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[This passage is from Catholic publisher Frank Sheed’s book The Church and I, 1974.]

The Italian popes at least have shown an astonishing freedom from nationalism, even after there was a nation of Italy to be nationalist about. Partly of course the rulers of the new Italian nation were seen as the enemy. Even when the concordat between Mussolini and the Vatican was on the point of conclusion in 1929, Pius XI could say to clerical students of Mondragone, “I would make a concordat with the devil, if it were for the good of souls.”

Yet what but plain nationalism could have caused him to bless the Italian guns when Italy invaded Abyssinia? He hadn’t a notion of the trouble he was to cause us in Hyde Park! I remember telling the crowd what a blessing was—a prayer to God that the object blessed should be used in God’s service. Blessing guns did not mean “Good shooting: go on and conquer”—if God were not being served the blessing would work the other way. It was all perfectly logical. But I wonder if Pius XI had that wholly in mind? Would he, for instance, have blessed Abyssinian guns?

And one suspects nationalism in the Duke of Norfolk’s persuading Rome to condemn the Plan of Campaign towards the end of the last century. I don’t know how many remember it. Irish tenants, cruelly overcharged by landlords whom England had imposed on them, tried to negotiate for more reasonable rents. They got nowhere at all. So someone thought up the Plan. The tenants would each pay a reasonable rent into a bank: the landlord could have it if he would agree to its reasonableness. England’s most highly placed Catholic, the Duke of Norfolk, convinced Leo XIII that the Plan was immoral, a breach of contract! The Pope issued a statement to this effect. Hilaire Belloc summed up the Irish reply—“Prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, we wish you would mind your own business.”

[Christopher Hollis (1902-1977) had a rather interesting life. The son of an Anglican bishop, he went to Eton and then Oxford where he became friends with Evelyn Waugh and his set, converted to Catholicism, taught at Stonyhurst and then Notre Dame, served as a Conservative MP for ten years after the war, and authored more than two dozen books. The following excerpt is from his autobiography, The Seven Ages: Their Exits and Their Entrances, 1974.]

As I have said, when I became a Catholic I did so largely—too largely as I came to see—because I wished to belong to an organization. I saw the Catholic Church as the great creative force of Western civilization—incomparably the highest achievement of Man—and threw myself with enthusiasm into defence of every Catholic cause in the present world, defending a number of causes on which I was not adequately informed and some that were not defensible. I accepted inevitably the belief that, even when the Pope was not infallible, yet a special grace informed him. That his policies were policies of impeccable virtue I took for granted. I was not at that time acquainted with Newman’s sentences written in 1871 in which he said, ‘I had been accustomed to believe that, over and above that attribute of infallibility which attached to the doctrinal decisions of the Holy See, a gift of sagacity had in every age characterized its occupants so that we might be sure, as experience taught us, without it being a dogma of faith, that what the Pope determined was the very measure, or the very policy, expedient for the Church at the time when he determined. I am obliged to say that a sentiment which history has impressed on me, and impresses still, has been considerably weakened as far as the present Pope (Pius IX) is concerned.’

The challenge that troubled me was this. If there was one clear teaching of Christianity, it was that war, killing and violence were great evils. I was not prepared to assert, any more than it was asserted by the general mind of the Church, that that involved absolute pacifism and absolute non-resistance. I was prepared to admit that there were extreme circumstances where the use of a little immediate violence might prevent greater violence. It might be legitimate to use force in police action or in self-defence. But quite obviously on any Christian principle it was only then that it was legitimate to use violence—only when the whole structure of society was threatened. Now, whatever the blemishes on Abyssinian society under Haile Selassie, it was clear that his regime in Abyssinia was no threat to the Italian way of life. If ever there was an unnecessary war, Italy’s attack on Abyssinia was such a war. Mussolini claimed that Abyssinia would provide a home for Italy’s surplus population. This, even if true, was hardly excuse for seizing the territory, and it was in fact nonsense. Therefore, if the Pope was to claim to be the guardian of the moral law, if ever there was an issue on which he ought to have spoken, it was in condemnation of that war. I did not claim to know enough about Italian conditions to say whether Mussolini’s overthrow of the Parliamentary regime was morally justified. I was quite prepared to allow that there were two sides to that and to agree that the Pope was right to reserve judgement. But on the Abyssinian war the issue was clear. Yet no clear word came either from the Vatican or from the Italian bishops. The bishops were indeed far worse than the Vatican.

