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Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period,” Journal of Contemporary History 53:3 (2018): 503-523.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Julio de la Cueva explores the role of anticlericalism in early twentieth-century revolutionary movements that saw “defeat of religion…either as a necessary condition for revolution or as an equally necessary result” (503).  He describes the antireligious violence that occurred in Mexico, Russia, and Spain during this period as the most extreme manifestation of a “second Kulturkampf” inspired by the French Revolution and the subsequent culture wars of the “long nineteenth century” (504).  As was true of their counterparts in those earlier conflicts, revolutionaries of the early twentieth century believed that organized religion was an obstacle to progress and the achievement of their goals, hence the “violent culture wars” embedded in these three revolutionary struggles.

Mexican revolutionaries alternated between attempts to reform the Catholic Church and get rid of it altogether.  During the period of war and violence that began in 1910, they confiscated church property, desecrated or destroyed sacred spaces and objects, and imprisoned or expelled priests and believers who opposed them.  The Constitution of 1917 significantly curtailed the public power and legal privileges of the Church, outlawed religious orders, secularized education, and gave state governments permission to limit the number of priests within their territories.  Vigorous enforcement of these measures by President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) and his successors led to armed resistance by devout Catholics in the Cristero War, in the course of which at least 70,000 persons were killed.  The state responded with a “defanaticization” campaign and attempted to suppress Catholic worship across much of Mexico.  After nearly a decade of intermittent religious war, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) recognized the futility of the state’s approach and allowed churches to reopen and priests and bishops to return.  “By 1938, the savage confrontation between the Revolution and the Catholic Church had come to an end in Mexico” (510).

De la Cueva identifies several notable differences between the Mexican and Russian revolutions, including a much higher death toll and a more sustained and intense campaign to eradicate religion in the latter case.  Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ initial moves were similar to those of Mexico’s revolutionaries.  They nationalized church lands, transferred church schools to state control, “deprived the churches of legal personality,” and waged a propaganda campaign against religious institutions and traditions (512).  Physical violence against clergy and believers increased during the civil war but subsided by the end of 1922 as the state adopted a less aggressive approach and church leaders became more submissive to the new regime.  However, this “semi-tolerance” gave way to renewed persecution under Stalin; by 1941, fewer than 1000 churches were still open (of the 60,000 that existed before the revolution) and only 5,665 priests remained (in comparison with 112,629 in 1914).  Although the Soviet state had gone a long way toward dismantling the Orthodox Church, many Soviet citizens, especially in rural communities, remained committed to Orthodox Christianity.  De la Cueva sees parallels with the Mexican case in this respect as well.

Revolutionary anticlerical violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) bore a resemblance to what occurred in these other revolutions.  As in Mexico, Spanish revolutionaries drew on older traditions of elite and popular anticlericalism dating back to the late eighteenth century.  The proclamation of the Second Republic and the Constitution of 1931 were stridently secular, calling for the separation of church and state, secular education, and the dissolution of the Jesuit Order.  A wave of anticlerical violence in that same year led to the destruction of 100 religious buildings over a period of five days, and attacks on clergy began to increase as well.  The most intense period of revolutionary anticlerical violence occurred during the civil war, in which 6,733 priests were killed (71 percent of them between July and September 1936).  However, unlike the Mexican and Russian cases, much of this violence was initiated by local actors rather than central authorities.  It came to an end in 1939 when Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces defeated the Republican government and restored the church to a place of prominence in Spanish society.

De la Cueva notes that radical movements from the French Revolution onward have identified revolution with the suppression or destruction of religion, but he highlights the variations as well.  Attacks on church property and acts of iconoclasm were common across all three cases in this article, but only in the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent Spain) did violence threaten to eradicate the clergy entirely.  In Mexico and the Soviet Union, the state played a central role in coordinating antireligious violence and anticlerical policies, whereas in Spain the initiative came from diverse local actors on the political left who shared a “powerful anticlerical identity” (516).  Despite Pope Pius XI’s emphasis on “atheistic communism” in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937), communist ideology played only a small role in the anticlerical violence that occurred in Spain, and hardly any at all in the case of Mexico.  The encyclical correctly identified Mexico, Russia and Spain as epicenters of religious persecution but was overly simplistic in its assessment of the ideological and contextual factors that were driving it.

