There are some restless and worried spirits who press the Roman Congregations to pronounce upon still doubtful questions. I oppose this, I stop them, because it is necessary not to prevent the intelligent from working. It is necessary to leave them the leisure to hesitate and even to err. The Truth can only win by this. The Church will always arrive in time to put them back onto the right path.

Still, the problems that emerged in the later nineteenth century were real ones—problems regularly lamented by intransigents, but problems, many of which they themselves had actually unconsciously helped to stimulate through their intellectual failings and their enthusiasm for militant political activity. That such problems could emerge, even through the labor of the most committed of Catholics, is by now no surprise to the reader of this book. All noble demonstrations of a pilgrim spirit born of a deeper understanding of the message of the Word in history and aimed at dealing with new steps in the dance of life always involve troubling complications. But troubling complications still have to be addressed if the dance is to flow properly and the work of correction and transformation effectively continued. Thus, the Papacy, even under the highly nuanced and experiment-friendly guidance of Leo XIII, became deeply involved in responding to them. The Church indeed proved herself ready to “arrive in time” to put Catholics “back onto the right path”, as that pontiff claimed that she would.²¹⁰

Leo’s “reining in” of pilgrim experiments gone astray began in the 1890’s, through a series of attacks on the purely naturalist form of biblical interpretation embraced by a number of the anti-intransigents discussed above. It continued with two documents criticizing Americanism, the more important of which was Testem benevolentiae in 1899. The significance of the former was swallowed up in the greater movement against theological and philosophical modernism under his successor, Pope St. Pius X; that of the second was subordinated to the flow of events in France, and basically forgotten in the midst of the anti-modernist onslaught as well.²¹¹

For our purposes now, it is best to focus our discussion of a second retrenchment upon Leo XIII’s publication, on January 18^th, 1901, of the encyclical letter Graves de communi, which rejected the creation of a distinctly Catholic Italian Democratic Party. If the term “Christian Democracy” were employed at all, the pope insisted, this could only legitimately be used to indicate “a beneficent Christian action in favor of the people”, not a commitment of the Church to democratic politics. Moreover, as the first of its two words emphasized, “Christian Democracy” could only exist with reference to a foundation in the Christian Faith; cooperation with those of democratic spirit who were materialist socialists was thereby excluded. Even what today would be called a “preferential option for the poor” was dismissed as objectionable by the pope, since a true concept of “the People” had to include all social classes, coordinated into one harmonious whole.²¹²

A second intervention came from Leo’s successor in the aftermath of the XIX Congress of the Opera in Bologna, November 10-13, 1903. At that meeting, Romolo Murri, with a certain support from Giovanni Grosoli (1859-1937), the President of the organization, had gained the edge over the older faction eager to continue abstention from national politics. An imprudent circular from Grosoli then argued that “old questions”, presumably including the issue of the papal Temporal Power, no longer mattered that much to contemporary Catholics, who were thus freed to confront more serious matters. Although personally content to let the Temporal Power issue die, the new pontiff, Pius X, was disturbed by what he considered to be the Opera’s lay-clerical insubordination, and dissolved it on July 28, 1904. Only Section II, dealing with Social Economy, was maintained, in order to emphasize the fact that “beneficent action in favor of the people” was still encouraged by Rome.

The Italian Catholic Movement was then entirely restructured on June 11, 1905, with the publication of an encyclical letter, II fermo proposito. Section II of the Opera became the Unione Economico-Sociale dei Cattolici Italiani. An Unione Popolare tra i Cattolici d’Italia was established on the model of the Volksverein, along with an Unione Elettorale Cattolica Italiana, designed to prepare Catholics gradually for active participation in national political life. In practice, with the hopes for a Catholic Party squelched, and the Opera’s original “stand-pat” position abandoned, Rome opted for the clerico-moderate line. The Unione Elettorale gradually pursued the kind of contractual agreement with conservatives that had been utilized in other countries. Its great chance to put this plan into effective operation came with the introduction of universal male suffrage in the next decade, increasing the impact of the pro-Catholic vote. This resulted in the famous “Pact” of 1911 of the President of the Unione, Vincenzo Ottorino Gentiloni (1865-1916) with the conservative elements of the liberal party guided by Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928).²¹³

Romolo Murri, disturbed by this development, moved on to build a Lega Democratica Italiana, open to direct cooperation with socialists in a way that seemed to confirm his belief in democracy’s superiority to the Faith as a guide to political life. Such an impression was still further strengthened by Murri’s calls for an internal democratization of the Church. He was formally expelled from the Catholic Movement and eventually excommunicated. Nevertheless, a number of “Christian Democrats” quietly remained within the official camp, hoping one day to be able to build a mass party that could address itself both outside as well as inside Catholic circles, and thus continue to allow a joint lay-clerical political activity. Don Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) emerged, later, under different circumstances, as the leader of this group, in what became the Italian Popular Party, and, after its demise under Mussolini, the Christian Democratic Party of Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954). And this latter formation, sometimes criticized by the Papacy and sometimes prodded by it, would then go on to preside over the most successful secularization of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” in Italy’s history. But that is another story for the next unhappy chapter.

Pope St. Pius X also condemned the Sillon in the encyclical letter, Notre Charge Apostolique of January 15^th, 1910. In doing so, he demonstrated, as Maurras quipped, that “democratic agitation was easier to bring about than any Catholic result as a consequence of it”.²¹⁴ Pius lamented the progress of the movement from one that had worked to assure that democracy would be Catholic in spirit to another that abandoned such a laudable project as superfluous. For, as was to be expected, the pope complained that the Grand Sillon grounded its definition of liberty, equality, fraternity, and, in fact, all morality, in a non-religious political philosophy, and one with a mythical authority—The People—to boot. But Marc Sangnier was not personally condemned along with the movement that he led. He was able to maintain his prestige within the Catholic camp at large by responding to the pope’s decision through an immediate act of submission---the absolute sincerity of which was deeply questioned by his enemies.

In fact, the whole of Giuseppe Sarto’s pontificate was characterized by a “call to order” of the same timbre in other realms well beyond politics.²¹⁵ Problems in the world of labor were addressed, the cooperation of Catholic unions with their socialist counterparts being placed under certain restrictions, particularly where going out on strike was concerned. Turning to intellectual issues, the pope, through one measure after another, brought the vitalist-inspired Modernist Movement under control in the spheres of scriptural, dogmatic theological, and historical research. Support was given to a network of intransigent groups in their efforts to purge the Catholic camp of activists and thinkers who were said to have abandoned the project of correcting and transforming nature in Christ and to have plunged into its uncritical acceptance instead. Mgr. Umberto Benigni (1862-1934), head of the Fellowship of Pius X and deeply concerned for social justice as well as doctrinal purity, is the name most associated with this new and extensive intransigent initiative.

Would, in many respects, that that work had been completed! In saying this, I do not mean that any of that prophetic brutality inherited from the Mennaisien past that continued to play an unfortunate role in the neo-intransigent crusade was praiseworthy. Uncharitable that spirit was in its origins and uncharitable in all of its subsequent manifestations. What I do wish to say, however, is that the modernist danger was a real one and the effort to rid the Church of elements surrendering to “nature as is” was, as always, absolutely essential to the labor of the Mystical Body of Christ on behalf of the message of the Word in history. Nevertheless, a totally effective crusade of this kind would have entailed not just purging specific disciplines of their modernist tendencies—which was done—but encouraging their proper positive use—which, for a time at least, was not. Insofar as this positive aspect was missing, the purge aided a one-sided recovery and could not be completely useful to the cause of Christ. And it was for this reason, as well as the need to correct brutal and uncharitable assaults on non-modernists who simply defied intransigent reductionism, that some necessary backtracking began almost immediately, during the pontificate of Benedict XV (1914-1922).²¹⁶

I also certainly do not think that “justice” to the Sillon somehow required a complementary condemnation of the Action Française. Many trustworthy sources tell us that this did not come about at the time for three reasons: because the non-doctrinal character of the political arguments of Maurras contrasted so clearly with the doctrinally-charged approach of Sangnier; due to Pius X’s appreciation of the practical work of the League in defense of the Church after the denunciation of the Concordat; and since the atmosphere of the whole of the Maurrasian movement was seemingly friendly to the Faith, with many conversions coming through cooperation with it.²¹⁷

On the other hand, much more ought to have been done to control nefarious developments in several other countries. Hence, solid and praiseworthy efforts to separate Catholics from palingenesist democratic temptations in France should have been accompanied by further assaults on democratic nationalist temptations in places like Germany, where the Center Party was not at all free from such contamination. Closer to home, the stop sign placed in the path of Catholic democratic socialist visions should have been paralleled with another that underlined the continuing danger coming from Italian liberalism. For the chief fruit of all of the changes in Italian Catholic Action was to press believers into a co-operation with a new manifestation of the Party of Order, as reflected in the support offered to religion “friendly” liberal candidates to Parliament through the above-mentioned Gentiloni Pact of 1911.²¹⁸

Last, but definitely not least, the future of the cause of the Word in history would have been much aided by a deeper attention being turned to the very real danger of Americanism. Yes, Leo XIII’s attacks upon this new civil religion were in many respects astute and crucial ones, but any sign of the importance of what he had to say faded swiftly into the shadows. It did so partly because, at the turn of the century, the United States was on the periphery of the Vatican’s telescope and could not hold its attention for long. Rome was not eager to bother the Americans so long as the Americans did not openly bother Rome. In other words, the Holy See allowed the infection to grow. And America would soon return to torment the Roman Catholic Church more than one can bear to mention at this juncture.

Admittedly, it was difficult for the Papacy to continue hostilities when the Americanists themselves insisted that no heresy existed, that they possessed no discernable theological platform, and that they merely espoused a humble, pragmatic method harmonizing order and freedom in a complex modern society, with no prejudice to any Catholic doctrine whatsoever. The transformation of a pragmatic political program into an evangelical national religion seems to have escaped the Catholic Americanists, much as it escaped many non-Catholic patriots who unwittingly served this pseudo-religious creed with universal missionary pretensions. Americanists could not grasp the meaning of Testem benevolentiae because the encyclical was itself part and parcel of that preoccupation with intellectual abstractions that their budding ideology of purely pragmatic action was designed to overcome. If the Americanist issue did not attract the concern of most Catholics, and one of the participants in the battle refused to admit that there was even a war, why would Rome, belabored with other difficulties which it judged to be more immediately critical, think to intervene anew?²¹⁹

Moreover, the contrast of modernism with Americanism seemed to confirm this judgment. The modernist crisis did involve a direct theological challenge to Catholic doctrine and, as such, once again, could not arouse Americanist enthusiasm. American failure to embrace modernism in the wake of its flare-up in Europe gave the United States the aura of a model orthodox nation. Unfortunately, Rome did not realize how a “practical”, “pragmatic” Americanism could suck whole nations into what effectively became a nominalist, naturalist, and equally modernist wind tunnel. And the opportunity for it to do so was soon to arise. For literal firebombing was by now just around the corner.

F. Danger on All Fronts

Unfortunately for the Church and for the globe as a whole, the First World War gave the willful intellectual, spiritual, political, and social fire bombers their greatest opportunity to link theory and practice together. Wartime observers as diverse as Karl Kraus (1874-1936) and Romain Rolland (1876-1944) were horrified by the orgiastic abandonment of all rational discourse and the passionately irrational destruction engendered by that conflict from its very outset. Meanwhile, complex postwar figures such as Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), the author of the famous 1920 work, the Storm of Steel, seemed to revel in them.²²⁰ Our task here, however, is to note that any open-minded student of the Catholic scene since 1848 is obliged to make one firm comment about the events of 1914-1918. Everything that intransigents, Pius IX, the Syllabus of Errors, and Catholic Social Doctrine had predicted would emerge from both uncorrected national material ambition and mechanist naturalist society was proving to be true. If the warring powers did not satisfy themselves with the destruction that they had already caused on behalf of what Pope Benedict XV called a “useless massacre”; if they did not end the conflict swiftly, then horrific and potentially irreparable consequences for the entire globe appeared impossible to avoid.²²¹

And yet every new impressive display of butchery evoked further rhetorical calls from the Entente and Central Powers for still greater commitment in support of the continuing evil, “lest those who have died be said to have died in vain”. No aspect of the unfolding nightmare seemed monstrous enough to prevent Catholics themselves, from fervent individual believers to whole national episcopacies, from participating in the orgy of self-destruction. Neither did it prevent the conscious and unconscious historical proponents of irrationalism from insisting that the damage logically caused by them was somehow actually the final demonstration of the pointlessness of Christian Faith. In short, the word merchants supporting the vision of “nature as is” laid the blame for the horror for which they were responsible at the feet of the very force that had sought to prevent such a situation from developing in the first place. In doing so, a worldview based on the struggle of all against all and the supremacy of willful action in giving direction to mankind closed up shop on the first global conflict that it had long prepared. It then “moved on” to justify more, but different “business as usual” projects, as revolution and civil war followed relentlessly in the footsteps of the four-year bloodbath.

A European continent devastated by the First World War, decimated by its aftermath of starvation and disease, and troubled by postwar internal partisan disturbances, offered few grounds for general optimism by 1920. International order, whose last political symbol Karl Kraus understood to be the now defunct empire of the Catholic Hapsburgs, seemed to be a chimera. Any hope for economic justice, made still more difficult by the return of impassioned front-line soldiers to unemployment in broken economies, appeared to be a utopian dream. In most respects, the Old World could appeal only to the fully conscious cynic, anxious to cripple all faith in moral and material regeneration. “We foresee more ferocious warfare”, the editors of La Civiltà Cattolica lamented as the decade commenced, “more difficult conditions for the good, a more menacing future for society as a whole”.²²²

Whatever the word merchants might argue, the First World War had been a massive defeat for the Enlightenment naturalist vision. It in no way discredited Christ and the Christian message in the eyes of anyone who knew what these actually taught in the first place. As a result, all three pontiffs of the horrific years between 1914 and 1945, Benedict XV (1914-1922), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958), unceasingly continued to proclaim the Catholic intransigent “thesis” that the world of nature must bend to the corrective and transforming message of the Word.²²³

Benedict had courageously insisted upon a return to the principles of international order in the face of brutal opposition from all the belligerents during the whole of the world conflict, and his successors continued to beg for “the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ” on a global basis in its aftermath. While Pius XI dedicated himself to encouraging the acceptance of Christ as King of the universe, Eugenio Pacelli, coordinating all of the different strands of the revival movement of the previous one hundred years and more, discussed the patristic doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ and its meaning for human life more thoroughly than any previous pontiff. The economic aspects of a just political order recognizing the complementary character of the individual and the community were again emphasized in Pius XI’s splendid encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Rerum novarum. Meanwhile, he and his incisive follower on the throne of Peter addressed the complex interaction of the supernatural and natural realms in innumerable papal letters and allocutions, on subjects ranging from the use of the radio and the cinema to that of medicine and astronomy.

Nevertheless, concern for the thesis did not obliterate the three pontiffs’ appreciation of the continuing reality of the hypothesis as well. All of the labors discussed above were undertaken with the requisite opening to a pilgrim spirit. That spirit can be seen in the Holy See’s ever more impassioned cultivation of a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and its courageous recognition that a New Christendom rooted in other parts of the globe might soon take precedence over a European Christian order whose underpinnings had, perhaps, been subverted for good.

Papal openness to nuance was not, however, without its unfortunate side effects. More than anything else, it was Rome’s accurate appreciation of the dilemmas posed by a rapidly changing reality, along with the new steps in the dance of life required to address them, that created the impression in many people’s minds that the Church of the years from 1914-1945 lacked both a commitment to solid principles as well as coherent policies. It was this openness that stirred critics to complain that hers was an engine propelled by base opportunism and hypocrisy alone. And it was this openness that also gave credence to yet another batch of telling black legends once the Second World War was over.

Anyone eager to identify seemingly incomprehensible flip-flops in the era in question does indeed have a gold mine to plumb in the pages of its history. Thundering condemnations of secularization and Bolshevism poured forth from the mouth of Rome. These did not, however, lead the Holy See to reject all contact with leftist Russia, nor to offer serious support to fervent Cristeros fighting a violently anticlerical and semi-Bolshevik government in Mexico, nor uncritically to accept the Spanish Nationalists in their anti-Red campaign, nor to proclaim an anti-Soviet crusade in 1941. The Holy See’s relations with the Christian Socials in Austria in the early 1930’s were friendly, even though it continued to reprove openly confessional parties elswhere. National cultures were highly praised, but French and Polish nationalism intensely disliked; international co-operation was touted, but many existing supra-national institutions openly disdained. Fascists were opposed but somehow not opposed; accepted, but publicly abhorred and chastised. What lay behind all of these contortions?²²⁴

They were fueled, first and foremost, by the basic fact that the dance of life is always difficult to perform well. Numerous contemporary Church failures in dancing that dance to sanctity inevitably emerged. Many may indeed have been due to the individual sins of Catholics, from those of Roman Pontiffs down to the evils perpetrated by ordinary believers active in lay political movements. Many more were owed to the fact that dangers were appearing on literally every front at once in what was, after all, a mere thirty-one year slice of history. Moreover, such strange new dangers, in this short space of time, were confronted by three men of highly different personalities, each of whom learned that a nuanced and prudent response to one practical dilemma tended to give birth to another problem of exactly the same intensity and complexity, often arising from a completely diverse and even totally unexpected direction.

