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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
**** ****
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL No. 6
THE WAR AND PAPAL INTRIGUE
HOW THE NEW POPE TALKED PEACE
AND WORKED FOR WAR
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD -- : -- KANSAS
**** ****
Chapter
CHAPTER
I The Church Crowns the Papal Policy ................. 1
II The Pope's Peace Efforts ........................... 9
III Poland Pays for its Piety .......................... 17
IV The German Church and the War ...................... 25
**** ****
THE CHURCH CROWNS THE PAPAL POLICY
At the close of the book on the monstrous perfidy of the Black
International in Czecho-Slovakia I asked: What did Pius XII, the
new Pope, and his local hierarchies do when the hellish bugles
sounded and the black flag was unfurled?
In our day-to-day reading of the crowded events of our time,
under the changing strain of feelings which one day are warmed with
stories of heroism and next day are chilled with despair, we
naturally lose sight of whatever continuity there is in the
bewildering procession. We could not readily answer such questions
as this, although it refers to only two years ago. But I have
prepared the reader for the answer. The Black International has
pursued a consistent policy during the last ten years, to say
nothing of earlier times. It has fawned upon the three Powers which
had already by 1930 openly exhibited such shameless programs of
greed and barbaric violence that the war was inevitable. I have
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proved that. So the answer to our question also is inevitable. The
Black International clung still to the arch-enemies of the human
race through all their crimes and atrocities as long as they had a
confident prosPect of victory.
Will it change its policy when that prospect changes to one of
defeat and dire punishment? I write with the hum of war-planes
overhead, the slender fingers of the searchlights probing for the
enemy that would make a shuddering pulp of us. Round me are the
horrid gaps in the rows of little peaceful homes from which I have
seen the men -- the garbage-men of a "New Order" -- bring out the
shrouded, crumpled forms of the dead. In the press daily are the
rumble of a struggle in Russia that surpasses everything in the
calendar of human folly and perversity and the tremulous
foreshadowing of an agony that the winter may bring upon
200,000,000 broken-hearted folk. The end is not in sight, and I
have no gift of prophecy. But should, as I confidently expect, the
heroism of the Russian people hurl back the advancing wave of
savagery and give us an unwavering hope of victory the Papacy will
change its policy.
Remember the last war. The Papacy supported Germany, which had
promised it the usual reward -- more power and wealth to the Church
-- even against Italy, but as soon as America entered the arena and
the defeat of Germany seemed probable, it recollected that the Pope
is the Great Neutral. The signs of change already flicker in the
press, but notice how feeble, how anonymous, how easily repudiated
they are as long as the terrific might of Germany still rears its
brutal head! Whatever be the next or the final phase, let the world
never forget how the Papacy helped its deadly and unscrupulous
enemies during the long years of corrupt preparation and supported
them during two years of shuddering criminality. The one virtue
which its best apologists claim for it that it preached the virtues
of peace, did but help to dope the innocent nations while the
crooks armed themselves. At least from 1936 onward war was
inevitable because Japan, Germany, and Italy could attain the
objects to which they were openly pledged by no other means, and
they saw the rest of the world so beguiled with their pipe-dream of
peace that it seemed to them safe to open the insidious campaign.
And in case the reader has become to some extent confused by
the mass of details and testimonies which it has been necessary to
give in support of this indictment let us sum up and formulate very
clearly the charges against the Black International. The intimate
connection of the Vatican by solemn agreements and the exchange of
ambassadors with Japan, Italy, and Germany and with such satellites
of theirs as Franco Spain, Vichy, Portugal, Hungary, etc., is a
fact of ordinary record. A desperate apologist might say that this
has no more significance than the diplomatic relations of other
neutral powers with those countries. The Catholic apologist is so
accustomed to writing for his own people, who are forbidden under
pain of hell to read criticisms of what he says, and treated with
such generosity in the general press that there is no limit to his
audacity. Listen to this. On the very day on which I write this I
receive a letter from a correspondent who tells me that a Catholic
to whom he spoke of the infamous agreement of Mussolini and the
Pope in 1929 denies that there ever was such a compact and that it
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is just one of McCabe's lies! Can you beat that? The Concordat and
Treaty were editorially discussed in every paper in the world,
especially the Catholic papers, which hailed the agreement as a
superb triumph of Papal diplomacy, and it seems impossible that a
Catholic should not know that the Vatican City and all its
privileges (independence, radio, etc.) only began with and were
founded by that treaty.
There is one fundamental difference between the position of
secular powers that exchange ambassadors and courtesies with the
Vatican and that of the Vatican itself: to say nothing of the fact
that these powers make no pretence of moral responsibility and
spiritual guidance of the world. They have not in Germany or Italy
a black army of 50,000 to 100,000 servants under their control --
bishops, priests, monks, nuns, religious brothers, organizers,
teachers, journalists, etc. -- which professes that it has to build
the character of the nation. The Vatican has. It is one of the
loudest boasts of the Church of Rome over its rivals that it is
international, its various national branches being entirely subject
to the Vatican, and that this gives it a unique power to judge
events from the universal moral, not the narrow national viewpoint.
What, then, are the vices of this triumvirate of poisoning
nations which the Vatican ought, on its own profession, to have
denounced to the world instead of protecting them by friendly
alliance? It will be enough here to select three.
The first is that the war for which they are responsible is
the most bestial in modern history because it is a war of naked
greed. Shires tells us in his Berlin Diary that he once said this,
in less blunt language, to the Nazi Economic Minister Funk, and the
man admitted that the aim of it was to secure "the maximum economic
opportunity" for Germany. Notoriously its aim is to concentrate
industrial production in Germany or to permit it in subject
countries, which are to provide food and raw material -- a much
less profitable service -- only under German control. Japan won
over the mass of its workers to the plans of its militarists and
capitalists by just the same bait. Even the leaders of the Social
Mass (Socialist) Party support the Chinese Incident. They say that
the British workers have a good status because the country seized
vast colonies overseas and exploits them. I should like to hear
them tell an Australian, Canadian, or South African that his
country is a "colony" and is exploited by Great Britain. In Italy
the original idea was the same. The chief argument of the
government during the Abyssinian War was that the country contained
at vast amount of undeveloped wealth which would raise the income
of every class in Italy. Today, it is true, they complain that the
word Axis is heard no longer, and that their German overlords
brutally tell them that the destiny of Italy is to be a playground
and kitchen-garden for Germans. But a share in the vast spoils of
the war was the lure that brought them into it.
It is a much-disputed point whether all modern wars can be
brought under an economic formula. In the case of the present war
there is no dispute. Mussolini and Hitler may have medieval dreams
of conquest and empire, and the Japanese fanatics may talk about
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the divine mission of the Yamata race to uplift the world, but the
real motive is that the division of the earth into two spheres of
influence means incalculable wealth for Germany and Japan and huge
fortunes for their politicians, bankers, and industrialists.
That is the war the Pope helped to bring on. It promised more
wealth and power to the Church. It meant the paralysis of
industrial development and its consequences -- education, urban
life, free discussion and the growth of Socialism and skepticism --
in the countries in which the Papacy had lost most heavily. Notice
what is happening in France. Petain makes no secret of his design
to destroy the old industrial life in the interest of the Church.
Even if you think a bunch of Italian clerics hardly capable of a
world-plot so subtle as this you have their cry, repeated for years
throughout the Church, for the destruction of Bolshevism and
Liberalism, the most prolific sources of rebellion against the
Papacy. Whichever way you take it the Black International has, for
its own profit, lent its aid in preparing the conditions of success
of the most sordid war of greed in modern history and has in each
country, through the local Church, boisterously supported every
step that Was taken in the direction of world-domination.
The second general vice is that the ambition of these Powers
has led to a quite repulsive degradation of the standards of public
conduct. Here there is no possibility of pleading ignorance on the
part of the simple-minded Vatican. The Nazis have lied to and duped
the Papacy itself repeatedly since their first bargain with it in
1933, and four-fifths of its complaints about Germany and Italy are
grumbles that the Concordats which were solemnly signed have not
been observed. Even Japan is now beginning to give it serious
concern by its scheme to make Christianity purely national and
independent of foreign influence.
Broadly we have seen years of such lying, treachery, and
corruption as we thought that we had buried forever. Nearly a
hundred pacts, treaties, or international agreements of one kind or
other have been signed in the last 20 years and cynically disowned
as soon as it was expedient. An Australian paper, The Vigilant,
sends me a copy of an issue in which it quotes Hitler's solemn
assurance of non-aggression to every country he has attacked or
annexed. "Germany neither intends nor wishes", he says in 1935, "to
interfere in the international affairs of Austria, to annex
Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss." His books show that he
wished and intended it long before that time. "The Sudetenland is
the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe," he said on
September 26, 1938. Within a few month's he took the whole of
Czecho-Slovakia and began to prepare for Poland. "Germany has
concluded a non-aggression pact with Poland and she will adhere to
it unconditionally", he had told Poland and Europe. So with
Holland, Belgium, and Yugo-Slavia. And all Germany Heil Hitlered
when on June 22, 1941, he said, with his usual ferocious solemnity:
"When the German Reich gives a guarantee, that means that it also
abides by it."
It is not only that the leading statesmen of the aggressor
nations have lied so brazenly and cynically for years that the
problem of the future historian will not be their psychology but
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that of the democratic statesmen. No trick has been too dirty to
use. The corruptor, or advance-agent, was considered as respectable
as the missionary. Japanese young "ladies" prostituted themselves
in the good cause in China and Mongolia, and in France dames of the
highest elegance used their charms for Germany and the Church.
Japanese and German gold corrupted even Russians. Buddhist monks
were used in Southern Asia, and women and promises of advancement
everywhere to provide the miserable brood of traitors, almost a
novelty of our age, whom we call Quislings. In short, the near-
success of the trinity in crime was won by as vast and
comprehensive a debasement of our standards of honor as had not
been known in Europe since those flowers of the Age of Faith -- the
Age of Chivalry and the Renaissance.
