
in the ultimate victory of Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the ruin
of all liberal, as well as Socialist and Communist, ideals which
they would effect no strong voice would be raised in protest,
against his alliance with a bestial greed that sought to attain its
end's by brutality almost without precedent in history. His
gauleiter and his gestapo would, as always, loyally support the
Vatican policy. The end justifies the means. As to the mass of the
faithful, when did any large body of them ever rebel when Pope and
Black International were united in their policy? And in the
glorious extension of the power and wealth of the Church, the
annihilation of its deadliest enemies, which the Pope anticipated
from the victory of Swastika and the Rising Sun few Catholics would
be in a critical mood.
In the second stage of the war, when the Germans, finding
nearly all Europe in their power and confident of Subduing the
remainder, began to disclose their real sentiments about Italy --
which the Vatican ought to have learned from Mein Kampf 20 years
ago -- and proposed to share the world with Japan only, the Pope
had a new dream. It suited the interests of the Vatican just as
well as it was to the interest of Germany that Southern Europe
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should have its industries destroyed. Big industries mean clotted
urban populations, free discussion, freethought, birth control, and
so on. The Vatican had seen that painful development in France,
Belgium, Italy, and Czecho-Slovakia. The Black International was
ready to join in the plot to de-industrialize those countries and
let Germany glow rich by a monopoly of industry, in Europe. Petain,
with the priests at his elbow, openly mumbles it, in his senile
honesty, and has within the last month closed down a thousand
industries in France. Leopold of Belgium and his Catholic
satellites, Franco, and Salazar cheerfully send their skilled
workers to Germany or to the Russian shambles. Hitler would allow
a Catholic League of Southern Europe, and through Spain and
Portugal the 100,000,000 folk of Latin America would be drawn into
it. Hitler promised the Subjection to the Vatican of all branches
of the Greek and Oriental Churches. Japan promised a monopoly of
Christian missions (if thoroughly Japanized) in the Far East. . .
That these were the plans on which the Vatican worked I showed
on Catholic admissions and by the plain testimony of facts in the
first ten booklets. Already the vast field of Catholic triumph is
a scorched earth. The Pope is ill, silent, desperately watching the
last critical phases of a conflict that, unless it be won speedily
by the Axis, will inexorably be lost. From those windows of the
Vatican Palace which look out upon the world he sees only one flag
waving above the ruins unsullied: the Hammer and Sickle. Britain
has won respect by the courage and endurance of her people but,
after a series of retreats that are rare in British history, has
still to, and doubtless will, redeem the honor of its flag. There
is a stain on the Stars and Stripes that has yet to be removed.
Russia. has made no large blunders but has met the initial impact
of an irresistible force and the loss of vast fertile provinces and
great industries and has begun its recovery with a devotion,
energy, and self-sacrifice that have torn the Pope's libels to
tatter's. Bring on your stage today representative figures of all
the Pope's peoples -- the pale and ragged Italian, the gaunt
Spaniard, the illiterate and poverty-stricken Portuguese, the
shame-faced Belgian or Vichy Frenchman, the hesitating Latin
American -- and at the end of the file bring on a Bolshevik, and
listen to the judgment of the audience. What the Pope cursed the
world blesses: what he blessed the world curses. The Pope has lost.
But, aside from the fact that in America the Black
International is powerful enough to hide this truth from the mass
of people, remember that the Pope has lost dozens of times before,
yet he has today more subjects than ever, immeasurably greater
wealth, and a new power in non-Catholic countries.
A week ago a powerful British air-fleet bombed Cologne. I had
wondered how long it would be before this was done. Here was one of
the most vital and most vulnerable bottle-necks in Europe. Through
it passed practically all the war-supplies from Holland, Belgium,
and Northern France. Thoroughly smash the railway through the city,
where it approaches the Rhine, and the great bridges, and you deal
Germany a terrific blow. But -- I once spent five or six weeks in
Cologne -- the cathedral is close to the railway and the bridges.
It was unhurt, and who will believe that the vital part of the
railway and the bridge which carries it over the river, which are
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only a few hundred yards from the cathedral, were properly treated
if no bomb strayed across the square? I hear that, at the prayer of
British Catholics, our airman were told to run no risk of touching
the cathedral.
