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‘Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview

and Conclusion
a
John Pollard
a
University of Cambridge ,
Published online: 18 May 2007.

To cite this article: John Pollard (2007) ‘Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview and Conclusion,
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8:2, 433-446, DOI: 10.1080/14690760701321528

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 Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
Vol. 8, No. 2, 433–446, June 2007

‘Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview and Conclusion

JOHN POLLARD
University of Cambridge
JohnPollard
1469-0764
Original
Taylor
8202007
jfp32@cam.ac.uk
000002007
& Article
Totalitarian
10.1080/14690760701321528
FTMP_A_232048.sgm
andFrancis
(print)/1743-9647
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Movements (online)Religions
Ltd and Political
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It was the Catholic priest and leader of the Italian People’s Party, Luigi Sturzo,
who first coined the term ‘clerico-fascism’, rather than ‘clerical fascism’, back in
1922. He applied it to former members of his party, almost all laymen, who were
either drawn directly into the Fascist movement – the Partito Nazionale Fascista – or
set up ‘flanking’ organisations, like the Unione Costituzionale, the Unione Nazionale
or the Centro Nazionale Italiano in order to rally Catholic support for the anti-
communist and pro-Catholic policies of Mussolini and his first Fascist govern-
ment. Some later stood in Mussolini’s National Block of candidates in the 1924
general elections.1 However, from that very same period, the term clerico-fascist
was also used in the Italian political context to designate individual members of
the clergy who were supporters of Fascism, like Franciscan friar Agostino
Gemelli, rector of the Catholic University of Milan and a vociferous supporter of
Fascism on such issues as the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the introduction of
the Racial Laws in 1938, and Father Brucculeri, who supported Fascist policies in
the pages of the authoritative Jesuit fortnightly, La Civiltà Cattolica.2 The papacy,
and thus the church in Italy, was an essential component of the ‘block of consen-
sus’ on which the Fascist regime depended during its nearly 21 year existence,
hence raising the issue of the institutional church as a form of ‘clerical fascism’, a
point to which we will return later.
Yet there is really not much in the way of a historiography of ‘clerico-fascism’/
‘clerical fascism’, since most major historians writing on fascism, particularly in
recent years, like Laqueur, Payne, Griffin, Eatwell, Morgan and so on, have said
little or nothing about the phenomenon: only Gerhard Botz, in his 1981 essay on
Austria used the term ‘clerical fascism’ to describe the ‘Christian, corporative and
German’ right-wing dictatorship of Dollfuss–Schuschnigg in Austria from 1934 to
1938, while Delzell coined the term ‘clerico-corporative state’ to describe the
Estado Novo in Salazar’s Portugal.3 On the other hand, some authors have tackled
aspects of the issue of relations between Catholics and fascism, like Richard Wolff
and Jorg Hoensch in their anthology on Catholics, the state and the European
radical right; Martin Conway in his excellent essay on Catholic politics in Europe
between the wars; and Richard Griffiths in his introduction to European fascism.4
So what is groundbreaking about this anthology is that this is the first attempt
to identify and analyse a Europe-wide phenomenon. Thus the term ‘clerical
fascism’ is used to encompass a wide-ranging collection of individuals, move-
ments and regimes, or quite simply, moments in the encounter between the
Christian religion and fascism, both in terms of their geographical spread, but
also in terms of the Christian denominations involved. This means that it is not
ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/07/020433-14 © 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14690760701321528
 434 J. Pollard

merely Catholicism, which has been presented so obsessively in the works of such
writers as John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen as the heart of this encounter – at
least in the matter of antisemitism and the Holocaust5 – but different forms of
Protestantism, including Scandinavian variants, and also the eastern Orthodox
churches. In addition, the political tendencies of members of the Ukrainian Greek
Catholic Church, a church which was in communion with the papacy but other-
wise bore the characteristics (like clerical marriage, vernacular liturgy etc.) of the
Orthodox churches that were not, are examined here.

‘Clerical Fascism’
The term ‘clerical fascist’ may be attached as a label to individuals, members of
the clergy or laity, who were ‘fellow travellers’, or in Italy, ‘flankers’, of Fascism.
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Some became fully paid up members of fascist movements. Others remained

outside, or belonged to separate movements that gave support to fascism. It can
be argued that some ‘clerical fascist’ movements constituted the main or only
fascist-type movement in their state, like the Croatian Ustasha, the Slovak
People’s Party/Hlinka Guard or the Iron Guard/Legion of the Archangel
Michael in Romania, and the first two actually constituted regimes, even allow-
ing for the possibility that they both belonged to a sub-species of ‘clerical
fascism’, ‘clerical nationalism’. Then there were the ‘abortive’ ‘clerical fascist’
regimes, General O’Duffy’s Blueshirts in Ireland and the radical-right-wing
movement based on Serbian Orthodoxy in Yugoslavia. In the area of encounter
between Christianity and fascist ideas, fascism exerted the pull of attraction
based on the concerns and priorities of Christians during the decades of crisis
between the two world wars in Europe. Fears circulated about the consequences
of the introduction of liberal democracy, about the very real threat of the spread
of Bolshevism, hostility to the emancipation and greater visibility of Jews; and in
broader terms, to the effects of ‘modernisation’, industrialisation and urbanisa-
tion. In the politically and economically unstable, and not to mention the socially
‘disordered’, Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, fascist ideas and movements were
very attractive to many Christians.
Sometimes, ‘clerical fascism’ took the form of pragmatic, opportunistic and
temporary alliances between fascists and politicians of a Christian inspiration, but
at other times, it involved the commitment to fascist party allegiance. Occasionally,
these alliances took place at the highest level, as with Pius XI and Mussolini’s
‘marriage of convenience’ in Italy and the initially close relationship between the
Croatian hierarchy and the leadership of the Ustasha in the Independent State of
Croatia. However, as is clear from different case studies in this collection, the
encounters could take more permanent, stable forms in movements and ideologies
that were syntheses of fascist ideology and Christian theology.

