Sources

The opening up of the Vatican Secret Archives for the pontificate of Pius xi has revealed that the Vatican campaign to impose the ‘Italian model’ of Catholic Action on Catholic lay activism world-wide was largely conducted through correspondence between the Vatican Secretariat of State, which usually meant Mgr Pizzardo but sometimes meant the pope himself, and also his two successive secretaries of state – Cardinal Pietro Gasparri (1922–30) and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (1930–9) – and the papal envoys throughout the world.Footnote ¹ Files have been consulted from the apostolic delegations in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, the East Indies (i.e. British India), the Philippines, the United States of America and Uruguay, and the apostolic nunciatures in Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Irish Free State (which effectively covered the British Empire until the establishment of an apostolic delegation in London in 1938), Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain. The Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari section also contains Secretariat of State circulars and correspondence with papal representatives abroad, as well as files on Azione Cattolica Internazionale.Footnote ² Ideally, material from the other end, so to speak, of the relationship between Pizzardo and his interlocutors on the issue of Catholic Action would have been consulted, but since this is scattered around nearly a score of diocesan or national episcopal archives world-wide, this has been a practical impossibility, though it was possible to consult sources in some British archives. So this task must be left to scholars in the countries concerned.

The development of Italian Catholic Action

The Italian model of Catholic Action had been developed in the peculiar circumstances of the Italian political situation under a succession of popes – Pius ix (1846–78), Leo xiii (1878–1903), Pius x (1903–14), Benedict xv (1914–22) and Pius xi (1922–39), but particularly the latter.Footnote ³ The emergence of the Catholic movement was initially a response to the establishment of the Liberal, secular state in Italy after unification, and in particular to the loss of the temporal power of the popes in 1870. It is, however, important to grasp that in the later stages of its development, the Italian model of Catholic activism was conditioned by the political turmoil in Italy in the early to mid-1920s, the rise of Fascism to power and the establishment of a Fascist dictatorship which, in the late 1920s, was already exhibiting totalitarian tendencies that had resulted in the ‘demolition’ of most of the other elements of the once complex and widespread Catholic mass movement in Italy.Footnote ⁴ In 1923, as the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano came under attack from Fascism, Pius xi and Gasparri sought to secure the future of ACI by giving it new statutes.Footnote ⁵ The Lateran Pacts of 1929, by means of which Mussolini and Pius xi sought to achieve a comprehensive solution of the ‘Roman Question’, the sixty-year Church-State conflict in Italy, turned out to be a truce, rather than a permanent settlement of relations between the papacy and the Fascist regime.Footnote ⁶ In the spring/early summer of 1931, tensions between Church and regime created by the unresolved issue of the role of the Church in the fields of youth and labour provoked a serious crisis which involved an attack upon ACI and its members, provoking from Pius xi the encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno which was critical of Fascism.Footnote ⁷ The ‘September accords’ of 1931, which brought this crisis to an end, while guaranteeing the survival of the youth and labour sections (sezioni professionali) in a truncated form, also effectively eliminated the election of the lay leaders of ACI.Footnote ⁸

Mgr Pizzardo, as general ecclesiastical assistant of ACI since 1922, and thus ultimately the pope's directing agent in the organisation, was intimately involved in this stage of the development of the ‘Italian model’, particularly during the dark days of spring 1931 when the youth sections of Catholic Action were closed down by the regime and members subjected to Fascist violence, and he was himself the object of scurrilous attacks in the Fascist press.Footnote ⁹ Pizzardo was a quintessential curialist, with limited experience of Vatican diplomacy in the field (three years as an assistant in the Munich nunciature) and he had virtually no pastoral experience other than the celebration of mass and the hearing of confession in Roman convents, tasks normally expected of priests working in the curia. Nevertheless he had worked with various branches of Catholic Action since his ordination. In 1930 he became under-secretary of state and was ordained bishop; four years later he became secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Russia, giving him a close acquaintance with Communism.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1937 he was made a cardinal and Prefect of the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities. During the reign of Pius xii (1939–58) he was a power in the Vatican, part of the ‘pentagon’ of cardinals who ruled it. But in the 1930s, as number two in the Secretariat of State, he was already a powerful figure and Pius xi's chief agent in the project to extend the ACI model to the universal Church.

The ACI model

The essential characteristics of the Italian model of Catholic Action as it had developed by the end of the 1920s can be summarised thus:

1. 1. Virtually all lay Catholic organisations and activities in Italy were under its jurisdiction, youth, students, adult, male and female organisations, and what remained of Catholic economic and social activities and institutions after the ‘demolitions’ of Fascism.

2. 2. The organisation was highly structured at every level, parochial, diocesan and national, and all appointments of key lay officers were made by the clergy: at the national level they were made by the pope himself.

3. 3. Lay officers at every level were shadowed by an ‘ecclesiastical assistant’, a priest, high-ranking prelate or even a bishop. At the national level, Pizzardo, as ‘general ecclesiastical assistant’ and the pope's representative, was effectively the head of Italian Catholic Action. In the absence of a national Italian conference of bishops, ACI was directly answerable to the Vatican.

4. 4. By the terms of article 43 of the Concordat of 1929, ACI was enjoined to be strictly non-political.Footnote ¹¹

ACI was thus, in the context of the rigid, hierarchical and clerical ecclesiology of Pius xi, truly ‘The participation of the laity in the Apostolate of the Hierarchy’ and therefore seen as the ideal organisational pattern for Catholic lay activism throughout the world.