Now not even a Bernard Shaw or an Aldous Huxley will say that
this foulness, this reversion to pre-civilized ways of living, is
found on all sides. Paradox is amusing but a paradox of that sort
would be revolting. Certainly we all have our faults. I write for
men and women who discount the utterances of statesmen and bishops
and do not see the present struggle as a Miltonian conflict of
angels and devils. We are poor enough, heaven knows, and much of
the motivation of our conduct even in this war is far from angelic.
But that this corruption of the standards of conduct is
overwhelmingly on one side will be generally recognized. It is on
the side of the Pope's allies; and it has done incalculable harm to
the democracies, for whom he has not a good word.
And the third vice, closely connected with this, is the
bestiality with which the friends of the Vatican have conducted the
campaign to attain their bestial greeds. A war inspired by such a
purpose could not very well be otherwise. It is on the gangster
level. Fear of retaliation has restrained that use of poison-gas
which we expected but the horrors thicken as I write. We thought
that we had reached a stage when soldier's recognized the rights of
man and confined their killing within certain lines. Now some blond
beast in Paris or Prague, to get praise or higher profit from his
Fuhrer, shoots fifty entirely innocent men for the act of an
unknown. Bulgar officers bloodily exterminate whole villages.
Russian villagers are shut in their houses and burned alive. The
food of children is stolen in Denmark and Holland. Japanese
officers indulge themselves or their men in rape and force opium
upon the Chinese. Gestapo men, trained in Hitler Colleges to give
the rein to sadistic impulses . . . But you have read enough about
these things.
What does the Pope say about this conduct of his allies?
Nothing. It would be "interference in polities" to notice what the
Italians did in Abyssinia or are doing in Greece and Yugo-Slavia,
what the Germans -- But I beg the Pope's pardon. He has twice used
very eloquent and moving language about outrages. You may not think
two protests in five years of bestiality a very high record for a
Pope. In fact, if we look into them the protests are not so
impressive. On January, 22, 1940 he referred to Poland in a
broadcast address and lamented that he heard of "infamy of all
kinds" and "horrible and inexcusable excesses." What did his German
allies say to that? Nothing. You see, he was referring to the
Russians. He said that he had heard that these outrages were "not
confined to districts under Russian occupation." We must, it is
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true, make some allowance for the Pope's ignorance. He evidently
imagined that the Russians had taken over some ten million Pole's
and were beating the life out of them, whereas, as the rest of us
know, the Russians had taken back only White Russians and
Ukrainians and were only too eager to make them feel at home in the
Soviet Union. In any case, although the press was still acridly
anti-Russian no responsible paper even suggested that they were
committing outrages.
A little earlier a censure of the seizure of part of Finland
by Russia had shown that the eagle eye of the Vatican ranged even
over the frozen north in search of outrages to rebuke -- if they
were not committed by its allies. There were many of us who did not
at that time know what Russia had offered for the territory and how
vitally necessary it was in view of the coming war, but we knew
that Russians did not behave like the Pope's friends. The Papal
organ, however, the Osservatore Romano, surpassed itself --
especially as it had never condemned outrages before. It had such
lyrical passages as:
"After twenty years of Bolshevik tyranny it now appears that
Communism which had already suppressed political liberty, stilled
individuality, reduced work to the status of slavery, and erected
violence into, a system, has added a new pearl to its diadem . . ."
After hounding men it now hounds nations.
The Papacy complaining that some other institution stifles
individuality is rich, and one cannot help reflecting today that
for slaves the Russian workers fight with remarkable spirit. But
these are incidental trifles such as we pick up in all Papal
pronouncements. The broad comment on this Vatican rebuke of
aggression is this: by that time Germany had drenched the Jews with
horrors, carried out its infamous Blood Purge, and savagely
destroyed Czecho-Slovakia. Italy had perpetrated the grossest
outrages in Abyssinia and Albania, and Japan had overrun five
province's of China and treated tens of millions of the Chinese
with barbarity. The Vatican, which had representatives of the three
Powers in the Papal Court, had seen none of this wanton and
monstrous aggressiveness and its accompanying savagery. Just as
today it knows nothing about the savagery that is being perpetrated
on Serbs, Greeks, and other conquered peoples. But the moment
Russia enters upon a normal military operation -- not after a
treacherous pact of friendship, but after an earnest effort to
bargain for what it vitally needed -- the Pope ceases to be the
Great Neutral and discovers that he is the supreme judge of the
moral life of the world.
The Russians committed no outrages in either Finland or the
provinces they recovered from Poland, although Poland had, as I
will show presently, shamefully persecuted those provinces for
twenty years. Today the Germans are in Russia and are surpassing
their own record of brutality. Mr. Winston Churchill does not love
Russia, so when he says that he has, officially, full and solid
information about the German atrocities we have to believe him. On
August 24 he said, speaking of Germany, in a carefully-prepared
broadcast:
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"As her armies advance whole districts are being exterminated.
Scores of thousands -- literally scores of thousands -- of
executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German
police-troops. Since the Mogul invasion of Europe in the sixteenth
century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such
a scale or approaching such a scale."
On September 29 he spoke again about "the absolutely
frightful, indescribable atrocities which the German police-troops
are inflicting on the Russian population in the rear of the advance
of their armored soldiers."
But the Pope has less to say than ever. One might gather from
the Catholic papers that he is so busy praying for peace that he
cannot maintain his customary moral survey of the world. Bunk. Not
even the banks and exchanges are watching the ebb and flow of the
red tide in Russia and calculating the chances of the issue more
carefully than the Vatican. He will not utter a word of censure
until we know that Germany is beaten. The common decent German
soldier is sickened by the infamies committed by the Nazi-trained
troops and police under Nazi leaders. A letter to his wife that was
found on the body of one ran:
"I hate the day when I was born in Germany. I am shocked by
what goes, on in our army in Russia. Vice, loot, violence, murder,
murder, and murder. We destroy old men, women, and children and
kill simply for the sake of killing . . . If I survive the Russian
bullets and shells I will, in my present mood, perish from a German
bullet."
Evidence accumulates daily that the Italian people and
soldiers, and most of the officers, are sick of the bestial
alliance into which Mussolini, with the cowardly connivance of the
King and the blessing of the Vatican, has drawn them. But the Pope
says nothing. The German and Italian clergy, 100,000 of them
besides paid officials, still cry whoopee.
Will the Catholics of America and Britain try, when the day of
human judgment comes, to throw all the blame on Secretary of State
Pacelli who is now Pope Pius XII? It would not be surprising. A
year or two ago the plea was that the poor, harassed, aged Pope
felt that he must in the general interest of the Church let Spanish
bishops rejoice over the brutalities in Spain, Italian bishops lead
their people in cheering for the "victories" in Abyssinia and
Albania, and German bishops rub shoulders with the Nazis. Now they
discover that, as we or they knew all along, behind the Pope,
issuing orders in his name, was the vigorous Pacelli, Will they,
when the war is over or the tide of battle definitely turns, say
that the Church was compromised by a man of unfortunate character?
We may have to defend poor Pacelli against the archbishops and
cardinals who lifted him to the skies a couple of years ago. He is
no more inhuman than my of themselves. He is a man of normal but
controlled sentimentality. In more fortunate circumstances he might
have been a successful Roman lawyer or banker, kind and generous to
his wife or some blonde baby. He is just a stricter churchman, more
narrowly concentrated on the interests of the Church, than any of
the others, and that is precisely why they made him Pope.
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And as far as one can penetrate the august secrets of these
proceedings it was not so much the Italian as the foreign,
including the British and American cardinals, who turned a wavering
scale in his favor. Pius XI, of unhappy memory -- no Pope in modern
times had been so severely criticized by Catholic writers of
several countries -- died on February 10, 1940, and the cardinal
voters flew to Rome. The world learned how scrupulous is the
procedure of the Church, the cardinals are locked in a room where
they sleep and eat (and drink) until two-thirds of them agree upon
a Pope.
What -- incidentally -- the world did not learn was the rather
amusing meaning of this Conclave (or "'shut in with a key"). The
history of Papal elections for the last sixteen centuries, or since
the Papacy became rich, beats the history of presidential elections
to a frazzle for bribery, intrigue, and good honest fighting. If
you read French and can get it read Petrucelli della Gattina's
Histoire diploinatique des Conclaves (4 vols, 1864-6), though you
will find a good deal of the material in Miss V. Pirie's Triple
Crown (1935). However, in 1271 the cardinals who were assembled for
an election in the Italian provincial town of Viterbo so disgusted
the towns folk by wrangling for three years that the civic
authorities locked them in a room and saw that none of them left it
or intrigued with outsiders until they elected a Pope. From that
date Conclaves began, though it must be confessed that the new
institution by no means put an end to bribery, intrigue, and
fighting.
On March 2, Pacelli was elected. Unlike profane elections that
of a Pope begins with a very solemn invocation of the Holy Ghost --
it did even in the days when the bribery ran to a million dollars
and the murders to 200 -- and then there are grave deliberations,
and the cardinals visit each other in their cells (the cubicles
into which part of the room is divided). After each vote the papers
are burned and the smoke is conducted out by a pipe so that the
Romans shall see. We thus know that there were three "scrutinies",
or examinations of votes, so that it took a considerable time for
Pacelli to get the necessary two-thirds of the votes. In other
words, although he was certainly the ablest candidate, the best
expert on international affairs, and the best linguist, more than
half the cardinals were at first opposed to him. It is useless to
speculate on the reasons, but we receive with skepticism the report
that German and Italian cardinals tried to prevent his election at
the bidding of Hitler and Mussolini. Had Pacelli as Secretary of
State not done enough for them? The best authority, the Pope's
biographer Rankin, says that the non-Italian cardinals carried the
day for him.