Then again, all three pontiffs were undertaking the already highly complicated work of bringing the full message of the Word into every aspect of natural life in an age of ever more perilous fire bombing activity, making those engaged in battle with her into sometimes more brutal but always much more effective enemies than those of the immediate past. Also, the word merchants laboring in the enemy vineyards had many further means at their disposal to promote their causes and overwhelm or confuse believers with new flips on existing black legends and alternative good stories. To take but one simple example of great importance on the “everyday” level, the fact that a popular cinema actor might be made to represent Christ one day and a “friendly” criminal or libertine the next was enough to baffle his adoring admirers and complicate the task of any pastor of souls, whether pontiff or parish priest.²²⁵

It is ironic that one of the Church’s chief flaws between the two wars was her exaggerated practical acceptance of liberal approaches her defenders had so often reproved. Perhaps more than anything else, it was this liberal temptation that provided fodder for the black legends propagated after 1945 regarding Church action in the era in question—a topic to be addressed in greater detail in the next chapter. Let it suffice to say, for the moment, that the “preferential option for conservative liberalism” demonstrated at the time of the Ralliement in France and, later, through the Gentiloni Pact in Italy, seems to have been more and more accompanied by a conviction that liberal concepts regarding “the rule of laws and not men” must be treated seriously by Church authorities. Hence, laying aside the basic, purely conventional foundations of liberal systems, and the philosophical, psychological, and historical willfulness that truly characterized them in practice, the Holy See tended to accept modern legal agreements and concordats as though they really did provide unshakeable guarantees for action in the future. The attacks made upon Rome for signing a Concordat with the Nazis—part of a network of treaties with the many states composing the German Empire that had been in the offing since the First World War, long before Hitler’s arrival at the summit of power—far from demonstrating friendship with National Socialism, revealed, instead, a quasi-liberal faith in the invincible strength of legal documents that was highly misplaced. And it was the same spirit that was at work in abandoning the Mexican Cristeros in exchange for government “guarantees”—and the approval of both secular and Catholic American opinion.²²⁶

A useful guide to Rome’s highly complicated---and, at times, seemingly ill-informed, contradictory, and intellectually tortured---perspective in the whole of the interwar period can once again be found in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica. This journal remained highly influential throughout those troubled years, both as a literary weapon as well as a practical intermediary between the European religious and political world. We shall see that it continued to base its critical commentary on current events on the fundamental principles of its nineteenth century intransigent founders. But it did so with an eye to the hypothesis as well as the thesis, illustrating the major difficulties of successful Catholic maneuvering in a time of danger on all fronts.

Despite the Civiltà’s terrible fears for the future, it insisted that there was no need to abandon all hope for improvement. Indeed, its editors argued, the very horrors of a war that belied certainty in a never-ending progress had radically increased sympathy in intellectual and artistic circles towards a Church that had long predicted this disaster as an inevitable consequence of a willful, Enlightenment–inspired nationalism.

Nationalism continued to be just as reprehensible in the Civiltà’s eyes after 1914 as before. One needed only to consider the way in which the fighting countries had dehumanized each another during the conflict, or the vilification of the Germans in its aftermath, to realize the irrational depths to which national feeling could drive men. The spirit of vengeance it fomented had then caused the Paris Peace Conference to trample upon the just interests of the defeated powers, in ways that would merely feed desires for retribution, “and please God that a new and more profound destruction does not take place”.²²⁷ Post-war Europe was also given further insights into the madness of the nationalist spirit through the creation of new ethnic nation-states out of the dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire lacking the requisite economic resources sufficient for their independent survival, and capable of defending themselves only so long as Germany and the Soviet Union remained in their momentarily weakened condition. Who was the ultimate loser in all these developments? The real individual human person, who was taxed, conscripted, brutalized, and sacrificed without concern to the needs of the merciless Moloch called the nation-state, and true, non-ideological, patriotic love of country along with him.

An equally Enlightenment-inspired internationalism, corrected neither by Reason nor Faith, was not the answer to the blight of nationalism either, the Civiltà insisted.²²⁸ A League of Nations with no real roots in European history was nothing other than a weak, liberal, pseudo-State. As on the national level, power in such a State would flow to the strong and the better-prepared forces capable of manipulating it rather than to the constituent elements it was truly supposed to serve. What this meant was that insofar as the League had any authority whatsoever it would inevitably be used to enforce the will of the victorious Entente Powers, whitewashed by the good story of finally securing the establishment of a just international order. But, of course, the governments of these manipulative victorious nations were themselves still the hapless tools of the anti-social, liberal capitalist financial magnates that controlled them, compounding the fraudulence of any League claim to provide global justice.

Moreover, the entire post-war edifice, international and national, was unbearably shaky. It looked, for a brief moment, as though it might be transformed at the hands of the “pragmatic” American civil religion, whose secular, revolutionary impact could easily be seen in the contrast of the ideologically charged peace plans of Woodrow Wilson with those of Benedict XV. But America’s time was not yet at hand. Instead, the shakiness of the European order was to be demonstrated by the political appeal of two opponents of the liberal capitalist version of the Enlightenment vision---Marxism-Leninism and Fascism---themselves immediately ready and able to take over the weakened nineteenth century constitutional State to serve their own purposes.

Lenin’s movement, like all truly Marxist approaches, was built on the concept of history as class struggle. We have seen that he added to it the role of an elitist, prophetic, and, of course, inevitably willful party---a “vanguard of the proletariat”. This would make use of historical opportunities to leapfrog the series of clashes Marx had thought man had to endure, in order to bring the battles leading to the final age of communism to a much more swift conclusion. The Bolsheviks had appealed to the ultimately misleading words of “land, peace, and all power to the Soviets” to gain control of the machinery of a weak liberal State, the Russian Provisional Government, to serve its communist aims. They were also happy to involve violent and criminal elements in the task of speedy liberation of the working class; groups ranging from returned front-line soldiers to ordinary town and villages toughs. The presence of a murky world of thugs ready to be mobilized on behalf of something—of anything—had long been a preoccupation of the Russian authorities and counterrevolutionary writers such as Dostoyevsky. It was a favorite topic of journalists in Moscow and St. Petersburg by the latter years of the nineteenth century. The “Thug Moment” in history had now definitively arrived, aided by gifted rhetoricians ready to proclaim it an instrument for the final emancipation of The People.²²⁹

Mention of thuggery brings us directly into the Fascist world. Concepts central to Fascism were “in the air” already for some time before Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) brought them together in the public forum. Eager, like Lenin, to leapfrog his way to a better world, this former radical socialist also understood that the general disruption accompanying a continental war would greatly aid the cause of change. Mussolini saw how a thoroughly determined but tiny minority with a rhetoric of “nation, strength, and glory” on its lips had been able to trick an overwhelmingly pacifist Italy into war, and, even more importantly, how men of the most diverse and seemingly irreconcilable backgrounds were transformed by the frontline experience into a collective, almost superhumanly self-sacrificing fraternal brotherhood. How did this transformation take place? It was brought about through unquestioned submission to the commands of the frontline officers who shared their men’s sufferings and their fate.

Obedience to the will of a leader—the leadership principle—transferred from wartime to peacetime circumstances could, Mussolini concluded, metamorphosize a badly divided modern people into a fraternal band of brothers, annihilate the individualist egotism of nineteenth century liberalism in the process, and move everyone to the accomplishment of great social deeds. No one, certainly to begin with, could ask exactly what these deeds might be or judge their intellectual or moral suitability, since to do so would involve not just questioning the leader’s commands but also reintroducing the division that his right to blind obedience was intended to overcome.

Given the exile of both Faith and Reason from this picture, Fascism could, potentially, work in the service of any cause whatsoever. Hence, while concerned for national solidarity as such in Italy, it came to mean fraternal commitment to an Hispanic ecumene for the Spanish Falange, a purged racial community or Volksgemeinschaft for National Socialist Germany, and the victory of a Nihilist monster, der Oberförster, in Ernst Jünger’s brilliant novel, Auf den Marmorklippen (1939)---about which much more in the epilogue to this work. Whatever the form it might take, however, Fascism’s appearance on the postwar scene was eminently understandable. In some respects, it was simply a more violent development of the mentality arguing for blind obedience to an absolute monarch in the aftermath of the chaos of the Religious Wars.²³⁰

Panic always stimulated a population’s readiness to accept an easy way out of a spiritual, intellectual, and social war of all against all brought about by the victory of “nature as is”---even if this meant welcoming Leviathan’s absorption of everything personal into its bosom. Nevertheless, the Civiltà editors continued to argue that long-term solutions to any given contemporary problems had to take account of the complexities of the dance of life, and, that this required the traditional intransigent unification of what the “principle of independence” had put asunder: social authority with individual freedom and dignity. Thus, for example, while they were quite willing to contemplate many “socialist”- sounding projects, including State aid to farmers, land reform, and, in the ultimate extreme, expropriation of large estates in order to combat agricultural indebtedness and semi-peonage, they insisted that all this was intended to promote the widespread dissemination of personal private property. Again, while supporting a strong Christian labor movement organizing workers to obtain their rights, especially given the economic reality created by liberal capitalist governments’ abandonment of real concern for the common good, they argued that this was only to secure the existence of an harmonious corporate society in which all classes were equally guaranteed their proper dignity. Finally, the editors campaigned for a purified League of Nations, one that built upon the success of European diplomacy at the Locarno Conference, where Germany began to be treated as a human entity once more. This would be a League of Nations that understood, as Taparelli had taught, that international authority had to work for the protection of the just distinctions of each of its constituent nations and the populations whose common good those nation-states were themselves meant to provide.²³¹

As always, the Civiltà concluded, Catholics had to realize that the answer to the problems of the dance of life was the full accepting, correcting, and transforming message of the Word in history. The teaching that emerged from the Catholic thesis showed them that the political organizations of both the Left and Right, despite betraying similarities with Christian positions on specific matters, were not tools through which they could comfortably work. All such partisan pseudo-societies manipulated words to take the Word captive for the sake of their own limited and corrupted goals. The contemporary Left, which often accurately pinpointed the individualist errors of previous less radical liberal movements, and hence might accidentally make common cause with Catholics on social issues, was still a carrier of the Revolution’s basic anti-authoritarian infection. Catholics could not forge an uncritical alliance with any of its representatives. The contemporary Right, which sensed the importance of authority, and therefore appeared to strike at atomism in a way that Catholics could exploit, did so mainly because its terrified proponents wished to use social coercion to protect their own particular but now threatened self-interests. Catholics could not rest contented with the politics of such temporarily frightened atomists and irrationally authoritarian bourgeois. Their battle was with the underlying principles responsible for horrific modern conditions in general. And these, many members of the Right would still dearly love to preserve.

Was a Catholic Party a fit instrument for a restoration of Christian society? The Civiltà was still firmly convinced that it was perhaps the worst expedient to which a Catholic could turn. Once again, a “party”, to the editors, was a pseudo-society, and any such entity formed amidst the madness of the twentieth century would do one of two things: it would either succumb to the spirit of the times and begin to compete with its opponents by offering a utopian ideological program for the solution of all manner of social problems, or it would become rigidly conservative and self-serving. In the party’s pursuit of an earthbound concept of “success”, it would inevitably demand a discipline concerning issues about which Catholics might legitimately disagree, equating its victory with the victory of Christianity. Accomplishing nothing, it would hamper the real correction and transformation of all things in Christ. Only peculiar and deeply significant circumstances could justify going down the “party” route.

Better to devote Catholic attention to the survival and progress of Catholic education, so that society could continue to know what the Christian thesis really entailed. Better, also, to promote issue-oriented pressure groups, “Catholic Action” organizations, which would work to ensure specific Word-friendly approaches to a variety of social problems. Such groups, while political in the sense that they would seek to exert pressure on the State, would nevertheless avoid partisanship. Their issue-orientation would prevent their commitment to a given party, and thus avoid forcing Catholics to adopt a wide spectrum of positions on topics about which no one need speak specifically as a Christian. This ad hoc character would also block their becoming ideological instruments, since they would exist to make the State respond to Catholicism, issue by issue—not to concoct a grandiose scheme whereby they themselves became the State and offered their own ideologically twisted key to happiness. Hence, Catholics could be brought together politically only on matters of religious importance. No statement needed be made on matters about which Christians could disagree; no party discipline exacted on non-essentials.

With proper education reflecting the Word-drenched thesis, the faithful could then turn to the hypothesis, keeping their eyes open for contemporary societies and statesmen susceptible to guidance from awakened believers organized in the lobbies of the fully developed Catholic Action movement. If political forces and leaders could be found who were not frightened by the use of social authority, and who demonstrated that their operating principles did not shut them off entirely from moving down a Catholic direction, then believers could work with them—whether they shared their Faith or not. Europe might be able to breathe again, and the center of Catholicism could yet remain in the Old World. Still, even under the best of circumstances, serious caution would always be required.

One example of how the Civiltà applied this postwar thesis-hypothesis argument to Catholic political action in a way that clearly demonstrates Church flexibility---for better or for worse---can be found in discussing its approach to Fascism.²³² Fascism, in its “doctrinal” form, as a thesis of its own, was anathema to the editors of the Civiltà. They condemned it as blatantly anti-Christian. “Catholics”, they concluded, “are not able therefore to approve, much less to support fascism, as they cannot support or approve socialism, both the one and the other being opposed to the most elementary principles of Christianity”.²³³ Did Fascism believe that authority was divinely instituted, shaped and limited? No. Did it recognize the need to subject individual passions to precepts of right reason and revelation? No. Indeed, it was a movement in which “brutality is allied often with lust and other passions of wayward youths”.²³⁴ Was international order one of its more heartfelt concerns? This was not at all the case. It praised libertine nationalists like the poet and dramatist, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had been one of the chief rhetorical tricksters seducing Italy into the First World War against the nation’s manifest true will. Perhaps social justice was a major Fascist aim? This was equally untrue. The fascist squadristi were the “Black Hundreds” of a dying liberal plutocracy that was ready to utilize any instrument to protect itself; funded by it to crack the skulls of the Italian Red Guards. Fascism was thus the natural home for frustrated ex-socialist ideologues like Mussolini, thugs, terrified liberals, and an exasperated bourgeoisie unable to deal with the consequences of their fundamental principles, unwilling to see chaos sweep the land, and, hence, forced to deal with their crumbling world by means of a still more frank and willful use of power. For “liberalism is always constrained to make up for moral weakness, for the defect of law, with the abuse of material force, and thus to pass from an excess of license to the other extreme of tyranny”. “Such we have seen and we still see in the deeds of fascism”, the editors lamented, “even without recognizing it as a direct work of the government, or a specific institution of the ‘liberal State’ which has, at the very least, tolerated and fomented it”.²³⁵

Nevertheless, the Civiltà could not help but see in the fascist movement a hypothetical tool for ultimately restoring the true authority of the State and an unconscious instrument fit to destroy the modern spirit. For even “doctrinal” fascism was, to a certain degree, an artificial plant. Many fascists were simply supporters of “action” to end the crisis of paralyzed post-war Italy and went no further in formulating definite ideological principles. Obedience to the will of the leader, who might then be able to judge the practical steps that had to be taken in order to act effectively, was their single unquestionable axiom. And the Duce, whose authority was thus exalted, had shown himself to be a man of enormous organizational ability; a politician who knew how to exploit the deficiencies and errors of both socialism and liberalism; a new type of statesman who could also charismatically dominate the population as a whole. This non-ideological fascism, whatever its intellectual flaws, nevertheless struck at anarchic individualism in the population at large. Even the “honesty” of the fascist glorification of brute force, as opposed to its hidden acceptance by liberalism, could, perhaps, aid in building a path back to an understanding of the value of social authority:²³⁶

The roar of the fasci which orders ‘enough’ to this disorder was like a call to battle that had to find sympathy and consent in the crowd of tired, disgusted, self-interested, and honest men who, even while applauding the goal of the fascist organizations, did not approve the method.

A consistent Civiltà policy, given the two-fold character of fascism, thus had to reflect the complexities discussed above. The editors determined that, first of all, fascism needed to be diverted from any dogmatic statement of its irrational principles and kept to its “gut” emphasis on action, order, and authority. This, in the right hands, could deal heavy blows to the atomistic spirit of the modern world. Secondly, Catholic Action must simultaneously be more vigorously developed and Catholic pressure more consistently exerted to ensure that Mussolini’s practical policies were actually Catholic in character. Thus, a Catholic order of things could gradually be constructed without the mediation of a Catholic Party that could itself easily be tempted either to accept liberal political presuppositions or to equate the social teachings of the Church with partisan, Marxist ideology. But the success of such a policy would, of course, require the strictest unity among Catholics, both cleric and lay, themselves.

This general approach can be seen throughout the journal’s pages in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Any justification of the paganism, immorality, violence and state worship of some fascists was vigorously reproved, as much after the March on Rome as before. Such justifications were consistently chastised as the ultimate consequences of liberal theories of passion, power, and popular sovereignty. Evils that might stem from fascist “doctrines”, the murder of Senator Matteoti in 1924 among them, were eagerly identified and connected with their ultimately liberal, atomistic roots. And that particular fascist murder was condemned as a frank and logical application of principles that both liberals and socialists, through their historical attacks on objective truth and praise of revolution, had been arguing on the theoretical level for many decades already.

