The MoH team goes more in depth into the Vatican’s approach to Western European minority questions

For many European minorities, churches were a safe heaven in the interwar period. In the most repressed areas, religious instruction and service in the mother tongue of minority populations were the only moments when members of such groups could freely speak and study their language. Yet the duality of the Church, as an institution devoted to the spiritual care of its worshippers, and the Vatican, as a state with diplomatic relations with other states, considerably blurs any simple portrayal of the Catholic Church’s role in promoting the defence, or the repression, of minority rights. The most surprising aspect, however, is that until now the Church has been remarkably absent in major works on the interwar minority question.

In order to fill this gap, Emmanuel had already spent two weeks at the Vatican Apostolic Archive in April 2022. Back then, he had found substantial material showing a rift within the Catholic hierarchy. On the one hand, there was the lower clergy on the ground in minority regions, which was often in favour of supporting the linguistic rights of local populations and ensure that religious service and instruction be given in the vernacular language (as prescribed by the religious doctrine). On the other, one could find the higher echelons of the Church, which were more responsive to the diplomatic pressures exercised by ‘nationalising states’ determined to enforce linguistic homogeneity and thus saw priests who defended minority languages as dangerous nationalists and irredentists. 

In 2022, however, Emmanuel did not have sufficient time to consult also the documents of the Archives of the Vatican State Secretariat. This contains the internal communications of the State Secretariat (the equivalent of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs), while the Apostolic Archive contains the correspondence with the Nuncios (the equivalent of state diplomats abroad). These documents will contribute to shed light on the internal rift within the Church, especially in the context of the radicalising 1930s, when the rise of Nazism, the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, the 1939 Option agreement in Italy and the development of extreme-right nationalist forces in Flanders and Eupen-Malmedy increased the salience of issues revolving around nationhood and belonging. 

The material gathered during the next two weeks will form a cornerstone of the last chapter of Emmanuel’s new monograph The Myth of Homogeneity: Minority Questions in Interwar Western Europe and will hopefully provide sources for further academic articles.