We are here not simply dealing with the overt action of the Vatican, which as in the case of Abyssinia and the Italian Church, often finds it convenient to act through the local hierarchy and itself remain silent. We are studying the share of the Black International in the world-debasement and tragedy. As far as Pacelli-Plus is concerned it is enough that he persisted in his attempts to conciliate Hitler and never said a word of the mildest censure of Germany's action in Austria. He knew that Mussolini had agreed to it as part of the general plan. But that the Church in Austria enthusiastically supported Hitler is not disputed, and no section of the Church was more docile to the Vatican. We shall see in a moment the trickery by which it was represented in America that the Austrian Church acted independently of the Vatican.
The way had been prepared, we saw, by the Church poisoning what the Annual Register calls "the Socialist watch-dog." Hitler would certainly not have had a walk-over in Austria if the Social Democrats, who firmly held Vienna and Linz and had hundreds of thousands of followers in the country, had still been strong in 1988. The Catholic Chancellor, Schusdhnigg, was himself vigorously opposed to annexation, and it is interesting to speculate what would have been the effect of an appeal to Czecho-Slovakia, with its magnificent Skoda arsenal close at hand, Russia, and the Socialists and Radicals of France were there. The Church, by destroying them, destroyed this early chance of defeating the world-plot. It had killed the Socialist leaders, had put tens of thousands of the more spirited Socialists in jail, and had drilled the country into docility to itself.
For Austria was, as we saw, a theocracy, a priest-ruled state as not even Poland or Eire was. Dollfuss, who assassinated the Socialists in 1934 after consultation with Pacelli, was promptly assassinated by the Nazis. His successor, Schuschnigg, hated the Nazis and was opposed to annexation, but the last word was with Cardinal Innitzer, bead of the Austrian Church; and he had the support in the Catholic government of Seyss-Inquart, who was a Catholic and a Nazi and was prepared at any time to stab his leader in the back. The main fact is, however, that since the suppression of the Socialists in Vienna in 1934, the whole country was prostrate at the feet of the cardinal. Socialists were whipped into silence and the whole scheme of education, in school and press, imposed absolute docility to the Church.
That there was an understanding between Cardinal Innitzer and Hitler, who made his usual glib promises to respect and protect the Church, nobody denies. When Hitler marched into Vienna on March 13, 1938, all the church-bells in Austria rang, and a Swastika flag waved over the ancient Cathedral. Two days later Innitzer had a cordial interview with Hitler, and the cardinal and four of his leading bishops issued a manifesto summoning all Austrians to vote for Hitler in the coming plebiscite. The cardinal wrote "Heil Hitler" after his signature. It is a sufficient refutation of the plea that the Austrian's wanted to join Germany that Hitler angrily refused to ask them this by a plebiscite as Schuschnigg proposed. Hitler turned the idea into a farce by making it a plebiscite of the whole German nation. In this farce Innitzer and his bishops concurred and ordered all Austrians—they were now all Catholics in Church law—to support Hitler, calling him the man "whose struggle against Bolshevism and for the power, honor, and unity of Germany corresponds to the voice of Divine Providence." Was a supreme Church authority with a large clerical staff really ignorant of Hitler's true plan and motive? They spoke a common language, remember, and were near neighbors, and there was not the least secrecy about Hitler's plan to exploit Europe, If Innitzer understood the Nazi aim—and it is incredible that he did not—his association of it with "the voice of Divine Providence" was blasphemous from the religious viewpoint and loathsome from any angle.
But did Innitzer take this line upon instruction from or without consulting the Papal Secretary of State? It is not material for my purpose to settle this, as we are studying the share of the Black International as a whole. It happens, however, that the question was referred to the Vatican by Catholics of other countries, probably America, who were outraged by this gross interference in politics, and in favor of a corrupt and very dangerous schemer. And I quote the facts about the Jesuitical action of the Vatican from a Catholic writer, C. Rankin, in his flattering biography of Pacelli-Plus (The Pope Speaks, 1940).