Similarly, helpful intellectual and socially authoritative actions of the fascists were excessively praised, and combined with exhortations to further good works. Let Mussolini make a reference to the help of God in Parliament, tinged though this might be with Mazzinian pantheism, and the Civiltà was seduced and would erupt in expressions of sympathy and hope. Could the Duce but cap his triumph over his enemies with a triumph over his own passions! Let the fascists publish works such as that by Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959), La marcia su Roma, which urged the regulation of the overly-violent squadristi, and the Civiltà was quick to laud its sagacity. Let the party faithful, irritated by liberal, democratic, and socialist opposition, launch an attack on popular sovereignty, or even on the “protestant” roots of the modern spirit, and the journal’s editors were enraptured, seeing all this as clear progress to the more balanced and rational advice to be garnered from a Taparelli or the papal social encyclicals. Fascists were frequently right in practice, they argued. If they could be consistently right in dealing with the problems of the age, they might even begin to be right for solid Catholic reasons.²³⁷

State worship and other basically anti-Christian fascist sentiments were identified and criticized in Giovanni Gentile’s educational reforms. Gentile did not show any desire to abandon State claims to control over instruction. Instead, the fascist reform suggested the construction of “a new form of monopoly on the part of the pantheistic State”.²³⁸ Gentile himself was a Hegelian who believed that advanced students in secondary schools and universities should receive a philosophical education that would radically transform the character of their earlier Catholic education. Nevertheless, the Civiltà saw that even in the midst of these theoretically bad educational measures, Gentile’s reforms granted the Church certain solid benefits. For one thing, at least a primary school Catholic education was encouraged. In practice, therefore, the fascists were conceding to the Church more than the liberals had ever done, and with a much better grace as well.

Another issue that demonstrated the double-edged character of the regime in the mind of the Civiltà was that of fascist syndicalism. Fascism, the journal claimed, had shed its formerly anti-proletarian image upon obtaining power, perhaps for pragmatic reasons, perhaps in reflection of Mussolini’s earlier socialist past. In any case, its desire for action through national unity led it to condemn the class struggle and also to sense the need for some kind of cooperative and just industrial system. Lacking justice, Italian economic and social life would always be darkened by a sullen hostility of a large segment of the population harmful to fascist goals. This seeming recognition of the rights of workingmen offered hope for the reconciliation of management and labor.

The minute, however, that “pragmatic” fascism attempted justification of its new, pro-corporative arguments, it revealed its erroneous statist principles and transformed these into economic ideology. “Doctrinal” fascism, founded upon the concept of the Leader whose will was transmitted through the State, conceived of syndicalism as a dependent, monopolistic, instrument of the government. Not only would such a “workers’ movement” ultimately prove to be distasteful to laborers, but, lacking historical roots, it would remain ungainly and uncontrollable, subject either to complete breakdown or eventual Bolshevik penetration. The only solution to the industrial problem was a free syndicalism, Catholic in spirit, opposing both the class struggle and the taint of owner or State dominion and manipulation:²³⁹

Just as yesterday Catholics were against Red precursors and masters of monopoly, so also today they remain firm advocates of true liberty in face of the encroachment of fascist exclusivism.

Neither the brutal club of reactionaries, nor the paternalistic umbrella of conservatives is useful against the socialist whirlwind. It is necessary to take refuge in a more spacious and solid edifice…the {free} professional organization.

La Civiltà Cattolica always defended Catholic Action alongside the pragmatic toleration of a willful fascism. Public educational means of teaching the Catholic ethos of the correction and transformation of nature in Christ, along with the presence of strong social pressure groups, were essential to guidance of an always basically unsound fascist outlook. Hence the journal’s critique of the effort to create in the Balilla a compulsory and monopolistic youth movement that was completely fascist in spirit. A pragmatic Catholic acceptance of fascism had to be accompanied by the right to organize youth in a firmly Catholic way. But the Civiltà felt no compulsion to defend the Italian Popular Party, whose implicit claim to being the “Catholic Party” it vigorously denied, basing its critique on its standard anti-partisan argument. From the very aftermath of the March on Rome, the editors urged the popolari not to oppose the fascists in a way that would encumber the real work of the Church in Catholic Action. The Civiltà expressed concern that the Popular Party might endanger “a solid national reconstruction”, incite certain fascists “to return to the deprecated method of violence”, and lead more excitable Blackshirts to confuse Catholic Action with Dom Luigi Sturzo’s organization---although the former “has nothing and ought to have nothing in common with any political direction”.²⁴⁰

Unfortunately, the journal argued, the popolari were pursuing just the sort of policy that yet again revealed the underlying problem of a Catholic Party. Faced with a legitimately established government that enjoyed significant popular support, was open to Church pressure, and seemed eager to restrict the atomistic license encouraged by nineteenth-century liberalism, Catholics ought to count their blessings. They should sense in Mussolini’s critique of the liberal State the spirit of their own hostile analysis. Instead, the Popular Party was interested solely in the maintenance of the former liberal-democratic system—which was understandable, since that system was indeed essential to the attainment of its own, narrow partisan goals. An interest in constitutional democracy was by no means illicit, but the rise and fall of constitutional democratic States, especially hypocritical ones, was not an issue of moral importance upon which the cause of the Church as such depended. As much as men might argue over such matters on the rational level, it could never be depicted as though it were a specifically Catholic concern.

Catholics had a primary concern for the common good, which, as Church doctrine had long taught, was not tied to any particular form of government. It was ironic, the Civiltà noted, that Catholic voters who had first been allowed to participate in Italian politics to fight materialist socialists were now being mobilized by the Popular Party to fight alongside such political naturalists to defend liberal democracy against a government which happened to be ever more friendly to the Church. Why join with men who revealed little sympathy for Catholicism and who would, given their past record, turn against the Church at the earliest possible moment, for the sake of such a non-essential matter as the particular shape of Italian political institutions? A call to do so could only reflect the sad truth that the popolari had succumbed to the spirit of the age, and wanted whatever served their partisan concerns to be proclaimed as inherently Catholic and even dogmatically binding.

The Civiltà regularly maintained its attack on the popolari, despite charges of servility and opportunism, always stressing the same theme. Indeed, opposition seems only to have strengthened the Civiltà’s bluntness, and in sometimes startling ways. There was no hope of securing a truly Catholic State in Europe under the present hypothesis, the editors wrote. One had in Italy the second-best thing: a friendly, though admittedly irrational authority, one which was open to Catholic influence, and—perhaps most importantly—one which had no intention of abdicating its power. It would be servile to do nothing against an unjust action of this government; it was by no means vile or opportunistic to accept a powerful historical reality, with all its inconveniences—just as one accepted a less than satisfactory marriage or the Third French Republic—and seek to aim it towards the good. A similar approach would be necessary, though with less chance of success, under a legally constituted liberal or socialist government. But to commit the Church against a formidable historical reality that seemed disposed to work for the common good, and to do so for the sake of the survival of parties and the partisan spirit was a real betrayal, a true secularization of her mission. If the Church appeared to be running the risk of associating herself with fascism by supporting the legal government, this was a fact of life with which she had to live. She would run the equal risk of appearing to support liberalism or socialism should she oppose Mussolini’s regime.

Confirmation of the legitimacy of the policy that the Civiltà advocated seemed obvious to the editors once the Lateran Accords of 1929 were signed. For modest concessions, great benefits were gained. Catholicism was recognized as the sole religion of the State, basic education was placed in the Church’s hands, and, in consequence, the old territorial issue was successfully resolved. Even the sequestration of one Civiltà issue, due to the journal’s criticism of a ferocious speech by Mussolini in the Parliament interpreting the Concordat in what it considered to be an unacceptable sense, gave little indication that the journal might contemplate a change of outlook. Once more, the editors’ question remained the same. Would the Church have gained as many goods had the government been entrusted to a Catholic Party committed to the partisan spirit of the liberal democratic State? This, they were convinced, was doubtful in the extreme.²⁴¹

Charles Maurras’ L’Action Française evoked a similarly complex---and sometimes quite ill-informed---reaction in the pages of the interwar Civiltà. This movement’s attack upon anticlerical influence continued to win for it numerous adherents among Catholics, after 1918 as before, giving it great influence in seminaries, at episcopal palaces, and even in the College of Cardinals. And yet, despite seeming to be at one with La Civiltà Cattolica in many of its basic themes, and certainly adopting a more consistently pro-Catholic political program than Italian Fascism, the Jesuit journal tenaciously supported the condemnations that befell the movement at the hands of Pope Pius XI in 1926.²⁴²

Only one constituent part of the l’Action Française movement was spared the journal’s criticism, and that was the first of its historical elements: the League. The League’s president during the course of the 1920’s was Bernard de Vesins (1869-1951), an undoubtedly pious Catholic. More importantly, it had been established as a pragmatic pressure group from the outset, did not require a universal political platform to function, and had, indeed, fought good Catholic fights against the nefarious effects of the unilateral abolition of the Concordat since the time of its foundation. It was, the editors therefore argued, in a sense, a kind of Catholic Action organization, especially since the bulk of its members were solidly faithful. As practicing Catholics of “good sense”, however, the Civiltà urged the pious members of the League to cease reading the movement’s daily newspaper and abandon the leadership of Charles Maurras and Leon Daudet (1867-1942). For both these men were said to be pagan classicists, “unbelieving and licentious novelists”, with Daudet in particular a supporter of a “school of corruption” which even “the worst pages of the lustful D’Annunzio could not surpass”.²⁴³

L’Action Française was attacked for three different reasons. To begin with, the Roman journal disliked Maurras’ historical positivism, which, it noted, made of secular concerns the primary factor in a people’s life, and brought him to defend the position of the Church in French society on political grounds only, “‘in function of the national interest’”, and not “for the profound principles of Christian philosophy”.²⁴⁴ Secondly, the Civiltà saw the movement’s insistence upon the suitability of only one traditional form of government as indicative of a “narrow minded politics of ‘conservative at all costs’”, that was especially dangerous to believers insofar as it demanded recognition as “the Catholic Party” in France.²⁴⁵ If the Church needed to restrain an Italian Popular Party insinuating that true Catholics must adhere to its dogmatic commitment to democratic liberalism, then she also had to critique l’Action Française’ claim to be the Catholic Party for its positivist support of the legitimate monarchy as well. Such choices might, once again, be suitable for debate on the rational plane, but they simply could not guide believers as believers. And, finally, the editors intensely disliked the movement’s encouragement of political violence, which not only worked to destabilize the nation internally in an age of already overly chaotic disruption but also stimulated that nationalist venom that continued to wreak havoc with efforts to build a just international order.

This last issue was of especially deep concern to Pope Pius XI, whose revulsion over nationalist excesses in World War One had been intensified by his horror at encountering the hold of nationalist ideals over much of the Polish clergy during his brief tenure as nuncio to the new Republic at the end of the global conflict. At that time, he had been told that to be Polish was the equivalent of thinking as an orthodox Catholic. The idea that Frenchmen might make the same point threatened even greater danger to the Church’s cause in Europe. Be that as it may, the Civiltà, while admitting the movement’s general anti-liberal position, echoed the pope’s critique of l’Action Française, and excoriated it--- inaccurately with respect to its supposed absolutist tendencies---for being anti-modern in a wrongheaded fashion.²⁴⁶

In combating liberalism with its false liberties, it passes to the defense of a censurable absolutism or of another form of at least debatable return to the old regime. In defending nationalism, it passes to a condemnation of all forms of ‘internationalism’, including the spirit of pacification among peoples, etc. In demanding, in conclusion, the principle of authority, it exaggerates and changes its nature, substituting, for example, the idea of material force and violence for that of moral force, justice, and love….

The editors, quoting Pius XI, went on to claim that the French movement espoused a vision of religion that was secularist and therefore “liberal” in its own manner:²⁴⁷

They have discredited political and social liberalism by giving way to an indeed worse form of liberalism, religious liberalism; this is not a good means of serving the cause of a monarchism that wants to reserve for the Catholic religion the first place in society, at least as an element of order and as the best auxiliary of authority.

Catholics, therefore, could follow the leaders of l’Action Française only accidentally, with respect to specific issues. Meanwhile, they were as obliged to reject their theses, as they were those of an ideological fascism:²⁴⁸

These men are indeed able to agree with us in some practical approach, or on some speculative point: as, for example, in rejecting revolutionary liberalism and similar things; but the agreement could never be complete, being determined per se by reasons diverse in motivation and ends opposed in intention.

In short, the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history could not be handed over to the care of a movement or party with an all-encompassing political vision of its own—fascist, democratic, liberal, nationalist, monarchist, or whatever else this might be.

Unfortunately, the understandable thesis-hypothesis nuances of the Civiltà’s approach to interwar politics were themselves to prove very problematic in this age of danger on all fronts---especially when they were sometimes somewhat ill informed. For what the Church actually obtained politically in Italy and in France was, in the long run, in many respects precisely what she did not desire—aid for the success of a vision of “nature as is”. Condemnation of the popolari as a secularist force did not prevent fascism from pursuing its own vitalist agenda in a threatening and—as we shall soon see—highly contagious manner, continuing to serve the naturalist and liberal anti-communist agenda even while escaping the salubrious effects of what proved to be an often rather timid Catholic Action movement. Furthermore, condemnation of l’Action Française did not free the Church from subservience to other secularizing political ideologies. Instead, it simply encouraged French Catholics with fervent liberal democratic convictions to begin their own machinations anew. It was the continuing supporters of the old Sillon Movement who picked up the pieces from the papal and Civiltà attack upon Maurras’ organization, taking over the French episcopacy and Catholic Action entities of all kinds. And these men, as will become obvious in the next chapter, were destined to renew an alliance with their former Americanist friends to build an order in which the entire outlook of the Civiltà, with all of its concern for the corrective and transforming message of the Word in history, was more effectively destroyed than ever before.²⁴⁹

G. A Portuguese and Austrian Model?

Another profoundly instructive means of illustrating the tremendous dilemmas of an era when dangers appeared on all fronts is by looking at militant Catholic confrontation with the problems of naturalism from the standpoint of what was happening in the smaller countries of Europe. This is particularly valuable because the inability of Catholics in weaker States to affect events on a grander European scale parallels the situation in which the Church as a whole found herself in the troublesome thirty-one year period from 1914-1945, and since it offers a full-fledged “bath” in all the difficulties that emerged from attempting new steps in the pilgrim dance of life in modern times. The following, highly detailed examination of developments in a Portugal and an Austria where powerful Catholic voices played a major role in interwar political life is especially interesting and useful. For it once again demonstrates both the basic continuity of the main themes of the Ninth Crusaders in the twentieth century as well as a willingness to engage in political and social experimentation to incarnate them that---given the very narrow room for maneuvering that national resources and the troubled times in general permitted---can seem either hopelessly pedantic and utopian on the one hand or simply tragically impotent on the other.⁶⁸

Portuguese Catholics felt little affection for the Republic replacing the Braganza Monarchy in 1911. Republican liberalism and anticlericalism sapped whatever good will may have existed. Opposition to the Republic’s evangelical secularization was fostered by interpretations of the Fatima visions of 1917, which intimated Portugal’s special role as a dike against the anti-Christian tide in the modern world. Opportunities opened for believers to combat the revolutionary hydra with the 1926 military coup d’état that placed the government in the hands of a junta led by General Manuel Oliviera Gomes da Costa (1863-1929). The entry of Dr. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) into the government in 1928 as Minister of Finance, and his elevation four years later to the position of Prime Minister, represented a major victory for their cause.

Salazar, who remained in power until 1968, was an ex-seminarian and an influential member of Portuguese Catholic Action. A monkish bachelor all his life, he gained a scholarly reputation as Professor of Economics at the University of Coimbra, whence he was called to political power. Salazar’s actions as Prime Minister so impressed many of his fellow believers that, as his own university proudly claimed; “the Catholic world acclaims him as its most eminent citizen”.⁶⁹ American Catholic institutions, such as Fordham, granted honorary degrees to a man whom Coimbra described as the “priest and prophet of the new social order”.⁷⁰ His reforms continued to be official policy, at least in theory, until the coup d’état that toppled the regime that he inspired in 1974.

Austria, struggling for a raison d’être after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, nurtured an influential Christian social movement under the leadership of the priest-Chancellor, Fr. Ignaz Seipel (1876-1932). It fell firmly into more intransigent Catholic hands, however, only after the accession of Engelbert Dollfuss (1892-1934) to Seipel’s position in 1932. Dollfuss, like Salazar, a practicing Catholic and ex-seminarian, was otherwise quite different in character. A gregarious, indeed, ebullient man, he was born of Tyrolean peasant stock, was happily married, and had served during the war with distinction. Dollfuss was no intellectual, though he did gain some reputation as a specialist on peasant problems for the Christian Socials during the 1920’s.

An opportunity for a Catholic counterrevolution in Austria appeared with a parliamentary crisis in 1933, after Dollfuss’ assumption of executive power. The president and two vice presidents of the Austrian National Assembly resigned at this time in a dispute concerning a controversial proposition supported by the German National Party. Parliament lacked a legal procedure for filling simultaneous vacancies in all three chairs. The Chancellor took advantage of the inability to reach a compromise to declare the legislature to be a victim of suicide and to begin administering the country by decree. A moment had arrived for him, as for Salazar, to correct “the mistakes not of fifteen years merely, but of one hundred and fifty years of intellectual and political delusions.”⁷¹ Dollfuss’ exuberance made him a danger for the National Socialists, whose desire for political union with Germany was opposed by the Chancellor. The result of their enmity appeared in 1934, with, in Chesterton’s words, “a set of horribly arrogant invaders…entering a place in disguise and butchering a poor little man…who happened to be fighting to keep one little corner of Germany still a part of Christendom”.⁷² Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg (1897-1977) continued his work, although under increasingly impossible conditions, until the Anschluss of 1938.

