I THE SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE
Although in most countries resistance movements were militarily insignificant, everywhere—including Germany and Italy—they helped restore a sense of national self-respect, and concentrated minds on the shape of the future that Allied military ascendancy opened up. In honouring that resistance, we should not exaggerate its extent, or imagine that its strategic contribution was more than exiguous. Even a generous estimate of the highest number of resisters in France sets it at 2 per cent of all adults. In Germany there were isolated resistance groups, of various political colourations, and degrees of ineffectuality, although in Italy by early 1945 some quarter of a million people were ultimately involved in an armed anti-Fascist partisan movement that acted as the long arm of the Allies in the liberation of the northern areas of the country. They tied down fourteen of the thirty-one German and Fascist divisions in Italy; thirty-five thousand of them were killed and a further twenty-one thousand seriously wounded.1
Like altruism in wartime, resistance was as much a matter of outlook, upbringing, and temperament as of ideological conviction, a dangerous form of doing the decent thing. Determining when resistance commenced is as imprecise as gauging which acts constituted it, but in virtually every European country Christians were closely involved, the general trend, for them as well as for everyone else, being from passive to active resistance as the depredations and exactions of the occupiers grew more desperate and German defeat seemed more probable.
Resistance by Christians was complicated by ethical concerns that did not trouble many Communists, for whom the ends justified any means, regardless of their impact on innocent bystanders. Apart from Romans 13’s exhortation to obey Caesar, more recently popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX and Leo XIII had strongly condemned any rebellion against legitimate authority, including rebellion by Catholic Poles or Irish. The experience of the Cartel des Gauches in France during the mid-1920s, and even more so of revolutionary Mexico, led Pius XI to qualify that position, although the Spanish Civil War rapidly indicated that the right of revolt—by Nationalist soldiers—could occasion greater evils than the Republic’s initial injustices, and led the pope to reconfirm the original position. Beyond the pope, Catholic resisters could fall back on classical notions of resistance to tyranny, albeit complicated by the fact that modern tyrants were not morally degenerate monarchs, but democratically elected politicians, whose anti-constitutional activities enjoyed the widespread consent of people whose views could be manipulated with methods unknown in the ancient world. That also complicated the response of Lutherans, who, furthermore, had to transcend such local values as obedience, conscientiousness, fortitude and service to the community, values which the Nazi regime had made its own.2
There were other complications. Opposing foreign occupation was one thing, but should resistance be extended to such collaborating regimes as Vichy, about which many Christians initially harboured illusions, and not simply because of its ostentatious subscription to some of the Christian virtues, for Vichy corporatism was a room with many mansions? Lower clergy and religious who resisted were doubly disobedient, both to the legally constituted government and to their immediate ecclesiastical superiors, who necessarily played a more cautious game in proportion with their greater public responsibilities. Vichy enjoyed the virtually unanimous support of the French ecclesiastical hierarchy, who—with some exceptions—denounced resisters as ‘dissidents’, ‘bandits’ or ‘terrorists’, and refused to contemplate clergy acting as chaplains to the Maquis until the pope authorised them through the nuncio. Some of the most trenchant criticism of the feeble hierarchy came from Catholic intellectuals such as the diplomat and writer Paul Petit, whom the Germans guillotined in Cologne in August 1944.3
It is also difficult to determine whether a person’s Christianity, or for that matter Marxism, rather than patriotic abhorrence for the Boche invader, was the crucial motivating factor in their lonely choice to resist. Clearly it was important to the splenetic writer Georges Bernanos and cooler philosopher—theologian Jacques Maritain, who elected to oppose Nazism and Vichy from respectively Brazil and the USA. Between December 1940 and November 1941 Bernanos wrote a series of long impassioned letters to the English, and later to the Americans, regarding the ‘fairy tale’ of the little island’s resistance to Nazism, ‘a child’s dream made real by grown men’. The letters were all the more moving in that their author had never visited England at all, celebrating an idea of it untroubled by the realities.4 Maritain had travelled from support for the Action Français—proscribed by Pius XI in 1926—to being an opponent of Fascism and racism (his wife Raissa was of Jewish extraction) and an advocate of a federal Europe that would be a reconstitution of medieval Christendom on the basis of human values, the right to work, free association and assembly, and free speech. Exiled in New York, Maritain acted as the unofficial ambassador of Free France, since Vichy continued to maintain an ambassador to Washington. Similar powerful voices from abroad were the Christian convert Maurice Schumann in London, and André Colin, the former secretary-general of the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française in Beirut.
For many Christian intellectuals in France, resistance to the occupation built on moral and religious objections to Nazism (and governmental appeasement of it) that they had repeatedly registered in the inter-war years as part of what some call the ‘pre-resistance’. It is commonplace to say that no one read Mein Kampf; many Catholic clerics and thinkers who would resist Nazism clearly had and warned about the totalitarian drive of the modern state and the worship of class or race. In France, some of the most trenchant criticism of Nazism in the 1930s had come from Catholic journals, such as L’Aube or Sept, which metamorphosed under the occupation into primitively produced clandestine papers. Since the subscriber base for such journals always resembled the membership of a political party, their distribution networks formed the initial framework for organised resistance movements, which were distinct from much tighter military networks connected to the intelligence operations of the Allies.5 The case of Edmond Michelet at Brive, perhaps the first resister, who began by distributing a simple typed tract days after the invasion, shows how one act led to another, for he was soon involved in spiriting Austrian and German refugees over the Spanish border, going on to command a resistance group operating in nine departments until he was deported to Dachau in 1943.6
Christian charity formed another route into resistance activity, when it involved helping French or Allied soldiers, as well as German and Austrian refugees, to reach the relative safety of the ‘free’ zone at Vichy, the route to neutral Switzerland or Spain. Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse had already afforded such a service to Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco. Country clergy were rightly celebrated even during the war for granting sanctuary to Allied airmen, Jews and resisters on the run. It was a short but fateful step, from performing the duty of asylum towards strangers to allowing bell-towers and crypts to be used to house a clandestine arms cachet or press, as was the case at the churches of the Nativity in Saint-Etienne or at Montbéliard. Such actions could, and did, result in arrest, torture, deportation and death in German concentration camps. We have already mentioned the Lyons-and Paris-based group of Jesuit theologians that produced Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien. Unlike parish clergy or Catholic politicians, members of such orders could think and write without having to bow to a constituency. The group that wrote these impressive tracts was motivated by the conviction that ‘It is necessary to choose Christ or Hitler’, and the belief that every human being was deserving of respect, regardless of their ethnic origins or religion. Several of the tracts contained searing critiques of Nazi ideology, notably of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was described as ‘Germany’s holy book’, while the accounts of persecution of the Jews, towards whom they proposed an entirely renewed theology, were remarkable in their detail. Issues 6 and 7 in April–May 1942 were devoted to a lengthy attack on the theory and practice of antisemitism, while issues 13 and 14 in early 1943, which were devoted to Nazi policy in Poland, included the intelligence that ‘700,000 Jews had been brutally murdered on Polish territory and that there could be no doubt regarding Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jewry completely’.7
Every resistance group thought about how they planned to reform France in the future after what most of them saw as the moral and systemic failures of the 1930s, a decade famously described as ‘the hollow years’. The results of these urgent reflections mirrored the dominant political colouration of the resistance movement.8 In general, Christian resisters came from left-wing Christian Democrat circles, certain religious orders—notably the Jesuits and Dominicans—Catholic trades unionists and, last but not least, independent-minded aristocrats and the bourgeois officer class, which was overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative. There was no single Christian Democrat resistance movement, but most resistance groups contained Christians. In the occupied zone, where the enemy was clearly defined, there was considerable co-operation between Christians, of various political persuasions, and socialists; in the south, Christian opposition to Vichy tended to come from Christian Democrats repelled by the regime’s clerically tinged conservatism. After June 1941, when its tortuous ‘line’ towards the Germans and the Allies was eventually clarified by force of circumstances, the French Communist Party became an important element in the resistance with which many Christians were disposed to co-operate, despite the visceral anti-Communism of most of the French hierarchy.9 The concept of ‘humanism’ provided common ground between Communists willing to soft-pedal atheism and Christians who subscribed to various forms of ‘personalism’, best described as a Christianised and socially conscious form of individualism, or who entered factories and trades unions as worker priests during the occupation.10
The resistance proved that Catholics could co-operate with freemasons, socialists, Protestants and Jews, and provided what would become the Christian Democrat Mouvement Républicain Populaire with an impressive range of leaders. Indeed, in June 1943 the Christian Democrat Georges Bidault became president of the Conseil National de la Résistance after the betrayal and arrest of Jean Moulin. The main advocate of a new broad-based political ‘movement’, embodying the ideals that had guided the resistance, was a young Catholic student in Lyons called Gilbert Dru, who was a disciple of Mounier and Sangnier. Dru was hostile to the old political parties of the Third Republic. He wanted to purge the right of its involvement with the extremist Action Française and big business, but he also had little faith in the Radicals and Socialists, whose contribution to the resistance had been negligible. Acknowledging realities, he wished simultaneously to collaborate with, and counterbalance the Communists, provided they abandoned their primary allegiances to a foreign country. Although Dru himself never lived to see the fruits of his deliberations—he was arrested and executed by the Germans in July 1944—his various memoranda influenced the formation of the Mouvement Républicain de Libération, which subsequently became the Mouvement Républicain Populaire. Both the words ‘movement’ and (especially) ‘republican’ were significant, the first suggesting something more compelling than a mere political party, the second a very public Catholic recognition that the legacy of the Revolution was there to stay. In that the Mouvement was Catholic, democratic and progressive, it represented a significant break with the mindset of the traditional Catholic right.
