British Catholics and Fascism

Religious Identity and Political Extremism Between the Wars

T. Villis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137274199
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing substantially on the thoughts and words of Catholic writers and cultural commentators, Villis sheds new light on religious identity and political extremism in early twentieth-century Britain. The book constitutes a comprehensive study of the way in which British Catholic communities reacted to fascism both at home and abroad.

1

Catholic Fascists?

The role of Catholics in the British Union of Fascists has understandably been a matter of some controversy. Hard data is difficult to find, and much of the commentary on the subject has been characterised by assertion rather than evidence. Early estimates of the number of Catholics in the BUF all support the claim that they were over-represented in the movement. In 1937, William Teeling went as far as to claim that ‘over half the Fascists in Great Britain are Catholics’ and that they were for the most part Liverpool-Irish.¹ This estimate needs to be treated with scepticism, if only for the fact fascism in the north-west was long past its peak by the time Teeling was writing. Teeling could also have been led to exaggerate the number of Catholics involved so as to spur the Church into greater political involvement with the working class.² His claims were rejected by Daniel Binchy, an Irish scholar formerly of University College Dublin, who had been the Irish Minister to Berlin from 1929 to 1932.³ Writing in 1941, Binchy had as much cause to depress the numbers of British Catholics in fascism as Teeling had to exaggerate them. He criticised Teeling’s assertion that Catholics made up more than half the membership of the BUF and that the Liverpool-Irish backed Mosley. Binchy claimed that such people would only have been of the ‘type’ most easily given to violence and who might have joined a terrorist organisation in Ireland.⁴ His conclusion was that ‘[a]mong the insignificant minority of the population who support Sir Oswald Mosley, the proportion of Catholics would seem to be larger than might normally be expected. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of British Catholics support the Labour Party, and therefore must be held to detest Fascism, both foreign and domestic.’⁵ Binchy’s main conclusion, therefore, was not so much that Catholics were not significant in the BUF, but that the BUF itself was insignificant. Other unsupported assertions of the ‘type’ attracted by fascism can be found in later surveys. Sewell, for example, claimed that in ‘[i]nsofar as Mosley and Joyce made any headway in suborning the Catholic Community in England, their successes tended to be among the new, grammar-school-educated lower middle class’.⁶

The closest to a concrete estimate of the number of Catholics in the movement comes from a Blackshirt article in May 1935 which claims that they made up 12 per cent of the leadership.⁷ In this particular case, Blackshirt had reason to underestimate the figure as the article was intended to reassure Scottish Protestants about the relative paucity of papists in the movement. From this evidence, therefore, 12 per cent seems a relatively conservative estimate and would certainly support the claim that the percentage of Catholics in the BUF was the higher than their proportion in the population as a whole. In one of the most authoritative analyses of the membership of the BUF, Rawnsley claims that the leaders in Hull, Blackburn, Bolton and North Leeds were all Catholic, as were local leaders in Manchester.⁸ Most members in Lancaster and Preston were Catholics, and there were so many Catholic members in Leeds that Mosley’s nickname was ‘The Pope’. The high number of Catholics in fascist groups in the north of England led some non-Catholics to complain that religion was a factor in determining one’s chance of promotion.⁹ In parts of Scotland and the north-west of England, these issues intertwined with existing sectarian politics. According to Rawnsley, the Liverpool BUF had separate Protestant and Catholic branches.¹⁰ In Scotland, too, Blackshirt carried a report on the existence of ‘rival factions which clash occasionally under the respective colours of orange and green’.¹¹

In Scotland, however, the attempt to target large numbers of Catholic recruits was more problematic. As Stephen Cullen has shown, the failure of the BUF in Scotland was compounded by the sectarian divide. In terms of street politics, the BUF’s effort to remain neutral with regards to religion left them in a double bind. Some Catholics saw fascism in terms of ultra-Protestantism, expressed for example in the viciously anti-Catholic rhetoric of fringe groups such as William Weir Gilmour’s Scottish Democratic Fascist Party. On the other hand, Gilmour described the BUF as ‘run by Roman Catholics, organised by Roman Catholics, in the interests of Roman Catholics’.¹² Gilmour wrote to Tom Gallagher later in his life and expressed the view that the anti-Catholicism of his Scottish Democratic Fascist Party unintentionally weakened support for the BUF by putting off potential Catholic recruits.¹³ Even when Mosley appointed Victor Duffy (an English Catholic) to be the BUF’s Scottish organiser, this made little difference to the BUF’s success north of the border. In Scotland, therefore, the British Union of Fascists proved less able to mobilise Catholic support than in the north of England. As for Wales, Mosley himself had confided in June 1937 that thus was one of the worst areas for his movement: according to Stephen Cullen the BUF membership did not even reach four figures at its height.¹⁴

In England, though, the view that Catholics were over-represented in the BUF was also shared by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which was monitoring the increasing prevalence of anti-Semitism in the late 1930s. In a letter to the Catholic Herald in October 1936 the Board of Deputies even suggested that there were priests who were members, although there is little corroborative evidence for this elsewhere:

what chiefly concerns me is the fact that numbers of Catholics, some of them priests, are associated with a movement that depends, very largely, for it’s [sic] stimulus upon racial prejudice, arousing that mass hatred which is the most irrational – and the most potent – of all political forces.¹⁵

