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ing his mission he writes as if he has come to recall the Church to
a sense of its obligations to the secular world. He would have us
believe that the Church has confined its ministrations to the relig.
ious sphere and that "matters of social, of political and economic
life it has abandoned to their own secular law." Nothing could be
further from the truth. The Church has played a very active role in
the social and political history of Europe and the Americas, par·
ticularly in those centers where its communicants are numerous.
To speak only of our own hemisphere the history of Mexico in the
last hundred years, and of Chicago, Boston and New York City
in
the last fifty, is incomprehensible without reference to the open and
sometimes decisive participation of the Catholic hierarchy-with
or without benefit of the light of authentic Christianity.
The advantages which the community is to derive,
if
the
Church will only heed M. Maritain's injunction to spiritualize
temporal political life, are illustrated, according to our author, by
the activity of the Catholic Church in Fascist Italy. Here in its
very cradle, totalitarianism has been checked, if not tamed, by
papal intervention.
"It
is highly remarkable," he writes, "that in
~e
very country where the totalitarian State first had that name,
the totalitarian. principle has been, in the sequel, half broken by the
resistance of the Catholic Church, with which historical circum·
stances obliged
it
to come to terms."
(p. 278, my italics.)
A masterpiece of misstatement! Were it not composed by
M. Maritain we would consider it a devastating piece of irony
from an anti-Catholic pen. The simple fact is that in coming to
terms with Mussolini the Catholic Church strengthened totalitarian–
ism in Italy. 1931, the date of the papal agreement, marks the
stabilization of Italian Fascism in the eyes of the world. It was
the Catholic Church that affixed the certified seal of stabilization.
Clericalist sentiment which was at a low ebb in democratic Italy
has grown tremendously in fascist Italy, aided and abetted by
Mussolini for value received. Did the Church lift up its voice
against the Ethiopian campaign or did it rather improve the oppor–
tunity to convert heretics? Is there any doubt that Mussolini's
invasion of Spain was carried out with the active collaboration of
the Papacy? True, the Church took exceptiun to Mussolini's ideo–
logical adventure into "racism," not on scientific but organizational
grounds. The idf;vlogy of Catholicism after all is indispensable