Why was Rome never bombed? There were times when this was
within our power, and it might have had a very considerable
influence on our fortunes in the Mediterranean area. H.G. Wells
asked me the other day if I knew why it was not done. I do not
know. These things are not put on paper, and if they were the paper
would never see the light. But there is a grapevine, and the
message went along it that through Roosevelt American Catholics
threatened things, and there were Black International threats in
parts of the British Empire, if we bombed Rome. Mussolini probably
patted his Papal friend on the back.
However these things may be, remember that Rome has many times
in history seemed to be doomed because of its Papal alliances with
brutality, but it recovered. About 850 years ago the Romans
themselves drove one of the strongest of the Popes into exile for
such an alliance. In 1527 Catholic armies wrecked Rome as Goths and
Vandals had never done. Early in the 19th Century, a contemporary
tells us, Napoleon's generals, entering Italy and carrying off the
Pope, decided that this was to be the end of the Papacy; and not
many years later Macaulay made his foolish prediction that there
would still be a Papacy when visitors from New Zealand came to see
the ruins of London.
I dislike prediction's, and indeed I have accomplished the
work which I set out to do in this series of books. I proved to the
hilt the indictment I brought against the Black International, and
I have now shown that the Church of Rome is of such a nature, so
dangerous in its structure and so feeble in its intellectual
appeal, that it is bound to look for such allies in every age. A
third line of evidence is found in Papal history, especially during
the last century and a half. Violence has always -- I do not know
if this was in the protocols given by Jesus to Peter -- been the
policy on which the Black International relied. The Popes merely
kept the weapon tucked under their cassocks during the few decades
between the death of feudal tyranny and the birth of totalitarian
tyranny. The leopard does not change its spots, but it may have
them white-washed.
Nevertheless I may conclude with a glance at the future. This
German-Japanese horror shall and will perish. As I write there is
still time for a serious setback to Britain, Russia, or America, or
all three. I have never been tempted to underrate the ability of
the men who, behind the miserable tinfoil Siegfried and his greedy,
friends, direct the German effort or the cunning and lean energy of
the Japanese. If this serious advance of the Axis does not occur in
the next few weeks we may breathe freely. Within, two further
months the retreat will begin. The end, this year (if Britain opens
a second front) or next, is certain.
What will Rome do? Remember first that comparatively few
people know the story of its guilt. A few American papers have at
intervals reported Vatican events which suggested it. The vast
majority of the leading papers, both in America and Britain, never
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gave any news which gave their readers an inkling of the truth.
Fortunately, much had been reported -- the compact with Mussolini,
the Concordat with Hitler, the enthusiastic support of Franco, the
diplomatic arrangement with Japan, and so on -- before the
bestiality of Fascism had revealed itself, and such facts as that
the only voluntary "crusaders" against Russia are from Catholic
countries and the unconverted isolationists of America play up
strongly to the Catholic minority, give us a basis in the Public
mind for a proper education.
It is therefore probable that there will not be the general
outcry against Rome that a man who has read the full evidence
would. expect. No other writer of influence has the courage and
honesty to warn the public, as Wells does, that instead of having
been reconciled with the modern spirit the Church of Rome is as
dangerous an enemy of civilization as ever. One thing only would
cause the Church the deepest alarm: if the victory of democracy
were to put Communism and Socialism back in the places they
occupied years ago. Will this happen?
It depends very largely upon America. When the war is over the
isolationists will be amongst the loudest to demand that America
shall have a leading voice in the settlement of Europe and China.
Every sensible man will welcome the aid of America in such a
restoration of Europe that, instead of sowing the dragon's teeth as
we did at Versailles at the close of the last war, we have every
guarantee that is humanly possible of a lasting peace. But the
terms of settlement that have been so far announced are ominously
vague, and we know only too well what "stability" means on the lips
of these folk.
You will find, when the time comes, that the Vatican will make
a brazen attempt to secure a voice as one of the great stabilizing
forces. You will find Catholics everywhere combining with the
reactionaries who want to plan the new Europe. They will want
Leopold restored, men like Bonnet put in power in France Franco
firmly established in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, the royal
family propped on the throne of Italy, and so on. By hook or crook
they will try to get Russia, which will have won the war in Europe,
excluded from the settlement. They will insist that religion be
"strengthened," knowing that Romanism,, Buddhism, and Islam have
worked on the side of our enemies, and that Communism be taken at
the Pope's valuation. If the present generation tolerates these
things and does not insist on the guilt of every party being
stamped upon the mind of the world they will deserve their future.
The struggle for the rights of man which has reddened Europe with
blood for a century and a half will enter upon a new phase.
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