The Mouvement’s founding manifesto called for a revolution that would not only free France from Vichy, but complete the imperfect Revolution of 1789 without its appalling violence. Its theorists sought to fuse freedom and justice so as to permit man to develop his full material and spiritual potential. In their view, man came first, followed by society, and then the state. The important groupings in life were anterior to the state. They attached enormous weight to ‘pre-political’ entities, beginning with the all-important family, and moving upwards through associations, communes, regions and trades unions, and above all the Church, which severally guaranteed man’s rights against the ‘spontaneous totalitarianism of the State’.11 Although the Mouvement was in favour of welfare, in the form of family allowances and housing benefits, and favoured more nationalisation of industry and central planning than its more market-orientated counterparts in Germany and Italy, it wished to limit the power of the state through an emphasis upon human rights, bicameralism, regional devolution and limits on presidential power. While it wanted worker participation in management, it opposed worker control; while it desired a social security system, and succeeded in creating one, it wanted that system’s beneficiaries rather than bureaucrats to be in charge. In foreign policy, which was controlled successively by Bidault and Schuman, the Mouvement initially flirted with the notion of being a mediator between East and West, while pursuing a hardline course towards Germany, but events transformed it into an Atlanticist and European-minded party, with the threat from Stalin soothing raw animosities towards the Germans.
The Mouvement joined the Socialists and Communists as one of the three main parties of the immediate post-war years. Initially, it enjoyed every prospect of success, since its leaders emerged with impeccable wartime credentials as part of the resistance, and its policies seemed to transcend conventional ideologies. The former history master Georges Bidault had been leader of its principal steering body, his autobiography a study in the discretion of concierges and close brushes with Milice and Gestapo.12 François de Menthon had escaped from a prisoner-of-war hospital, Pierre-Henri Teitgen from a train taking him to a concentration camp. Maurice Schumann, a Jewish convert to Christianity and the Mouvement’s first president, had been the BBC’s ‘Voice of France’ in London for four years. Another resister, Robert Schuman, provided a focus for the Mouvement’s more conservative supporters. The ramified organisations of Catholic Action and the Catholic trade union the CFTC (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens) provided the Mouvement’s lower-echelon leaders, although the eager support of the Catholic hierarchy was a more mixed blessing in a country where anticlericalism was entrenched and widespread.
The Mouvement did strikingly well during elections in 1945 and 1946, taking nearly 24 and 28 per cent of the vote in these contests, and managing to push the Communists into second place in that last election. This success was largely because the Mouvement was the only alternative open to conservative voters, whose traditional political parties had been discredited by the Vichy interlude. Wits claimed that MRP stood for ‘Machine pour Ramasser les Pétainistes’. It also did well among Catholic women, who for the first time had the right to vote, and made some inroads in traditionally working-class industrial regions such as Alsace–Lorraine and the Nord. It seemed that the Mouvement would succeed in reconciling the Republic and the Church and the latter with the working classes. In reality, the Mouvement suffered from several problems. It was not Catholic enough to attract the majority of Catholic voters, but it was too Catholic to get anything other than Catholic votes or to overcome anticlerical resentments.13 While most of its leaders were left-leaning Christian Democrats, many of its supporters were temporarily homeless conservatives, who departed in droves once de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français provided a major authoritarian and bonapartist alternative. In 1947 the Mouvement lost 75 per cent of the support it had gained in municipal elections in Paris the previous year, and its vote also slumped in the legislative elections in 1951.14
II NIGHT PASSES AND EVIL THINGS DEPART: ITALY AND GERMANY
In late July 1943 the Italian Fascist Grand Council passed a motion critical of Mussolini, who on 25 July was summarily dismissed by king Victor Emmanuel. For forty-five days Italians held massive popular demonstrations celebrating the fall of Fascism, burning down Party headquarters, and tearing posters and symbols from walls. The new government of marshal Pietro Badoglio concluded a secret armistice with the Allies before the latter were in a military position to exploit it. German troops poured into northern Italy, restoring Mussolini as head of a puppet republic on Lake Garda, and interning the ‘Badoglio swine’, that is Italian soldiers who had remained in their barracks rather than dispersing homewards. They were miserably treated. In a move that would soon seal the fate of the monarchy, Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio fled the capital for Brindisi in the south; in contrast pope Pius XII remained at his post in German-occupied Rome, defying Allied aerial bombardment, and sheltering opposition political leaders, and Jews, in Church buildings, actions which immeasurably enhanced his stature in the post-war period, when the Church seemed to many a rock of stability. In September 1943 the Vatican refused to recognise Mussolini’s new republic at Salò, thereby decisively distancing itself from the Fascist regime.
In the north an armed ‘anti-Fascist’ movement emerged, like a chill wind, with links to half-a-dozen political parties across the political spectrum. Their numbers rose from about nine thousand in September 1943 to twenty to thirty thousand fighters by early 1944, and to eighty-two thousand later that summer.15 They included many self-proclaimed Christian Democrats, including a large unit called Green Flame, and priests who sometimes recruited and organised partisans as well as sheltering and succouring them.16 Partisans fought a hit-and-run campaign against the Germans as exhausted British, American and Polish troops inched their way northwards towards the formidable ‘Gothic Line’ which field marshal Kesselring had thrown across Italy. As elsewhere in Europe, partisan warfare unleashed a horrific spiral of violence involving savage reprisals by the Germans whenever their troops were assassinated. At Marzabotto, near Bologna, an entire village of eighteen hundred souls was wiped out during reprisals. People connected with the resistance were arrested and tortured, including lifelong friends of such senior curial officials as Giovanni Battista Montini, the future pope Paul VI, a useful reminder that the Vatican was not somehow miraculously insulated from (or oblivious to) the horrors of war.17 The various partisan groups acquired a political face in the local and regional Committees of National Liberation that were established in areas they conquered from the Germans and their Fascist confederates. By Christmas 1943 nearly two hundred opposition politicians met in secret in the Lateran Palace to discuss Italy’s post-war future. In March 1944 Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist leader, announced the ‘shift of Salerno’ which enabled the PCI to support the royalist government, a shift that reflected Stalin’s desire not to jeopardise an Anglo-American landing in France through the extension westwards of the civil war already raging in Greece, although on the ground many Communist partisan groups were bent on far more radical objectives. In April 1945 the partisans instigated mass uprisings in the major cities of northern Italy, largely to afford their political leadership a say in the shaping of the country’s future. After saluting them at victory parades, the Allies quietly disarmed the partisans, so as to stymie plans for a thoroughgoing social revolution. This did not prevent a bloodbath of former ‘Fascists’, known as the epurazione, that claimed the lives of between twelve and fifteen thousand people.18
The discrediting of the Fascist experiment in forging a new Italian national identity meant that three alternative models (or myths) competed for dominance in the post-war period. Two of these were foreign in inspiration. Communism enjoyed enormous prestige, as the fighting prowess of the Red Army, and of wartime partisans, amplified older myths of the USSR as a workers’ paradise and of Stalin as everyone’s favourite uncle. Of course, few Italians—except the quarter of a million who fought alongside the Wehrmacht—had ever been to Russia, whereas millions of Italians had relatives in the land of opportunity across the Atlantic. Anti-Communism provided common ground for two other powerful forces that sought to shape a new Italian identity, although in other respects their relationship was uneasy: the United States, which had achieved an unparalleled economic and military dominance, and the Catholic Church, which had emerged from the wreckage of Fascism, as it had survived the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier. For a brief period the Church thought that it might reconquer Italy for Christian civilisation, a project that only partially overlapped, in the matter of anti-Communism, with the ascendancy of the US in the peninsula.19
These grandiose visions triumphed over the more mean-spirited policy of the British, who initially were given the leading role in the peninsula. The British sought a weak Italian monarchical regime, dependent on Britain’s diminished power in the Mediterranean; the US was concerned to create a self-confident Italian democracy and to restore Italian sovereignty as rapidly as possible. Whereas the British adopted an unpleasantly punitive attitude towards the Italians, Roosevelt’s awareness of the fickle electoral loyalties of six million Italian-Americans contributed to the US’s more sympathetic treatment of the anomalous ‘alleato nemico’.20 A ‘special relationship’ between Washington and the Vatican, which had begun with Myron Taylor’s appointment as Roosevelt’s personal representative, grew deeper as the Americans gradually abandoned their wartime indulgence of the Soviets and their optimism regarding Stalin’s willingness to co-operate in the reordering of the post-war world, and came round to Pius XII’s damning verdict upon Communism as the greatest danger for the future of Italy and European Christian civilisation as a whole. In December 1943 under-secretary of state Tardini formally advised Taylor that the Vatican had decided to abandon its prudent agnosticism towards forms of government in favour of democracy:
Only this kind of consent offers sufficient guarantees for the control of government by the people; it accustoms people to self-discipline; it makes it possible for everyone, from whatever class they come, to enter public life; it embraces all the vital forces of the country; it can gradually educate the Italian people towards the habit of moderation in political rivalries so that the general harmony of the country will not be impaired.21
For a crucial period, the Vatican effectively represented Italian interests in Washington, while the conference of US Catholic bishops, and New York’s redoubtable archbishop Spellman, whom Pius wanted to appoint as his secretary of state, also ensured that the voice of the Church was heard.22 The Communists retaliated with crude smears against both Pius and the Church in general, regarding the Catholic Church’s role in the war years and their aftermath. The Communist paper L’Unità ‘revealed’ the financial and material interests that were alleged to drive Vatican policy: ‘The robes of the papal nuncio in the USA are saturated not only with incense but with oil’ is representative of its leaden materialist manner. The Soviets meanwhile hired a professional anti-religious slanderer, Mikhail Markovich Sheinmann, to smear the reputation of the pope, an approach subsequently elaborated by the left-wing German playwright Rolf Hochhuth in his 1963 play The Deputy, which still influences uninformed views of Pius XII.23
The political vehicle for the defence of Christian values was the newly founded Christian Democratic Party of Alcide de Gasperi, who after a spell as foreign minister became prime minister in December 1945 and would remain in that post until 1953. The leadership of the Christian Democrats largely came from that of the former PPI. Based on clusters of like-minded individuals in Milan and Florence, its party statutes were adopted at a congress in Naples in July 1944. Without a party apparatus of its own, the DC initially broke with Don Sturzo’s earlier attempts to maintain a distance between Party and Church, although by the early 1950s it would ignore attempts by the pope to dictate policy. In addition to its network of twenty-five thousand parishes, the Church had quietly extended its influence during the Fascist period to parts of the urban working class, while carefully nurturing a new generation of political leaders through FUCI, the federation of university students under its president Giulio Andreotti, in which Giovanni Battista Montini had played a distinguished part. It took some time for the Vatican to acknowledge that the Christian Democrats were the ideal political vehicle for the defence of Catholic interests: it initially favoured a monarchy or an authoritarian regime along the lines of Salazar’s Estado Novo.24 Pius XII seems to have thought de Gasperi ‘too feeble’ in his toleration of the Communists and Socialists. Many in the Vatican wanted the Party to move to the right, whereas its leaders viewed it as a centre party moving to the left. But once the decision to support the Christian Democrats was reached, the Church made an enormous contribution to a party that came to be regarded as an ark of salvation for more than the Italian middle class, largely by providing a mass following for a parliamentary party of notables. Luigi Gedda’s Catholic Action capillary organisations quietly encompassed artists, businessmen, doctors, farmers and teachers, and Catholic welfare associations reached out even to the very poor. A party whose support was historically strongest in the traditionally ‘White’ areas of the north attracted southern notables, with their clienteles, and the sinister might of the mafia and camorra, through colossal reconstruction projects that poured money into the Mezzogiorno.25
It is important not to project on to the early Christian Democrats what they undoubtedly became by the mid-1950s: an opportunist party whose sole raison d’être was to occupy and hang on to power at any price.26 Although Christian Democrats came in various hues, roughly corresponding to the conservative right and a quasi-socialist left under Giuseppe Dossetti, they placed a keen emphasis on freedom under the rule of law, a principle that had tremendous resonance after the oppressions of Fascism and as the US-led free world squared up to the more resilient totalitarian menace. Apart from a Christian faith that brought him to mass every day, and his daughter to a convent, de Gasperi combined underlying principles with a definition of politics as a form of mediation. As a young man he had denounced the ‘religion of nationalism’, while his rejection of Fascism was based on first principles. ‘It is the concept of the Fascist State that I cannot accept,’ he explained to a Fascist tribunal, ‘for there are natural rights which the State cannot trample upon. I cannot accept the annihilation, the disciplining, as you say, of liberty.’27 Never again would bullying Jacobin minorities, or ‘conventicles’ as he had it, be allowed to take away the freedom of majorities without protest. The self-consciously centrist Christian Democrats were almost as unsparing in their condemnation of bourgeois materialism as they were of Communism: ‘the bourgeoisie has given us mechanical progress and not civilisation, because civilisation has above all a spiritual connotation’.28 They opposed Communism, not simply because of its atheism—although Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, was profuse in paying his respects to religion—but because everything, from education to property, would ultimately end up in the hands of the state, while all arrangements with the Communists would be preliminary expedients to the rule of one party. The Christian Democrats supported the family and small property ownership against the state, at the same time recommending the legal expropriation of both big business and large-scale landownership, albeit with adequate compensation for the former owners. Although the Party’s left-wing intelligentsia sought a ‘social state’, its middle-class farming and small-business base, and its supporters in industry, were hostile to anything that smacked of state interference.29
A narrowly won referendum sealed the fate of the monarchy in favour of a republic, but much of the Fascist state apparatus was left in place, contributing to the feeling on the left that there had been no radical break with the past. Career policemen and prefects replaced partisans who had briefly usurped their functions, while as minister of justice Togliatti himself introduced an amnesty for those affected by the process of epurazione, that is purges of former Fascists. They were so ubiquitous at every level of Italian administration that removing them, and replacing them with technically incompetent former partisans, would have spelled national disaster, but there was something morally distasteful about turning a blind eye to serial torturers.30
In these early years, de Gasperi’s primary concerns were with establishing a political framework for democracy; halting rampant inflation; reviving the economy with generous US assistance, which in the two years 1945–7 amounted to nearly US$2 billion; and securing the constitutional position of the Catholic Church through confirmation of the 1929 Lateran Accords.31 In its efforts to extend a hand to the country’s majority Catholic population, the Communist Party supported article 7, which guaranteed the Catholic Church’s position in the new republican Constitution, a measure which passed by 350 votes to 149. The Church regarded the existence of these rights as sufficient basis for its own extensive interventions in the post-war political process. In November 1946 the Vatican warned de Gasperi, who had several leftists in his coalition government, that ‘any kind of collaboration with the anticlerical parties, not only in the municipality of Rome but in the government, is no longer admissible. If the Christian Democrats were to continue with such collaboration, they would be considered a party favouring the enemy. The Christian Democrats would no longer have our support or our sympathy.’ Having secured everything he could from a coalition with the left, and with an eye to president Truman’s squaring up to the Soviets on a global scale, in May 1947 de Gasperi decided to reform his government without Communist and Socialist participation, and to postpone the elections due in October 1947 until the following April. Reassured by this step, the Church swung its full might behind the Party. It was a turbulent period. The Peace Treaty with the Allies was deeply unpopular and peasant unrest turned violent in Sicily; six hundred thousand landless labourers went on strike in the Po valley. The left managed to weaken itself when a pro-Western Italian Social Democratic Party split from the Socialists, whose Marxist remnant then decided to join with the Communists in contesting the election as the Democratic Popular Front. They chose Garibaldi as their electoral symbol, although the Christian Democrats transformed him into a Janus-faced figure with the moustached monster in the Kremlin lurking around the back.
During the latter months of 1947 economic discontent assumed violent forms in the northern industrial cities, the Po valley and parts of the south, where the mafia was used to suppress peasant discontent. Although Togliatti was concerned to prevent the sort of civil war that had gone badly for the Communists in Greece when the Allies took the royalist side, both former partisans and his own more radical supporters were clearly bent on toppling the government of de Gasperi, towards whom the US finally abandoned any residual reserve. At a meeting in February 1948 with the Irish ambassador to the Holy See, Pius XII seemed worn out and deeply pessimistic. ‘If they [meaning the Communists] have a majority,’ he said, ‘what can I do to govern the Church as Christ wants Me to govern?’ Ambassador Walshe offered the pope asylum in Dublin. Pius replied: ‘My post is in Rome, and, if it be the will of the Divine Master, I am ready to be martyred for him in Rome.’32
The US began to prepare for the possibility that the Communist Party might react to defeats in the elections by seizing power in northern Italy, particularly if these defeats coincided with the planned withdrawal of Allied forces which would leave battle-hardened former partisans with nothing more fearsome to face than a demoralised Italian army and the paramilitary Carabinieri. The US National Security Council anxiously contemplated a nightmare scenario in which an exiled democratic Italian government would continue to challenge a Communist-dominated mainland from the Mediterranean ‘Taiwans’ of Sardinia and Sicily.33 Truman’s government began supplying the Italian army with small arms, while US warships anchored off all of Italy’s main ports in the weeks before the election. The US gave the Vatican Bank the one hundred million lire proceeds of the sale of surplus military equipment to put at the disposal of Catholic Action and the Christian Democrats.