The final vote is said to have been unanimous, as was very apt
to happen when it was seen that other candidates had no chance. In
other words -- this is why I enter into detail -- the Church put a
crown not merely on the head of Eugenio Pacelli, but on the policy
he had pursued for ten years. We will remember that if a day comes
when American and British prelates try to disavow that policy. It
is probably true that he fooled them by his suave assurances when
he visited England and America that he was a friend of democracy
and peace. But it would be juster to say that they fooled
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themselves. The Catholic Teeling, a layman, was fully aware and
gave it as a fact of common Catholic knowledge, that the Vatican
had for years been making every effort to counteract western
[democratic] influence, which is not considered very good for the
Church (The Pope in Politics, p. 3). The American cardinals and
prelates who reported after his visit to the United States in 1936
that he was "a great friend of democracy" knew that his visit to
South America in 1934 had been followed by the truculent
suppression of democracy, in which the Church cordially helped, in
nearly the whole of that half of the continent. Cardinal Hinsley,
who stressed above all others that they had elected a Pope of Peace
-- even making absurd play of the fact that pace is the Italian for
peace -- knew just as well that for three years he had urged an
attack on Bolshevism that would involve Italy, Germany, Japan, and
the United States in war, and that he had given his support to
Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan. Whoever was fooled, we will not be.
The princes of the Church set the seal of his most solemn approval
on Pacelli's policy by electing him King.
Chapter II
THE POPE'S PEACE EFFORTS
Many will remember the note of synthetic admiration and
rejoicing that was struck in the entire press of the world when
Pacelli was elected on March 12. His biographer observes that while
for some obscure reasons the Italian papers grumbled those of
America and Great Britain glowed with satisfaction. The Archbishop
of Canterbury talked like an elderly virgin in the House of Lords
at Westminster, and his promise that if the new Pope would lead the
world into paths of peace and justice he would follow and support
him was hailed as a new and most promising religious phenomenon.
Ransom sums up the general enthusiasm by pointing out that upon a
world in flames there came at last a Pope with the inflexible
motto: Peace, Truth, and Charity.
We skeptics are accused of stirring up sectarian strife in a
world that needs cooperative action, of indulging in destructive
criticism when what the race wants is constructive idealism. Who,
in the light of recent events, was right? Four years before the
election of Pius XII I wrote, in the Appeal to Reason Library,
every word that I say in these booklets about the tendencies in
life and about all events and developments to 1935. My work was
neither destructive nor constructive. It was realistic: a statement
of facts. And it differed from the statements of fact of these
spiritual people and the newspapers which broadcast everything they
said and ignored everything we said in that it was a full and
truthful statement of facts. If all those facts which I gave -- the
programs of Hitler and Mussolini, the origin and trend of Nazism
and Fascism, the situation in Spain and Austria and Poland, and so
on -- had been put squarely before the public in 1938 or 1939 there
would have been much less school-girlish rejoicing because a new
Pope spoke prettily about Peace, Truth, and Charity and much more
demand for a realistic analysis of what was wrong and for
appropriate action.
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The world was not in flames at the beginning of 1939. It had
accepted Mussolini's assurance that with the annexation of
Abyssinia for his surplus population he was now content; Hitler's
assurance that with his annexation of the German fringe of Czecho-
Slovakia he had reached the limit of his ambition; Japan's
assurance that it did not now covet a single additional square mile
of Chinese or other Asiatic territory.
But every man who saw the broad truth about the world-
situation, that the race had entered upon a titanic conflict
between privilege -- wealth, Churches, all vested authority -- and
a new spirit that was reviled as Bolshevism, and that the utterly
corrupt and dangerous forces of Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese
Imperialism had been enlisted on the side of privilege, knew that,
while the world was not yet in flames, a sinister fire shouldered
underground, and it was no time for pretty talk about Peace and
Charity. Sluggish as British statesmen were, we now know that they
were preparing for the conflict that broke out later in the year,
though they protested that the risks of disturbing the peace of the
world by overt action (raising vast monition-plant's) restricted
them to such matters as secretly hiring premises for ministries in
the country, drafting schemes, and organizing medical and
undertaking services for vast numbers of wounded and dead
civilians.
I must confine myself to these matters in so far as they
involve the Church of Rome. The idea that the new Pope entered a
world of danger and confusion for which others were responsible
brought to it a new and beautiful gospel is, we now understand,
tripe. He had had as Secretary of State at least for the preceding
five years the same power which he would now wield as Pope, and he
had deliberately used it to help the work of the forces of evil
because, he believed, it was to the interest of the Church. It was
nothing new for him to talk about peace. As the inspirer of Pius XI
he had put the praise of peace on his lips or in his fountain-pen
twice a year for years. In the intervals he had called through the
Pope's mouth for the extinction of Bolshevism and upon that cry
only one possible interpretation can be put -- war. We saw that
Papal policy after 1919 was bound to seek this end above all
others. Socialism and Communism were running the Church. And the
only possible explanation of the Vatican entering into and in spite
of every rebuff clinging to the alliance with the corrupt forces of
Nazism, Fascism, and Japan is that they promised to accomplish
that. It was the reason, also, why Pacelli, in the name of Pius XI,
wrote an encyclical enjoining every Catholic state to become a
Fascist Corporative State, and practically all the South American
Republics as well as Portugal and Hungary, and later Spain, France,
and Belgium complied. Coercion alone brought apostates to heel.
I made short reference in one booklet to -- as far as I can
discover -- the first public declaration by the Papacy -- except
that the Pope began to lash out with his hatred of Russia in 1926
-- of the sentiment that had long been forced upon it: that
Socialism and Communism must be destroyed and that, since argument
about the beauty of the Catholic faith ran off Socialists and
Communists (who knew its history too well) like water off a duck's
back, they must be destroyed by violence. As the point is
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fundamental let us return to it for a moment. The occasion was a
reception at the Vatican of Spanish refugees on September 14, 1936.
The Pope's speech to them, which is published in English by the
Catholic Truth Society -- I do not know if by this time they
realized their blunder and suppressed it -- with the title The
Spanish Terror is no rambling talk of an aged and agitated priest.
It is a polished rhetorical address, prepared in the Secretariat of
State. It represents the rebellion of Catholic Fascist generals in
Spain as a "satanic" attack on the established order by the very
men who had established it, and it says that this is the work of
"those forces which have already given proof and estimate of their
quality in the attempt to subvert established order of every kind
from Russia to China, from Mexico to South America". As Chiang Kai-
Chek had already, under the treacherous guidance of his earlier
associates in Japan, destroyed Communism in China (and prepared the
way for Japan), the Pope's allies were destroying it in Spain, and
the Fascist governments of South America had destroyed it there at
Pacelli's request, the meaning is clear. The Pope invited Germany
(with the aid of rugged divisions from Catholic countries) and
Japan to attack Russia and the United States to attack and annex
Mexico. From that date the cry for the extinction of Bolshevism in
Russia and Mexico echoed every month through the Catholic world.
It is plain that this sentiment of the Pope is not merely
inconsistent with his gospel of peace, but it shaped a policy which
was the very worst possible for the world and for the real prospect
of peace at that time. I do not suggest that the Pope was either
muddle-headed or hypocritical. He had made his position clear a
score of times: peace -- when Communism was extinct by the conquest
of Russia and Mexico and his Nazi and Fascist allies had received,
as a gift, what the Pope thought they wanted. It was the Pope's
admirers who were muddle-headed or -- when they told the world that
Pacelli was going to work for peace without qualification --
hypocritical.
Recent events have now shown that the peace of the world and
the removal of the corruption that threatened civilization depended
above all upon the democracies and (in some form or other) the
United States allying themselves closely with Russia. I may be
pardoned for explaining that this is not on my own part a case of
being wise after the event. In the A. B. C. Library of Living
Knowledge (No. 3, Economic Gains of the Soviet Union, 1937) I fully
vindicated that great civilization against calumnies that were
current in nearly the whole press and showed how peace was the
first condition it required for the completion of its splendid
work. I pointed out that whatever dreams Russians may have had at
an earlier date of inspiring revolution in other countries had been
long abandoned, and they were content to let the peoples of the
world judge for themselves between the civilizations of the west
and that of the Soviet Union. I warned the reader that it was just
because the Russians were so successful in creating a civilization
without private capital and without religion that the combined
influence of capitalism and the Churches used almost the entire
press to libel them. "This generation," I said (p. 29), "is the
most heavily duped and doped in all recent history, and its blunder
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may prove the most costly in history to the workers of the world.".
I insisted that a great war of aggression was, on the open
professions of Hitler and Mussolini and because of this criminal
aloofness from Russia, certain to come and said:
"If this war of aggression, which, if it were successful,
would be a signal to Mussolini to take up -- at the deadly expense
of France and England -- his dream of an eastern empire, is
averted, the world will have to thank the Soviet Union (p. 29)."
I have knowledge of even Rationalists who had long read my
books but refused to read another line of mine because of that
little book on Russia. They preferred the superficial gush and
treacherous optimism of accepted writers and journalists who fooled
them about the new Papal era of Peace and Charity.
Since this is the one defence of the action of the Black
International, that the Pope used his world-prestige to issue one
fervent appeal after another for peace, we must make a decisive
reply to it. We are concerned with the action of the Church and
will not be diverted by this trick of distinguishing between local
hierarchies, as if they had a remarkable degree of independence of
the Vatican, and the Pope. We shall see, indeed everybody knows,
that the German Church loudly supported Hitler, as usual, when he
launched the world-war and all its horrors, the Italian Church
fully supported Mussolini in his miserable entrance into the war as
soon as he felt that victory was certain, and the Spanish, Irish,
Hungarian, and Portuguese Churches -- and when the time came the
Belgian and French Churches -- supported their governments in
assisting and fawning on the aggressors.
