We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
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Sign up at the Federalist dot com. We are joined today by Kristin van
Uden. She is an author. She's a spokesperson over at the Sophia Institute,
and she's the author of a new book that I'm excited to talk about.
It's called When the Sickle Swings, Stories of Catholics who survived Communist oppression.
There's a lot of reasons I'm interested to dig into this topic. But
first, Kristin, and just welcome you to the program. Thanks for joining,
Hi, am Elie, thanks so much for having me. Yeah,
and maybe we'll just start by having you tell us a little bit about your
background. I think it's your first time on the show, so just let
us know how you ended up at Sophia and how you ended up writing this
book. Sure, so I like to say that I started writing this book
really in college. I was very I've always been very drawn to stories of
survivors of totalitarianism, grew up reading about the Holocaust, and then when I
discovered communism in many of these less widely publicized stories, I just felt this
real call to memorialize these and start to take these down before it's too late.
So I completed an independent study oral history project my senior year where I
interviewed Catholics from all walks of life who had survived communism all throughout the globe,
and then continue this to this day. Conducted the majority of these interviews
within the past two years, so it's kind of been something that's been latent
on the back burner until I had the chance to do it, and now
I have. I ended up at Sophia a few years ago, and really
it's such a dream job that I get to talk about and read Catholic books
for a living. So I am usually on podcasts and radio shows as an
author spokesperson for I like to say authors who are either dead or Italian who
can't speak for themselves, either through a language barrier or from countries so sometimes
both probably yes, exactly, we have I think three or four who hit
both of those criteria. So I am now talking about my own book,
which is very exciting, but yes, it's it's very interesting role. There's
so much in the Church's treasury in terms of reprints that have just gone out
of print and are not available until publishers like Sophia bring them back and resurrect
them. So I get to do that on a daily basis and also write
this book, and I'm hoping to continue this work. You'll notice that the
stories in the book center around four countries main Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and a
bit of Hungary in Romania, and that's due to the availability of interviews.
So I have lots of Polish friends, but no Polish interviews in the book.
So maybe a sequel or something down the line, I can continue that
project. But I really found that these stories, while not completely comprehensive of
the Catholic experience under communism, are representative in the sense that across the board
there are very many similarities with how these policies were implemented, and then on
the other side, the resilience of the survivors and how they navigated life under
these regimes. So I think it's a pretty representative set that will provide for
many people perhaps a starting point for a topic they have not delved in too
much before. And so, speaking of starting points, the one where I
want to begin is actually in the sort of era of Marx and Angles and
Darwin, the Nietzsche and all of these thinkers who informed what ended up happening
in the Soviet Union, informed what ended up happening, inspired what ended up
happening in China and Cuba, in the countries that this book touches on.
You write about this in the introduction to the book, and I want to
ask you right here if we could just start by how this post Enlightenment,
Industrial Revolution era skepticism, this idea that God was dead, and Nietzsche wrote
impassionately, with very passion, I should say about the possibilities that are now
on the horizon after God has been killed. That leads directly to these failed
communist experiments, or I suppose successful communist experiments, un failed utopian experiments.
How did religion specifically come to the lack of the religion, the skepticism of
the religion come into Marx a sort of lapsed Lutheran But in some ways,
you could maybe call that a lapsed Catholic. I know where we interview tons
of leafs Catholics on the show, and I'm a Lutheran, so have a
little fun with the topic. But you know, in that kind of intellectual
cauldron, how important is religion to being one of those dominoes that leads us
to, you know, ultimately places like Cuba. Yeah, that's a great
question, and I'm glad you bring up Nietzsche specifically, because of course Marx
and Engels are the godfathers of this movement, but Nietzschean thinking obviously is also
somewhat at the bedrock. And it reminds me of a book that I relied
on heavily for sort of the ideological part of this project, which is Father
Vincent Micheli is the Gods of Atheism, where he very astutely goes through these
sort of godfather figures of what we consider now to be standard modern atheism.