Events in eastern Europe, notoriously the murder of the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, which the Italian left tried to deny in weasel fashion, increased the attractions of the American way over a totalitarianism that was losing its romantic wartime lustre. Regarding Italy as a ‘test case’ in its struggle with Communism, the Truman administration ploughed in US$176 million interim aid, with US ambassador James Dunn omnipresent as each shipment of supplies arrived in Italian harbours. American-Italian ‘friendship trains’ then distributed the goods throughout the country. The US offered a carrot, in the form of Anglo-French agreement to the return of Trieste and the Valle d’Aosta to the Italians, while secretary of state George Marshall waved a stick by threatening to cut all aid if the left won the Italian elections. The Italian-American community was mobilised to write to the voters of the old country, and cardinal Spellman warned: ‘I cannot believe that the Italian people…will choose Stalinism against God, Soviet Russia against America.’ The bishops of Dublin and Kerry raised £50,000 for the Christian Democrats, and Irish Catholics followed the elections with keen interest.
In Italy itself, the Church mobilised on a massive scale, believing that the success of an alien Communism would be inexplicable other than as a triumph of superior organisation.34 Milan’s doughty cardinal Schuster instructed his flock: ‘Catholics must cast their vote for candidates who they know will preserve the rights of the Church. It is impermissible for a member of the Church to cast his vote for a candidate he knows to be hostile to the Church, or hostile to the application in public life of Christian moral principles.’ Ricardo Lombardi, the Jesuit editor of Civiltà Cattolica, was so omnipresent and voluble in his attempts to rally the troops for what he regarded as an apocalyptic fight with the powers of darkness that he was known as ‘God’s microphone’. As his journal explained: ‘Bishop and priest dare not wait until they are in front of the firing squad, and civil and religious liberties have been extinguished. If the Communists win the election, the Church will have to be administered from behind the Iron Curtain.’35 Although the Concordat and Electoral Law prohibited clergy from attempting to influence voters, parish priests effectively became propagandists for the Christian Democrats, while Luigi Gedda’s gigantic lay network of Catholic Action assumed the task of getting out the Catholic vote through the agency of ‘civic committees’ (comitati civici) which made up for the Christian Democrats’ lack of a local Party apparatus. A network of nuclei, whose leaders were responsible for mobilising the Catholic vote, encompassed virtually every house, farm and factory in Italy. When the Communists accused the Church of bringing even the dead or the insane to the polls, the Church responded: ‘The indignation of the Communists is as reasonable as that of the famous sword-dueller, proverbial in Italy, who shouted at his opponent, “But if you don’t stand still, how can I run you through?”’ ‘Labour chaplains’ were sent into the factories to combat Marxism at its source, while students from seminaries and universities were seconded to help the bishops in the task of getting out the huge female Catholic vote. Christian Democrat propaganda, whose main symbol was a shield with a cross inscribed ‘Libertas’, painted the not inconsiderable Red spectre on the wall, and reminded Italians that it was the US rather than Russia that was providing such prodigious quantities of aid as well as the alluring luxury items to be had on the US-fed black market. Posters showed ‘Mongol’ Red Army soldiers battering the Christian Democrat shield with their hammers and sickles, or despondent Italian families pondering the only aid the Russians gave—dynamite and pistols. ‘Save your children’ said a poster showing a gay little girl about to be crushed by an enormous Soviet tank. Pius XII never failed to broach the dark prospect of Cossacks watering their horses in Rome’s delightful fountains.
Although the Communists still retained a certain leather-jacketed and neckerchiefed glamour, and dominated high culture and the universities for decades ahead, America—rather unfairly—signified cheap watches, chewing gum, chocolate, nylons, boogie-woogie, DDT and a relaxation of relations between the sexes rather than university faculties that included Einstein. It was no competition, although ironically the Church may have had greater sympathy with the austerity and sexual puritanism of the Communists than with the hedonism and materialism of the Americans.36 In the rougher game routinely played in the Mezzogiorno, bishops and priests refused the sacraments (or a Christian funeral) to Communist and Socialist leaders, or banned them from the prestigious committees that organised the feasts of local patron saints, while mafia gangsters shot left-wing agitators or lobbed the occasional grenade into meetings of aggrieved peasants.
Whether by fair means or foul, the results increased the Christian Democrat poll from 35 to 48.5 per cent of the electorate, giving them an absolute majority of half the seats in the chamber. Having begun life as a party opposed to the system of liberal Italy, political Catholicism became—until the early 1990s as it proved—the main party of government. Civiltà Cattolica welcomed the outcome of the elections: ‘On 18 April the Italian people decided for Christ and his representatives. With their own bodies the Italian people have erected a bulwark around the cliffs of the Vatican, thereby maintaining the sacred character of Rome and its centuries-old role as a centre of Christian culture.’ Pius XII declared that ‘the skies of Italy are now lightened with a new hope of tranquillity and order which will make speedily possible the material and social reconstruction of the country…this day had also revived the confidence of Europe and the whole world’. However, the outcome had not been a Christian ‘reconquest’ of Italian society. Rather, the Church found itself battling a more insidious enemy in the form of Hollywood and American consumerism, while the Christian Democrats ignored the Church’s desire for Italy to practise an ‘equidistance’ between the superpowers, as they opted for membership of NATO.
Unlike Italy no significant armed resistance developed in Germany; resistance was confined to lone individuals and isolated groups to which over-large labels are routinely attached for political reasons. As the SS secret monitoring of popular opinion reveals, large numbers of Christians had remained immune to the political faith of Nazism, sensing that it could offer no spiritual consolation or that it was actively satanic. The progress of the western Allies through France and of the Russians into East Prussia, together with relentless aerial bombardment and the non-appearance of wonder weapons, brought widespread disillusionment. Public hangings and shootings of deserters and dissenters, added to an epidemic of suicides by the true faithful, meant that in a metaphysical sense Nazism had collapsed before the Allies arrived.
Christians of all denominations had been active in the Kreisau Circle around Graf Helmuth James von Moltke, who presided over highly illegal discussions that sought to establish a moral framework for a post-National Socialist Germany. Merely being connected to such activities proved to be a death sentence, as the Jesuit Delp and Moltke himself discovered, once these discussions were deemed to have been part of attempts to assassinate the German Führer. Even expressing an abstract affirmative in the confessional to the question of whether tyrants could be killed, was enough to condemn the Munich priest chaplain Wehrle, since he should have known the identity of the tyrant concerned. A more exclusive group of practising Christians were among the brave individuals who in July 1944 made the most serious attempt on Hitler’s life, a doomed enterprise that they felt they must undertake in order to testify to the existence of ‘another Germany’ uncontaminated by Nazism.
At the end of the Second World War, Germany was not simply physically ruined—a chaos of severed bridges, shattered masonry and twisted railways. Its people were also bewildered, exhausted and traumatised, not to speak of those Germans, slave labourers and refugees who were victims of National Socialism. Both Nazism’s more than rhetorical ‘national community’ and the dislocations of total war had had what sociologists call a modernising effect, levelling hierarchies and bridging denominational, regional and class divides. Germany’s traditional elite groups had been either irreparably weakened or destroyed, ensuring that they would not exert the deleterious influence they had manifested during the Weimar Republic. But there was a noteworthy exception to the fate that otherwise befell the armed forces, heavy industry and major landowners, which is important for a spiritual, as opposed to sociological, audit of Germany at the end of the war. Although the Churches suffered their share of human and material loss, in the form of bombed-out buildings, pastors and priests who had been imprisoned or killed, the disruption of their capacity to reproduce through seminaries and theological faculties, and, in the case of the Catholic Church, the virtual eradication of its lay organisations, they were the one organisation to survive the war relatively intact. Observers compared the situation of the German Churches to that of early Christians in the era of the Roman catacombs, an analogy that had the requisite odour of martyrdom and the promise that things could only improve.
