‘People and Freedom’

Extract

The words ‘People and Freedom’ did not sound well to Catholic ears when a small group bearing that name was founded in London in 1936 under the inspiration of Don Luigi Sturzo. ‘Sounds to me like Bolshevism’, said an old lady to whom the Group’s news-sheet was offered outside Westminster Cathedral. And the old lady echoed the feelings of the majority of her co-religionists, who found the title slightly provocative and subversive, not knowing that it had once been the proud old Guelf motto of the City of Florence—the battle-cry of Pope and people.

It would be untrue to describe English Catholics as philo- fascists in the years immediately preceding the war of 1939. There were, of course, the devotees of General Franco and those who—in the words of Professor Brogan—considered Mussolini to be ‘a combination of Augustus, Constantine and Justinian’, but the majority felt that whilst Democracy worked well enough in England, it was not an article for export, especially to Catholic countries, where authoritarianism was the form of government not only best suited to the temperament of the people, but most in keeping with the ‘Catholic tradition’. Those who travelled on the Continent were told by their friends, especially in France, of the existence of a few extremists, best described as ‘Black Marxists’ or ‘Red Christians’, who were fortunately unrepresentative and insignificant. No one seemed aware of the existence of a vigorous Christian-Democratic movement with a tradition extending well over one hundred years—soon destined to play a leading part in saving Europe from Communism.