By Ernesto Rossi

ABSTRACT: After having studied a series of passages taken from pontifical documents, Ernesto Rossi emphasises how the Church condemns en bloc all modern thought and civilisation and aspires to a return to the Middle Ages.

He published these documents without heeding the observations of friends who accused him of having selected them for factious purposes. He has also asked himself how Catholics can reconcile their faith in the immutable doctrine of the Church and the infallibility of the Pope with the fact of such pontifical documents on the major political and social questions of our time.

(IL RADICALE no.1, March 2, 1957)

For several years it has not been possible to find in shops any copies of the "Syllabus" published by Pius IX on December 8, 1864, together with the encyclical "Quanta cura", to condemn the errors of the century; a document which is still valid and constantly used by the Catholic press as a point of reference. I have therefore proposed its republication to the publisher Parenti followed by a selection of excerpts from some pontifical documents of Pius IX's successors that confirm and develop its principal standpoints. The publisher has willingly consented.

The research in libraries immediately fascinated me: I had no idea I would find so rich a mine. I am convinced that we lay liberals should pay much more attention to Vatican publications than we usually are inclined to do: we would find there the best arguments for the defence of some of our principle theses. Choosing flower by flower - among the encyclicals, the messages, the allocutions, the pastoral letters - what during the last century the popes have written or said about rationalism, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom of teachings, the "plagues" of Communism and Socialism, the separation of Church and State, the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical powers, I have compiled a small sample collection in which all modern thought and our civilisation is condemned en bloc. The Vatican's aspirations are all still turned nostalgically towards the Middle Ages - a romantic Middle Ages where the throne was always the ally of the altar, where men accepted as tru

th whatever the popes declared to be the truth; where the relations between worker and employer were dictated by Christian charity; where everyone was good and kept quietly to the place he had been assigned by the Heavenly Father. According to the Vatican, the French Revolution, the fruit of materialist rationalism, had thrown wide the doors of Hell from which a thousand devils rushed forth to plague the world.

Before sending my little anthology to the printers I gave it to some leftist Catholic friends to read in order to get their opinions and suggestions for possible additions or changes. Their reactions were completely negative.

"If you published these pages", they observed, "you would only demonstrate your anti-clerical bias: if you had wanted to, you could have found many propositions among the documents of the successors of Pius IX that favour ideas opposite to the ones you have compiled. For proof of this, all you would have to do is read the Christmas messages of Pius XII".

The only advice my Catholic friends were able to give me was to drop the whole thing. But I have not accepted their advice because I do not mind in the least being accused of an anti-clerical bias when all the liberals, the so-called heirs of our Risorgimento, seem to fear nothing so much as being suspected of anti-clericalism. The Communists are bound to respect article 7 of the Constitution which they approved, and the leader of the Socialist Party denounces anti-clericalism as one of the greatest dangers of the present Italian political situation.

I did not follow the advice of my Catholic friends also because I think they are wrong. In the rare cases when the successors of Pius IX have spoken in favour of democracy and freedom, it has always been in such ambiguous and general terms, and they have always subordinated their agreement to the verification of such conditions, that no great dialectical ability was needed to find the points of agreement of these words with the propositions of the "Syllabus".

I have also read Pius XII's Christmas messages, but I have reached the same conclusions as Ernesto Buonaiuti did when he wrote (on page 259 of "Pius XII", Rome, 1946):

"All such self-evident declarations, of such disconcerting banality, that one could not see how it was possible for anyone to disagree with them".

The Christmas message that is most often extolled as democratic and liberal is the 1944 one which, according to Igino Giordani (in "The Social Encyclicals of the Popes", Rome, 1949) "the new democracies would do well to inscribe over the entrances to their Parliaments". So it would be worth while to stop for a moment and examine this.

The moment in which the message was launched - Giordani recalls - was a grave one in that it "coincided with the supreme effort of Hitler's armies to take back the initiative and reverse the military situation with a bloody counteroffensive in Belgium". What Giordani does not remember however is that the message was launched when the Fascist regime had been dead for more than a year and the war was already certain to be won by the allies who had already been occupying Rome for several months. Needing the dollars and support of the Americans, the Pope had every interest in speaking in a way to make a good impression on the United States and make them forget the collaboration the Vatican had given to the "regime", particularly with regard to the Abyssinian undertaking and the Spanish civil war.

