Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume III - Historiaonceib ...

Fascism and non-democratic regimes 263positivist interpretation of Christianity as a social and historical foundationof national identity as distinct from the universal Church and religiousbelief. Far from reassuring the Church, such tendencies were more or lessexplicitly attacked and, in a few cases, condemned. The conciliation with theItalian state and the Lateran treaties generated a positive response, but wassoon dispelled by some of the policies and statements of Mussolini. In thelater 1930s, the hegemony of National Socialists within the fascist campled to a more critical and – in the case of the Belgian bishops in relation tothe Rexists – hostile response. The presence of fascist clerics who were notcondemned by the hierarchy does not alter this fact, just as the presence ofcommunist clerics who were tolerated after 1945 does not alter the anticommunismof the institutional Church. In authoritarian regimes, thefascist component was forced to moderate its anti-clericalism; in some cases,it was even forced to incorporate a religious dimension, even though the‘movement in the regime’ would latently persist in its hostility to clericalhegemony. The anti-liberal, anti-democratic Catholic ideological traditionand clerical influence became a barrier to fascist totalitarian ambitions,thereby contributing to the limited pluralism. For its part, fascism became achannel for the limited defence of laicist culture against the hegemonicambitions of Catholic integralist culture.With the exception of Ataturk’s secularizing dictatorship, authoritarianregimes dealt respectfully with the churches even as they were committed toa certain degree of statism; and the churches, for their part, were generallyaccommodating. Indeed, because these regimes had proclaimed their antipathyto communism, not only the churches but many of the lay leaders were infavour of those regimes combating godless communism; a few even sympathizedwith the local fascists on that account. A diffuse anti-Semitismreinforced these tendencies in Eastern Europe. In the case of the Orthodoxchurches, the traditional caesaropapism contributed to this pattern ofcooperation.It is necessary to distinguish Austria, Portugal and Spain – particularlyafter 1945 – from this pattern. In these cases, the regimes incorporated elementsof corporatist, authoritarian Catholic thought and used religionpolitically; on the other side, some of the clerical elements conceived this asan opportunity for a ‘religious use of politics’. They felt that the state couldserve to re-Christianize society and that this would grant the Church aprivileged position in public life, education and cultural censorship.In Catholic countries, conservative, authoritarian nationalism could makepolitical use of religion and religious institutions in order to legitimize itsrule; it could not, however, develop a political religion. Only on the radicalright fringe did fascist groups break with the universal Church by going sofar as to define the conversion to Christianity as oppression of an Urvolkthat had possessed a tribal identity and its own gods. Manipulation of thereligious tradition and its symbols was more likely in countries where thenational identity was linked to a religious identity, to a legacy of crusading