Tribulation and Resistance
In less than thirty years, from the 1880s to the 1910s, Euro-American discoveries and innovations—electric power, radio waves, radioactivity, automobiles, aircraft, submarines, the telephone, cinematography, sound recording, broadcasting, plastics and synthetics, the eradication of many endemic illnesses—reshaped everyday life. This tremendous material progress transformed Western societies in ways that seemed to validate the Enlightenment’s principles of reason, order, prosperity, and peace. But these material advances also disrupted traditional forms of life, and the social dislocations often made European countries politically unstable. Moreover, progress was soon harnessed for war and destruction.
The terrible events that rocked Europe and the world from 1914 to 1945 did not dispel belief in progress. Most people blamed the catastrophic events on an “eclipse” of the Enlightenment. It was not easy to recognize that the twentieth century’s “totalitarian” experiments—the project of “total war,” the murderous “total class warfare” waged by communism, the “total State” promoted by fascism, and the genocidal “total racial engineering” fantasized by Nazism—might on the contrary be an ultimate expression of the Enlightenment’s totalizing drive. In retrospect, 1914–45 were not decades of irrationality; they were a time of a mad rationalism.
Committed Christians and other religiously minded Europeans were swept along by patriotic fervor in the summer of 1914, as were other citizens. Many remained ardently patriotic or nationalistic after the Great War, either out of fidelity to the sacrifices borne by soldiers and civilians, or because they viewed nationalism as Christianity’s best defense against atheistic socialism and its new, radical wing, Bolshevism.
The trauma of the trenches and concerns about communism caused some leaders of Christian parties to turn to the fascists in Italy and the national socialists in Germany. Others urged a “traditionalist” or “corporatist” Christian-fascist synthesis (sometimes referred to as “clericofascism”). This impulse was manifest in Action française (even after its 1926 condemnation by Rome), António Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal, Engelbert Dollfuss’s regime in Austria, José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones’s Confederacy of Autonomous Rights (CEDA) and later the Franco regime in Spain, the Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, the Metaxas or “Fourth of August” regime in Greece, the Iron Guard in Romania, and both the Croatian-Catholic and Serbian-Orthodox radical movements in Yugoslavia. There was also, in many places, a very different but equally extreme and post-democratic Christian infatuation with the left, including even communism, as the strange case of Pierre Pascal exemplifies: Pascal was a devout French Catholic who joined the Bolshevik party in Russia in the wake of the October Revolution.
Yet amid the turmoil of the interwar years it was also the case that many religiously minded Europeans were alarmed by the rise of political totalitarianism. Resisting the communist threat was a priority throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s, but as the thirties advanced, national socialism and Japanese militarism were likewise regarded with growing suspicion. Some Catholics hoped that clericofascism and even Italian-style fascism would contain both menaces—hence their support for Dollfuss in Austria, their pro-Italian stand in the Abyssinian crisis of 1935, and their sympathy for the half-traditionalist, half-fascist rebellion in Spain in 1936. When Mussolini aligned strategically and ideologically with Hitler, sacrificing Austria in the process, these hopes started to unravel. Right-wing Catholics, like many Protestants, drew the proper conclusions.
The ideological disorientation and gradual clarification of Christian political commitments during this time are reflected in intellectual debates, especially in France, a country that hosted many refugees from totalitarian regimes. The “nonconformist school” (Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle’s description) dominated the 1930s. This outlook was encouraged by Esprit, a periodical founded by Emmanuel Mounier, and l’Ordre Nouveau, a movement influenced by Robert Aron that was largely Catholic and looked for a “third way”—neither right nor left, neither liberal nor totalitarian, but “communitarian” and “personalist.” Some of its members were active in Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in 1936–1938; others worked for the Vichy government in 1940. Most eventually joined the Resistance. Charles de Gaulle, the charismatic leader of the Free French, had been close to l’Ordre Nouveau before the fall of France in 1940.
