Giuliana Chamedes

After the United States entered World War I and the Russian Revolution exploded, the Vatican felt threatened by forces eager to reorganize the European international order and cast the Church out of the public sphere. In response, the papacy partnered with fascist and right-wing states as part of a broader crusade that made use of international law and cultural diplomacy to protect European countries from both liberal and socialist taint.

A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals that papal officials opposed Woodrow Wilson’s international liberal agenda by pressing governments to sign concordats assuring state protection of the Church in exchange for support from the masses of Catholic citizens. These agreements were implemented in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, as well as in countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In tandem, the papacy forged a Catholic International—a political and diplomatic foil to the Communist International—which spread a militant anticommunist message through grassroots organizations and new media outlets. It also suppressed Catholic antifascist tendencies, even within the Holy See itself.

Following World War II, the Church attempted to mute its role in strengthening fascist states, as it worked to advance its agenda in partnership with Christian Democratic parties and a generation of Cold War warriors. The papal mission came under fire after Vatican II, as Church-state ties weakened and antiliberalism and anticommunism lost their appeal. But by this point, the Vatican had already made a lasting mark on Eastern and Western European law, culture, and society.

Dollmaker (1954). She does not include many major postwar African American migration novels, and I suggest that looking at even three – Lloyd L. Brown’s Iron City (1951), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), or Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) – would produce a more complicated story than the one Battat tells. The one Black migration narrative that produced the interracial ideal Battat imagines is Lloyd L. Brown’s 1951 Iron City. In a Scottsborolike depiction of interracial unity, the Mississippi migrant flees the racial violence in Mississippi for Pittsburgh, drawn there by seeing the poster of two Communist Party nominees, one white and one Black, and joins an interracial cadre of Communist Party members to free a falsely imprisoned Black man. Though Iron City’s interracial ideology may have been motivated by Brown’s communist commitments, this novel is the singular example from the Cold War 1950s of Left interracialism: Blacks and whites are joined to...

While it was underway, the brutal and chaotic Spanish Civil War was already being cast in contradictory ways by its leading participants. It was represented as an opportunity to lament injustice and the travesty of democracy, marshalled as positive proof that the European continent was in fact under the live threat of communist revolution, cast as a story of brutal anti-clericalism gone rampant and narrated as the battle between close-minded traditionalism and open-minded modernity. These contradictory understandings of the Spanish Civil War far outlived the conflict's conclusion in 1939 and have been played out repeatedly across the decades through the historiography. Thus, the Spanish Civil War has been represented by scholars as the fight between dictatorship and democracy, between religion and anti-clericalism and between conservative nostalgics and forward-looking modernisers. All of these narratives have some grain of truth to them. But what is so exciting about the up and...

Given the recent scholarly interest in the history of anti-communism, it is surprising that relatively little has been written on the ambitious transnational anti-communist campaign launched by the Vatican in the early 1930s. Drawing on new archival material, this article explores how the Vatican founded an organization known as the Secretariat on Atheism, which disseminated a form of anti-communism grounded in Catholic teachings. The Secretariat sought to buttress the position of the Roman Catholic church in international affairs and unite Catholic groups across Europe and the Americas, all the while maintaining its independence from other forms of anti-communism – particularly those espoused by Nazi and Fascist forces. However, the Secretariat was only partially successful in preserving its independence. For if the Vatican campaign avoided the antisemitic and nationalistic motifs that characterized Nazi-Fascist propaganda, the key protagonists of the movement cooperated with Nazi, Fascist and proto-Fascist forces on the ground. The Vatican campaign led to joint surveillance efforts, the toning down of the Pope's public denunciations of Nazi-Fascism, and the papal sanction of violence against purportedly communist enemies. Despite its potentially damning association with Nazi-Fascist forces, the Vatican anti-communist movement would outlive both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and leave a lasting mark on Cold War politics.

The conceptual history of ‘economic development’ is often told as a U.S.-centered story. The United States, according to the standard account, turned to economic development as a tool in its struggle for global dominance during the Cold War. In line with recent research, this article demonstrates that the post-World War II boom in ‘economic development’ had European origins as well, and that it originated as a joint response to the Cold War and to the unraveling of European empires. In particular, emphasis is placed on the little-studied contribution of a French Catholic activist who helped redefine ‘economic development’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Dominican Father Louis-Joseph Lebret stood at the head of an influential movement, which conceived of ‘economic development’ as a way to save both France and Christianity in a moment of crisis for the French Empire and for the Roman Catholic Church. In his writings, Lebret bestowed renewed legitimacy on the French ‘civilizing mission.’ He also revived elements of interwar Catholic thought to argue for the imperative of building a new moral-economic order that was neither communist nor capitalist. Far from a marginal historical actor, this theorist-practitioner was very successful in his efforts, and gained followers for his vision of ‘economic development’ in France, in Vatican City, at the United Nations, and in various former colonized countries.