Fascist and Christian ‘Palingenetic’ Projects

All those Christians, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, attracted to fascist-style
ideologies, movements and regimes did so in very large part as a reaction against,
and rejection of, liberal parliamentary democracy, which was seen as alien, if not
hostile, to the Christian tradition, whether in Catholic Italy, the Protestant parts of
Germany or Orthodox Romania. Liberalism was deemed responsible for secular-
ism and anti-clericalism, as well as the consequent laws which, from the French
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 435

Revolution onwards, had restricted the property, privileges and power of the
churches. After 1919, for many Christians in central and eastern Europe, democ-
racy was also deemed alien inasmuch as it was a largely Anglo-Saxon, or at best
French, import and imposition in the aftermath of war, the result of President
Woodrow Wilson’s crusading spirit embodied in his famous ‘Fourteen Points’.
The Weimar Republic seemed to Catholics and Protestants alike to epitomise the
triumph of the worst forms of modernisation, with the emancipation granted
women, and consequent erosion of Christian-based forms of patriarchy, in addi-
tion to general relaxation of the regulation of matters of sexuality and public
morality, not entirely dissimilar from those realised in Lenin’s Russia.6 Thus,
‘clerical fascism’ can be seen as a major consequence of the ‘culture wars’ between
Catholicism and liberalism that had raged in Europe since the early nineteenth
century.7
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One of the major factors which attracted Christians to fascists was that they were
both engaged in ‘palingenetic’ projects. If, as Griffin argues, fascism, as it emerged
in the early 1920s, was a form of ‘palingenetic, populist, ultra-nationalism’, it is
clear that Christians in the same period, and for some of the same reasons, were
seeking a moral and spiritual rebirth of European society.8 The most explicit and
compelling form which this Christian palingenetic project took was that which the
Catholic Church embarked upon after the election of Pius XI in 1922. Benedict XV
(1914–1922) foreshadowed his successor’s commitment to a ‘Christian restoration
of society in a Catholic sense’ through his analysis of the causes of the First World
War – the spreading of materialism and secularism – in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi:
evils which were, of course, essentially seen as the consequences of liberalism and
all its works.9 Pius set forth his comprehensive vision of a Christian ‘reconquest’ of
a society vitiated by secularism and anti-clericalism in his first encyclical of 1922,
Ubi Arcano Dei. He then took this programme a stage further by instituting the feast
of Christ the King in 1925 and the worldwide development of Catholic Action as a
means of mobilising the Catholic faithful.10 It is no coincidence that, in 1924, one of
the leading Italian clerico-fascist commentators, Piero Misciateli, should have
saluted the Duce with these words, ‘From the historical and religious standpoint it
is important to understand that Mussolini is a convert, or, as William James
defined it, a man born again’.11 As Jorge Dagnino points out, the commitment to
the Christian palingenetic project meant that, even in FUCI, the Italian Catholic
student’s movement, there was a strong sympathy for Fascism’s ‘spiritual and
moral aspirations’ in the 1930s.
Orthodox and Protestant palingenetic projects may not have been as coherent
and well-organised as the Catholic one, but the aspirations for an end to moral and
spiritual ‘decadence’ amongst these Christians denominations were just as clear
and explicit, exemplified by the Ukrainian OUN’s demand for ‘the revival of
national spirit and Christianity’, as Anton Shekhovstov describes it, or the core
belief of members of the Iron Guard that the Legionary Movement ‘would do
away with the corruption and moral decadence of the body politic’, and that it was
‘one of spiritual regeneration gifted by God to a people perhaps once in a millen-
nium through its predestined leader, Corneliu Z. Codreanu, the “Captain”’.12
Many German Protestants, and Catholics with some misgivings, interpreted the
coming to power of National Socialism as a moment of spiritual and moral cleans-
ing of Weimar’s Augean Stables, like the Lutheran Landesbischof of Mecklenberg
who proclaimed, ‘Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933
as a gift and miracle of God’.13 Even that via media of post-Reformation churches,
 436 J. Pollard

the Church of England, produced pro-fascist clergy like the Reverend Nye who,
according to Thomas Linehan, in his demand for a Christian revival of society,
used the Catholic slogan, ‘Long Live Christ the King’.

Anti-communism, Anti-capitalism and ‘Ruralism’

If fascists and Christians had some similar aspirations, they also shared certain
common enemies. Thus most Christians were consistently and sometimes
violently anti-communist. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as well as other
attempted revolutions and even short-lived Soviet regimes in eastern and central
Europe, hung like a shadow over the politics of interwar Europe. Christian move-
ments opposed the economic and social ideas as well as policies, particularly
those regarding women and the family, not to mention the atheistic materialism of
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Soviet communism. The ‘Godless’ campaigns of the Soviet governments against

