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While Garibaldi was on the loose in Sicily during the summer of 1862, Lord John Russell, who had expended so much energy attempting to formulate possible solutions to the Roman Question, observed that there was no early prospect of the Emperor Napoleon III withdrawing his troops from Rome, as ‘Garibaldi furnishes the French Govt with too good an excuse for staying’. Garibaldi’s activities, and the conduct of the Rattazzi government during the Italian crisis of 1862, made the British anxious over not only the unstable condition of the Kingdom of Italy, but also the potential for its incompleteness to cause problems in international affairs. Lord Cowley, the British ambassador at Paris, advised the foreign secretary that Russell’s restless attempts to induce the French to evacuate Rome ‘caused difficulties instead of removing them’ and advised him in the aftermath of Aspromonte to desist from such intervention. Moreover, Queen Victoria complained frequently of ‘the want of dignity’ in Britain’s efforts. In the context of Aspromonte, Russell was obliged to admit that it was beyond his capacity to resolve the Roman Question, at least for the time being. In September 1862, he considered asking his nephew Odo if, through his role as the unofficial British representative to the Holy See, he might be able ‘to induce the Pope to leave Rome for a time & go to Malta—small chance I fear’. After that, the British finally left the matter alone.

Although the idea of a Catholic Federation failed to get off the ground, the Catholic Union was for the rest of the 1930s involved in arguably the most concerted Catholic social action in the United Kingdom through the Advisory Bureaux set up in 1931. The CUAG was to bring the direct messages of Pius XI and Leo XIII to the lives of many Catholics, and provide a mechanism that could unite the most affluent and professional Catholics with the poorest and most disadvantaged of their co-religionists. The impact of the Catholic Union of the Archdiocese of Glasgow Advisory Bureaux (CUAB) was considerable though it has remained a neglected topic for study. The CUAB barely gets a mention in Tom Gallagher’s major study of Catholic and Protestant relations Glasgow, the Uneasy Peace. Where most historians have tended to discuss the Catholic Social Guild (CSG) or abortive attempts at a Catholic Trades Union movement and Catholic political parties in Great Britain in the 1930s, both the CUAB and the WCF have largely escaped the notice of scholars. The CUAB, which was arguably more representative of the spirit of Catholic social teaching, as laid down by the Vatican, is often ignored. The scale of the work of the CUAB was unprecedented: it operated throughout the large Archdiocese of Glasgow, and by its own estimation it had dealt with over 10,000 inquiries annually. The activity ranged from helping local people to complete applications for public assistance, to representing them in the highest Scottish courts. There were, at various times, between 20 and 50 different parishes operating individual advice centres. Irrespective of the considerable number of individuals helped by the Advisory Bureaux, the functions and workings of the organisation give an insight into the dynamics of social Catholicism, its aims and objectives both in an internal and external context.

Both countries were days away from a military confrontation when the Vatican intervened in order to mediate. Indeed, the agreement marked an important step toward the mediation of the Beagle problem, but the Vatican was successful only in keeping the parties at bay, not at pushing for a settlement; this is discussed in the first section of the chapter. It had been stated publicly by both states that Cardinal Samore was the most important figure in this dispute. Without denying his diplomatic role and performance, new evidence shows that he was also a controversial figure for Argentina. In fact, official documents have been found that recommended the removal of Samore from the mediation. Second, this chapter reveals how the decision-making process in Argentina became more fragmented. In contrast, it concludes by demonstrating Chilean coherence and the country’s strengths at the domestic level. Nevertheless, its pariah status still affected its relationship with the international community.

In 2008, the Brazilian government and the Holy See concluded an Agreement between the Federal Republic of Brazil and the Holy See on the legal status of the Catholic Church in Brazil.1 Despite being called merely an Agreement, its range makes it a Concordat.2 The Church makes quite a frequent use of such Concordats, especially after the Vatican II Council, and often with European and Latin American countries whose societies are largely Catholic (Ferrari 2004).3 However it is described, it affects the legal architecture of relations between the Brazilian State and religions, as well as the formally equal exercise of religious freedom.4