Salazar was a rigorous political theorist, and, hence, may be invoked to provide the conceptual framework for what is to follow. Austrian divergences with his thought can be indicated when they appear. Certainly, there could be little disagreement regarding the chief goal that Salazar identified for the movement that he led: a typical Ninth Crusade root and branch extirpation of the entire revolutionary order of things, and, with it, the whole modern Zeitgeist:⁷³

We are against class warfare, irreligion and disloyalty to one’s country; against serfdom, a materialistic conception of life, and might over right. We are antagonistic to all the great heresies of today, all the more because we cannot see that any benefit has accrued through their propagation; for they have rather served the new barbarism by sapping the foundations of our civilization…We are anti-parliamentarians, anti-democrats, anti-liberals, and we are determined to establish a corporative state.

Further attention must be devoted to three points emphasized in this declaration of intent, all of which we have seen eternally to recur in the literature of the Ninth Crusade: the materialism and barbarism engendered by modern political and social thought; the need to replace the liberal State with a more socially authoritative system for the attainment of the common good; and, finally, intimately tied to these first two themes, the “corporative” model as an essential key to ensuring proper order as well as individual human freedom and fulfillment—a model that many Catholic theorists had worked to develop more thoroughly throughout the latter nineteenth century.

Modern materialism, Salazar insisted, stemmed, ultimately, from an absurd effort to build a social order upon the intellectual foundations of “doubt”.⁷⁴ This sin, most closely associated with liberal thought, was, he argued, endemic to naturalism as a whole, discernable under the most luxuriant ideological foliage. It rendered the attempt to fight one branch of “The Revolution” with another of its offshoots a dubious enterprise at best. The abandonment of efforts to uncover the true philosophy of society, through the application of man’s natural rational faculties, had not left the West without a reigning Weltanschauung. It had simply handed it over, by default, to the mindless, yet tyrannical guidance of a utilitarian outlook that emphasized might over right, and bodily needs over spiritual and intellectual ones.⁷⁵

Several familiar examples of irrational, materialistic, utilitarianism-by-default can be noted from Salazar’s thought. One is the fact that the average liberal government, after speaking of the impossibility of learning the truth, found itself eventually compelled to reintroduce some substitute “contractual” reality. It recognized that without this substitute reality, society would crumble. Liberalism was “constrained by its principles to act as if {it} had none”; it was “driven to act inconsistently in order to exist”. Hence, the need for “attributing infallibility to the decisions of a parliament, the verdicts of a court, and the acts of an executive power”; the need for its democratic offshoot to create the myth of the wisdom of the People; and, finally, the inevitable need for shaking the policeman’s nightstick at those unwilling to believe. Instead of remaining subject to a law that sought rational or divine pillars, modern man became the slave of material force. These, the reader will recognize, are all familiar themes from intransigent journals such as La Civiltà Cattolica and writers like Taparelli d’Azeglio.⁷⁶

A second example of the victory of matter over spirit in the modern world, more blatant than the first, was identified in economic theory and practice. Dr. Salazar discussed this point with reference to Portugal’s limited capacity for economic growth. No reforms, he argued, could transform Lusitania into Eden. Situated on the edge of Europe, poor in mineral deposits and farmlands, Portugal simply lacked opportunities for development on a scale equaling that of the rest of the continent. Still, it was questionable whether contemporary Europe’s vision of Eden was, in practice, as enticing as imagined. Her rejection of fixed moral principles gave her a purely quantitative measurement of wellbeing; a utilitarian standard “detrimental to and beneath human dignity”; a subtle infection that ever increased her thirst rather than allowing it to be quenched. European man had been tricked into believing that mountains of artificial and insipid consumer goods had become “dreadful necessities”. The “mechanization of life” was his frightful fate. Cities without souls, architecture without animation, luxuries without pleasure were the final, anti-human consequences of the “liberating” philosophy of doubt.⁷⁷ Again, these are familiar themes, reiterated in numerous nineteenth century intransigent circles.

Any truly solicitous regime, Salazar insisted, must turn its energies towards understanding the true, objective foundations of social order. Only when the real order of things was enshrined in law could justice and freedom be assured and injury to man’s rational faculties be avoided. Only when the truth guided the government could arbitrary methods forcing irrational substitute realities upon whole populations be rejected, along with “totalitarian concepts…which tend to deify the State, the People, a given doctrine or individual”.⁷⁸ Again, it was useless to argue that one might make rational errors in determining how to deal truthfully with nature. The price of eliminating possible error was the inevitability of backing, by default, into a barbaric, materialistic and anti-rational nightmare.

Although always insisting upon the importance of religion, Prime Minister Salazar placed much emphasis upon the fundamental effectiveness of Reason in guiding State actions. “We wish to organize and strengthen the country by means of principles of authority, order, and national tradition”, he argued in a characteristic passage, “in harmony with those eternal verities which are, happily, the inheritance of humanity and the sustenance of Christian civilization.”⁷⁹ The impression given—and it is an impression legitimated by the mainstream of Catholic natural law theorists and certainly one that was shared by Taparelli—is that political science is primarily a secular enterprise, although one that is, of course, provided its greatest practical strength through the support and supernatural insight that Faith gives to Reason.

Yet such statements mask the fullness of Salazar’s religious inspiration. This becomes clearer in his discussion of the need for a spiritual awakening. Any lasting political and social improvements, Salazar insisted, and any consistent social application of the rational faculties, had to be preceded by a spiritual transformation of the individual. “Noisy” modern civilization could not ensure this, nor could Maurras, with his contention that politics was “the great factor in a people’s life”.⁸⁰ Salazar hoped to rebuild the life of the spirit in order to enable man’s reason to see through the materialist stupidities preventing the attainment of order and peace:⁸¹

From a civilization which is returning scientifically to the jungle, we are separated unceasingly by spiritualism—fount, soul, life of our History. We shun feeding the poor with illusions, but we want at all costs to preserve from the wave that is rising in the world the simplicity of life, the purity of customs, the sweetness of feelings, the equilibrium of social reactions, the familiar air, humble but dignified, of Portuguese life—and through these conquests or reconquests of our traditions, social peace.

Still, how was this seemingly vague spiritual transformation to take place? It was to occur through overwhelmingly Catholic means, in recognition of the Church’s role as the “mother of intelligence”.⁸² Public schools, recognizing “the singular importance of the Catholic religion in the molding of Portuguese character” would “take adequate precautions for overturning the corruption of morals”, and teach orthodox doctrine “to pupils whose parents or guardians do not lodge a request to the contrary”.⁸³ Mocidade, the Portuguese Youth Movement, would ensure “that Christian doctrine and morals should be a living force in the minds of the boys, springing from their own personal observation of cause and effect and of conduct of life.”⁸⁴ Measures long desired by Catholic militants were the practical path to spiritual renewal. Hence, the Cardinal-Patriarch of Lisbon’s enthusiastic endorsement of the regime in 1938:⁸⁵

There has been, and is, a spiritual renaissance in Portugal. It is a miracle. The soul of the nation is born again in the grace of its people, who are renewing their energies at the source of all life. The constitution of Portugal, while not officially Catholic, is based on Catholic principles guaranteeing the freedom of the family, the Church, of education, and by that freedom, encouraging them to grow.

Chancellor Dollfuss and the movement that he led were also convinced that society could not be built upon doubt and that the materialism of modern Europe was no answer to man’s problems. He, too, believed that the spirit had to be reawakened in order to stabilize Austria. The chief difference from the Portuguese—a difference accepted by the Papacy, and dictated by Austria’s pressing need for a mass movement strong enough to resist the allure of Nazism—was the more open Catholicity of their political enterprise. Dollfuss argued that Austria’s new “imperial mission”, following the demise of the old Empire, was to give “the example of a real honest attempt at forming a Christian State”; ⁸⁶ to make Catholicism “inherent in our public and political life” and manifest itself “as the formative factor in the development of the State”: ⁸⁷

I am convinced that it is the will of a higher power that we should maintain Austria, this land of ours, with its glorious history, though now on a smaller scale; I am convinced that this Austria is to give an example to other nations in the shaping of her public life; that we in this land of Austria have a great and valuable service to render to the German people as a whole.

With us, to be German means also to be Christian at the same time. As the German people were once brought by Christianity out of paganism to the highest pitch of civilization, so it is our ambition now once more to realize in our German land a devout, humble, and truly practical Christianity. Perhaps the time may come when what we are striving to bring about in little Austria will also be achieved outside our borders, wherever there is a will and a way.

We intend to renew the spirit of our country in the sign in which western Christendom was delivered from the power of Asia two hundred and fifty years ago; the simple sign of the Christian Cross.

For the Austrians, objective order was to be found in “immutable-divine Christian law”.⁸⁸ Political reforms were secondary, since “only Christ can save men’s souls, and only He can help society”.⁸⁹ “The greatest sin and most heinous crime” that the anticlericals had committed was that of having trained “masses of the people” to become “irreligious egoists”.⁹⁰ In recompense, the new Austria would “take care that children in public instructions receive a religious and moral education”, and ensure that every teacher be trained to “regard it as important that Catholic principles should prevail in the education of the people”.⁹¹ To promote the Catholic moral perfection of youth was to promote social improvement and sound statesmanship:⁹²

We want, with the help of grace and the Sacraments, to become better men. If our Catholic Youth Movement is so guided that {the young} will learn to avoid vice, {and} cultivate truly Christian charity from an inner conviction, then they will become a young and healthy source of an entirely Christian nation…We must arouse within us a truly Christian spirit of endeavor. If we succeed in making ourselves real Christians instead of make-believe Christians, then I have no anxieties about the future.

If they are taught what is the supernatural end of man: if they are told what they must do and what they must avoid; if, above all, they are taught the fundamental precept: ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’; if children are brought up not on mere humanitarian slogans, but on Christian principles, so that they may become men of character, men with a sense of responsibility; then the State is most keenly interested in their education…It is sound statesmanship to foster and encourage a life of religion.

If you, my young friends, talk of taking your part in public life, let me tell you one thing today: just as you can only be a good soldier if you have learned to obey, so you can only take an effective and useful part in public life if you have tested yourselves in the virtues which are in the very blood of the German manhood; if you have honestly tried with the help of the means offered by our religion to become better men…

Struggle against barbarism and materialism in modern life also meant encouraging only that measure and quality of economic progress that left a nation’s spiritual life, intellectual goals, and esprit de corps intact. Hence, as Salazar indicates, an ideological capitalism had to disappear. After all, this had failed to recognize “the statesman, the judge, the lawyer, the doctor, the priest, the artist, the professor, the man of learning are not mere ornamental flowers of a surface civilization”.⁹³ Liberal capitalism had placed “villains” in control of society, plutocrats who “do not recognize the rights of labor, moral exigencies, or the laws of humanity”.⁹⁴ Economic rules of the game there might be, but it was crucial to remember that these had to bend “in accordance with the community aim”, or, as Dollfuss argued, “to the law of love”.⁹⁵ Individual property, although “a rational imposition of human nature”, and “one of the essential bases of social preservation and progress”, could not be allowed to work against the well being of the nation as a whole.⁹⁶ Its use had to be modified in such a way as to aid as many Portuguese as possible to become property owners themselves, and then to act in a Christian Portuguese fashion with their lands. Portugal, Dr. Salazar claimed, had to be reconstructed into “a more humane and Christian country”, where “excessive and inhuman” economic ambitions were discouraged; a “middle land”, one “where neither multi-millionaires nor paupers are possible”. The best means of restoring property was abandonment of atomistic liberal capitalism in a way that did not encourage its collectivistic, materialist, socialist counterpart.⁹⁷

Our reformers emphasized two methods of achieving the desired goal, the first of which was an attack on liberal political thought, with its emphasis upon parliamentary constitutionalism. An anti-parliamentary approach was obvious in both the statements and actions of the Austrian and Portuguese reformers. Dollfuss claimed to feel the “finger of God” in an enthusiastic peasant response to his announcement, after the suicide of the Austrian Parliament, that “nobody can say when it will be allowed to take up its dubious activities again”.⁹⁸ And as far as Dr. Salazar was concerned, parliaments and “word games” were synonyms:⁹⁹

The truth is that I am profoundly anti-parliamentary. I hate the speeches, the verbosity, the flowing, meaningless interpolations, the way we waste passions, not round any great idea, but just about futilities, vanities, nothingness from the point of any national good…Of course, there are occasional ideas of value, but it is mostly just fine phrases, just words!

Aversion to parliamentary government was due to the fraudulence of liberal claims to defend human freedom through its operation. We have seen that intransigent Catholics understood man to be capable of perfecting his personality and becoming “free” in the traditional sense of the world, only through his recognition of the proper demands of his social nature. The individual’s improvement could take place solely in the framework of all the various associations “which spring up and are spontaneously organized in the heart of the nation”; those “natural extensions of and supports to human activities”, all of which matured man through the duties that they imposed upon him and the vistas that they opened up to him; all of which mediated between the individual and the community at large; and none of which could be supplanted, one for another:¹⁰⁰

Human institutions are not ‘chains’ for man to break through, impediments hampering the fulfillment of his aims. They are barriers to the vagaries of his liberty, a shelter for the frailty of his nature, a sure guidance amid the hesitations of his conscience, an aid to enable him to obey the laws imposed upon him.

The State, in this vision of political life, was meant to be simultaneously both strong and limited---something that liberal thought claimed to be an impossible paradox. Its guidance by the moral law and human reason rather than by individual, liberal willfulness made its foundation both firm and conscientious. Its submission to an historical community, the nation, which stood above the individual corporations, compelled it to see “everything in the light of its duty and capacity to save the interests of all”. The State had to be vigorous enough to make an “unequivocal statement of responsibilities and duties”, and to harmonize inevitable clashes among the various associations.¹⁰¹ Yet the very vibrancy of its numerous meditating institutions was to tha nation’s constant protection against the State becoming Leviathan. One had to be blind to the evidence of history, Dr. Salazar concluded, not to recognize that traditional corporate societies, harmonized through the action of a strong, rational State, had been beneficial to human freedom:¹⁰²

The medieval institutions, attesting the cooperation between the sovereign and the subject, produced a well-balanced community enjoying the benefits both of liberty and authority. Under the traditional monarchy, a strong government did not run counter to civic freedom, which in politics, economic life, and society ensured the rights of the individual.

Salazar, like Ninth Crusader Catholics in general, argued that modern “atomism”—what Mgr. Ketteler had called the “chemical solution of humanity into individuals, into grains of dust equal in value, into particles”—had actually ruined prospects for personal and social perfection.¹⁰³ This “false conception of individualism”, which dismantled corporate life in the name of human liberation, left man in an unnatural, solitary condition.¹⁰⁴ It released him, “manacled and powerless”, either into the hands of strong and vicious individuals who consciously or unconsciously profited from society’s destruction, or into the grips of the God-State, which had been called upon to bring about the end of corporate life.¹⁰⁵

Perhaps a better expression of Salazar’s view would be to say that he believed, as did Taparelli, that the individual was handed over to a God-State, which itself was then manipulated by the strong and the vicious. We have seen that this, indeed, is what the liberal parliamentary system appeared to guarantee to many Catholic thinkers from the middle of the 1800’s onwards. The liberal State was a “fiction created chiefly under the erroneous principles of the last century”.¹⁰⁶ It established a civil order subject to atomistic individuals “artificially disassociated from the interests and preoccupations which gave them their true place in the social scene”.¹⁰⁷ It thus could represent no true popular will. Unbound by any moral law, it could do what it wished, guided by private and occult groups who were enabled to throw responsibility for their crimes onto “The People” as a whole. Hence, it fashioned the worst of possible systems, one in which the State did not make an unequivocal statement of responsibilities and duties, and one in which the true holders of authority were disguised and could not be held accountable for their actions at all.