all religions, but especially the Russian Orthodox and the Catholic churches, and
the introduction of easy divorce, abortion and the decriminalisation of homosexu-
ality, confirmed the worst fears on this score.14 For the Ukrainian Greek Catholic
Church, there was an added ethnic issue: Orthodoxy also represented Russian
imperialism, to which Ukrainians had been subject for hundreds of years.
Coalitions of forces – monarchy, armed forces and landowners – had cooperated
in crushing the threat of Bolshevik revolution in such countries as Hungary and
Slovakia, and the authoritarian regimes established in the former, and in Franco’s
Spain and Salazar’s Portugal (obviously without the monarchy), were essentially
based on such anti-communist coalitions, plus the Church – as arguably Fascist
Italy also was. Yet the difference in the case of Italy was that Mussolini’s regime
had been inspired by and built around an autonomous, dynamic mass political
movement – Fascism – to which the other elements in the ‘block of consensus’,
monarchy, armed forces, church, agrarian and business elites, were subordinate,
even if they retained a certain autonomy throughout the life of the regime. It was
in this context that Catholic politicians and intellectuals abandoned the Catholic
People’s Party and rallied to Fascism.
‘Clerical fascism’ was also characterised by a strong vein of anti-capitalism. On
the basis of persisting hostility towards money-lending, not to mention its stereo-
typical association with the Jews, capitalism was abhorred as ‘the evil child of
liberalism’. The values it represented – individualism, materialism, profit-making
and the brute forces of the market – were regarded as un-Christian and anti-
social. Industrialism was another child of capitalism and it produced those twin
evils, urbanisation and modernisation, which eroded the moral values of ‘healthy’
rural, agrarian societies.15 In most European countries in the interwar years, rural,
agrarian society remained the heartland of religion, whether Catholicism, Ortho-
doxy or Protestantism; so the rural, agrarian policies of fascist movements and
regimes were a natural meeting point. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
Slovakian People’s Party ruled a society that, unlike the western heart of the
former Czechoslovak state, was hardly touched by industrialisation and urbani-
sation. In its institutionalised form in Italy, ‘clerical fascism’ manifested itself with
particular strength in the participation of the clergy – bishops and parish priests –
in Mussolini’s ‘Battle for Grain’; namely, the unsuccessful attempt to make Fascist
Italy self-sufficient in cereals.16 In broader terms, this was a signal of Catholic
support for Mussolini’s ideology of Ruralisation, the rationale for an attempt to
freeze the balance between rural and urban society as a way of preserving social,
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 437

and therefore political, stability.17 In Romania, the Iron Guard/Legion of the

Archangel Michael was built around, among other things, a romanticisation and
idealisation of the ‘long suffering’ peasantry, who constituted 80% of the popula-
tion.18 The Nazi doctrine of Blut und Boden [blood and soil] was very consonant
with the views of farmers in Protestant areas of Germany, while the Clerical
People’s Party of Sweden and the Finnish Lapua movement also found their
strongest support in rural areas.19

Corporatism
The Catholic answer, both to godless communism and heartless capitalism, was
corporatism. Catholic corporatist ideas had first emerged in Austria, Germany
and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to industrialisation. They
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were then inscribed in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on Catholic ‘social doctrine’,
Rerum Novarum, which was a response both to industrialisation and the rise of a
revolutionary Socialist working class movement in many parts of Europe.20 Built
around a neo-Thomistic idealisation of the medieval guild system, corporatist
theorists elaborated a system of organisations representing both capital and
labour that would transcend and eliminate the divisions of class conflict. Pius XI
produced an even more elaborate system in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of
1931.21 Thus the corporatist policies and institutions of the regime were a key
factor helping to consolidate the support of Italian Catholics for Fascism in the
1930s.22 In reality, Pius XI was critical of Fascist corporatism in his 1931 encyclical,
rightly perceiving that Mussolini’s corporative institutions, which were essen-
tially the implementation of ideas advanced by the pre-First World War Italian
Nationalist Movement, and therefore not Catholic in inspiration, involved rigid
regimentation of the work force and dependence upon the state.23 Nevertheless,
inside of Italy, economists at the Catholic University, like the later Christian
Democratic Prime Minister, Amintore Fanfani, and the Jesuit columnist
Brucculeri, viewed those corporatist institutions as one of the most attractive
elements of Fascism.24 They were admired by many Catholics outside of Italy, and
were imitated by the regimes in Austria, Portugal and Spain, while also evincing
keen interest among Catholics in Ireland, as Cronin shows.25

Antisemitism and Race

That antisemitism should have been one of the most important meeting points
between fascist movements and Christianity in the interwar period, an issue
around which some forms of clericalism should have crystallised, is hardly
surprising given antisemitism’s deeply Christian, theological roots. Some defend-
ers of Pius XII in the ‘Hitler’s Pope’ debate, like Signor Margherite Machione,
however, have tried to make a distinction between the racial antisemitism of
National Socialism and other fascist movements as opposed to what they regard
as the ‘anti-Judaism’ of Catholicism. Comparing Christian antisemitism to the
mutual suspicions and hostility between Catholics and Protestants, they argue
that it was an essentially religious phenomenon.26 This does not make a great deal
of sense in the context of interwar Europe. For example, for decades the Jesuit fort-
nightly, La Civiltà Cattolica, had waged a violently antisemitic campaign, one
riddled with the usual accusations of ritual murder, economic exploitation of
Christians and other conspiracy theories, including the Protocols of the Elders of
 438 J. Pollard

Zion.27 This made it very difficult for its editor, Father Rosa, to disassociate it from
Mussolini’s introduction of the Racial Laws in 1938.
Antisemitism was an almost universal characteristic of Christian Europe, from
Scandinavia to Romania; indeed, in the latter, antisemitism was at the heart of the
beliefs held by Corneliu Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael. To be a
Romanian was to be Christian and antisemitic.28 Only in Italy and the Iberian
peninsula was antisemitism not a major political factor. Hoever, even in Italy,
where antisemitism was not on Fascism’s agenda until the mid-1930s (in large part
because Jews had been well integrated into Italian society since the Risorgimento,
as evidenced by their strong presence in the early Fascist movements), there were
isolated pockets of virulent Catholic antisemitism. One has already been cited, that
of the Jesuits and their authoritative journal. The other was the Fede e Ragione
newspaper in Florence, which represented the most intransigent, integriste form
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of Italian Catholicism.29 Yet the deep contamination of all forms of European

