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~ Totalitarian States and
Movements ~ |
Popes Pius XI and Pius XII were key figures
in articulating the Catholic Church’s position toward against
communism and their attitude influenced succeeding papacies that
rallied for “the conversion of Russia” well until 1989, the year of
the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Europe.
One has to bear in mind the historical antecedence that accounted
for the evolution of such a rabid attitude against communism. Prior
to ascending the papacy, both were papal diplomats to central and
Eastern Europe and witnessed – and experienced, in the case of Pius
XII – the violent rise of the Bolsheviks and Soviets to power
between 1915 and 1920. Yet their personal confrontations with
communists should not be too quickly dismissed as the roots of
churchʼs opposition to communism.[1]
From historical documents that are now available to us, it can be
deduced that both the militant manifestation and the political
deviations in the practice of Marxian philosophy in the Soviet Union
significantly influenced the hard line stand of the papacy.
In spite of his stern
denunciation of it, Pius XI (whether he was aware of it or not)
“borrowed” much of the social propositions in his encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno from the teachings of Karl Marx. If the pope
defended the rights of the working class and the poor, emphasized
the necessity of unions, and exposed the evils of capitalism, Marx
has done that years before. The irony is that the document held a
very negative opinion of Marx.[2]Apparently,
what appalled Pius XI (and his successors) was “atheistic Communism
as they are chiefly manifested in bolshevism.”[3]
The pope encapsulated this side of the ideology:
“Where Communism has been able to assert its power. . . it has
striven by every possible means, as its champions openly boast, to
destroy Christian civilization and the Christian religion by
banishing every remembrance of them from the hearts of men,
especially the young.”[4]
And yet what drove Marx to make his
philosophy atheistic was the church of his time, which had been
overly concerned with spiritual matters and administering
sacraments. If the scenario was not so, Marx may not have spoken ill
of religion as an opiate that made people resigned to their lot,
thus only perpetuating the injustices then being perpetrated on the
masses by capitalists, the ruling class, and aristocrats.[5]
An ideology plays a crucial role
in a totalitarian state. To justify its encroachment into the
personal and political lives of its constituents, a totalitarian
government embraces an ideology of its choosing. It so happened that
the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe took up Marx’s
communist doctrines. And yet it never developed in complete
consonance with what Marx fully envisioned. These deviations were
begun by the Bolsheviks, and further altered by Lenin and Joseph
Stalin. In a communist state (as in all other totalitarian regimes),
there can be no autonomous institution for the activities of every
aspect of society was centralized. An institution of such nature
could only exist with the approval of the state.[6]It
was resistance to state control and to the innate atheistic
principles of communism that produced a new batch of contemporary
martyrs.
At the time of the successful Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia (1917), the Catholic Church was not harmed. For
the Bolsheviks, the Catholic clergy was among the victims of czarist
oppression and were, thus, tolerated and even preferred over the
Russian Orthodox clergy who were intensely persecuted by the new
regime.[7]
But what they could not count on was the subjection of the church
(with its properties, clergy and adherents) directly under a
commissariat in charge of religious affairs within the state. That
would have been in direct contradiction with the provisions of canon
law. In due time, the communists (as the Bolsheviks later chose to
be called) counted the Catholic Church as a counterrevolutionary
institution just like all other religions. In 1923, fifteen clerics
including Archbishop Jan Baptyst Cieplak, his vicar Msgr. Konstantin
Budkevič, and Exarch Leonid Feodorov of the Russian Byzantine
Catholic Church, were tried by a communist court for opposing the
decree on separation of church and state and the decree on the
nationalization of church properties. Thirteen of the arraigned were
sentenced with imprisonment; Cieplak and Budkevič were condemned to
death by firing squad for “counterrevolutionary activities.”
International outrage may have accounted for the commutation of
Cieplak’s sentence to ten years’ imprisonment.[8]
However, Budkevič was executed at Moscow’s Lubianka prison for his
contacts with the government of his native Poland, “a foreign
bourgeois government unfriendly to the Soviet power.”[9]
The conflict between the church and communism
greatly intensified after the Second World War. The provisions of
the Yalta conference (1945) had assured Stalin of control over
eastern Europe should the war end. When it did cease, communist
parties, with the backing of the Soviet Union and its military, were
able to secure power in all the countries of eastern and central
Europe (except the Mediterranean countries of Greece, Malta, and
Cyprus). Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had already been
forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union since 1939. By the end of the
1940’s, Moscow had considerable influence over its satellite
communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Bulgaria, and East Germany. Two other countries, Yugoslavia and
Albania, resisted Stalin’s domination but were both governed by
communists.
There can be no argument that the Catholic Church
in these countries suffered severely under its acknowledged
atheistic governments. However, the oppression of the churches
in the Eastern Europe varied in degree and scope according to
their geopolitical situation. In most cases, the faithful who
suffered from communist repression resisted the move of their
governments to nationalize their churches and sever their
communion with the Vatican. Most notable among these were
cardinals József Mindszenty (+1975) of Hungary, Stefan Wyszyński
of Poland (+1981), and Jósyf Slipyj (+1984) of Ukraine. But none
of these three died as a result of physical harm. Others were
not as fortunate. In 1946, Vincentas Borisevičius, bishop of
Telšiai (Lithuania) was killed after a lengthy interrogation and
torture. One year later, Bishop Teodor Jurij Romzha, apostolic
administrator of Mukachevo (Ukraine) was assassinated. Bishop
Evgeni Bosilkov of Nicopoli (Bulgaria) was executed by firing
squad as a “Vatican spy” along with three Assumptionist priests
in 1952.[10]
In that same year, Bishop Janos Scheffler of Satu Mare (Romania)
died in prison from burns after a “bath” in boiling water.
[1]
Hansjakob Stehle,
Eastern Politics of the Vatican: 1917-1979 (Athens, OH.: Ohio
University Press, 1981), p. 17.
[2]
Pedro V. Salgado,
Social Encyclicals: Commentary and Critique (Quezon City: By the
author, 1992), pp. 92-96. In the same encyclical Pius XI
also criticized making class struggle an essential law of
society, abolishing private ownership, and instituting the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Salgado believes that in
these the pope was right.
[3]
Pius
XI, Divini Redemptoris, 7 (Engl. transl.
Papal Encyclicals: 1903-1939, p. 538).
[6]
A Dictionary of Political Thought,
1982 ed., s.v. “Totalitarianism.”
[8]
On March, 1924, Archbishop
Cieplak was released and returned to Poland. He died two
years later at Passaic, New Jersey during a pastoral visit
to Polish Catholics living in America. [Joseph Ledit,
Archbishop John Baptist Cieplak (Montreal: Palm Publishers Ltd., 1963)].
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