Pius XI Reconsidered

Pius XI, Papa Ratti, was the last pope following traditional models of the papacy much like how his name predecessor, Pius X, was the first pope in the modern mold of the papacy. Some will blithely point their fingers to Pius IX and Vatican I saying "When the Council made the pope infallible we have the modern, constantly inerrant vision of the pope." That Council forms a simple demarcation if we do not think about what the modern papacy really is and why Pius XI did not fit into it.

What better defines modern government, religious or secular, than what Nisbet called that great vacuum of buffer between the governing and the governed? Whereas traditions, institutions, places, and customs once gave the individual identity and gave authority a measure of guidance, modern government gives the individual all his rights, privileges, prerogatives, and policies that govern his life. In light of this, the modern papacy really begins with Pius X and the tradition papacy ends with Pius XI. Papa Sarto began his reign following a controversial conclave, when the metropolitan cardinal of Poland vetoed the election of Mariano Rampolla for any number of speculated reasons. Initially interested in seemingly harmless subjects like ensuring only men sang Gregorian plainsong or giving chant a place of prominence again, but soon interests, either Papa Sarto's own or those of the Vatican bureaucracy around him, began to stick their tentacles into common Christian life. His re-introduction of Communion for the young confused the order of sacramental initiation in most of, but not all of, the Western Church, a mistake some bishops have slowly remedied without a universal correction. His re-jiggering of the Office kalendar and psalter effectively tossed out the Divine Office as Saint Benedict, Saint Bernard, Saint Pius V, and the pope himself knew it, paving the way for the "restoration" of the other unchangeable part of the Latin liturgy, the anaphora. Most notably, he enabled Umberto Benigni to hunt anyone whose opinions differed from his own, be they true heretics or simply those in need of correction. While modest by today's standards, Saint Pius began a practice of the papacy that dictates how one enters the Sacramental life, how Mass is said, what prayers a priest prays daily, and that the priest is someone whose ideas must actively correlate with those of the Roman Bishop's. By contrast, Pius XI had little to do with these things.

In his Phoenix from the Ashes HJA Sire observes that many traditionalists "regard popes Pius IX, Pius X, and Pius XII as models of what a pope ought to be, but (with due respect for their sacred office) really look upon Leo XIII and Pius XI as rather letting down the standards of papal authority. They show little sympathy with social and political pragmatism in the framing of religious policy" (Sire 139). In Pius XI was a resolute orthodoxy tempered by a cautious, healthy distance from the impractical excess condign to arbitrary use of power.

Papa Ratti's foreign policy is the most memorable and mixed aspect of his pontificate. He had the good sense to end the "Roman question", which had been answered since the Italian unification ended the Papal States in the prior century. With traditional monarchies and temporal rule gone, the pope could now, ironically, speak on matters of foreign policy with an authoritative detachment and lack of personal interest that gave moral strength to his statements. History perceives Pius as friendly, or at least amenable, to Fascistic movements in Spain and elsewhere in Europe because he was. While horrifying to post-modern liberals, the only options most had in revolutionary countries were atheistic, class warfare Communism or Fascism—understood as a glorification of the state and its cultural history along with public-private cooperation with major corporations (Nazism was not Fascism, it was something more unique). Because Fascism takes the state as its alpha and omega, Fascism is not Catholicism, but it can tolerate Catholicism and even give a place of respect to Catholic culture; Communism cannot, and as ruthless as the Fascists were in the Spanish Civil War, the Communists matches or exceeded them in brutality, something anti-Fascist adventurer and author Ernest Hemingway begrudgingly depicts in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The pope's vociferous denunciation of Hitler and his deranged racialistic theories of state and expansion redeem the pope to historians; Mit brennender Sorge had to be smuggled into Germany to be read from the pulpit during Passiontide in 1937, and since his Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, succeeded him as pope, one might reasonably assume the swift reaction of the Nazis against the Church was a lesson learned by Pacelli in his more cautious War-time administration. Post-War Europe's coziness with socialism has cooled Pius's legacy, but we must admit given his choices he could have done far worse.

Pope Ratti's most enduring success and failure could both be summed up in three word: Christ the King. In an age when nation or class or race ruled men's hearts, Papa Ratti reminded Christians eager to embrace political movements that Christ must be king both of the individual and all of society. Yet when the Freemasonic president of Mexico, Plutarco Calles, enforced the existing anti-clerical laws in that country and the Catholics in the populace effected an outright rebellion without episcopal support, they won near-total victory in the Cristiada only to be told by Rome to sue for peace and return a near-unconditional surrender. The enforcement of the anti-clerical laws lessened after Calles, doubtless inspired by Henry VIII's reaction to the Pilgrimage of Grace, reprised the favor with some indiscriminate slaughter. A shining moment for the Secretariat of State under Gasparri and Pacelli. Viva Cristo Rey.

Despite my education being partially in Economics, I have not read the pope's encyclicals on the subject in depth with supplementary resources. And yet I feel familiar enough to say he wrote in continuity with the social teachings of Leo XIII, reflecting Pius XI's pervading theme of upholding doctrine fully with some awareness of his times. The times asked different questions under Leo XIII than under Pius XI, not just in social questions, but the state of the Western economies and of economic literature. Leo wrote during the Industrial Revolution, the abuse of child-workers, new money capitalists, economists writing about rational self-interest as an inherently moral act, displacement from traditional settings of living into atomistic city life, and the like. By contrast, these phenomena were three decades old when Ratti took the tiara. The new concerns were political cults, collectivism's many forms, atheism, interventionist economics, and secular utopianism. In this regard, the pope was quite adroit in keeping up with the signs of the times; would that our modern popes be interested in any issue more current than 1978.

Pius XI was a good pope. He was, in no sense, a great pope. He made any significant contributions to the Church while not entirely succeeding in making lasting changes that he successors felt obliged to keep. Perhaps he never saw himself as a reformer, merely a traditionalist, that is, one handing on the Church as he knew in the best way he could. He was not a modern pope, reforming the Church according to his own ideas. HJA Sire notes that if not for his boundless optimism, John XXIII could have returned the Church to the paternal, familiar style of government Pius XI and Leo XIII personified, gentle, firm, practical, and respectful of tradition. Vatican II was supposed to rubber stamp some very unimaginative documents and move on in eight weeks; what ensued was something quite different, a parliamentary hijacking by bureaucrats whose power derived from a more modern practice of the papacy. John XXIII died and "blessed" Paul VI took his place, succeeding Pius XII more than John XXIII or Pius XI.