The war was a moment of truth. Christianity, or at least a commitment to the Christian heritage, was often the touchstone of resistance, separating those who mobilized to defeat Nazism from its sympathizers, appeasers, and collaborators. Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, who served as secretary to de Gaulle in London, recalled in his memoirs, Born to Be Free, a conversation he had on Christmas 1941. Hitler had declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, and the European war was now global. Bouchinet-Serreulles was speaking to “a prominent member of the Conservative party” who still favored an arrangement with Hitler. “Finally, I asked him whether a Nazi victory would not mean the passing of our Judeo-Christian civilization. At that point, his face darkened and he stopped talking to me.” Bouchinet-Serreules knew that the religious core of European identity was at stake.
In Germany, opposition and resistance to national socialism was found in and around the churches. In his 1939 novel, On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger portrays the destruction of the Evil Empire by a handful of learned monks. Among Protestants, the Confessing Church movement (which defended Christianity against the neo-Marcionite “German Christians”) played an important role. Among Catholics, leading prelates such as Clemens von Galen, Konrad von Preysing, and Josef Frings took part in drafting the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge. They denounced, even during the war, many aspects of the regime’s ideology and policies. Galen condemned racial anti-Semitism but was not above religious anti-Judaism. Preysing and Frings let it be known that they were horrified by both attitudes and their genocidal consequences (“a crime crying to Heaven,” Frings said).
These public pronouncements influenced Germans who were not fully fanaticized. The White Rose group in Munich came together after Galen condemned the Nazi T4 euthanasia program. It was driven to action in 1943 by reports and testimonies, many of them disseminated in church circles, about the genocide of Jews. “Since the conquest of Poland ... Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way,” the group wrote in its second public leaflet. “The German people slumber on in dull, stupid sleep and encourage the fascist criminals. Each wants to be exonerated of guilt, each one continues on his way with the most placid, calm conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!” Preysing was in touch with another Resistance group, the Kreisau Circle led by the Protestant Helmuth James von Moltke. He also met and blessed the Catholic Claus von Stauffenberg shortly before his ill-fated attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
In most countries subject to German control, Christian activists engaged in various forms of anti-Nazi mobilization, from underground and guerilla operations to political maneuvering. In France, priests, monks, nuns, and lay Christians joined the Resistance. The communist poet Louis Aragon wrote La Rose et le Réséda, a ballad celebrating the partisan “who believed in Heavens” along with “the one who did not.” In 1943 in Italy, where Church authorities and lay activists had attempted to moderate Mussolini’s regime from within, large numbers of Christians joined the Partigiani guerilla groups against the German military occupation in the north and center of the country. In Hungary, the churches supported Admiral Miklós Horthy’s stubborn efforts to keep the country as independent as possible from its German ally, and to protect its large Jewish community.
In Greece, the Orthodox Church entertained ambivalent relations with the semi-fascist Metaxas regime, which sought to make religion subservient to the state but did not otherwise pursue anti-Jewish persecution, and did not surrender to the Italian and German invasions in 1940–41. Under German occupation, the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, Damaskinos Papandreou, protested the deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews in 1943, then engaged in extensive underground operations to rescue the rest of the Jewish community. He supported the Resistance in many ways. In Bulgaria, the Orthodox Church unanimously mobilized against the planned deportation of the local Jewish community.
Christian Democracy, Phase Two
The courageous stand of many churchmen and lay Christians during World War II granted them a special role after 1945—at least in the Western half of Europe, where American protection and support allowed for the restoration of democratic politics. But other factors contributed to the remarkable ascendancy of Christian Democracy during the postwar era.
First, there was a MiMa’amakim (“out of the depths,” from Psalm 130) response. The human suffering of the wartime years led to a general turn toward transcendence and a return to the Judeo-Christian outlook. The most instinctive and stunning manifestation was the baby boom, which started simultaneously in Germany, France, Britain, America, and Russia. Bearing and raising children had always meant love, faith, and hope for the future.