But for the moment we must clearly understand the action of
the Pope himself. Chanting the virtues of peace is as idle as
preaching justice in the abstract and is often far more dangerous.
The only occasion on which I ever addressed a meeting of a Peace
Society was in 1938. I at first declined the invitation and
consented only on the understanding that I would tell them truths
which they would not like. The bulk of the members refused to
attend -- the local Churches had been busy -- and to the few who
did I presented a realistic analysis of the state of the world,
which the chief officials described as masterly and worthy of their
deepest consideration, and a solemn warning of what was coming. I
was not further invited to address one of the hundreds of Peace
Societies in Great Britain, and a few months later they were all
enthusiastic over the new Pope's beautiful sentiments! These people
flatter themselves that they have superior sentiments to the rest
of us when they really differ from us in flabbiness of intellect
or, in the better cases, in lack of realism.
The plain truth is that the Pope talked peace and worked for
war. He had a very large share in the libel and hatred of Russia
which prevented the one combination of sound forces that could
ensure peace. France had entered into an alliance of mutual defense
with Russia, but the Pope openly condemned it, and the Catholic
military chiefs robbed it of reality and effectiveness. On the
other hand the Pope clung to the alliances with the corrupt forces
which he had cemented. It required very little intelligence and
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study of world-affairs at that time to perceive that the only
possible danger to the peace of the world lay in Germany, Italy,
and Japan. A closer student, as the Pope was supposed to be, could
go further. He would know that those three Powers, his friends,
were determined to start an aggressive war. What, in such
circumstances, was the value of his appeals to the world at large
to see the beauty of peace?
Well, says the apologist, wearily, at least he soon perceived
his error and entered upon a series of practical proposals for
ensuring peace. Did he? He was crowned Pope on March 12. I said in
an earlier essay that it detracts somewhat from the beauty of his
words about Charity that on the very day of his coronation the Jews
were, with terrible injustice and suffering, turned out of Italy,
and he said nothing. Again I beg his pardon. He protected some of
the Jews. In October (1941) the Italian paper La Vita Italiana
sourly complained that not only were there still Jews in Italy but
some of them were millionaires and occupied very high positions in
the state-service. One of these, a Signor Sacerdoti, had just been
appointed Director General of all the shipyards of Italy. The paper
went on to say:
"The appointment again confirms the general conviction that
Italian Jews are strongly favored and protected by the Catholic
Church and that wealthy Jews in Italy are still very influential."
I always acknowledge without a qualm these little injustices
to the clergy into which incomplete knowledge betrays me at rare
intervals. At the same time I must point out, in case you do not
know, Italian, that "Sacerdoti" means "Priests", so that this one
protected Jew of whom I have heard was obviously a Roman Catholic
as well as a millionaire, and therefore a fit person, to come under
the Pope's mantle of Charity: which did not cover the 69,999 Jews
who were robbed and cast out.
March 12 was not merely a real Yom Kippur for the Jews of
Italy. It was the day on which, as I have elsewhere stated, the
sleek and treacherous priest, Msgr. Tiszo, went from Slovakia to
see Hitler and arrange with him for the final betrayal, or sale, of
Czecho-Slovakia. That foul deed was certainly done with the
agreement of the Vatican. It made a final end of the Liberalism,
which the Pope hated, of the Czechs, and it made solidly Catholic
Slovakia an independent state, another member of the Pope's new
dream of a Catholic bloc and abjectly submissive to the Vatican. As
I said, you can believe if you like that Tiszo accomplished this
without consulting Rome. But the step meant far more. It finally
remained the great obstacle to Hitler's march to Russia and the
Balkans. How did the Pope of Peace regard that? It is well known
that even Chamberlain was now convinced that war was absolutely
inevitable. The whole world saw it. Are we to suppose that the new
Pope in the weeks, intense brooding and praying, with three hours'
sleep a night, that followed his coronation (his biographer, says)
did not see what every statesman and editor in the world saw?
Well, says the apologist, still more wearily, Pacelli girded
his thin loins and settled down to six months' fighting to avert
the great calamity. Let me say at once that Pacelli was not such a
fool as one might be tempted to think when one reflects how he had
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prepared the irresistible conditions of a great war. He is a man of
considerable ability and I suggest the alternative view that he
knew well that war was inevitable, was convinced that Germany,
Italy, and Japan -- we shall see later that he was aware of the
joint plan -- would win, and was equally convinced that this would
prove to be to the advantage of the Church. The known facts permit
us to make only one concession to the claim that after all he was
human as well as ecclesiastical: he would work sincerely for peace
in the sense of appeasement or granting Hitler, Mussolini, and
Japan what they quite obviously wanted, and he probably did not
realize how much they wanted that they did not make obvious.
In this light we may review his peace-efforts in the fateful
summer of 1939. The first was unfortunate. He was crowned on March
12 and he emerged from his week of Yogi meditation on the "9th.
Easter Sunday was to fall on April 9, and he had to have a
particularly fervent appeal to the world for peace ready for that
date. But on Good Friday Mussolini took the second step in his war
by invading Albania! The Pope's biographer tells us that he was
annoyed, in so far as consecrated persons can be, both by the
desecration of the holy day and the need to rewrite some passages
of his appeal for peace. To what extent he was really duped we do
not know. Catholics say that he wrote a letter to the King of Italy
to prevent the invasion. It would be as futile as writing to the
king of toyland, but there is no evidence that such a letter was
ever written. Everybody in Italy knew -- was bound to know -- that
a large Italian force was concentrating at the Adriatic ports for
the invasion of Albania; and every thoughtful Italian must have
known that Albania was for Mussolini just the same stage in a
journey to the East as Czecho-Slovakia had been for Hitler. But
whether or no it is true that Mussolini double-crossed his partner
in crime by taking the step, in order to make sure that he got the
southern half of the Balkans for Italy, need not be discussed here,
and the desecration of Good Friday does not interest us. We will
examine the eastern expansion as a whole and the Vatican's relation
to it in a separate essay.
The upshot was that, while nice-minded people all over the
world read the Pope's appeal with the usual moist eyes and muddled
brains, for serious folk it was at the best a damp squib, at the
worst a mockery. And the Pope soon knew it. Many believe that,
while Hitler has certainly not the vast planning and organizing
intelligence with which Nazis credit him, he probably does throw
off the general plans or imaginative scheme's which the massive
military and economic brain behind him then works out in detail.
However that may be, we see a steady and very able method in the
great plot: a step, very carefully prepared (the Saar, the
Rhineland, Austria, etc.) every six months or so, then six months
of covert preparation for and open lying about the next step. After
Czecho-Slovakia the lying became useless. Only Dutchmen and
Belgians were duped by it. Poland was to be the next stage; and the
next stage meant war on a European scale.
There is evidence, which we will see later, that, as we should
assume, the Vatican knew this as well as the French and British
Foreign Offices. A fortnight after Easter the Pope, his biographer
tells us, received so secret a message from his Nuncio in Berlin
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that he opened the letter with his own hands and kept the contents
secret. Only his Secretary of State, Maglione, knew what reply he
made to it. Is it fanciful to suppose that it apprised him of the
next step that Hitler meditated? It was followed, the biographer
says, by "feverish activity" at the Vatican, the Pope consulting
his Nuncios from Berlin and Warsaw and seeing numbers of bishops
from France, Germany, and Poland. As the quarrel about Dantzig, the
unmistakable herald of Hitler's next step, soon broke out, the
Vatican could not even pretend to be taken by surprise.
What, then, were all these efforts to secure peace of which
the Catholic apologist speaks? We ignore the Easter lyric. It
reminds us of one gangster sending a wreath to the funeral of
another. In May he suggested -- so unobtrusively that it could be
denied when the plan failed -- a Five Power Conference over the
German-Polish dispute. The five Powers were to be Poland, Germany,
Great Britain, France, and Italy. You may think him either
unpractical or insincere but the fact is that he wanted Russia,
which was deeply interested, excluded, on his usual assumption that
it was not a respectable Power, and Italy, which was not interested
and would intervene only to support Hitler, included. France, which
was now, to the Pope's annoyance, allied with Russia, and Great
Britain refused. The Conference would certainly not have checked
Hitler.
It is said -- and, of course, denied -- that the Pope then
suggested a Conference on the economic grounds of the world-unrest.
Mussolini had been complaining for some time that Great Britain and
France were trying to starve the Axis economically, and that Tunis,
Jibute, and a share in the control of the Suez were vital economic
requirements of Italy and would entirely satisfy it; while his
troops were trying to cross Albania to Greece and his Fascist
toughs were encouraged to bawl in the streets and theaters that
Italy must have Savoy, Corsica, Malta, etc. Hitler was pleading
that once the question of Dantzig and the Corridor was settled he
would lay aside his armor forever. Any man who wishes may assume
that the Pope really believed them. His economic peace plan was an
attempt to get Great Britain and a France that was already weakened
by treason to give them what they wanted. In any case his
suggestion was rejected as amateurish.
These various proposals are interesting only in connection
with the belief of many that the Vatican has as fine an
intelligence-service as any Chancellory in Europe. If that were so,
the Pope would know that these pretended economic grievances of
Germany, Italy, and Japan were dishonest pretexts for crime. They
were based upon two lies: over-population and a disadvantage in
getting supplies from parts of the world which were included in the
empires of Great Britain and France.
The grievance about over-population is nauseous when we recall
how Hitler for six years and Mussolini for fifteen years had been
whipping up the birth rate by every means in their power; and in
this their action coincided with that of the Catholic clergy.
Neither in Italy nor Germany was there the least reticence about
the reasons for demanding early marriages and giving special prizes
to parents of large families. They wanted soldiers. "We were born
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to die for Germany" was painted up in boys schools in that country,
and leading statesmen urged mothers to look anxiously for the first
mystic flicker of the "starlight of battle" in a baby boy's eyes.
