Quoting Professor Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, 347–8:
It was true that American Catholics constituted an important base for Ambassador Rosso as he prepared a campaign opposed to intervention against [Fascist] Italy. Precisely because the Protestant churches and their communities, as well as African-American organizations, were the most important militant forces in the anti-Fascist struggle,¹⁴⁸ the Catholic hierarchy with few exceptions (such as the archbishops of Chicago¹⁴⁹ and Baltimore¹⁵⁰) reacted by defending the [Fascist] government.¹⁵¹
The Catholic press was particularly motivated to defend what had been characterized as the silence of Pius XI about the war. Father William B. Smith, in an unpublished thesis for Catholic University of America, summarized the press coverage thus:
It would seem that the majority of writers on the Ethiopian war in American Catholic periodicals stayed away from any consideration of religious motives or justification of the event. If such was suggested, moral principles were usually brought forth to answer opposition to the war.
This is not to say that Catholics in America favored the war. Many did not, and said so, but most said nothing. There was still a certain feeling of identification with the Italians because of the number of Catholics in Italy, and also, no doubt, because the Pope was not considered to have spoken so definitively as to allow for no doubt on the question. […] [S]ome did defend the silence of the Holy Father, while others denied it, and a few proposed justification for Italy’s invasion.¹⁵²
In truth, Smith’s conclusions, which carry the imprimatur of Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, diverged in part from some of the very documentation he provided.¹⁵³
From his evidence, one can see that only the Catholic Worker, linked to the Catholic union movement, took an editorial stance of total condemnation of Fascist aggression,¹⁵⁴ whereas other periodicals more representative of the Church in the United States (such as America, a Jesuit publication; Commonweal; and The Catholic World) and the great majority of diocesan papers were committed to offering justifications for Mussolini’s war and above all to strenuously defending the papal position.
Such rhetoric offered Rosso ample room for action among American Catholics, even without resorting to such extremists as Father Coughlin, Roosevelt’s fearsome adversary and supporter of American abstention in the matter of the Ethiopian dispute, who could have further provoked the administration.¹⁵⁵
Rosso clearly grasped that the sympathies of American Catholics were due, apart from to the attitude of Pius XI and other exponents of the Italian Church hierarchy, to the ethnic makeup of their own church. It was mostly composed of the Irish, easily led to favor a policy that was presented above all as anti-English, as indicated by Rosso’s telegram to Mussolini. In this context, Rosso deemed it of great importance to develop influence in the Irish community by expanding his contacts among Irish publications such as the Gaelic American and the Irish Times, which published an article titled “Mr. Hull Has Declared War on Italy.”
(Emphasis added.)
Although a Catholic reader shall no doubt cringe at this history, that is not my goal in sharing this. In fact, this is, above all, a topic intended for Jewish readers.
As you can tell, ordinary Catholics had a great respect for the Kingdom of Italy since its founding. Having always been an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and having Vatican City in its midst, the Kingdom of Italy was practically sacred even to Catholics who were not Italian at all. This made many Catholics, especially upper-class ones, willing to overlook Rome’s atrocities.
The fact that many Irish Catholics shrugged at the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia is also worth emphasizing. At first I thought that it was a moot point, and obnoxious to bring up when so many Irelanders today are busy demonstrating against the war on Gazans. When I thought about it, though, mentioning it makes perfect sense: the Irish, theirselves victims of colonization, should have been the last to tolerate the invasion of Ethiopia… yet many did anyway.
As we should all know, the Fascist colonization of Ethiopia ultimately failed, and I suspect that very few Catholics today would still endorse it if someone educated them on the event.
Need I specify the parallels?