The ideology of Catholic Action

Like the totalitarian movements with which it was in conflict during the 1920s and 1930s, Catholicism obviously had utopian goals. Whereas the utopias of Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were material and earthly, that of Roman Catholicism was, of course, spiritual and celestial: ‘the Kingdom of God’. Moreover, like the Fascist movements and regimes, Catholicism was committed to what the historian of generic Fascism, Roger Griffin, has described as a ‘palingenetic project’.Footnote ¹² In the case of Italian Fascism and National Socialism, the object was the rebirth or regeneration of a national community and a Volksgemeinschaft respectively, which they believed had decayed and degenerated thanks to the corrosive influences of materialism, liberalism, parliamentary democracy, freemasonry and the Jews. For Catholicism the object was ‘the Christian restoration of society in a Catholic sense’. Human society had gone into (moral) decline and decadence thanks to some of these same influences – materialism, freemasonry and liberalism (and for some Catholics, the Jews) – but above all secularism and anti-clericalism. The key text for Pius xi's palingenetic project, and ultimately the theological rationale of Catholic Action, was his encyclical Quas Primas on the institution of the feast of Christ the King.Footnote ¹³

Published in December 1925 as Pius xi's first Holy Year was drawing to a triumphant conclusion, Quas Primas reads as a logical development of the thrust of his first encyclical, Ubi Arcano Dei consilio of 1922, in which he committed his pontificate to the restoration of ‘the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ’.Footnote ¹⁴ Prefaced by reference to the usual catalogue of the evils afflicting human society, the encyclical argues that the cause of these evils was the fact that ‘the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives’, and that the only way in which that society might be restored or reborn is through the universal recognition of ‘the Empire of the Lord’.Footnote ¹⁵ After providing scriptural authority for the title of ‘Christ the King’, Pius claims that ‘Thus the empire of our Redeemer embraces all men.’Footnote ¹⁶ The most striking statement in the whole encyclical is that in which, while obviously accepting that, in strictly scriptural terms, Christ's Kingdom ‘was not of this world’, he speaks of ‘the Catholic Church, which is the Kingdom of Christ on Earth’.Footnote ¹⁷

This ideology fortified Pius xi in his battles against the other totalitarian powers and their attacks upon the Church and it is clear that Catholic Action organisations throughout the world consequently made the encyclical a key element of their study days and weeks and the feast of Christ the King their particular celebration. The doctrines espoused in Quas Primas percolated down to the local level of the Church: as early as 1927 a Belgian Catholic Action pamphlet declared that ‘Christ has given to the Church the power of ruling men. From this power derives the right to make civil and spiritual laws and to ensure that they are carried out.’Footnote ¹⁸ Members of Catholic Action were thus to see themselves as a militia or ‘army’, agents in the process of recuperating human society for Christ, under the leadership and command of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in defence of the Church against its many enemies.

Catholic lay activism at the beginning of Pius XI's reign

While the term ‘Catholic Action’ had frequently been used to describe all manner and forms of Catholic lay activism in the universal Church, from the beginning of Pius xi's pontificate it took on the rather more restricted meaning, developed in Italy, of a comprehensive organisation of lay activists under tight hierarchical control. In any case, the vitality and effectiveness of Catholic lay activity, in the social sphere especially, varied enormously from country to country at the beginning of Pius xi's reign. In countries like France, Germany and the Benelux states, Catholic lay activities were extremely diverse and highly developed. They were also very well-developed in Britain, Australia, Canada and the USA, and in the latter case were directed from a strong national organisation in Washington – the National Catholic Welfare Conference.Footnote ¹⁹

In other countries, however, the situation was very much less promising. While there was plenty of Catholic ‘associationalism’, it was largely devoted to para-liturgical or devotional activities, lay spiritual formation and charity, divided into many specialist groups and not coordinated at a diocesan or national level: social activism was less evident. Mgr Pascal Robinson ofm, papal nuncio to the Irish Free State, for example, reported on the depressing inactivity of Catholics there as late as 1935, despite the efforts of the bishops to establish a national Catholic Action organisation.Footnote ²⁰ Two other deeply Catholic countries, Portugal and Spain, presented a similar picture: the papal nuncio in Lisbon informed Pizzardo in 1930 that there was a virtual absence of Catholic social activism in that country, where the Church had little influence among the working classes.Footnote ²¹ As far as Spain was concerned, according to Frances Lannon:

Her conclusions are borne out by a report of a Spanish Jesuit to the Vatican on the state of Spanish Catholic Action in 1930.Footnote ²³

In Latin America, the situation varied from country to country. In Argentina, in the 1930s, there was much Catholic lay activism – probably the work of large numbers of Italian immigrants – especially among the working classes, but it was not always effective.Footnote ²⁴ Chile presented a rather different picture. Here there was much activity both at a grass-roots level, especially among the workers, but also on the part of the hierarchy who, as early as 1927, were seeking to reorganise Catholic youth into thirteen regional groupings. Even so, the term ‘Catholic Action’ had as vague a meaning in Chile, as elsewhere, encompassing Marian associations and the Knights of Columbus (the Catholic layman's association founded in the USA), reflecting the rather inchoate development of Catholic activism at this time.Footnote ²⁵ Elsewhere, the situation was worse, sometimes very much worse, especially in some Latin American countries where Church-State relations were strained – like Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Worst of all was the situation in Mexico where the Church, including lay members of Catholic Action, was being violently persecuted. What was almost universal in the Church was the absence of the highly structured organisation of Catholic activism which was central to the Italian model.