Christianity by antisemitism did not always lead to fascism. As Griffiths states,
‘antisemitism does not necessarily denote fascism (or “clerical fascism”). It was
endemic in Eastern Europe (and particularly strong, for example in Poland)’.30
Poland, which was indeed a hotbed of antisemitism, was strongly Catholic, yet it
did not produce a serious fascist or ‘clerical fascist’ movement. Much the same
could be said of Lithuania.
The Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany did not express alarm at the
progressive development of Jewish persecution by the Nazis after 1933. Nor did
the Catholic hierarchy of Hungary protest when antisemitic legislation was intro-
duced there in 1938; in fact, Catholic bishops voted for the legislation along with
Protestant leaders in the upper house of Parliament, though they protested
further legislation in 1939 and sought to protect Hungarian Jews from deporta-
tion to Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945.31 Yet there was no opposition from clerical
members, including Bishop Vojtissak of Spiss, when the Parliament of the Slovak
Republic voted to legalise the deportation of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz in 1942;
and the role of Monsignor Tiso, priest-president of the republic during the actual
deportation of Slovakian Jews to the death camps, was equivocal to say the
least.32 As Mosignor Tardini, Under Secretary of State in the Vatican, bewailed in
1942, ‘It is a great misfortune that the President of Slovakia is a priest. Everyone
knows that the Holy See cannot bring Hitler to heel. But who will understand if
we can’t even control a priest?’33 The response of the Orthodox Church was no
different when similar laws were enacted Romania in the late 1930s and early
1940s.34
Belief in the superiority of the Aryan race is, of course, more than just antisemit-
ism, and is part of a complex doctrine of biological racialism which reached
its fullest stage of development in the mature ideology of German National
Socialism. While many Christians shared antisemitic feelings with fascists, only in
the context of Protestantism, and more specifically German and Scandinavian
Lutheranism, could the encounter between fully developed racial ideas
and Christianity evolve into a close, tightly knit synthesis. According to Richard
Steigmann-Gall, the Deutsche Christen [German Christians] in Germany, building
upon Luther’s visceral antisemitism, sought to ‘Aryanise’ Christianity: they
‘rejected the Old Testament and contended that Christ was not a Jew’, presenting
him instead as an Aryan hero, the archetypal antisemitic warrior.35 The Swedish
Lutheran Manhem Society, according to Lena Berggren, embarked upon a similar
project, a ‘second reformation’; stripping out the elements in Christianity which
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 439

were allegedly the result of Jewish or Catholic ‘perversion’ and re-presenting

Christianity as the cult of ‘the Aryan Jesus’, with Christ as ‘an heroic Christian
warrior’ – thus bringing Christianity nearer to Odinism, the Nordic religion, so
that the former was no longer a contemptible ‘religion of slaves’, but a ‘religion of
warriors’. The Anglican priest’s vision of Jesus as the ‘ideal fascist’, as cited by
Tom Linehan, was another variant of this heresy.
This kind of synthesis, or dare one say it miscegenation, of Christian theology
and fascist racial ideology was not possible in the Catholic context. ‘Catholic’
means universal, and whatever forms of racial discrimination and segregation
might actually have been practised by Catholics, the theological essence of
Catholicism remained universalistic, and the Gospel injunction ‘go forth and
preach to all nations, baptising in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Ghost’ remained the mission statement of the Catholic Church in the twentieth
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century. As some Protestants rightly perceived, Catholicism was too ‘dogmatic

and rigid’ to permit any tampering with an age-old belief system: Roman
centralism and the need to conform under the 1870 dogma of Infallibility made
this impossible. In the 1920s and 1930s, Pope Pius XI came out repeatedly and
strongly against all forms of ‘exaggerated nationalism’ and racialism: his
condemnation of Action Française in 1926; his criticisms of Fascist doctrine in his
1931 encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno; and his attacks on National Socialist ideas
in Mit Brennender Sorge in 1937 and in the April 1938 decree of the Sacred
Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, which condemned the proposi-
tion that ‘human races, by their natural and immutable character are so different
that the humblest among them is furthest from the most elevated than from the
highest animal species’.36 He commissioned an encyclical against racialism tout
court during the summer of 1938; the result, Humani Generis Unitas, was not
published because of his death in February 1939, though he publicly condemned
Mussolini’s introduction of the Racial Laws in September 1938.37 Yet all of the
Vatican’s statements on racialism did not prevent the emergence of the OUN, a
form of ‘clerical fascism’ on the fringes of the Roman communion, in the milieu
of the Greek Catholic Church in the Ukraine which, according to Shekhovstov,
not only legitimised the use of violence against communists and other enemies,
but also ‘physical mass extermination of existences’. This might help explain the
collaboration of some Ukrainians in the Holocaust.

