Vatican Plots and Intrigues in Every Country W RKS BY JOSEPH McCABE ~ A History of the Popes MR. MCCABE is an acknowledged authority on the Papacy, and in this extensive work he surveys the whole long story of the fight for Papal supremacy, starting in the early years of the Christian era and continuing down to the present day. The narrative is full of colour and contains many revelations of startling facts which have long been concealed. Contents :­ Book I : l'i-fE AGE OF DEVELOPMENT.-The Modest Prhnltive Church; T h- Growth of Papal Ambition; Callistus Humanizes the Church; From Persecution to a Shower of Gold; First Degradation of the Papacy; The Popes Begin to Persecute; Augustine Scorns the Papal Claims. Book II: THE DARK AGE.-Consequences of the Fall of Rome; "I ue Final Quarrel with the Greeks; The Pope Rules the Ruins of Europe; Charlemagne and the Popes; Forging New Title-Deeds; The Popes Pass into the Iron Age; The Rule of the Courtesans; The Debasement of Europe. Book III : THE AGE OF POWER -The Work of Gregory VIi ; The Mythical Age of Chivalry; The Popes and the Artistic Revival; The Intellectual Awakening; The Popes React with Massacre and Inquisition; Frederic II and the Papacy; Two Centuries of Degradation; The Inevitable Reformation. Book IV: THE AGE OF DISINTEGRATION.-The Mythical Counter-Reformation; The Popes and the Thirty Years' War : The State of Catholic Countries; The Popes and the French Revolution; The Bloody Reaction in Papal Lands; The Crumbling Church and the Return to Violence. Cloth, 15s. net (inland postage 6d.) THE SPLENDOUR OF MOORISH SPAIN Cloth, lOs. 6d. net (inland postage 6d.) THE POPES AND THEIR CHURCH Cloth, 25. 6d. net, by post 2s . 10d. Paper cover, Is. net, by post Is. 3d . TWELVE YEARS IN A MONASTERY Clothelte, Is. net, by post Is. 3d . WHY I LEFT THE CHURCH Paper cover, 3d. net, by post 4d. WATTS & CO., JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E .C .4 1 } .' " THE PAPACY IN POLITICS TO-DAY - - ---- -- --- - -- -- - ----- THE PAPACY IN POLITICS TO-DAY VATICAN PLOTS IN SPAIN AND OTHER COUNTRIES BY JOSEPH McCABE, AUTHOR OF "SPAIN IN REVOLT"~ ~·THE SPLENDOUR OF MOORISH SPAIN." ETC. Second and Revised Edition LONDON: WATTS &1 CO., 5 & 6 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.G.4 First Published 1937 Second edition 1939 Printed and Published in Great Britain for the Rationalist Press Association Limited, by C. A. Watts & Co. Limited, 5 & 6 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C. 4. INTRODUCTION HIS second quarter of the twentieth century will one T day inspire as large an historical literature as did the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In few ages has there been so swift and comprehensive a change. For a hundred years or so the race had made slow, unsteady, but in its totality unparalleled progress, and in the course of the last ten years we have seen this end in an appalling reaction. We have seen what we regarded as the worst evils of the Middle Ages return, almost as grim and robust as ever, and take their incongruous place among the scientific wonders of a new age. But ten years ago we boasted that, in spite of the War and the years of confusion that followed, we kept the pace that our fathers had set. To-day we shudder at the monstrous shapes which darken civilization, and we discuss daily the chances of a world-disaster. The narrowest and most truculent nationalism mocks our dream of the brotherhood of nations. The standards of public conduct are borrowed from Macchiavelli. We have held fifty international conferences in twenty years and almost completely destroyed international faith and trust in the honour of statesmen. The right to person­ ality and to freedom of discussion is derided over half of Europe, and education is starved or prostituted to base putposes. Jews suffer as they did in the vilest periods of the Middle Ages, and women lose all that they had won in fifty years of struggle. Armed forces assume such proportions, and are so deliberately equipped to v Vi INTRODUCTION destroy peaceful cities, that it is as common to discuss the chances of the wreck of civilization as to wrangle over the problem of unemployment. And the historian of the future will find it not the least remarkable feature of this degradation that a Church which poses as the supreme moral and spiritual authority on earth is allied everywhere with the forces of corruption. Mr. Belloc once genially asked me whether I did not, when on a country walk, look for a Jesuit behind every bush. Mr. H. G. Wells pictured me as a grim old Ironside lurking in an alley off Fleet Street for the first rumour of a Papist plot. But there is to-day no