Pope Ratti was a good pope, perhaps the most recent thoroughly traditional pope we have seen.

Who Was Papa Sarto?

Looking toward the future

Hammer of the modernists. A great liturgical reformer. A stodgy dinosaur. A chain cigarette smoker. A pastoral pope with the mind of a parish priest. Pope Pius X, who occupied the Petrine See from 1903 until his death in 1914, has been called all of these things by various factions. All these labels bear a small amount of truth to them, but ignore the fact that precious little is actually remembered about the man. Traditionalists have made him into their favorite pope—although all rad trads know Gregory the Great owns the top place, that is, until the election of Sixtus VI—without much consideration of his real legacy and the Vatican that created it.

J's latest offering on modern Catholic blogosphere vocabulary has generated copious comments on the liturgical changes that Pius X put into force, changes which were just as radical as those effected by Pius XII to Holy Week and Paul VI to the Ordo of Mass, although they were less distasteful in their result. This same who tossed out the psalter used by the ancient Church of Rome since probably the fourth century and which St. Benedict of Nursia proactively sought to imitate in his Rule also went on a zealous hunt against theological and disciplinary dissidents in an effort to preserve what I have termed the "Perfect Society" model of the Church. What could be more modernistic than discarding a fifteen century old liturgical tradition?

Guiseppe Sarto was not the College of Cardinals' first choice for the Apostolic See. An often reliable and much condemned correspondent for National Review, Mary Ball-Martinez, wrote in her Undermining of the Catholic Church that Mariano Cardinal Rampolla del Tindaro, Secretariat of State, was originally elected only to be vetoed by the Archbishop of Krakow on charges of Freemasonry. Mainstream thought, whenever it heard this far-fetched claim, quickly dismissed it. Recent research and leaked papers from the 1903 conclave now validate at least part of Martinez's claim. Sarto assigned the dubious Rampolla to the Holy Office and gave the Secretariat of State to the conclave secretary, Msgr. Merry del Val. A parish priest and unlikely patriarch now found himself at the center of a political institution that had hardly moved since the the Peace of Westphalia.

What differentiates the pontificates of Pius X and Pius XII, at least in this observer's view, is that Pius XII displayed a unified program of policies which he indefatigably followed. Consider, for example, the concerted effort to save Jewish lives during the Second World War, the various offices involved in implementing the new Holy Week, the general concordance of his encyclicals, and the movement towards new methods of communication. Pacelli's Vatican modernized and dealt with the prevailing issues of the time with a somewhat uniform mind, athwart the baroque remnants of prior pontiffs. Pius X's Vatican seems much less unified. Rampolla promoted the careers of his three prized students (della Chiesa, Gasparri, and Pacelli). Benigni hunted dissidents with his own home-grown intelligence network and ghost wrote official documents. Liturgical reformers reformed the Divine Office along the lines of the Jansenist breviaries on vogue in France. Everyone seemingly followed his own desires and none the pope's, which early in his papacy were a return to chant and more frequent Communion.

Was Pius X in complete control of his Vatican or was he, like Leo XIII at the end of his life, a functionary for the larger factions? His inexperience in playing politics and possibly apolitical nature (coming from peasant stock, not a noble) could very well have disincentivized Sarto from favoring or suppressing the urges of any one group. He let them do as they please, or by consent or by surrender. Pius XII had firm control. Did Pius X? If not, it would be difficult to ascribe to him any specific legacy, much less the proto-Lefebvrian image so many assign the parish priest turned pope.

Sarto and his second successor, Pius XI, may have been relatively inactive personally as pontiffs because they were compromise candidates between the reactionary political forces, liberal reformers, and the Rampolla clique, the most powerful of them all. The Rampolla clique eventually got their own Pope in Benedict XV, who died after having expended almost all his effort on preserving the Church through the First World War. Gasparri had already made a bad name for himself and Pacelli was too young to elect in 1922, so another Sarto, another compromise came about in the form of Achille Ratti. The only remaining mystery, if we are right thus far, is why did Pius XII canonize the nominal obstruction of his mentor's program? Was Pius XII above politicking? Was it a humble concession to the miracles attributed to Papa Sarto? Was it a nod to conservative elements in the Curia, to re-boot the liturgical reform program? We may never know. What can be known is this: Pius X, the great reactionary pope of the 20th century, may have been less a reactor than a spectator in his own see.

Passing the baton

Ostpolitik: A Hermeneutic of Continuity

News of the pope's very prominent role in de facto ending America's long standing embargo against Communist Cuba has caused the secular press, again, to rejoice in the reigning pontiff's accomplishments. The media are comparing Francis' efforts in Cuba to John Paul II's efforts against the Red Russians, disregarding a strong difference in goals.Perhaps, when the writers at the New York Times are not goading on the mayors of that town to ban smoking, they will light up a Cohiba Esplendido in celebration. For those looking to make more serious sense of Francis' international politics, one must look back to the beginning of the 20th century. 