‘Clerical Nationalism’?
Perhaps this is the point at which to explore Aristotle Kallis’s suggestion that
there exists a sort of sub-species of ‘clerical fascism’, ‘clerical nationalism’. The
Slovakian People’s Party, with its slogan ‘One God, One People, One Party’, was
the product of an intensely Catholic, rural and largely agrarian society, fighting
for independence from Czech domination.38 The clerical element was real, not
only in terms of the identification of religion and ethnic nationalism, but also in
the pervasive influence of the clergy in the party: two successive leaders, Andrej
Hlinka and Josef Tiso, were priests. If the SPP progressively adopted the trap-
pings and policies of a ‘fascistised’ or ‘Nazified’ party, then it was due to circum-
stances; namely, the fact that it owed its power to Germany’s dismemberment of
the Czechoslovak state in March 1939, meaning that it was henceforth pressed
down by the massive, inescapable weight of Nazi influence in the country.
Certainly, Slovakian Catholic society was deeply permeated by antisemitism, but
 440 J. Pollard

the destruction of Slovak Jewry was a policy largely forced upon it from outside
yet accepted by the more radical, less clerical wing.39 Much the same can be said
about the OUN as of the SPP. While the OUN did display some signs of fascism –
a preference for a totalitarian form of government under some kind of ‘leader
principle’ – it was essentially a party of frustrated ethnic nationalism centred
around an isolated, in some ways embattled, Greek Catholic Church that was the
very symbol of this ethnicity. In the same way, Biondich shows that the Croatian
Ustasha regime managed to win the support of the church for its Independent
State of Croatia as a realisation of Croatian Catholic hopes of winning indepen-
dence from the hated domination of Orthodox Serb Belgrade.
Perhaps even the Iron Guard/Legion of the Archangel Michael can be
described as a form of ‘clerical nationalism’. After all, what is most striking
about the Romanian movement is its deep sense of being challenged and threat-
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ened, not only by the Jews, but by all the other ethnic minority groups – Saxons,
Hungarians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Turks and so on – with whom they had to
live in the post-Versailles ‘Greater Romania’.40 Juan Linz has observed that: ‘It is
no accident that some of the peripheral nationalisms would develop consider-
able affinity with fascism; that in Eastern Europe integral nationalism would
often be fascist or quasi-fascist’.41 He advances this view on account of the
absence of strong, organised parties of the Christian democratic type in most
Eastern European countries. Would this explain the ‘exterminatory nationalism’
of OUN, the genocidal policies of Ustasha – including the participation of some
priests – and the complicity of Tiso and other clergy in the deportations of the
Jews from Slovakia? Or is this just evidence of the virulence of antisemitism in
rural populations?

The Role of the Institutional Churches

The role of the institutional churches in these relationships between Christianity
and fascism was as complex as the relationships themselves. In Italy after the
Conciliazione of 1929, when Pius XI and Mussolini signed the Lateran Pacts, bring-
ing the 60-year-old ‘Roman Question’ to an end, must be regarded as the high
point of fascist-Christian collaboration. Pius XI’s suspicion of liberal democracy
and his dislike of priests taking a part in politics – to his extreme annoyance they
were active in most European countries, like Monsignor Kaas of the German
Centre Party, Seipel of the Austrian Christian Socials, Hlinka and Tiso of the SPP,
and even ‘clerical fascist’ priests in Belgium and Hungary – doomed the Italian
Catholic party. So the Vatican endorsed and legitimised Mussolini’s Fascist
Regime and effectively ruled out any legitimate form of Catholic antifascism.42
Yet the Church did not completely identify itself with Fascism; it was always
different, separate and autonomous, and more significantly, true to its age-old
principles, it prepared for the dopo-fascismo, for an Italy after Fascism, by building
a complex structure of lay organisations around Catholic Action, including, most
importantly, FUCI and the Movimento Laureato [association of Catholic graduates],
to be held in reserve as a possible new Catholic ruling class.43 Pius XI not only
dispensed with the Catholic Partito Popolare and doomed it to extinction; after the
Conciliazione, he dropped with equal ruthlessness the clerico-fascist elements
whose efforts had helped make that historic agreement with Italy possible.44
Elsewhere in Europe, the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities usually displayed
the same opportunism and circumspection. In Belgium, as is clear in Bruno De
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 441

Wever’s essay, the church authorities kept their distance from Leon Degrelle and
the Rexists; and in Hungary, according to Bela Bodo, they behaved in a similar
fashion towards incipient ‘clerical fascism’ in that country. Their counterparts in
Yugoslavia were rather less circumspect when Anton Pavelić and the Ustasha
ca[u
e]t

established their Independent Croatian State which seemed for them to be the
realisation of all their hopes of a Catholic state, free from subordination to the
Orthodox Serbs in Belgrade.45 In Germany, however, the activities of the Deutsche
Christen, coupled with Hitler’s efforts to bring all the evangelical churches under
state control in a Reichskirche, provoked a serious split, with disputes between the
supporters of the Confessing Church and the Deutsche Christen.46

Catholic Fascism? Christian Fascism?

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As well as the concepts of clerico-fascism and ‘clerical fascism’, some historians

have used the concepts ‘Catholic fascism’ and ‘Christian fascism’ in analysing the
phenomenon of Christians attracted toward fascism. Griffiths does so particularly
in relation to the 1930s. He argues that increasing numbers of Catholic intellectu-
als, especially in Belgium, Britain and France, looked with benevolence upon
fascist movements (especially Italy’s following Mussolini’s Conciliazione with the
Vatican and the publication in 1931 of Quadragesimo Anno, which was seen as a
papal endorsement of corporatist, authoritarian systems), citing the likes of
Douglas Jerrold and The English Review in Britain, Robert de Brasillach, Henri
Massis and Emmanuel Mounier in France and Leon Degrelle and the Rexists in
Belgium.47 To this list could be added elements of the Swiss Catholic Party, the
KVP which, according to Conway, ‘chose to affiliate themselves to the quasi-
fascist National Front’.48 Domenico Sorrentino, biographer of Egilberto Martire,
one of the leading Italian clerico-fascists, uses the term ‘Catholic fascism’ to
describe the belief of his subject, and other Italian Catholics, that Fascism could be
‘baptised’ – an illusion also cherished by Pius XI, but not for as long as Martire.49
After the Conciliazione and QuadAgesimo Anno, the next milestone in the devel-
opment of Catholic or Christian fascism was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
in 1936. This was seen by most European Catholics as an Apocalyptic, titanic strug-
gle between Good and Evil due to of the appalling anti-clerical violence by some
Republican forces, the support of anti-clerical Mexico and the atheistic Soviet
Union for the Republic, and the inevitable lining up of Spanish Catholic forces –
including the institutional church – on the side of Franco and the Nationalists.
In addition, the Spanish tragedy did not just attract the attention of European
Catholics: as Linehan explains, more than one Anglican clergyman was
profoundly agitated by the violence committed against the church in Spain. The
Romanian Legion also saw the Spanish Civil War as a religious war. Valentin
Săndulescu quotes Ion Moţ a as saying that ‘machine guns were shooting in the face
of Christ’ (in fact, a picture of Republican militia men firing at the head of a massive
sculpture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus became of one the icons of the Spanish Civil
War). As Săndulescu’s description of the 1937 funeral of Romanian Legionary lead-
ers in Bucharest demonstrates, the clergy of the Romanian Orthodox Church were
strongly drawn to the Legionary movement. The Legion was thus, arguably, itself
an essentially ‘clerical fascist’/nationalist movement.
The Spanish Civil War was undoubtedly the major moment of encounter
between Christians and fascists, but the looming shadow of the diplomatic and
military power of German National Socialism in the late 1930s quickly became a
 442 J. Pollard

