Leading labor activist and Communist William F. Dunne, who came from an Irish Catholic immigrant family and went to Catholic schools in Minnesota, on what each had to gain as the United States hosted the Vatican’s 1926 Eucharist Congress in Chicago. Wobbled by the revolutions in Europe, the Vatican made a seemingly unlikely pivot to the historically Protestant-dominated United States in the 1920s. With appeals to the morals of both Presbyterian bankers and millions of conservative Catholics, it promoted two U.S. priests to Cardinals in 1924 before the Eucharist Congress deepened the relationship.

‘American Imperialism’s Black Mass’ by William F. Dunne from Workers Monthly. Vol. 5 No. 10. August 1926.

CHICAGO is the second largest city in the United States. In and around Chicago, into which run every important railway in America, making it the greatest rail transportation center in the world, are steel mills, meat packing plants, finished metal factories of all kinds, the Pullman car works; down Lake Michigan, thru the rivers and canals which make of Chicago a checkerboard, come the steamers loaded with iron and lumber for the hungry factories and mills; to the south are the great bituminous coal mines.

All these huge industrial plants are filled with workers of foreign birth and extraction—Poles, Italians, South Slavs, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Germans, Bohemians, Irish.

For the most part they come from peasant stock and the Catholic religion is the traditional religion of their fathers and forefathers. Here was to be found in the greatest quantities in America the human material for the tremendous political demonstration which delights the Vatican and its legates and which the Eucharistic Congress was.

To try to minimize the gigantic character of the Eucharist would be foolish and futile. To its sponsors must be given credit for organizational and political ability which puts far in the shade the obscene posturings and gibberings of the Ku Klux Klan. America is not a Catholic but Protestant country, yet the most powerful and influential capitalist papers such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Daily News grovelled and kowtowed to the papal delegates.

As for the Hearst press, it laid down on its collective belly and wriggled in a masochistic ecstasy.

Not even during the period of American participation in the World War, when patriotic fervor was at its height and the possession of an army uniform a sure entree to the pictorial sections of the capitalist press, were such strenuous efforts made to give the readers elaborate lustrations. Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, papal nuncios, priests, arrayed in all the glory of a religious institution which understands the tremendous emotional appeal of regal vestments, passed in review—not by ones and twos, or in single and double column array, but by tens and scores, in single and double pages.

The minutest detail of the pagan-feudal ceremonials of the Catholic church was featured. A prominent politician kissing the ring of Cardinal Mundelein was good for a half-page. The ritual of the various ceremonies was published both in Latin and in English. Special articles by the papal publicists, explaining the history and symbolism of the ceremonies were featured.

The capitalist press of Chicago was turned over to the Catholic church. No such widespread and well-organized propaganda has been displayed in this country since the great Wilsonian uplift.

And like the entry of America into the war the Eucharist Congress was used to plunge it further into reaction.

For the Catholic church is reaction personified. In the countries, and those sections of countries, which it controls, peasant Poland, peasant Bavaria, peasant Spain and Italy, peasant Ireland, peasant France, it builds on abysmal ignorance and maintains its supremacy by maintaining ignorance.

It is inevitable that in every agricultural country where a movement of the masses against feudal-capitalist oppression occurs it encounters the uncompromising opposition of the Catholic church and, if it is successful, has to smash the church control of the schools and government while smashing the allies of the church.

It is no accidental occurrence, therefore, that in Italy, Spain, and Mexico, where the Catholic church has retained political power even in recent times that the mass movements take on a definite anti-church character.

Even in Ireland the Vatican came to the rescue of British imperialism and denounced and excommunicated the most militant groups of the republican movement.

The fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the general collapse of monarchy in Europe since the world war, the rising tide of workers’ and peasants’ revolutions, the establishment of more or less “democratic” republics, has been a terrible blow to the power and prestige of catholicism.

The rise of the left bloc in France and the abolition of the concordat which the church believed was a prelude to the re-establishment of its power was another blow. Its position in Italy, somewhat improved under Mussolini, does not compensate it for the loss of its political base in central Europe. Spain remains the only government which recognizes the sovereignty of the Vatican.

The Vatican had high hopes of building a new Catholic bloc, but the warring nationalisms in Europe and the upward surge of the masses has made this reactionary task extremely difficult.

The present pope, formerly Cardinal Ratti, is a “French” pope—that is, he came to power on the program of support of French ambitions in eastern and central Europe. He was instrumental in organizing the Poles against Soviet Russia and for a united front with French imperialism.

Poland, Austria, Hungary and Bavaria—this was to be the new Catholic center. But in supporting the German royal family against the German masses in the expropriation issue the Vatican has given expression to its enmity for the interests of the workers and peasants and even in Catholic Bavaria there has been much criticism of and some open opposition to this policy. Poland and Lithuania are prevented from uniting under the Vatican by their quarrel over Vilna. Similar nationalist rivalries are rife in Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Hungary.