As a result of the war, Pius XII said, "it is as if the world's peoples had awakened from a long torpor":

"Induced by a bitter experience, they oppose with greater energy the monopolies of dictatorial power, uncensurable and untouchable, and demand a system of government that is more compatible with the dignity and liberty of the citizens.

"These multitudes, restless, overwhelmed by the war to the depths of their being, are today filled with the conviction - perhaps at first in a vague and confused way, but by now unmoveable - that if there had been any possibility to criticise and correct the actions of the public powers, the world would not have been dragged into the disastrous turbine of the war and that, to guard against a future repetition of such a catastrophe, it is necessary to create effective guarantees within the people itself".

The people demand... the multitudes are filled with the conviction... but the Pope does not lose his composure: he does not say what he himself thinks.

"Souls being so disposed", he adds, "is there any reason to marvel if the democratic tendency grips the peoples and wins wide suffrage and the consensus of those who aspire to collaborate more effectively with the destinies of individuals and society?".

The Pope does not marvel at it, and further on he says:

"To express one's opinion about the duties and sacrifices that are imposed on one; not to be obliged without having been heard: here are two rights of the citizen that find their expression in democracy as its very name indicates".

But this too is a mere definition and not a stance taken in favour of democracy. With regard to the extent and nature of the sacrifices demanded of all citizens, the Pope observes, "a democratic form of government appears to many a natural postulate which reason itself imposes".

"When, however, there is a demand for »more democracy and greater democracy , such an exigency can have no other meaning than to increasingly put the citizen into the position of having his personal opinion, of expressing it and of asserting it in a way suitable to the common good".

But after presenting these ideas, which Pius XII cites as the ideas "of many", he distinguishes the true people worthy of this name from the one which is not worthy, and the men of government worthy of holding power from those who are not worthy. The true people recognises that "each individual has the right to live in honour his own personal life, in the position and the condition which Providence has designed and disposed for him", and true governors recognise that all power comes from God. The absolutism against which the Pope hurls himself does not consist in prohibiting any criticism whatsoever, or any opposition to the government: it consists only in the fact that before the authority of the State "no appeal is admitted to a superior, morally obligatory law".

"A man filled with upright ideas concerning the state and its power and authority as the custodian of social order, would never think of offending positive law in the sphere of its natural competence. But this majesty of human positive law is then only without appeal if it conforms to - or at least does not oppose - the absolute order established by the Creator and revealed in a new light by the Gospels".

Since the only true interpreter of the Gospels is the Catholic Church, the aforesaid is tantamount to maintaining that the laws of the state are only to be obeyed if and to the degree that they conform, or at least do not contradict, the will of the Pope.

This theory was formulated with greater precision in a discourse pronounced on July 15, 1949 to those attending the First Congress of Italian Catholic Jurists in which Pius XII affirmed that if a law was unjust the judge, in applying it became co-responsible with the legislator.

"The judge", the Pope said on that occasion, "can never oblige anyone to commit an intrinsically immoral act, which is to say an act whose nature is contrary to the law of God and the Church.

"In no case can he expressly recognise and approve the unjust law (which, furthermore, would never constitute the foundation of a valid judgement in good conscience and before God). Therefore he cannot pronounce a penal sentence that would be equivalent to approval of that kind". On these principles one can found a theocratic state, never a democratic state.

Neither did the 1944 Christmas message keep Pius XII from giving his support to Franco, Salazar, and Peron (even Peron for as long as he remained loyal to his filial duties toward the Holy Mother Church).

Even if the observation of my friends had been justified - that is, if I had factiously chosen among all the documents those that support the thesis of the "Syllabus", neglecting the ones contrary to it - I would still never manage to understand how Catholics can reconcile their faith in the immutable doctrine of the Church and the infallibility of the Pope with recognising that in pontifical documents are to be found conflicting affirmations regarding our biggest political and social problems.

But these are cases of conscience which I am not considering. In choosing the passages that I have chosen, my intention was to put in evidence the seriousness of the error, condemned in the last proposition of the "Syllabus", of those who maintain that "the Pope of Rome can and must reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation".

He cannot because "the contradiction does not allow it". On this point of formal logic I, as a good Voltaireian, am in complete agreement with the Pope.