Francis is continuing a dangerous and long disproven method of Vatican diplomacy called Ostpolitik. One could seek a formal definition using Mr. Google, but a practical definition would be something like this: whereas in previous times the Church exercised political power through alliances with like-minded and like-oriented parties, she now engages hostile parties directly, making concessions to her aggressors in hopes that said aggressor will be nice. His Traddiness suspects that Ostpolitik has a special appeal to the modern papacy because it disassociates from the now-detested "altar and throne" arrangement of previous times and instead substitutes direct engagement where Churchmen can be assured of their own do-goodism. Benedict XV—along with Pietro Gasparri and Eugenio Pacelli, a disciple of Cardinal Rampolla—tried to end the First World War by his effete appeals and by maintaining neutrality, understandable given the Church's fragile status. Gasparri, as Pius XI's Secretariat of State, ended the Cristero War by forcing the army which had achieved absolute victory to make an unconditional surrender, again to maintain "the peace" despite the fact that the Cristeros were fighting for the faith, although not for the Vatican or the disinterested Mexican episcopacy. Pius XII most successfully practiced Ostpolitik to save nearly 800,000 Jews during the Second World War, leaning on local relations to stop deportation trains, to create false Bapstismal certificates, and to hide Jews in local religious houses. However, in doing so he put the entire Church at risk by not maintaining neutrality and the Church in Europe was more or less destroyed by the War, nominally rebuilt with American money after the conflict. He furtively practiced Ostpolitik with the Russians after the War while publicly maintaining an anti-Communist facade, hence his support for the troubled Josef Cardinal Mindszenty; given America's prominence, he had to tow their anti-Communist line while secretly attempting to make Catholics' lives better behind the Iron Curtain. Unlike his efforts on behalf of Western European Jews, his efforts for Eastern Catholics failed and the Eastern Churches were nearly liquidated; only the Ukrainian Church survived strong. Paul VI continued his mentor's approach with the Russians and maintained the lines of communication they had opened in the 1950s (those Orthodox observers at Vatican II did not appear ex nihilo). The process failed, reunion with the Orthodox never happened, and the anti-religious campaign of Nikita Khrushchev became as active as Stalin's. There is even some evidence that Communists had agents within the hierarchy, which should not be written off as "conspiracy" given that they had agents in every major Western government just as we had agents there. Pope Paul's continuation of Ostpolitik ended the Church's important place in international affairs until the election of John Paul.

Papa Wojtyla may not have been the virulent anti-Communist we like to imagine. His philosophical training was quite tainted by his rearing, which was not his fault. He even had unique travel privileges that his predecessor in Krakow did not enjoy. Still, he wanted to make life better for the Church behind the Iron Curtain and, rather than pick up where della Chiesa, Gasparri, Pacelli, and Montini left off, he began a unique diplomatic approach by paying visits to Eastern Europe, to his native Poland, and by making friends of Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the ideology's chief political opponents. Simultaneously, he subverted the Soviet establishment in the East and strengthened its opponents in the West. If the Second World War and the Cold War taught Wojtyla anything, it taught him a lesson in real power politics.

And now Francis has revived Ostpolitik in dealing with Cuba: secret negotiations with Communists in hopes that the situation will improve. Why did he do this? We can only guess: dislike of the embargo formed by the non-alignment legacy of Peronist Argentina? Fantastical notions of the poor of Cuba becoming wealthy with new trade lines become available? His arrant admiration of Paul VI, the pope he quotes most of all? Was he seduced by the supposedly charismatic Barack Obama? Could the Pope himself still have some hitherto unknown political baggage? We will probably not know until this Pope has passed and the political play in Cuba unfolds. This return to Ostpolitik disconcerts at least this writer, who had happily read a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rapture in the diplomacy of John Paul and Benedict XVI.

The Pre-Conciliar Church

source: ctu.ed

We spend so much time talking about the “Conciliar Church” that we often forget what the “pre-Conciliar Church” was. Indeed, the Catholic Church has been the “Conciliar Church” since the Council of Jerusalem recounted in the Acts of the Apostles or, at least, since the Nicene Council convoked by Emperor Constantine in 325. The Second Vatican Council was the latest council in the long history of the Church, but not the only. For all intents and purposes, it is the only Council that matters to most modern Latin Churchmen. They, wrongly, see it as the birth of their own incarnation of Catholicism. In this they are wrong. Their variation of Catholicism was born long before the Second Vatican Council and only was brought to full maturity during the 1950s and 1960s. The grapes had long been crushed, the juice bottled, and the product fermented. The Council only opened the cork. What was that process?

Such a question is too intimidating to answer, but hopefully we can get a head start here. It all began, of course, with the Reformation and, later, the French Revolution. We often think of these twin revolts as revolts first against the Church and then against God Himself. The Reformation and French Revolution were these things, but they were also so much more. From the Edict of Milan until 1517, the Church built a distinctly Catholic culture in Europe on the ashes of the Roman legal system and Greek philosophy, baptizing them into herself and allowing them to flourish in a renewed set of political structures. The emergent Catholic Europe was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-governmental, but united by the faith, a remarkable feature the Greek and various Oriental Churches did not enjoy.

After the Reformation, and especially the French Revolution, there was no longer a Catholic Europe, only a Europe in which the majority of inhabitants were Catholics. The faith was undermined for political reasons. Few large blocks of territory signed onto the Augsburg Confession for reasons of belief. In the various north German states as in Henry VIII’s England, Protestantism offered a chance to break away from the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Spanish politics. In the case of England, the “stripping of the altars” was not so easy and required considerable bloodshed to eventuate. Catholic culture died a heroic death, but it died nonetheless.

A new Catholic culture emerged which separated itself from secular society. This was a culture to which one could belong if one was a Catholic, not necessarily if one were only European. European intellectual thought, particularly in Germanic states and France, began with anti-clerical cynicism, but Spinoza and Voltaire it radicalized into open anti-clericalism, anti-popery, and anti-monarchism. Lockean concepts about freedom, the blank slate man receives at birth, and economics insinuated academia everywhere. America’s revolution encouraged the seeds of France’s revolution. Everywhere the former conduits of Catholic education and intellectual thought were undermined and replaced by the Enlightened. More and more Catholics began to emphasize the Church as a “perfect society,” something akin to St. Augustine’s City of God, which exists on earth, but is beyond earthly criticism. The “perfect society” nearly received explicit expression in the First Vatican Council in the documents Tametsi Deus and Supremi Pastoris. This “perfect society” was not celestial as was St. Augustine’s. It was a society parallel to the secular one, running on even plane with it, never touching it. This perfect society, bereft now of major universities and academic credibility, but still enjoying a place in most royal courts, took the apologetics and theology of the baroque doctors as well as the art of that period and called them its own. This 16^th to early 20^th century synthesis of the baroque political establishment with the privatized Catholic faith would be the irreproachable idea of the Catholic faith that survived until World War I. The perfect society could never question itself, nor its head, the Pope. This escapism was fine while popular, but when it declined, many lapsed. Novelist Umberto Eco lost his faith during university when he discovered, to his shock, that the Church had done wrong during the Spanish Inquisition—semantics about the true nature of the Inquisition aside.