Because we have to remember atheism as we know it today as this default state
almost in the West, was not always that way. It came from somewhere,
and it came from somewhere quite recently, actually, within the past two
centuries and so Nietzsche, I think he was another lapsed Lutheran. Also,
I remember in the book it discusses he's quite devout as a child, and
then that just ends obviously. But father Michelli makes the excellent point that atheism
is not really the absence of worship, but it is the worship of idols,
and that just really stuck with me, that there's this yearning in the
human soul to worship something, and when it's not filled in the proper channels
by going to God and religion, then something else worldly will take its place.
So communism filled this vacuum very neatly. There had to be a certain
degree of buy in from the populace for communism to be viable, and that's
where the utopian thinking comes in, because they're promising the world they're promising,
and when you listen to what they promise in the propaganda, it does sound
very nice and desirable, this land of equality where there are no sort of
racial differences, economic differences, no disparities, complete and total lack of suffering.
And if it sounds too good to be true, of course it probably
is. This is where the religious element really comes in, because Christians know
that this sort of utopia cannot exist on earth that were still a fallen people.
Jesus came, and of course the redemption has been secured, but that
does not mean that heaven can exist on earth. The Catholics who I interview
in this book were very cognizant of knowing that they were storing up their treasures
for heaven for the next life, and even when they won political temporal victories,
the main source of their motivation was to focus on keeping holding on to
their souls essentially, and this is what I found. And there's various examples
we can go into of communist authorities, whether that's through threatening trying to force
people to apostatize even though they're purportedly atheists, So what would it matter if
someone believes in a fairy tale, you know, to coercing this sort of
behavior is the state seeks to take this place of God and for whatever reason
that is, that is the main battle that had to be fought was within
their own souls. So a few examples of this. Actually, there's one
story from Cuba that I heard from several people I interviewed is really illustrative of
this, and it's this propagandizing and sort of indoctrination that occurred in the elementary
schools. So of course indoctrination begins very early to try to form the next
generation. What they would do is line all the kids up and have them
all close their eyes and stick out their hands and say, okay, ask
God for a piece of candy. And of course the minutes would tick by,
nothing would happen. They would get antsy, and then they said,
ask Fidel for a piece of candy, and lo and behold the teachers would
go around and place a piece of candy and everybody's hands and it was great.
Therefore, Fidel is the one who provides for all your needs, and
God is just some made up fairy tale archaic. So yes, this human
drive towards religion, the need for a worldly replacement when it is not through
these channels of religion, and how communism takes fills that vacuum and becomes really
a religion unto itself. And another thing that you get into in the book
is how they're actually this becomes law in communist societies, and a lot of
people are familiar with this history. But Christen, if you could refresh us
on actually the steps that dictators. Communist dictators took to cleanse their countries their
societies of religion. So I identify five main steps in this process, and
this could be applied pretty wide across all religions. There, of course,
was a concerted effort against most religions within communist countries. In the Catholic context,
there is a little bit of an additional type of persecution because the Catholic
Church has both the Institution of the Church and the sovereign state of the Vaticans.
So one of the common charges you'll see levied against practicing Catholics is that
they're a fifth column for the Vatican or a Vatican agent, which in many
cases is just clearly ridiculous. So with that in mind, these five steps
are number one outlaw the public worship of the Church, So maintaining control over
the public sphere was very important to communist regimes. We see they institute their
own calendar of holidays and events, so Victory Day, for example, of
celebrating victory during World War two, May Day, Labor Day, International Women's
Day is actually originally a Communist holiday, and this sort of takes the place
of the church calendar that would you typically occur within the church year would be
outlawed. That would not be allowed to take place on the public roads,
and the very act of going to daily or weekly mass or receiving the sacraments
would be either made outright illegal, and this could be accomplished through the seizure
of property and the closing of property, or in the very least highly discouraged.