The campaign to impose the Italian model

Pius xi's campaign to galvanise Catholic lay activism throughout the world, by exporting the ACI model, began at the outset of his reign with his encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei. In it he told the Catholic bishops of the world:

He carried forward his campaign by means of letters to primates and/or the presidents of national episcopal conferences. The key documents were letters to Cardinal van Roey, archbishop of Malines-Mechelen and primate of Belgium (August 1928), Cardinal Bertram, prince-bishop of Breslau and a leading figure in the German Bishops Council (December 1928) and Cardinal Segura, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain (November 1929). The timing was not accidental: by late 1928 negotiations for what would become the Lateran Pacts of February 1929 had reached a critical point and, in consequence, the new physiognomy of Italian Catholic Action had more or less emerged. During the course of the 1930s these papal letters would be incorporated into Catholic Action manuals as seminal texts, with the letter to Bertram being treated as key.Footnote ²⁷

Thereafter, from his strategic position in the Secretariat of State, Mgr Pizzardo developed a growing correspondence with nuncios and apostolic delegates about Catholic Action. Sometimes he corresponded directly with local prelates and priests, and even laymen working in the field. But on the whole he preferred to do his work via the Vatican's representatives, urging upon them the necessity for the national hierarchies to which they were accredited to adopt the Italian model, as well as providing copies of publications produced by Italian Catholic Action to be translated into various languages. The publication which most frequently served this purpose was Mgr Luigi Civardi's Manual of Catholic Action (Manuale di Azione Cattolica) which set out in the clearest terms the organisational principles to be adopted.Footnote ²⁸ Civardi's pamphlet was translated into English, French, German and Spanish, and may have been rendered into other languages as well. The Belgian Catholic activist, Christine de Hemptinne, translated a Catholic Action manual into Spanish for Peruvian Accion Catolica and into English for Australian and Indian Catholic Action, the latter then being translated into Tamil.Footnote ²⁹

The papal ‘inspectors’ of Catholic Action

In support of his correspondence with papal envoys and local bishops, Pizzardo also used the offices of two papal ‘inspectors’ of Catholic Action who travelled the world reporting back to him on the state of Catholic Action, and the threat of Communism, in the field, giving lectures on the ACI model and offering advice and encouragement to local leaders and members where appropriate. Surprisingly, both of these veritable legati a latere were lay people, and women at that, Madame Florentine Steenberghe-Engeringh from the Netherlands, and the Belgian countess Christine de Hemptinne.Footnote ³⁰ From 1922 to 1952 Steenberghe-Engeringh was president of the International Union of Catholic Women's Leagues, which grouped together nineteen leagues in forty countries.Footnote ³¹ In December 1932, in response to a letter from the nuncio in Berne, Pizzardo wrote that the Union, and its head, should be treated as the official spokespersons on certain issues affecting women and the family, of the Holy See at League of Nations organisation.Footnote ³² Consequently, the Union and its president exercised much influence in both Geneva and Rome.

In 1930 Pizzardo sent Mme Steenberghe-Engeringh to Portugal to inspect lay Catholic activities, report on them and make recommendations for their future development. In his letter of introduction, Pizzardo noted that she was bringing a special papal blessing to the Catholic women of Portugal.Footnote ³³ Her report back to Pizzardo was not encouraging, a view shared by the nuncio in Lisbon. Catholic social action was little understood in Portugal and few organisations existed: she was especially unimpressed with the ‘elegant inactivity’ of the society women who seemed to make up the bulk of female organisations.Footnote ³⁴ Three years later, Pizzardo asked Steenberghe-Engeringh to report on The Grail (De Graal), a Catholic female organisation sponsored by the bishop of Haarlem and with branches in England, France and Germany, which was causing much concern in Rome due to allegations in L'Osservatore Romano of ‘Nordic’ and even ‘Wagnerian’ tendencies.Footnote ³⁵ Steenberghe-Engeringh refuted most of these claims but warned that The Grail did not fit easily into mainstream Catholic Action and posed a potential danger to recruitment for the latter's female organisations.Footnote ³⁶ A year later she was reporting to Pizzardo on the state of Dutch Catholic Action in general and her comments were not encouraging. While Catholic lay activism was vibrant and effective in the Netherlands, it was not being run on the Italian model, though she did hope that the Dutch bishops would eventually establish a national structure,Footnote ³⁷ a feeling shared by the papal nuncio, Mgr Schioppa, though without much optimism.Footnote ³⁸

Christine de Hemptinne was the president of the Belgian Young Catholic Women and was appointed head of the international federation of Young Catholic Women, the junior section of IUCWL, by Pius xi in 1932: in 1939, the junior section claimed three million members in sixty-four countries.Footnote ³⁹ Wealthy and unmarried, in the 1930s she travelled the world on behalf of Pizzardo, carrying letters of introduction to the local hierarchies signed by Pius xi himself. In 1932 she visited Brazil and Peru for six weeks.Footnote ⁴⁰ Two years later she was in Chile with the blessing of the Holy Father to inspect the female organisations of Chilean Catholic Action.Footnote ⁴¹ This was immediately followed by a visit to Argentina, ostensibly to participate in the eucharistic congress in Buenos Aires but also to give lectures on Catholic Action, plus a ‘delicate mission’ to both Paraguay and Uruguay (the Holy See had no links with Uruguay and Church-State relations there were tense).Footnote ⁴² Madame Steenberghe-Engeringh followed much the same Latin American itinerary as De Hemptinne.Footnote ⁴³ In 1936, after a private audience with the pope, the latter went to Australia and New Zealand, returning home via Ceylon and India, where she left her mark on local Catholic Action organisations: she returned to Australia in 1939 to assess the progress made since the establishment of a national Catholic Action organisation.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Vatican Archives testify that she also visited, at different times, Canada, Ireland (the Irish Free State), Britain, France, Poland and the Netherlands.