In 2013, two figures in Polish public life made homophobic claims that caused a scandal on a national level. The fact that both of these figures, one from politics and the other from the professional repertory theatre, are directly and intimately connected to 1989 as a transformative political moment in Polish history should not be divorced from the significance of their statements nor from the outrage that followed their publication. The events began when Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity Movement and a key player in the Round Table Talks that led to the establishment of liberal democracy in Poland, stated that homosexuals as minorities have no right to a prominent role in politics and should not be entitled to a front-bench position in the Sejm, the Polish parliament.1 Walesa further claimed that this injunction should be carried out in spatialised terms wherein non-heterosexual politicians should be placed on the backbenches or even outside the Sejm chamber. In short, the former President of Poland suggested no less than the implementation of a gay ghetto in the seat of the country’s main legislative body. This was soon followed by the actress Joanna Szczepkowska’s (2013) assertion that, not unlike in the Vatican, a powerful homosexual lobby (or ‘homolobby’, homoprawda) dominates the Polish theatre, an elite group who privilege fellow gay artists in casting and force heterosexual actors to publicly undress in order to attract gay audi-ences.2

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze how international factors affected the implementation of Argentinian and Chilean foreign policy during the Beagle crisis. The evolution of the crisis in 1977–1984 was embedded in a global political context. In other words, it was never simply a bilateral dispute between Argentina and Chile as many scholars have tended to view it. From the international arbitration to the participation of third actors and the relationships between them, including the United States, the Vatican, the Malvinas/Falkland War, and the United Kingdom, the Beagle crisis also had a regional and international dimension. Domestic and international factors conditioned Argentinian and Chilean foreign policy to varying degrees. Depending on the domestic structural conditions of each country, FDMP varied according to the interaction between domestic and international constraints.

In mid-October 2013, the Vatican issued a worldwide survey, sent out to every national conference of bishops, in order to collect data on the practices of parishes and the attitudes of believers regarding such sensitive issues as abortion or gay marriage. The data are being collected in preparation for the Vatican Synod on “Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization” which Pope Francis I is organizing in October 2014 and 2015.1

Just as the social web is a powerful opportunity for marketers and communicators to reach and persuade people of the merits of their products and services, it can also be a double-edged sword that results in your carefully crafted efforts being sliced apart in full public view. Of course, some campaigns set out to cause controversy; a thick skin goes with the territory. Benetton’s 2011 online Unhate ad campaign promoting “a culture of tolerance” and intended to “combat hatred around the world” featuring the Pope kissing an Egyptian imam may have scooped the Grand Prix at the Cannes advertising festival but it also resulted in an uproar amongst religious groups, condemnation by the Vatican and White House, and led to the image being withdrawn. 1 But it had achieved what it set out do: generate press coverage and digital ink.

Immersion into the study of the interactions between Catholicism and the European integration takes us to a very rich and diverse area of interest with breath-taking depth of historical context. The complexity of the topic also brings a number of conceptual challenges. One of these necessary decisions that the student of the topic has to make deals with the delimitation of the time frame of the study. Since this book as a whole puts emphasis on the current situation, this chapter not only concentrates mainly on recent developments but also gives an overview of those of the whole post-war era. In spite of this general time frame, we also link each section of the chapter to the broader historical context whenever it is useful and possible. The other conceptual difficulty is related to the way of understanding the focal objects of our analysis as both European integration and Catholicism represent multifaceted phenomena difficult to conceive in their entirety. Even when focusing only on their central institutional embodiments,1 we still face the problem of their complex structure and multiple identities. The EU is represented by the ever-changing and still growing assortment of common institutions, legislation, and decision-making, which influence both the EU as a whole, its constituent units (the member states) and their citizens. On the contrary, the institutional triangle of the Catholic Church/the Vatican State/the Holy See, all interconnected by the person of the Supreme Pontiff, constituting the central institutional forms of Catholicism, is no less complex.

In 2013, filmmaker Alex Gibney released Mea Maxima Culpa, a film documenting the case of sexual abuse of deaf children in a Catholic residential school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and, perhaps more importantly, the alleged involvement of members of the Church hierarchy right up to the Vatican in the prolonged protection of priests who committed abuse. When, just a few days after the release of the film, Pope Benedict XVI made the unprecedented move of resigning, Gibney suggested that the resignation was ‘inextricably linked to the sexual abuse crisis’.1 His conjecture may or may not have been true, but the tide of evidence and disquiet about the history of sexual abuse in the Church is without doubt precipitating a demand for a far more comprehensive response than has been seen.