In 1945 the Allied occupying powers and the broad German public had a greater regard for the conduct of the Churches under National Socialism than would be the case by the 1960s, the beginning of decades of therapeutic inquisition that has since become tawdry. As if to symbolise this, in July 1945 the BBC broadcast a remarkable memorial service celebrating the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Holy Trinity Church in London’s Kingsway, Bonhoeffer having been murdered a few months before. Virtually all sections of German resistance to Nazism had had a Christian presence, with a third of Catholic clergy coming into some sort of conflict with the regime, in the form of warnings, threats, fines, arrest or imprisonment. At the end of the war, both major Churches proved adept at transforming individual clergy who had resisted Nazism, such as the Catholics Delp and Galen, or the Protestants Bonhoeffer and Niemöller, into representatives of institutions whose corporate conduct was less gloriously heroic than the ‘Lion of Münster’ who, consistent to the end, was soon roaring at the petty injustices of the uncomprehending British. The Allies subjected the Churches to few restrictions and refrained from interfering with their internal organisation. Clergy were among the few Germans allowed to travel freely. Even the Soviets, whose conduct in occupied Germany was otherwise disgraceful, respected the sites and symbols of Christian worship. This was at once attributable to the co-operation of Christians and Marxists on the National Committee for ‘Free Germany’, as well as the residual Orthodox religiosity of many Red Army soldiers. Although bishop Preysing of Berlin ostentatiously refused to have any dealings with either the Soviets or the German Communists, whom he regarded as the moral equals of the Nazis, a certain pragmatic continuity in dealing with totalitarian regimes was guaranteed by bishop Heinrich Wienken, who had performed a similar function under Hitler.
Because of the moral regard they enjoyed, churchmen played a considerable role in the selection of people who would help in the reconstruction of Germany, providing testimonials of a person’s political probity which helped smooth their way through the more or less stringent ‘de-Nazification’ procedures which each occupier adopted. Some clergy took the opportunity to correct what they thought was the Allies’ (and especially the British) predisposition towards the political left, a conservative clerical bias that, among others, the Christian Democrat Leo Schwering, who had himself been imprisoned by the Gestapo, highlighted.37 Many churchmen were unhappy with the entire process of ‘de-Nazification’, since its use of clumsy categories failed to distinguish the innocent and the hapless from the guilty. As Martin Niemöller said in 1948, ‘de-Nazification’ also opened the floodgates for personal hatreds masquerading as civic virtue. Church-led opposition to ‘de-Nazification’ raised wider questions of collective and individual guilt. Even the radical theologian Karl Barth wondered what was the point of the exercise, since enthusiasm for Nazism seemed to have evaporated long before the end of the war. While the Protestant bishop Theophil Wurm was prepared to see war criminals punished, he thought the Allies were in breach of the maxim nulla poena sine lege as they sought to criminalise actions or expressions of opinion that were technically legal under German law before 1945. Bishop Galen of Münster used a sermon to protest: ‘if people suggest that the entire German people, and each of us individually, are guilty of crimes which happened in foreign lands and in Germany itself, and above all those committed in concentration camps, then that is an unjustified and untrue accusation’. Pius XII concurred. In February 1946 the pope remarked, while investing Galen, Frings and Preysing with the red hat, ‘that it is wrong to treat someone as guilty, when personal guilt cannot be proved, only because he belonged to a certain community. Ascribing collective guilt to an entire people and treating it accordingly is to interfere in God’s prerogative.’38 Both Niemöller and cardinal Frings were prominent in persuading the Allies to abandon their blanket ‘de-Nazification’ procedures. Frings, who proved himself a real thorn in the Allied flesh at every opportunity, denounced this ‘Nazi inquisition’ so forcefully that the chairman of the German Review Board resigned, warning that no Catholic lawyer would ever serve in his place. For once, clergymen demonstrated cold-blooded realism while the Allies floundered around in a woolly-minded self-righteousness. In reality, there was a more urgent, pragmatic reason for not carrying out wholesale purges of former Nazis, namely that a blanket juridical purge would make reconstruction almost impossible, a lesson apparently not learned either in contemporary Iraq. Of the twenty-one skilled personnel in Cologne’s waterworks, only three had not belonged to the NSDAP; of the 112 doctors in Bonn, 102 were Nazi Party members. Simply to dismiss people on the basis of their membership of proscribed organisations was to invite chaos. By September 1948 ‘de-Nazification’ had effectively been abandoned.39
The moral authority of the Churches was further boosted in German eyes by the role they played in averting widespread disease and mass starvation in the winter of 1945. Between 1945 and 1949 fifty-five thousand Protestants were involved in distributing sixty-two million tons of food and clothing, as well as processing the details of some ten million people who had lost touch with their families. They also organised youth camps for the large number of young people who might otherwise have fallen into crime, vice and delinquency. Before and after the watershed of May 1945, Europe witnessed the largest migrations it had undergone since the end of the Roman Empire. Some ten million ethnic Germans fled or were forcibly expelled from East Pomerania, Danzig, Lower Silesia and East Brandenburg, to be followed by those driven out of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. Since international refugee organisations were confined to helping non-German ‘displaced persons’, the burden of dealing with these huge numbers of indigent people largely fell upon Christian charities. The Vatican managed to send 950 goods trains loaded with food, clothing and medical materials. The Catholic Caritas Association distributed about 150,000 tons of aid between 1945 and 1962, and successfully relocated four hundred hospitals and charitable institutions that would otherwise have been lost beyond the Oder–Neisse line. The newly minted cardinal Frings endeared himself to many Germans when in a radio broadcast he allowed that to steal food or fuel when in dire need was not a mortal sin, which led to the new verb fringsen, or to steal for worthy reasons.40 Protestants tried to prick the consciences of their ecumenical contacts with harrowing photographs of starving people, while simultaneously enjoining their own fellowship to spare something for the dispossessed from their meagre rations. After an unwarrantable delay, both Churches established dedicated agencies to assist those Christians who had been persecuted for racial reasons.
The Churches were also at the forefront of providing explanations for horrors that leading historians, judging from the octogenarian Friedrich Meinecke’s pitiful The German Catastrophe, with its advocacy of Goethe Societies as the solution to Germany’s spiritual crisis, seemed unable satisfactorily to explain. It is misleading to imagine that there was no serious reflection on the evils of the immediate past, although modern left-liberal historians have almost succeeded in popularising the view that they discovered the evils of ‘Fascism’ in the 1960s, a conceit hard to reconcile with Eugen Kogon’s 1949 Der SS-Staat or Karl Dietrich Bracher’s monumental 1950–4 Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik.
At the time, religious thinkers, such as Gustav Grundlach or Romano Guardini, who had gone into exile or semi-retirement in the preceding twelve years emerged to find that they had a wider audience than they ever imagined despite the abstruseness of their work or the considerable limitations on what could be published. They were joined by a substantial number of conservative writers who applied two of their principal past complaints about Western modernity—namely ‘massification’ and ‘de-Christianisation’—to National Socialism (and Communism), discovering in democracy a new form of defence of Western civilisation against what they were learning to call ‘totalitarianism’.41 Similar notions were popular among more exclusively religious thinkers who emphasised the evils of secularisation, and mankind’s abandonment of a divinely decreed moral order, which had been replaced by an amoral world in which demonic forces used ruthless demagogues and crooked simulacra of religion to propel the masses towards ever darker moral degradation.42
This was the view taken by Konrad Adenauer in his first major speech as provisional chairman of the Rhenish Christian Democratic Union before a large audience at Cologne university. Like de Gasperi, who was sixty-four when he became Italian prime minister, Adenauer—who was sixty-nine in 1945—benefited from the discredit which totalitarianism had wrought upon the cult of youth. Although not without dry humour, Adenauer had a face of almost oriental impassivity, as if carved from some exotic hardwood. He had become lord mayor of the Rhineland metropolis in 1917 and had already negotiated a seven-year period of Allied military occupation after the First World War. In late 1945 the British military authorities inadvertently facilitated the coolly impassive elderly gentleman’s nationwide political ascendancy by rudely dismissing him from the post the Americans had appointed him to a few months earlier. His Cologne speech was a masterly mixture of shame regarding the crimes of the recent past with pride in the steadfastness of the German spirit. Although unsparing in blaming such groups as the generals and industrialists, Adenauer acknowledged a more pervasive German tendency to treat the state as an idol, sacrificing on its altar ‘the dignity and value of the individual person’.43
Both Churches also made public pronouncements on the broader subject of guilt, something they had ostentatiously denied after the 1914–18 war when German ‘guilt’ became part of the Versailles peace treaty. The Catholic hierarchy were the first to make a solemn statement on the subject, in the joint pastoral letter issued by the Fulda Conference of Bishops in August 1945. This began with a rousing declaration regarding the impermeability of the faithful, or their refusal to bow the knee to Baal, as the bishops put it, before a measured acknowledgement of both crimes and moral complicity for which some of their fellow Catholics and Germans had been responsible:
Terrible things were done in Germany before the war and by Germans during the war in occupied countries. We lament this deeply: many Germans, including those from our own ranks, allowed themselves to be deceived by the false teachings of National Socialism, remaining indifferent towards crimes against human freedom and human dignity; the conduct of many facilitated these crimes, many others became criminals themselves. A heavy responsibility applies to those who could have used their influence to prevent such crimes, and who did not do so, but rather made these crimes possible and thereby declared their solidarity with the criminals.44
Among those who failed to be impressed by the conduct of the Catholic bishops was Adenauer, who in early 1946 commented on an essay titled ‘The Silence of the German People’ by Max Pribilla, a Jesuit schoolfriend, and editor of the periodical Stimmen der Zeit. Giving the lie to the contemporary conceit that conservatives somehow conspired in a form of public amnesia regarding Nazi criminality, Adenauer said that everyone was aware of the illegality of ‘the pogroms against the Jews in 1933 and 1938’ and the ‘unparalleled barbarities’ in Poland and Russia. He argued that the bishops should have agreed among themselves jointly to denounce these things from their pulpits on a particular day, and that if they had done so many crimes could have been prevented: ‘That did not happen, and for that there is no excuse.’ If the bishops had been imprisoned or sent to concentration camps so much the better.
