Some Republicans. I don’t think the murder of priests can be seen as official Republican policy. And most actions against the Church occurred, I believe, after it aligned itself with anti-democratic forces.
This is certainly fair enough. I am probably going a little bit overboard - though I do think more could have been done in the form of a Popular Front; not that there isn’t enough blame to hand out to all parties on this front.
I don’t dismiss the support for the Enabling Act quite as easily as you, though. That was a time when courage was necessary, and supporting the Act was a spineless action.
I was more under the impression that the preeminence of the Stalinists on the Republican side came about after the betrayal of democracy by the British and French, and the arms embargo, when only Stalin would support the Spanish government.
Supporting the act was a mistake, sure, and a lot of prominent Center Party politicians were against it…Bruening and Wirth, most notably. But Kaas’s arguments were:
Even if the Enabling Act isn’t passed this time, the Nazis will find other ways to get the legislation through, anyway.
Hitler is ruling by decree as it is, so this is just a recognition of reality
The Nazis are bad, but at least it’s Hitler’s moderate wing in charge. If he’s weakened, the extremists in the party will come to power.
I have guarantees from Hitler that he’ll protect Catholic civil liberties and not take action against Catholic schools.
The support was a mistake, sure, and Kaas’s reasoning bad, but that’s what it was…one mistake, unfortunately made at the time when there was no room for mistakes by the pro-democracy groups in Germany.
They had actually been taking over beforehand. It was a very nasty peice of work. But, as in Russia beforehand, the radicals were much more capable of discrete and effective action. There was still some democracy in effect, but by the time of the Spanish Civil War the Stalinists were firmly in poewr behind the scenes and working steadily towards taking over. During the war they were able to purge and murder at will.
The only odd thing is that a lot of pro-democracy groups never realized how they had been used. Initially, this was ben understandable. As George Orwell discovered, unless you wanted to close your eyes deliberately it was hard to ignore with whom you were working.
Most actions against the Church happened between 1931-33, when the government banned religious schools, outlawed the Jesuits, nationalized Church property, and required government consent for any public religious display.
And the violence against the Catholic Church started before the civil war. Franco himself claimed that it was the burnings of churches by leftist groups (and the Republic’s indifference to them…Azana commented, remember, "All the convents in Spain aren’t worth the life of one Republican) that turned him against the Republic in the first place.
You’re compressing a lot of history together here. The “small-scale civil war” period was right after WWI ended. The Spartacists were defeated in 1919 amd the Friekorps had all been surpressed by 1920. Hitler was barely involved in this (although a lot of former Friekorps members later joined the Nazis). When Hitler took power in 1932 it was due to political maneuvering not street fighting.
Pius had to decide if he was a secular or moral leader. If he wanted to follow the secular route, then he was the political head of a small city and an international organization and his job was to protect those institutions - if so, then he was no different then any other secular leader of the time. But if he wanted to claim a greater authority as a moral leader, then he was obligated to fulfill the responsibilities of that role - and that means denouncing evil even when it incurs serious consequences.
So what? I never claimed that heresy was the only route to excommunication. My explicit observation was
The Italian attacks upon the Papal States directly resulted in confiscation of church property and imprisonment of religious. (Even smiling bandit only claimed that excommunication focused on heresy “usually.” No one has claimed that excommunication is reserved for theological issues.)
As to Castro and the 1949 declaration: every single “Communist” regime from 1917 through 1949 had banned the Catholic Church and the promoters of Marxism were quite vocal in their calls to eliminate the church. It pretty much stands to reason that if a movement makes the elimination of an institution one of its major hallmarks, the institution in question just might decide that its own members who support such a movement just might not be worthwhile members. Hitler had already excommunicated himself long before he came to power and making a formal declaration that someone who had already left the church was being kicked out would hardly have made much of an impact on the target or on the public.
As to the broader themes of this thread:
Pius XII very definitely suffered from an excess of diplomatic language. He did not make any references to specific persons or governments, regardless whom he opposed. I agree that this is a failing. On the other hand, as noted, his predecessor’s encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge (that many folks suspected was written by not-yet-Pius XII for Pius XI), was very much targeted directly to the Catholic Germans who understood exactly what it meant, but who still did not feel moved to oppose Hitler in any great numbers. The papal Christmas address of 1942, now dismissed (perhaps correctly) as too little, too late and (probably incorrectly) as not specific enough because it failed to condemn Hilter and the Nazis by name, was noted at the time as being a bold move in the face of the effective occupation of Europe and was sufficiently specific that the German envoy to the Vatican formally protested it for “unfairly” attacking the Nazis.
As to any overall church support for Fascist states, there were certainly (far too) many Catholics (including many in the hierarchy) who were more inclined to support Right Wing governments (that, typically, did not go out of their way to attack the church), than were inclined to support Left Wing governments (where Catholics were frequently made the explicit targets of persecution and murder). This was certainly not a good thing, but you will find that people are frequently more tolerant of groups not trying to kill them when those groups are fighting groups who are trying to kill them.
Despite other criticisms of Pius XII, it should be noted that even though he had a long-standing opposition to Communism, when several bishops approached him during WWII, asking him to call a Crusade against the godless commies by recruiting the defeated militaries of Europe to join the Nazis in attacking the Soviet Union, Pius XII rebuked them, saying that no aid should be given to the Nazis under any circumstances because the Nazis were far worse than the Communists.
I could be wrong, but I think the Church in Spain had a long history of obnoxiousness going back to the Inquisition. Not to excuse the church burnings, but it seems to me that there was a history of unpleasantness that stretched back a ways.