On April 1st, apparently in reply to Catholic complaints of Inititzer's conduct—for so public a rebuke of a cardinal would otherwise be unprecedented—a Jesuit speaker on the Vatican Radio censored the Austrian cardinal and regretted that he had not recognized "the wolf in sheep's clothing." It is clear that this brought German protests, for the Vatican organ then declared that the radio talk was not official. Even the pious and rather obtuse Ransom adds that "it was characteristic of the extreme delicacy of the situation" that this denial was not published but was "telephoned direct to foreign correspondents by persons instructed by the Vatican to do so." He seems to be unaware of the irony of his words. The Osservatore said that Innitzer's action was not authorized: Radio said that it was opposed to Vatican policy and anonymous officials in the Vatican press bureau then said that the criticisms of Innitzer were not authorized. The cream of the joke is that all three—radio, printing press, and press bureau—are in the Pope's back yard, so to say, and would not dare to say a word on a matter of importance without consulting the Secretariat of State. About this time some American film company put into circulation a very impressive film, with most edifying and largely untruthful commentary on work in the Vatican City. It did not point out the convenience of the above arrangement.
Innitzer was invited to Rome to explain his action, and the Vatican was careful not to declare that he had been censured. Instead of this, the Osservatore on April 6 gave a long and sympathetic account of the cardinal's reasons for his action. Keesing's Contemporary Archives gives the gist of Innitzer's arguments, as published in the Swiss press at the time, but there is no need to consider them here. The Black International had rendered a new and most important service to the crooks, and the Vatican had neatly dodged the censure of Catholics in democratic countries.
Pacelli knew that, as we have seen several times, local Catholic hierarchies will, in their own interest, finally submit to anything that the Papacy does. For a year or two Mundelein had roused American Catholic's to a white-hot indignation against the Nazis for persecuting the Church and besmirching the fragrant lives of the communities of lay brothers. You would expect apoplexy when the news came that the Church had sold Austria to the Nazis, and given them control of the Danube, and smoothed the path of their bloody ambition, yet there was only a momentary flutter. Catholics bowed to the "unauthorized" assurance that Innitzer had not consulted the Vatican, and, as the world at large soon forgot Austria and resumed its admiration of Nazi efficiency, the matter was dismissed.
One needs no documentary evidence that this conspiracy between the Austrian Church and the Nazis was directed from Rome. National branches of the Church of Rome are bound to consult the Papacy before taking action on any issue of grave importance. That is what the Secretariat of State is for. And when the issue is one that affects other countries and the international policy of the Vatican the obligation to consult headquarters is so strong that an evasion of it is unthinkable. The question of joining Austria to Germany was clearly of this character. Such union would not only strengthen Hitler's position to a very important extent, so that it was a most valuable opportunity for one of those bargains for which the Vatican is always alert, but to put an additional 7,000,000 Catholics under Nazi rule after what had happened to the Church in Germany this was so serious a matter that the suggestion that Innitzer acted on his own initiative may be dismissed as frankly childish.
But, while the concurrence and lead of the Vatican is certain, the ground of its policy is not clear. The key to it seems to be the extraordinary persistence of Pacelli in trusting the promises of Hitler. He had in 1932 made, in return for valuable service, a promise of a very favorable agreement with the Vatican. He had immediately dishonored the agreement, yet Pacelli and the German bishops had continued to appeal to him. In 1936 he had opened the series of vice-trials of priests and monks which had dealt the Church a heavier and more ignominious blow than ever, yet the Vatican had, with occasional mild complaints about persecution and paganism—never about crime and brutality until Catholic Poland was threatened with extermination—remained friendly. We shall see that at the opening of the great war he had made new promises to the Church, and we shall find the German bishops in 1941 complaining, while they still supported him, that he had not fulfilled his promises! This persistence