The Italians were less absurd but equally frank. The men who will
be called to account in future history are the states-men and
writers of other countries who saw year by year this frenzied and
artificial attempt to increase the population, accompanied by
hypocritical pleas that the countries were already so
overpopulated, that they must have more territory. The Catholic
clergy were the worst offenders. They pretended to discover that
birth control was immoral. Their real purpose in their ban on it
was to secure an increase of the Catholic population while the non-
Catholic practiced birth control.
In point of fact, Germany was very far from overpopulated, and
Italy was by no mean's one of the most densely populated countries.
England has about 800 people to the square mile, while Italy has
only 350 and Germany 322. Belgium, Holland, and other countries
annexed by Germany on the plea of wanting more "living room" for
its distressed population are twice as densely populated as it is.
The whole economic plea of Germany, which the Pope wanted gravely
discussed, stank with mendacity. Sir Norman Angell, one of the most
anxious of men to remove grounds of war, proved years ago in a
special study "that England had very little economic advantage from
its empire." You can trust the Canadians and Australians to see
that any advantage is mutual. Hitler says repeatedly and
emphatically in Mein Kampf that Germany does not want colonies: in
which he includes dominions of the British type. It wants land in
Europe, he insists, and we now see it clearly. He wants to reduce
Europe to economic servitude to the Nazis.
The Pope's biographer complains that after a time both Great
Britain and Germany refused to take the Pope further into their
confidence. We do not wonder. But, whether you prefer to believe
that he was not willing to be pushed out of the spotlight or that
he really thought he could help the interest of peace, he tried
again. He issued a very pretentious document in which he stated the
conditions of peace, and half the world began again to discuss the
marvelous sagacity and moral serenity of his famous "Five Points".
It was, in point of fact, his worst effort. The material part
of his first and most important point was: "A fundamental postulate
of an honorable and just peace is that of the right to life and
freedom of all nations, big and small, powerful and weak." It is
exasperating that most papers, in their eagerness to please
Catholic readers and advertisers, promised this as a very clear-
headed piece of moral guidance in a world of confusion. Such a
right has been a platitude in political theory for more than half
a century. One is tempted to say ever since the ropes were
compelled by the Italian armies to let the inhabitants of Central
Italy decide by plebiscite how they preferred to live. But for
Pacelli-Pius to formulate this principle solemnly to the world in
the year 1939 was a breath-taking piece of audacity.
As I showed in an earlier booklet, four-fifths of the
Catholics of the world live under a Fascist regime, and they are
assured by their priests that this is in accordance with the Pope's
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teaching! What is worse, most of them have had this despotic regime
imposed upon them under Pacelli and at his direct instigation. I
have shown how freedom disappeared almost whenever he visited a
country or it came under Catholic authorities: in 20 Republics of
Central and South America, Portugal, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and
in the end France and Belgium. The Black International was solely
responsible for robbing the people of Vienna of their right to
choose their mode of life and cordially cooperated in depriving the
Spaniards of that right. The Papacy had been an intimate ally of
the Fascists for ten years in refusing the Italians the means of
expressing their wishes and of the Nazis for six years. It had
consented by silence to the theft of that right from the people of
Abyssinia, Bohemia, Moravia, and Albania. It demanded almost every
month that the people of Russia and Mexico should be violently
deprived of that right. And the Pope crowns this formidable list of
encroachments on the liberty of peoples which he inspired or
blessed by assuring the world that to respect the right of self-
determination is the first condition of the peace it ardently
desires! I need not go on to ask what serious prospect he thought
there was of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the only three powers to
whom it was necessary to preach, agreeing to it.
The least that the world could do, since the press is not open
for candid reflections on the Pope's actions, was to ignore him and
his Five Points. The other points were platitudes. The second
condition of peace was disarmament: a very practical thing to say
in 1939. Then we get counsels to learn from the past, to consider
the demands of racial minorities, and to cultivate mutual goodwill
and a sense of justice. It was like proposing to sell a man
asbestos paint when his house was burning furiously. If the Pope,
had framed these points in the office of the Secretariat of State
in 1929 and had broadcast them sternly whenever a violation of them
seemed imminent he might not have averted the coming tragedy but he
would have saved the honor of the Papacy. He could not. Authority
is the first principle and coercion the indispensable instrument of
the Church. Some Protestant bishops applauded the Pope's Five
Points. Others asked what freedom, good-will, and justice non-
Catholics had in Poland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, and a
score of other Catholic states.
Chapter III
POLAND PAYS FOR ITS PIETY
What passed between the Vatican and the Nazis before the
invasion of Poland and the opening of the European War only the
Pope and a very small number of his collaborators know. On April
24, as I said, the question of Slovakia being now settled and
Hitler in possession of the bridge to the Ukraine and the Balkans,
the Pope got a letter from his Berlin representative in a secrecy
that surprises and puzzles his biographer, it took two days of
solitary reflection for him to decide upon the answer, and only he
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and Cardinal Maglione know to this day what the answer was. Then
there were visits to the Vatican of the Rumanian and French
ambassadors and various German and Polish bishops, and there was a
brisk secret correspondence with the Nuncios at Berlin, Warsaw, and
Paris.
Clearly the new Pope was confronted with a terrible dilemma
and he was anxious to keep secret even from the Church what
decision he took. Rome is one of the busiest sounding boardes of
rumors in Europe and the Vatican press bureau is as Pegler has
shown, one of the leakiest or most venal, but at this stage the
secret was guarded with unprecedented rigor. If you will next
notice the significant fact that the Pope refrained from an
explicit condemnation of the invasion of Poland as carefully as in
the case of Abyssinia and Albania -- he certainly never used a word
to compare with his language about the Russians when they simply
took back Rusalan provinces which Germany would have annexed -- you
will hardly hesitate in your guess what the secret was. The Pope
was informed of the plan to invade Poland and was induced to assent
on certain conditions: probably that the occupation of Poland would
be temporary and was indispensable for the attack on Russia, that
religion would be respected in Poland, and that the Church would
get concessions in Germany and great opportunities in Russia. The
idea seems to have been that the Pope would persuade the very
docile Poles to submit on these conditions and would continue to
inflame them against Russia, the only Power that could save them.
In refraining from condemning the invasion of Poland -- I do
not count later protests when the Catholic, body was threatened
with annihilation -- the Pope could not plead, as he did in the
case of Norway, that the Catholic body was small and he must think
of his German Church and not offend the Nazis. Whether or no that
is a respectable ground of action in a Pope, the fact is that there
were twice as many sincere Catholics in Poland as in the Reich. A
cynic would add that, though it had more adherents and of a more
passionate loyalty, the Polish Church was not a quarter as rich as
the German Church. We will, of course, not admit that the Vatican
was moved by so profane a consideration, but the numbers are
indisputable. We have seen that by 1939 there were not 12,000,000
Catholics left in Germany: probably not more than 10,000,000. No
one disputes that of the 33,000,000 people of Poland more than
20,000,000 were sincere Catholics and several further million were
compulsory members of the Church: a type of Catholic of which the
Vatican seems to be equally proud.
This strange situation requires an historical explanation, but
for even a short summary of the history of Catholicism in Poland I
must refer to my Appeal to Reason Library (No. 5., "Roman
Catholicism in Poland and Russia") and confine myself here to a few
points which are essential to understand what follows. There is, as
I have often pointed out, a close parallel between Poland and
Ireland, especially if you think of Catholic Ireland before British
Liberalism relieved many of its grievances. Both countries suffered
from their geographical position, on the outskirts of civilization,
and in both cases this gave the priests a rich opportunity to
exploit the poor and very backward population. And just as the
earlier tyranny of Protestant England had hardened the faith in
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Ireland and brought priests and people closer together, so had the
long tyranny of Orthodox Catholic Russia in Poland. While, however,
Britain had very materially modified its treatment of the Irish
more than half a century ago, Russian tyranny had continued until
1917.
We thus recognize a very serious traditional ground for that
hostility to Russia which prevented Poland from entering into
alliance with the one Power that could protect it, but it is due
mainly to the Black International that hostility became worse after
1918 and completely destroyed the chances of checking Nazism on
that side.
At Versailles, to which the Poles sent Paderewski to lull the
ears of statesmen with his music, a Republic of 30,000,000
inhabitants was set up. Not much more than half of these were
Poles, so that there were few parts of Europe in which the
Conference of Versailles sowed the seeds of a future war so
recklessly as in Poland. In particular the Poles claimed Russian
territory (White Russia and the Galician Ukraine) containing seven
or eight million people of alien race and generally alien religion,
and, to the disgust of the British representatives, the French
bulldozed Wilson, who reeled under the shower of weird geographical
names (and lies) into consenting. The Poles also claimed Silesia
from Germany, but it was so obviously far more German than Polish
that the League of Nations was directed to take a plebiscite.
The time came when the French were disgusted with their Polish
pet -- they had supported it as a bulwark against Bolshevism -- and
they gave away the fact that the plebiscite was corrupt. See the
Catholic Rene Martel's La France et la Pologne (1931). The Poles
had formed a special organization for corrupting and intimidating
voters and officials, and one of the three directors of it was
Msgr, Adamski, Catholic Bishop of Posen. The Black International
had begun its record in Poland, and there is no other part of the
world in which it has proceeded with such gross inhumanity, as we
shall see presently. The vote was still 700,000 for Germany and
400,000 for Poland, and the Commissioners decided to divide the
province. This division was, carried out with the same corruption,
the richest districts going to Poland even when the great majority
of the inhabitants were found to be Germans. They had to sell out
to Poles, at a heavy loss, and transfer to Germany. Still the Poles
were not content. The League of Nations permitted them to take
advantage of Russia's distress and seize Vilna and part of
Lithuania. Ever since that period of grab and corruption there has
been a monument on German soil facing Poland with the inscription:
"Germans, never forget of what blind hatred has robbed you."