So a woman I interview from Czechoslovakia recounts having to go to church with
her head down, looking at the floor, not paying attention to anyone else
who was there, because it was highly likely you would be hauled in front
of state security and asked to inform on your fellow parishioners. And she could,
with a clear conscience, just tell them I don't know who was there.
I don't know the identity of the priest. People would lose their jobs
if they were seen coming out of mass. So the sacraments really had to
go underground at that point, and that's heavily what I recount in the later
section of the book. Second is to round up the clergy and religious.
So this is a human rights abuse that most Communist countries that I studied undertook
In one form or another. In Cuba, hundreds of priests and religious were
expelled on a ship to Spain, and then in Czechoslovakia this took place under
two separate actions called Operation K and Operation R after the check words for monk
klustierty and nuns for Hoolnitze, and these were i mean, even on a
larger scale than in Cuba. Thousands of monks and nuns were rounded up,
deported to central locations and then pressed into forced labor. One nun recounts the
poor conditions she had to work in, and she was also just working with
these these day laborers who would be very crass in front of her and undress
and things like that right in front of her. So really forced obviously so
many human rights violations just with them as one action fairs to seize and repurposed
church property. So this is one of those instances where you can say,
well, of course communists don't believe in private property, so they seized everyone's
property, which is true, but it does allow them this modicum of control
over these other five points, because if they own the church property, then
they can more easily persecute and control both the clergy and the laity. And
also steal the treasures of the church, be that wealth or vestments, even
smaller things like that. Fourth is control the laity, which we alluded to
earlier. This system of informants and coercion that would push the laity right to
the edge without actually taking military or police action against them. It would place
them in these impossible situations where it was easier to just join the party or
to just stop going to Mass. And this is very similar to the Catholic
concept of red martyrdom versus white martyrdom. White martyrdom is sort of the daily
death to self, and someone I interviewed referred to this in her own life
as death by a thousand cuts, where you're not necessarily asked to give your
life in this ultimate moment of sacrifice, but you live a life with tons
of little daily sacrifices that amount to the same really dedication in the end.
And I would say most people who survived this period without losing their faith suffered
at least a degree of white martyrdom. And then finally, and this is
one of the most powerful tactics that we saw even in the United States,
is to infiltrate the church hierarchy with Party men. So even in the US,
a former Communist agent, Bella Dodd, who was converted back to the
Catholic faith by a Bishop Fulton, Sheen told him that she had placed thousands
of men in the seminaries who were either loyal to the communists or willing to
do their bidding for some sort of money or blackmail. And this happened.
And we can go into this a little bit later. Really a throughout the
communist world, most dramatically in Czechoslovakia, where there was actually a National Church
that was schismatic from the Vatican but loyal to the communist state, and not
only would it serve to control the church on a day to day basis,
but also to even try to change doctrine to be friendlier to communists. The
most powerful example we have of this today is the National Church in China,
where unfortunately this tactic is getting good ground. As a listener of Federalist Radio
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the concept of control government control came up, not just economic control, of
course, but sort of personal or I should say control over people just in
general, so not just economically, but also control over their cultural decisions,
their family lives, what we consider I was going to say the private sphere,
but that's obviously very much not in there. You know, they don't
want that distinction to sort of even exist. Why then, again, this
may sound obvious to some people, but I think it's interesting from the perspective
of an author who's been interviewing survivors of communist oppression. Why is control over
people's most fundamental belief so central to every iteration of communism? And I asked
that with one additional point from your book where you write or since Karl Marx
publishes writings the Church has condemned communism is an ideology of false Messianism in which
man usurps the place of God. You wrote about Pope Pious the eleventh writing
communism isn'trinsically wrong and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it
in any undertaking whatsoever. So Man taking the place of God in communism and
God then being so central of a target for the Communists to knock down,
just explain a little bit why every time communism pops up that is so central
to their mission. Yeah, it's a great point. And again I say,
I think that there is a huge degree of spiritual warfare in this battle
where a lot of this is happening and playing out on either the economic,
political, or just human level. But ultimately the ideologies boiled down to complete