The French Revolution ended a few years and untold thousands of deaths after it had begun, yet its spirit did not subside. Despite the ascendance of the diminutive despot Napoleon, the Revolution would continue to spread. Napoleon himself spread it. He had no interest in the “rights of man” or public use of the guillotine, but he did promote liberation from ancient governments, demonstrated that one could oppose the Church publicly, and inculcated French intellectual culture wherever he held influence in Europe. The 1815 Peace of Paris nominally restored the ancient order after Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo, but the damage had been done over the preceding decades. The revolutionary spirit was there to stay.

The perfect society proved ill-equipped to deal with Bonaparte, the revolutionary culture he created, or with shifts in 19^th century academia. A revival in Biblical scholarship in Germany fell early to protestants and disbelievers with linguistic talents who taught that the Gospels were, at best, penned a century or so after Christ. Educated people could no longer take the Scriptures seriously despite complaints from clergy that the first century origin of the Gospels was the Church’s teaching. The beliefs of the perfect society were self-evidently true to believers and required no explanation, only instruction. To those outside the Church, the teachings looked like circular logic.

Another shock to the system was Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species, in which he, perhaps with borrowed material, sought to explain variations in bird beaks in the Galapagos through evolution of creatures. "Mutability" replaced "cause" as the truth of the learned.

The perfect society, as with any subgroup within a larger society, developed what Richard Hofstadter would call “paranoid style” when describing American politics. “Paranoid style” happens when a large minority, convinced of its own value, resorts to conspiracy theories and accusations of wrong doing to explain its own futility. These theories intermingle with the facts, but do not accurately reflect them. In the 19^th century, some Catholics became enamored with what later conspiracy theorists would call the “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy,” which states that the Jews and Freemasons of Europe had united to deceive and destroy the Catholic Church from within; in some variations of this theory, the Freemasons are Satanists who knowingly attempt to invalidate the Sacraments and change fundamental teachings.

As with most examples of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style,” there are facts mixed with fiction. The Jews of Europe did support the various revolutions of 1848, including the revolt against the Pope in Rome. In the next century, Jews would support socialist and communist parties, too. Modern people looking through modern lenses lose sight of why. Prior to Pius IX, Jews were forced to live in a walled ghetto within Rome, a fetid place with limited access to infrastructure and a proclivity to disease. Marriage laws forced more recessive genes which, ironically, raised both the average IQ of European Jews and their susceptibility to certain sicknesses. Jews could hold few good jobs. Among the few lucrative positions Jews could hold was money lending, since Catholics were forbidden to lend money at interest. This had the compounding consequence of making some Jewish families, like the Rothschilds, very wealthy, while making Jewish stereotypes all the more prevalent; no one likes his debt-holder. Jewish people grew tired of their inability to participate in the now-secular society growing throughout Europe. Some progressive politicians, like Pope Pius IX, tried granting rights in moderation and removing the ghetto walls. Pius IX felt betrayed then when the Roman Jews supported the failed revolution and erected a new wall around the Jewish quarter.

Similarly, one faces difficulty in separating Freemasonic facts from Freemasonic fiction. Blaming the Freemasons for what happened in the 1960s, or 1860s, is humanly understandable. How else could the perfect society have collapsed in the years after the Second Vatican Council? A closer look reveals that, from what outsiders can know about them, they may not be all some traditionalists believe them to have been. The Masons are a cellular brotherhood, not a single organization. Fairly independent lodge systems associate with one another, but do not necessarily answer to one overarching figure. This means the Freemasons are united in their vague pseudo-religious beliefs, although not in agenda or organization. The Freemasons in France played a considerable role in the blood bath Revolution. Their evil Italian twins, the Carbonari, aided the revolts of 1820 in Rome, Naples, and Sicily. By contrast, their English and American brethren were quite well behaved. This may have been because England and America were not Catholic countries or because the communitarian character of those joining the lodges in the Anglophonic world differed from the revolutionary character of those joining Continental lodges.

The Freemasons were a force in 18^th and 19^th century politics, organizing revolts and coups in a grassroots fashion, achieving goals through networking and making the right friends. Their goals could be vaguely characterized as progress, fraternity of man, enlightened thought, and liberty. If understood loosely enough, some progressive Churchmen could join the right lodge in good conscience despite condemnations of the Craft by the Apostolic See. Several people over the years even accused Pius IX himself of having joined a lodge during his liberal years as Msgr. Mastai-Ferretti, delegate to Peru. Some lodges and Mason James Marples support this claim, while others like Jesuit Fr. Herbert Thurston denounce it in great detail. While the idea may seem outlandish—and it certainly is—it is not impossible: Mastai-Ferretti was a liberal, the John Paul II of his day, until the 1848 sent him into exile, an exile form which he returned an archconservative. Regardless, the Freemasons’ goals were to spread their secular-progressive ideas. The method of doing this was left to local discretion. Some aimed at infiltrating the State and Church. Others organized revolts. Others attended town hall meetings. And others yet did nothing other than share ideas and operate fraternal functions. To assume a concentrated effort reveals some ignorance of 19^th century European politics and of the Craft itself.

During the latter part of the 19^th century and early part of the 20^th century, the perfect society of the Church found herself shaken by vitiating movements of liberalism and liturgical reform. The liturgical reform movement, the Liturgical Movement, sought to revitalize Catholic life through the liturgy in places ravaged by the preceding century of revolutions and destruction of culture. It also offered an alternative to the Romantic movement, which rejected the excesses of rationalism, but still replaced Revelation with nature, as is evident in 19^th century artwork. This movement was also characterized by an indifference to the clericalism—a reaction to the existing anti-clericalism—of Pius IX’s long reign.

