Betrothed: Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI

How love of a Romantic Novel led to global human misery

Perhaps excepting the rare graduate student of Italian Literature, few Americans have heard of Alessandro Manzoni or his novel The Betrothed. I read it only because it was mentioned as the favorite book of Pope Pius XI in David I. Kertzer's The Pope and Mussolini.

The Betrothed was written in the 1820s and was set in and near Milan (Milano) in 1628. It is largely an old-fashioned adventure story centered on the romance of a young peasant couple who are prevented from consummating their planned marriage by an evil local member of the nobility. It is quite readable and modern. As literature it is notable in the way it develops a wide variety of complex characters, from a simple peasant girl to the powerful movers and shakers of the nobility and Roman Catholic Church.

Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, would have found it easy to identify with several of the characters. Achille was born in 1857 to a silk factory supervisor and his wife in a town just north of Milan. He became a priest early in life and quickly rose to the position of director of the Ambrosiana Library. Thus he could relate to Renzi, the silk worker who is in love with Lucy, as well as with the monk and priest characters up to Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, who founded the Ambrosiana Library. Achille became Cardinal Ratti, archbishop of Milan, in 1921, around the time Benito Mussolini was developing his Fascist Party.

Benito Mussolini was born in a small town in Romagna, northern Italy, in 1883, to a socialist blacksmith and a Roman Catholic schoolteacher. Benito was not baptized, but was sent to a Catholic boarding school. As a young man he was influenced by a variety of writers in the socialist camp, notably Georges Sorel, and was attracted to violent tendencies within the socialist camp. The world would likely be different if he had remained a school teacher, but in 1904 he joined the Italian Army for two years. After another teaching stint he became a Socialist Party functionary. Still attracted to violence, he nevertheless opposed the Italian war against Libya in 1911 [part of a series of preludes to World War I in which European nations began dismembering the Turkish empire].

After initially opposing Italy's entry into World War I, Mussolini switched positions, rejoined the the Italian army, declared himself a nationalist, and began to develop what would come to be called fascism. It was an anti-establishment, nationalist, anti-clerical, violent movement with socialist tinges. It appealed to young men, and to local gangsters. Italy's democratic national government was weak and corrupt, and Benito was elected to it. In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini to be Prime Minister.

And now we are in The Betrothed, at least as far as Cardinal Ratti was concerned. Pope Benedict XV had died in January 1922. A flock of cardinals divided between an ultra-conservative faction and a conservative faction settled on Ratti as the next Pope. He took the name Pope Pius XI. It was all perfectly clear to him. He was the equivalent of Federigo Borromeo, and Benito Mussolini was the equivalent of the character in Betrothed only referred to as The Unknown.

In the novel The Unknown was the leader of bad men, and a threat to all that was good. Yet, through his encounter with the virtuous Lucy and then with Cardinal Borromeo, The Unknown turned his back on evil and becomes a force for good.

Mussolini is now thought of as a dictator with absolute power, but that is a caricature of the real situation. The Pope too, while powerful, depended on a bureaucratic machine to rule. Mussolini had changed his ideology many times prior to becoming Prime Minister, and now made a strategic decision that fed into the Pope's delusion. He decided to embrace the Roman Catholic Church. He eventually made it the only legal religion of Italy.

The Pope liked that the Fascists beat Protestants and atheists into line. But he did not want to take orders from Mussolini. Benito liked that the Catholic Church solidified his rule and enabled him to control some of his own rabid-dog fascists, as well as to destroy his main political rival, the Socialist Party. But he did not want to take orders from the Pope. See The Pope and Mussolini for the gory details.

Reality contradicted The Betrothed. Both Mussolini and the Pope became more evil as the years passed. Hitler rose to power in Germany and added his own evil to the mix. At a crucial time Pius XI helped Hitler become Chancellor of Germany. Probably he again saw Adolf Hitler as a useful tool against atheism and communism, and another The Unknown. It helped that Hitler was Roman Catholic (he thought the small percent of Nazis who were pagan or atheist were nuts).

Pius died in 1939, of natural causes, before the final terrible results of his sponsorship of Mussolini, Hitler, and General Franco became obvious to all. Mussolini died in 1945, shot by communists.