In October 1945 the Protestant Church leadership weighed in with the ‘Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt’, which was signed by eleven prominent Church leaders, including Otto Dibelius and Martin Niemöller, as an indispensable precondition for German Protestantism’s readmission to the ecumenical community symbolised by the newly founded World Council of Churches, a delegation of which visited the Germans. It was a potentially difficult moment since countries that had fought the Nazis were being exposed to the full, post-facto shock of the extent of Nazi criminality, while the Germans felt deeply aggrieved at such injustices as ‘de-Nazification’, mass expulsions of population and being treated as international pariahs. The key passage of the declaration read:
We are the more grateful for this visit [from the World Council of Churches], as we with our people know that not only are we in a great company of suffering, but also in a solidarity of guilt. With great pain do we say: through us endless sufferings have been brought to many peoples and nations. What we have often borne witness to before our congregations, we now declare in the name of Jesus Christ against the spirit which found a terrible expression in the National Socialist regime of tyranny, but we accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously and for not loving more ardently. Now a new beginning can be made in our churches. Grounded on the Holy Scriptures, directed with all earnestness towards the only Lord of the Church, they now proceed to cleanse themselves from influences alien to the faith and to set themselves in order. Our hope is in the God of grace and mercy that He will use our churches as His instruments and will give them authority to proclaim His word, and in obedience to His will to work creatively among ourselves and among our whole people.45
Perhaps the most astonishing feat of the immediate post-war period was the creation of two avowedly interdenominational Christian political parties, which the far-sighted few—such as Adam Stegerwald and Konrad Adenauer—had advocated in the inter-war era and whose attractions had multiplied under the conditions of the Nazi regime. The presence of Stalin’s legions on the Elbe further concentrated minds. Ecumenical activity was sanctioned at the highest ecclesiastical levels, since the Catholic Church quickly realised that it alone was not strong enough to combat a left to which Protestants might defect unless there were a powerful interdenominational conservative alternative. In Bavaria, where a nostalgic monarchism initially weakened the right, one of the key supporters of this development was Josef Müller, whom we encountered earlier as the key intermediary between the pope, the German conservative resistance and the British in 1940. In June 1945 Pius XII implicitly gave Müller the green light for interconfessional political activity, when he said that as Catholics and Protestants had stood together against Hitler they should work together against Marxism.46 Both the Catholic hierarchy in Germany and such leading Protestant figures as bishop Otto Dibelius supported the new Christian Democrat parties. Although the Protestants were more circumspect, the Catholics were never going to support the SPD, whose leader Schumacher’s embittered outbursts included calling the Catholic hierarchy the ‘fifth occupying power’, and who in 1945 said: ‘It is precisely the Nazis and reactionaries who for better or worse want to keep what they have in hand and who would as gladly camouflage this under the term “Christian” as they previously did under the term “national”.’
While the Social Democrats simply picked up where they left off in 1933, failing to adjust either their Marxist dogma or over-centralised organisation to evolving realities, the Nazis’ virtual obliteration of the rest of the party-political landscape, and the Allies’ limitation of what was acceptable on the right, provided a crucial opening which a remarkable generation of German politicians took creative advantage of. Occupation conditions meant that the new Party was inherently multi-centred and had subtle regional emphases. A witty French observer once described the Christian Democrats as ‘socialist and radical in Berlin, clerical and conservative in Cologne, capitalist and reactionary in Hamburg, and counter-revolutionary and particularistic in Bavaria’. Actually, a better way of describing the CSU would be to imagine that Scotland had undergone a Catholic Counter-Reformation.47
Political activity in Germany resumed about six weeks after the end of the war. Separate Allied occupation zones, the disruption and restriction of communications, and large numbers of robust individuals with a strong local following entailed party-political initiatives of a highly localised character, with the Christian Democrats only coalescing into the Christian Democratic Union or Christian Social Union (the more particularist Bavarian branch of the Party) in the course of 1947, a development that roughly paralleled the Western Allies’ decisions to merge the various western occupied zones. Andreas Hermes and Jacob Kaiser founded the first ‘German Christian Democratic Union’ (CDUD) in wartorn Berlin in June 1945. They sought to nationalise heavy industry, to afford workers a huge say in the running of businesses, and, last but not least, to establish a neutral, Christian socialist Germany that would mediate between West and East. Both a programme that seemed more socialist than Christian and the machinations of the totalitarian Socialist Unity Party ensured that the former capital exerted less influence than some of the western regions.
Initially, the Catholic culture of the westerly Rhineland had more enduring significance for the CDU than the former Prussian–German capital, although over time the CDU has taken on the confessional colouration of whichever area it seeks votes in. Adenauer made strenuous efforts to recruit Protestants to the new party, winning over such distinguished figures as Eugen Gerstenmaier, Gustav Heinemann, Hermann Ehlers, Friedrich Holzapfel, Ludwig Erhard, Robert Pferdmenges, Gerhard Schröder and Otto Schmidt. In return for a fair share of influence within what was a heavily Catholic party, in key areas Protestants were allowed to set the policy agenda. This was despite the fact that a Dominican priory at Walberberg had been the setting for the earliest discussions of Party policy in which the ‘social’ aspects of Catholicism seemed dominant. This tendency was short lived. The spirit of Thomas Aquinas may have hovered over the Party’s 1947 Ahlen Programme, but two years later that of Adam Smith prevailed in the CDU’s Düsseldorf Programme.48
Compared with the Centre Party, a party of confessional beleaguerment, which limped along until the Catholic hierarchy deliberately killed it, and despite its high levels of support among practising Catholics, Christian Democracy seemed much more attractive to Protestants, to whom it made important concessions. It proclaimed that doctrinal differences between Christians were less important than the chasm that separated them from atheist materialists. Its emphasis upon social justice, largely derived from the tradition of Social Catholicism, would smooth the rougher edges of free-market capitalism, while stopping short of collectivist state socialism, thereby attracting some workers to what was otherwise a party of bourgeois self-assertion. A powerful Protestant component, deliberately rewarded with a fairer proportion of posts than a Protestant-dominated German state had ever conceded Catholics, ensured that social justice would not stifle individual enterprise. Ludwig Erhard’s ‘social market economy’ did not camouflage the fact that this was a conservative pro-enterprise party, with the ‘social’ concerns increasingly hived off to committees of ecclesiastics and lay experts. As the official definition said: ‘The “social market economy” means that the market is regulated by the needs of society—i.e. the activity of free and competent agents is directed to the highest possible degree towards the economic benefit and social justice of all.’ By the late 1950s Catholic thinkers were worried that the interconfessional political experiment had been too successful, with the Protestants acting as a Trojan horse for liberalism and secularism by another name. These fears were increased by the CDU’s coalitions with predominantly Protestant parties.
The incipient Federal Republic was always more than an ‘economic miracle’. It is easy to forget that post-war Germany’s new rulers came from a generation that did fourteen hours of Latin and Greek each week at school, and that many of them were more than conventionally devout. In broad cultural terms, the CDU reflected Adenauer’s conviction that a fault line ran through Germany itself. Germany west of the Elbe and south of the Weser had been Christianised a millennium before the rest of the country, whose eastern regions had been pagan as late as the fourteenth century. The Prussian cult of the state had grown in this thin soil, itself providing the root stock upon which Nazism had thrived.49 The CDU would be aggressively pro-Western, eliding Schumacher’s socialism with an ‘alien’ Prussianism as well as the ‘oriental’ Kremlin, while its enthusiasm for Europe meant that for the first time a centrist conservative party could appear more internationalist than the parties of the left which persistently played the nationalist card. The Rhinelander Adenauer joined his fellow ‘frontiersmen’, de Gasperi from the former Habsburg Trentino and the Alsatian Robert Schuman, in discussing the future of Europe in a German that all three men spoke fluently.50 The Western, Catholic orientation of the CDU, or what one distinguished scholar has called ‘a German and European policy, with Cologne cathedral as centre’, appalled a number of prominent Protestants who combined anti-Americanism with anti-Catholicism. The theologian Karl Barth routinely denounced the US while finding every conceivable excuse for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Germans and Europeans, he felt, should opt out of the Cold War, pursuing what he claimed was Jesus Christ’s neutralist ‘third way’. Martin Niemöller similarly attacked the newly founded West German state as a Catholic confection, and denounced Adenauer for appearing to be in no hurry to forfeit Catholic dominance through reunification with a larger number of east German Protestants: ‘the present form of the West German state’, he declared in 1949, ‘was conceived in Rome and born in Washington’. While the Catholic Church was concerned about the fate of the much smaller numbers of German Catholics marooned in the east, it generally supported Adenauer’s pro-Western line, and was cooler towards the notion of a reunified Reich that historically had been dominated by its confessional opponents.