ground for these amiable reproaches. The Pope's political activity is not more modest and furtive than that of Signor Mussolini, His Church is more intimately associated with the life of the Italian State than it has been with the life of any State for more than half a century; and it is not less intimately associated with the life of the Brazilian or the Polish State. We have the repeated assurances of General Franco that the Fascist regime which he hopes to establish in Spain will be distinguished from all other such regimes by its reliance upon and intimate co-opera­ tion with the Church. The entire Press has told us recently how the Pope, in a public declaration at Rome and then through the bishops of Germany, has begged Hitler to accept his co-operation; and, since he especially desires to co-operate in tt the destruction of Bolshevism in Russia, Spain, and Mexico," he not only endorses Hitler's plan to conquer and exploit Russia, but he plainly promises the influence of his Church in Poland and the United States. We have, in fine, a recent announcement in the Press that Japan, which almost lay beyond the Pope's purview in its gentle artistic days, INTRODUCTION vii is, now that it takes first rank amongst the aggressive nations, to have an ambassador at the Vatican and a Papal Legate at Tokio. These facts would suffice of themselves to dispose us to study the share of Papal policy in the degeneration of our age. It is just in those countries-Italy, Spain, Brazil, Poland, Germany, and Japan-which we regard as the chief sources of the infection that the Pope exer­ cises, or seeks to exercise, most influence. And the force that impels the Vatican to embark upon a policy which the historian of the future may find revolting is not obscure. In 1909 I showed in my Decay of the Church of Rome that the Papacy had lost about 100,000,000 followers in the course of the preceding hundred years: in the sense that, if it had kept all the descendants of the Catholics of the early nineteenth century, it would count 100,000,000 followers more than it honestly could in 1909. My con­ clusion, which was supported by Catholic authorities for the greater part of the loss, was generally accepted, and the Church began to construct a very elaborate and industrious organization to check the loss and increase the inflow of converts. The zeal of the laity was enlisted, and all sorts of covertly-acting groups and societies were formed to promote Catholic interests in the Press, the library, the publisher's office, the bookseller's shop, the political organization, the school, the B.B.C., and so on. We shall see some remarkable details later. Yet the Vatican not only recovered no ground in what had been known as Catholic countries and made no progress beyond what the growth of population gave it in England and the United States: in twenty years it suffered a further loss of about 5°,000,000 adherents. Readers who are unaware what censorship controls our VIII INTRODUCTION papers and other publications are apt to be startled by such assertions, but they will easily see, on reflection, that, while the chronic leakage from the Church con­ tinued, the outflow was swollen to the dimensions of a torrent by the rapid advance after the War of Communism and Socialism in Europe and Latin America. The extra­ ordinary shrinkage of the Catholic vote and expansion of the voting strength of bodies which the Church drastically condemned is just a matter of official statistics that may be read anywhere. We shall confirm the evidence in other ways, but these statistics themselves plainly show that the Roman Church was rapidly foundering in Ger­ many, Austria, Italy, Spain, and some of the larger Latin-American Republics; while it has, notoriously, almost disappeared from Russia. We cannot evade the conclusion that in less than twenty years after 1917 the Church, in spite of its militant organizations and the political intrigues which we shall describe, lost something like 50,000,000 members; and it owed this mainly, though by no means entirely, to the propaganda of Socialism, Communism, and Syndicalism. And just when the Vatican realized that it could not save its empire from the devastating inroads of these Goths and Vandals, as it conceives them, it saw the politico-economic opposition to them take the form of Fascism. We have here nothing to do with the clash of political theories. What concerns us solely is the fact that the Roman Church now allied itself everywhere with an element which had begun with vulgar brawls and the sordid use of castor-oil and has gradually engendered those evils which make so many wonder if the race is not entering upon a new Middle Ages.