In modern day diplomacy, the role of the Holy See (HS) has been characterized by conflicting perceptions. Most recently, a serious public spat occurred between The Economist and the HS in 2007 concerning the very nature of the HS as a diplomatic actor. In the conclusion of a well-researched article, the journal proposed that in an age of rising importance of various independent agencies active in the world of diplomacy, the HS would enhance its authority by clarifying its status: Instead of claiming to practise a form of inter-governmental diplomacy, it could renounce its special diplomatic status and call itself what it is — the biggest non-governmental organisation in the world. (The Economist 2007) The response from the HS came a few weeks later in the form of an interview by the then head of the papal diplomatic service, the French Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, with the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference Avvenire. There, he argued that suggestions such as those made in the article in The Economist, may have arisen from an imprecise understanding of the Holy See’s position in the international community: a position that can be traced back to the beginning of the international community itself, and has been reinforced above all since the end of the nineteenth century.

This section briefly examines the influence on family policy of international organizations, such as the World Bank and the EU, and argues that in practice they had very little influence on policymaking. It also takes up the Catholic Church in Poland. One could argue that the Polish Catholic Church is not really “international,” since the Catholic authorities in Poland do not necessarily advocate the same policies as Church officials in other countries. But even if differences arise in choices of what issues to emphasize, the Polish Catholic Church rarely goes against the official doctrines developed by the Vatican. This chapter argues that international organizations do not have much influence on family policy, but the EU has had influence on the discourse on gender, which has made feminism more acceptable in the public discourse. This in turn increases the future chances for women’s organizations to gain some influence over policymaking.

A Pope who ‘wanted to make himself God’ could only deepen the loathing that Britain had long felt towards what was considered to be an oppressive and authoritarian institution: the Papacy. Therefore, even though the era of selective interventionist foreign policy ended in 1865, there were no doubts as to how the British wished to see the Roman Question solved. This is a chapter on religion and foreign relations, in which diplomacy, public opinion and intellectual debates are discussed together. The first part analyses the transition of power from the last government headed by Lord Palmerston into the hands of a prominent exponent of British anti-Popery, Lord John Russell, who had been elevated to the peerage as First Earl Russell in 1861. It is followed by an examination of the somewhat different approach taken by a Tory government and its attitude towards one of the last Garibaldian adventures: the expedition against Rome in 1867 that ended in the clash with Papal and French troops in Mentana. It then argues that Britain attempted to exert pressure against the declaration of infallibility that the Pope wished to proclaim in the Vatican Council of 1870. Gladstone was particularly averse to it for, he wrote, imperfection manifestly pervaded every human being and ‘no combination of fallibles can… make up an infallible’.3

The Catholic and Protestant churches have a long history of working in development, especially in education, welfare, healthcare and indeed in challenging dictatorial regimes (De Kadt, 2009). The Vatican II Council held between 1962 and 19651 expressed the need for the Catholic Church to go beyond its traditional roles of providing education and healthcare especially in the less privileged parts of the world (Charles and Maclaren, 1982; Himes, 2004: 53–56). The Council foresaw clearly the need for organisational structures within the Catholic Church and appropriately trained personnel to be engaged in such tasks2. As a result of this mission, the Church recognised a need to work with governments but the exact nature of that role was not clearly articulated in the mid-1960s.

In July 2011, the Cloyne Report was published. It examines how both the Catholic Church and the state handled allegations of abuse against 19 clerics in the County Cork diocese up until 2009. Shortly after its publication, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny delivered an impassioned speech to Dail Eireann, the Irish Parliament, condemning the Vatican and the institutional church in Ireland. Kenny accused the Vatican of downplaying the rape and torture of children to protect its power and reputation and of refusing to cooperate in investigations as recently as three years ago. His speech marked a watershed moment in the state’s deteriorating relationship with the Catholic Church, not least because in it he made clear that Canon Law may never be exempt from the laws of the state: This is not Rome. Nor is it industrial-school or Magdalene Ireland, where the swish of a soutane smothered conscience and humanity, and the swing of a thurible ruled the Irish Catholic world. This is the Republic of Ireland, 2011. A republic of laws, of rights and responsibilities, of proper civic order, where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of a particular kind of morality will no longer be tolerated or ignored.1