Rome: world headquarters of Catholic Action

While Pizzardo sought to impose the Italian model of Catholic Action upon Catholics throughout the world, Pius xi was engaged in a parallel effort to focus the attention and emotions of those Catholics upon Rome itself. During the course of his reign, an unprecedented number of mammoth gatherings of Catholics was organised in the Eternal City.Footnote ⁴⁵ The pope's reason for organising this stream of major events was to mobilise Catholics throughout the world, emphasising the authority of the Roman pontiff in the face of challenges from the Church's enemies and to demonstrate the demographic power of Roman Catholicism. It was perhaps also meant as a reminder to Mussolini that Rome was, first and foremost, the centre of Christianity.Footnote ⁴⁶ But given the specialist nature of some of these gatherings – Catholic journalists, doctors, nurses, young workers – it is also clear that it was seen as a way of tightening the bonds between these groups and the pope, and also their relationship with Catholic Action. It is especially significant in this regard that in 1935 an attempt was made to establish a ‘General Secretariat for Catholic Youth in the World’ in Rome.Footnote ⁴⁷ The new organisation would have acted as a centre of study and information (it was proposed to dedicate a weekly programme on Vatican Radio to its news), and with Luigi Gedda, the dynamic leader of the youth organisations of ACI, at its head, as was proposed, it would have been able to imprint a more uniform, Roman, character upon Catholic youth and thus hopefully rein in the excessive independence of JOC. Why these plans did not come to fruition is unclear.

A centralising initiative which did come to fruition was the establishment, on 25 March 1938, of an Ufficio Centrale dell'Azione Cattolica (Central Office of Catholic Action) in Rome under the direction of Mgr Pizzardo (who had been created a cardinal in 1937).Footnote ⁴⁸ This was simply de jure recognition of what had been fact for a long time, Pizzardo's central role in the development of Catholic Action throughout the world. But it was a powerful signal, nevertheless, of the importance which Pius xi attached to world-wide Catholic Action, and while there is no evidence that the Ufficio had the same juridical status as a curial dicastery, placing it under a cardinal and housing it in the newly-built Palazzo delle Congregazioni at San Callisto in Trastevere, along with congregations of the Roman curia, gave it effectively the same status. According to the authoritative Jesuit journal, La Civiltá Cattolica, the office was put in San Callisto, ‘Because … [visiting] bishops have occasion go there on the business of their dioceses, they will now have the ability to communicate with him [Pizzardo] about one of the most important elements of their pastoral activity.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The new central office also gave greater cachet to the special courses of lectures in Catholic Action which Pizzardo had been organising in Rome from the mid-1930s onwards for seminarians at the national colleges, religious and even bishops. One course of lectures in May 1935, employing the services of prelates closely associated with ACI, such as Civardi, Roveda and Anichini, included participants from the Belgian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Czech, English, French, German, Maronite, North American, Polish, Portugese, Scottish and Spanish colleges, the Collegio Pio Latino-Americano and the Russicum.Footnote ⁵⁰ Increasingly during the late 1930s, Pizzardo encouraged national heads of Catholic Action to send priests, and occasionally laymen, to attend these courses and several, who would later play a key role in Catholic Action at home, answered the call.

Catholic Action, Communism and National Socialism

While the purposes of Catholic Action were multifarious, it was, above all, supposed to fight the Church's enemies. The evidence from the documentation now accessible in the Vatican Archives demonstrates that Pius xi's anxiety to impose ‘the Italian model’ of Catholic Action on the world-wide Church was particularly motivated by a belief in the need to counteract the spread of Communism outside of the Soviet Union. The pope would eventually become concerned by the threat posed by all three totalitarian dictatorships, but that posed by atheistic Soviet Communism was world-wide. Initially, the threat had been limited geographically to the onslaught of the ‘godless campaigns’ of the Bolshevik regime on the small Catholic minority in Soviet Russia and as late as 1928/9 Vatican diplomacy had believed that it could achieve some sort of modus vivendi with the Soviets.Footnote ⁵¹ Thereafter, the threat of Communism became the Vatican's major preoccupation: Communism was seen to be behind the persecution of the Church in Mexico and the driving force of anti-clerical Republicanism in Spain. In Divini Redemptoris (1937), the major public condemnation of Marxian socialism, Pius xi denounced ‘the most persistent enemies of the Church, who from Moscow are directing the struggle against Christian civilisation’.Footnote ⁵² Such was Pius xi's concern about the threat of Communism that he actually denounced it in no fewer than six encyclicals during the course of his seventeen-year pontificate.Footnote ⁵³ A seventh encyclical warning against Communism – Divinis Humanisque Iuribus in Russiarum Regionibus Impiissime Violatis (‘On the impious violation of divine and human law in the Russian regions’), drawn up in 1931, was never published.Footnote ⁵⁴

One of the key tasks assigned to the Italian-style Catholic Action organisations established in various countries was, accordingly, the monitoring of Communist activities and the adoption of measures to combat them. This task was one of the priorities set out in papal letters to national episcopates and individual bishops, and in the founding statutes of some national Catholic Action organisations. And assessing the scale of the Communist peril was also a key feature of the reports that Christine de Hemptinne sent back to Rome after her visits on the Vatican's behalf to Catholic Action organisations in various parts of the world. In 1930 Madame Steenberghe-Engheringh explained to Pizzardo that in Portugal there was a real Communist threat in some cities – especially Porto, where only one Catholic union operated in competition with Communists and Socialists active in the field.Footnote ⁵⁵ Concern about Communism even reached the director of Vatican Radio, which had been founded in 1931. According to Ferdinando Bea, ‘From Latin America came repeated requests for (radio) programmes of a social character with which to challenge Nazi and Soviet propaganda.’Footnote ⁵⁶