Not directly, but he used street fighting with the Communists to disrupt the civil government and force middle-class Germans to choose. It was a major part of his strategy (it almost backfired because of public disgust, but it worked in the end). The civil government, dealt a lousy hand because it was proclaimed without public approval or imput and associated with the failed war, and then shown as weak in the ensuing anarchy, was pretty well shot after being shown as unable to control a gang of thugs.
On the Spanish Catholic Church:
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, much of the Spanish Catholic Church was run as a serf fiefdom by nobles’ sons.
I’m not sure I would place a lot of stock in Franco’s word as to why he opposed the Republic.
But more importantly - yes, I accept the Republic was not friendly towards the Church. And for good reason - the Church was part of the regressive oppressive forces that were working actively against everything for which the Republcians stood. But the RC Church has always chosen which groups to find common ground with. And in this period of history, it chose to preserve its privileges, and find comon ground with fascism, turning a blind eye to its evils, rather than attempting to form a common ground with progressive democratic forces.
Yes, the Stalinists had been working to take over. That’s what they do! But they were a minority, and their success was by no means guaranteed. Spain could have been saved for democracy - but the forces that could have saved it either washed their hands of the matter (Britain, France) or actively supported the rise of fascism (the Catholic Church).
But you’ve set up sort of a trap in that, that I don’t know how the Catholic Church could have found its way out of. The Spanish Republic comes in and identifies the church as “part of the regressive oppressive forces that were working actively against everything for which the Republcians stood”.
So, at the beginning, it idenifies the Church as its enemy…it says, “You, Catholic Church, are part of the forces of reaction that this Republic is trying to fight”. And so it starts passing all sorts of laws that hurt the Catholic church and try to get rid of its influence in Spain. It’s not the Catholic Church that started the fight, and you can’t find common ground with the people who want to wipe you out.
So what’s the Catholic church to do, in your mind? If it supports the Republic, it’s supporting a force that’s openly hostile to its values and wants to destroy it. If it doesn’t, it gets your moral condemnation for not supporting the Republic.
Its not that the Republicans identified the Catholic Church as the enemy - more the Catholic Church identified Republicanism in Spain as the enemy. The Church chose which side to line up with - neither was going to be perfect for them, but they made their choice, as they did in other countries. And the choice made seems always to have been authoritarian, fascist regimes, rather than socialist movements.
What could the Church have done in Spain? They could have supported the more moderate progressive forces. They could have not actively backed the fascists. Maybe with support from the Church, the Stalinists would not have been successful in taking control of the Republican movement.
So, in other words, you expect them to support a movement which was openly hostile to them, led by Stalinists, and quickly going down the path of totalitarianism, in the vague hope that somehow things would work out alright. Faith is one thing. This is asking for insanity. It was an insane age, but that’s not much of an excuse.
The Catholic Church has a very practical outlook on politics. It doesn’t generally infringe on political movements. It will tolerate anyone, even naked power-grabbers, provided they leave it alone. Render unto Ceasar, etc. Now, the Spanish were very weird in the first because their highly aristocratic society left them with a legacy of semi-noble, highly political priests in a pretty poor country (Spain isn’t intrinsically poor, but it lacks a lot of material wealth which hindered development).
But the Republic was hostile to the Catholic Church from the beginning, before the Church took a stand one way or the other. Like I had said before, at the beginning of the republic, before Franco, before the Nationalists, before Spanish fascism, the Republic passed laws banning religious education, nationalizing churches and cemetaries, outlawing the Jesuits, and so on, as well as turning a blind eye to Republican mobs that were burning churches and convents and harrassing priests.
So by the time of the Civil War, the choice for them was “Do we back the group that’s persecuting us, or do we back the group that’s not”. And that’s not really a hard choice for any group.
I don’t know that, like you said, when the Catholic church chooses who to support, the “choice made seems always to have been authoritarian, fascist regimes, rather than socialist movements”, but remember two things. First, the Catholic Church is a hierarchical authoritarian organization itself, so it hasn’t neccesarily seen authoritarianism in quite as negative a light as you seem to. Second, some strains of socialism, especially the ones that have grown off from Marx and Marxism, have been pretty hostile to the Catholic Church. So it’s not so much of a surprise that the Catholic Church would be hostile right back.
To expand on my preivous comments, we are not the Church of Democracy. Democracy is a form of government, nothing more. It is not goodness and does not make people good, and to confuse law with morality is… foolish, at best. People are in the habit of tinking democracy is good. Democracy is good in the hands of a good people, and bad in the hands of bad people - exactly like every other government. There may be good reasons to have a democratic government, or a socialist one, but this is not the same thing as Christianity.
And the interests of the Catholic heirarchy, which aligned itself with fascism at multiple opportunities, are markedly distinct from “goodness,” or Christianity, or the interests of individual Christians, be they Catholic or other denominations.
Bottom line, my problem isn’t that the Catholic Church in Germany did not endorse the SDP (though they were hardly “above” partisan politics throughout Europe). It’s that they betrayed the underpinning of what I see as Christianity by actively providing succor to fascism.
And my impression is that the heirarchy of the Catholic Church did this in order to preserve its privileges - storing up treasures on earth rather than in heaven.
Against what, particularly? You seem to think there was an easy, “right” answer. As with most politics, it’s a war between two bastards. Aside from which, the Catholic Church did not favor authortarians generally, only against what they saw (arguably rightly) as greater evils. It’s no secret the Church has been lukewarm about liberal politics, which you seem to describe as some kind of sin.
Since you are now ascribing motives without evidence, I can hardly respond.