How in spite of all this greed and the large loans extended by
France and Britain, Poland sank to the position of the poorest
country in Europe -- read Spivak's Europe Under the Terror if you
want to know what exploitation really is -- cannot be discussed
here. The point of interest to us is that the country no sooner rid
itself of the tyranny of Czarist Russia than it set up a still more
galling tyranny over its own minorities, and in this the Black
International worked in intimate cooperation with the Dictator
Pilsudski. Marshal Pilsudski, over whose death in 1935 we shed
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tears as we read the record of his virtues in all our papers, was,
not to put too fine a point on it, a brute and a crook. He had led
the Poles who fought for Germany against us in the 1914-1918 war,
and they had not thought it discreet to send him to Versailles. He
had joined the White War against Russia, which he hated with all
the bitterness of (like Mussolini) a renegade Socialist, and only
the French had saved him from losing Poland to them. He disgusted
every group of politicians, and the Socialists saved him from ruin
and he then sent their leaders to a fortress and tortured them
exactly (even to the guards putting excrement in their food) as
Nazis later tortured Jews in Germany.
As far as I can discover Pilsudski never became a sincere
Catholic -- again like his friend Mussolini -- but he acted with
and on behalf of the Church, which is more powerful than in Ireland
or Peru. Let me explain at once that the appalling persecution that
lasted twenty years in Poland was a joint affair of Church and
state and aimed equally at destroying the nationality and the
religion of the immense non-Polish minorities. In the Galician
Ukraine alone there were 1,000,000 Catholic Poles, 1,250,000 Jews,
4,000,000 Greek Uniates (acknowledging the Pope but with a Greek
liturgy), and 4,000,000 Orthodox or Greek Catholics. In the west
were about 1,000,000 German Protestants; and there were, of course,
representatives of all minorities and not a few skeptics in the
cities. For twenty years every device of persecution and brutality
was used to destroy the religious liberty and the national tongues
and customs of these minorities, although the Poles had given
Versailles a solemn engagement to respect them. I am concerned only
with the coercion in religious matters, and the reason for
recalling it here is obvious. During all the years when the Vatican
and the Black International in every country, but especially in the
United States and Canada, was inspiring, on the ground of its
"persecution of religion", that hatred of Russia which has been of
incalculable service to the Nazis, this same Black International
not only knew that there was no persecution of religion in Russia
-- it was Polish conspiracy that brought punishment on the
Catholics there but was conducting a quite fiendish persecution of
religion in Poland and preventing the press in other countries,
with only four exception's amongst all the dailies of Canada, the
United States, and Great Britain, from publishing the facts. The
honorable exceptions were the Toronto Evening Telegram, the Chicago
Daily News, the New York Herald-Tribune, and the Manchester
Guardian (England); and the persecutions had been in progress for
eleven years when they discovered it.
The Ukrainians of Galicia had sent a deputation to Versailles
to protest against incorporation in Poland and claim independence.
The French had got the petition dismissed, and the Poles had
promised to respect their minority-rights. Six months later they
addressed to the French a memoir (Les atrocites polonaises en
Galicie Ukrainienne) which showed a very brutal persecution,
political and religious raging over the whole vast area. In one
overcrowded and filthy jail 200 of the 2000 prisoners were Orthodox
priests. More than 1000 priests had been arrested and Polish Roman
priests stalked like ghouls in the rear of the police and soldiers
taking over the schools and chapels of the dispossessed Greek
priests. The soldiers were instructed to subject the Greek priests
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to every kind of humiliation and mockery so as to break the
attachment of the people. But the peasants and farmers reacted with
the fiery protests that might have been expected, and "whole
villages were depopulated by massacre." The women were raped and
beaten, the men shot by the thousand. In other words, the Catholic
Poles were perpetrating in Poland twenty years ago just those
atrocities which are now exercised upon themselves by the Germans,
and, except for this authoritative account in French, which was not
translated into any other language, the world was not permitted to
know anything about it.
It is an important secondary aim of these booklets to warn the
reader of the extraordinary extent and pernicious nature of the
Catholic censorship of the press and of publicity generally. Just
about that time, twenty years ago, I spent six months in New York
and when I suggested to a well-known publisher, who asked me for a
book, that I should write on the Catholic Church, he refused and
assured me that I would not find a publisher for such work in New
York. Few publishers have any sympathy with the Church -- the only
one I found with such personal admiration of it was, curiously, my
Rationalist friend G.H. Putnam -- but the press would not bring to
the notice of the public, in the usual way, books that were
(offensive to Catholics", and they submitted that it was useless to
publish them. Libraries were often intimidated from buying them and
booksellers from exposing them for sale. Haldeman-Julius is the
only publisher in America during the last ten years who has enabled
me to tell truths of the kind I tell here, yet it will be evident
that the world would have been far better equipped to meet the
darkening future if the whole truth had been put before it year
after year.
I have devoted a paragraph to events of twenty year's ago
because they were but the first page in a chapter of persecution
which covers the whole intervening period and is very material from
several angles to my present theme. The matter not only affords a
very striking illustration of the suppression of truth which it is
important to know. It shows that the worst blunders of Versailles,
which we blamed so fluently, were enormously aggravated by the
conduct of the Catholic Poles. It explains that bitter hostility of
the Poles to the Russians which caused them to lend a hand in every
conspiracy against the Soviet government since 1919 and brought
upon the Catholic priests in Russia, most of whom were Poles, the
legitimate legal proceedings which the Vatican and the American
bishops represented as persecution of religion. It shows that
outrages as vile as any committed by the Japs in China and now by
Nazis in many lands were being perpetrated by the most profoundly
Catholic state in the world for twenty years while nice-minded folk
everywhere were wondering whether the new barbarism was not due to
a decay of religion. And it puts in a strange light that standing
excuse of the Vatican for its conduct, that the extension of its
rule over further millions of men or the maintenance of that rule
over million's who seem to be rejecting it is so important for the
moral and social good of men that we must be lenient in regard to
the crookedness of its policy.
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If ever this appalling record of persecution in Poland by the
Catholic Poles is forced upon general public notice we shall
probably hear the usual distinction between the action of a local
hierarchy and the action of the Vatican, I need not repeat that we
are here considering the conduct of the Black International as a
whole not simply of the Popes, and we are not embarrassed by being
unable to trace in every case the instructions of the Vatican to
national Churches. But this distinction is not even plausible in
the case of Poland. The present Pope Pius XII, has, we saw, an
intimate knowledge of German affairs, and no plea of ignorance or
misinformation can be made in connection with any of his relations
to that country. But the late, Pope Plus XI, had the same personal
interest in Poland, his pontificate (1922-1939) exactly coincides
with the Catholic Reign of Terror in that country.
Any writer must dwell with reluctance on the misconduct of a
people which bore, and with great heroism, the first brutal onset
of the European War and suffers so bitterly for it today. It is,
however, necessary to tell the whole truth if we are to appreciate
the insincerity of the pretensions of the Black International, the
truth about its conduct, and the mendacity with which a good deal
of that conduct is concealed. It is fortunately easier in America
than elsewhere to learn the truth. When the Chicago Daily News and
the Herald-Tribune disturbed the clerical folk who were raving
about persecution in Russia -- Jewish rabbis joining in processions
with bishops in New York while financiers applauded from the
windows -- by showing that the real persecution was in Poland,
officials in Washington answered inquirers with the suave
assurances of the Polish Catholic representatives that it was "all
lies." But there is a large body of Ukrainians in the United
States, and in 1931 they collected and published a large volume of
testimony (letters, reports, journalistic accounts, etc.) of the
outrages.
No impartial person who reads this (Atrocities in the Ukraine,
1931, edited by Emil Revyuk) can for a moment doubt the truth of
the statements. The authority is absolute. The details are
revolting. The defense urged by some is that, the Ukrainians had
rebelled against their Polish masters. Yes, after years of brutal
treatment in violation of the promise's made by Poland when it
received the province. But a nation of 30,000,000, spending a very
high proportion of its revenue on an army which could stand up to
Germany for three weeks hardly needed torture and brutality to
suppress any revolt in a province. Flogging, with whips loaded with
wire or iron, was a daily occurrence. Pregnant women and girls were
beaten. Heated irons were applied to the feet. Water, sometimes
mixed with oil, was forced down their nostrils. Men -- not merely
peasants but professional men and scholars -- were deprived of
sleep until they became half-insane. There were 200,000 in jail in
1930 and torture was used lavishly on them to make them betray
others. The brutality was even worse in 1934 and 1935, though it
seems to have relented a little after the death of Pilsudski in the
latter year.
The first encyclical that the Pope issued in 1939 deplored
that the root of all evil in the world was the decay of religion.
One wonders how many sage editorials took up and confirmed that
text; and not one in a hundred of these papers had informed its
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readers that bestiality of the kind that will make sociologists of
the future hesitate to call our social order a civilization had
been going on for twenty years in the most religious country in
Europe. Poland was to 1939 far more Catholic than Eire or Peru. A
French Catholic visited it in 1932 and wrote an article on it in
the Catholic Revue des Deux Mondes (February 1, 1933). He describes
exhibitions of piety in public to which you will find no parallel
in any other country. American Catholics were, at the time, telling
non-Catholic neighbors that if they could only see religious life
in a solidly Catholic country they would perceive the beauty of the
Church. Well, Poland was the most solidly Catholic country in the
world, and its priests and bishops were equally behind this
persecution, which extended also to German Protestants and Polish
Freethinkers, with the politicians of the Pilsudski school, They
were just as eager to destroy the Uniate, Orthodox, and Protestant
Churches as the politicians were to make everybody thoroughly
Polish. That is abundantly shown in Revyuk's book.