17 June 2000 was a momentous day in the vexed and complex history of the city of Granada. Two high-ranking Catholic priests, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinge r, the man who was to become Pope Benedict XVI, and the Archbishop of Granada, Don Antonio Canizares, met in the Vatican. The two men were already friends, as they both attended regular meetings of the Congregation of the Faith, of which Ratzinger was the prefect, but their meeting on that June day was an official rather than a personal one. On this occasion the cardinal handed over to Don Antonio 235 lead disks, an ancient piece of parchment, a bull issued by Pope Innocent XI, two lead plaques which acted as covers for some of the lead disks and 14 boxes of lead items of different sizes, together with 468 postcard-sized photographs of both sides of the lead disks, plus 20 CDs of historical documentation (Figure 1.1). Shortly after this bizarre encounter, on 28 June, journalists gathered expectantly in the salons of the abbey of the Sacromonte1 in Granada to witness the long-awaited return of these strange artefacts, in the presence of the archbishop, the chapter of the abbey and a representative of the Spanish bank Caja Sur, which had financed the undertaking. This act of restoration revived an ancient memory, one which brings vividly into focus the extraordinary events that took place in the city nearly half a millenium ago: the remarkable archaeological artefacts known as the Lead Books of Granada had come home.

The Roman Catholic Church in the twentieth century was a ‘religious international’ by any definition of the term. First, the Church is itself a transnational, global religious body that maintains formal relations with nations abroad, especially through diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The popes from John XXIII (1958–63; b.1881) through Benedict XVI (2005–; b.1927) have seen the Church as an international actor uniquely situated to work for global unity. The Church also includes within the fold semi-autonomous transnational movements that are fluid, mobile and only informally related to local churches. In the period under review in this chapter the Vatican itself began to conceptualize ‘Catholic power’ as rooted in and guaranteed by the Church’s evolution as a transnational civil society – or at least as a leavening agent for civil society in numerous emerging and established democracies.

It was Friday and the month was April, Anno Domini 2005, when these words sounded from the platform in front of St Peter’s. Myriads of faithful mourners had massed into Rome and now crowded the Square and the broad avenues leading up to the Vatican to participate in the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Unprecedented numbers were listening in on radio or watching television broadcasts around the globe. Spoken in sombre, dignified, yet slightly artificial Italian by Cardinal Ratzinger, soon-to-be Pope Benedict and leading the service, this prayer initiated a carefully orchestrated series of commendations of the deceased bishop of Rome to his Heavenly Father. Alternating with rhythmically repeated chants of the Latin phrase te rogamus, audi nos (‘we beg you, hear us’), were select representatives of the congregation praising the virtues and good offices of the former pope, each in his or her own tongue. French, Swahili, Philippino, Polish, German and Portuguese accumulated into a virtual cacophony of voices. Earlier during the mass, sections had already been heard in English and Spanish in addition to the leading languages of Latin and Italian. No one was to doubt that the Catholic Church was truly universal.2

Between approximately 1509 and 1511, as Michelangelo completed the Sistine ceiling nearby, Raphael set to work on his first major commission in Rome, a set of frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican. On one wall of the room he painted the fresco that would become famous as The School of Athens (Figure 1.1); on the facing wall a theological subject that has come to be called the Disputation of the Sacrament (Figure 1.2); and on a third, a vision of poetry, Parnassus (Figure 1.3), presided over by Apollo and the Muses and inhabited by the great poets of antiquity and the modern era. Raphael’s program presents a beautifully realized illustration of the various realms of achievement — divine, intellectual, and creative — given weight not only by the painter’s mastery of technique and originality of conception, but also by the location of his works in the heart of Christendom.

On 31 December 1441, when his enemy Alfonso of Aragon had confined him to little more than the city of Naples, a dramatic spectacle, based on a dialogue by Lucian, took place before king Rene in the Castelnuovo. A platform was erected in the courtyard bearing a scene representing the entrance to the Elysian fields (Illustration 4). Actors portraying Scipio Africanus, Hannibal and Alexander argued before their judge, king Minos, to earn a palm that was the prize for the greatest warrior, which was eventually awarded to Scipio Africanus. In the humanist fashion a jurist, Cyprien de Mer, finished with a Latin oration in which he explained the allegory and applied a moral to the spectacle. Having reminded his audience that Hannibal (who came from Spain) was initially successful in his campaigns while the wise and virtuous waited for fortune to turn in their favour, he addressed Rene directly: Most Serene King … Hannibal fought against the Romans just as your enemy fights against the Roman church. Scipio defended the republic and you defend the Holy See. Like Hannibal Alfonso is old, sly, malicious and mendacious; like Scipio you are young, prudent, just and a friend of the truth … Be assured, O Great King, that if you continue as you have done you will soon drive out your enemy and reign in peace over your lands.2