The Vatican needs support from other quarters.

Where can it get it except from the most powerful imperialist nation in the world, having an estimated population of 18,000,000 Catholics, and which is extending its hegemony over all Europe, outside of Soviet Russia, at a rapid rate?

Like the kings whose thrones are trembling and the still more luckless royalties whose thrones have been kicked from under them, the Vatican comes to America and, like the kings and princes, it receives a warm welcome and unlimited publicity—publicity which is of far more value in Europe than it is here.

It is not to be sniffed at, this thunderous acclaim accorded the princes of the church in Chicago and elsewhere. The homage and adoration of the foreign-born in the United States, when properly transmitted and interpreted, is of immense value to the Vatican in the districts where millions of peasants are beginning to doubt the wisdom of its doctrine of submissiveness to the landowners on earth and “pie in the sky” afterwards.

Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, representing President Coolidge, addressed the Eucharist Congress. Perhaps the high pitch of enthusiasm for the entire congress was reached when, obviously referring to Mexico, he said that the United States would tolerate no interference with religious liberty. The Chicago Tribune, in reporting this gladsome spectacle, remarked that the assembled prelates “exchanged joyful smiles.”

This incident, when related in the clerical journals of Europe, will do much to strengthen the Vatican. Just as in Europe, the Vatican has fallen on evil days in Mexico. Once the largest single landholder in Mexico, the revolution has stripped it of its landed property. Recognized as the strongest supporter of reaction, the Catholic church in Mexico has been separated from the estate and, as are other religious denominations, is prevented from carrying on the “educational activities” which the Mexican masses have come to understand are nothing more or less than propaganda and organization for the return of landlordism.

The Catholic church can be forged into a powerful weapon for American imperialism—not only in Mexico but in all Latin-America and the Philippines where it held undisputed sway for centuries under Spanish rule.

The leadership of many powerful unions is Catholic and already, in the protest sent by John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor against the expulsion of certain Catholic dignitaries from Mexico, and the welcome to the Eucharist Congress voted by that body at his request, we have an inkling of the forces which are at work to line up the Vatican, the Catholic church in America, sections of labor officialdom and American imperialism for a new drive on Mexico.

Triumphant reaction is the only phrase which describes the Eucharist Congress. The disappearance of the Ku Klux Klan while the congress was capturing Chicago is significant in that it indicates that the klan as such is no powerful political influence in the United States. It was told to shut up and keep out of sight and it did so.

American reaction had more important business in hand. It was busy making a united front with the best organized and most militant religious institution in the world—one which holds in ignorance and superstition millions of workers and peasants and which American imperialism believes it can use to good advantage. The Vatican is willing to be used because it too needs a powerful ally.

Each party to the alliance has something to contribute which the other can use. The Vatican wants:

1. Support in Europe for the building of a new Catholic bloc.

2. Support in Mexico to re-establish itself as a political factor and regain its landed property.

3. Sympathetic support in other Latin-American countries.

4. Full freedom for its supporters to engage in political campaigns for the highest government offices. (Al Smith of New York, potential candidate for the presidency; George Brennan of Illinois, candidate for United States senator.)

American imperialism wants:

1. Support in Europe for its financial and industrial enterprises.

2. The complete subjugation of Mexico, its reduction to the status of a colony.

3. A minimum of resistance to its plans for the conquest of all Latin-America.

4. Strengthening of the influence of an organizationally competent religion among the workers in basic industry which will make more difficult the task of building powerful unions.

Both want to crush the Communist International and its sections because both understand that the working class under Communist leadership is their only dangerous enemy.

It may be that the alliance of the two most reactionary forces in the world was not perfected during the Eucharist Congress but all the evidence points to the fact that a fairly good understanding was reached.

“Religion,” said Marx, “is the opium of the people.” Opium poisoning can be counteracted only by prolonged exercise. The poison of the Eucharist Congress, the danger of the alliance of American imperialism with the Vatican, can be overcome only by an intensification of working class activity and struggle—struggle centering around the daily needs and demands of workers in basic industry during the process of which they can see who supports them and who, and what forces, are found in the ranks of the enemy.

In the coming struggles whose faint signs can be seen in the American economic and political arena, in the struggles in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, where the Catholic church and American imperialism are and will be found together against the masses, both will be exposed in a much more convincing manner than that in which the Eucharist, “the body and blood of Christ,” exposed on the Catholic altar, in a ritual originating in the pagan sacrifice of the god, brings conviction of the certainty of heavenly joys to those too meek to fight the fords of finance and industry.

The thin, unleavened wafer that is the Eucharist cannot satisfy the hunger of millions.

Workers Monthly began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Party publication. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and the Communist Party began publishing The Communist as its theoretical magazine. Editors included Earl Browder and Max Bedacht as the magazine continued the Liberator’s use of graphics and art.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/wm/1926/v5n10-aug-1926-1B-FT-90-WM.pdf