INTRODUCTION 13priority over those of Italy and the papacy,”34 or—better yet—
Catholicism would be reduced to the status of “a national church
separate from other churches—to win over the lower clergy and
to neutralize the episcopate.”35
The Holy See’s response to this drive for Catholicism’s nation-
alization was what Peter C. Kent has called the “lonely cold war of
Pope Pius XII,” in which the pope “constantly warned about the
threat of communism and worried about the future of his church
in the event of the extension of communist power across the en-
tire European continent.”36 With the indictment of Yugoslav pri-
mate Alojzije Stepinac in 1946, Yugoslavia fell out of the Vatican’s
orbit. Pius XII shifted his focus to France, Italy, western Germany,
and the Benelux countries, with whose postwar political leader-
ship he developed an anti-Communist synergy that went hand in
hand with the project of launching European integration.37
In tandem with his support for the economic and political in-
tegration of Western Europe, Pius XII sought to prevent Catho-
lics from joining or supporting Communist initiatives. On July 1,
1949, the Holy Office issued a decree threatening excommunica-
tion against any “faithful professing materialist and anti-Christian
doctrine as Communists and, above all, those who defend or prop-
agate such doctrine.”38 This decree proved effective in justifying
- Ibid., 104.
- Milan J. Reban, “The Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia,” in Catholicism
and Politics in Communist Societies, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1990), 146. - Kent, Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII, 4. Kent’s argument is a response
above all to Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Cold War, 1945–1980 (Nor-
wich: M. Russell, 1982). - See, for example, Wolfram Kaiser, “Creating Core Europe: The Rise of the
Party Network,” in Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 191–252; Robert A. Ventresca, “When
Politics Reaches the Altar: Catholic Action Gets Out the Vote,” in From Fascism to
Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Election of 1948 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2004), 177–97. - Decree of the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic Church, July 1, 1949, repro-