The broader relationship between the CDU–CSU and the Churches was far from straightforward, particularly in the case of the Protestant Churches, which sometimes viewed the Christian Democrats as a Catholic cabal. The crypto-constitutional Basic Law guaranteed religious freedom and the generous flow of Church taxes, while the immense range of institutions involved in health and welfare were financed by the state but run by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches. Protestant clergy generally kept a healthy distance from the new party, although the anticlerical stridency of Schumacher’s Social Democrats propelled many of them to abandon their neutrality. By contrast, the Catholic Church was more forthcoming in its support, with cardinal Frings ostentatiously joining the CDU in December 1948, and many of his episcopal colleagues openly supporting it. The Church helped organise local Party groups and allowed them to use its halls in the absence of a political infrastructure. As in Italy, the Church actively encouraged the laity to obey the dictates of conscience during polls, although perhaps not so unashamedly as the Bavarian priest who said: ‘It is not for me to tell you how to vote. But I do say: Vote Christian! Vote Social!’ Others were more subtle: ‘Everyone must vote according to his conscience. But it is clear that every true Catholic’s voice of conscience recommends giving his vote to the candidate or the list which offers really adequate guarantees for the protection of the rights of God and the soul, for the true good of the individual, the family and society, in keeping with the law of God and Christian ethical teachings.’
In return for its support, the Catholic hierarchy expected to influence policy, seeing it as a vehicle for a Social Catholicism that seemed increasingly outmoded. It established a liaison office in Bonn, under monsignor Wilhelm Böhler, who in turn created a series of committees and working parties designed to represent Catholic views among politicians. Böhler thought that his remit included influencing appointments within the civil service, his main interlocutor being Adenauer’s staunchly Catholic éminence grise Hans Globke, whose political influence had not been diminished by his co-authorship of the legal commentary to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Protestants in the Party responded with their own working group to tilt appointments the other way. In practice, the wily Adenauer gave the Catholic Church the illusion of influence, affording it a limited say in the formation of social policy, but that influence stopped whenever it threatened his broader political calculations. He thought that clergy of any stripe had no particular political competence. Not even the intervention by Pius XII in 1949 in favour of parents’ rights to confessional schools, as guaranteed under the still operative Reich Concordat, could persuade Adenauer that this issue was worth permanently alienating the Free Democrats, and Social Democrats who no less vehemently opposed it.
One issue that fundamentally divided Catholics and Protestants was German rearmament, something the US military increasingly desired to counter both the might of the Red Army in central Europe and the 1948 decision of the German Democratic Republic to create paramilitary police units stationed in barracks. Events in East Asia raised the temperature in Europe. North Korea’s invasion of the South in the summer of 1950 prompted the East German leader Walter Ulbricht to issue rhetorical threats linking the ‘puppet regimes’ in Seoul and Bonn. With the encouragement of Churchill, Adenauer suggested to the Americans that West Germany might supply 150,000 volunteers to a future European army. The cabinet retroactively sanctioned this recommendation, with one notable dissenting voice, the minister of the interior, Gustav Heinemann, who immediately resigned.
The leading Protestant within the CDU, and Präses (chairman) of the Protestant Synod, Heinemann believed that on two occasions God had justly removed weapons from the German people and that rearmament was morally wrong. He also thought that such a momentous decision should be subjected to a popular mandate, including the views of the ‘brothers in the East’. Adenauer countered that a passive stance towards the Russians would only invite aggression, past experience having taught him that only strong defences, and the prospect of annihilation, would deter a totalitarian power from expansionist aims.51 Heinemann was supported by the increasingly hysterical Niemöller, whom Adenauer began to characterise as ‘an enemy of the state’, after the pastor accused the chancellor of secretly manufacturing weapons and using former members of the Wehrmacht to organise an army against the wishes of the majority of the German people. Niemöller also seems to have imagined that he was entitled to pursue what amounted to a separate Protestant foreign policy, thereby straying into territory that Adenauer regarded as peculiarly his own. While Heinemann and Niemöller represented a nationalist and neutralist left-wing trend in German Protestantism, which chimed with the ‘ohne mich’ (count me out) mentality of many in the SPD, other conservative Protestants, such as Hermann Ehlers and Eugen Gerstenmaier, declined to support Adenauer’s critics, and backed German rearmament. The Catholic response was even more extraordinary.
Cardinal Frings cited the authority of Pius XII for the view that ‘it would be reprehensible sentimentality and falsely directed humanitarianism if, out of fear of the suffering of war, one permits every kind of injustice to occur. If, in the opinion of the Holy Father, going to war can be not only a right but also an obligation of states, so it follows that propaganda for an unlimited and absolute conscientious objection to military service is not compatible with Christian thinking.’
The Catholic Church opposed pacifism, neutralism and the granting of legal protection to conscientious objectors, reminding believers of such saintly warriors as St Sebastian in the remote past. In describing Charlemagne’s western empire, Frings rather pointedly remarked that its eastern border was at Magdeburg. In March 1952 the Soviets seemed to dangle the prospect of German reunification as a reward for German non-participation in any coalition or military alliance directed at one of the victors of the Second World War. Adenauer rightly sensed a plot by Stalin to use a neutralised Germany to provoke a US retreat from western Europe. To that end, Stalin was prepared to write off the German Democratic Republic, hoping that with appropriate guarantees Communism would triumph in the end. Similarly those Germans, such as Heinemann, who claimed that Adenauer had missed a crucial chance to reunite Germany were ready enough to abandon the claims of the eight and a half million ethnic German refugees, half of whom hailed from east of the Oder–Neisse frontier that a reunited Germany would relinquish for all time.52 The Catholic Church mobilised its lay organisations, with the Federation of German Catholic Youth and the Association of Catholic Men’s Organisations in supporting government policy on rearmament. Clergy who dissented from this view found themselves banished to remote parishes, and leading Catholic intellectuals who advocated neutrality, similarly found themselves the object of the hierarchy’s froideur.
The Protestant disarmers, meanwhile, founded a party—the All-German People’s Party—which they hoped would be a Protestant neutralist alternative to the Western, rearming Christian Democrats. Unfortunately for them, few Protestants appeared to sympathise with their stance—which was permeated with vulgar anti-Catholicism and guilt-ridden naivety towards the Soviet Union. In elections that came a few months after the June 1953 popular uprising in East Berlin, the Party was wiped out by Adenauer’s CDU, which became the first party to achieve an absolute majority in a German election, a result that was possible only because it attracted a very high number of Protestant supporters. The majority of Protestant Church leaders thenceforth neither endorsed nor opposed German rearmament, although Niemöller and his admirers continued their opposition for some years. In 1955 they did, however, strongly oppose the introduction of military conscription, arguing that each citizen should decide whether or not to take up arms. They largely got their way, especially after the equipping of the Bundeswehr with tactical nuclear weapons brought into question older notions of what constituted a just war when war seemed to promise indiscriminate annihilation. As a direct result of their interventions on behalf of reluctant conscripts, Germany introduced some of the most extensive exemptions for conscripts in the world.
Once again, the Catholic Church adopted an entirely contrary position, claiming that a professional army would be an updated version of the predominantly Protestant Prussian army of old, and opposing any exemptions for conscientious objectors. The Catholic Church also supported the deployment of nuclear weapons, with cardinal Frings choosing a visit to Japan, of all places, to declare: ‘The Catholic Church does not advocate the outlawing of atomic and hydrogen weapons at the present time.’ Christian Democrat politicians required more than this cryptic utterance when the Social Democrats went on the attack against the prospect of ‘nuclear death’ in the 1958 elections in North Rhine–Westphalia. The Catholic Church issued a lengthy justification of nuclear weapons, albeit within the desired context of controlled disarmament, against an enemy bent on destroying ‘all contrary beliefs and life’. It categorically rejected the facile quip ‘better Red than dead’: ‘If, then, a state belongs to such a defence alliance and carries out all the implicit obligations for defence, including acquisitions of the appropriate weapons, it is only fulfilling the obligation to its own citizens and to the international community.’ While German Protestants in many respects anticipated what subsequently was called ‘Ostpolitik’, notably claims on what had become Polish or Soviet territory, just as its Stuttgart declaration on guilt was a harbinger of Willy Brandt kneeling in the Warsaw ghetto, the German Catholic Church remained silent.
