July 9, 2013

FINEST HOUR 128, AUTUMN 2005

ABSTRACT
CHURCHILL AS FUNDAMENTALIST CATHOLIC? Now indeed we have heard everything, thanks to Angels and Demons, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel about the “Illuminati.”

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“The Illuminati are well documented throughout history…. You ever heard of a guy called Winston Churchill? ….BBC did a historical a while back on Churchill’s life. Staunch Catholic by the way. Did you know that in 1920 Churchill published a statement condemning the Illuminati and warning Brits of a worldwide conspiracy against morality?….London Herald. February 8, 1920.” —Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown (New York: Atria, 2000, 255).

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Was Churchill a Roman Catholic? We are asked this question often lately. Since Dan Brown’s novels, led by The Da Vinci Code, assumed cult status, many Brown fans apparently think they have some basis in fact. Enjoy Brown’s yarns, but don’t take them seriously. On the merits they are perhaps best described by John J. Reilly’s blog:

The count of bloopers [in Angels and Demons] is so great that one begins to wonder whether they Mean Something. Mere ignorance could explain why the book translates “Novus Ordo Seclorum” as “New Secular Order.”* The assertion that Catholic Holy Communion “comes from” Aztec ritual cannibalism might be just badly compressed comparative anthropology. But what are we to make of the assertion that Winston Churchill was a staunch Catholic?

What indeed, Mr. Reilly! Churchill was raised in the Church of England, though in his short story The Dream (1947) he refers to himself as “Episcopalian” (North American Anglican). His “religion” was probably that of an optimistic agnostic. He said he was “not a pillar of the Church but a flying buttress—I support it from the outside.” He wrote that having made so many deposits in the “Bank of Observance” as a boy, he had been “drawing confidently on it” ever since, never enquiring as to the state of his account—lest he find an “overdraft.”

Churchill did write the article Brown cites (“Zionism versus Bolshevism” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 25 January 1920, Collected Essays TV: 26-30, Woods C73). But it had nothing to do with the sinister group Brown calls the “Illuminati”—a cult allegedly dating at least back to Galileo, which challenges the teachings of the Catholic church. Churchill was never a Catholic, and did not express the sentiments ascribed to him in the novel. The threat to morality Churchill attacked was Bolshevism—and he went on to explain why he thought so.

“Zionism versus Bolshevism” is sometimes produced as evidence that Churchill was an anti-Semite, since his article notes the preponderance of Jews among Bolsheviks, “a sinister confederacy…mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race….Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing….with the exception of Lenin, the majority of leading figures are Jews.”

To quote this paragraph out of context from the rest of the article is to misrepresent Churchill, who added that such figures comprise only a small portion of Jews, whom he calls “the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” Prefiguring his later indictment of Nazi Germany, he writes: “Nothing is more wrong than to deny an individual, on account of race or origin, his right to be judged on his personal merits and conduct.”

Jews in every country, Churchill continued, “identify themselves with that country, enter into its national life….a Jew living in England would say, I am an Englishman practising the Jewish faith.’ This is a worthy conception, and useful in the highest degree…and in our own Army Jewish soldiers have played a most distinguished part, some rising to the command of armies, others winning the Victoria Cross for valour.”

The context is extracted from such popular condemnations of Churchill’s article. No one but the most ardent Churchillophobe can use “Zionism vs. Bolshevism” to indict Churchill for anti-semitism. And no one but an imaginative novelist can use it to portray WSC as a fundamentalist churchman. —RML

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* The correct translation is “New Order of the Ages”: the motto on the Great Seal of the United States (see a dollar bill) that hints at the high-flown pretensions of the American Revolution. According to the Great Seal website the motto originates with the Roman poet Virgil, “from a line in his Eclogue  IV, the pastoral poem that expresses the longing of the world for a new era of peace and happiness.”