The USA, Canada and Australia were an especial object of the Vatican's anxieties concerning the spread of Communism, as Pizzardo's correspondence shows. Mgr Sassuolo, apostolic delegate in Canada, wrote to him that Communists were no great threat except in Ontario and British Columbia, that those most susceptible to their propaganda were immigrants, and that various organisations, like the Catholic Youth League, the Catholic Welfare Bureau and the Knights of Columbus were active in combating them.Footnote ⁵⁷ As far as the USA was concerned, the Vatican, and Italians generally, tended to exaggerate the threat of Communism there because of the ‘democratic and egalitarian nature’ of American society when, in fact, these two characteristics of America probably made the growth of Communism much less likely.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the case of Australia, Christine de Hemptinne on her visit there was alarmed by signs of Communist ‘activity and propaganda, at the University, amongst women in the street, in the ports’, as she pointed out in a letter of November 1936 to Mgr Panico.Footnote ⁵⁹ Many Australians shared her fears: the establishment of a national Catholic Action secretariat under the lay leadership of Bob Santamaria and Frank Maher in Melbourne in 1938 was in large part prompted by fears of Communist ‘entryism’ inside the trade unions (ACT) and the Australian Labor Party: a strong national secretariat was seen as a means of combating this.Footnote ⁶⁰ Immediately after its establishment, the Australian Communist Party denounced the secretariat for its ‘pro-Fascist policies’.Footnote ⁶¹ Catholic concern about Communism during the Cold War would lead to Santamaria and other Catholics splitting the Australian Labor Party in the late 1940s, thus keeping Labor out of power for nearly a generation.Footnote ⁶²

Though Communism was always ‘public enemy number one’ for the Catholic Church in this period, by early 1937 German National Socialism had become a close second. In his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (‘With burning anxiety’) in March of that year, Pius xi condemned the repeated violations of the 1933 Reichskonkordat committed by the Nazis, and also much else of the theory and practice of the Nazi regime, including racialism, paganism and ‘statolatry’.Footnote ⁶³ In 1938 the Sacred Congregation for Seminaries and Universities issued a comprehensive warning about the spread of racial ideas.Footnote ⁶⁴ When it appeared that malign Nazi influences had reached Fascist Italy, as manifested in Mussolini's introduction of the Racial Laws against the Jews in 1938, with similar legislation in Hungary and Slovakia later, Pius publicly protested against the laws, as in his famous ‘We are all Semites’ outburst in July of that year. It was at this time that he also commissioned a condemnation of racialism from the American Jesuit, John Lafarge, which would take the form of the unpublished, so-called ‘secret encyclical’, Humani Generis Unitas (the Unity of the Human Race).Footnote ⁶⁵ The Vatican's concerns about the increasing threat posed by German Nazism were communicated to apostolic delegates and nuncios, and through them to bishops and Catholic Action organisations world-wide in 1937, after the publication of Mit Brennender Sorge, and again in 1938 and early 1939.Footnote ⁶⁶ The German bishops were only too well aware of the dangers posed by the Nazis, but the message took longer to get through to Catholics elsewhere, except Belgium, where bishops and Catholic Action organisations were already conscious of the perils of Fascism by the mid-1930s, as pastoral letters and the content of study days demonstrate. With Germany as a neighbour and their own home-grown Fascist organisations, the Walloon Rexists and the Flemish Vlaams Nationale Verbond and Verdinaso (an organisation advocating the union of Flanders with the Netherlands), that was not surprising.Footnote ⁶⁷ Over the border, Madame Steenberghe-Engeringh, in a letter to Pizzardo in 1934, warned of the need to guard Dutch Catholic Action against ‘des infiltrations fascistes, national-socialistes et communistes’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Dutch hierarchy specifically denounced A. A. Mussert's National Socialist Movement as infected with ‘totalitarianisms and idolatry of the state’ and issued edicts banning Catholics from belonging to it in 1934 and again in 1936.Footnote ⁶⁹

Problems

Inevitably, given the vastly differing local and national situations to be found in the Universal Church, the Vatican's efforts to impose a standardised, Italian, model for the organisation of Catholic lay activism encountered many obstacles. An absolutely fundamental problem was the apathy of Catholic laypeople and their inability fully to grasp the over-arching idea of the new Catholic Action project. As the nuncio to the Irish Free State explained to Pizzardo in 1935, the majority of Irish Catholics could not conceive of their religious obligations as extending beyond formal ritual observance and that they were without the Catholic ‘social sense that is so manifest in Britain and the United States’.Footnote ⁷⁰ And in 1938 a leading Catholic in the diocese of Brentwood, England, wrote to his bishop that ‘despite the clear words of the Hierarchy, Catholics have only the vaguest possible idea of what Catholic Action means’.Footnote ⁷¹ The remedy for this was an outpouring of books and pamphlets on the subject in most countries. These had as their model, and were sometimes merely translations of, Mgr Luigi Civardi's manual for Italian Catholic Action. According to the nuncio in Chile, who sent Pizzardo a copy of a book by Fr Leira, Nociones de Accion Catolica, this perfectly accorded with papal documents. It was rather like a catechism, in question and answer form, which made it rather monotonous, but it was needed because most of the ideas were unknown: ‘In other countries it might seem a defect, but here it is a necessity where one is dealing with concepts. It has helped the growth of Catholic Action which has made a lot of progress since 1931.’Footnote ⁷²

Another problem was that some bishops found it difficult to understand why and how Catholic Action was different from the Catholic lay activism with which they were familiar.Footnote ⁷³ Others regarded it as simply too much extra work: they had few enough priests for basic parish work without having to load them with an additional responsibility as social organisers and propagandists.Footnote ⁷⁴ On the other hand, Pizzardo, in his exhortation on Catholic Action to the French bishops, claimed that Catholic Action militants could act as a lay ‘supplement’ to their declining numbers of clergy.Footnote ⁷⁵ And sometimes bishops were quite simply unwilling to accept any infringement of their authority as diocesan ordinaries, by giving away ultimate direction to a national structure of Catholic Action. This is not surprising. Bishops were always jealous of their prerogatives: Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston had shown a similar unwillingness to accept direction from the National Catholic Welfare Council when it was founded (after the USA entered the war in 1917) to co-ordinate the Catholic, lay contribution to the war effort, and had even attempted to have it suppressed by the Vatican.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the 1930s Archbishop Michael Kelly of Sydney fiercely resisted being drawn into the national organisational structure for Australian Catholic Action. Kelly disapproved of a national secretariat and preferred diocesan secretariats subject, ultimately, to the pope via the apostolic delegate, but by 1939 he had come round, and had changed the name of organisations in his diocese from ‘Lay Apostolate’ to ‘Catholic Action’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Episcopal personality clashes also impeded progress. Kelly, for example, objected to having to collaborate in a national organisation with his opposite number, and rival, Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne.Footnote ⁷⁸ A very similar situation was to be found in Chile where the problem lay in the antagonism between the archbishop of Santiago and the Armed Forces bishop, Mgr Edwards, who was nominated head of Chilean Catholic Action in 1930.Footnote ⁷⁹ The apostolic nuncio in Chile reported to the Vatican that the organisational integrity of national Catholic Action in the youth field was being undermined by the archbishop's decision to establish new Catholic groups in the university of the capital, in direct opposition to those officially sponsored by Catholic Action.Footnote ⁸⁰ The traditional rivalry between the two Scottish archiepiscopal sees, Glasgow and St Andrews and Edinburgh, was also a reason why a national Catholic Action organisation never got off the ground in Scotland: it even proved impossible for the Scottish bishops to produce a joint pastoral on the dangers of Communism because the archbishop of Glasgow had already acted unilaterally.Footnote ⁸¹ Then there were bishops who flatly refused to cooperate with the Vatican's plans, like the archbishop of Bombay, in British India.Footnote ⁸²

