Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church" - Part IV: “Catholic” Purification and "Worker-Priests"

1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad

A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil

A "Worker Priest" celebrates Mass turned to the people in the 1940s

Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification

Part II: Dangers on the "Catholic Purification" Front 

Part III: Purification and Doctrine in the Interwar Era

IV. "Catholic" Purification and the "Worker-Priests"

          Many personalists looked, greeted the early fascist victories of the Second World War hopefully. A number of them, long convinced of the innate weaknesses of the liberal bourgeois “established disorder,” expressed little surprise over the conquests of Nazi Germany. What really concerned them was whether Catholicism could find some way to turn a potentially apocalyptic “purification” down the proper pathway. For fascism was seen to be a “monstrous prefiguration” of the new personalist humanity waiting to be born. It clearly revealed the presence of strong will, virile manliness, self-sacrifice to the community, and even, in the context of the war effort, a commitment to the construction of that European-wide super society which many thought to be crucial to a better New World Order.

         Pétain’s so-called National Revolution was appreciated by French personalists both because of its anti-liberal bourgeois character and its freedom from the more gross “materialist” aspects of Nazism. They hoped to make Vichy France a wartime laboratory for educational and evangelical schemes designed to reshape the world in a spiritual way. One major example of educational experimentation incorporating both contemporary Catholic ideas as well as features of the fascist Ordensburgen—the castle training centers for the new elite of German youth—was the École Nationale des Cadres at the Château Bayard above the village of Uriage, near Grenôble. Founded in the waning months of 1940, this institution became especially significant by June of 1941, when the Vichy regime determined to require a session at the Ecole for all future high government functionaries.

Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for Purification Gone Mad" - Part II: Dangers on the "Catholic Purification" Front

1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad

A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil

Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification

Part II: Dangers on the "Catholic Purification" Front 

Unfortunately for Catholics, the Church’s quest for purification of the spaces of public life in 1918 was a hotly contested one, with her Gnostic, Nominalist, Reformation, and Enlightenment shaped opponents either potentially or immediately wielding more power than she might ever hope to command on her own. Dangers on the purification front were international, national,and broadly cultural in character, with most of the threats in question ultimately perilous on all these levels.La Civiltà Cattolica continued to apply and develop the conclusions reached by the revival movement of the previous century to understand and parry them. Therefore, much of what I have to say below is fit into the broad framework that this journal’s interwar analysis provided.

One of the two newer, but historically rooted perils of the interwar period emerged from the United States. Due to her entry into the European conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson’s statement of allied goals in his Fourteen Points, his response to Pope Benedict XV’s peace proposals, and his popularization of the worldwide struggle as “the war to end all wars”, America loomed large as a potential purifying influence on November 11th, 1918 and in the months thereafter. Although the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles by the United States Senate and her consequent failure to participate in the League of Nations removed the imminent threat of New World competition for the political control of spaces in the Old, America’s “isolationism” in the interwar years was never truly complete. Latin America and East Asia remained public American concerns and fields of action, and New World cultural impact---the American way of life ---also continued to grow unabated in much of Europe as well. Cultural “Americanism” eased the way to American political domination of the European world in the wake of the second global conflagration. By 1945, mobilization of the American Way---what then came to be called pluralism---as a weapon for coaxing the reawakened Catholic Faith of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries back into its eighteenth century dogmatic slumber was complete.

A second new force competing with the Church for the occupation and purification of social spaces came out of Russia, which, although it played no role as a nation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was nevertheless “present” in everyone’s mind at that gathering. For the seizure of power in Russia by Lenin’s Bolsheviks---formally known as the Communist Party from March, 1918 onwards---and the impact that Marxism-Leninism immediately exercised outside that troubled country’s fluctuating borders gave grave significance the world over to what was happening therein.This was certainly true in the defeated nations, Germany’s Communist movement sparking the Sparticist uprising of the weeks preceding the opening of the Peace Conference, and Hungary experiencing a Soviet style government briefly thereafter. But the spirit of the Revolution was not unknown to the victors either, with Red Guards seizing factories and agricultural estates and dreaming of an Italian imitation of the distant Russian model.

Special Series: "1919—2019 A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for Purification Gone Mad" - Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification

1919—2019
A Centenary Meditation on the Church and a Quest for “Purification” Gone Mad

A Series by Professor John C. Rao, DPhil

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Part I: The Peace, the War, and the Longing for Purification 

Despite its claims of openness to everyone and anything, friendliness to time gone by is sorely lacking in our pluralist society, and this for very good reason indeed. Pluralism needs to destroy knowledge of the past in order to survive. Historical wisdom makes the depth and longevity of the intellectual, spiritual, and practical divisions in our daily life all too clear to those seeking to learn its lessons. Such wisdom diverts attention away from the only acceptable pluralist solution to human problems: the satisfaction of those material passions to whose endless permutations, monotonous as they ultimately really are, fallen man in his dullness seems ceaselessly attracted.

Unfortunately, we Catholics living in an all-encompassing pluralist society are ourselves subject to its soporific effects. We also have a tendency to don an historical blindfold, to focus on immediate material concerns and their time-bound explanations of current events, and, thus, to replace real intellectual judgments with shallow, pluralist-approved mantras. The result is that our own appreciation of the causes of our present ecclesiastical debacle is both too mundane as well as much too limited historically in its scope.And, sadly, this prevents us from dealing with its horrors effectively.