There were intellectual and cultural signs as well. The Ten Commandments was published in the United States in 1943, featuring chapters by famous European authors such as Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, Franz Werfel, Rebecca West, Jules Romains, and André Maurois. Toward the end of the war, Jünger circulated among German anti-Nazis a short but stunning essay, The Peace. He argued that a war that brought so much destruction and led to such crimes (he mentioned the “gas chambers” and the crimes perpetrated “in the name of race”) should have no other outcome than “a better and wider Kingdom of Peace,” to be achieved by a wholesome return to “the God of the Bible.” In his judgment, “the symbols of Man’s Godly origins, the narrative of the Creation, the figures of Cain and Abel, the images of Sodom and the Babel Tower, the Psalms, the Prophets, the New Testament’s truth, so superior to the base laws of this reign of terror, provide us with the eternal pattern and measure governing human history.”
The return to religion was not just a gesture among intellectuals. At the old German justice hall in Nuremberg where surviving Nazi leaders were tried in 1946, the four judges were seated under the Tablets of the Law. From Berlin to Le Havre to Coventry, churches and cathedrals were the first monuments to be rebuilt in devastated cities.
Christian Democracy’s rise was also strengthened by the Year Zero effect. Though materially hurt, the United Kingdom and the U.S.S.R. could take pride in their fortitude and final victory, but most other nations were morally collapsed as well as physically destroyed. Germany was left with no central government and had lost 25 percent of the land mass it possessed in 1937. It was subjected to forced migrations of ethnic Germans on a huge scale from lost provinces to the East, split among four occupation zones, and burdened by the crimes of the Nazi regime. Italy was shattered by the fall of Mussolini’s dictatorship and the Savoy monarchy. France had been wiped out militarily in 1940, and its liberation in 1944 had been the work of the Anglo-Saxons (de Gaulle’s gallant stand notwithstanding). In these contexts, religion was the last token of legitimacy and national continuity.
In Germany, Italy, and even France, Year Zero was characterized by a backward-looking and often only half-admitted desire for absolution. Too many people among the elites and the masses had tacitly or explicitly supported the fascist regimes, at least for a time. This was often the case for non-fascist conservatives. Having feared Bolshevism as the greater evil, they had allied themselves with fascists, and they sought to be cleared of this alliance, if not amnestied. Pledging allegiance to Christian values, and to the Christians who had fought fascism in one way or another, offered a path to rehabilitation.
In sum, the postwar situation favored the dominance of Christian Democratic parties. They would remain in charge for several decades.
In the 1949 German elections (the first free elections since 1932), two Christian parties, the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the rest of West Germany, emerged as the largest political group in the Bundestag. They earned 31 percent of the vote, gaining a narrow victory over the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which garnered 29.2 percent. Four years later, in 1953, the CDU/CSU rose to 45.2 percent of the vote, against 28.8 percent for the SPD. In 1957, it rose even higher, to 50.2 percent. In the 1960s and later, the CDU/CSU was dominant in West Germany, and after unification it dominated German politics as a whole. It has ruled for forty-two years out of the last seventy-one, as either the parliamentary majority or a partner in a broad coalition with the Social Democrats. Even in opposition, during brief periods when the Social Democrats have held power, the CDU/CSU has been a force to be reckoned with.
The Christian Democracy Party (DC) was likewise dominant in Italy after World War II. The direct heir of the pre-Mussolinian People’s Party (running under the same emblem, a red shield with a white cross and the Latin motto Libertas), the DC won the first elections under the new constitution in 1946, with 35.2 percent of the vote. In 1948, its vote share rose to 48.5 percent. The party stayed above 40 percent for a decade, then stayed close to 40 percent for two more decades after 1958.
In France, the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), a secular party with Christian influences, did not fare as handsomely. It began at 24.9 percent of the vote in 1945, rose to 28.2 percent in June 1946, and fell slightly to 25.9 percent in November 1946. In 1951, it fell to under 15 percent. Conservative voters had rallied to the party largely out of the need for absolution and reintegration into legitimate French politics. But in the early 1950s, voters switched to the new national-democratic party founded by de Gaulle, or they moved to Antoine Pinay’s more right-wing Independent and Agrarian Party. From the early 1950s onward, French Christian Democracy, or the Centrists, as the party was renamed in 1965, never achieved more than 15 percent of the vote nationwide. But the fragmented Christian constituency in France would at times reunite on specific issues and exercise decisive influence.