Ironically, it was often the most highly structured national organisations of Catholic Action, and most active and successful in their fields, that caused Pizzardo many headaches. First, they threw up some strong, powerful lay leaders, a phenomenon disliked by bishops and priests, who resented being given orders by laymen, and they were difficult to control at a national and diocesan level. Thus, in 1931, Mgr Verdier, archbishop of Paris complained that the Fédération Nationale Catholique (adults), the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrêtienne (Young Christian Workers) and the Fédération National des Patronages (Catholic benevolent societies) were ‘in effect … outside of the hierarchy's control. Because these organisations are frequently directed by laymen, and the priests are little more than elemosiniers (chaplains), patterns of thought and moral attitudes are created which are not in perfect conformity with the teaching of the Church’.Footnote ⁸³

The Jocistes were a particular problem because their founder and leader, and their international organisation, seemed to threaten the authority of both local bishops and the Vatican. Founded by Fr Joseph Cardijn in Belgium, the Jocistes quickly spread to France, Canada and to the Catholic communities of other countries, including England. As Oskar Cole-Arnal notes, the Jocistes were officially launched by Pius xi in 1924 and

Cardijn was a powerful, charismatic figure with ideas of his own, hence Cole-Arnal's reference to his ‘ideology’. Consequently, he was very much a law unto himself and the Jocistes a sort of ‘state within in a state’ as far as Catholic Action was concerned. Complaints on this score, from prelates in Belgium, England, France Holland and Switzerland, reached Cardinal Hlond of Poland who passed them on to Pizzardo.Footnote ⁸⁵ Mgr Micara, nuncio to Belgium, summed up the problem of the Jocistes in a letter to Pacelli about the Jociste congress in 1935: ‘This congress was the glorification of Belgian JOC and Canon Cardijn, with the former being presented as the model for organisations of its kind and the latter as the father, the founder, the person who incarnates the Jociste ideal’, and he added for good measure that his opinion was shared by ‘the excellent Dr Gedda’.Footnote ⁸⁶

The Jocistes were also tainted by the undesirable tendency of some Catholic workers’ associations to operate as an exclusivist, ‘class’ organisation, contrary to the inter-class ideal of Catholic social doctrine. This was one of Micara's worries,Footnote ⁸⁷ and other complaints in similar vein reached the Vatican, such as the letter from a priest in Huy, Belgium, in 1936, who claimed that the attitude of JOC during recent strikes had been deplorable and that the organisation ‘does not understand the world of business and especially the problem of small businesses’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Gerd-Rainer Horn argues that in November 1931 a decree of the Belgian bishops ‘submitted the youth organisations to the direct and exclusive authority of the Catholic hierarchy’ and appropriately gave them new statutes,Footnote ⁸⁹ but this does not seem to have ‘tamed’ them.

In the Netherlands, a Catholic workers’ group of a corporatist nature, the Standenorganisatie, was deemed un-assimilable into Catholic Action because it had become, ‘a purely economic and political organisation’.Footnote ⁹⁰ If the Catholic trade unions and the Catholic party, the Roman Catholic State Party, are also taken into account, then Dutch Catholic Action had powerful rivals for the allegiance and energies of the faithful.

Another dangerous temptation for Catholic Action was involvement in party politics: while individual Catholics were allowed to participate in the political process, Catholic Action itself was emphatically not supposed to ‘do politics’. This sprang from Papa Ratti's experiences in Italy in the early 1920s when the distinction between the activities of Catholic Action and the ‘Catholic’ Partito Popolare Italiano had become seriously blurred.Footnote ⁹¹ Then there was the perhaps even more painful experience of the nationalist, antisemitic and authoritarian movement Action Française and its relations with the Church in France, which eventually led to a condemnation of the movement by Pius xi in 1926.Footnote ⁹² Again, in Belgium in the mid-1930s, there was the episode when Leon Degrelle transformed Rex, originally a movement of young Catholics centring round Rex, the leading publication of the Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Belge of Mgr Picard, first into an electoral and parliamentary rival to the Belgian Catholic party and then a Fascist organisation of increasingly National Socialistic leanings.Footnote ⁹³ Catholic Action was supposed to operate as a non-party political pressure group in defence of the Church, its interests and ideals, but sometimes it was difficult for Catholic groups not to get involved in party politics, especially in Latin America where recurrent revolutions and crises in Church-State relations in a number of countries presented Catholics with a dilemma. Two examples will suffice to illustrate this. One was Chile, where for many years young Catholics had enlisted in the ranks of the Partido Conservador,Footnote ⁹⁴ and the other was Mexico with the Cristeros. In the turbulent situation of Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Church being persecuted by the state, the fundamental issue around the Cristeros was their use of violence (effectively guerrilla warfare) against the radical liberal, anti-clerical regime.Footnote ⁹⁵ In 1931 Pius xi warned the Argentinian hierarchy that