In the 1950s and 1960s the cremationists’ 75-year campaign came to fruition. Between 1952 and 1970 the cremation rate rose from 19.27% to 55.41% and the number of new crematoria rose from 63 to 206, the vast majority being built by local authorities. The huge increase in building brought crematoria within most urban families’ reach. In 1964 the Vatican relaxed the Catholic ban on cremation. The influx of Hindu migrants from the Indian sub-continent further bolstered religious support for cremation. After 1970 the onward pace of cremation slowed but it passed 70% during the late 1980s. In the increasingly consumerist culture in the 1990s, public attention turned to improving the quality of funerals. The cremation process was particularly affected by the Environmental Protection Act 1990, in an increasing context of ethical issues around death. The government became interested in a wide range of death issues, in the active participation of which the cremation movement entered the twenty-first century.

It was the election of the Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla, as Pope John Paul II in 1978 that instigated the public process leading to the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Working closely with President Ronald Reagan of the United States, the Holy See exerted sufficient pressure on the communist bloc to force a significant re-evaluation of its continued effectiveness once Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet President. The pressure for change gathered its own momentum, fomenting revolutions in many parts of eastern Europe and culminating in the symbolic destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The 1990 reunification of Germany effectively ended the division of Europe which had been the central feature and locus of conflict of the Cold War.

Before the Western Allies recognised the threat of Soviet expansion, before Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain speech’ (1946), the Truman Doctrine (1947) and NATO (1949), the Roman Catholic Church had struggled against communism, which it perceived as an assault upon its doctrine, institutions and community.1 Following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holy See feared both the militant atheism of the Soviet state, and its subversion of the social and political orders. Almost immediately the Vatican perceived the ideology and its adherents as a peril to Christian civilisation. These fears were revealed in the apparitions of Fatima, of 1917, where Mary allegedly invoked prayers for the conversion of Russia. They were also catalogued in Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical (Divini Redemptoris), which condemned atheistic communism,2 despite the fact that Stalin focused on ‘socialism in one country’, and sought rapprochement with the West. His successor, Pope Pius XII (1939–58), mobilised Catholic forces to combat communism, initiating a global campaign against Bolshevism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, thus contributing to the opening of the Cold War. While American historians have finally recognised the part played by the United States in provoking the Cold War,3 the papal role has not always been recognised.4

In the discussion of Cold War diplomatic events, very little mention is made of the Catholic Church and its role in foreign affairs. Some historians have argued that as the Second World War era closed, the sovereign state of the Holy See, or the Vatican, closed in on itself when Pope Pius XII was rebuffed from affecting the post-war peace negotiations sponsored by the ‘big three’. During the Cold War, Pope Pius XII, still sceptical of United States’ intentions in a bipolar world, attended to ecclesiastical restructuring and the reorganisation of his own diplomatic corps. On the whole, the Vatican and the Western powers worked cordially through the Cold War period, but in an understated and usually non-public way. While there was a common philosophical aversion to the rise of world communism, there were no treaties signed, no mutual statements made, or any agreements concluded that marked an explicit East—West ‘Holy Alliance’ between the Western powers and the Vatican.1

This chapter examines the Catholic Church — one of the oldest and largest transnational actors of all. Organized Catholicism has a uniquely wide range of groups within its structures, ranging from the smallest level of sub-parochial units through to missionary religious orders, such as the Jesuits, that can claim to be prototypes of globalization. With around one billion baptized Catholics and a presence in nearly every state the Church remains a major power within many societies; whilst the evangelizing impulse which is intrinsic to Christianity has left an enduring and dynamic legacy for the transmission of influence. That influence has often been seen in material terms, for example the Vatican’s long and bitter struggle for statehood that culminated in the Lateran treaties. However, the Church has usually regarded the formation of values, beliefs and culture as the key battleground — hence the enormous effort devoted to establishing Catholic schools, universities, newspapers, radio stations and political parties which would, in turn, secure a significant Catholic input into society. Much of that effort has traditionally been subcontracted out to religious orders, development agencies and the so-called ‘new movements’ such as the Focolare.