That the Abyssinian regime had its defects—than many people had just grievances against it and among them many Italians, I did not doubt. Equally I could see that, at any rate in the view of the Vatican, the concordat between Church and State was an advantage; that, if the Church saw fit to defy the State, the State would be likely to revenge itself by measures that made uncomfortable the life of pious Catholics in Italy. Orders might be expelled, revenue confiscated, freedom of action in many ways impeded. Reasons such as these might well be sufficient to justify a secular state turning a blind eye to some of the actions of another secular state—saying, ‘It is no concern of mine.’ But the Church was not a secular state. It was either the voice of God or it was nothing. If its claims were at all valid then it had the promise of Christ that the gates of hell (whatever exactly they might be) would not prevail against it. It was proper enough to show prudence in minor matters of no moral content and not wantonly to defy the world and make more difficult the lives of private Catholics for no real purpose. But where there was a real moral issue, surely if the Church was to be anything, it must defy the consequences and take its stand. And what was a real moral issue if an unnecessary war was not one? Yet the Church did not speak. There was nothing like a clear voice saying that this was an unjust war, which Catholics should not support.

I could not but contrast the conduct of the Italian bishops towards the Abyssinian War with the Vatican’s conduct in the conflict a few years before over Lord Strickland’s behaviour in Malta. There, in a little island where the Church had for generations enjoyed enormous privileges, it was at least arguable that those privileges should be brought under some sort of control—that it would have been to the advantage of the Church that some of the privileges of ecclesiastics should not remain quite unbridled. Lord Strickland, himself a Catholic, made certain suggestions which were at any rate, one would have thought, arguably desirable. Yet then, when a voice was raised against ecclesiastical privilege, the Church had, it seemed, no sense at all that there might be two sides to the question, that it might be a matter for debate and compromise. Its verdict was instant and without qualification. Lord Strickland’s policies were condemned. The contrast was very disturbing. It was hard not to reach the conclusion that, when the Church spoke of itself as the upholder of the moral law, what it was really concerned to do was to uphold the rights of the Church—the rights of the Church to its property. It was concerned with the rights of Catholics to practise their religion—but it was much less deeply concerned about the rights of non-Catholics.

[This anecdote from Catholic publisher Frank Sheed’s book The Church and I, 1974, suggests that Orwell’s observation that ‘there is one law for the rich and another for the poor’ was a principle accorded as much respect among the Princes of the Church as anywhere else. Cardinal Hayes was Archbishop of New York from 1919 until his death in 1938, and his friend, George MacDonald, was a rich Roman Catholic “promoter.” (Two gentlemen of Manhattan who professed themselves friends of MacDonald agreed with his secretary that they do not know what he does, or why he maintains an office at 149 Broadway where rents are high.) In 1929 MacDonald accompanied the Cardinal to Rome where he met with the Pope and where MacDonald was elevated to the Papal peerage. The various banquets and celebrations were followed by a cruise round the Mediterranean aboard the British yacht Icanara, chartered by George MacDonald.]

I was at a public dinner for Cardinal Hayes on his return from a journey round the Mediterranean on the yacht of George MacDonald. There had been much pulpit emphasis at the time on the duty of Catholics to send their children to Catholic colleges, with quotations from the Code of Canon Law about excommunication. It was not of this that Cardinal Hayes spoke but of the journey he had just had. He was quoting Byron, I remember—“The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”—when there came a loud interjection: “Why doesn’t George MacDonald’s son go to a Catholic college?” There was a kind of stunned silence. MacDonald’s son was indeed at Princeton. But no one interrupted bishops in those days and I fancy there was a confused feeling that the interjector was being disrespectful to the Pope, who had made George MacDonald a Papal Marquis. All those around me agreed afterwards that the man must have been drunk. Four men carried him out of the room. Cardinal Hayes went on with his Byron.

[Catholic teacher Ted Schmidt tells a similar tale of hypocrisy in his autobiography, Shabbes Goy: A Catholic Boyhood on a Jewish Street in a Protestant City, 2001.]

Around 1937, before my mother had any children, she would dutifully accompany my dad out to Tessie and Harry’s mansion in the west end. Harry was a tough Irishman who set a rare festive board on Sunday evenings and like the wealthy often do, loved to have the clergy along to bless their enterprises. This one particular evening Monsignor Farley (not his real name) the “Dean of Catholic Education” was present as was his wont on most Sundays. Basking in the glow of the wine of the evening, Farley became voluble in his praise of Catholic education. My mother stopped him cold with a simple question.

“How can you go on like this when you know what is going on in this house?”

Mom was referring to the fact that Tessie and Harry sent their kids to private, non-Catholic high schools. Farley tried to insist that this was “different.” In her quiet, dignified way, Eileen would have none of it, much to the amusement of my grandfather who was present. From that day on, mom was persona non grata with Harry and she never went out to the big house again.

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