In the summer of 1938, between the tragedy of Munich and that of Prague. Pacelli went to preside at the Eucharistic Congress at Buda-Pesth. He was housed royally in the royal castle, and the fleet-less Admiral Horthy had long and very cordial conversations with him. Hungary is counted a Catholic country because 64.9 of its population is described as Catholic. It is Fascist, but as the star of Mussolini paled before that of Hitler, Horthy had linked the fortune of the state he despotically controlled with that of Germany. German armies could march through Hungary or use its stretch of the Danube whenever they needed. It had been unjustly treated at Versailles, and it looked to Hitler as it had earlier looked to Mussolini, to recover for it a large and rich slice of Yugo-Slavia. It was another of Hitler's bloodless victories and, as he had the sense not to interfere with Hungary's Church or institution's, the Papacy was content. It was one more Catholic Fascist state for the grand alliance, and Czecho-Slovakia was already doomed in the eyes of thoughtful observers.
The year 1939 then opened with very grave anxiety in all democratic lands. What would be the feeling of the Black International outside those countries?
You have only to turn back a few years and compare its feeling at the time when, at the beginning of 1930, Pacelli virtually took over the rule of the Church. Then the Church of Rome was disintegrating more rapidly than ever before. The steady loss by leakage until 1914 had been succeeded, as I showed, by a catastrophic loss of between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 in about ten years. Russia, the principal source of the new corroding force, had made good and was preparing to offer to the world something which Rome had always declared impossible: a great civilization built without the least religious inspiration, for no one questions that the constructive class in Russia was entirely atheistic. Without anything that could justly be called persecution of religion this class had communicated its atheism to something like 100,000,000 people within its own frontiers, won tens of millions in China and even French Indo-China and Siam, and crossed the Pacific and devastated the Church from Mexico to Patagonia. The same influence had pervaded Europe and had in Germany and the southern half of the continent detached tens of millions of Catholic's from the Church. I have given the figures and the evidence.
Such had been the situation and the outlook of the Church in 1929. In the ten years of Pacelli's tenure of office as Secretary of State there had been a dramatic change. The triumphant spread of Russian irreligion had been completely arrested, and that country was isolated by a great wall of international hatred and slander. Italy and Spain were again prostrate at the feet of the priests. We will not say that it did not matter two pins to the Vatican whether the men who went to church and sent their children to Catholic schools once more were blessing or cursing the Church in their hearts as long as they obeyed, but we may certainly say that it was regarded by the Black International as a magnificent triumph that the tens of millions of apostates dare not open their lips and that their children were all handed over to the priest. Italy and Spain were once more Catholic countries. Portugal and Hungary were in line, and, while Germany, resisting both threats and blandishments, was still a very unsatisfactory ally, it had at least destroyed the Socialist-Communist force that had made havoc in the Church. The proud anti-Papalism of Czecho-Slovakia was in the dust, and France was on cordial terms with the Vatican. The rot (liberation?) had been stopped in South America, which presented an almost unbroken compulsory-Catholic front, and in the Far East the alliance with Japan opened up a golden prospect of a Catholic monopoly of missions in the one-fourth of the earth over which the flag of the Rising Sun was expected to wave.
That—again I am just summarizing facts of which I have given full evidence—was the situation in the Spring of 1939 when Pacelli reaped his reward and became Pope; and American Catholic literature assures you that he piously hated limelight and desired only to be an obscure parish priest moving amongst the obscure poor! Our newspapers have today "experts on religion" as "Church editors" just as they have political, financial, or international experts. These men never enlarge on this most spectacular religious development since the Reformation. In a single generation the Church of Rome lost and regained at least one-third of its members. These "experts on religion" would probably be startled and incredulous if you told them that, though I have proved it line by line. They are too busy talking nonsense about the Church in Russia or describing parochial triumphs and quarrels.
But why does not the Catholic journalist or orator dilate on this dramatic development? In the first place because he does not wish to call attention to or acknowledge the Stupendous losses of the Church from 1919 to 1929, which he has always denied. He prefers the miracle of the tail wagging the dog; the theory that small minorities of wicked men somehow get power in spite of rich and formidable bodies of priests, all the conservative elements, and the overwhelming majority of the nation! That explains Mexico and South America, Vienna and Spain. Exact—that is to say truthful—analysis is as rare in this field as decency is amongst Nazis or Fascists.
In the second place, and chiefly, he very certainly does not want to draw attention to the fact that whatever losses the Church sustained from 1919 to 1929 occurred in an atmosphere of free discussion while the gains were won entirely by coercion and violence. That sounds like one of those generalizations which suppress exceptions and reserves for the sake of strength. It is not. It is an accurate generalization of facts which we have now seen and it requires no qualification whatever. The only apparent exception is Russia, but the Church of Rome was always small in that country so that its losses are a slender element in the total; and it was more Polish than Russian and entirely pledged, as we shall see, to the war against the Soviets, so that it suffered on political grounds. In Mexico the losses preceded the application of the laws (passed long before) which punished political activity on the part of the clergy and do not make an exception to my general statement. But the great losses, the losses in ten's of millions, in Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain, Czecho-Slovakia, and South America were the result of free discussion and the enlightenment of the people.
