The Great Confusion

Joseph Stalin once asked a scornful question: "How many divisions has the Pope?" An answer was prepared last week. Pius XII decreed excommunication for Roman Catholics who "knowingly and freely . . . defend and spread Communism." Those Catholics who "enlist in or show favor to the Communist Party" and those who "publish, read or disseminate" Communist publications would be denied the sacraments.

The church was trying to reduce the ignorance and the pressure that had led millions into a double allegiance to Communism and Catholicism. It wanted to sharpen the issue in the consciences of men. Confusion over this issue had created dangers for the church on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the West the confusion arose mainly out of ignorance; in the East, out of the efforts of individuals to come to terms with the police state.

Why the decree was issued and what effect it will have is best understood by looking at how it was greeted last week in two countries, Italy and Czechoslovakia.

"Do You Understand?" Beside the Anzio beachhead, war-ruined Genzano calls itself "Little Stalingrad," takes pride in supplying table wines to Italian Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti. Over half its 10,000 people (many of them unemployed, some dwelling in caves) support the Communists. Yet they are married in the church, have their children baptized, and are buried with a priest blessing the grave and a banner-bearing Communist official paying pompous graveside respects. Last Sunday an old woman peddling the Communist paper L'Unita was surprised when asked what she and her fellow Communists would do about the church. "Why, I've already been this morning," she said.

In a Rome suburb, Borgata Gordiani, where poverty lives in two-room shacks and walks the dirty, unpaved streets, young Father Giovanni Orlandi confronted the problem raised by the decree. "Many have told me," he said, "that they'd like to break away [from the Communists] but don't dare. The men who come to church are taunted and jeered by young hoodlums. Some of the women are even more fanatical than the men. It's poverty that makes them so, I guess."

On Sunday, Father Giovanni read the excommunication decree from the pulpit. "What this means," he explained, "is that if you approve of Communism, you'll be banned from the church. We cannot give you the sacraments. This is only a religious measure . . . We are defending our church. Only that. Do you understand?"

In Bari, a struggling blacksmith, Angelo Pantoso, fretted: "I believe in God. God protected me at war, but when I came back home, only the Communist Party explained the cause of my poverty. Now there is a storm in my mind."

The Vatican had known it would stir up such a storm in hundreds of thousands of minds. "The misguided or illusioned," said a Vatican spokesman, "will be obliged to review their ideas and cut off their [Party] membership."

"They Are Not Forsaken." East of the Iron Curtain, the decree has a somewhat different purpose and effect. The Vatican said that the decree was designed to give Catholics in Communist lands "the sensation that they are not forsaken, but spiritually supported by the whole Catholic world."

In these countries, Communist pressure on the church has been mounting. Its immediate goal is not to root out Catholicism but to reduce it to helpless captivity. The Kremlin succeeded in that policy with the once great Russian Orthodox Church, and it is trying to repeat the formula. The trial of Cardinal Mindszenty was part of the operation. The persecution in Hungary was followed by efforts to split the Church in Czechoslovakia away from Rome.

Shortly before Pope Pius XII published the decree, Czech Communists had taken another step in their assault on Prague's Archbishop Beran and his hierarchy. In a memorandum signed by Party Secretary Rudolf Slansky, plans were made to build up a government-controlled national church. Another circular detailed punishments for priests who had read Beran's pastoral letters denouncing Communist persecution of the church. "Finally," said the circular, "we shall accuse [the Catholic hierarchy] directly of high treason."

The excommunication order forced Czech Communists to hurl accusations of treason faster than they intended. Minister of Justice Alexej Cepicka blared that Beran had maintained "treacherous connections with foreign enemies" and plotted "treacherous anti-state riots." "Let no one doubt," the minister went on, "that today anyone who . . . tries in any way to carry out the Vatican's orders commits treason against the vital principles of his own state and people." Cepicka lists himself officially as a Catholic. He is a son-in-law of Communist Boss Klement Gottwald.

The Vatican called the Czech threat of prosecution for treason "laughable nonsense." A Vatican spokesman asserted: "Excommunication has no need of a material executor who can be traced and punished. Excommunication acts upon the guilty in the secret of the conscience." On the other hand, Eastern Catholics who were terrorized into lip service to Communism would not incur the penalties of the papal edict. Priests, he added, were expected to do their duty regardless of personal consequences.

In 400 churches last Sunday Czech priests read a defiant resolution, proclaiming their loyalty to Archbishop Beran and Pius XII. "We are certain," the resolution declared, "that all conscientious and faithful Catholics agree with us and that they would so testify if they were given the opportunity of free speech."

"Ye Cannot Serve." The Vatican was well aware that the excommunication decree might cause some Catholics to leave the church. It had to balance this risk against one it considered greater: the confusion that resulted in two opposing allegiances that could not, in the end, be reconciled.

This confusion arose from some characteristics of 20th Century man: his materialism, his clumsiness in dealing with spiritual ideas, and his bitter and understandable disappointment at the poverty that still surrounds him in spite of the technological promise of plenty.

The Communists feasted on the fuzziness and played upon the bitterness. They promised (but did not deliver) material abundance. They said that Communism was not opposed to religion. Yet they also said (more quietly)--and this was a fact --that the Communist philosophy was essentially atheistic and that the only morality it recognized was based upon what was good or bad for the "world revolution." Pius XII's excommunication decree was an effort to expose the Communist duplicity. He was repeating: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." The strength of the Pope's divisions would be measured by how well he succeeded in clarifying the 20th Century's great confusion.

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