Pius XII, who followed Pius XI, danced with both Hitler and Mussolini, and hoped that they would destroy communism and atheism. Islam, Budhism, and Protestant sects could be mopped up later. But when it became obvious the Allies would defeat the Axis, Pius XII switched sides, thus becoming a cold war ally of the capitalist block.

Miracles: Seeds, Saints, Sands and Popes

Take any viable plant seed. Take, for instance, a poppy seed: a tiny bit of blackness, smaller than some grains of sand.

Add the proper conditions, generally just some water and ordinary soil. What appears to be a miracle follows. The seed sprouts, and under proper conditions grows into a plant thousands of times its original size. Then it creates beautiful flowers, which in turn each create hundreds of new seeds.

Until the 19th century or so this seed to flower process was a mystery. It was attributed to God (the mental projection on a much smaller Universe, by some humans, of a universal King), or was just a mystery of nature.

The recent accelerated filing of two dead Roman Catholic Church Popes for sainthood, by the current Pope, has re-opened the debate about miracles.

That Church basically admits to having no ability to produce miracles. Its miracles are more mundane than the sprouting of a poppy seed. No living Catholic can show any special power over nature. No Catholic can point at an ordinary grain of sand and make it grow into a poppy plant.

Catholic miracles are miracles of fame. A famous Catholic gets prayed to. If enough sick people pray to these potential saints, someone will get well, probably through the triumph of their innate immune system over some disease. Getting well happens every day, but Roman Catholics want to treat some healings as a miracle caused by their prayers to dead personalities.

Let me be clear: Buddhists are not able to produce genuine miracles. Neither can Islamists. Nor any of the many Hindu sects, nor any of the self-promotion gurus who run about like ants on a hot summer day. Donald Trump does not do miracles, nor do cinema stars, not even Matthew McConaughey.

The closest thing to a miracle the Catholic Church produced in the last century was the Miracle of Fascism. The fascist leaders (Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Philippe Petain, Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII, and their allies and underlings) collectively almost managed to kill every Jew and Atheist in Europe. Call it the Holocaust Miracle. But they did not do it by waving magic wands, or converting non-Catholics by sprinkling them with holy water. The holy instruments were extermination camps, tanks, warplanes and just following orders.

I do not call myself an atheist, though others may use that label for me. I believe in Natural Liberation. If I say the poppy seed is a miracle, I mean a miracle within nature, not anything outside of nature. And if I say it was a miracle the Roman Catholic, fascist troops were defeated in World War II, I know it was the Red Army, its soldiers and tanks and all the apparatus of war, that defeated the Pope and his minions.

It is not possible to turn sand into a poppy seed, but it can be turned into silicon, which in turn can be used to do tricks with electronics, including calculating accounts and posting puppy videos to social media. Tricks are not miracles, but they have their uses.

Few humans want to be hopeless. Hopes crushed by Reality (governments and bosses of all sorts), many people want to believe in miracles.

Show them a poppy seed. And teach them some history. Adolf Hitler was Roman Catholic. Don't let that be forgotten. Popes are not good people. Popes are bad people. If you want to argue that some are more or less bad than others, that is your business.

Saint Adolf Hitler

The creation of saints has been one of the Vatican's best propaganda tools. Saints encourage national or ethnic affiliation with the Roman Catholic faith, and they may also represent vocations or other attributes people can identify with.

It takes a while for a dead person to achieve sainthood. partly this is because Rome requires three "miracles" to be attributed to a person. In ancient times the miracles usually occurred before death. In our times the miracles are almost always cures that sick people achieve after praying to the potential saint. The Vatican has rules for what is a medical miracle and what is not, and they seem to follow the rules, so it may take quite a few decades of pretty many sick people praying to someone to build up the case for sainthood.

Right now Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day is being promoted as a potential saint. She would have been appalled at such nonsense. She would have had a thing or two to say about Spanish-Civil War era Catholic fascists priests who are in line for sainthood, too.

A rather large number of miracles have been unofficially attributed to Adolf Hitler, the former Chancellor of Germany. The Vatican is keeping them under wraps for purely political reasons. Hitler was the boy wonder of the Catholic Church in the 1920's and 1930's. When the Catholics lost World War II they had to do an abrupt about-face on Hitler. Most Americans think Adolf was a pagan, so effective has the re-write of history been effected.