III CHURCH AND CAUDILLO
While Christian Democracy helped return Italy and Germany to Western liberal democratic civilisation, the victory of Franco’s forces in Spain inaugurated a reactionary regime whose preferred models were not Mussolini or Hitler, but the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. The symbolism of the Crusades was omnipresent at the Festival of Victory in Madrid which culminated in a five-hour march-past of Nationalist forces, with aircraft tracing ‘VIVA FRANCO’ in the leaden skies. At the royal basilica of Santa Bárbara, Franco presented his sword of victory to cardinal Gomá, in a setting heavy with relics of Spain’s crusading past. Franco, whose bluff soldierly Christianity had deepened under the influence of his wife, vowed: ‘Lord God, in whose hands is right and all power, lend me thy assistance to lead this people to the full glory of empire, for thy glory and that of the Church. Lord: may all men know Jesus, who is Christ son of the Living God.’53 Unlike Croatia or Slovakia, or for that matter the Basque region or Ireland, where religion was integral to the national self-consciousness of a marginalised and repressed people, Franco’s ‘national Catholicism’ was an attempt to recover past glories that had only been achieved in the first place through the total identification of Church and nation.54
Wherever the right triumphed, the Republic’s anticlerical and secularising legislation was nullified in an atmosphere of distasteful ecclesiastical triumphalism. The measures that were reversed included civil marriage and divorce, the prohibition of the Jesuits, and the exclusion of monks and nuns from education, while intimate human affairs were resubjected to ecclesiastical courts. As part of the desired ‘resacralisation’ of Spanish life, crucifixes became compulsory adornments of classroom walls and religion part of the curriculum from elementary schools to universities. The quarter of a million Republican inmates in Francoist prisons were not spared the attentions of their erstwhile victims, since clergy were given extensive powers to bring about their conversion through compulsory mass and catechisms. Churches were rebuilt on a lavish scale with the aid of public subsidies and every area of public life was suffused with an outward show of piety through evangelistic rallies and processions. Their symbols were dwarfed by the largest cross of all time. In April 1940 Franco embarked on the megalomaniac Valley of the Fallen north-east of Madrid, a huge granite monument, with a five-hundred-foot cross, built by penal battalions of Republican prisoners who expiated their sins with blood smeared in the granite. Clerics from modest rural backgrounds manifested an embarrassing obsequiousness in the company of the rich and powerful. A degree of outward religious conformity was indispensable to getting and keeping a job, while men whose intellectual horizons were limited by their seminaries exercised censorship over films and books they knew nothing about. The only area in which the Church experienced minor setbacks was when confessional trades unions were absorbed into state syndicates and the Falange insisted on the prohibition of Catholic boy scouts.
While the Vatican had been careful to distance itself from the wartime effusions of most of the Spanish hierarchy, by May 1938 so many governments had recognised Franco that it duly followed suit. The regime may have heaped privileges on the Catholic Church, but it did not reciprocate with unqualified approval, for the more avant-garde or nationalist elements in the Falange included anticlericals, or were otherwise wary of the Church’s internationalism at a time when Christian Democracy was ascendant elsewhere. The Church’s concern for the losers of wars (in this case former Republican sympathisers rather than Fascists and Nazis) met with a stony-hearted response in Franco’s Spain. When in April 1939 Pius XII sent the new government congratulations on its victory in the Civil War, passages in which he urged magnanimity and moderation upon the victors were cut from the Spanish transmission of his thoughts. Cardinal Gomá found that a similarly irenic pastoral letter Lessons of the War and the Duties of Peace was suppressed, as the regime did not care for his talk of respect for human rights or his strictures on the growing power of the state. In 1942 a pastoral letter from the bishop of Calahorra y La Calzada condemning National Socialism was similarly proscribed. In Seville, archbishop Pedro Segura had a number of run-ins with the local Falange when he refused to allow them to inscribe the names of their dead, and that of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, on the walls of his cathedral while declining to hold open field masses to round off Falangist rallies. When they tried to bring a giant rally up to his cathedral to make their point, Segura threatened to excommunicate them. Pointing out that the term caudillo meant the head of a band of thieves also took considerable nerve, as did his concern for the plight of imprisoned Basque republican priests in his diocese. Wherever he went, Segura was shadowed by armed Falangists. Bishop António Pildain Zapiaín of the Canaries did not endear himself to the Caudillo when a pastoral letter condemning dancing coincided with Franco’s attendance at a splendid military ball. The bishop also regarded the state’s revival of monarchical influence on episcopal appointments with distaste.55
These critical voices were atypical, and did not address themselves to the black heart of the regime. Having made so many institutional advances, the Catholic Church was satisfied with Franco’s vague assurances and the adoption of the outward trappings of a Rechtsstaat, while such Fascist provocations as the outstretched saludo nacional were quietly dropped. A repressive dictatorship seemed a small price to pay for what seemed to be an upsurge of religious enthusiasm, albeit in traditionally Catholic regions in the north, rather than among industrial workers in the cities or the de-Christianised helots of the south. The new primate, Enrique Pla y Deniel, co-operated in defining what critics called a ‘national Catholic’ identity to replace a Fascist Falangism that had fallen into disrepute. The Civil War, he claimed, had been a legitimate rebellion against the tyrannical Popular Front.56 The primate became one of three members of the Regency Council, and, together with another prelate, also sat on the Council of State. Appointments in the universities began to be influenced by the National Catholic Association of Propagandists and the more secretive Opus Dei. Although only three of the thirteen members of Franco’s first post-Fascist cabinet were identifiably Catholic politicians, it was striking that in addition to education and public works the head of Catholic Action, Alberto Martín Artajo, became minister of foreign affairs, the key figure in presenting an image of a ‘post-Fascist’ Spain on the wider world stage.
The defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 represented a perilous moment for the Franco regime. The Baptist freemason Harry Truman had no time for Franco, exclaiming: ‘He wouldn’t let a Baptist be buried in daylight. That’s the truth. He had to be buried at night in plowed ground.’ His administration duly struck Spain off the list of potential recipients of Marshall’s largesse. In 1946 the UN Security Council described the Franco government as ‘Fascist’, agreeing to deny it diplomatic recognition if it did not quickly establish a more representative government. The border with France was closed and most of western Europe was deeply hostile. In addition to international isolation, there was domestic trouble too. Anarchists and Communists conducted assassinations and bank robberies, while there were large-scale strikes in the Basque country and Catalonia. Although it served to divide the opposition, there was trouble from the monarchists too. In March 1945 the pretender Don Juan issued the Lausanne Manifesto inviting Franco to step aside for a moderate monarchist regime. In response to this challenge, Franco appeared to leave the door ajar to restoration of the monarchy while he remained head of state for life. The regime began to cultivate Juan Carlos, the boy Bourbon heir, who from 1948 onwards was educated in Spain, while Franco’s doling out of titles of nobility to various old cronies warned the pretender of where things might tend if he did not play ball. Franco’s return to international semi-respectability was achieved through ‘Hispanic’ connections in Latin America, especially involving Perón’s Argentina, and his claim to have been first into the anti-Communist lists, a theme that resonated as the US contemplated events in Greece, Italy and eastern Europe in the late 1940s. A powerful Spanish lobby operated in Washington—with huge sums going to the law firms involved—the most vocal supporters of Franco being a group of senators and congressmen from Nevada who in 1950 pushed through US government loans to Madrid.57 Although the US declined Franco’s offer of Spanish troops for Korea—which may have been a reflection of the fact that on ceremonial occasions the army minister sported a German Iron Cross—international tensions resulted in over two billion dollars of US aid, and executive agreements that established US military bases in Spain. Ironically, Franco whipped up anti-imperialist hysteria over Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Gibraltar at precisely the moment he was conceding Spanish sovereignty to the USA. Only some of the Catholic hierarchy, notably cardinal Segura, were unhappy about this closer association with the (Protestant) ‘dollars of heresy’, being partly compensated by ruthless repression of any public manifestations of ‘heresy’.
While re-establishing amicable relations with the US was a paramount concern, Franco’s government was also keen to wring a new concordat from a Vatican that was distinctly cool towards the regime. There was a preliminary treaty in 1941, but a concordat was not concluded until August 1953. This ratified many changes that had already taken place, including Franco’s usurpation of the royal right to choose from the three names recommended for each vacant bishopric. The Church gained a powerful voice in education and social morality, while the Catholic nature of the Spanish state was expressly proclaimed. Pius XII appointed Franco a member of the Supreme Order of Christ, while Spain itself was reconsecrated to the Sacred Heart. There were other more worrying developments beneath the outward pieties of open-air masses and processions. During the 1950s the number of religious vocations may have reached record numbers with a thousand priests ordained each year, but the Spanish working class was as hostile or indifferent to religion as ever, with a mere 5 per cent of a Catalan textile town’s population attending Sunday mass. Large lay organisations, such as Catholic Worker Youth or Worker Brotherhoods of Catholic Action, became involved in wage disputes and strikes that brought them into conflict with the regime. In both the Basque country and Catalonia, radical priests became closely involved with regional nationalist movements, with ETA—the Basque separatist terrorist organisation—evolving out of a Catholic youth organisation. More worryingly for the regime, while the ‘development society’ of the 1950s acquainted Spanish people with enhanced demands, fundamental shifts in the international Church began to filter and then flood back into Spain itself.