It is hardly necessary to point out how these facts make a
mockery of the Vatican's assurance to the world that when the
Russian troops entered this Galician Ukraine in 1939 they committed
outrages as the German troops did in Posen. Roman Catholic Poles
and the few other Roman Catholics in the province fought against
the Russians, but what was likely to be the mutual attitude of the
Ukrainians and the Russian's after 20 years of this agony? The
Ukrainians hated the Poles mortally. The Russians were an army of
liberation. The jails were opened. The farms were restored to their
owners. But the Papal lie was reproduced respectfully in the world-
press. I remember very few papers which even troubled to explain
that the two provinces taken over by Russia, palpably to anticipate
a German annexation of them, were Russian provinces wantonly torn
from their natural unity by Versailles, but I do not remember a
single paper that explained what grounds the Ukrainians had for
relief and how bitterly they hated the Poles.
Another reason why I enlarge on this painful chapter of Polish
history just before the war is because it has a vital bearing on
one of the grossest blunders of the democracies and greatest
advantages of the Nazis, the estrangement from Russia. Since I
cannot put before the reader any correspondence of the Vatican with
the Polish hierarchy he must decide on a general knowledge of
Church methods how far the Vatican knew and approved of the brutal
persecution I fancy he will not have much difficulty -- but that
the Papacy inflamed the Catholic Poles against Russia is patent.
The Poles had, we saw, very strong traditional grounds to hate
Tsarist Russia, and Pilsudski had carried his hatred over to Soviet
Russia and had gravely implicated the Roman Catholics in Russia in
the White War and subsequent conspiracies. Grave difficulties were
bound to arise when there was a common frontier between the most
religious and the most irreligious country in Europe. It will,
however, not be questioned that these difficulties were immensely
aggravated by the appeals to the Catholic world of the Papacy to
work for the extinction of Bolshevism after 1926. It was in large
part owing to this that the democracies lost the last opportunity
of either preventing the war or making it short and restricted.
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Poland had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1934,
and there cannot be the least doubt that, imbued as it was with the
Pope's idea of a crusade against Russia, in which Germany must play
at least the leading part, Poland regarded this as a preparatory
condition for the eventual attack on Russia. When Hitler and
Mussolini had hamstrung Czecho-Slovakia, Catholic Poland and
Catholic Hungary had, like wolves waiting until a buffalo is
wounded, bitten large pieces of territory out of its flanks. On
January 25, 1939, Hitler had sent Ribbentrop, the vilest agent of
his more treacherous moves, to Warsaw to represent Germany at the
celebration of the fifth anniversary of the non-aggression pact. It
was, he said in his speech, "one of the firmest bases of European
peace." What children these Europeans were the historian will one
day reflect! Germany was then, he knew, plotting the destruction of
Poland and a world war.
Ribbentrop returned to Germany to join in the plot against
Czecho-Slovakia in which, as I have elsewhere explained, it
received most valuable help from the Black International. The
Germans entered Prague on March 15 (1939), while the new Pope was
preparing his moving address on peace and charity; and the world
began to prepare for what seemed to be the inevitable war. Most of
my neighbors in London had gas-masks by that date and looked
forward with amazing apathy -- or was it lack of imagination? -- to
the horrors that were predicted. The French signed a mutual
defensive alliance with Poland. In fact, in the course of the next
few months France and Great Britain had such alliances also with
Rumania, Greece, and Turkey.
We can imagine some imperfectly informed reader of the next
generation exclaiming impatiently: But why string together these
small, scattered, and not wholly reliable nations and omit the one
great power, Soviet Russia, which was Germany's natural enemy and
was worth all the others put together? We did not ask the question
at the time because we knew the answer. These Catholic countries
and even Great Britain regarded an approach to Russia much as a
Baptist mothers meeting would regard a suggestion, in case of need,
to call in the aid of a gunman to protect their virtue. For that
the Pope had a very large part of the responsibility.
Naturally there were approaches, of a sort. The French signed
a pact with Russia, almost useless because it did not include a
military alliance, in April. The Vatican promptly condemned it. The
British asked Russia to promise military aid to Poland and Rumania,
but only in such form and measure as those powers decided, and they
would not promise British aid to Russia if it was attacked. Russia,
sore about the insulting exclusion from Munich, rightly distrusting
a Britain which, it knew, regarded it as an outlaw, refused. Poland
refused to have adequate Russian armies in it, and the little
Baltic states, prizes set up by Versailles for the first grabber,
also refused. Great Britain half-heatedly pushed on. It sent a
diplomatic mission, of a character it would not send to any other
country, to Moscow, then a military mission of the same inferior
quality. Russia did not need to read how one of the Blimps of a
London club had said: "We may, of course, have to get Russia to
help, but, please God it will not come to that." It, in August 23,
sent the old women of the clubs into hysterics by announcing that
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it had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. A few weeks later
it sent the Nazis into what we might call a subdued hysteria by
snatching the Galician Ukraine -- for reasons which I have surely
fully explained -- from under their guns.
We quite understand Russia. We also now understand Poland,
which entered upon its three-years war-agony on September 1st, and
its three-years peace-agony a few weeks later. Only one feature in
that year of tragic blunders concerns us here. Poland, which
thought it had been following the luminous lead of the Church for
so many years, had been led by the nose. The brave, exploited,
perversely educated people had been cursed with blundering leaders
who were in closer alliance with the Church than leaders were in
any other Catholic country. They had brought upon the land the
contempt of Europe and had made it refuse the aid of the big
brother who, with real aid from the British and French fleets,
Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have averted its tragic fate.
The poles paid for their piety. Little did the French dream that
they also, the least religious people in Europe after the Russians,
Would soon be led by the Black International, and without the
redeeming trait of honor and bravery which we accord to the Poles,
into same black pit. Never was there before such lack of
foresight in an age of mortal danger. We know why the statesmen and
churchmen of democratic countries were reluctant to face realities.
Hitler and Mussolini and their satellite promised to kill
Socialism. Would the catastrophe have been as grave if the peoples
of the world had had all the facts candidly before them?
Chapter IV
THE GERMAN CHURCH AND THE WAR
On September 1st, 1939, began, with the invasion of Poland,
the greatest war, it maybe the most terrible and tragic three-year
period, in the whole of history. The aggression-mongers, the Pope's
biographer affirms, thrust him aside and excluded him from their
counsels. "When the swords flash let the lawyers be silent" said an
old Roman proverb. The new Roman applied it to churchmen: Mussolini
assured the Pope that he would see that Rome was respected as a
sacred city, and, although Italian planes have taken part in the
foul bombing of London, Rome has never been bombed. Churchill
persistently refuses to tell why. Perhaps the Catholic authorities
of the United States and the British Empire could tell us. The
Pope, to make doubly sure that he would remain out of heaven some
years longer, had a luxurious shelter prepared under an ancient
tower with walls fifteen feet thick. Germany would not require his
services again until the attack on Belgium and France.
A pathetic spectacle for the moral ruler of the world! If he
had been the austere world-figure that Catholic literature
represents him -- nay, if he had been a man -- what would he have
done? He would certainly not have been content, as he was to ask
the nations of the world, as if they were equally guilty, to make
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peace: certainly not have proposed economic conferences, as he did,
to make the aggressive powers still stronger by conceding territory
for which they need not expend any of their forces. Indeed, the
whole world knew at that time that only one nation threatened its
peace, Germany. The Italian and Japanese jackals would not move
until the lion had scattered a few corpses about the landscape. So
the Pope's function, unless America apologetic literature is
admitted to be insincere, was clear. He ought to have branded as
criminal in the highest degree the ambition to annex and exploit
other countries, one by one, of which Germany had given ample
proof. He ought to have condemned in the most explicit and severest
terms the glorification of war by the German and Italian leaders,
the lies they put forward about encirclement and over-population,
the racial arrogance with which they were poisoning their people,
the murderous outrages with which they had begun to say to all the
little nations of Europe: See what you will get if you resist us.
It is hardly worthwhile discussing the immediate pretexts of
the opening of hostilities. For my part -- I have never hesitated
to say that Dantzig was a German city and ought never to have been
taken from it, and that to take from it a slice of East Prussia
measuring 260 miles by 80 to give the Poles -- Polish capitalists
and French bond-holders, that is to say -- a "Corridor" to the sea
was little less monstrous. But no one in Europe expected Germany to
be satisfied with these. The situation was as clear as the Eiffel
Tower at Paris. Germany meant to take Poland, and England and
France were sworn to regard such a step as proof of a large
aggressive design and declare war. Those of us who knew the facts
reflected, sadly, that the democracies could hardly choose a weaker
case to champion than that of the synthetic Poland they had set up
at Versailles, the Fascist state which had bludgeoned its
minorities for twenty years. It was all the worse that, as was soon
proved, they could give no help to Poland and were not even able to
help themselves.
The very difficult and still obscure question of France
require's a separate book but I can speak for England. About mid-
day on that fateful Sunday the news was broadcast that Chamberlain
had declared war on Germany. By an extraordinary blunder the sirens
wailed within half an hour and, to make matters worse in my own
street, a stupid warden gave the signal to prepare for gas. I will
not describe the panic -- which does not detract from the fine
courage of most Londoners when the blow fell later -- but it
reminded us of one thing: we had no armament whatever for the war
we had declared. It has since transpired that England then had only
18 good fighter planes. Germany had thousands. Nine months
preparation had done little more than give most of us gas-masks --
I had none -- accommodations for a million or so in the hospitals
and coffins for hundreds of thousands. Yet for once Englishmen
might be proud of the folly of their government. It cried a halt to
brutality and criminal greed.