You have to understand the Hitler, the American political establishment, and the Pope all had a common enemy back then: atheistic communism. Their epitome of evil was Joseph Stalin, leader of the openly communist Soviet Union (USSR, essentially Russia). But people were falling away from Catholicism in droves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The system of simply killing Protestants, agnostics and atheists had broken down even in Spain and Italy. Fascism, Pope Pius XI realized, could be made into the ideal tool to insure that only one religion was allowed in the world.

Benito Mussolini only converted to the Roman Catholic faith after he had achieved power in Italy, but most of his supporters were Catholic and the Pope was willing to work with anyone who could crush the secularist and socialist movements after World War II. Mussolini and the Pope were willing partners.

Adolf Hitler was raised Catholic and first rose to prominence after World War I in Bavaria, which had (and still has) a Catholic majority. His first miracle might be said to be surviving World War I unscathed, despite constantly being on the frontline, except for a leg wound and later temporary blindness from poison gas used by the British near the end of the war. His party, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party was just one of many tiny parties created in the chaos after World War I, and it used Socialist in a sense opposite to its common meaning..

The Nazi Party was not officially Catholic: its membership also admitted Lutherans, a few pagans who wanted to restore the worship of pre-christian German gods, and even modern, non-religious members. The Catholic Center Party was the main Catholic party, but the Pope did not feel it was aggressive enough and in the end pushed to have Hitler as German Chancellor. So perhaps it was not a miracle that Hitler, the leader of the largest party legally elected to the German Reichstag, was given the position of Chancellor on January 30, 1933. The Pope did not feel that his friend Franz von Papen was sufficiently iron-willed enough to destroy socialism and atheism, but as second in command von Papen was supposed to watch out for the Pope's interest.

Hitler's next miracle was a pretty impressive one: helping General Franco establish a purely Roman Catholic, fascist regime in Spain by killing everyone who believed in religious freedom and democracy, even including a large number of Catholics. The Pope was very happy with Hitler and Mussolini about that. Priests killed in the fighting on Hitler's side of Spain's Civil War have been nominated for sainthood. Priests killed on the pro-democracy side have been ignored, but then maybe no one prays to them, and hence they are unable to show their miraculous healing powers.

Hitler and the Pope did quarrel quite a bit from time to time. Each wanted to be top dog. But the Pope was more than happy that Hitler forced German Lutherans into a "unity church" with Catholics. He was thrilled when Hitler's armies defeated the French Republic and replaced it with the Roman Catholic, Fascist, Vichy Government. Most of all, the Pope was thrilled when Hitler's bombers and tanks went for the heart of the Russia.

What was president-for-life Franklin Delano Roosevelt doing about Saint Hitler? At first not much, because he needed American Catholic votes to stay in power. While Catholics were, and still are, a religious minority in the United States, they had power beyond their numbers because of their political and geographic concentration. They were almost all in the Democratic Party, and they were almost all in the northeastern states. The Democrats needed them as badly as they needed white segregationists in the southern states. Thus President Roosevelt refused to allow the Republican (democratically elected) side in the Spanish Civil war to buy arms from the United States.

Roosevelt may have shed a tear for France, but he actually did nothing because he knew the French empire would be up for grabs. He planned for the British Empire, Soviet Union, and Germany to chew up each other in Europe, and for Japan and China to chew up each other in Asia, so that in the end he could conquer the world. Roosevelt was smarter and more patient than your average dictator.

American Catholics would probably have kept this nation out of World War II if it had not been for the war between the Japanese and China, which had much to do with colonialism but nothing to do with religion. When Japan and Germany declared war on the U.S.A., suddenly Catholics here put aside their religion in favor of American nationalism.

The atheists in Russia, while losing about 20 million dead (see Atheist Holocaust), defeated Hitler, and apparently would have even if the U.S. had stayed out of the war. When Stalin's soldiers started marching towards Berlin, the Pope began to hedge his bets. He flipped when U.S. troops invaded Italy. Suddenly he could only remember the fights he had had with Hitler, not their love affair. When Hitler was no longer producing miracles, the Pope needed a more practical basis for the long-term survival of his church in Europe. America made a natural ally because at its core it was anti-communist and pro-capitalist. While the Pope preferred the fascist economic system (with God's blessing, as enshrined in Papal encyclicals that they don't want you reading anymore), given the choice between communism and capitalism, the Pope went with the U.S. and Britain. The Cold War started before Hitler had even died.