From 1929, when Mussolini made his infamous compact with the Vatican, onward the area of free discussion has been steadily reduced, and in each country in which freedom and democracy have been replaced by the tyranny of Fascism the Church has recovered ground. The only exception to this is Germany, and it is not an exception in principle because, though the Church was not here in alliance with violence this was only because its offer of alliance was spurned. Let us understand clearly what happened. We are not asked to believe that the 30,000,000 apostates of Spain and Italy, for instance, have become once more Catholics in their conviction and affections, any more than the 10,000,000 apostates under the Vichy government have. They probably in their own minds curse the Church more bitterly than ever. But all organizations and literature which criticized the Church and told people the truth about its history and its real aims were suppressed, and all children were compelled to receive religious lessons and breathe a Catholic atmosphere. The spread of the revolt was thus drastically checked and the people were treated as Catholics and subjects of Canon Law. The Church considered that it had recovered its ground.
This recovery by coercion had to be affected in every case by an alliance with the secular powers. The Church had never known any other means of regaining lost masses except by alliance, for mutual profit, with tyranny and violence, and it now found that, by an extraordinary piece of good fortune for itself, the secular powers which had formerly bludgeoned its rebels for it and seemed to have lost forever the power to do so, recovered the use of the whip and the firing squad. The Church's recovery in the last ten years does not imply any genius in the person of its guide, Pacelli-Pius. The reaction against Communism began long before he became Secretary of State. He had only to link the Church with the powers of darkness which gathered strength in his time, and this was no new discovery of ecclesiastical statesmanship. That is why in the preceding books I have given a good deal of historical information. Without it you cannot fully understand the contemporary situation.
So the Black International pledged the Church to a policy of violence and tyranny, since this was the only possible way in which it could recover the ground it had lost. If there is one real miracle about the Church of Rome it is the loyalty of the normal educated Catholic layman to his clergy. Very large numbers of the faithful are of the type that tells you that it "never reads the paper's" but I am thinking of the men who read their daily and discuss its contents just as you do. They read one year of Italy passing under the combined rule of Fascism and the Church and the violent suppression of all Socialist, Communist, Rationalist, and any other literature that caters to non-Catholics. A few years later it is South America, then Spain, then Austria, then Czecho- Slovakia. During all these years they are reading books or articles by Catholic writers who assure America that their Church is the ideal champion of freedom and democracy, and they know that in these countries where Church and Fascist authorities have combined millions—they could easily find that it is tens of millions—of men and women have been robbed of the kind of freedom they treasure most and bullied into conformity with what they regard as false. They know this much at least, however much the press and their priests conspire to conceal the imprisonment of tens of thousands and the groans of tortured men in the jails. Does your Catholic friend really agree with his priest that this complete suppression of free discussion is necessary to guard the faith, and that million's of sullen, reluctant, bitter-hearted folk driven into submission by violence are a gain to it or to the World?
There is another feature of this on which I have as yet made no comment. The last ten years have witnessed not only the appearance of a vast amount of tyranny, torture, and bloodshed, but also a general degradation of character in which all sense of honor, truthfulness, and manliness seems to have been lost. Agreements between nations have become as cynical as they were in the days of Caesar Borgia and Pope Leo X. More than fifty such international agreements, treaties, pacts, etc., have been solemnly signed and sealed in the last twenty years, and tossed aside like broken toy's a few years later. Statesmen must now sign such pacts in the spirit in which Roman augurs once winked at each other over the altars. To deceive another state is a diplomatic ideal. No means to gain the end of a state—from castor-oil to opium, from prostitution to castration—is too foul to be used. Fluency in lying is almost the first qualification for office; and the men who talk most about honor are completely destitute of any sense of it.
I would ask the reader to reflect here very carefully. Certainly not the whole of civilization is thus degraded. Your nation and mine—America and Great Britain—have many faults, but we should justly resent the application of this description to them. Today we may add Russia; and there are Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and many countries. In fact, is it not the literal truth that it is only the allies of the Black International that have thus degraded and debauched the standard of personal and collective life? Let the Catholic who finds a triumph of his Church in the last ten years reflect on that. It is part of the price that the Church has had to pay.
And the greater price was still to come. Pacelli had, through the local hierarchies at least, blessed war, in Spain, Abyssinia, and Czecho-Slovakia. He was still in 1939 alternating between beautiful praise of peace and demands of war upon Russia and Mexico. We need not linger to wonder how far he realized what he had done with his alliances, but all the world now knows it. He had helped to set the stage for the vilest and bloodiest war in history. He had helped and courted the three powers which were pledged to launch this war, and for the most sordid greed that ever moved an army. What did Pius XII and his Black International do when the hellish bugles sounded and the black flag was unfurled?