I would like to preface this disclaiming that I don’t divulge this out of any interest in disparaging religion, Christianity, or Catholicism specifically. Although I am an atheist, I am not an antitheist (anymore).
Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that Fascists and religious authorities frequently collaborated, among other things with the goal of either winning over or neutralizing lower‐class theists. Thankfully, not all religious proletarians toed the line; in reality, they actually have very little in common with their upper‐class equivalents.
Lower‐class theists and atheists alike should continue resisting anticommunism in whatever façade is assumes.
[Excerpt]
The Secretariat also provided Catholics with tools to launch local initiatives. For instance, it helped activists in Switzerland exert pressure on the League of Nations to block Soviet membership to the League and develop strategies for making the international labour movement immune to communist influence.
In the United States the Secretariat worked with charismatic local emissaries like the Jesuit Father Edmund Walsh (founder of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service) to discourage diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.
[…]
The papacy’s attempt to disseminate a distinctly Catholic form of anti‐communism may also explain why the Secretariat’s publications by and large avoided antisemitic and nationalistic motifs.
It was perhaps no accident that shortly after the Secretariat’s founding, Hitler would remark that the Vatican was attempting to deprive ‘National Socialism of the historic credit of having started the anti‐Bolshevik campaign’.
However, the Secretariat’s attempt to assert independence from Nazi‐Fascism was imperfectly echoed by its on‐the‐ground initiatives. In this practical domain, Vatican anti‐communism became increasingly imbricated with the anti‐communism of […] Fascist and proto‐Fascist forces.
To be sure, the cooperation of the Church with these forces did not prevent clashes over the proper scope (and relative autonomy) of Catholic activism in social and civic domains in Italy and Germany.
As many scholars have noted, there were many such clashes throughout the 1930s. But the Vatican’s relationship with Nazi‐Fascist figures never deteriorated entirely; in domains like anti‐communist cooperation, they actually expanded.
[…]
However, it soon became increasingly difficult to keep Vatican anti‐communism separate from that of ‘Hitlerians’ and Fascists. As Franco prepared his troops for an attack on the Spanish Republic, Mussolini and Hitler transformed their early concern with rooting out the communist enemy within their own borders into a broad‐based mobilization against Soviet influence writ large.
Doing so, the leaders reasoned, was geostrategic commonsense, for standing with Franco and against Stalin would likely win them a stronghold in the Mediterranean and facilitate mastery of Europe as a whole.
[…]
In sum, the Secretariat on Atheism’s exhibition depended on the approval of Fascist censors; enjoyed the attendance of […] Fascist representatives; employed Fascist aesthetic tropes; tipped a hat to anti‐communist activism in Italy and Germany; and called on anti‐communist states to work with the Vatican to defeat the Soviet Union.
Thus, despite the climate of tension regarding Catholic civil society activism in Italy and Germany, the Vatican did not scorn tactical cooperation with Nazi‐Fascist forces on matters of shared concern.
From the mid 1930s, the Vatican and Nazi‐Fascist groups began to work even more actively together in pursuit of a shared anti‐communist agenda.
Shortly after the conclusion of the Rome exhibition, Ledóchowski asked the Secretariat’s head to travel to Munich and take part in the opening ceremonies of an exhibition organized by a so‐called ‘independent’ organization, the Gesamtverband Deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen e.V. (Coalition of German Anti‐communist Associations).
Of course, it was no secret that the Gesamtverband was in fact a creature of Joseph Goebbel’s Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment. Entitled ‘Bolschewismus ohne Maske’ (Bolshevism Unmasked), the exhibition sought to reveal the ‘true face’ of international communism.
[…]
In the increasingly polarized political climate of the late 1930s, the Fascist régime[s] began to work more closely with the Secretariat. The Fascist secret police granted the Secretariat special permission to import over 50 banned publications to facilitate up‐to‐date coverage of communism’s real and imagined expansion.
The Gestapo — having welcomed the circulation of the Secretariat’s German‐language journal — likely offered similar dispensations. Additionally, the Secretariat finalized a complex three‐way agreement in the spring of 1936 between Italy, Germany and the Vatican, regarding the joint surveillance and jamming of signals of Radio Moscow.
[…]
It would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that the Vatican anti‐communist campaign was roundly endorsed by Catholics around the world. To the contrary, many Catholics expressed their dismay at the Secretariat’s willingness to work closely with […] Fascist forces.
The German Jesuit Gustav Gundlach — no less than the figure to whom Ledóchowski had initially offered leadership of the Secretariat — worried that Hitler might gain ‘moral sustenance’ from the Secretariat’s actions.
The Secretariat’s willingness to partner with the Nazis in particular might well have had the effect of ‘confusing Catholics in Germany and elsewhere weakening the moral influence of the Church’. Other clerics voiced similar concerns.
Their worries would be partially addressed following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Pope Pius XI’s condemnation of communism and of Nazism on theological grounds in the spring of 1937.
[…]
When Pius XI issued three encyclicals for global consumption shortly thereafter, the work on Nazism was marginalized, as the theologians involved in the theological attack on Nazism noted with displeasure.
Ledit’s reflections, however, figured prominently, as did the Secretariat on Atheism’s underlying message: while the Vatican could work with Nazi‐Fascist forces, any form of reconciliation with the Soviet Union was impossible.
[…]
As a whole, the encyclicals of 1937 can thus be read as efforts to consolidate and further radicalize the Secretariat’s anti‐communist movement by using the most official tool available to the Pope to underscore the message that the Soviet Union posed a global threat to the survival of Catholicism.
The encyclicals defended the notion of the Vatican as the leader of a transnational anticommunist movement, and authorized the use of violence against communist groups. They also clarified the Church’s doctrinal opposition to certain key elements of [Third Reich] ideology, all the while keeping open the path of tactical cooperation between the Vatican and Germany.
(Emphasis added.)