In march 1998, the Vatican released a long-awaited statement on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust. In a preface to the document, entitled We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, Pope John Paul II expressed his hope that it would ‘help to heal the wounds of past misunderstandings and injustices’. Eighteen months after the publication of the document, it seems now possible to conclude that, however sincere the Vatican’s intentions, the pope’s hopes will almost certainly not be realized. Indeed, far from healing, the document has succeeded largely in re-opening, if not actually deepening, old wounds. Not only did it divide the Catholic intellectual and journalistic communities. More importantly, I think, it bewildered and frustrated many Jewish readers and bitterly disappointed others. It also called forth a literary response from Jewish intellectuals and organizations that, while especially vigorous in the immediate wake of the document’s publication, had force and feeling to last more than a year. Since the energy driving these responses appears to have subsided, it seems possible now to undertake a comprehensive survey of Jewish reaction to We Remember and to attempt to account for its intensity and duration.

On 16 march 1998, the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued the document Wir erinnern: Eine Reflexion uber die Shoah. This was the latest in a long line of papal statements concerning Jewish-Christian relations that extends as far back as the Patristic period in the first few centuries of the Common Era. It was eagerly expected by many to be the most significant prospect for Catholic-Jewish reconciliation since the promulgation of Nostra Aetate in 1965.

On 16 March 1998 the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued the Holy See’s long awaited statement on the Shoah, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah with a prefatory letter by Pope John Paul II. The document contains five sections. The first is entitled ‘The tragedy of the Shoah and the duty of remembrance’. Citing Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter of 10 November 1994, Tertio Milennio Adveniente, the Commission declares that the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children recalling … when they departed from the spirit of Christ and of his Gospel and … indulged in ways of thinking and acting which were truly forms of counter-witness and scandal. In this statement, the Commission appears to make the highly debatable claim that insofar as the Church’s ‘children’ were perpetrators they conducted themselves in a thoroughly un-Christian manner. The reflection then continues: Before this horrible genocide, which the leaders of nations and Jewish communities themselves found hard to believe at the very moment when it was mercilessly put into effect, no one can remain indifferent, least of all the Church, by reason of her very close bonds of spiritual kinship with the Jewish people and her remembrance of the injustices of the past.

In 1997, the Vatican issued a document, Christianity and the World Religions, prepared by its International Theological Commission and approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.1 The document arises from a recognition that ‘The question of the relations among religions is becoming daily more important’, and that circumstances today ‘make interreligious dialogue necessary’. Accordingly, the Commission sets out to ‘clarify how religions are to be evaluated theologically’ by offering ‘some theological principles which may help in this evaluation’. And the Commission adds that ‘In proposing these principles we are clearly aware that many questions are still open and require further investigation and discussion’ (pp. 3–5).

The Roman Catholic Church, which directs from the Vatican City the activities of a network of spiritual, educational, charitable and diplomatic institutions across the globe, had a unique status during the Second World War. The Holy See was neutral, yet like any institution it had its own list of prioritized interests. Despite the centralized hierarchy which is such a dominant characteristic of Roman Catholicism, Catholics reacted in various ways to the moral challenges of the war.

The reaction of the Roman Catholic Church to the Holocaust is a vast and contentious subject. With a natural focus on the Pontiff, Pope Pius XII, many historians have tried to parse the often baroque political and diplomatic record of the years 1933–1944; playwrights and theologians have added their words to this attempt at veracity. And now the Vatican itself has convened a distinguished commission to peruse documents hitherto closed to scholars.

In june 1939, when Nazi Germany’s expansionist demands and blatant racism rendered the outbreak of a new cataclysm inevitable, the French Ambassador to the Holy See, Francois Charles-Roux, lamented the cautious and neutral position of the new Pope, Eugenio Pacelli, who assumed the name Pius XII. The Ambassador appreciated the Pope’s determination to preserve the peace, but resented his refusal to pass judgment or assign responsibility, treating aggrieved and aggressor alike. Charles-Roux considered this an unfortunate departure from the course of his predecessor, Achille Ratti, who pontificated as Pius XI (1922–39). ‘Without doubt all expected a change, because each has his own temperament and his own methods,’ the Frenchman explained, adding, ‘to many, however, the differences seemed excessive.’1

