JOHN G. writes:

Thank you for posting the excerpt from the 1944 Christmas Message of Pope Pius XII and the link to the full text.

While I was glad to have the chance to read this historical document, I was appalled by the content. It was Christmas Eve with the world at war, and the Pope chooses to speak about politics. And of all politics to speak about, he chooses “democracy.”

Barely even a hint of Christian Scripture or Tradition or the Magisterium appears in the section of the talk on Democracy, or in the entire address for that matter. Even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that everything he says about politics and democracy is true, this message nevertheless fails entirely to do the one thing necessary for the most important spiritual leader in the world to do — to present a supernatural vision. Instead of using the current troubles to inspire men to return to the sources of true supernatural revelation — which was, in fact, what people all around the world were doing instinctively at that time, as reflected in the popular culture of those days — he turns for answers to political opinions.

He presents one quote from a predecessor Leo XIII which says nothing more than that representative government is not forbidden by the teachings of the Church, and from there he launches into a panegyric on how democracy is our only hope for world peace. The style of what he says may sound a bit more traditional than what we hear today, but his content and method are completely in keeping with the current pontificate of Francis.

When he makes statements like, “The Church has the mission to announce to the world, which is looking for better and more perfect forms of democracy, the highest and most needed message that there can be: the dignity of man,” he misrepresents Christianity in order to place it in service to modern anti-Christian forms of government.

When he says, “Thus while the armed forces continue to engage in murderous battles with weapons ever more deadly, the statesmen, responsible leaders of nations, meet for talks, for conferences, to determine the fundamental rights and duties on which should be built a community of states, and to blaze the trail towards a better future, more secure and more worthy of mankind,” he is referring to the soon-to-happen Yalta Conference, so infamous in history for selling into Communist slavery the entire population of Eastern Europe, most of whom were Catholics but who were soon to find themselves living under atheist tyranny thanks to the naiveté of those like the Pope who should have known better.

Meanwhile he is ignoring the true political hope which surrounded him, but which he was in the process of betraying. Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and nearly all the rest of continental Europe were living under avowedly Catholic governments. These governments had been won at the cost of Catholic blood which had been shed to overthrow Communist tyrannical regimes. While it’s true that Pope Pius XII maintained a strict official neutrality, this Christmas address makes clear that his heart was on the other side. He opposed the Catholic leaders who restored peace and stability and liberty to practice the true Catholic Faith, men like Salazar and Franco and Pétain. He preferred instead to seek for answers from Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin.

History tells us how well that plan worked out. For not only did nearly all the world fall into the clutches of either the left hand of Judah or the right hand of Judah, so too did the Church bring upon itself its own catastrophe which was to take place only a few short years in the future.

Laura writes:

Thank you for your comments.

The Holy Father often seems to endorse secular democracy in this message, though he does warn against the excesses of democracy and the cult of liberty. It’s confusing. The Church’s true doctrine on politics is that it is not the rights of man that are paramount, but the rights of God. He does not explain this clearly. It’s not that he denies any doctrines, he is confusing and omitting.

One year before the establishment of the United Nations, the Pope in his Christmas message endorses the idea of just such an international body, but does not mention that any such body must be subject to the moral and spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.  In his apparent desire to see an end to catastrophic war, he seems ready to rush headlong into secular globalism, which could not be anything but an uncompromising enemy of the Church in the long run:

62. The decisions already published by international commissions permit one to conclude that an essential point in any future international arrangement would be the formation of an organ for the maintenance of peace, of an organ invested by common consent with supreme power to whose office it would also pertain to smother in its germinal state any threat of isolated or collective aggression.

63. No one could hail this development with greater joy than he who has long upheld the principle that the idea of war as an apt and proportionate means of solving international conflicts is now out of date.

64. No one could wish success to this common effort, to be undertaken with a seriousness of purpose never before known, with greater enthusiasm, than he who has conscientiously striven to make the Christian and religious mentality reject modern war with its monstrous means of conducting hostilities.

Along those lines, you will find equally distressing, Pope Pius XII’s Allocution to Italian Catholic Jurists of 1953, in which he again hails an international union of states that is not subject to the Church’s authority.

There are many papal statements that clearly condemn the separation of Church and State in ways that Pius XII did not in these messages, in which we see strands of liberal thinking surfacing years before Vatican II. They include:

Mirari Vos, Gregory XVI, 1832
Acerbissimum, Pius IX, 1852
Quanta Cura, Pius IX, 1864
Syllabus, Pius IX, 1864
Cum Multa, Leo XIII, 1882
Humanum Genus, Leo XIII, 1884
Immortale Dei, Leo XIII, 1885
Libertas, Leo XIII, 1888
Au milieu des solicitudes, Leon XIII, 1892
Longinqua, Leo XIII, 1895
Amplissimum coetum, St. Pius X, 1905
Vehementer Nos, St. Pius X, 1906
Gravissimum apostolici, St. Pius X, 1906
Le moment, St. Pius X, 1908
Maximam Gravissimamque, Pius XI, 1924

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