solvent of ‘Christian’, and even more so Catholic, fascism. Pius XI ensured that
Vatican diplomacy would tread cautiously in Spain, despite the enthusiasm of
Italian Catholics for the cause of Spanish Catholicism, because of his fears of Nazi
influence in the Iberian peninsula.50 Generally speaking, Catholics in Italy became
increasingly suspicious of Nazi, ‘Nordic’, influences (including Christmas trees!)
as the 1930s wore on, seeing Mussolini’s introduction of the Racial Laws in 1938
as their most baleful fruit.51 As Antonio Cosa Pinto explains, the Portugese church
was an important element in helping to prevent the ‘fascistisation’ of Salazar’s
regime. On the other hand, Degrelle, instead of moving away from National
Socialism, moved increasingly towards it in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and
ended up fighting as a member of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front and, still
later, as a public spokesperson of Holocaust denial in the 1960s.52
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‘Clerical Fascism’ since 1945

Fascism is not dead: nor is ‘clerical fascism’. There have arguably been several
‘clerical fascist’ movements in the period since the end of the Second World War.
The resurgence of the far Right in North America and Europe over the last 25 years
has been characterised by the clear identification of some Christians with, and
their affiliation to, antisemitic, xenophobic and racist organisations in both conti-
nents. In the United States, the power and influence of the ‘Christian Right’ mani-
fests itself in many ways, most notably inside the Republican Party, but the heady
Christian fundamentalism so characteristic of the midwestern and southern states
provides the ideal breeding ground for a fusion between religious and racist ideas.
Its most extreme manifestation is the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations grouping,
a post-war version of ‘Aryan Christianity’ whose ideology is a bizarre, unstable
mix of Christian fundamentalism, Aryan racialism and British-Israelitism, thus
providing a theological rationale for both racism and antisemitism.53 Christian
Identity is thoroughly contemporary, allegedly, among other youth organisations,
its own skinhead militias and skinhead hate rock bands.54
In Europe, latter-day ‘clerical fascism’ is to be found largely among traditional-
ist Catholics, like the supporters of the French Archbishop Lefebvre, who broke
away from Rome in the 1960s. They would argue that the church has changed,
not them. They believe that the church was hijacked at the Second Council of the
Vatican (1962–5) by freemasons, liberals, Marxists and perhaps even the Devil
himself, with catastrophic results.55 In particular, they reject the council’s declara-
tions on Jews and on freedom of religion. In France, supporters of Lefebvre (now
dead) and his breakaway, schismatic church, have long been strongly sympa-
thetic towards Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front National.56 In Eastern Europe in
the wake of the collapse of communism, there is a Catholicism that has barely
been touched by Vatican II, even less by the liberalising and secularising tenden-
cies of the West; hence, it is still to some degree permeated by antisemitism, not to
mention hostility to Roma people, and now homophobia. A similar story is
evident in Orthodox countries like Romania. In Poland, already before the end of
the communist regime in 1989, traditional, nationalistic Catholics had found a
home in the Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski [National Polish Rebirth, NOP], an organ-
isation which exhibited signs of all three prejudices.57 Though some Catholics
have tried to disassociate themselves from the more openly neo-Nazi element in
the NOP, their racism and homophobia continue to give rise to concern in other
member countries of the European Union.
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 443

In Mediterranean Europe, ‘clerical fascism’ has also maintained a postwar pres-

ence among traditional Catholics. In Spain, in the galaxy of fascist and para-fascist
groups that emerged during the last years of the Franco regime, the Guerrilleros de
Cristo Rey [Warriors of Christ the King] occupied an important place; after the
death of Franco, another emerged called Alianza Anticommunista Catolica [Catholic
Anti-Communist Alliance].58 In Italy, a variety of far right Catholic groups have
appeared over the last few decades, like the Christian Catholic Militia, but have
rarely lasted very long. More recently, another traditional Catholic organisation,
Alleanza Cattolica [Catholic Alliance], has closely associated itself with both
the respectable, ‘post-fascist’ face of the Italian right, the Alleanza Nazionale of
Gianfranco Fini and the rather less respectable face, Forza Nuova, which is heavily
influenced by the racist, ‘Nazi-skin’ tendency.59 An important factor that needs to
be taken into account when contextualising the contemporary Italian situation is
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the church’s willingness to recruit allies of virtually any political description in its
battles over such issues as abortion, bio-ethics and same-sex unions, leading paro-
chial clergy in the Lazio region to signal support for the Alleanza Nazionale.60 This
is analogous to the context in which clerico-fascism emerged in the early 1920s.

