The Church Meeting the Communist Challenge
HARRINGTON, LLOYD
The Church Meeting the Communist Challenge Eastern Politics of the Vatican: 1917-1979 By Hansjakob Stehle Translated by Sandra Smith Ohio University. 466 pp. $13.50. Reviewed by Lloyd...
...The Nazis also persecuted Catholics, he reminded the Ambassador, observing that the swastika was not the cross of the Crusades...
...After World War II, Pacelli anxiously sought to assure the world that the church had not spoken a word of approval or encouragement for Germany's war against Russia, despite "certain pressures...
...His successor, Pius XII (Eugenio Pa-celli, 1939-58), had an early and unconcealed infatuation with Hitler's anti-Bolshevism...
...The choice between Stalin and the West made it easy for Pacelli to join the Cold War clamor...
...In August 1941, however, the papal nuncio in Berlin told the German Foreign Minister, "Anyone who talks peace now is a Stalinist...
...The devastation of World War II quite overwhelmed the Pontiff and his advisers...
...Essentially the "monarchial central authority of the Pope...has not been touched by any reforms...
...The Holy See today prefers a clear separation of church and state, and has moved away from its past practice of seeking concordats with secular governments...
...Immediately following the War, the Vatican had grave doubts about the victorious powers' decisions at Yalta and Potsdam, and sensibly held itself aloof from the short-lived Soviet-Western euphoria...
...Stehle realistically summarizes the Holy See's transition to the postwar world: "In retrospect, it seems self-evident that the Vatican-simply as the result of its temporal impotence- would...
...On the whole, though, this indecisive and often contrary-minded Pontiff resolutely opposed Communism...
...Such agreements are now viewed as presuming "a greater degree of mutual accommodation than is desirable for either side...
...Since human rights, including religious freedom, seem more attainable when international tensions are relaxed, Vatican policy is doubly in favor of world peace...
...Yet a hesitant Vatican maintained an aloofness that in these changed circumstances was at the least counterproductive...
...Tito alone among Communist dictators," Stehle points out, "took seriously the separation of church and state that was a part of all the constitutions...
...After Stalin's death, Pius XII did begin "warily to look around for new shores...
...So just as Moscow could not mold the Communist states into an unvarying unit, the Church could not treat them with a single, rigid policy...
...That religious sentiment could not be as easily contained and suppressed in the new, more Western-oriented satellite states as in the Soviet Union seems to have been no less a surprise to the Vatican than it was to Stalin...
...And especially not within the confines of its own walls...
...West German journalist-historian Hansjakob Stehle's excellent study is a diligent chronicle of the Holy See in the throes of grasping this reality and arriving at a new pragmatism...
...The fact was most strikingly revealed in the expedient use of the 1922 German-Soviet Rapallo Treaty by Pius XI (Achille Ratti, 1922-39) to establish an opening to Moscow...
...Tar-dini's, and presumably Pius XII's, idea was "to set a thief to catch a thief...
...end up following the trends of the epoch: Now it was engaged in the Cold War, just as it had once used the Rapallo policies, subscribed to Hitler's anti-Communism and then denied any crusade ideology...
...Documents that have survived (Pacelli burned many official papers) refute Moscow's contention that the Holy See hoped to persuade the West to turn on its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union...
...And the Vatican's realpoli-tik is further evident in its tacit concession that Moscow cannot be ignored if the Church is to make even modest gains in the East...
...Indeed, when Nikita Khrushchev's congratulations were conveyed to John XXIII on his 80th birthday, the Pontiff commented to his secretary, "Better than a slap in the face, isn't it...
...No one in the Roman curia," says Stehle, "had such primitive ideas...
...But Stehle does discern a pattern underlying the Vatican approach...
...By the '70s, the Vatican's Eastern politics took on still greater elasticity...
...Piecemeal, ad hoc solutions are being pursued instead, making a virtue of necessity...
...To Stehle, a liberal observer of the Church, there is of course an irony in all this...
...For while the Vatican appears ready to further relax its dogma-albert only slightly-with respect to relations with the Communist world, it shows no signs of acknowledging the need to do so anywhere else...
...It was recognized that, as things had developed, the attitude of Communist countries toward Catholicism differed significantly-ranging from a churchless Albania to a very Catholic Poland to a Yugoslavia having its usual special position...
...In Stehle's mild description, "The Polish exception, as they called it in Rome, was regarded with reservations...
...In meeting the Eastern challenge Roncalli displayed a new flexibility...
...Admittedly, confusion and a slight sense of guilt over relations with the Nazis werealso part of the Vatican's insight...
...Out of stark necessity, the Vatican haltingly initiated a little-known Ostpolitik during the Soviet Union's initial years...
...This pragmatism, Stehle stresses, should not be misread as signifying a change in the basic views of the Holy See beyond the limited realm of diplomacy: "Even a Polish Pope like John Paul II, who began his pontificate with an avowal of stronger 'collegiality' between Pope and bishops, can only alter the personal style, the form of expression, of this authority, not its dogmatically-based principles...
...Nonetheless, at that very moment high Catholic clerics in Germany were hailing Hitler's onslaught as "a European crusade...
...The process quickened with the papacy of John XXIII (Angelo Ron-calli, 1958-63...
...He treated Polish prelates who were arduously establishing a modus vivendi with their Communist government in Warsaw like pariahs...
...Reviewed by Lloyd Harrington Despite the Kremlin's best efforts, by the beginning of the 1950s, Communism ceased to be a monolith...
...Asked by the Italian Ambassador to the Holy See for a clear anti-Soviet statement, Tardini responded that Bolshevism was merely the worst, not the only enemy of the Catholic Church...
...The true nature of the Church's wartime anti-Communist position probably can best be gleaned from a stand taken the next month by a less inhibited official, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, who served in the papal Secretariat of State and was as privy as anyone could be to Pacelli's thinking...
Vol. 64 • November 1981 • No. 21
