The Conflicted Relationships of the American Catholic Church With

THE CONFLICTED RELATIONSHIPS OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH EUROPEAN FASCISM by Jason M. Surmiller APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ________________________________________ Nils Roemer, Chair ________________________________________ Peter K. J. Park, Co-Chair ________________________________________ Zsuzsanna Ozsváth ________________________________________ Monica Rankin ________________________________________ Marilyn Waligore Copyright © 2016 Jason M. Surmiller All Rights Reserved To Vanesa, Louis and Izzy THE CONFLICTED RELATIONSHIPS OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH EUROPEAN FASCISM by Jason M. Surmiller, BA, MTh DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES – HISTORY OF IDEAS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to first thank my wife Vanesa for supporting me these past six and a half years. If not for her I would not have accomplished this feat. Her love and support was everything. I appreciate the monetary support that made my research possible as provided by the University of Texas at Dallas through a Ph.D. Research Small Grant, by the Catholic University of America through the Dorothy Mohler Research Grant, and by the Ackerman Center Graduate Student Support Award Scholarship. I am also thankful for the direction and advice given to me by Drs. Nils Roemer and Peter K. J. Park. Their assistance in pointing me in the right direction and the time they spent reading my many drafts were invaluable in helping me to finish this dissertation. October 2016 v THE CONFLICTED RELATIONSHIPS OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH EUROPEAN FASCISM Publication No. ________________ Jason Surmiller, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas Supervising Professors: Dr. Nils Roemer, Chair Dr. Peter K. J. Park Faced with European Fascism, the American Catholic Church had no choice but to react to the changing political realities taking place in Europe and Latin America during the 1920s and 1930s. Because of fascist control over the Vatican and the German Catholic Church, the words and actions of bishops, priests, laymen and the Catholic press in the United States revealed a distinctly American force that championed to the world American-style freedoms prior to World War II. Yet, this support took time to become a reality. Originally, many in the U.S. Church openly and enthusiastically supported Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco because of their stance against the Church’s great enemy, communism. However, this support would erode as the U.S. Church united itself with the U.S. government in its campaign to confront Hitler and his allies. Still, even after the rise of Hitler, the Church had to battle against supporters of Hitler’s racist ideology, led by the Detroit priest Fr. Charles Coughlin. Studying the U.S. Church and its members during this period, separate and apart from the rest of the Catholic Church, offers a new way of understanding the inner workings of the Church. While the American Church had an vi intimate connection to the Vatican, Pope Pius XII, and the German Church, it had a semi- autonomous leadership structure that responded differently to the fascist crisis. Unlike the Vatican and German Church, the American Church was much freer to express its opinions about fascism and react against it. The Church in the U.S. also had a friendly American government willing to work with it, while at the same time the Church was hoping to ingratiate itself with President Roosevelt and his administration. The American Catholic Church during the inter-war years not only represented Catholicism but also stood for America. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………...………………………..v ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC SUPPORT OF THE MEXICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE INTER-WAR YEARS……………………………….………………….… 12 CHAPTER 2 THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH VERSUS THE FALANGE AND NAZISM IN LATIN AMERICA………………………………………………………..……….50 CHAPTER 3 THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO FRANCO AND MUSSOLINI.…………………………………………………………………..89 CHAPTER 4 MUNDELEIN, SPELLMAN, & RUMMEL AGAINST THE NAZIS AND FASCISM………………………………………………………………………………………126 CHAPTER 5 RYAN AND COUGHLIN, LIBERALISM VERSUS FASCISM IN THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC CHURCH………………………………………………………….166 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………204 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..…. 210 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………...224 CURRICULUM VITAE viii INTRODUCTION The Roman Catholic Church in the 1930s had a presence in almost every part of the world and by then had existed in some form or fashion for almost two thousand years. Due to its size and age, it is difficult to draw simple conclusions about the actions of Church leaders at any particular point in time. Additionally, the Church claims that it was founded by God; certainly its pope is one of the world’s most recognizable leaders. In its long history, the Church has been involved in numerous atrocities, including the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. The rise of European fascism, especially in the form of Hitler’s Nazism, once again called into question its moral authority. Many scholars have blamed the Church for refusing to challenge fascism. Reading the scholarship, one gets the impression that Catholicism did nothing but make deals with or offer concessions to Hitler and his fellow-dictators, Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. According to this line of thinking, the Church never pushed back against fascism, and the only course of action the bishops seriously entertained was silence or collaboration. Most famously, John Cornwell argued in his book, Hitler’s Pope, that the Church, and specifically Pius XII, undermined the German Catholics’ ability to confront fascism and that the pope refused to speak up for the Jews. Cornwell argues that Pius “created the means of establishing, imposing, and sustaining a remarkable new ‘top-down’ power relationship,” helping the Nazis rise to power.1 The Church, however, is more than just the papacy. To come to a valid historical conclusion about this ecclesial society requires that historians delve more earnestly into the details of the Church prior to World War II. 1 John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 6. 1 This dissertation questions the idea of a monolithic Church controlled by the pope. Instead, it studies the Roman Catholic Church in America as its own entity with its own conflicted responses to the spread of European fascism. Treating the American Church on its own terms is possible because it is not simply a branch of the Roman Church; it has its own leadership and its own unique views of the world on the other side of the Atlantic. While previous scholarly works have touched on the American Church during this era, as will be discussed in the body of this dissertation, the coverage has only been indirect and cursory. Rather than seeing the whole Church as completely folding to European fascist pressure, high-ranking bishops and lay members of the semi-autonomous American Church arguably stood up against Hitler and his allies by fiercely denouncing their policies. Additionally, many in the American Church worked with the government of the United States to contain fascism. Furthermore, this work explores how the U.S. Church used the American ideas of freedom of speech, religion, and conscience to push back against fascism not only in Europe but also in the Western hemisphere. While American Catholics practiced a European faith, many of them grew up in the U.S., learning and internalizing the values of its constitution. They rallied around the American notion of freedom and joined with their fellow-Americans to defeat the country’s enemies. This dissertation is not an attempt to exonerate the Catholic Church during the 1930s and 1940s. As the following chapters detail, plenty of priests and bishops made terrible decisions, from Fr. Charles Coughlin (1879-1979) in Detroit and his followers to Pope Pius XII, with his accommodating relationship with the dictators. Yet, the Church at this time included a whole host of other actors. The Church is a collection of laity and clergy across the world, and many of them, in America and elsewhere, challenged the Nazis and the fascists. Lumping all those 2 members of the Church with those that collaborated or remained silent flattens our understanding of their behavior, while at the same time offering only a simplistic and distorted understanding of the inner workings of the Church during this period. Such a simplistic approach handicaps historians that want to study in detail the range of Catholic responses to fascism. Although the American Church worked against European fascism, much of the opposition of the bishops against the totalitarian regimes was admittedly limited. For example, members of the Church rarely, if at all, criticized Francisco Franco and did not attack Benito Mussolini until late in the 1930s, despite his brazen assaults against the Church far earlier in that decade. In fact, the bishops praised the dictator for stabilizing and developing the Italian state. They did this, as this dissertation details, because the

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