Hitler died on April 30, 1945. On his death certificate his religion was marked Roman Catholic. He had run out of miracles.

But he fought the good fight, doubtless went to Catholic heaven, and is due for a revival. Now may not be the time. But be assured, the Vatican is keeping a list, and when the time is ready, the miracles of Saint Hitler will be revealed.

Pius XII and the Cordell Hull Lacuna

It is a mystery, and a lot of secret history may hinge on it.

I came across it last night while reading The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Or rather, I did not come across it, because it is a lacuna, or gap in the record.

Cordell Hull was one of the most important figures in American history, though he is now largely forgotten. The highest office he obtained was Secretary of State, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). But why was he appointed to that high office? He is the man who brought us the income tax, back when he was a Democratic representative from Tennessee. You would think at least the Tea Party would want to know about the guy. He also brought us Free Trade, or at least a major step in that direction. As Secretary of State he was largely responsible for an unnecessary war with Japan, while evading as long as possible doing anything about Adolf Hitler.
I am reading his Memoirs as my last major research task before drafting my U.S. War Against Asia. His Memoirs are vast: two volumes, 1800 pages of fine print. Only one printing was made [MacMillan, New York, 1948], with most copies doubtless bought by libraries. So far I am only to page 718, in the opening days of what later would be called World War II.

I mention the size of the book because it emphasizes the gap. Hull loved to document and explain his actions in glorious detail.

On page 713 Hull begins recounts his initiative to get Pope Pius XII involved in a peace process, starting in July 1939, well before Germany invaded Poland (regaining the territory lost in the peace settlement after World War I). This account goes on to page 716, corresponding to March 1941. While interesting of itself for the light it throws on U.S. and Vatican war aims, it flashed in my mind that I thought Vatican Secretary of State Eugene Pacelli, before he became Pope Pius XII, had relations with the FDR regime .

I pulled out my copy of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, and sure enough, Cardinal Pacelli had visited the United States from October 1936 until November [see pages 176-178]. He met with FDR on November 6, just after FDR had won a second term. They had made a deal, possibly set up and executed by Francis Spellman, then a bishop but later known as Cardinal Spellman. The Roman Catholic Church silenced Father Charles Coughlin, an influential radio-based critic of FDR. Pacelli, in return, received a promise that FDR would work to restore direct relations between the U.S. Government and the Vatican, which had made a treaty with Mussolini in 1929 (see Lateran Treaty) to become a sovereign state as well as the center of a global religion business.

The context for this is important and mostly forgotten. There were two core constituencies of the Democratic Party. There was the southern, racist, white, mostly conservative and Protestant southern wing. In the northern and western states, normally majoirty Republican, the Democratic Party was mainly urban, working class, and Roman Catholic. Holding that coalition together from the Civil War until the 1970s was a great political feat. FDR needed the Roman Catholic Church to stay in power. But the southern democrats did not like that very Church. At the same time, the Depression and popularity of the New Deal (or at least the blaming of Herbert Hoover) brought many former Republicans into the Democratic Party.

So why the lacuna? The Vatican Secretary of State visits America, makes some deals, even has a documented meeting with President Roosevelt. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, who in his own words ran most American foreign policy with only moderate direction from the President, has nothing to say about it?

You can call it speculation, but I call it analysis. Pacelli had been working on a long-term plan for Roman Catholic domination of the globe, starting with Europe. Mussolini was cooperating in Italy, but Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, had been chosen by Pacelli to lead God's work, which included converting or exterminating atheists, socialists, communists, and even democrats, republicans, protestants, and of course Muslims, Jews, and other religious sects. Roosevelt had a different agenda: American imperialism, on the model of the British Empire, with democracy in the home company serving as a cover for a global dictatorship. Both Roosevelt and the Pope (as well as Hitler and Stalin) knew the biggest global prize was the British Empire. The Popes wanted it brought back under their religious sovereignty, but that would be second step, after Hitler defeated Russia. FDR wanted it to collapse just enough to allow the U.S. to take it over.