The other movement was the Modernist movement. Modernism was not, contrary to the teaching of Pascendi, the “synthesis of all heresies.” “Modernism” is a term applied too broadly to too many people. Some supposed Modernists, like Adrian Fortescue, were simply good Catholics who did not fit into the perfect society’s mold. Others, like Loisy, were outright apostates. And many others, like Tyrrell and Duchesne, fell somewhere in the murky middle. Pascendi and the anti-Modernist oath given by Papa Sarto forced all non-conformists underground and, effectively, synthesized the various dissidents and disgruntled clerics into one identity, the Modernist. Pascendi was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Modernists stayed out of the spot-light until the coast was clear after the Second World War, bidding their time by studying seemingly benign subjects such as liturgy and coopting those subjects to their cause.

Msgr. Umberto Benigni assumed that the Modernists were an organized clan intent on infiltrating the hierarchy. Benigni organized the Sodalitium Pianium to counter the Modernists. The Sodalitium was a loose network of fifty to one hundred people, mostly laymen, who never spoke to each other. They only answered to a single contact in Rome. The agents would spy on potential Modernists by reading their articles or book, sometimes by opening their mail, and even by looking up their receipts in bookstores. Once a potential Modernist had been confirmed, Benigni would either use the pope’s authority against the person or condemn said Modernist in the press. All this kept the perfect society safe from those assaulting it from the outside.

The more liberal Benedict XV succeeded the to-be-canonized Pius X in 1914 and, after the War to End All Wars, dissolved the Sodalitium, an organization which Pietro Gasparri—Pius XII’s mentor and Pius XI’s first Secretary of State—called “occult.” The perfect society was gone. The Church from Benedict XV onward would live in the world and work with the means available to her.

The Church struggled working within secular politics for the coming decades. The Integrist movement and Action Francaise was met with some measure of success in advocating a Church-friendly right-wing agenda that would be the first breath of fresh air for the French Church in nearly a century and a half. The Cristero movement opposed Calles’ openly secular aims and desire to suppress any public expression of religion. The Church, although effectively disestablished, still possessed enough popularity and prestige to wield political power that would ensure her longevity in Europe. “The faith is Europe and Europe is the faith,” Hillaire Belloc wrote. It was not to be. While Pius XI was writing about the “social reign of Christ the King,” his Secretary of State and Under-Secretary were suppressing the Cristeros and the Action Francaise movements. This did not mean the Church was out of politics, only that the Vatican and the “Rampolla clique” were out of right-wing politics. Newspaper editor turned activist Giorgio Montini’s Popular Party, a center-left Christian democrat faction, enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal Gasparri and Eugenio Pacelli. The Vatican often supported or did not obstruct worker organizations or other types of granges formerly associated with working class collectivism. The Vatican was discreetly pandering to yesterday’s liberal causes while the contemporary forces surged faster towards a new wave of revolutions and political disruptions, namely the rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. The Second World War destroyed the first two of these, leaving the third untouched until the joint efforts of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II accelerated the Soviet Union’s internal decay. The Second World War not only destroyed Germany, but also the remaining relics of the perfect society incarnation of the Church. The emerging materialist and existentialist Europe would have little use even for the vestiges of its Catholic heritage.

Pius XII’s papacy marked a transition period between the perfect society and the “Conciliar Church.” The perfect society—entered by Baptism and juridically governed in a visible way by the Roman Pontiff—replaced the temporal Catholicism of pre-Revolutionary Europe. Now the Church of the “Mystical Body” would supplant the perfect society. For several centuries now, Catholics in the Latin Church assumed the Church was a self-contained society with its own intellectual and inerrant theological systems, ruled by the Pope. Then, in 1943, Pius XII wrote that he could find no description of the Church to be “more sublime” than “Mystical Body.” The new paradigm of the Church as a mystical union with the person of the Pope was certainly a shock to theologians and a departure from the spirit of Vatican I—Vatican II was not the first Council with a spirit which departed from the letter. The liturgical revolution was revived in 1948 and began in earnest with the new Holy Saturday in 1951 and a new Holy Week as well as radical changes to the calendar in 1955. Progressives looking to foster good relations with other religions or seeking to create new interpretations of older teachings thrived on the lecture circuit and in conferences. Many conservatives were irate that when the Society of Jesus suppressed Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s works the Vatican seemed indifferent. Above all, the Vatican seemed to share in the United States’s post-War optimism about the future. The perfect society and the Europe of ideology were both dead. A renewal was both necessary and inevitable.

At this point, the familiar story begins. Religious forces long simmering under the lid blew the top off the pot between 1962 and 1965. German theologians and ecumenists used their influence in the schema committees and in parliamentary proceedings to interpolate controversial statements at the choke points of several documents. The justification for the long-planned new liturgy is finally given. While those following the Vatican since Pius XI’s reign were hardly surprised, the faithful still operating on the perfect society model were throw into paralysis and, often, disbelief.

The point of this article is to give readers an understanding of the political and social place of the Roman Church and the forces pushing her in the years prior to the Second Vatican Council, not to summarize the Vatican’s politics or the reform movement itself, a loaded topic for another time. If context is key, we must know why so many reform movements arose and why the Council played out the way it did.

Perhaps the mistakes of the Vatican in politics were a felix culpa? The perfect society was going to collapse eventually. Nothing could survive the Second World War intact, not even, as the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 proved, the planet itself. The traditionalist movement originates in the French countryside, a place which had enough Gallican common sense to ignore the problems in Rome and to continue what had been done for centuries. The French traditionalist movement was a strange mix of bedfellows: Ultramontane doctrine, Gallican action, and quasi-Jansenistic moral rigidity. This odd blend ensured some semblance of tradition survived for us today in the mainstream. Perhaps one day we will have them to thank within a smaller, more vibrant Church, one dissolved from concerns about the City of Man and focused narrowly on the City of God.

Christian Society?

One of the more thought provoking bloggers—with whom I sometimes, but not too often agree—is Fr. Anthony Chadwick of As the Sun in its Orb. He recently posted a piece that bids what he sees as a long overdue adieu to state religion and the long decayed relationship between Church and State. In his article he draws particular attention to the spiritual collapse of the Church of England, which still stands financially and institutionally with state aid. The gist of Fr. Chadwick's observation is that State enforced religion was an intrinsic corruption of Christianity and that we should be happy it is gone. I would like to present readers with some ideas to the contrary.