Of the minority of Catholics who joined the BUF, moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that their Catholicism played a central role in their attraction. Nellie Driver, a member from Arnside (then in Lancashire), claimed that the BUF had recruited large numbers of Catholics ‘because they supported our stand against atheistic Communism mostly’.¹⁶ William Eaton, a northern official for the BUF, described meeting a Catholic priest on the way to the fascist meeting at Olympia in 1934 who was going along to discover the extent to which BUF policy reflected the church’s social teaching.¹⁷ Patrick O’Donegan, (a ‘North London Manufacturer’) mentioned G.K.’s Weekly as having ‘similar viewpoints’ to the BUF.¹⁸ O’Donegan also took inspiration from the writings of Hilaire Belloc, ‘especially by the prophesies and warnings contained in his books The Party System and The Servile State’ although he was careful to point out that ‘Hilaire Belloc did not join or support our Movement’.¹⁹ Another Blackshirt, John W. Charnley (a ‘Lancashire Baker’) talked of the pleasure he found in singing the Latin mass.²⁰ Charnley was an admirer of Thomas Aquinas and a member of the Saint Vincent de Paul society and the Knights of Columbia. He was drawn to the BUF in the belief that it was the closest modern movement to the ideals of Rerum Novarum. Other fascists talked of the route to the movement through the non-materialistic ‘human socialism’ which struck a chord with so many Catholic writers. Louise Irvine (a ‘Birmingham Schoolteacher’) talked of her considerable respect for the ‘human socialism’ of Tom Mann, Keir Hardie, Ben Tillet, Robert Blatchford and George Lansbury as opposed to her dislike of the ‘scientific socialism’ of the Coles, Duffs, Laskis, Stracheys and Webbs.²¹

The BUF in England, therefore, had a lot to gain in specifically targeting Catholics for recruitment. According to Sewell, the movement even tried to prevent its subordinates from provoking the Catholic hierarchy.²² Evidence from the fascist press also suggests that the movement took pains to attract Catholic support. One Catholic contributor to the Blackshirt wrote that fascism was closer to Catholic teaching than democracy, claiming that fascist idea of citizenship, ‘clean, healthy and virile’ had ‘always been a precept of Catholic teaching’. Fascists and Catholics also had the common bond of being against financial capital and in favour of providing workers with a living wage. Much was also made of the common strands of national patriotism, anti-communism and respect for family life so as to appeal to Catholic social conservatives: ‘Fascism realises that a healthy and virile nation depends for its health and virility upon the success of its family life, that is why it intends to destroy the slums and sweep the county clear of decadence, raising in its stead an era of high moral tone.’²³ More specific Blackshirt propaganda appealed to the issue of religious schooling in the hope of attracting Catholic sympathisers. One article criticised the state’s policy of only allowing maintenance grants ‘where Catholic and denominational schools have reached a certain standard of efficiency at their own expense’. Fascism, it was claimed, would give generous aid and grants to Catholic schools and would not interfere with religious teaching:

In this manner, Fascism will give effect to its complete toleration of all religions, and will remove the anomaly that Catholics and others should subscribe to the building of schools for other people’s children while at the same time erecting special institutions for their own.²⁴

Such campaigning was clearly political opportunism. The fascists realised that the school issue could be a vote winner in Catholic communities: it was support for religious schools which led many Catholics to move over to Labour in the 1920s. By the 1930s, however, there was less political capital to be made out of the issue, and there is more evidence of fascist attempts to attract Catholics than of these attempts being successful or reciprocated.

Indeed, leading BUF writers were aware of the potential and actual conflicts between fascism and Catholicism and did their best to neutralise them. Alexander Raven Thomson, a leading BUF intellectual, tried to demonstrate that Catholic and fascist ideas were compatible. Catholics criticised the excessive individualism and liberty in democracies, for example, and fascists too made a distinction between ‘liberty’ and licence’. Catholics and fascists therefore had the potential to join together in calling for a more authoritarian government. Thomson struggled, however, to reconcile differences between the Catholic and fascist views of the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’. Many Catholics had difficulties with the fascist view that the nation was the most elevated of all political organisms. Thomson merely asserted that the same tension in Italy had not prevented the Italian government from signing a Concordat with the Church. Deification of the state, too, was an issue which held back many Catholics from embracing fascism wholeheartedly. Thomson quoted Rerum Novarum which claimed that the ‘State must not absorb the individual or the family’. However, he argued that the biggest threat to individual freedom was not the state – which could ensure freedom – but rather powerful individuals within the capitalist system. Such a view echoed Belloc’s ideas on the corruption of party politics and could have been attractive to a Catholic. In order to further endear himself to such a reader, Thomson peppered his analysis with quotes from suitable Catholic philosophers. He cited the Catholic preacher Friedrich Muckermann on the need for a spiritual and mystical body politic, adding that he himself claimed ‘not more for this organic concept of the State administration that the right to regard itself as “corpus politicum mysticum”, instinct with divine purpose . . .’ Such gesturing was intended to awaken Catholic desires for a body-politic which mirrored the divine plan. Thomson clearly did not take this analysis further because it would in the end suggest the deeper conflict over the nature of this ‘divine purpose’ which, in it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Catholic Fascists?
• 2. The Hierarchy
• 3. The Press
• 4. The Chesterbelloc
• 5. Campbell, Dawson, Burns and Wall: Catholic Writers and the Crisis of Liberalism
• 6. The Catholic Literary Right
• 7. Literary Catholicism and Fascism in Wales
• 8. Catholic Anti-Fascism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index