a complete disparity in cosmology and in world view. Of course, the famous
quote from Stalin that he would seek to be the engineer of souls is very
revelatory to the heart of this project. They're seeking to engineer Homo sovieticos,
the new man in the Soviet image in this case, or worldwide communism in
really the image of the state or the image of the good proletariat. And
this comes through in certain points. It's important to remember because people often think,
oh, yeah, communism is atheist, but that's sort of just a
byproduct. But communism is overtly atheist this is written. They don't hide this
fact. This is something that is one of their main platform points and one
of the reasons that they look down on and use these tactics of derision towards
religion is that they do believe that religion is backwards and is a less evolved
state of the human of the human person I would say human soul, but
that doesn't really jive with their ideology. Again, the battle to save one's
own soul and really one's own sanity and freedom was sort of the first frontier
before any sort of organized resistance could occur. One example from Romania comes to
mind. Someone I interviewed who grew up in the Cheches Group period remembers having
to sit down and see him on TV. He would have these three to
four hour rants every day where he would just go on and it was expected,
of course by the state and by all the various little party informants,
that you would be intently listening to this until he became the star of everyone's
favorite Christmas show and execution. But he really commanded the airwaves in this way
to just drum in his ideology, if not through the convincing propaganda, just
through straight repetition, which which can sometimes be effective because it just wears the
mind down. And this person that I interviewed remembers that her family would do
this active resistance, which seems small but in retrospect was really quite powerful,
which was just turning off the TV or turning down the volume and praying the
Rosary together as a family during that time, or going out to play,
or just doing something else. And it is really important to protect your own
mind because it is a seductive ideology. We know even the Devil, the
Father of Lives, was able to seduce even the garden. This is something
that can and does get into people's psyches, so as we know just from
looking at the death count of communist regimes, this is something that to many
seems obviously evil, but when you're in the thick of it can be quite
convincing. One other example I wanted to bring up on this topic is another
one from Cuba, this time from the political prisons, and this is a
tactic that Communist soldiers actually used in the Spanish Civil War too, so it
spans kind of time and place within the communist world, and they would try
to induce the Catholic prisoners to apostatize to give up their faith, saying,
oh, you know, you can just go to confession after you get out.
If you apostatize, I'll set you free. Then you'll be free.
Run to confession and you'll be fine. You get to see your family again.
And many saw through this and saw that this was a bad deal.
But after being tortured and starved for months, many others believed the guards and
would give in and would do whatever performative apostasy was required of them. And
then the guards would look at them and laugh and say now you're going to
hell and shoot them on the spot. Anyway, So it speaks to this
sort of deeply, this deep hatred and animosity towards religion that in my opinion,
transcends any sort of rationalism that communist thinkers purport to be representatives of.
That you can say this is backwards and anti rationalists all you want, but
if you don't believe any of it's true, why luxury in this cruelty towards
someone who holds these beliefs. So to me, that showed that this really
demonic element, that someone would target a soul in the state of grace in
that way and you see examples of this from across the communist sphere that they're
saying the quiet part out loud, that the hatred of religion goes beyond just
a simple facts based narrative. Yeah, speaking of Cuba, you have an
interesting chapter on Cuba, an interesting section of that chapter, specifically on the
Bay of Pigs and how faith informed a lot of the actions of a lot
of the men that were involved in that operation. But that reminded me of
a question I wanted to get in front of you, which was about liberation
theology, because one of the biggest of attacks on you know, the conservative
the anti communist approach to the twentieth century and still today is that this is
the church sort of colluding with the capitalist forces of oppression. And of course
we don't need to get into rebutting that because I don't think either of us
are in need of persuasion, and most of our listeners are neither. But
how the teachings of the church, if you could talk about maybe how the
teachings of the church are abused by liberation theologists in this search of utopia in
ways that often do put man ahead of God. Yes, this was a
very insidious tactic that speaks to that fifth point that I got to earlier about
infiltration. This is not only just merely boots on the ground infiltration within the
ranks of the Church, but also an ideological infiltration that I think, unfortunately
we're seeing the effects of to this day with some of the narratives currently coming
out of the Vatican. Even liberation theology. Is this the system of distorted
Catholic truth, and it really hones in on the principle of Catholic action.