First let me distance myself from conventional "altar & throne" narrative one hears in the integrist parts of France (not that I mind those people, some of them are quite Catholic). Does God seek to create glorified nations or does He seek to glorify the soul? Old France, often given the name "First Daughter of the Church," was special because prior to the 18th century the faith thrived there, not because France's government exemplified Catholic virtue. England, which left the Catholic Church centuries prior to the French Revolution, has many sainted kings going back well before Hastings. France has one, St. Louis IX. 

Christian societies and Christian nations are only exceptionally created by kings and emperors. More often they are a recognition of a reality and a new social paradigm that already exists. Constantine legalized Christianity when a large fraction of his Empire was Christian. He even supported the Roman Church by building three basilicas and giving the Bishop of Rome the Lateran Palace, yet he did not make Catholicism the state religion. That did not happen for another six decades, by which time the majority of the Empire was Christian. Indeed Theodosius perhaps did his Empire a favor by championing Nicene Christianity, helping to end Christological struggles that put the stability of the Empire into flux. The forced conversions that followed the Baptism of St. Vladimir of the Rus' were quite a contrast. It took centuries for Rome to Christianize, followed by the rest of Europe (Gaul, Brittania etc.) and the normalization of Christianity as the state religion confirmed what already was. It did not stage a new political or religious scene.

Among the benefits of this normalization of Christianity as the state religion is that morals could now be publicly accepted in a Catholic context. It is not unthinkable that in the mid-fourth century extra marital sex and public gladiatorial games were considered good or acceptable behavior, even though Christianity was legal. The imperial recognition of Christianity as the state religion forced the gruesome gladiatorial games out of existence and ensured a taboo for extra marital sex—not that such behavior ceased entirely. Ought we not concede or even accept the probability that God used the Roman Empire to establish and grow the Church? Was there no greater point to the miracle witnessed by Constantine beyond the Battle of the Milvian Bridge?

Surely this is correlation and not causation though? Exactly! Most commonly Christianity becomes the faith of a nation and the social norm because it has changed the behavior, outlook, and direction of that polity. At some point government forces realize this and decide to "tap into" the Church's new influence or to use the Church for the sake of political cohesion. This is not necessarily good or bad. It can be either depending on the context. When Mussolini re-established the Church in Italy he did so with entirely malevolent intentions; his disdain for the faith was quite apparent when he refused to be photographed kneeling to the Pope and when he rejoiced that the "dog is dead" upon the passing of Pius XI. Au contraire Charlemagne spread the existing Christian society in Gaul and streamlined it to mold France. In doing this he aided the Church, but also those under his dominion by diffusing education through the subsidization of monasteries and proto-universities. 

"Christendom," the pre-1517 Europe, was quite unique in that it united an entire host of independent countries under one religious obedience. Yes, there were still wars, but little of the scale of what existed in the Roman days or what would exist in later days. The decision of Henry VIII to separate from Rome had far reaching impact beyond his marriage bed. It had implications beyond Protestantism. It showed the sovereigns of Europe that they could ignore the Pope in Rome, prioritize short-term national goals, and get away with it. Winston Churchill poetically surmises the result of Henry's execution of St. Thomas More and the ensuing schism: 

“The resistance of More and Fisher to the royal supremacy in Church government was a heroic stand.  They realised the defects of the existing Catholic system, but they hated and feared the aggressive nationalism which was destroying the unity of Christendom.  They saw that the break with Rome carried with it the risk of a despotism freed from every fetter.  More stood forth as the defender of all that was finest in the medieval outlook.  He represents to history its universality, its belief in spiritual values, and its instinctive sense of otherworldliness. Henry VIII with cruel axe decapitated not only a wise and gifted counselor, but a system which, though it had failed to live up to its ideals in practice, had for long furnished mankind with its brightest dreams.”

A nostalgia lingers in many parts of these formerly Catholic countries. One of the verses of the folk hymn Immaculate Mary I believe says something like "Pray for us dear Lady/ Reign over us once more/ Be England thy dowry/ As in days of yore." This is not a yearning for the reign of Henry VII nor is monarchism necessarily a cry for a fictitious France under the Sacred Heart. Often it is a cry for the faith to be the norm again.

Many like Msgr. Lefebvre favored the Vichy government in France and the Francoist regime in Spain for reasons with which I sympathize. Yes, some madly thought a single strongman would restore a former national glory under the "Social Kingship of Christ the King." Others were simply fed up with a century and a half of violent anti-clericalism as existed in France. The Spanish lost their monarchy very early in their civil war, leaving Franco the fascist and the priest-murdering communists as the only options. Neither were attractive, but Franco was certainly the proverbial "lesser of two evils."

All this may be a moot point. Christian societies and Christian nations will not be returning to the Western world for a very long time. Europe has lost its faith. America is losing it. South America is becoming Protestant, which means it will lose its faith in a generation or two. The Catholic Church will, for the first time in a long time, have to live in a non-Christian society as the visible other, the outsider, the one in the world and not of it. The Church will have to lose a great deal of property and respect. She will have to evangelize many people who have never read even a paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount nor seen a Nativity scene during Christmas time. Christian societies and nations might emerge in Africa. I hope they do, but that does very little to help or hurt the Catholic Church in America, which was never the norm and damaged itself by exposing its morals and standards to proto-libertarian jingoism.

It is time to start again, but why reject the past?

St. Pius XII?

With all the talk last month about the impending canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II, only a few are still discussing the interesting news that Pius XII, the last Pope prior to the Second Vatican Council, may also be raised to the altars and by the same dispensation as his successor, Papa Roncalli. One wonders why?

 

Rome's eagerness to canonize John XXIII and John Paul II reflect a desire to canonize the Second Vatican Council and the "Spirit" of the Second Vatican Council respectively. But what would make them want to canonize Papa Pacelli? Francis has been compared to John Paul II for his liturgical praxis, but at least this observer finds him more analogous to Paul VI than to the Pope from Poland. Which brings us to a potential answer. Pius XII made Paul VI, and in a great many ways.