Conclusion
All the various tendencies discussed here, clerico-fascism, ‘clerical fascism’,
Catholic fascism, Christian fascism and ‘clerical nationalism’, have one thing in
common: a belief that fascist movements and ideas offered the best political vehi-
cle for the protection and promotion of religious interests and objectives, and a
sense that those ideas were consonant with Christian ideals and practices. This
places the phenomenon in direct contradiction with that school of thought that
claims fascism to be somehow a product of ‘disenchantment’, the decline of reli-
gion, of secularisation, ‘de-christianisation’ or the ‘Death of God’. They argue that
a key part of the appeal of fascism was its capacity to fill a spiritual, ‘mythopaeic’
vacuum in a secularised society, one whose members needed reassurance and
security in a period of socio-economic disruption and political turmoil when so
many other certainties had vanished.61 In other terms, fascism’s ‘aestheticisation’
and ‘sacralisation’ of politics, its construction of a ‘political religion’ through the
use of rituals, uniforms, colourful display, processions and so on, filled this
void.62 However, the case studies published here suggest the reverse: while some
people may have been attracted to fascist movements because of the spiritual,
religious void in their lives, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fervent,
practising Christians, Orthodox, Protestant and Roman Catholic – people who
experienced no such void – were attracted to fascism precisely because it seemed
to fulfil and advance their religious aspirations.
Steigmann-Gall writes, ‘I suggest that, for many of its leaders, Nazism was not
the result of a ‘Death of God’ in a secularised society, but rather a radicalised and
singularly horrific attempt to preserve God against secularised society’.63 Leaving
aside the radical outcome of the Holocaust, there can be no better explanation of
‘clerical fascism’ than that it was, precisely, an attempt to preserve God against
secularised or secularising society. Sandulescu’s description of the funeral of the
Legionaries who fell in the Spanish Civil War is of a ceremony that is not so much
a form of ‘political religion’ or ‘sacralised religion’, nor a substitute for the
absence of religion, but a synthesis of martial rites and existing religious rituals.
The presence of numerous Orthodox clergy confirms this, and it was always the
 444 J. Pollard

case that Orthodox clergy accompanied Legionary demonstrations and proces-

sions.64 The very same phenomenon was observable in Italy when Fascist
‘martyrs’ were interred in the crypt of the Church of Santa Croce in Florence
(1934) and in that of San Domenico in Siena (1938) with a ceremony which was a
synthesis of Fascist and Catholic rituals.65 What this clearly demonstrates is that
Italian Fascism sought and obtained the blessing of the church for its own cult of
the dead.
If Italian Fascism in particular adopted the trappings of religion – credos, lita-
nies, commandments and rituals – it was not in order to fill a secular void in
Italian society but because it made the movement and the regime more compre-
hensible and acceptable to the average Italian, who was steeped in a living and
vibrant Catholic culture. In a country which was 99% Catholic and the seat of the
Papacy, there was never the remotest possibility that Fascism could in any sense
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replace Catholicism as a national religion, despite Mussolini’s many claims to the

contrary.66
In the end, what the case studies presented here tell us, and they mark only the
beginning of the study of this phenomenon, is that, in the various forms which
‘clerical fascism’ took, Christians made an enormous input into fascism in Europe
between the wars and, above all, that ‘clerical fascism’ is as much about religious
politics as political religion, at least as far as the first half of the twentieth century
is concerned.

Notes
1. John F. Pollard, “Conservative Catholics and Italian Fascism: the Clerico-fascists”, in Martin
Blinkhorn, ed., Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-
century Europe (London: Unwin Hyman,1990), ch. 3; Richard A. Webster, Christian Democracy in
Italy, 1860–1960 (London: Hollis and Carter, 1960), also explores the role of Catholics in the rise of
Fascism.
2. See Antonio Pellicani, Il Papa di Tutti: La Chiesa Cattolica, il Fascismo e il Razzismo 1929–1945 (Milan:
Sugar Editore, 1964), chs 3 and 4.
3. Gerhard Botz, ‘Varieties of Fascism in Austria: Introduction’, in Stein Ugelvic Larsen, Bernt
Hagtvet, Jan Peter Myklebust, eds., Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism
(Berge–Tromso–Oslo: Universitatsforlaget, 1980), p.197; and Charles F. Delzell, Mediterranean
Fascism, 1919–1945 (New York: Walker, 1971), p.331.
4. Richard Wolff, Jörg Hoensch, eds, Catholics, the State and the European Radical Right (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987); Martin Conway, Catholic Politics in Europe, 1918–1945 (London:
Routledge, 1997); and Richard Griffiths, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth,
2002), especially ch. 7.
5. John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: the Secret History of Pius XII (London: Viking, 1999); and Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: A Moral Reckoning and the Unfulfilled Duty of
Repair (London: Little, Brown, 2002). For an overview of the controversy over ‘Hitler’s Pope’, see
Jose M. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Washington: Catholic
University of America Press, 2002).
6. For Protestant clergy attitudes towards ‘godless Weimar’, see Richard Steigmann-Gall, Holy
Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp.15–8.
7. Christopher Clark, Wolfram Kaiser, eds, Culture Wars: Secular–Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth
Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.32–6.
9. John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV(1914–1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (London:
Cassell, 1999), p.86.
10. For the text, see Claudia Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 5 Vols (Raleigh: Pierian Press, 1990),
Vol. III, pp.225–39.
11. As quoted in Pollard (note 1), p.41.
 Context, Overview and Conclusion 445