Five years later, Cardinal Pacelli issued a circular to all papal envoys in Spanish-speaking countries reiterating the warning against the involvement of Catholic Action in both party politics and violence.Footnote ⁹⁷ The troubles in Mexico did, however, bring some compensation: in December 1934 a female member of Mexican Catholic Action, Maria de la Luz, was murdered trying to defend a church against ‘Reds’ (Socialists) in Coyoacan, Tabasco state, during mass. She was proclaimed the first female martyr of Catholic Action by the archbishop of Mexico City.Footnote ⁹⁸

Transforming existing, loosely organised Catholic lay activities into a tightly-structured, highly organised and visible, national movement also risked provoking an anti-Catholic backlash in some countries with a ‘mixed’ population. Protestants in the Irish Free State were feeling a little beleaguered by 1931, and many were migrating to the United Kingdom, so that Mgr McCaffrey, rector of Maynooth, felt obliged to reassure them that they had no need to fear Catholic Action.Footnote ⁹⁹ It also seems likely that the four bishops of Northern Ireland did not set up Catholic Action organisations in their dioceses for fear of inflaming ethno-sectarian passions. Scotland, especially the Glasgow diocese, faced a similar problem and the first eucharistic congress to be held in Edinburgh in 1935 was accompanied by anti-Catholic riots, another reason for the Scottish bishops’ caution on the subject of Catholic Action.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In Australia, thanks to controversies over the Irish question, there was already deep Protestant suspicion of the Catholic influence on the Labor Party: events in the late 1950s would have confirmed their worst fears about the activities of Catholic Action.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In all these countries, tact had to be employed to ensure that new Catholic organisations did not look too militant and aggressive.Footnote ¹⁰²

How successful was the Vatican in ‘selling’ the Italian model of Catholic Action to the rest of the Catholic world? Pizzardo did succeed in persuading some hierarchies to set up national organisations on the lines of ACI. The first country to adopt the Italian model was France, thanks to a talk which Pizzardo gave at the French Seminary in Rome, ‘L'Action Catholique et la Hiérarchie, in the presence of Cardinal Verdier and M. Fontenay (French ambassador to Holy See) in December 1930.Footnote ¹⁰³ A year later, Mgr Saliege, archbishop of Toulouse, had produced an ‘Essai sur les Statuts de l'Action Catholique Francaise’ and by 1932 a national secretariat under the supervision of the council of archbishops and a full-time secretary had been put in place but not without resistance on the part of some bishops.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Poland's national Catholic Action organisation was set up at almost the same time as the French. In 1930 a provisional commission for Catholic Action was established with its headquarters in Poznań, the metropolitan see,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ and its statutes had been sent to Rome: they were approved two years later.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In 1935 the hierarchy of England and Wales set up a national Catholic Action organisation with Cardinal Hinsley, archbishop of Westminster, as president.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Individual English bishops seem to have taken the Italian organisational method to heart, judging by the experience of the Westminster and Brentwood dioceses,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ and the organisation of Catholic Action in the Liverpool diocese, where Downey was archbishop, was a veritable model of its kind.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ ‘Slow but steady progress’ was also reported of the development of Catholic Action in Ireland in 1937, where a professorial chair in Catholic Action was even established at Maynooth.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Chile, despite the personality clash, and the usual problem of persuading bishops to accept Catholic Action, they nevertheless managed to create a national organisation in 1936.Footnote ¹¹¹ And Australia finally set up a national secretariat for Catholic Action in 1938.

But the new statutes and organisations did not necessarily mean that there was always effective, organised activity all'italiano. There were reports from several countries that Catholic Action only existed on paper, Chile and Spain being the worst examples.Footnote ¹¹² Even worse, after 1934 Catholic Action effectively ceased to exist in Germany where, in any case, it had proved impossible to persuade the very well-established and very diverse Catholic associations to accept overall, national coordination.Footnote ¹¹³ The ‘Roehm Putsch’ of June 1934 claimed the lives of four leading figures in German Catholic Action, Eric Klausener, Adalbert Probst, Fritz Beck and Fritz Gerlich.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thereafter, Catholic organisations of all kinds were closed down, and there is no evidence of Germans attending international Catholic gatherings after 1933. It is unlikely that the Italian organisational model would have saved German Catholic Action from the onslaught of Nazi totalitarianism, any more than did the Reichskonkordat of 1934.

On the positive side of the balance sheet, however, there is clear evidence that Catholic Action had begun to take root in several territories of the European colonial empires during the pontificate of Pius xi. Karachi, in British India, seems to have had a flourishing Catholic Action section as early as 1931.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In Ceylon the first youth group of Catholic Action was established in a convent in 1936 with the approval of the vicar-general and another a few days later. Morocco,Footnote ¹¹⁶ the Belgian CongoFootnote ¹¹⁷ and ChinaFootnote ¹¹⁸ all witnessed efforts to set up Catholic Action during the 1930s. And in France, the importance which the hierarchy attached to Catholic Action may be deduced from the fact that in 1930 it was decided that in future questionnaires about candidates for the episcopate, there should be a question asking whether the priest had been involved in Catholic Action.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While, therefore, the efforts of Pius xi to ensure the establishment of Catholic Action organisations on the Italian model among all sizeable communities of Catholics in the world were far from being entirely successful, the evidence suggests that, as a result of those efforts, at least the message about the Catholic Action ideal was reaching more and more Catholics.