Two developments symbolized this degeneration of the State in the eyes of Salazar and the Austrians more than any other. One of these will in no way be a surprise to readers now familiar with the themes developed by the intransigents. This was the replacement of true social corporations in the liberal parliamentary order by the “party”. The political party was nothing other than a self-interested, materialist enterprise, a “big employment agency where one struggled to queue up for the distribution of offices awarded when one’s party was victorious”.¹⁰⁸ The party was anti national, keeping the population in a “state of feverishness and permanent excitement” which it “wasn’t natural to expect from all men at all times”.¹⁰⁹ It left the State in a “gloomy and mean melancholy” by magnifying “matters of secondary importance…into scandals {true or false} that completely absorbed both time and effort”. It posed as a friend of the people “to lead them to an agitation which {they} themselves {did} not desire”.¹¹⁰ Parties rejected a specific proposal, as Schuschnigg complained, “not because of its demerits, but simply because it was supported by the other side”.¹¹¹

A second negative force was the Press, which Salazar and Dollfuss, perhaps after three quarters of a century more experience with it than their Ninth Crusader forbears, felt discernibly less hope for using properly than La Civiltà Cattolica and l’Univers. The Press had betrayed its proper mission of providing “the spiritual food of the people”.¹¹² Instead of pursuing this, it spend much time stimulating idle “democratic curiosity” in order to do little that was more elevated than selling newspapers to those in search of entertainment. This was bad enough, but it also served as a powerful tool of “private and occult interests”, which helped invent a fraudulent “public opinion” that “complained of evils that do not exist” in order to promote whatever their agenda might be.¹¹³

Concern for the common good dictated the demolition of this liberal system. Given the dangers of the age, an “authoritarian government”, a dictatorship of “Reason and Intelligence”, was required in its place.¹¹⁴ Such a government would be provided with an executive authority whose clearly delineated organs would have “much wider powers than those which they employ at the present time”,¹¹⁵ and become “the moving force in the life of the State”.¹¹⁶ These administrative organs would thereby do a favor to the population as a whole, since they would no longer be “slaves to the opinion of the masses, which is different from, and of a much lower category than the true mind of a nation”.¹¹⁷ The truly popular government that they would provide would not be ruled either by partisan pseudo-societies or by those media-manipulated masses who cheer one day and “may rise up in rebellion the next day for equally passing reasons”.¹¹⁸ Parliament and parties had to disappear, along with the very language used to defend them. “Even our political phraseology will need revision”, Salazar insisted, since “most of the words we are accustomed to use in our politics refer only to the past and will be inapplicable to the present. The old ideas, habits, political machinery and everything else will have to go”.¹¹⁹ The Press as such would stay, but regulated to remove its manifest evils. Irritating and unjust to the few serious journalists as this might be, Salazar argued that only censorship could ensure the expression of true public opinion. “In any case”, he complained:¹²⁰

I think it is very extraordinary that many should be so irritated by the barriers set up by constituted authority (who at least may be supposed to have the welfare of the community at heart) and yet do not raise their voices in protest against the enslavement of thought by huge capitalist organizations, by private and occult interests, by the brute force of wealth.

Both Salazar and the Austrians were conscious of the dangers of the dictatorship their strengthened State seemed to raise. The Portuguese Prime Minister warned of the temptations to which this regime “on the road to fulfillment” might be subject, especially if its officials were not “saints and heroes”.¹²¹ It could easily end by becoming a goal in itself. The Austrians sought to establish a “clear dividing line between authoritarian government and forcible dictatorship”.¹²² “As in the peasant’s home, the farmer must rule the household”, Dollfuss explained, “so the public administration needs a ruler”. Yet, “as in the peasant’s household that rule must not be arbitrary if progress is to be made, so also in the government of the state there must be no arbitrary rule”.¹²³

Totalitarianism was to be avoided not by illusory liberal checks and balances but by solid respect for Reason, along with the corporate institutions that both natural law and historical experience had been shown to be valid in a nation’s life. The reformed State was under obligation to work to resurrect the power and effectiveness of these various corporations, each of which was meant to labor in its own sphere to do what the government itself could never properly do on its own.

Concern for corporate life had to begin with concern for the family. Both Portugal and Austria were adamant about leaving the family a wide autonomy. “The basis of all society”, Dollfuss declared in 1934, “and especially of every society organized on Christian principles, must be the family”.¹²⁴ Salazar called it the primary organic element of the political order. The Portuguese Constitution insisted that it would do everything to maintain its strength.¹²⁵ A “Family Defense League” was developed which sought to counter such modern movements as feminism. Public recognition was given to the need for familial control of education.¹²⁶ Indeed, Salazar, who was rather opposed to female participation in civil life, positively encouraged women’s social action in the realm of teaching. Hence, his support for an organization called the Mother’s Movement for National Education.¹²⁷ “Everything is based on the family as the {primary} unit of life in society”, the Cardinal-Patriarch explained, in praise of the regime.¹²⁸

The Church was also ensured corporate freedom, her autonomy sealed by the Austrian (1933) and Portuguese (1940) Concordats. Canon Law was recognized as binding on priests. Church rights to acquire property were confirmed. Church officials could levy taxes. Full and consistent protection was offered to her by the State, and her moral strictures, such as her prohibition of divorce, were binding upon all who had themselves clarified their a relationship with her through contracting a canonical marriage in the first placee.¹²⁹ Austria was seen by many as being so favorable to the Church as to be guided directly from Rome, a charge that Schuschnigg denied as anticlerical propaganda:¹³⁰

The idea that the government was getting orders from the Vatican, or that the Vatican sought to exercise influence upon the administration, has been spread by the invention of fantastic stories, the purpose of which was to becloud public opinion, and prepare the ground for a feud against religion which might then be directed to political ends.

Schuschnigg could have easily pointed to the fact that neither country was willing officially to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the national religion. This was avoided, partly in recognition of the hypothesis—the reality of significant numbers of non-Catholics and totally secularized individuals living peacefully within the body of the nation—but also with the clear intent of avoiding resurrection of the “friendly” secularizing errors of the past. It was one thing for the modern State to be guided by the truth, religious as well as rational. It was quite another for a single corporate entity, the Church, to be given privileges beyond those due to any legitimate corporation within the State. All that the Church required was the kind of full corporate freedom that corporatism in general promised, since this gave her the control over the clergy and the laity allowing her to function smoothly; nothing more and nothing less. Salazar, who was criticized severely by many of his fellow Catholics for his failure to relent on this point, defended himself vigorously, evoking themes with which we are quite familiar:¹³¹

Such things can and must be so...It must be so because political activity corrupts the Church, either when she wields it or suffers its effects, and it is to the general good of all that sacred things and persons be handled as little as possible by profane hands or agitated by mundane interests and passions. I consider it dangerous for the State to arrogate to itself such power that it can violate heaven; equally do I think it unreasonable that the Church, on the grounds of the higher value of spiritual interests, should seek to increase her actions to the point of interfering with those things which the very Gospels declare to belong to Caesar.

Both sides would have failed to have learned the lessons of the past if they had not become aware how privilege can corrupt, how protection can lead to the trimming of essential liberties; how a religious policy can deviate from the defense of the interests of the Church and seek other ends which impair the legitimate action of the State, and which, therefore, the latter cannot countenance.

It is important to grasp the full import of Salazar’s argument. This can only be seized by understanding it in the context of his other pronouncements. Salazar does not mean that the State ought to “make believe” that Catholic teachings do not concern it. Rather, he is speaking of the serious danger of what I have elsewhere labeled an “indirect secularization”; the kind of secularization through which Catholic Action becomes too closely tied with purely political parties, decisions or ideologies. Salazar was partly worried that a proclamation of the reestablishment of the Church would convince Catholics that Portugal had been magically purified by this basically rhetorical action alone. The State could then justify all its future decisions by insisting that it had declared itself to be Catholic. All its measures would take on a doctrinal flavor, as though Catholics must agree with them as articles of faith. Similarly, the State could find that its legitimate autonomy would be hampered by the clergy’s attempt to guide the so-called Catholic government, even though priestly ordination gave it no special protection in such an enterprise. Better that the Church should devote her energy to putting her own house in order; this alone would give her proper influence over the State, in her role as a teacher. Were she to equate the new Portugal with Catholicism, then the body of the faith would have to be expanded to incorporate positions on all kinds of issues on which the Church had no supernaturally confirmed right or need to speak---just as with a “Catholic” political party.

One of the most crucial undertakings in the entire enterprise of rebuilding corporate order, and one upon which was greatly stressed by the reformers, was that of its introduction into economic life. State interference in economics, beyond obvious measures such as the control of foreign investment, ownership of basic industries fundamental to national survival, and general principles regarding minimum wages and maximum prices, was said to be disastrous. “Real progress can only be achieved when the State is prepared to abandon all forms of activity which can best be performed through private channels”, Salazar argued; “the maintenance of healthy social conditions depends on allowing a wide margin of liberty to private initiative…”.¹³² There existed a real danger with bureaucratic regulation that “gradual extension of such control may embrace spiritual and intellectual values, the emotions and family life”.¹³³

A modern corporate system, a modified replica of medieval guild life, could, Salazar believed, solve many problems simultaneously. Through it, the State could be enabled “to reap the benefits of all its productive forces and to uphold private property, personal initiative, and legitimate competition…”.¹³⁴ A commercial life lived through corporate institutions would mean an “auto-economy”, a “self-directed economic system”. The State could intervene in this only “to see that the law was duly observed”,¹³⁵ and, then as a “teacher or trainer”, or a “representative of the mass of consumers, whose interests it would harmonize with those of producers”.¹³⁶ Unrestricted capitalism, fascist statism, socialism, and communism, might all be avoided in one fell swoop.¹³⁷

Austrians emphasized the same benefits, but, again, always in a more openly pious tone. “The plan”, Kurt von Schuschnigg wrote, was “that by progressive development, the State would be relieved from dealing with those affairs which the corporations were in a position to deal with themselves in their own sphere of influence”.¹³⁸ Austrian corporatists laid stress on the value of the guild as an instrument for ending the class struggle. Dollfuss indicated that the employer and worker would be linked together in it like the peasant and his helpers round the dinner table after a day’s work on the farm. Their union would be still more solid, he added, if, as in the peasant’s family, their day were ended with the Rosary. Guild solidarity would ensure the worker’s sense of dignity and, indeed, would give him a kind of property of his own to cherish. The humanity and intimacy provided by the guild, its incorporation of the “law of love”, its efficacy as a religious instrument of perfection, appealed to his Christian conscience. Indeed, Dollfuss always associated the Austrian corporative effort with Pope Pius XI’s encyclical letter, Quadragesimo anno, which he went so far as to commend to the League of Nations from the speaker’s podium at Geneva. This encyclical, he said, contained the “principles of a reform of society which {was} to lead to the overcoming of materialism and the solution of the social question irrespective of religious creed”. The end result of corporate order was that “all would take pleasure in {their} work…and realize that it {was} harmony and not the stirring up of dissension among men that {made} everybody happy and contented”.¹³⁹

Dollfuss claimed that Austria’s efforts to realize this rather utopian sounding vision would be useless unless “the whole people {became}, as it were, actuated with the new spirit which {was} to animate the new Constitution”.¹⁴⁰ Yet too many opponents of Catholic corporatism haunted the Austrian political scene to make this saturation possible. National Socialists, for whom Dollfuss’ Christian Austrian mission was a serious obstacle to Anschluss, were not cooperative. The Chancellor’s non-Catholic allies in the Heimwehr, a nationalist organization that also called for a corporate State, were susceptible to Nazi propaganda and little moved by the religious rhetoric underlying many of his programs.

Dollfuss exerted some energy trying to win to his cause supporters of the Social Democratic Party whose power he had crushed and whose leaders viewed him as a clerico-fascist---a term, one might add, popular with his Catholic capitalist opponents as well. “We meet you not with contempt or distrust”, he insisted in one of his many speeches to labor.¹⁴¹ We have established a “fundamentally Christian” constitution, containing “all the elements of the best and purest social philosophy”.¹⁴² We wish to provide not merely the necessities of life, but also “the power to believe that Christian charity is truly a living thing which embraces all men”.¹⁴³ There is, the recurring theme runs, no need for class struggle in a corporate society:¹⁴⁴

At a time when the employment of labor was organized wholly according to Liberal and Capitalistic principles, it was intelligible—though unjust according to our Christian conceptions—that on the other side class warfare should have been taken as the basis for the defense of the worker. But if among employers of labor there is a sincere readiness to cooperate in the new political, economic, and social constitution, a readiness to take as the foundation of social and economic life the relation of man to man, viewed at a new angle and regarded as the source of mutual duties and obligations, then the antithesis of class warfare no longer exists, and labor must seriously consider whether it is not its duty to show a sincere readiness to cooperate in the new order of things.

Salazar urged the introduction of the corporate economy slowly, “so as to try a system which has not yet been adequately tested”:¹⁴⁵

All new establishments which lack experience…must be built up slowly and laboriously. It is always difficult to apply novel principles to old societies with ingrained habits and a different outlook. Indeed, it is so difficult as to appear impossible to those persons who cannot brook delay…Revolutions, to be profound and human, require many years of resolute application and genuine revolutionary laws, for only when the real mind of the people is attained can the movement be said to have reached its objective. In the same way, though it is not absolutely impossible to regulate production, and to set up definite boundaries and channels of development, the effective and affective collaboration of the various classes and branches of production in a country where competition and speculation were reckoned inseparable from trade, can be secured only with great difficulty and with endless patience.

A rather detailed framework for this slow but steady establishment of corporative order, an outline frequently altered, was in place by the middle of the 1930’s. “Pre-corporative” programs were undertaken and propaganda campaigns mounted. Ultimately, each given enterprise in industry was to possess a workingman’s syndicate (Sindicato nacional) and an employer’s association (Gremio). These would repudiate all the classic instruments of the liberal capitalist order, such as lockouts and strikes, as well as reject the Marxist concept of class warfare. The various syndicates of a specific large-scale industry were to be linked together in “federations”, and the employers’ associations into “unions”. All, together, would, in the last analysis, be joined in a given guild. Functions such as aiding the sick and serving as clearing houses for employment would also be performed by these entities. Labor courts, under the guidance of the National Institution of Labor and Providence, would settle disputes that might develop.

Special organizations, such as the National Foundation for Joy in Work, were also formed, partially to spread propaganda for the New Order. They were created to stimulate “the atmosphere of pure idealism” in which the syndicates were created; “to keep burning the flame of enthusiasm and of confidence which the social concept of the new Corporate State rekindled in the soul of the working classes”.¹⁴⁶ Their function was also to “aid the leisure of the Portuguese workers in such a way as to ensure for them the greatest physical development and the raising of their intellectual and moral level”.¹⁴⁷ Casas de Povo in rural regions, and Casas dos Pescadores, among fishermen, were designed for similar purposes, the aim of preserving national traditions always being emphasized. Hence, concerning the latter:¹⁴⁸

With regard to education, it will be the duty of these associations to set up schools for the children of fishermen so as to give them a good all-round education which, in time, will contribute to the raising of their standard of living; local traditions and customs will be piously preserved and proper respect will be paid to those religious beliefs which are so strong in the hearts of the fishing population of Portugal.

Two major problems continuously afflicted the Portuguese in their corporate endeavors. The first was the statism that Salazar himself claimed to dread. A system designed to lessen State interference in daily life seems to have permitted its intrusions to grow exponentially. This tendency was already clear in the pre-corporative stage of the plan. Ministers of Agriculture and Commerce and Industry were allowed to intervene regularly in corporate life. An Undersecretary of State for Corporations, operating under the aegis of the National Institute for Labor and Providence, was ubiquitous. A Corporative Council that included Salazar and many other ministers became the ultimate watchdog of the entire system. Bureaucratic interference on such a major scale was, perhaps, inevitable, given the fact that the reformers were attempting to reintroduce artificially something that had grown up spontaneously in the Middle Ages. In any case, they themselves often recognized how “inorganic” their construct was. Salazar admitted that “floods of complaints” came into his office regarding bureaucratic errors and staff inefficiencies. Although he claimed not to be surprised by such criticisms, he did express concern that “they should be repeated without any satisfaction being given”.¹⁴⁹

A second problem, giving the lie to the enthusiastic language of much Portuguese propaganda, was that of lack of popular cooperation. Salazar indicated in 1937 that he was pleased enough with the growth of syndicates. These had understandably grasped their aims and duties, given that “those who own little are always unselfish”. But Gremios, he complained, left much to be desired. “Instead of entering into the spirit of the corporative state”, he argued, some “may have tried to drive away probable competitors” through their structures. Indeed, a number of people, he chided, “have thought that the corporative organization would be a means of multiplying middlemen, removing competition, and safeguarding against all comers the positions acquired by some…”.¹⁵⁰

Lack of cooperation in agriculture was especially blatant and irksome. It had proved to be extremely difficult to fit Portuguese agriculture into the corporate structure, due to uncertainty regarding its organization on a geographical or crop basis. By 1937, however, farmers’ associations were established on a district foundation. These were then gradually combined into regional entities. Bitterness due to ineffectiveness was always near the surface. Salazar reacted by calling farmers “by nature selfish and self-sufficing”.¹⁵¹ Farm workers could not see the need for cooperation with those outside of their districts, and landlords would not pay the minimum contribution demanded for participation in the corporate entity. Proprietors, ultimately, were obliged to take part in agricultural bodies, since, “in matters of this kind, experience has taught that it is not good enough to trust man’s better nature”.¹⁵² Still, by the end of the thirties, one had as yet discovered “no perfect form” of agricultural order.¹⁵³ None would ever be found.

This renewed corporate order was meant to give a more sound representation of the popular will than any atomistic parliament. Hence, its structure was to be reflected in the political order:¹⁵⁴

It is our intention to establish the social and corporative State in close correlation with the natural constitution of society. The families, the parishes, the municipalities, the corporations wherein all citizens co-exist in possession of their fundamental juridical liberties, are the components of the nation and as such should have direct intervention in the constitution of the supreme bodies of the State; this is the most accurate definition of the representative system.

This Constitution must take account of the natural organization of the people and ensure that all estates alike will have an active part in the conducting of public affairs, while avoiding all those obstructions to legislation arising from the inadequacy of the present Constitution. Such popular representation, being the symbol of the organic life of the community, thus does justice to the State as the visible expression of that organic life.

Accordingly, as the latter develops, the state will more faithfully reflect the nation as an organized whole, while the part played by the individual in the creation of such assemblies will correspond more closely to the part he plays in the national life as head of a family, producer, member of a Church, or in his connection with education, public assistance, or sport. This may be described as the ‘Policy of Real Life’.