 

As the Rad Trad has said before, Pius XII is the least understood Pope in centuries. He is condemned for the good he did and lauded for the ills of his pontificate. Traditionalists and liberals alike see him as the tiara-wearing, Thomistic, Latin Mass-defending bastion of orthodoxy that preceded the radical changes that began with "Pope John's Council" in 1962. This is romantic (or horrific, depending on one's perspective) rubbish. As previously stated on this blog, Pope Pius was a modernizer, neither a liberal nor a conservative, so his canonization would not necessarily vindicate either side's view. In more sensible times his cause would have had ecumenical implications with the Jewish people, but the media have blemished his reputation since the play The Deputy in 1966 and have painted him as a seething anti-Semite or passive Nazi-enabler; neither characterization could be further from the truth.

 

Yet his work on behalf of the Jewish people in the face of their extermination might be the only clear cut good on Papa Pacelli's part. His primary duty, to preserve the Catholic Church through the Second World War, was less than successful. Most of the Church hierarchy was disbanded, understandably, in Germany and Poland—less so in the lower countries which had Catholic Italy as a cultural boundary against too much Nazi secularism. The rebuilding of the European Church after the War was unsuccessful. Sure, American money—provided by Americanist bishops like Cushing and Spellman—restored the physical plants, but no revival of the faith took place in Europe. Poland had withstood secularism during the War and continued to do so, far from American influence, nestled behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps one reason the Traditionalist movement began in France is because Church influence and Mass attendance had been declining since the reign of Louis XVI. French Catholics had no illusions, no glass house like American and English Catholics. One rarely heard Pius XII speak on matters of Church-State relations in a theological context. His concerns always seemed more practical and concerned with rights rather than public religion. More Paul VI than Pius XI in my opinion.

 

Pope Pius XII with his protégé some time after 1956, when
the Pontiff's health was in rapid decline.

Which brings us to one point too long overlooked: Pius XII made Paul VI. Sure, there are the stories of Msgr. Montini, a secretary in the Vatican, celebrating Mass with university students huddled around his altar—a forerunner to the modern day Newman center if there ever was one, which Pius XII's aristocratic nature did not meet well. And yet we find from his days as a cardinal, Eugenio Pacelli raised Giovanni Battista Montini through the ranks with startling efficiency, almost to denote his successor. Pacelli, as Vatican Secretariat of State under Pius XI, hired Montini for prestigious diplomatic work. Aside from a minor assignment in Poland, Montini worked under Pacelli's tutelage for the better part of three decades, including during the War, a time when other members of the Vatican diplomatic core, like Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, were engaged in active field work. There is, of course, the tale that Montini furtively held negotiations with Russian communists during the War, inciting the fury of his superior, by that point Supreme Pontiff, who promptly exiled him from the Vatican to the archdiocese of Milan. We should not be surprised if there had been contact between Rome and the Soviets, given the ease with which John XXIII acquired Orthodox observers at the Vatican Council a few years later, but this would indicate that the connection between the two parties was well-developed. Which causes us to re-examine the canard of Montini's exile: Msgr. Montini, a priest, was transferred from an under-secretarial position in the Vatican to one of the most important episcopal sees in the world (which had produced the previous pope at the time) and received his consecration from the Pontiff himself. If anything, Pius was denoting his eventual successor. Much is made of the fact that Montini did not get the red hat. Neither did Cushing and many others. Montini was raised to the episcopacy in 1956, three years after Pius XII's second and last consistory. Interestingly, Pope Pius also gave Frs. Suenens, Wojtyla, and Cushing their first episcopal work.

 

Captain Charles Ryder Evelyn Waugh,
convert to the faith, novelist, and
lay liturgical critic.

Lastly there is the liturgical question. Pope Paul stated explicitly in his bull Missale Romanum, which introduced the new ordinary of the Mass to the Roman rite of the Church, that this new praxis was the culmination of a renewal process which began under Pius XII. Given Montini's daily first hand knowledge of Papa Pacelli, one would be hard pressed to dispute this claim. Novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote "many of the innovations, which many of us find so obnoxious, were introduced by Pius XII." Waugh's tone aside, he hits the "nail on the head" here. Evening Masses, vernacular Masses, people muddling through spoken responses, the new Holy Week, and other novelties came about with official approval from Pope Pius. He certainly was not a fan of other novel practices, like the lay offertory procession—which he condemned in Mediator Dei, but he did very little to stop other innovations such as Mass versus populum.

 

Depending on one's perspective, all of this could be good or could be bad, but, as the saying goes, you are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. Pope Francis is an enthusiast of Paul VI, the Pope of his seminary formation and early priesthood. He knows that Pius XII, far from being a 19th century stuff-shirt, was in fact a very modern Pope who set the stage for Council and the liturgical renovations of the 1960s and 1970s which formed the modern hierarchy. It is the Rad Trad's opinion that Pope Francis, God love him, may be seeking to canonize Pius XII for the same reason he intends to canonize John XXIII and John Paul II: to canonize the what people perceive as the changes associated with the Second Vatican Council.

Emperor Constantine and the Feast of Christ the King

And He is the head of the body, the Church, Who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things He may hold the primacy.—Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians 1:18

Today is the last Sunday of October, hence the feast of Christ the King. It is fittingly also the 1,700th anniversary of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome, where Constantine defeated Maxentius for the rule of the great, but declining Empire. From Eusebius's Life of Constantine:

Accordingly he called on him with earnest prayer and supplications that he would reveal to him who he was, and stretch forth his right hand to help him in his present difficulties. And while he was thus praying with fervent entreaty, a most marvelous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been hard to believe had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history, when he was honored with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth? He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, In Hoc Signo Vinces. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also, which followed him on this expedition, and witnessed the miracle.

At dawn of day he arose, and communicated the marvel to his friends: and then, calling together the workers in gold and precious stones, he sat in the midst of them, and described to them the figure of the sign he had seen, bidding them represent it in gold and precious stones. And this representation I myself have had an opportunity of seeing.

