Faith?

God and the DictatorFranco. Mussolini. Hitler. Pinochet. At some point, all of them received the support, blessing or complicit silence of the Catholic Church. It wasn't a coincidence. It was a policy. There is a question that Catholics of good faith have been avoiding asking precisely for decades because asking it precisely requires an answer.The question is not whether the Catholic Church made political mistakes in the 20th century. That is already recognized. It is documented. It's in the history books that anyone can read. The question is why they always committed them in the same direction. Why every time the Church chose between authoritarian power and the most vulnerable that power crushed, it chose power, not once. Not in a specific country with specific circumstances that could explain an isolated decision. On every continent, in every decade with each dictator who offered the Church what the Church needed. That pattern is not a series of errors, it’s a policy.

Italy, 1929 On February 11, 1929. Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Vatican Secretary of State, and Benito Mussolini, head of the Italian fascist government, signed the Lateran Treaty. With this agreement, the Italian State recognized the sovereignty of the Vatican over its territories, paid it an indemnity of 750 million lire plus State bonds worth 1,000 million as compensation for the papal territories lost in the Risorgimento, and established Catholicism as the official religion of the Italian State. In exchange, the Church recognized the Italian State with Rome as its capital and Mussolini as the man who had made that agreement possible. Pope Pius XI publicly called Mussolini "the man whom Providence has sent us." Not in a private document. In public statements. Mussolini had been in power for seven years when the Lateran Treaty were signed. Seven years during which he had abolished political parties, eliminated freedom of the press, imprisoned his opponents and built the first fascist state in Europe. The Church called him the envoy of Providence.

Germany, 1933 On July 20, 1933. Five months after Adolf Hitler assumed the German chancellery, Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pius XII and then Secretary of State of the Vatican, signed the Reichskonkordat: the treaty between the Holy See and Nazi Germany. The agreement guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany: its schools, its organizations, its ability to operate freely. In exchange, the German Catholic Church dissolved the Catholic Center Party, the only religiously based political party that had resisted Hitler's rise, thus removing one of the last institutional obstacles to Nazi control of the German Parliament.

The Reichskonkordat was the first international treaty that Hitler signed as chancellor. It gave him diplomatic legitimacy in front of the world at the most critical moment of his consolidation of power. It was signed by the Holy See. When the genocide began, when the trains began to move towards the fields, when the smoke from the ovens was visible from the nearby towns, Pius XII was silent. Not silence of ignorance documented silence, silence of someone who knew and chose not to speak. The reasons its defenders offer are complex and in some cases historically based: that speaking out would have made the situation worse, that the Church secretly saved Jews, that the circumstances were extraordinarily difficult. All of those reasons may be true. And none of them change what the Reichskonkordat was. The signature that gave the regime that killed six million Jews its first international recognition.Posted by the institution that claims to represent God on Earth. Spain, 1936 When on July 18, 1936, General Francisco Franco took up arms against the legitimately elected government of the Spanish Republic, the hierarchy of the Spanish Catholic Church made a decision that was soon made public. They took Franco's side. Not in silence, not with diplomatic ambiguity but with enthusiasm.

On July 1, 1937, the Spanish bishops published a Collective Letter that was sent to bishops around the world describing the civil war as a "Crusade" in defense of Christian civilization against atheistic communism. The term was not coincidental. Crusade was the word that for centuries the Church had used to designate the wars that God authorized. What was happening in Spain while the bishops wrote that letter was not a crusade. It was a war in which the side that the bishops blessed was executing teachers, doctors, union members, and democratically elected politicians. It was the war that produced Guernica, the bombing of a Basque civilian city by Nazi aviation in the service of Franco, immortalized by Picasso. It was the war that inaugurated the methods that Europe would see applied on a continental scale three years later. The Spanish bishops called it the Crusade. And when Franco won, the Spanish Church was rewarded with exactly what the Church has always sought when allying itself with power: Control over education, legal privileges, state financing, a position of moral authority supported by the State apparatus. Franco died in bed in 1975, with all the sacraments. Having received the blessing of the Church until the last moment.Latin America, 70s In the 1970s, a wave of military coups swept through Latin America. Chile, 1973. Argentina, 1976. Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay. In each of those countries, priests and nuns who had chosen to work with the poorest, who had embraced Liberation Theology, who preached that the Gospel had concrete political implications for the oppressed, were kidnapped, tortured and in many cases disappeared by the same regimes that the bishops of those countries blessed in the cathedrals. In Argentina, during the Videla dictatorship, Cardinal Raúl Primatesta maintained cordial relations with the Military Junta while thirty thousand people were disappeared. In Chile, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez was a notable exception: he created the Vicariate of Solidarity to document and denounce the human rights violations of the Pinochet regime. It was the exception, not the rule. The rule was silence or something worse than silence.

Military chaplain Christian Von Wernich in Argentina actively participated in torture sessions, using the trust that detainees placed in his priestly figure to extract information that he then delivered to his captors. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007, thirty years after the events. While committing these crimes he wore collars. 

The pattern: Each of these cases has its historical specificities. Defenders of the Church point out, rightly in some cases, that there are priests and religious who resisted, who risked and in some cases gave their lives facing the power that the hierarchy blessed. Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador, murdered while celebrating mass in 1980 by a death squad linked to the government that the Vatican hierarchy viewed with diplomatic understanding. The American nuns murdered in El Salvador that same year. The priests of Liberation Theology who paid with their freedom or their lives for choosing the poor over the institution. Those men and women existed, they are real. And its existence does not contradict the institutional pattern, it makes it more disturbing. Because it shows that within the Church itself there were people who saw what was happening and chose differently. That the complicity of the hierarchy with authoritarian power was not inevitable, it was a choice, taken consciously, repeatedly, throughout the entire 20th century by the same men who on Sunday preached about the dignity of the human person.The question that has no comfortable answer is Why? Why did an institution that claims to represent the man who was executed by the imperial power of his time choose, time and time again, to side with the imperial power of each era? The most honest answer is not theological, it is institutional. A two thousand year old organization that has survived the fall of every empire that has existed since its founding learned a lesson that no sermon teaches but that every conclave practices: That survival requires adaptation. That power, any power, is more useful as an ally than as an enemy. That the principles are negotiable when what is at stake is the continuity of the institution, that God can wait, let the poor too. But that man with the army needs an answer this week.

That logic is not monstrous. It is perfectly rational from the perspective of an institution that prioritizes its own survival over any other value it preaches. What makes it intolerable is that the institution preaches those values, while applying that logic. Let them speak about human dignity from the same rooms where the Reichskonkordat was signed. Let them preach about the poor from the same institution that blessed the generals who disappeared them. Let them use the moral authority of Jesus of Nazareth, a man executed for resisting the power of his time, to legitimize the most powerful and cruelest men of the 20th century. This contradiction is not a historical error to be regretted. It is the question that every parishioner who fills a church every Sunday should be able to answer before entering. To which institution I am giving my faith? The one who canonized Romero? Or the one who remained silent while they killed him?