The left gets a modus vivendi, the right a concordat
Concordats have traditionally been made with rightwing governments, whether absolute monarchies or fascist dictatorships. However, only a quiet working arrangement has been made with authoritarian governments on the left, as these compete with the Church ideologically, rather than complementing it.
Ordination of priests at St. Peter's in Rome. Dictators
also want to keep people humble and rightwing ones have
traditionally allied themselves with the Church through concordats.
A dissident 17th-century French priest describes the pact between the Church and the King of France – but he could just as well have been talking about other authoritarian rulers like the Emperor Napoléon or the Nazi puppet, Marshal Pétain:
Religion supports political power [...] and the government, in return, protects religion.[...] On the one side, the priests command on pain of curses and eternal damnation obedience to the magistrates, princes and kings, as established by God to govern the rest, and on the other side, the princes ensure that the priests are respected and granted good appointments and good revenues.... [1]
A pact with an authoritarian is ruler can be useful for getting concordats, as an eminent Vatican lawyer admits:
The Apostolic See, to avoid the risk of open mockery, usually enters into solemn undertakings only where a civil government is under no obligation to seek the consent of a representative body, or where there can be no reasonable doubt that such consent will be granted. [2]
This was the inside view from a famed canonist at the Gregorian University in Rome who became superior general of the Jesuits and a trusted adviser to Pope Pius X.
It's much easier to sign a concordat with a dictator — then there's no worry that a democratic legislature might refuse to ratify it. This is why concordats are so often made with strongmen. Here on Concordat Watch you can find ones concluded with despots, large and small: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Duvalier, Trujillo, Dollfuss, the Ivorian President-for-Life Houphouët-Boigny, the Argentine Generals Aramburu and Onganía and the Peruvian military junta under General Bermúdez two days before he had to step down. (The first five gentlemen even made it into the Killers of the 20th Century.)
These rightwing dictators generally got on well with the Vatican, despite occasional theoretical differences. For instance, their problem with the Jews: the Church was anti-Jewish, blaming the Jews for communism, democracy and "killing Christ", whilst the Nazis were anti-Semitic, blaming them for ancestry that wasn't German. When it came to the crunch, this subtle distinction about exactly what they should be accused of didn't help most Jews very much. [3] In practice, it just meant that a few of the Jews who had converted to Catholicism were saved through Church intervention, while the rest were left to their fate under Hitler.
This marriage between fascism and religions has been called clero-fascism or clerical fascism. More detail can be found at the site of the Clero-Fascist Studies Project.
However, any alliance with the Vatican remains a marriage of convenience, one which is promptly annulled when support for the dictator threatens to become a liability. Thus the standard sequence is for the Vatican to conclude a concordat with a dictator who is anxious for the legitimacy conferred by a concordat with the Holy See. Yet when his hold on power slips and it's clear he's soon going to be to be replaced by popular demand, the Church turns on him. It suddenly remembers his atrocities and issues grave warnings from pulpits across the land. This happened in their declining days to Spain's Franco, Haiti's Duvalier, the Dominican Republic's Trujillo, Argentina's Juan Peron, Venezuela's Marcos Perez Jimenez and Colombia's Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. [4] Of course, when the Vatican turns on its concordat partners it does not renounce the concordats, as well. Long after the rightwing dictators have been deposed, these remain.
With leftwing dictatorships the relationship was less cosy. The Church opposed Socialism and Communism from very early on, long before Soviet abuse of the peoples under their power. [5] This fact suggests that the Church objected to Marxism, not because it was against oppression, but because it wanted to check any competing ideology, especially one which was hostile to religion.
However, the Vatican still wanted to find out what was going on and exercise what influence it could and thus it arranged a modus vivendi — a working agreement — with the various Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. This was a kind of diplomatic note lacking the full force of an international treaty, (which is what a concordat purports to be). The modus vivendi acted to secure whatever could be got, it kept the lines of communication open and yet it withheld the diplomatic recognition conferred by a concordat. The modus vivendi was intended as a stopgap until a leftwing regime collapsed. Then the Vatican could offer a new and more compliant successor the prospect of international recognition and the stabilising support of the Church — at a price — the price of a concordat.
Notes
Note on the picture of boots: These seem a better symbol of modern Fascism than the traditional "fasces". Springer boots, originally for paratroopers, have thick soles to absorb the shock of landing. Neo-Nazis use them to absorb the shock to their feet of treading on their victims.
1. Jean Meslier (1664-1729), Mémoire contre la religion. (The original title was: Mémoire des pensées et des sentiments de Jean Meslier, prêtre, curé d’Étrépigny et de Balaives, sur une partie des erreurs et des abus de la conduite et du gouvernement des hommes où l’on voit des démonstrations claires et évidentes de la vanité et de la fausseté de toutes les divinités et de toutes les religions du monde pour être adressé à ses paroissiens après sa mort, et pour leur servir de témoignage de vérité à eux, et à tous leurs semblables.)
2. Francis Xavier Wernz, SJ, Jus Decretalium I, 166, (Rome, 1905). http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=3230
3. Muriel Fraser, "Vatican anti-Judaism versus Nazi anti-Semitism: a subtle theological distinction", National Secular Society Newsline, 21 July 2006.
4. "Bishops' Warning", Time, 15 February 1960.
5. David Ranan, Double Cross: The Code of the Catholic Church, (Theo Press, 2000), p. 18.
(Last updated 16 April 2010)