12. As quoted in Peter Davies, Derek Lynch, eds, The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right
(London: Routledge, 2002), p.110.
13. As quoted in Steigmann-Gall (note 6), pp.48–9.
14. For an account of Soviet persecution of the churches after the 1917 Revolution, see Hans-Jakob
Stehle, Eastern Politics of the Vatican, 1917–1979 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), ch. 1.
15. P. Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the onset of Industrialisation to the First World War
(London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2005), ch. 6, p. 279.
16. Richard Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy (London: Penguin, 2006).
17. See the entry for “Ruralism”, in Cyprian P. Blamires, ed., Historical Dictionary of World Fascism
(Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2007).
18. Zeev Barbu, “Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Iron Guard, the Fascist
Movement of Romania”, in Larsen, Hagtvet, Mykklebust (note 3).
19. For an overview of the Lapua movement, see Marvin Rintala, Three Generations: The Extreme Right
in Finnish Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).
20. For a discussion of the impact of Rerum Novarum, see Misner (note 15), ch. 11.
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21. For the text, see Carlen (note 9), Vol. IV.
22. Webster (note 1), pp.156–8.
23. John F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism, 1929–1932: A Study in Conflict (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.172–3.
24. Webster (note 2), pp.156–8.
25. Delzell (note 3), pp.304, 331–3, and 340–2.
26. Margherita Marchione, Pope Pius XII: Architect for Peace (NewYork: Paulist Press, 2000), pp.40–5.
27. David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: the Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism
(New York: Knopf, 2001), pp.265–9.
28. Barbu (note 16), pp.382–5.
29. Webster (note 4), p.223.
30. Griffiths (note 4), p.107.
31. Ladislas Laszlo, “Hungary: From Cooperation to Resistance, 1919–1945”, in Wolff, Hoensch
(note 4), pp.126–130.
32. Jörg Hoensch, “Slovakia: ‘One God, On People, One party’”, in Wolff , Hoensch (note 4),
pp.176–7.
33. As quoted in J. Conway, “Germany and the Holocaust”, in Peter C. Kent, John F. Pollard, eds,
Papal Diplomacy in the Modern Age (Westport: Praeger, 1994), p.113.
34. Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945 (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Company, 1968), pp.263–6.
35. Steigmann-Gall (note 6), p.33.
36. As quoted in Georges Passelecq and Bernard Sucheky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XII (New York
and London: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p.114.
37. Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002), p.76.
38. Hoensch, (note 32), pp.158–66.
39. Ibid., pp.176–7.
40. Barbu (note 18), p.383.
41. Juan Linz, “Some notes Towards a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Perspectives”, in
Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism A Readers’ Guide: Analyses, Interpretations and Bibliography (London:
Penguin Books, 1976), p.18.
42. For an analysis of Vatican attitudes towards Catholic anti-fascist activity in the early 1930s, see
Pollard (note 21), pp.175–6.
43. Ibid., pp.181–6.
44. Pollard (note 1), pp.43–4.
45. See Stella Alexander, “Croatia: the Catholic Church and the Clergy, 1919–1945”, in Wolff, Hoensch
(note 4), pp.52–3.
46. Steigmann-Gall (note 6), pp.170–5.
47. Griffiths (note 4), pp.60–70.
48. Conway (note 4), p.52.
49. Domenico Sorrentino, La Conciliazione e il ‘fascismo cattolico’: I tempi e la figura di Egilberto Martire
(Brescia: La Morcelliana, 1980).
50. Peter C. Kent, “The Vatican and the Spanish Civil War”, European History Quarterly, 16/4 (1986).
51. See John Pollard, Catholicism & Modernisation: Religion, Society and Politics in Italy, 1861–2000,
Routledge, 2007 (forthcoming), ch. 6.
52. Paul Wilkinson, The New Fascists (London: Pan Books, 1983), p.88.
 446 J. Pollard

53. Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New
York: New York University Press, 2002), pp.232–249.
54. Nick Lowles, Steve Silver, eds, White Noise: inside the international Nazi skinhead scene (London:
Searchlight Magazine Ltd, 1998), pp.65–7.
55. Nicholas Atkins and Frank Tallett, Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism
since 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.296–7.
56. Ibid, p. 297; and M. Vaughan, “The Extreme Right in France: ‘Lepenisme’ or the Politics of Fear”,
in Luciano Cheles, Ronald Ferguson, Michalina Vaughan, eds, Neo-fascism in Europe (Harlow:
Longman, 1991), pp.223–4.
57. They had their own racist, skinhead bands, such as Legion: see Lowles, Silver (note 54), p.180;
and Paul Hockenos, Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (London:
Routledge, 1993), ch. 6.
58. Wilkinson (note 52), p. 83.
59. http://www.contrappunto.org.resist (last accessed 3 March 2007), pp.3, and 42–5.
60. Pollard (note 51), ch. 9.
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61. For an excellent summary of some of these arguments, see Griffin (note 9), pp.186–200.
62. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996).
63. Steigmann-Gall (note 6), p.12.
64. Barbu (note, 18), p.392, where he says: ‘Nobody who lived in Romania in the inter-war period can
forgot the anachronistic and at the same time vivid character of a legionary procession … It was
normally headed by a group of priests carrying icons and religious flags’.
65. Roberta Suzzi Valli, “The Myth of Squadrismo in the fascist Regime”, Journal of Contemporary
History, 35/2 (2000), pp.131–50, especially pp.144–6.
66. This issue has been very successfully explored by Lutz Klinkenhammer, “Il Fascismo Italiano tra
Religione di Stato e Liturgia Politica”, in Vincenzo Ferrone, ed., La Chiesa Cattolica e il Totalitarismo:
Atti del Convegno Torino, 25–26 ottobre 2001 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004), especially
pp.202–3.