Salazar, for whom parliaments were designed for “ratification of the general fundamentals of juridical rules”,¹⁵⁵ made it clear that this representation would be purely consultative, given the innate concern of corporations for limited, particular goods:¹⁵⁶

In the first place, whatever may be the scope of vested interests in the corporations, there will always be lacking in them the representation of national interests…Secondly, because it would be most dangerous without the long preparation acquired by experience, for a particular interest to be defended by, or its activities defined, either by other vested interests or in collusion with them.

Both Portugal and Austria did, therefore, establish corporative representative institutions, but with restricted responsibilities. A Corporative Chamber, including representatives of Lisbon and Oporto, various state administrative agencies, presidents of corporations and other national interests was created, and a ceremonial Head of State, chosen by families, was also established. Austria formed a Bundesversammlung composed of four distinctive consultative organs representing economic activities, provinces, cultural entities, and national interests as a whole. This advised the Bundestag, which was itself made up of representatives of the Bundesversammlung. A Head of State elected by Bürgermeisters from across the country presided over the whole structure.

There is no doubt that there were enormous problems with the Portuguese and Austrian experiments, from both a Catholic as well as a purely political standpoint. Several of these have been indicated above. They would not have been human experiments if such problems had not existed. Nevertheless, insofar as anything could be done politically to attempt some twentieth century transformation of the social order in a way that was respectful of both nature and the corrective and transforming mission of the Word in history, these nations seem to have attempted it. Insofar as anything could be theoretically sketched out to achieve a twentieth century Catholic cleansing of modernity without falling into the same ideological and intellectual errors as the enemy, Salazar appears to have outlined it. But, ultimately, as this brilliant thinker repeatedly lamented, the contemporary Christian statesman faced two almost insurmountable difficulties in a land like his own. One obvious obstacle was the fact that small nations were practically helpless in setting goals for themselves when the large powers were indifferent and hostile to them. And perhaps more importantly still, the western world had lost its taste for truth, honor, and glory—maybe even forever.¹⁵⁷

H. Christian Opposition to the Correcting and Transforming Word

The growth in willful intensity throughout the nineteenth century, leading ultimately to the First World War and its revolutionary aftermath, left its impact upon the entirety of the Christian world. We have already seen that many Protestants, whatever the logic of the concept of total depravity might be, were, in practice, horrified by naturalism and its political and social consequences. Evangelicals, Reformed Christians, and Anglo-Catholics engaged in many initiatives that any Catholic concerned for correction and transformation in Christ could wholeheartedly approve. Moreover, Karl Barth’s (1886-1968) critique of the manipulative political use of religion in the First World War was a great sign of health on the theological plane. So was much of the spirit of the early twentieth century peace and ecumenical movements, both of which bitterly excoriated the blindness of nations marching thoughtlessly and relentlessly from one spirit-killing disaster to the next.¹⁵⁸

Despite papal approval of a number of Protestant social, theological, and antiwar initiatives, none of the popes of the period could accept a regular co-operation with fellow Christians that acted as though doctrinal differences had somehow ceased to retain their crucial importance. All such “doctrine free” cooperation ignored the reality of the continued, logical, destructive impact of substantive Protestant teachings upon each of the reformed denominations. The logic of these teachings promoted theological modernism and weakened traditional religious beliefs and practices that many illogical Protestants admittedly cherished. Moreover, sometimes those favoring a revival did so by emphasizing selective—and often purely irrational—charismatic, esoteric, mystical, or liturgical practices that guaranteed temporary fervor while laying the groundwork for innumerable future woes. Without a correction of underlying principles, even the best of the theological hopes for improvement would be dashed, and willful choices would be made that promised more sophisticated secular manipulation.¹⁵⁹

Russian Orthodoxy had become more and more popular in the nineteenth century among catholicizing forces within the Anglican Church that could not accept the principle of an active Papal Primacy. Links with the Russian Church helped to justify the idea of the validity of a broadly “Catholic” via media, permitting basically solid doctrine and liturgy without submission to Roman authority and its supposedly legalist obsessions. The Russian diaspora in Paris and London following the Revolution and the Civil War aided this interest in Orthodoxy as a non-Roman, non-legalist path to religious sanity.¹⁶⁰

Russian thinkers and their western sympathizers thus broadened knowledge of the growth of Hesychast spirituality noticeable in the East since the last years of the Eighteenth Century. Along with this was spread an awareness of that particular vision of the relationship of the individual and the community promoted by the supporters of the concept of sobornost, which many deemed to be the answer to western secularism. The “alternative good story” of a spiritual East coming to redeem a West that was hopelessly legalist, secularist, and atomistic, in both its Roman religious envelope as well as in the revolutionary garb stemming from a “naturalist” Romanism, was appropriated by a wide range of figures, from Dostoyevsky to influential members of Catholic as well as Protestant circles. While already highly visible in the 1920’s and 1930’s, this was destined to have its most substantial effect in the decades after the second global conflict.

Obviously, the Ninth Crusade recruited men of the deepest and most unquestionable zeal for militant evangelization and transforming action both abroad and at home. Nineteenth and early twentieth century Catholics, like militant Protestants as well, began to speak of the distinction between the Outer Missions (those focused on bringing the Faith to non-Christian peoples) and the Inner Missions (those aimed at the secularized populations of what were considered generally as already Christianized lands) as two parts of an overall enterprise of evangelization. Building upon the experience of generations of missionaries in the tradition of Matteo Ricci, some of those engaged in such labors became more and more convinced of the need for a deeper effort to “get under the skins” of the groups whom they were trying to evangelize—to “inculturate” the Faith, as one would say in our own day. They hoped in doing so that Christianity could be stripped of any appearance as an alien force, and be seen as something best suited to the development and perfection of the communities in question instead. The names Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) and Vincent Lebbe (1877-1940) are very important in this regard with respect to the Outer Missions, while the Inner Missions took a great deal of inspiration from men like Joseph Cardijn (1886-1967) and his conception of a Catholic Action specialized according to the nature of the communities it targeted. If anything, laborers in the Outer Missions and Inner Missions grew still more concerned about their failures, both foreign and domestic, by the l910’s. This was due to the fact that their lack of success was made painfully obvious by native resistance to conversion and the general indifference to religion that activists noticed among their fellow soldiers in the trenches during the First World War.

An influential explanation for such lack of success was offered to them after the conflict ended by representatives of the personalist movement.¹⁶¹ Personalism, as it developed in the interwar period, perhaps ought to be referred to as a tendency rather than a specific idea. Many diverse circles of thinkers used the term and some of the themes associated with it. It is in this sense that Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), principally thought of in conjunction with the related, more structured, and sometimes rather critical vision of Integral Humanism, may be cited as a personalist.

More directly identified with the term personalism as such is Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), editor of the journal l’Esprit and destined, like Maritain, to have a wide impact beyond Europe in radicalizing the Catholic camp after the Second World War. Mounier had pre-war contacts with a kaleidoscope of thinkers engaged in similar speculations: Jean Danielou (1905-1974), the future cardinal; Jean Guitton (1901-1999), who would one day become a close friend and advisor to Pope Paul VI; Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)—the most important representative of the spiritual, “non-legalist”, Russian Orthodox position—and a network of friends who met at Jacques Maritain’s home outside Paris; Henri Daniel-Rops (1901-1965) and his fellow members of the organization Ordre Nouveau (New Order); Belgians inspired by the “spiritualized Socialism” of Henri de Man (1885-1953); proponents of European cooperation like Otto Abets (1903-1958), the future Nazi ambassador to a defeated France; and a group of “revolutionary National Socialists” gathered in the early 1930s around the Hitler rivals Gregor (1892-1934) and Otto Strasser (1897-1974).

Personalism had its roots in late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century romantic and vitalist thought concerning the importance of “energy” and “action” as guides to truth. Lamennais’ heritage played a major role in transmitting such interest among Catholics, and modernists in further disseminating it. The emphasis upon energy and action as a program for life was enhanced still more by meditation upon the experience of those front-line soldiers during the First World War who heroically sacrificed themselves together in a common cause despite their divisions into so many different religious, political, and social factions at home.

Insofar as one can summarize a highly variegated vision, personalism can be said to argue that the individual, trapped inside his private intellectual and behavioral concerns, is a dead man. To become a full “person”, capable of realizing his deepest potential and fulfilling his true destiny, he must find a way to get out of himself and his deadening introspective existence. This he can achieve by diving into the richer life provided by communities and the “natural values” they incarnate and pursue. Which communities? Which natural values? The communities and natural values in question were those that moved men to cohesive, energetic, effective action by means of a unique, discernable, vital “mystique”. Action in union with such mystiques transformed limited, sterile individuals into truly microcosmic personalities.

Catholic personalists saw the kind of believer who approached his faith as a set of precepts that might be studied intellectually and then put into practice on the individual level as a self-crippling, introspective personality. Ninth Crusade Catholicism, with its emphasis on speculative theology, private devotions, and concern for individual sanctification, was said to produce just this type of faithful. A better grasp of the Christian Faith, a richer life, and a full perfection of “personhood” required something quite different. It demanded the individual’s abandonment to the “mystiques” of the energetic and highly effective communities that he saw around him. Yes, these might appear to be promoting purely “natural values”. Nevertheless, the energies that they unleashed, and the successes they enjoyed, demonstrated that there was something more at work through them: the providential power of the Holy Spirit in history. The Catholic missionary’s task was that of “witnessing” to his faith in a quiet, humble fashion, by nurturing the natural value of the community to which he was sent so that it might be brought to its innate perfection. Such witness would also be enriching for him, since he would learn things about Christ and the movement of the Holy Spirit in history that he could never have known before plunging into the mystique and life of the vital group in question.

One day, the Holy Spirit would guarantee the “convergence” of all these seemingly contradictory mystiques. The result would be the establishment of a community of communities capable of producing what would, in effect, be super-persons, “the grandest transformation to which humanity has ever submitted.” The seeming nightmare provided by a variety of often quite violent twentieth century forces hostile to the Faith was actually a splendid call to hope. One was witnessing through their maturation “the bloody birth of a true ‘collective being of men’”—mysterious indeed, but Spirit-guided and therefore eminently Catholic.¹⁶²

Believers must not sit in judgment of mystiques on the path to convergence. For they could not even fully know what the Catholic Faith entailed and where the Holy Spirit was leading it until the natural values that the various mystiques enshrined had all unfolded and then merged together. Rather than criticism, total immersion in energetic communities and their mystiques was required. Such immersion demanded a root and branch obliteration of all previous education and practice that gave the militant missionary a different perspective from someone who was already a part of the providential community to which we was sent to witness. Reliance on the dry, intellectual, introspective teachings and private devotions of Ninth Crusade Catholicism presented an obstacle to victory. Christ and His Spirit were to be found in the vital community and its mystique—not in textbooks of theology mulled over by self-limiting individuals who stubbornly refused to become truly active and effective persons.

Nineteenth-century Catholics opposed to Lamennais knew what to expect from his vision. Their critique, enunciated in the writings of Louis Veuillot and the Jesuit editors of La Civiltà Cattolica, also points to the problems of Christian personalism. All calls for submission to vital, active, effective community guidance from the time of Lamennais to that of Mounier have always entailed two consequences: first of all, the destruction of any means of distinguishing between a good and bad manifestation of communal energy; and, secondly, the determination, in practice, of what is or is not acceptable as a “natural value on the path to maturation” through the Diktat of charismatic interpreters of the “right kind of vitality”. Tossing away the crutches of the self-crippling, introspective individual has regularly ended in immersion in anti-Christian community passions to begin with, and enslavement to the obsessions of “vanguards of the people” who explain what a society “really” energetically feels forever thereafter. “Spiritualization” of everything natural, as practiced by the personalists, has regularly ended in the naturalization of a world that is really meant to undergo correction and transformation in Christ. The progress of the Holy Spirit in history becomes merely another way of describing the triumph of the strongest human will. Those subscribing to this vision find themselves incapable of responding to any energetic fraud; “barren in the face of a Ramakrishna”, as Jacques Maritain complained.¹⁶³ Morever, they are also helpless in combating the frightful willfulness of successful, charismatic, and criminal twentieth century ideologies—fascism among them.

And, indeed, many personalists looked at the early fascist victories of the Second World War from a hopeful perspective. A number of them, long convinced of the innate weaknesses of the liberal bourgeois “Established Disorder,” expressed little surprise over the conquests of Nazi Germany. What really concerned them was whether Catholicism could find some way to turn a potentially apocalyptic situation to its own advantage. For fascism was seen to be a “monstrous prefiguration” of the new personalist humanity waiting to be born. It clearly revealed the presence of strong will, virile manliness, self-sacrifice to the community, and even, in the context of the war effort, a commitment to the construction of that European-wide super society which many thought to be crucial to a more successful stimulus to the creation of spiritualized personalities.

Pétain’s so-called National Revolution was appreciated by French personalists both because of its anti-liberal bourgeois character and its freedom from the gross “materialist” aspects of Nazism. They hoped to make Vichy France a wartime laboratory for educational and evangelical schemes designed to reshape the world in a spiritual way. One major example of educational experimentation incorporating both contemporary Catholic ideas as well as features of the fascist Ordensburgen—the castle training centers for the new elite of German youth—was the École Nationale des Cadres at the Château Bayard above the village of Uriage, near Grenôble. Founded in the waning months of 1940, this institution became especially significant by June of 1941, when the Vichy regime determined to require a session at the Ecole for all future high government functionaries.

The teachings of a vast array of Catholic luminaries and their fellow travelers were marshaled under the banner of the National Revolution to play a role at Uriage. Still, under the day-to-day direction of Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac (1906-1968) and the guidance of the Study Bureau of Hubert Beuve-Mery (1902-1989), Mounier’s “communitarian personalism” was central therein. This was true even after political problems led to Mounier’s removal from its staff. For his vision continued to prosper through the similar teaching of his friend, Jean Lacroix (1900-1986), and their common master, Jacques Chevalier (1882-1962), professor at Grenôble and sometime Vichy Minister of Education.

Allied with personalism at Uriage was the radicalizing influence of the budding New Theology. This arrived via the Dominican houses of Saulchoir and Latour-Maubourg, the Jesuit center at Fourvières, the journals La vie intellectuelle, Sept and Temps present, the French scouting movement, and specialized Catholic Action groups stimulated through the activity of Joseph Cardijn with young Christian workers in Belgium. Segonzac and Beuve-Mery had frequented such circles before the war. They happily brought to Uriage priests like Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), Jean Maydieu (1900-1955), Victor Dillard (1897-1945), and Paul Donceour (1880-1961). These men, in turn, introduced students to the writings of Lamennais, Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Maurice Blondel (1861-1949), Charles Péguy (1873-1914), Marie-Domenique Chenu (1895-1990), Yves Congar (1904-1995), Karl Adam (1876-1966), Romano Guardini (1885-1968), Charles de Foucauld and, perhaps more importantly than anyone else, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Uriage also had links, direct and indirect, with Frs. Louis Joseph Lebret (1897-1966) and Jacques Loew (1908-1999), founders of the Catholic social movement, Economie et Humanisme, which was destined for a significant “progressive” future in Latin America as well as in Europe.

Students at the École were thus familiarized with currents of biblical, historical, spiritual, liturgical and philosophical thought that, while marginal at the moment, would become immensely powerful and instrumental in guiding the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar Church. And this team, “ensconced in a chateau up in the mountains with a commission to completely rethink and transform the way France educated its young people”, was absolutely and enthusiastically convinced that it was the prophetic guide to the future.¹⁶⁴

Correction and transformation of the world, according to the doctrine taught at Uriage, was, once again, dependent upon the creation of “persons” as opposed to “individuals.” Hence Uriage’s stunning ecumenism, testified to in a myriad of ways. One could see Segonzac’s ability “to form friendly relations, on the spiritual plane, with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Moslems, agnostics,” since he “preferred (rooted) people…in their own setting, in their own culture”.¹⁶⁵ Uriage’s Charter proclaimed the truth that “believers and non-believers are, in France, sufficiently impregnated with Christianity”, so that “the better among them could meet, beyond revelations and dogmas, at the level of the community of persons, in the same quest for truth, justice and love”.¹⁶⁶ And Mounier, in full-fledged Teilhardian rapture, prophesied the mysterious and convoluted growth of the “perfect personal community,” where “love alone would be the bond” and “no constraint, no vital or economic interest, no extrinsic institution” would play a role:¹⁶⁷

Surely [development] is slow and long when only average men are working at it. But then heroes, geniuses, a saint come along: a Saint Paul, a Joan of Arc, a Catherine of Siena, a Saint Bernard, or a Lenin, a Hitler and a Mussolini, or a Gandhi, and suddenly everything picks up speed...[H]uman irrationality, the human will, or simply, for the Christian, the Holy Spirit suddenly provides elements which men lacking imagination would never have foreseen.

May the democrat, may the communist, may the fascist push the positive aspirations which inspire their enthusiasm to the limit and plenitude.

As John Hellman explains, “Mounier’s belief that there was an element of truth in all strong beliefs coincided with Teilhard’s vision of the inevitable spiritualization of humanity”.¹⁶⁸ This belief, Uriage as a whole made its own.