De la Cueva begins and ends his article with a call for additional transnational comparisons as well as the integration of “different explanatory models that have been offered of antireligious violence in each country” (503).  He hopes “to stimulate a dialogue between the histories and the historians of the early twentieth century revolutionary regimes” (523).  Contemporary church historians will also find his work helpful in terms of understanding the moral panic and political and cultural polarization that led many Christians to seek the protection of fascist and far-right regimes during the interwar period, an alternative that proved to be equally perilous for the churches and their members.

 

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Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “A European Culture War in the Twentieth Century? Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Bolshevism between Moscow, Berlin, and the Vatican 1922-1933,” Journal of Religious History 39, no. 2 (June 2015): 280-306.

By Beth A. Griech-Polelle, Pacific Lutheran University

Todd H. Weir’s article is a transnational account of the anti-Catholicism gripping Europe in the interwar years. Between 1927-1939, thousands of Catholic clerics and lay people suffered persecution, torture, and murder in places such as Mexico, Spain, and Russia.  Weir addresses an interesting aspect of the ‘culture wars’ by examining the role that religion plays in relation to political ideologies in an age of extremes. The focus is on Germany as the site of a contested ideological and religious struggle between the Vatican and the Soviet Union. The work is divided into two phases of the relationship, covering the 1920s through 1930 as a time when Germany played the role of diplomatic mediator between the Soviet Union and the Vatican via the German Communist Party and the Catholic Center Party. Beginning in 1930, however, Germany became the chief battle arena for an ever-increasing transnational propaganda war between Catholics and communists.

In the first phase, Weir offers explanations as to why both the Vatican and the Soviet Union were open to negotiations. For Vatican officials, the communist takeover meant that there was a need to ensure access to the sacraments for the more than two million Catholics in Russia. It also offered an opportunity for the Church to seek converts from Orthodox Christianity to Catholicism. For Soviet officials, the need to secure diplomatic recognition from powerful entities and to avoid offending countries with substantial Catholic populations were reasons enough to enter into diplomatic talks. Throughout these discussions, Germany emerged as the chief negotiator, particularly since Germany and the Soviet Union had reached a diplomatic agreement in the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922.

During the 1920s, influenced by the Rapallo Treaty, the German Foreign Office refused to do more than mention religious persecution within the Soviet Union. To increase the pressure on the Soviets, Vatican Officials, including Eugenio Pacelli, began using their connections to German Catholic newspapers such as Germania to insert demands for an end to religious persecution. In response, the Bolsheviks issued an April 1929 decree making it possible for the state to persecute religious associations even more. The April decree also placed greater burdens on congregations to maintain the upkeep and taxes on their churches. The persecution and targeting of church leaders also proved to be an effective way of destroying village solidarity and ridding the areas of local elites. The Soviet clamp-down on Catholic priests induced German Catholics, including Friedrich Muckermann, to place still more articles attacking the Soviet authorities for attempting to rid their country of religion.

By 1929, Pope Pius XI had given up hope that diplomacy would win the day. Now, the Vatican would launch a “crusade of prayer” (which opened publicly on March 19, 1930) attacking the persecution of Catholic priests inside the Soviet Union, but the crusade also sought to counter the growing promotion of anticlericalism—especially in Germany. The German Freethinkers, under the influence of Soviet examples, urged Germans to leave the churches through public demonstrations, agitprop theater, and graphic propaganda. Both sides now squared off: the Soviets proclaimed that the Pope was the ringleader of Western powers seeking the destruction of the Soviet Union while the Vatican argued that communists were seeking to spread atheism and anti-clericalism throughout Europe. In Germany, Catholic priests followed the pope’s lead in the “crusade of prayer” and organized marches and demonstrations in which thousands protested the spread of anticlericalism. Priests in Germany were trained to combat atheism largely through the People’s Association for Catholic Germany. Through lectures, demonstrations, conference meetings and brochures, priests were instructed to take positive steps in the fight against the spread of atheism and godlessness. These efforts were transnational when some German priests went as a delegation to Mexico to address uprisings against the Cristero movement.

Weir tracks the divisions among German Social Democrats, German Communists, and Catholic Center Party members, revealing the strains of anticlericalism, fears about secularization, and the rising tide of groups such as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party with its promise to end secularism in Germany. The author concludes his article by suggesting that the study of political ideas “should investigate Christian apology as a crucible in which a number of religious-social discourses and theological-political strategies were forged. Although most succumbed to the more powerful political ideologies and are now largely forgotten, these Christian strategies and discourses represent signature elements of the political culture of the period” (305).

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