And whereas, Maxentius, trusting more in his magic arts than in the affection of his subjects, dared not even advance outside the city gates, but had guarded every place and district and city subject to his tyranny, with large bodies of soldiers, the emperor, confiding in the help of God, advanced against the first and second and third divisions of the tyrant’s forces, defeated them all with ease at the first assault, and made his way into the very interior of Italy.

Having then at this time sung these and suchlike praises to God, the Ruler of all and the Author of victory, after the example of his great servant Moses, Constantine entered the imperial city in triumph. And here the whole body of the senate, and others of rank and distinction in the city, freed as it were from the restraint of a prison, along with the whole Roman populace, their countenances expressive of the gladness of their hearts, received him with acclamations and abounding joy; men, women, and children, with countless multitudes of servants, greeting him as deliverer, preserver, and benefactor, with incessant shouts. But he, being possessed of inward piety toward God, was neither rendered arrogant by these plaudits, nor uplifted by the praises he heard: but, being sensible that he had received help from God, he immediately rendered a thanksgiving to him as the Author of his victory. 

"Triumph of Christianity" in the Vatican Palace.

When I visited Rome a year and a half ago I was staying with some friends outside of the main city and attempted to walk to the Vatican by following the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. After meandering around some roads and following the always-late public buses of Rome, we found ourselves at the Milvian Bridge, entirely by surprise.

We as Catholics ought to hold this day with reverence. On this day God liberated us from the shadows and the hidden places of worship where we had been forced under Diocletian. Contrary to the existing political order, whereby the emperor was one of many discursive gods, God imposed Himself as the only God, under Whose permission the emperor served. In short, God manifested Himself as King.

Over the years we have grown too accustomed to Christianity being permissible, or even the normal, and have forgotten how the mystical reign of Christ over us looks. For this purpose, Pope Pius XI issued the Bull Quas Primas in 1925, in which he instituted the feast of Christ the King:

 It has long been a common custom to give to Christ the metaphorical title of "King," because of the high degree of perfection whereby he excels all creatures. So he is said to reign "in the hearts of men," both by reason of the keenness of his intellect and the extent of his knowledge, and also because he is very truth, and it is from him that truth must be obediently received by all mankind. He reigns, too, in the wills of men, for in him the human will was perfectly and entirely obedient to the Holy Will of God, and further by his grace and inspiration he so subjects our free-will as to incite us to the most noble endeavors. He is King of hearts, too, by reason of his "charity which exceedeth all knowledge." And his mercy and kindness which draw all men to him, for never has it been known, nor will it ever be, that man be loved so much and so universally as Jesus Christ. But if we ponder this matter more deeply, we cannot but see that the title and the power of King belongs to Christ as man in the strict and proper sense too. For it is only as man that he may be said to have received from the Father "power and glory and a kingdom," since the Word of God, as consubstantial with the Father, has all things in common with him, and therefore has necessarily supreme and absolute dominion over all things created.

The foundation of this power and dignity of Our Lord is rightly indicated by Cyril of Alexandria. "Christ," he says, "has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature." His kingship is founded upon the ineffable hypostatic union. From this it follows not only that Christ is to be adored by angels and men, but that to him as man angels and men are subject, and must recognize his empire; by reason of the hypostatic union Christ has power over all creatures. But a thought that must give us even greater joy and consolation is this that Christ is our King by acquired, as well as by natural right, for he is our Redeemer. Would that they who forget what they have cost their Savior might recall the words: "You were not redeemed with corruptible things, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled." We are no longer our own property, for Christ has purchased us "with a great price"; our very bodies are the "members of Christ."

Let Us explain briefly the nature and meaning of this lordship of Christ. It consists, We need scarcely say, in a threefold power which is essential to lordship. This is sufficiently clear from the scriptural testimony already adduced concerning the universal dominion of our Redeemer, and moreover it is a dogma of faith that Jesus Christ was given to man, not only as our Redeemer, but also as a law-giver, to whom obedience is due. Not only do the gospels tell us that he made laws, but they present him to us in the act of making them. Those who keep them show their love for their Divine Master, and he promises that they shall remain in his love. He claimed judicial power as received from his Father, when the Jews accused him of breaking the Sabbath by the miraculous cure of a sick man. "For neither doth the Father judge any man; but hath given all judgment to the Son." In this power is included the right of rewarding and punishing all men living, for this right is inseparable from that of judging. Executive power, too, belongs to Christ, for all must obey his commands; none may escape them, nor the sanctions he has imposed. 

 This kingdom is spiritual and is concerned with spiritual things. That this is so the above quotations from Scripture amply prove, and Christ by his own action confirms it. On many occasions, when the Jews and even the Apostles wrongly supposed that the Messiah would restore the liberties and the kingdom of Israel, he repelled and denied such a suggestion. When the populace thronged around him in admiration and would have acclaimed him King, he shrank from the honor and sought safety in flight. Before the Roman magistrate he declared that his kingdom was not of this world. The gospels present this kingdom as one which men prepare to enter by penance, and cannot actually enter except by faith and by baptism, which, though an external rite, signifies and produces an interior regeneration. This kingdom is opposed to none other than to that of Satan and to the power of darkness. It demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness. They must hunger and thirst after justice, and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross. Christ as our Redeemer purchased the Church at the price of his own blood; as priest he offered himself, and continues to offer himself as a victim for our sins. Is it not evident, then, that his kingly dignity partakes in a manner of both these offices? It would be a grave error, on the other hand, to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power. Therefore by Our Apostolic Authority We institute the Feast of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ to be observed yearly throughout the whole world on the last Sunday of the month of October - the Sunday, that is, which immediately precedes the Feast of All Saints. We further ordain that the dedication of mankind to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to be renewed yearly.—Quas Primas, Pius XI, P.P., given December 11, 1925 at St. Peter's Basilica

Christ is the King of our souls. Constantine's realization of this saved the flailing Roman Empire and transformed the world for the cause of God.

Arch of Constantine, built to commemorate the victory at the Milvian Bridge, as seen from
the Colosseum, where many Christian were martyred.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.