The Popes hoped important men in the U.S., even if not religious themselves, would eventually make the U.S. a Catholics-only nation. In the meantime, they did not want the U.S. economy used to build up the armies of anti-fascist governments and groups in Europe. In 1936 the issue was Spain, where the Pope's pet General (Francisco) Franco had launched a civil war, murdering everyone who disagreed with him, including Roman Catholics who supported the democratically elected government. Probably Pacelli and FDR agreed the U.S. would not arm the elected Republican government of Spain, thus ensuring Franco's eventual victory.

What Pacelli wanted long term was for Hitler, when his armies were ready, to have the freedom to attack Russia (aka the USSR) and destroy Communism and Atheism with one blow. But it's a complex world. While Hitler did eventually attack Russia, and engulfed that region in an Atheist Holocaust, the Pope and Cardinal Spellman were not able to convert Roosevelt to Catholicism. With the defeat of the fascists Catholicism suffered a major setback. The Popes had to spend 30 years trying to convince people that they had never even liked Hitler, Petain, Mussolini and Franco. America did inherit the British empire, got the French empire thrown in as well, occupied Japan, and would have gotten China for good measure if it had not been for the Chinese Communist Party.

The negotiations with Pacelli in 1936 probably continued after he became Pope Pius XII; certainly Spellman retained the ear of both FDR and the pope. The peace negotiations of 1940 went nowhere because there were several very different versions of peace involved. Hitler wanted peace if he could keep Poland and prepare for further advances to the east, in line with the papal plan. Britain and France wanted peace if they got to keep their empires and Germany had to give Poland back. America wanted peace because it was good politics, but we know FDR was hoping the European powers would do a World War I repeat: draining each other so that the United States of America would become the new global imperialist power.

Pius XII, Hitler, and the Role of Catholicism in Fascism

Yesterday I finished taking notes on John Cornell's Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Today I published the notes to the web. You can see them at Notes on Hitler's Pope.

While I appreciate the amount of work Mr. Cornell did researching and writing his book, I think he missed some major points because he was too focused on Eugenio Pacelli (aka Pope Pius XII), Germany and Adolf Hitler.

Fascism was a particular combination of political, social, and economic attitudes. Specific attitudes were shared with other ideologies and types of government. Most notably, fascist governments are headed by men who are, for practical purposes, dictators; but not all dictators are fascists.

One dimension that is seldom talked about by mainstream historians is the religious underpinnings of fascism. In fact, there are often deliberate distortions of the record induced by focusing on minor facts while ignoring the preponderance of evidence. Mussolini is said to have been an atheist, Hitler a promoter of the German pagan revival.

The fundamental truth is that all the major fascist rulers of European nations during the fascist crest were communicants in the Roman Catholic Church. Adolf Hitler was born Catholic and died Catholic. Mussolini, dictator of Italy, was raised an atheist, but converted to Catholicism shortly after he seized power. Antonio Salazar, Portugal's dictator, was Catholic. So was Spain's, General Franco. Marshal Petain, France's dictator, was Catholic. Before Hitler took over Austria, its fascist leader was Catholic. When Croatia was set up as an independent, fascist nation, its leader was Catholic.

That is not to say that all Catholics were fascists, or supported fascism. Nor were all fascists Catholics. But there was a very strong correspondence between Catholicism and fascism.

I don't think it is correct to simply attribute this to the kind of mindset that the Catholic Church creates in its communicants: ignorant, intolerant and obedient. The evidence is that the Catholic Church created and promoted fascism. Cornell does a good job showing how Pacelli used his influence to bring Hitler to absolute power in Germany. True, Hitler might have come to power without Pacelli's help, but then again he might not have.

Would Pacelli have liked someone other than Hitler to be dictator of Germany? Sure. Because the Vatican's plan (I say that because a series of Popes worked on the plan, in particular Pius XI, who was Pope when Hitler came to power; Pacelli became his successor, as Pius XII) was to establish a Catholic dictatorship over the entire globe. Take overs in Catholic-majority nations could only go so far: the Popes wanted a war on the Soviet Union. Hitler was picked as the most likely German leader to rearm Germany and fight the U.S.S.R.

Hitler was less than ideal because he was a German supremacist. That meant he believed the Pope should be subservient to the German emperor. If you know European history, you know the so-called Holy Roman Emperors not only had this view over a period of about a millennium, but that they indeed often saw that their puppets were appointed Pope.