There is, perhaps, no better metaphor for Catholic-Jewish relations both during and after the Holocaust than that of mixed signals. Nechama Tec, the distinguished sociologist who as a young girl survived the Shoah by passing as a Polish Christian, describes the nature of these signals. On the one hand, the Church has advocated ‘Jewish hatred’, yet on the other hand, it required its members ‘to reassess their own sins, to love, and to sacrifice for their fellow human beings’. During the Holocaust, and absent any clear message from the Vatican, observes Tec, ‘the clergy and lay Catholics could base their reaction on religious anti-Semitism or on Christian teachings of charity and universal love.’ Three events of the last fifteen years reveal the ongoing impact of the legacy of mixed signals. Indeed, the two major controversies engendered by the Carmelite convent and the planting of crosses at Auschwitz, and by the promulgation of the papal document ‘We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah’, continue — and deepen — this legacy.

On 21 October 1945 — a few months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had put the final end to the Second World War — Pope Pius XII spoke on the Vatican radio. He was concerned about women’s dignity: Equal rights with men has made woman leave the home, where she used to reign as a queen. This has degraded her true dignity ... her characteristic feminine role and the intimate cooperation between woman and man ... To re-establish as far as possible the honour attached to the woman and the mother in the home — this is the watchword we hear from many quarters, like a cry of terror.1

With the exception of the Vatican, all countries in Europe are characterized by varying degrees of ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. However, this diversity has only been recognized as a major European issue since the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and the eruption of violent conflicts involving minorities in Europe. The situation in former Yugoslavia — including Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia (with its Vojvodena and Kosovo regions) — has featured in news headlines daily. Violence continues in the Caucasus, in Moldova, while the potential for other violent conflicts is substantial. Many have been killed, and over two million people are refugees or displaced people from former Yugoslavia alone.

The first recorded European involvement with Korea is that of the Dutch merchant seaman, Hendrik Hamel, whose ship ran aground on Cheju Island in 1656. The survivors were detained and some thirteen years later, Hamel and others escaped and made their way home. Hamel’s adventures became the first written account of Korea to appear in the West. Catholic missionaries followed, apparently through contacts in China, and their zeal was often matched with an equal zeal to resist. In 1831 the Holy See set up a Korean parish, but it was the US and Japan which opened up Korea in the 1870s.

Views of the Cotswold countryside in early summer immediately recall a period and place of high prosperity in pre-industrial Catholic England. A verdant, rolling landscape of deciduous trees and gently grassed hillsides, it is completed by the elegant perpendicular towers and steeples of the village churches, shrouded and quiet behind wood and field, reaching upwards to the medieval heaven of a fair blue sky. From Cirencester or Burford in the fourteenth century, on horseback and on foot, priests and wool merchants travelled to their continental centres of religion and trade in the Vatican and the Hanseatic League. The roots of that civilization are still with us here, though a twentieth-century showroom of wood and glass displays motor cars by Ford and Fiat and obscures the cobbles and stables in the yard behind.

In another place I have described Barth’s “theology of Israel” as simultaneously radical and traditional.1 Barth displayed the radical side of his Israel doctrine when he spoke out against Jewish persecution and declared that anti-Semitism was anti-Christian, when he emphasized the continuing and irrevocable nature of Israel’s divine election, when he engaged in private and public dialogues with rabbis and Jewish intellectuals, when he pronounced Christian mission to the Jews “theologically impossible,” and when he took to task the authors of the Vatican’s “Nostra aetate” for its classification of Judaism as a “non-Christian religion.”

Two factors were instrumental in wresting Catholicism from the complementary assumptions of clerical nationalism and the emasculated religious conceptions of the Iglesia National. The first was the defeat of De Andrea in the archiepiscopal controversy of 1923–24. For the first time since the restoration of relations with the Vatican in the 1860s, Rome refused the government ’ s nomination of an Archbishop, so provoking a constitutional crisis. Faithful to the regalist model, Alvear ’ s government insisted on the state ’ s supremacy, rejected the Vatican ’ s nomination of the Bishop of Santa Fe, and stood by their choice of De Andrea. The see remained vacant for two years before a compromise candidate was found, during which time the opposition of those who had resisted andreismo came to the fore.1 De Andrea and his supporters later imputed Rome ’ s opposition to the campaigns of Christian Democrats and Jesuits; but they underestimated the importance to the Vatican of restoring the doctrinal basis of Catholicism in Argentina. The rejection of De Andrea was a decisive act by the Vatican to put an end to the Gallican tendencies of the Church hierarchy. Hereafter, the way was open for integral Catholicism.