The reason for the only limited success of the Vatican's campaign probably lies in the choice of the ACI model, which admittedly was almost inevitable given the strong centralising and Romanising tendencies which had characterised the rise of the modern papacy since the beginning of Pius ix's reign.Footnote ¹²⁰ At the risk of stating the obvious, neither of the two chief protagonists in the campaign to impose the Italian model of Catholic Action, Pius xi and Pizzardo, had had much experience of successful Catholic lay activism in a democratic setting outside of Italy. There were clearly alternative models to the Italian one – those of the Benelux states and also the United States of America. But from the view point of Rome, while the Belgian and Dutch models had their attractions, they also had definite drawbacks, typified by the problems created by JOC and its charismatic leader, Joseph Cardijn. Though Pius xi clearly had a strong predilection for Cardijin and his organisation, his subordinates in the Vatican and elsewhere had serious reservations. Again, though Catholics in Belgium, and above all the Netherlands, had a lot to teach Italians about handling the media, especially radio and cinema, many of their modus operandi, and their allegedly ‘Nordic’ aberrations, provoked deep suspicion in the Vatican.Footnote ¹²¹

Above all, they did not seem to offer the necessary organisational guarantees of total obedience to the hierarchy, which the Italian model did: frequently, they were seen as being too ‘democratic’. While the hierarchies of France, Belgium and the Netherlands took on board some of the key elements of the Italian model, overall, the structure of Catholic Action in those countries seems to have remained largely unchanged. Gerd-Rainer Horn argues that, after the bishops’ intervention in 1931, Belgian Catholic Action moved towards operating on the Italian model but all the evidence suggests that this was not so.Footnote ¹²² The ACI model could be effectively transplanted to Poland and Portugal, and some of the Latin American countries, but it seems to have been less adaptable to truly democratic and developed ones.

Ironically, a Belgian and a Dutch woman, Christine De Hemptinne and Florentine Steenberghe-Engeringh, campaigned vigorously for the ACI model on behalf of the Vatican in their various journeys across the world. This can be explained by their frequent visits to Rome and contacts with Pius xi and Pizzardo, which thus exposed them to the ACI model and the rationale developed for it. But, in reality, neither of these leading Catholic activists, nor the international organisations which they headed, was typical of the Belgian or Dutch experience of Catholic activism.

The Vatican was equally suspicious of the American model of Catholic lay organisation, which was again very ‘democratic’, despite its undoubted practical success: the Canadian hierarchy founded an organisation patterned on the NCWC model in 1943.Footnote ¹²³ Its strength lay in the fact that, while it was well-organised at the national level and subject to the US Bishops’ Conference, it did not seek to enforce its policies and initiatives on individual dioceses. Not surprisingly, individual American bishops paid only lip-service to the idea of Catholic Action, few making any serious attempt to implement it.Footnote ¹²⁴ That the Vatican made no serious effort to impose the ACI model on the American hierarchy is probably explained by its desire not to upset US bishops who were so generous, not to say munificent, in their annual Peter's Pence collections during the late 1930s.Footnote ¹²⁵

The Vatican's attempts to impose the Italian model of Catholic Action upon the rest of the Catholic world was a logical development from the first attempts by Pius ix in the mid-nineteenth century to bring about the mass mobilisation of the Catholic laity in his battles against the Church's enemies, most notably liberalism and anti-clericalism.Footnote ¹²⁶ The attempt to spread Catholic Action in the 1920s and 1930s was thus new only inasmuch as it was on a world-wide, organised scale, and also because it faced a new enemy – Communism. But the world had moved on since the mid-nineteenth century: Catholic communities in large parts of Europe and North America now possessed well-developed and highly successful lay activist organisations. Moreover, while, of course, ecclesiastical structures remained deeply authoritarian, Catholic lay culture in some countries had become more democratic, hence perhaps the unwillingness to accept the ACI model which had been developed in a country – Italy – which had seen a regression to an authoritarian political system.

It is ironical that, though by the end of Pius xi's reign Pizzardo appears to have succeeded in persuading Catholic hierarchies throughout the world to adopt at least some of the elements of the Italian model of Catholic Action, at that same moment the Italian model of Catholic Action faced serious difficulties in its country of origin. Despite strong elements of convergence and consensus between the policies of the Church and Fascism during the 1930s, the latter's totalitarian pretensions gave rise to a serious Church-State dispute in 1938/9.Footnote ¹²⁷ What the 1938/9 crisis demonstrated was that, as the regime assumed more blatantly totalitarian institutional forms and policies, its ideological development, particularly in the realm of race, was at odds with the underlying tenets of Catholicism. And Italian Fascism's excursions into the ‘sacralisation of politics’, its tendency increasingly to adopt the trappings of a secular religion, made it a rival for the allegiance of Italian Catholics, though not a very credible one given the deep embeddedness of Catholicism in Italian society.Footnote ¹²⁸ Pius xi's initial tendency to treat Fascism as yet another example of the authoritarian, semi-dictatorial regimes that were so common in inter-war Europe, gave way to an awareness that Fascism was more than that, that Mussolini was seeking to transform his dictatorship into a totalitarian regime on the lines of the Third Reich. Hence, the ACI model did not protect Catholic Action organisations from further Fascist attacks in the last months of the pope's reign, when tension between the regime and the Vatican was ratcheted up by the conflict over Mussolini's introduction of the Racial Laws. The tension continued right through until the death of Pius xi in February 1939. Following his election in March, Papa Ratti's successor, Pius xii, sought to defuse tension with the regime and so in April dismantled all the national organisations of Catholic Action, dismissed the greatest exponent of the Italian model, Cardinal Pizzardo, from his post as head and decentralised control to local bishops.Footnote ¹²⁹ This would explain why the Ufficio Centrale dell'Azione Cattolica disappears from L'Annuario Pontificio after 1939. But the ACI model would have its victory after the fall of Fascism. In the 1940s and 1950s, under a new democratic, republican regime, Italian Catholic Action, under the leadership of Dr Gedda, would come to wield immense influence on the Italian political scene.Footnote ¹³⁰