Those who try to defend Pius XII, casting him as an opponent of Hitler, fail to add that perspective. Sure, Pacelli and Hitler had heated disagreements. But they were disagreements over who would be top dog, not about the importance of the dog being both fascist and Catholic.

That is more obvious when you look at the Pope's relations with other fascist dictators, and at what Adolf and Eugenio fought about. Franco, Petain, and Salazar were happy to let the Catholic Church run their nation's schools. Hence, the Pope loved them. He had nothing bad to say about them, even when Franco murdered over a million non-Catholics (before World War II even began). But Hitler and Mussolini wanted the government to control education, because they wanted to create a certain type of citizen, and knew the schools were key. They wanted citizens loyal to themselves, or to their respective national governments. The Pope wanted young citizens loyal to him.

World War II (excepting the war in East Asia, which was mainly anti-colonial in character) was about many things, including economics and the egos of political leaders. It was also a war of Catholics against everyone else. This has been forgotten mostly because the truth did not serve the political purposes of the powerful after World War II. In particular, the Catholic Church was influential enough in the U.S. to protect the Pope (and General Franco and Salazar).

Does this matter? Today a former Nazi is Pope Benedict XVI. His program does not seem to be to re-create the Nazis. But he has taken Catholic dogma back to the Dark Ages and expelled most progressive Catholics from the religious hierarchy. His attitude towards women is akin the Taliban's. He has sought to influence U.S. politics by urging his bishops to attack nominally Catholic, pro-choice politicians. In Italy and other Catholic majority nations the Church is actively trying to turn back the clock on religious tolerance and cultural diversity.

If allowed, there will be political repercussions if the Catholic Church continues to promote its social agenda. At some point the Church will try again to suppress other religions and philosophies; to do that it will need dictators.

Currently the Church is losing members to the modern, secular culture. It is not as powerful an influence as it was before World War II. It seems that, right now, a lot of the Catholic rank-and-file does not want to return to the Dark Ages. But the Church still has a vast organization that can act in a unified manner on a global scale. If people are distressed by economic or cultural turmoil, some could turn to the Church for leadership again just as they did in the 1930s. Just as some people have turned to fundamentalist Islam in this past decade.

The Atheist Holocaust

Tired of Jewish Holocaust stories? I think it important to a take on people and institutions that deny the grim facts of history. But denial also sometimes comes from selectivity. Concentrating on the slaughter of the Jews by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party overlooks the many other victims of the fascists, including the regimes run by Franco in Spain, Petain in France, and Mussolini in Italy.

The Nazis started executing their enemies shortly after they came to power in 1933, but that hardly distinguished them from the typical world government. The numbers were not large, at first. The first big numbers were racked up by the Spanish fascists led by General Francisco Franco in the civil war that began in 1936. Again, at the time it was not clear this was the beginning of the Holocaust; soldiers kill each other, and often civilians, in civil wars. But Franco's troops, when they took a town, got lists of local atheist and Protestant men from Catholic priests, and shot them without trial. The roundups and executions continued even after the the Republican side surrendered. Franco's side was Catholic. Thus the shootings were an extension of the Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic wars against Islam in Spain (and against pagans in the Americas). Amazingly, except for some arms supplied by the Soviet Union, none of the democracies offered help to the elected government of Spain. In fact, the United States and Great Britain refused to sell arms to the Spanish Republic. They said that was neutral (they did not sell arms to Franco either), even as Germany and Italy supplied the fascist rebels with arms and trained soldiers.

Usually this lack of support for the elected government of Spain is attributed to the fact that democratic socialists (as opposed to anarchist socialists (anarcho-syndicalists) and communists) were the largest party elected. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, however, had other reasons for neutrality. He, and the Democratic Party, depended on two large voting blocks: Catholics, mainly living in northern urban centers; and racists in the southern states. The Catholic Church in the United States supported Franco, and Roosevelt decided he could not risk alienating Catholic voters for a cause so far from most American's concerns during the Great Depression.

It is generally agreed that the failure of the democracies (the United States of America, Great Britain, and France) to respond to the fascist takeover of Spain that convinced Hitler and Mussolini that they could start grabbing bits of the world. Regarding the Holocaust, it also convinced Hitler that he could execute large numbers of his enemies without interference from the outside world. Kristallnacht, which did not involve mass executions, did not take place in Germany until 1938. However, even before the fascist win in the Spanish Civil War, Hitler already had a model, the Turkish genocide against Armenians [See Franz von Papen, Hitler, and Two Popes].