The Vatican is, in many ways, a peculiar international actor. It is at once an anachronism in the modern world of power politics and, in the words of the US ambassador to the Holy See, the world’s best listening post. It presides over 800 million Catholics worldwide and yet occupies less than a half square kilometer of land in Rome. The Roman Catholic Church is the ‘universal’ Church, open to all, but the Vatican’s doors are closed to all but a select few. And, to paraphrase Stalin, the Vatican’s monarch, the Pope, has no armed divisions.

Over the last two years several friends rung to tell me that Evelyn Waugh’s first wife had been on television and revealed that the Vatican’s annulment of the Waugh marriage was a sham. Waugh had persuaded her to testify to the Roman Catholic marriage court, falsely, that before marrying they had decided they would ‘never have children’ — and it was this untruth that won the case.

To determine the Vatican’s ‘policy’ towards any particular region, we usually have to proceed indirectly. For the Church has no forum in which such policies might be discussed and debated. So what the Vatican’s policy towards Latin America is will have to be deduced from the appointment of bishops, the appointment of nuncios (and their instructions, when known), documents from the Roman Curia and papal speeches.

It is one of the great paradoxes of the period that Combes’s most durable legacy to France should be the Separation of Church and State.1 There are still many historians who believe that Combes wanted the Separation. Combes himself sustained this interpretation in his memoirs, posthumously published in 1956;2 and there is no doubt that in 1904 Combes made an outward show of favouring Separation, even to the point of putting forward a Separation bill in the autumn of that year. The evidence of both his papers and his acquaintances, however, makes it clear that Combes initially used the threat of Separation as a stick to intimidate the Vatican. He wished to bully Rome into accepting his own rigorous interpretation of the State’s rights under the Concordat, especially in the matter of episcopal appointments.

By the beginning of 1906 a majority of the influential clergy in France were in favour of giving the associations a trial. Yet the Vatican was already inclined to the opposing view, and eight months later was to condemn them outright.

The lull in atheistic attacks against the Church did not last very long. Already in September 1944 when victory was beyond doubt, the Central Committee issued a decree calling for renewed antireligious efforts through ‘scientific-educational propaganda’. Party members were reminded of the need to combat ‘survivals of ignorance, superstition, and prejudice among the people’. Another Central Committee resolution, calling for the intensification of atheistic propaganda by the mass media, was issued in 1945, soon after the end of the war.1 As long as Stalin lived, the renewed atheistic propaganda was mostly limited to words, and was only rarely accompanied by direct harassment or acts of vandalism. The main target of verbal attacks was the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican in particular; although on the local level Orthodox bishops, parish priests and believers had to fight for the survival of churches opened during and immediately after the Second World War. Here and there local officials of the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church did close some parishes and made life difficult, particularly for the bishops, by trying to prevent any disciplinary measures that the bishops might take against immoral or otherwise unworthy clerics and church activists.

Whatever the extent of Merry del Val’s knowledge of the negotiations, he seems from the first to have favoured the alternative course — rejection of the associations. It is here that his handling of the French bishops provides the most controversial aspect of a controversial question. It has made him the subject of charges of dishonesty, and it has indirectly caused critics to question the integrity of his master, Pius X. When the canonisation of Pius X was first discussed in the Vatican, the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, saw this as a serious and possibly decisive obstacle. The historian is therefore treading on eggshells; and at the risk of trying the reader’s patience still further, he can only move slowly.

Writing in 1963, Professor Thomas Hovet stated that ‘the key to any understanding of the United Nations is a recognition of the role the Organisation plays as an instrument of diplomacy. As a diplomatic instrument, the United Nations is in some sense a permanent international conference. Representatives of 110 nations are in almost continual attendance at the headquarters in Manhattan and their very presence provides a ready atmosphere for constant diplomatic negotiations.’2 If Hovet was correct then, he is even more correct 20 years later. One indication that this is so is the fact that of the 158 member states of the United Nations no less than 154 have established permanent missions at New York.3 Even those few remaining states which have not become members of the United Nations have, for the most part, established permanent observer missions. These include the two Koreas, the Holy See, Monaco and Switzerland.