Let it be emphasized once more that the message taught at Uriage was not a rational one. Its ultimate justification was the prophetic intuition of teachers giving witness to the coming New Order and their strength of will in leading men to creative action. Any appeal to logic, either in support or criticism of strongly willed commitment to the natural values they approved was dismissed as either belaboring the given or as dangerous, decadent, crippling, individualist scholastic pedantry. Better to bury the temptations of a sickly rationalism through the development of the obvious virtue of “manliness”—a virtue defined in completely anti-intellectual ways: the ability to leap onto a moving streetcar; to ride a bicycle up the steep hill to the École like Jacques Chevalier; to look others “straight in the eye” and “shake hands firmly”; to endure the sweat-filled regimen labeled décrassage devised for students under the inspiration of General Georges Hébert; to sing enthusiastically around the evening fire in the Great Hall; to know how to “take a woman”; and, always, to feel pride in “work well done.” Such manliness was said to have deep spiritual meaning in and of itself, aspects of which were elaborated in lectures like de Lubac’s Ordre viril, ordre chrétien (Virile Order, Christian Order), and Chenu’s book, Pour être heureux, travaillons ensemble (For Happiness, Let Us Work Together).¹⁶⁹

Finally, let us stress that Uriage’s teaching was unabashedly elitist. In fact, the particular mystique of the École was that of developing the natural value of leadership. “The select youth of Uriage” were said to be “the first cell of a new world introduced into a worn-out one”¹⁷⁰, “entrusted with the mission of bringing together the elite from all of the groups that ought to participate in the common task of reconstruction in the same spirit of collaboration”.¹⁷¹ Since they were destined to reveal the eternal supernatural significance of the natural values witnessed to by the mystique of all virile communities, Uriage students were in some sense priestly figures as well. Each class was consecrated and given a great man’s name as talisman. Segonzac especially “took upon himself a certain sacerdotal role, even regarding the wives and children of his instructors”.¹⁷² This entailed also a “separation between the leaders, the lesser leaders, the lesser-lesser leaders, the almost leaders and the not-at-all leaders” irritating to some of the interns. “The central team,” as one of them indicated, “were gods”.¹⁷³

Nevertheless, for those manly spirits ready to leap off of streetcars moving towards indeterminate destinations, sit down in a café, and indulge in a little logical scholastic debate, the education imparted at Uriage might easily seem to be sacrificing the corrective and transforming mission of Catholicism at the altar of fascism rather than taming the “monstrous prefiguration of the future” that it represented. But, then again, the reader is all too familiar with such spiritually disguised labors on behalf of the Coalition of the Status Quo. He knows that this particular manifestation of an age-old phenomen emerged out of the same concern to restore a shattered western social order by appeal to the non-rational will of virile communities stirred to action by charismatic prophets central to the school of Lamennais. And it was, of course, to this heritage that the teachers of Uriage appealed.

Yes, many of the particular obsessions of contemporary fascists may have been of secondary importance to the Catholic personalists we have been discussing, but the canonization of a submission of the individual to the will of the leaders of a non-rational community was common to both. What difference did it make if Uriage teachers employed Catholic-friendly words and phrases like “person” and the “Mystical Body of Christ” in their enterprise? How could one know what, exactly, these words and phrases signified when rigorous philosophical-theological examination of their meaning was ridiculed as decadent and unnecessary to men with “deep faith” working to lead men to the better world in the making? Alas, the consequences of this fascist mentality for Catholicism were, ironically, only fully to be seen when fascism itself was thought to have been unconditionally defeated, after 1945. And the postwar age that followed was to prove to be a time when the “business as usual demands” of “nature as is” were to triumph more completely than at any moment since the conversion of the Roman Empire; an era when the very Mystical Body of Christ herself, the “salt of the earth”, seemed to lose her savor—to the detriment both of true community and the dignity of the individual human person.

Chapter 11

When the Salt Loses its Savor: Mindless Rout and Voluntary Enslavement to the Words

A. Conquering Heroes and Catholic Personalism

Fascist Europe was doomed by the time that the United States and the Soviet Union were linked with Britain in the war against Germany. These first two countries were to prove to be the real victors in that conflict. Both found that that victory was useful as a postwar propaganda tool in demonizing the opponents of their guiding ideologies: Americanism---rebaptized in the postwar world under the more suitably international, freedom and diversity friendly name of “pluralism”---and Marxism-Leninism. All they needed to do in order to maintain this demonization was to keep the drama of the Second World War alive as a never-ending “current event”. Memory of the war was to prove to be a “Punic terror” that might always be evoked to stimulate a fear sufficient to maintain unity among any of their wavering troops.

By repeatedly recalling the evils perpetrated by Hitler, the victorious ideologies were able to drive home the argument that everything non-Marxist or non-pluralist was, ipso facto, National Socialist; that anyone who opposed tyranny, bloodshed, and genocide had better fall in behind their banners and dread the consequences of breaking rank. Human awe in the face of victorious armed strength, combined with terror at the prospect of being labeled a fascist, badly crippled and even totally silenced opposition of any kind. The only weak point in this powerful ideological weaponry was the fact that it could be—and swiftly was—used by the two victors against one another as well as against their common enemies. Marxist-Leninists were the new fascists for the pluralists, and pluralists for the Marxist-Leninists—another example of the age-old divisions within a Grand Coalition of the Status Quo solidly unified only in its joint disdain for the corrective and transforming mission of the Word Incarnate.

Although Marxism-Leninism, for a time, seemed to match American pluralism in its appeal as victor, it was ultimately the latter force that won the contest for exploiting a good story about the good war on its behalf. Using the innate and often unconscious power and prestige that came from conquest, the United States worked mightily to reshape the spiritual, intellectual, economic, and social systems of Western Europe in order to channel them to the service of its own pluralist vision. What could be more appealing to a world worn out by the incalculable human suffering accompanying ideological hatred and deadly political conflict than the pluralist offer of a practical, pragmatic “method” for dealing with the diversity and divisions of modern life; a method guaranteeing freedom for all beliefs and cultures to co-exist peacefully, subject only to the dictates of a “basic common sense” ensuring “public order”? What could be more suitable than the peaceful, “free marketplace of ideas and life styles” that it cherished? Persecution would end and every tear would be wiped away. If attempts to resist such a magnificent vista were not indicative of sympathy for the genocidal madness of the defeated fascists, then they could only represent a state of insanity pure and simple.

Gradually, the influence of the pluralist message over every aspect of life, over every judgment regarding what one should think and how one should behave, became more and more inescapable. It was reinforced in daily imagery, from morning until night, from infancy until old age. So pervasive was it that the average youth in the Old World came to understand his counterpart in America even without a common spoken language and even as his own particular tradition became more and more incomprehensible to him. The pressure exerted upon individuals and institutions by the subtle and overt presuppositions and demands of the daily environment created by the American pluralist vision was, in short, overwhelming, rendering the idea of any protection against its ravages or any open resistance to it from any quarter whatsoever utterly utopian. This was a Defender of the Peace of whom Marsilius of Padua might truly be proud.

Many European Catholics were as awed and acquiescent before the victors as everyone else on the Old Continent. The enormous difficulties of explaining a Christian position built upon theological, philosophical, and cultural arguments rejected by them frustrated a second group of Catholics into silence. A third Catholic element did speak out against whichever of the two victorious ideologies it deemed more dangerous, while remaining quiet regarding the errors of the other, and eventually even praising its own similar acceptance of the demands of “nature as is”. Yet another segment of the Catholic population, ashamed by the fact that some fellow believers had either been attracted by fascism or had seen in it a useful tool against a much more dangerous Marxist threat, enthusiastically embraced the message of the victors to compensate for sins which, uncontested, might be used as a pretext for casting aspersions upon the whole Church’s honor. And, finally, the atmosphere created by the “good story” about the “good war” allowed misled Catholics who were actively committed to Marxism or pluralism an audience and an impact that they otherwise might never have had. This was especially true if those activists had performed courageous deeds during the great conflict that might give them enormous prestige in the postwar anti-fascist world.⁰

Mention of this last group brings us back to the Catholic personalists. There is no denying that fascism, with its vibrancy, was intensely appealing to many personalists. But the dominant National Socialist strain of fascism was unavoidably and unacceptably tied to the Volksprinzip, and personalists, despite their other temptations, never succumbed to that of modern racism. After all, different races could be just as energetic in the support of their beliefs and traditions as the Nazis were of Aryan supremacy. In fact, it was precisely this truth that had led important missionaries into the personalist camp in the first place. In any case, a number of personalists courageously and openly opposed Nazi racism from the outset, both through membership in the Resistance Movement as well as in journals like the French Témoignage chrétien. They thereby gained understandable prestige as heroic exemplars for future generations.⁰

Even more significant in assuring personalist condemnation of all of fascism, non-racist as well as racist, was the simple fact that it had not been sufficiently vital to win the Second World War. Through defeat it lost the credibility it had once possessed as an engine of success. Victory in that conflict had been carried off by the Soviet Union and the United States. One might thus legitimately conclude that Marxist-Leninist and American-guided communities were those that possessed the greatest vigor and successful energy---and therefore the infallible stamp of approval of the Holy Spirit.

Both conviction and prudence thus told personalists who had openly tried to collaborate with a non-racist fascism that the entire movement, at least as presently constituted, had to be jettisoned. Nowhere was this more felt than at Uriage.⁰ The deportation of French youth to forced labor camps, the increasing control by Germany of internal Vichy affairs, and the outright takeover of the Unoccupied Zone in the latter part of 1942 had already moved the leadership of the École closer to the growing Resistance Movement, long before allied victory was absolutely assured. This tendency matured by December of that year, when Uriage’s enemies at Vichy managed to have it expelled from the Château Bayard.

But Uriage never did anything haphazardly. Building upon its sense of constituting a modern band of crusading knights, the exiled École leadership in 1943 created a Chivalric Order whose inner circle was bound by special vows of a character that Fr. Maydieu compared spiritually to those of matrimony. Members of the Order were to sally forth to show the various elements of the Resistance how to perfect their “mystiques” in the Uriage manner. Thus, high-level emissaries were dispatched to contact de Gaulle and “flying squadrons” into the countryside to guide the maquis so that their deficient mystiques could be “transcended spiritually” and “converge” in the construction of the better world of the personalist-Teilhardian Faith.

The enthusiasm with which this labor was undertaken was genuine, but especially so with respect to the Marxist component of the Resistance Movement. Many, if not perhaps most personalists, felt a preference for the vital energy of the Marxist-Leninist element in the United Nations Alliance. Despite the fact that its classic mish-mash of Enlightenment mechanism and willfulness violated the basic Catholic understanding of man’s simultaneously natural and supernatural, individual and social character, the Soviet communal emphasis was more immediately satisfying to the personalists’ pronounced social sense. One sees this not only among members of the Order but also in the writings and labors of priests and bishops trying to understand the “mystique” of the proletariat in German labor camps and ordinary French factories. Systematic training for the latter purpose was offered, from 1943 onwards, under the patronage of the supra-diocesan Mission de France.

Uriage teachers were themselves deeply involved in these priestly activities. Fr. Dillard, for example, canonized the Soviet citizens he encountered in the labor camps and insisted that all industrial workers were born to carry out their tasks with the aid of specific virtues denied to other people. But an Uriage-like openness was noticeable in other, similar-minded circles. All such enthusiasts explained that there were “riches in modern disbelief, in atheist Marxism, for example, which are presently lacking to the fullness of the Christian conscience”.⁰ Enlightened spirits thus had “to share the faith in and the mystique of the Revolution and the Great Day (i.e., when all spiritually valid approaches would converge)”,⁰ as did one priest who asked to die “turned towards Russia, mother of the proletariat, as towards that mysterious homeland where the Man of the future is being forged”.⁰

One major problem with this enthusiasm was that the Catholic peoples who ultimately came under Soviet control did not show themselves as open to the charms of Marxist-Leninist communal energy as its personalist supporters had done. Yes, a movement of so-called Pax Priests, with an underlying theme of shared Catholic and Marxist pathways to international harmony and social justice, eventually did develop. However, it was tainted by its association with the governments of the Peoples Republics and the practical material benefits that could be gained for its adherents through such an alliance. In general, the experience of Soviet Marxism-Leninism, linked as it was with the reality of a party dictatorship backed by the military strength of the Red Army, did not become popular with the believing Catholic masses. This was especially true in those post-war years when the Papacy vigorously preached an anti-communist message. Moreover, insofar as the Russian authorities did feel the need to cooperate with religious forces, they usually found attempts to collaborate with national Orthodox Churches simpler and more fruitful than efforts to manipulate an international Roman Catholicism. Rome was as resistant to the allurements of the Marxist Defender of the Peace as she had been to that of medieval times.⁰

Another difficulty with Marxist-Leninist communal energy was its closure to the crucial prophetic mission of the personalists. One must remember that the sons of Uriage always retained their wartime sense of being a priestly nation, a people set apart, chosen to judge which aspects of burgeoning mystiques were and were not acceptable on the road to convergence. Marxism-Leninism, like fascism, was indeed acceptable in spirit. But it was acceptable as yet another “monstrous pre-figuration” of a happier future that had to be spiritually transcended in order to fulfill its true destiny. Uriage personalists were called upon to “witness” to the Marxist-Leninist “mystique” by raising it to a higher and fully appropriate level of consciousness---inside the Soviet Bloc as much as elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the Stalinist cult of personality, the omnipresence of the Red Army, and the jealous apparatchiks of the postwar era stood in the way of their prophetic vocation. Worse still, with the fall in 1964 of a highly anti-religious Nikita Khruschev who at least possessed the virtue of rocking the Soviet boat to promote the meritorious within the communist ranks, “security for the apparatchiks” became the primary goal of the whole of the shaken party membership. Hence, the growth of that pervasive cynicism that affected not only the Soviet population at large but the system’s functionaries as well. For party functionaries understood that they survived as an elite only by demanding as little as possible in the way of labor, discipline, and the cultivation of “special virtues of the proletariat” from the common run of socialist mankind.

None of these realities meant that Marxism was no longer still worth “transcending”; only that different paths to ensuring fulfillment of the sacred socialist mission were required. Divergent paths would have to be found outside of the sphere of influence wherein ran the writ of the apparatchiks and the Red Army. Still, many other vital cultural forces, some of which had already begun to attract personalist attention before 1939, were manifesting their potential for mobilizing energetic mass support in more pronounced ways during the postwar era. Some of these, like the feminist and sexual liberation movement, were vigorous in the western world. But, perhaps even more importantly, numerous other vital forces were to be found in the newly independent nations of Asia, Africa, and Oceania as well as in the semi-colonial protectorates of Latin America. Such energies reflected either flips on familiar European Enlightenment themes on the one hand or a resurgence of local, native beliefs and customs on the other.

Of course, all these vibrant developments of western and indigenous cultures also desperately needed witness and prophetic transcending to ensure their perfection and ultimate convergence in the Holy Spirit. Latin America became particularly appealing to personalists and fellow travelers like Mounier, Chenu, Lebret, and even Maritain. Here, such men found social unrest in conjunction with an accelerated industrial development fueled by foreign capital, all of which seemed to portend the growth of a new and seemingly more “spirit-friendly” Marxism throughout the region. The energy unleashed by Fidel Castro (b. 1926) and Che Guevara (1928-1967) excited an especially explosive enthusiasm. Personalists thus began to hope that they would be able to use Latin America as a proving ground, diving into its “real world of the oppressed”, giving testimony to its budding message of impatience and rage with “structures of sinful dependence”, and rousing it to the kind of Marxist liberation that the Holy Spirit wanted but the apparatchiks of the Soviet Bloc stubbornly refused to permit. Yes, the mass of inert Latin American believers might not yet understand its own victimization---just as the bulk of Catholics had not grasped what the spiritually awakened Lamennais had to tell them. But that was always the job of the prophet: to shake a sleeping people out of its dogmatic slumbers to an appreciation of its true energy and the goal towards which it was unconsciously striving.⁰

Dictatorial and aging apparatchiks were certainly an obstacle to the emergence of a better world, but they were not the only danger standing in the path of vital energies and their future convergence. Traditional Catholicism itself, which from Uriage days had “feared the insistence on bringing together men with different ‘mystiques’”, was increasingly seen to be at least as great a threat as an unresponsive Soviet Marxism, arousing in personalists “a ‘manly’ impatience with clericalism, dogma and the orthodox”.⁰ Catholic authoritarianism, manifested in its insistence upon adherence to frozen teachings and rituals, had to give way to changes dictated by diving into the living realities and vibrant energies of the day. Hence, the deeply committed Fr. Dillard ended by saying that his work in the vibrant forced labor factory was more important than his Mass, and, indeed, that the very machine on which he toiled itself actually had a soul of its own.

Mounier is particularly instructive with respect to this intensifying dismissal of the whole of the Church’s traditional teaching and practice. His vision had always logically involved the possibility of shelving entire realms of Christian scripture, theology, and spirituality, should they clash with the “emerging convergence.” By the last years of the war, “there was little place for sin, redemption and resurrection in the debate; the central acts of the Christian drama were set aside”.⁰ Nietzsche’s critique of slavish Christianity now seemed to him to be unanswerable, and he “came to think that Roman Catholicism was an integral part of almost all he hated. Then, when he searched his soul, he discovered that the aspects of himself which he appreciated least were his ‘Catholic’ traits”.⁰ Doing what one willed was the unum necessarium. Not surprisingly, everything rational from the Greek tradition that had been used to support Christianity and dampen the vital will was execrated along with Catholicism as well. The Socratics, for him, were indeed Seeds of the Logos---and, as such, had to be driven into the wilderness with a fiery sword. Those obsessed with Catholic dogma, Catholic practice, and the philosophical hunt for the Logos all required diagnosis and serious psychiatric help.

