The Black and the Red

Extract

Mr Blanshard has been at it again. This time he appears in the arena astride not one adversary but two: the twin steeds of the Vatican and the Kremlin, the Black International and the Red. His thesis is that there is a triangular war going on, between Communism and Democracy and Catholic power (he implies some distinction between Catholic power, which is his chosen concern, and Catholicism, which quite evidently is not)—a struggle in which each of the three is fighting the other two simultaneously, and in which there is room for only one ultimate victor.

But though in this book there are two horses in the ring,where in Freedom and Catholic Power there was one, it is really the same turn all over again. The net result is but a deeper denigration of the Catholic Church, by (this time) comparing it for three hundred pages with a Marxist institution whose blackness none of his readers except Communists will any longer doubt. The parallel is of course fascinating (there is never a dull moment): provided you are content for it to have extent without depth—for he never addresses himself to the problem of why, fundamentally, the Church execrates Atheistic Communism, nor vice versa. To him they are both primarily power machines, and anti-majority-rule. It is as easy as that. And parlous plausible.

In one respect there is more restraint than last time. There is none of the bombast about nobody being able to refute a single fact or quotation. On the contrary, his preface saddles responsibility for any mistakes upon himself rather than upon his consultants: though he is freer with the names of the ex-Marxists among these than of the ex-Catholics: ‘Unfortunately it would not be wise to mention all of my friends in Italy who have helped ... to show me the seamier side of Vatican policy’.