And the Pope had nothing to say. Someone ought to collect a
bouquet, or encyclopedia, of all the impressive assurances of
American Catholic apologists that their Pope is the ideal
inflexible, international and irrepressible arbiter of right and
wrong, justice and injustice. Of all the excuses that they bleat
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today the funniest -- and even bishop's mumble it -- is that he is
the Father of All Peoples and must not take sides! We had been told
that it was just that position of cosmopolitan and international
judge which made him a unique and incorruptible tribunal. Was there
some doubt from the moral point of view on which side the guilt
lay? Can one even imagine Britain and France, with their miserable
armament, having any other aim than to cheek a brutal
aggressiveness? In plain English, and in the light of the Pope's
own words, this plea means that he would not denounce a wrong if
his interests and those of his Black International were to suffer
for it in any country. And that is the gist of our accusation. The
Black International pursues its own interests though it be through
the ruin of civilization and of all human idealism.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, it is rather this Black
International than the Pope that interests us. We must not allow
ourselves to be distracted when the end comes by Catholic or any
other criticisms of Eugenio Pacelli. Any Pope would have acted as
he did. No Pope ever acted otherwise. The great French scholar, A.
Loisy, scourged the Pope during the last war for exactly the same
conduct. And the apologist has not simply to explain way his
"neutrality," though that is a vice in a moralist in face of a
grave crime. He had helped bring on the war. He had made it easy
for Hitler the annexation of Austria. He had cooperated with him
still more closely in the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia. He had
turned a blind eye to his vile conduct in Germany and helped to
protect his intervention in Spain. He had been in large part
responsible for the weakness and incoherence of the world-
opposition to him by his preaching of hatred of Russia -- and --
not to speak of matters which will be discussed in later booklets
-- he had encouraged his monstrous plans by allying himself with
the two other powers which had similar plans.
But when we say that the Pope was silent we mean only that no
clear messages were printed in the Osservatore or broadcast from
the Vatican Radio or sent out to the world in encyclicals. His one
encyclical at this time, when the flames of war were lit from
Poland to England, was, as we saw, a plea that the world, not one
or two nations, was evil because it was losing religion, and
Catholic Action must come to the rescue. Catholic Action! It had
been busy in the Polish Ukraine for twenty years, in Spain for
Several years, in Hungary and Portugal, in Austria and South
America. No one took any notice.
Was the Pope acting through the German hierarchy? We do not
care two pins whether this can or cannot be proved. One thing we do
know as we have already seen. The summer had seen "feverish
activity" at the Vatican, and an outstanding part of this was
correspondence with the Nuncios at Berlin, Warsaw, and Paris and
the reception of German and Polish bishops. As the whole world was
now discussing the chances of preparing for an invasion of Poland
and a general war we shall hardly be accused of undue
suspiciousness's if we suggest that this was the chief topic of the
very busy correspondence and interviews. What was decided we do not
know. The most sensible theory in view of the facts is that Hitler
informed the Vatican that he was taking over Poland, peacefully, as
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the first step in a campaign against Russia, promised to turn over
a new leaf in Germany, and wanted the Pope to keep France out of
it; and that the Poles, not being as trustful as the Pope rejected
his advice to submit.
However that may be, he must have had an understanding with
the German hierarchy, and we know how it behaved. lt was as
Hitlerite as the Hitler youth. Edith Moore quotes a number of the
pronouncements of the German bishops in her No Friend of Democracy
(1941). The very sound and impartial Manchester Guardian (May 24,
1940) thus stated the position:
"Among the higher ranks of the Catholic clergy a decisive
majority desire to see the victory of the Reich or at least a peace
that will leave Germany's political and military strength
unimpaired. At the same time they still look to an eventual
Catholic-Conservative restoration. The National Socialist State
has, it seems, been able to reach an understanding with the
Catholic leaders. Assurances have been given as to the status of
the Church in the Bohemian-Moravian Protectorate and in Germany
itself. The special position of the Catholic Church in Poland is
also to receive due recognition. In spite of the persecution of
laymen and priests by the Nazis, in spite of all the attacks upon
the Christian religion now hopes have been raised among the German
Catholics as a result of these negotiations."
As I suggested, the hierarchy -- and the references to Bohemia
and Poland seem to bring in the Vatican -- was soothed with
promises of greater advantages to the Church and in view of these
saw nothing of the enormity of the annexation of Norway, Denmark,
and Holland which had then taken place. On August 22 the bishops
held their annual meeting at Fulda, a national shrine from which
they were accustomed to give guidance to their Church. Usually only
a score of bishops attended, but this year the whole 45 were
present, and, according to the German press, the advice they gave
to the faithful was a very emphatic "Heil Hitler." By this time, I
may recall, the German army had swept over Holland, Belgium, and
France and, exasperated by the opposition of those countries, had
stooped to outrages and infamies which shocked the world. Yet the
German papers revealed that the bishops decided that "after the
completion of the final German victory special ceremonies of
gratitude to the German troops and of loyalty to Hitler will be
announced." It was said that the bishops submitted their proposals
to the Vatican and that the Pope who was at the time bargaining
once more with Hitler (Catholic Herald, August 9, 1940, and
Catholic Tablet, September 21, 1940), forbade them to publish their
resolutions: clearly to avoid scandal in Britain and America.
The Tablet found a significance in the fact the final address
at the Fulda Conference was given by the bishop of Osnabruck, who
was appointed by Goering the representative of the Catholic Church
in the Prussian State Council, and the New York Times reported that
"the leaders of the Catholics in Germany . . . exhort their
believer's in and outside the Reich to do their utmost in the
righteous cause of the German nation under the leadership of
Chancellor Hitler." The hierarchy, in other words, did not merely
urge Catholics to support Hitler, but went out of their way to
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affirm that the miserable bandit had "a righteous cause." A British
Catholic paper, the Herald (October 18, 1940) quoted a passage from
a Pastoral Letter which the chief Catholic chaplain, Bishop
Garkowsky, addressed to all Catholics in the Army, Navy, and Air
Force. He said:
"The German people have a clear conscience and are aware which
people will have to bear the responsibility before God and history
for the gigantic struggle that is now going on. The German people
know who primarily started this war. Just as certainly as God is
the Father of all Peoples, He is also the judge of right and wrong,
of honor and deceit."
Those who find it possible to imagine that these German
bishops honestly blamed Britain and France for the war because,
after a reiterated solemn warning, they had declared that they
would oppose further aggression may do so. I would not argue the
matter. Most of us can see nothing but nauseous hypocrisy in German
prelates who invoke God as a witness to the righteousness of the
Nazi cause and program.
We have already seen that the new Pope had, a year before,
issued an Encyclical, Summi Potitificatus, on the state of the
world it was very wicked because the nations had lost the Christian
sense of brotherhood -- so conspicuous, of course, in the
nineteenth century and earlier -- and had adopted theories of
racial superiority. Even Catholics in England and France were very
uneasy in commenting on this. Could the Pope possibly mean that the
democracies were at least so close to the dictatorships in these
respects that he was not called upon to draw any distinction? And
why did he not say that he meant Germany, Italy, and Japan? One
French Catholic writer evaded the difficulty by saying that "in
time of war the Church of Rome has to observe an impartial
reserve." The same writer said, incidently, that in no other war in
history was good so clearly on one side and evil on the other. The
Pope was just a moral coward, and a consequence of his cowardice is
seen in these quotations from the German bishops. Their stern
inexorable moral guide left them free to tell people that the
vilest campaign in modern history, both in its aim and in its
procedure, had the full approval of the Black International and
their God.
But the cordiality between the butchers and the black-cassocks
was never long maintained in its purity. Hitler, who seems to have
regarded the complaisance of the hierarchy and the Vatican with
complete cynicism, threatened a new blow at the Church in the
Spring of 1941. He returned to the ideas of Mein Kampf and said
that both Protestant and Catholic Churches must be blended in one
Christian body which must be strictly "national" or independent of
Roman authority and adapted in its moral teaching to Nazi ideas.
The Pope's spokesman on the Vatican Radio now discovered some moral
courage -- not in excess, it is true -- and summoned German
Catholics to "wake up and see clearly the pagan tendencies which
were spreading everywhere." The sordid behavior of the Gestapo and
the soldiers in half of Europe -- in the concentration camp's of
Germany itself, in Austria and Bohemia, and now in Norway, Holland,
Belgium, and Occupied France must not be censured except where
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THE WAR AND PAPAL INTRIGUE
Russia can be made to bear the greater part of the censure. The
bloody ruling of this intoxicated blonde beast over Europe must be
viewed with "impartial reserve." But to tamper with the Church and
the interest of the Vatican . . . And still the hierarchy supported
the war. The Archbishop of Freiburg, who had denounced the plot to
the Vatican, added:
"Far be it from me in this terrible struggle to say anything
that would turn aside the energies of the people or prejudice their
devotion to their country. Everyone who thinks as a German desires
to secure for his country a lasting peace with honor."
With honor! There's the rub. It was left to Hitler, Goering,
Goebbel's, Ribbentrop, and Himmler to interpret the phrase. They
smiled and pushed ahead, and we shall later find them again
courting the Vatican.
When Eugenio Pacelli became Pope in 1939 he had to choose a
coat of arms and a motto. He chose a dove with an olive-branch in
its beak and the words "Peace in Justice"! He had by his ten years
of inflaming passion against and libelling Russia, to his unctious
benediction of corruption in Spain and Austria, by his intrigues in
Czecho-Slovakia, and especially by standing out before the world as
the friend of Germany, Italy, and Japan, helped to make the world
war inevitable. He dare not, even when the raw greed of Hitler and
Mussolini was flaunted before his eyes, say one word in
condemnation of it; and the local regiments of the Black
International which he controlled sanctified every outrage and
egged on the German people in the most criminal aggression and most
savage behavior that the world had seen for many centuries. And his
supreme word of guidance was that the world was very wicked because
it would not listen to religious oracles.
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