While he and the two fascist popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, disagreed on some things, they agreed that it was important to exterminate non-Catholics, particularly Communist non-Catholics. Hitler, of course, put a higher value on exterminating Jews than the Popes, and both were willing to give Protestant Christians, who did not otherwise cause too much trouble, time to convert to Catholicism. [In case you have not been reading this blog, Hitler was Catholic. So were Mussolini, Franco, and Petain].

You know about the six million Jews. Who else did Hitler kill, with the Pope's blessing? I use generally accepted numbers here (there is much debate, largely due to attempts by various groups to whitewash their own deeds and demonize those of their enemies).

The Romani ("Gypsies") lost in the vicinity of 1 million. Non-Jewish Poles lost 2 million. Disabled Germans killed numbered a quarter million. Some 5000 Jehovah's Witnesses were killed.

But the really, really big number of victims can be classified as Atheists; most were Communists, though only fraction of them were members of the elite Communist Party. Hitler murdered Germany's Communists early on [though many of them converted to being Nazis], and even murdered some leaders of the more atheist, socialist wing of his own party. But the really big numbers came from deaths of citizens of the U.S.S.R. Some of these people may have been Orthodox Christians, but the vast majority were atheists. An estimated 7 million died fighting the German army. Perhaps two million soviet POWs were executed. And probably about 12 million civilians died in collateral damage or from starvation in German-held areas. [See World War II casualties of the Soviet Union for details]

That is a lot of dead atheists. This atheist holocaust was planned for decades by the leaders of the Catholic Church [See my series of articles on Pope Pius XI].

But Hollywood is based in the United States, and heroic Russian war movies, or pitiful atheist-civilians-killed-by-Catholics movies would not go over big here.

I think the atheist holocaust deserves some serious study. We still have a large Catholic Church, now led by an "ex" Nazi who seems to be trying to push the Church and world back to the Dark Ages. We still have religious leaders of all sorts who encourage their followers to hate people of other faiths. I might mention the record of atheists is not clean either, especially when atheism has been combined with authoritarian political trends like Leninism.

In my Natural Liberation philosophy war is always a war crime. Killing civilians (and pushing them off their lands into refugee camps) is always a crime against humanity. Religion may be wrong-headed, but it is up to the upright to persuade the religious to align themselves with Nature. I do believe people have a right to use violence for self-defense, but that is a very limited right because all too often people claim they are defending themselves when they are really attacking others or perpetuating a pointless feud.

Israel, Pope Pius XII, and the Holocaust

There is currently a controversy, or renewal of a controversy, about the role of Pope Pius XII and the Jews in during World War II. It is usually posed by mainstream accounts as: did Pius XII do all he could to save the Jews from the Holocaust? Since the current Pope, Benedict XVI, was a member of the Nazi youth organization and is trying to get Pius XII qualified as a saint, now is a good time to get the facts about Pius XII.

"Politics makes strange bedfellows." Here I find myself siding with the State of Israel, whereas I am usually pro-Palestinian (the Palestinians have nothing to do with this particular controversy). Israel, and doubtless many Jewish organizations, don't want Pius XII canonized.

Pius XII, before he became Pope, was the Vatican Secretary of State. Born Eugenio Pacelli, as Cardinal Pacelli he was the right-hand man to Pius XI. To understand Pius XII you have to understand Pius XI, who chose to promote Pacelli to the second highest rank in the Roman Catholic Church.

I think it is fair to say that Pius XI, who became pope in 1922, was the architect of fascism. Of course this is a controversial hypothesis, and can be argued against on a number of fronts. Benito Mussolini would be the other candidate for the title. But it was Pius XI who made anti-Communism the first priority of the Catholic Church. Under the banner of Anti-Communism (and the Church was also openly against democratic forms of socialism, and even capitalist forms of democratic government), Pius helped first Mussolini, then other fascist leaders come to power. I know that is a shocking assertion to most people, but it is not difficult to paint that picture once the facts are at hand. First, however, I want to relate this to antisemitism and thus the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler is usually portrayed as the architect of the Holocaust. His own antisemitism, in the consensus histories, is attributed to anti-semitic cults that he encountered as a young man living in Vienna. However, this does not hold up under analysis.