Hence, Mounier now flatly denounced old-fashioned Christianity and Christians. Christianity, he wrote, was “conservative, defensive, sulky, afraid of the future.” Whether it “collapses in a struggle or sinks slowly in a coma of self-complacency,” it was doomed. Christians were castigated, in Nietzschean style, as “these crooked beings who go forward in life only sidelong with downcast eyes, these ungainly souls, these weighers-up of virtues, these dominical victims, these pious cowards, these lymphatic heroes, these colourless virgins, these vessels of ennui, these bags of syllogisms, these shadows of shadows…”.⁰ Metaphysical speculation, Mounier declared, was a characteristic of “lifeless schizoid personalities.”…He referred to intelligence and spirituality as “bodily diseases” and attributed the indecisiveness of many Christians to their ignorance of “how to jump a ditch or strike a blow.” “Modern psychiatry,” Mounier wrote, had shed light on the morbid taste for the “spiritual,” for “higher things,” for the ideal and for effusions of the soul…Thus, once again, he dismissed many forms of religious devotion as the result of psychosis, self-deception or vanity. Prayer was often a sign of psychological illness and weakness that analysis could do much to heal. Vigorous exercise would help as well.⁰

This brings us back to the liturgical question, the liturgy obviously being one of the most important aspects of daily Christian life that would have to change with the emergence of a new and more vital personalist order. Uriage recognized as much, and was therefore permeated by the spirit of “pastoral concern” characterizing the more recent liturgical movement. This movement, in fact, was formative in shaping its own understanding of the importance and methodology of accommodation to active “mystiques” for the sake of the creation of the self-sacrificing individuals that true personhood required.

Fr. Maydieu was already active before the war, together with “friends of Sept”, celebrating new style Masses, during which the priest faced the people and provided a French narration.⁰ Fr. Doncoeur, terrified that vital life was passing inert Catholics by, became enthusiastic for pastoral liturgical developments in Germany as early as 1923. He used the model of games and sports events, along with the general desire of youth to cooperate as a group, to guide the French scouting movement down a new liturgical direction:⁰

Games can also be an excellent preparation for worship, which to the little ones appears to be very little different from a game. This should not scandalize us. The word game is not in the child’s vocabulary, and particularly in the realm of scouting, it is a synonym for diversion. A game is an action, passionate insofar as it is sincerely played. Well, official worship is eminently sincere. Children sense this. They find satisfaction in this atmosphere of truth. They savor this serious action, wherein all participate, body and soul, this collective and ordained action, similar in nature to those grand modern sports events wherein modern youth finds its discipline and sometimes its mystique. But the little faithful heart senses well that worship is more noble than sports. Worship is the Big Game, the Sacred Game which is being played for the Chief of Chiefs….Among the troops the Mass is generally a Dialogue Mass at which all actively participate. Certain among them make the offering. The cadets which Father Doncoeur leads each summer with knapsacks across France’s roads also have the Dialogue Mass. Gathered before the altar, they respond to the liturgical prayers, make the offering of the host which will be consecrated for them at the Offertory….

Concerned as it was with using all communal tools to build persons possessing the “leadership mystique”, Uriage turned the entire day into a “manly” liturgical experience. Bonfires were lit, backs slapped, virile poems and hymns composed, and special pageants mounted. Uriage claimed that all of these were, of course, inspired by “deep feeling,” constituting demands upon the developing persons of the community, rejection of which would have been a breach of Volksgemeinschaft equivalent to an individualist sin against the Holy Spirit. Interestingly enough, all of this new, “natural”, participatory, creative---and expensive---liturgical life was being elaborated while Frs. Maydieu, Doncoeur, Chenu, Congar and others were bringing into existence what would be the extremely influential “Center for Pastoral Liturgy”, designed to effect similar changes in ordinary ecclesiastical life.

Worker-Marxist-Soviet mania from 1942 onwards increased the reformers demand for a liturgy based upon a pastoral response to particular mystiques to fever pitch. This often played upon Pius XII’s well-known willingness to take risks on the pastoral level if real success could be demonstrated to emerge from them. In any case, Henri Godin’s (1906-1944) famous work, France: Pays de Mission? (1943), outlining worker dechristianization, had created a sense of crisis in France that the pope could perhaps be counted upon to take seriously. This book argued that the loss of Church influence among the working class was so dire that all prudence had to be tossed aside. Lack of any precise plan for how to guide the pressing need to dive into the worker mystique was attributed to the spontaneous genius of those participating in the program and their unfailing faith in the Holy Spirit.

One thing alone was certain: the liturgy and the priesthood were out of sync with the vital world of the laboring man. All that was associated with what Paul Claudel disparagingly called the “mass with one’s back to the people” had therefore to be abandoned.⁰ Such a mass had become the precious toy of little minds and bigots who could not understand the New Order emerging around them. Hence, also, the critique of Fr. Dillard, who dismissed any supposed difficulties emerging from a total rejection of an anachronistic Catholic priestly mission. He insisted that his worker clientele would be able to sense the superior spirituality of what others might be tempted to call a secularized clergy due to a je ne sais quoi emanating from its own fresh sacerdotal mystique: ⁰

My Latin, my liturgy, my mass, my prayer, my sacerdotal ornaments, all of that made me a being apart, a curious phenomenon, something like a (Greek) pope or a Japanese bonze, of whom there remain still some specimen, provisionally, while waiting for the race to die out.

Religion as they [the workers] knew it is a type of bigotry for pious women and chic people served by disguised characters who are servants of capitalism….If we succeed in ridding our religion of the unhealthy elements that encumber it, petty superstitions, the bourgeois “go to Mass” hypocrisy, etc. we will find easily with the Spirit of Christ the mystique which we need to reestablish our homeland.

Yes, there was no doubt that the constraints of traditional Catholicism had to be relaxed, along with those of nefarious Soviet apparatchik influences, if the good spirits of Marxism and other energetic movements in Europe and the Third World were to come to fruition and converge. But how, practically speaking, could this work of liberation be accomplished? The only other viable political and social vision was that of American pluralism, and this outlook did not at first appear to many personalists to be all that promising. “The Americans,” Beuve-Mery, who went from Uriage to the management of the highly influential postwar French newspaper, Le Monde, complained, “could prevent us from carrying out the obligatory revolution, and their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur of the materialism of the totalitarians”.⁰

Still, a number of personalist fellow travelers, Jacques Maritain prominent among them, were much more hopeful, arguing that American pluralism was an immensely powerful revolutionary force suitable for breaking down many petrified traditions—if only it were witnessed to properly. Through the Marshall Plan and its support for supra-national, continental economic reconstruction, pluralism’s powerful vision had already begun to break down traditional authorities and work for that European union that so many personalists—along with the Nazi New Order itself—had also longed to achieve. Maritain argued that American pluralism might even lend itself to a convergence with the most vital spiritual elements of a Marxism whose true transcendent mission was being botched by the Soviets.

Besides, one simply could not deny that the impact of the pluralist message of a practical openness to a world of diversity was as strong on European Catholics as it was on everyone else on the war-weary Continent. They, too, were tired of a divisiveness that had seemingly produced nothing but hatred and conflict. The words of the conqueror were beautiful words indeed, and Maritain could point to the fact that American Catholics were among their most fervent propagandists. Pluralism could become the Defender of the Peace and the Defender of Freedom for everything and everyone, including fresh, exciting, energetic developments noticeable in the Old as well as the New and Third Worlds. It could, therefore, powerfully aid the work of personalists in witnessing to their many vital mystiques and assuring their convergence in fulfillment of the message of the Holy Spirit. Perhaps. But the Holy Spirit in question was one whose teaching would have been recognizable to Lamennais, Rousseau, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, and, ultimately, Isocrates as well.⁰

B. Diving Into American Pluralism

For what, exactly, would “diving into” the “mystique” of pluralism actually entail? The best way to begin to give an answer to this question is by briefly recalling what we learned about pluralism’s Americanist youth in the last chapter: namely, that the American message to the world means more than what its simple words of “peace” and “freedom” seem on the surface to indicate; it also means everything that comes along with these words in its historical and sociological baggage train.

In practice, diving into pluralism’s “lived reality” signifies immersion in the experience and teaching of the first important society in the western world that never knew a stage of orthodox Christianity. It necessitates becoming one with a culture deeply influenced by the atomist doctrine of total depravity and the effects of its secularization on the one hand and by the desires of the founding moderate Whig Enlightenment oligarchy and their consequences on the other. It then entails praising what emerges from this union both as a purely pragmatic tool for providing a tranquil, free, prosperous social order in a multicultural America as well as a sacred, providential gift of God, destined for missionary transport everywhere around the globe.

American pluralism thus brings with it experience of the full development of the initial Protestant animus against a blasphemous, tyrannical, fleshly, Word-drenched Church. That animus, expanded through secularization beyond its original anti-Roman focus, gradually manifested itself in an attack upon all authoritative institutions providing guidance for individual human action. It came to see in the American system a ticket to an atomistic Eden where the “unbound rhinoceros” could pursue his personal agenda without fear of condemnation from Faith, Reason, or his equally liberated neighbors. Hence, diving into this lived reality means approval of “unbinding the rhinoceros”.

But becoming one with the American mystique also brings with it experience of the full development of the moderate, Whig Enlightenment ideal. That form of the Enlightenment sought a civil order ruled over by a weak State. This weakness permitted satisfaction of the material interests of the dominant elements in private society. Such domination began with an oligarchy whose conservatism also led it to preserve a traditional language of respect for a Christian-sounding God---who respected the need to keep His distance from daily human affairs. Diving into this lived reality means justifying satisfaction of the material wishes of the strongest unbound rhinoceros in society as an integral part of mankind’s last, best hope for maintaining a peace and freedom in accord with both common sense and God’s Providence.

Still, the Whiggish passion for maintaining civil order was forced to work together with the radical dedication to pursuit of an atomist freedom. And that more radical fervor was itself, in turn, constrained to take the much more conservative moderate Enlightenment tendency seriously. These two concerns proved to influence one another, guaranteeing the development of the system in a way that both changed and yet confirmed the founding oligarchy’s original designs. It is necessary to examine this two-fold effect before the picture of the lived reality of the American experience and the consequences of diving into it is complete.

America changed in that the Founders’ conviction that they could maintain the dominance of the existing propertied Whig elite as an obvious dictate of both common sense and God’s Providence proved to be misplaced. John Locke’s principle of toleration---with its “multiplication of factions” to a degree that would render any community or coalition of forces that might try to threaten the power of the original revolutionary planter-merchant oligarchy impotent to effect real change---was indeed supposed to work on its behalf. But the radical conception of the meaning of American freedom, in practice, gave to societies and individuals prepared to do whatever was necessary to satisfy their own ideas and material desires the chance to expand the borders of what eighteenth century men said that common sense signified and permitted. Growing insistence upon the need for openness rendered it progressively more difficult to “close" the vision of “freedom” and “common sense” within more limited Moderate Enlightenment bounds and take its notion of God’s “natural law” seriously. A development of visions of radical freedom increasly blocked appeal to any faith-filled or rational standard for judging the validity, justice, and prudence of any desire or action of any specific group or individual. The path to replacement of the existing elite was simply to use one’s freedom more willfully than the Founders had conceived possible. This allowed a new community or individual to become so significant and powerful as to require “integration” of its concerns into the syllabus of ideas and behavior patterns deemed acceptable by the existing establishment if only for the sake of peace and quiet. But such a fresh and still more “unbound rhinoceros” could itself come to dominate society and define anew what God, common sense, “the will of the Founders”, toleration, peace, and progress meant. The civil religion could be counted upon to drill in the argument that a universal liberty continued to triumph under the orderly domination of the new and still more arbitrary elite. Some of its own members might even honestly believe this tale of a unique, simultaneous American guarantee of peace and freedom to represent the truth.

Despite the change of personnel, however, the kind of order favored by the founding oligarchy---an order permitting the tranquil enjoyment of material desires and possession, free from the unwanted interference of a dogmatic Church and a powerful State---was to an overwhelming degree confirmed under all subsequent elites. Those strong conservative influences whose passion for order allowed for the integration of new elements into existing society continued to be exerted and have an enormous impact. Such influences, as always, urged everyone to renounce the private use of political freedom to shape the public society in which men lived according to particular spiritual and intellectual convictions. For the men of order argued that it was precisely such attempts to unify thought and action that had been the historical cause of horrible division and bloody disturbances of the peace.

Concerns for the maintenance of public peace in a country promoting a radical freedom increased exponentially due to the multicultural waves of migrants arriving in the United States from 1848 onwards. A Protestant rooted America found the path to unity in the midst of such diversity through an anchoring in the one characteristic every fallen man shared in common: Original Sin. Free citizens were to be unified through a systematic exploitation of the common fallen human passion for willful satisfaction of material desires. The result was that Americans learned that they were really expected to use their liberty in but one single, concupiscent fashion---for the attainment and protection of material possessions. In other words, even though the theoretical freedom granted to communities and individuals under the American pluralist “mystique” was one allowing them to “be themselves” and potentially even to “go wild”, in practice, that freedom became a liberty merely to hunt for and protect property in a myriad of communal and personal fashions. This reductionist freedom, based upon promoting the chief consequence of Original Sin, then had to be praised as the greatest gift to the human mind, heart, and soul known to history. Whether that gift was granted by God or nature was left to individual taste to determine---but not to impose upon others.

Strong and unscrupulous men whose eyes were open gradually realized that the “even-handed” American pluralist methodology put them in a position “freely” to create a public “order” in which they devoured the weak. Once again, this could, theoretically, be done in the name of an ideology, but the tendency of the system was to create an order based upon a materialist expression of strength and willfulness. And the logic of this tendency was to degenerate and ensure construction of an order based upon the dictates of ever more willful libertine or criminal strongmen. All these strongmen maintained their alliance with honest American pluralist ideologues who did not realize that they were being “mugged” by their own beloved system. They also allied their cause with that of dishonest rhetorical word merchants who made their living by justifying and ennobling the oppression of the weak and the gullible, exploiting the powerful American civil religion and its images to ease their labors. It was all these developments that guaranteed that the system “spiraled downwards”, ending in that boring, materialist, intellectually barren sameness---that “tumultuous monotony”---already depicted for us by Louis Veuillot as a chief characteristic of the coming, global “Empire of the World”.

Communities and individuals resisting the lived reality of the American system could---and did---hold back the logic of its growth and development. But those who “dived into” its “mystique” to help to bring it to its perfection assisted in unleashing its full fury. They, at best, would end by embracing a thoughtless, soulless, materialist existence; one wherein the dance of life, with all of its many spiritual and intellectually difficult problems, would come to a halt. In other words, at best, the truly law-abiding pluralist minded community or individual would commit spiritual and intellectual suicide. For this is what the pluralist Defender of the Peace ultimately demanded of men—although from the lawmaker’s standpoint the action performed should more properly be labeled euthanasia rather than suicide. Having “dived into” the lived American reality, they could only use their freedom either to praise the privilege that they had been given to live their lives serving the material interests of the current masters of the system or, worse still, to dominate society by playing this materialist game still better than their opponents.

All modern proponents of Protestant and Enlightenment "freedom" insist that a new age of Reason and Liberty dawned for mankind with the return to the proper understanding of “nature as is” promoted by the Renaissance and the Reformation. Anyone who questions this glorious victory is answered not by rational argument but with haughty condescension. He is condemned as an enemy of God and man, and one who lacks that faith in Progress that is urgently required to assure the full development of a novus ordo saeclorum.

American pluralism and its Divine Republic continue this “tradition” with a special vengeance and a particular success. Nevertheless, they sow the wind with their dogma of a pragmatic and order-friendly openness to freedom and diversity. In consequence, they reap the whirlwind of impassioned, irrational, willful dominance over the truly serious and peaceful man. Abandoning God’s Law and Reason, the civilization they produce has nothing left to restrain it. And yet the irony is, as Louis Veuillot noted, that those who consider themselves the victors and the rulers of this civilization cannot even sin with any real gusto. It is a cheapened, inhuman way of life in arid suburban shopping malls and freeways to nowhere that stirs their ambitions and libido. Every aspect of modernity smacks of death. It was fitting, therefore, that American pluralism should arise to give to modernity a thoroughgoing culture of living death---a living euthanasia---to sate its thirst for eternal slumber.

C. Vae Victis! The Captive “Catholic Moment”

Conquered peoples, as Horace noted, have sometimes taken their captors captive. But not all conquerors are Romans, and frequently the consequences can be quite different. The vanquished can come to adopt their conquerors’ language, customs, heroes, and religions as their own. Indeed, they can reach the point of recoiling in horror at the mere mention of their earlier beliefs and ancient champions. Barring this, they can end up forgetting them entirely and even denying that they ever existed. This cultural conquest can have certain positive effects when the victor is something or someone better than the vanquished. We are rightly edified, as was St. Ambrose, at the contemplation of ancient Rome, humble enough to surrender her gods and a number of her traditional customs, once conquered by the superior truth of the Word Incarnate. We can rejoice at the thought of a powerful tribe like that of the Franks under Clovis, abandoning itself to its Roman and Catholic cultural conquerors and forsaking its pagan barbarism in consequence. But we should be saddened whenever we encounter a high civilization, heir to the most profound truths and cultural achievements, which so learns to adore a debased conqueror that it voluntarily silences the songs of the glories of its own princes, warriors, and thinkers. We should be saddened when it no longer recognizes its former accomplishments or beliefs when confronted with them, and even uses the arguments of its masters to eclipse them further.