4-21-05, 9:23 am
A tabloid newspaper in Berlin had as its headline, 'Wir Sind Pabst,' or triumphantly, 'we are the Pope.' Before one begins to think, 'today the Vatican, tomorrow the world,' let me say that German people are not collectively militarists, reactionaries or fascists. Germany from the 1870s to WWI was the most important center of the world’s socialist movement – the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was in that period the flagship socialist mass party in the world. German anti-fascists, particularly members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), were the first to be hurled into concentration camps. The post-war German Democratic Republic (DDR) a state founded by Communists and other German anti-fascists emerging from the concentration camps was, during the period of its existence, one of the world’s most advanced socialist countries, and a country which provided refuge for victims of Pinochet’s Chilean fascist regime and aided revolutionary and national liberation movements through the world.
But that is not Cardinal Ratzinger’s Germany, but the Germany that he and his predecessor John Paul II, the world’s capitalist press likes to boast, helped to destroy along with 'world communism.'
Ratzinger was to John Paul II what Dick Cheney has been to George Bush, the man setting things up, suggesting the appointments, directing policy on social issues particularly. Although I am a non-believer in spirit gods and non-material things and in ethno-cultural terms a Jewish-American (so some might ask who I am to write about the choice of a Pope), as a Marxist I feel compelled to mention that the Catholic Church and all institutional churches and religions, whatever their theologies, cannot be separated from both the ideological-institutional superstructures that guides social relations and the class struggle which is the great force in all class divided societies.
Ratzinger as John Paul’s key aide and political secretary has been a major player in what one might call a 'Second Counter-Reformation' against the reformation represented by Pope John the 23rd’s Vatican II in the early 1960s.
Some history, from a Marxist perspective that won’t be found in mainstream US media, is very important here. The Roman Catholic Church along with other religious groupings found itself at war with the socialist movement from the last decades of the 19th century on. In Germany and other countries it formed clerical 'Christian' unions to counter the socialist-led unions, groups like the Militia for Christ and later the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists in the US to fight socialists and communists respectively, and actively advocating anti-Communist, anti-socialist purges everywhere.
This was the general policy of the higher clergy, although individual priests sometimes found themselves allied with their working class and socialist and communist fellow citizens. While post World War I fascist movements were primarily secular and at various points clashed with Catholic clerical forces in many countries, the fascists also borrowed from conservative Catholic theology the concept of corporatism and more importantly secularized clerically based anti-Communism, clerically based anti-liberalism, clerically based anti-humanism and also, one should never forget, clerically based anti-Jewish prejudice, mixing all of these reactionary ideologies with extreme nationalism, militarism, pseudo scientific racism, and social Darwinism, to concoct fascist ideology.
The record of the institutional Catholic Church in the interwar period in its relationship to both fascist movements and fascist states is one of appeasement verging on and sometimes becoming open collaboration. Whereas the secular governments of the Italian Republic and the German Weimar Republic had established the liberal democratic principle of separation of Church and State, Mussolini’s Fascist regime in 1929 and Hitler’s Fascist regime in 1933 signed Concordats with the Roman Catholic Church, increasing their influence in society over education and other matters, in effect buying off the high clergy. This was a factor in strengthening both fascist regimes.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the Catholic Church in Spain and the Vatican became active supporters of Franco’s fascist rebellion and de facto allies of the German and Italian fascists who provide military aid to Franco’s forces. In 1937, Pope Pius XI excommunicated all Communists from the Church. Although Pius XI also issued 'With Burning Sorrow,' a formal statement critical of Nazi paganism and brutality, Nazis were never excommunicated from the Catholic Church then or posthumously, starting with Adolf Hitler, who was born into the Catholic Church in Austria.
Subsequently, Catholic based clerical fascist puppet states were established in Slovakia after Czechoslovakia was dismembered in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement of 1938 and Croatia after Yugoslavia was dismembered with the German invasion of 1941. In Slovakia the head of state was actually a Catholic Priest, Father Joseph Tiso. In Croatia, the Fascist Ustasha became subcontractors of Hitler’s genocidal program, and murdered over 700,000 Serbian people, along with tens of thousands of Jewish Yugoslavs, Roma (Gypsy) Yugoslavs, and anti-Fascists. Jasenovac, the Utasha run murder camp in Croatia, was the third largest camp where genocide was committed in Europe. A number of the most notorious Ustasha mass murderers were former priests. The Catholic upper clergy and the church institutionally have not yet confronted this history.
While there were rank and file priests and nuns in many countries who worked with and supported the anti-fascist resistance, including some who gave their lives heroically in the struggle, the policy of the Vatican, under the leadership of Pope Pius XII, who had been papal nuncio in Germany earlier, was one that might be charitably called 'benevolent neutrality' toward the fascist powers and against the Allies, particularly the 'atheistic communistic Soviet Union' but also at a much more subtle level the United States and Great Britain, which for the Church were the two great Protestant world powers.
After the defeat of fascism in the war, many high clergymen aided and abetted in the escape of German, Austrian, French, Croatian, and other fascist war criminals through Europe. While apologists for Pius XII have stressed the clergy’s role in saving Jewish lives and have attempted to portray the wartime Pope as a timid, pragmatic anti-Fascist, the historical record in no way bears this out. 'With Burning Sorrow' I believe that the Catholic upper clergy saved more fascist lives after World War II than it did anti-fascist and especially Jewish lives during the war.
But the war transformed the balance of forces through the world. At the end of the 1950s, an anti-fascist priest who had saved Jewish lives during World War II had become Pope John XXIII. He greatly expanded the College of Cardinals, encouraged progressive developments within the Catholic Church, radically reformed the liturgy by having priests say mass in vernacular languages rather than Latin, preached and practiced doctrines of Ecumenism that hugely improved relations with other Christian Churches and with Jewish religious groups, and turned the Church away from defending the status quo in Europe to addressing the problems of the world’s people.
Pope John Paul II occasionally talked the talk of John XXIII on economic and political issues, but he never walked the walk. He actively opposed and sought to eliminate from influence in the Catholic Church the advocates of Liberation Theology in Latin America and other places, who had identified themselves with the liberation struggles of the people. He sought to weaken if not marginalize the socially liberal Catholic clergy of the United States. He also packed the College of Cardinals with the right-wing conservatives who today elected Ratzinger. Although John Paul II criticized the Bush war in Iraq (the Christian minorities in Syria and Iraq are within the Roman Catholic Church, although they have practices that differ from many Catholics) and also was recently critical of the US blockade against Cuba, he was the modern Catholic Church’s telegenic Ronald Reagan, as John XXIII was its Franklin Roosevelt.
The new Pope has said many harsh and absurd things about gay people, the reproductive rights of all women and the political rights of women within the Roman Catholic Church, the Church’s relationship to Buddhism and Islam as rival religions, and has put forward a view of Christianity as punishment and dogma. Whether he can or even will seek to implement these statements in policy remains to be seen. If he does, it may create the greatest schism that the Catholic Church has seen since the Protestant Reformation.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