Hitler was born a Catholic (See Hitler's Catholicism) and was raised as a Catholic in a Catholic state, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Antisemitism in Austria was rooted in the Catholic Church. There was a close alliance between the Hapsburg emperors and the Church, which ran the education system under the tender mercies of the Jesuits. When modern ideas began to penetrate the empire in the 19th century and some representative government was allowed, an Austrian Catholic Party (Later the Christian Social Party) was formed, with the Church's blessing. Because the Church itself was be abandoned by so many citizens in the empire, the party's leader, Karl Lueger, hit upon antisemitism as the primary selling point.

The antisemitism of the Holocaust grew out of the antisemitism promoted by the Catholic Church throughout its history. It became enshrined as a principle of fascist government because the Church wanted its prejudices to be backed by the power of the state.

To consider the idea that Pius XI was the architect of modern fascism, see the following essays (they are in linear order):

Pius XI and the Rise of Benito Mussolini
Pius XI and the Rise of Adolph Hitler
Pius XI and the Rise of General Franco
Pius XI, the Rise of Petain, and Fascist Vichy France

Pius XI and his Secretary of State were deeply involved in promoting fascism in other nations, notably Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria as well.

So when Cardinal Pacelli became Pope on March 2, 1939, he had been part of setting up a series of fascist regimes in Europe. Fascist movements, mostly but not exclusively Catholic, existed in many more nations of the world, including in the United States. He was a gung-ho anti-communist who believed that fascist dictators were the best bulwark against atheist communism, and against all rival creeds. Better still, except for Hitler, who had a large Protestant Christian population to deal with, all the dictators made the Catholic Church their exclusive religious partner. Cardinal Pacelli had never spoken out against anti-Semitism. He did not even speak out against mass-murder of non-Catholics, which had just been carried out by the Spanish fascists under General Francisco Franco. Here's what he said:

"With great joy we address you, dearest sons of Catholic Spain, to express our paternal congratulations for the gift of peace and victory, with which God has chosen to crown the Christian heroism of your faith and charity ... As a pledge of the bountiful grace which you will receive from the Immaculate Virgin and the Apostle James, patrons of Spain ... we give to you, our dear sons of Catholic Spain, to the Head of State and his illustrious Government, to the zealous Episcopate and its self-denying clergy, to the heroic combatants and to all the faithful, our apostolic benediction."

That said, I don't think that Pius XII agreed with the technical details of Hitler's extermination of the Jews. Hitler saw the Jews as not just a religion, but as a race of people. Pius XII and the Catholic Church had a long history of giving Jews (and other non-Catholics) the choice of conversion or death. I believe that if Pius XII had run Hitler's concentration camps for Jews he would have gone to great lengths to convert them to Catholicism. Hitler did not give the Jews that opportunity.

You might say that Pius XII does not sound like much of a saint, but you are using your own definition of a Saint, not that of the Roman Catholic Church. There are many Saints who were mass murderers. As long as they killed non-Catholics, with the idea in mind of converting the survivors to Catholicism, they are considered to be heroes of the church.

Bill Clinton, Pius XI, Hitler and Mussolini

No, this is not one of my blogs comparing famous historical persons, with shock value from the juxtapositioning of people Americans are trained to see as saints and demons.

I've added some serious essays to www.iiipublishing.com that have not been posted in this blog. I am just letting you know about them, in case you want to read them.

Yesterday I posted Clinton Era Memories. Remember President Bill Clinton, who was supposed to represent a return to liberalism after a decade of Reagan and Bush? I sure do.

Then there is Pius XI. I am going to be writing a lot more about him because I found a book by Avro Manhattan, The Vatican in World Politics, at a used book sale. This had been very helpful in filling in the factual details about the relationship of fascism to the Roman Catholic Church. Here are the links to the first two articles:

Pius XI and the Rise of Benito Mussolini
Pius XI and the Rise of Adolf Hitler

Look forward to future essays on Pius XI and the rise of fascism in Spain, Austria, Slovakia, Poland, and France. Then there is Pius XII, who helped Pius XI with all that and continued to support fascist regimes during World War II until it became clear that the Allies would win the war.