“Fascism is a religious concept. Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands, and an infinite scorn in our hearts. […] We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.”
—Benito Mussolini, Speech to the Chamber of Deputies, January 3, 1925
“If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
—Jesus of Nazareth, The Gospel of John, 15:10-13
To hear the terms “Catholic” and “Anti-Fascist” within the same phrase may cause a few heads to turn. At first glance, modern exemplars of Catholicism’s relationship with the political ideology of fascism tend to have the sentiment, if not the prefix, “pro-” attached to them. Recall the Church’s complicity in Italy’s shift to fascism under Mussolini, with Pope Pius XI even calling the dictator “providential”; the early support offered by the Church in Germany and Austria in religiously enforcing the NSDAP’s agenda; or Francisco Franco’s implementation of National Catholicism and his continued cooperation with the Church for the entirety of his regime. The fact that the Constantinian shift saw a complete conflation of Christianity with the original adopters of Fascism, the Roman Empire, makes the associations between the two seem all the more one sided.
And yet, each of these bizarre allegiances on the part of the institutional Church have had distinctly anti-fascist counterparts. Mussolini faced staunch opposition from Guido Miglioli’s White League conglomeration of Catholic trade Unions; the heroic resistance of the likes of our Lutheran brother Dietrich Bonhoeffer or St. Maximillian Kolbe—encompassing both sides of the pacifist spectrum—in the face of Nazism; or the Basque clerics who served not just as chaplains on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War but facilitated the escape of the faithful to diaspora communities in South America; are among countless other stories of modern Anti-Fascist action rooted in faith.
Such an ethical turn is most compelling, however, when one sees anti-fascist resistance operating in the very life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ within the context of the most brutal fascist regime to have ever existed. To grow up as a child in the wake of a genocidal decree from the State; to love the Other instead of killing them; to heal the sick instead of avoiding them; to uplift the downtrodden instead of discarding them; to speak of God’s Kingdom rather than Caesar’s; to forgive debts in a world based on them; to reject the sword when the Empire was built by it; to literally be beaten with the rods that made up the fascis; and ultimately, to show that execution for treason via the most brutal mechanism imaginable will not have the last say are facets of the most ardent anti-fascist rhetoric imaginable.
With this context in mind, the goals of the following symposium are severalfold. First, the trajectory of this anti-fascist imperative bears particular urgency in our own context as the rise of the Religious Right here in America, the solidification of conservative Catholicism within the governments of Eastern Europe, and the secular turns toward fascism in Western Europe, constitute the dreary landscape of the socio-political realm. As activists, theologians, ethicists, and scholars, the contributors here share a common urgency for action in the face of this reality.
Second, each contributor directly ties the anti-fascist ethos to a liberationist theology or contemporary ethic as well as to the foundations of Christ’s life, death, message, and deeds. We agree that the Church was forced to navigate a fascist context from its very initiation while also reminding readers that the Church has continued to be a beacon of this type of resistance in the years since that first Easter morning. We hope that in our work, the faithful may see anti-fascist action as foundational and in continuum.
Finally, through a diversity of backgrounds, research interests, expertise, and approaches, this symposium aims to push back against contemporary claims that anti-fascist action is uniform—mainly that it is atheist, violent, chaotic, and anti-democratic. By cataloguing an approachable Christian-oriented anti-fascism, we hope to engage audiences not merely in contemplation, prayer for change, or internal spiritual renewal, but in tangible action. To such hopes we now turn, Amen.
