Clerical fascism

Clerical fascism is an ideological construct that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with theology or religious tradition. The term has been used to describe organisations and movements that combine religious elements with fascism, support by religious organisations for fascism, or fascist regimes in which clergy play a leading role. For Catholic clerical fascism, the term Catholic integralism is sometimes used, although Catholic integralism may have points of disagreement with fascism.

The term clerical fascism emerged in the 1920s to refer to the links between the Church and Italian fascism.[1] More recently, the term has been used by scholars, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, who seek to create a typology of fascism, distinguishing between clerical fascism and more radical types of fascism such as Nazism.

Examples of clerical fascism

Examples of dictatorships and also electoral political movements involving certain elements of clerical fascism include those of António Salazar in Portugal, Maurice Duplessis of Quebec[2], Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, Jozef Tiso in Slovakia, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše in Croatia, the Iron Guard movement in Romania, the Rexists in Belgium, and the government of Vichy France. The government of General Franco in Spain had nacionalcatolicismo as part of its ideology. It has been described by some as clerical fascist, especially after the decline in influence of the more secular-fascist Falange beginning after the mid-1940s. With the exception of the Croatian Ustashe movement, scholars debate which other examples in this list should be dubbed, without reservation, clerical fascist.

Some scholars, such as Walter Laqueur, consider certain contemporary movements to be forms of clerical fascism, including Christian Identity and possibly Christian Reconstructionism in the United States; militant forms of politicized Islamic fundamentalism; and militant Hindu nationalism in India (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh / Bharatiya Janata Party).

However, other scholars, such as Juan Cole, assert that currently the term is used pejoratively by those opposed to religious influence upon politics in general.

See also

• Fascism and the Catholic Church
• Islamic fundamentalism
• Islamofascism (epithet)
• Jewish fundamentalism
• Green-Fascism
• Positive Christianity

Further reading

• Randolph L. Braham and Scott Miller, The Nazis Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, [1998] 2002). (ISBN 0-8143-2737-0)

• Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991). (ISBN 0-08-041024-3)

• Nicholas M. Nagy–Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Iaşi and Oxford: The Center for Romanian Studies, 2001). (ISBN 973-9432-11-5)

• Charles Bloomberg and Saul Dubow, eds., Christian–Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa, 1918–48 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). (ISBN 0-253-31235-3)

• Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner, 1995). (ISBN 1-55587-535-1)

• Ainslie T. Embree, ‘The Function of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation’, in Accounting for Fundamentalisms, The Fundamentalism Project 4, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 617–652. (ISBN 0-226-50885-4)

• Partha Banerjee, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and BJP of India (Delhi: Ajanta, 1998). (ISBN 81-202-0504-2)

• Walter K. Andersen. ‘Bharatiya Janata Party: Searching for the Hindu Nationalist Face’, In The New Politics of the Right: Neo–Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies, ed. Hans–Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 219–232. (ISBN 0-312-21134-1 or ISBN 0-312-21338-7)

• Mark Juergensmeyer. The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). (ISBN 0-520-08651-1)

• Roger Eatwell "Reflections on Fascism and Religion"[3]

• Chip Berlet Terms to use with caution

• Laqueur, Walter. 1966. Fascism: Past, Present, Future, New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-19-511793-X

Vatican policy

• Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of Dictators 1922–1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973). (ISBN 0-340-02394-3)
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) (ISBN 0-253-33725-9)
• Livia Rothkirchen, ‘Vatican Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in Independent Slovakia (1939–1945)’ in Michael R. Marrus (ed.),The Nazi Holocaust 3, section 8, Bystanders to the Holocaust (Wesport: Meckler, 1989), pp. 1306–1332. (ISBN 0-88736-255-9 or ISBN 0-88736-256-7)