Catholic action, when viewed historically, is actually something that's promoted by the popes.
It basically means that Catholics should not live in cloisters unto themselves, but
be out in the world doing good works and forwarding as pious. The Tenth
said to restore all things in Christ and to make Christ king over even secular
countries. And so in Cuba, the Catholic action movements were very active,
especially at the schools throughout the twentieth century, and we'll see they did not
buy into this false distortion of liberation theology, and the main Catholic action groups
were actually some of the anti communist guerrillas who I end up profiling for the
book, so many people unfortunately did fall into this distortion, and it's sort
of marrying Marxist principles of concern for the poor and redistribution of wealth with Catholic
principles. Of of course, charity is important and the poor will always be
with us, so it's really a dishonest allocation of Catholic principles to enable Marxist
policies. And the infiltration ideologically occurred in very different but equally insidious ways throughout
communist occupied countries, and I compare in the book The Liberation Theology of Latin
America to this sort of more formalized infiltration in Eastern Europe. So in Czechoslovakia,
for example, as I mentioned before, a percentage about a lets seven
percent of the clergy stayed loyal to the communist state rather than to the Vatican.
So this is objectively a schismatic act. It can be compared to what
happened in the French Revolution, where the revolutionary government forced priests to take an
oath of loyalty to the state rather than to the Vatican, and these were
known as the Juring Priests, and many of them refused, and the ship
righted itself in France eventually, but in Czechoslovakia sadly, a number of these
priests performed this oath so to speak, and stayed loyal to the Vatican.
But this made the lines very clear. You could pretty much suss out which
priests were loyal to the Vatican, which priests were loyal to the state,
and there was this sort of clear delineation. Of course, sometimes people went
back and forth, and there was a lot of gray area too, but
that type of thing makes it obvious where you have to stand, and the
challenge just becomes how to survive underground. With liberation theology, it was more
it just leaked into the public consciousness and psyche more so that it was hard
to define who was on what side, so to speak. And I think
that's harder to root out because these poisonous ideas can get in and a perish
that is otherwise one hundred percent true to the faith can adopt some of these
and allow just an inch of communist control at a time, and over time
that amounts to a generalized apostasy or too Before you know it, you wake
up and Catholic doctrine has been completely subverted. So this it's a very almost
impressive, wily tactic, but to colonize the minds and to use words,
especially words of the Bible against the Church in order to sort of co opt
it for their own purposes was basically the movement behind liberation theology, and what
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and maybe drawing on I think a lot of people who don't pay super close
attention for good reason, maybe to Latin American politics, because we have so
much going on in our own politics. This is very much everything you're just
describing is very much still alive. You need look no further than Amlo right
to our south to see some of this language and lines of argumentations still being
used. But maybe drawing on some of your interviews and some of your research,
what would you say or what stories maybe would you share with younger people
or people in the United States now that are maybe suffering for various reasons and
look to socialism. Let's maybe you even start slightly lighter than communism. Look
to a form of democratic socialism that really involves an expanded state, not just
you know, not just some version of some boosted version of Obamacare or something
like that, a real expanded state. Are there lessons in particular that you
think would resonate or should be heeded by people in that position, which I
asked, because there are a whole lot of people I think in that position.
Sure, some advice that I would give, which is going to sound
bad, but be pessimistic in that look at what you like. I'm a
cheerful pessimist. This kind of attitude that I find with people who survive communism
too, is just this implicit distrust of the government, which is a very
healthy thing to have. But just look at the trade off for what you
are getting versus what you could be giving up. Theoretically. Sure, if
if you're giving up certain freedoms and they're not being used against you at the
moment but could be in the future, that is something you always have to
keep in mind because if it can happen, it probably will. And one
example that that's not even from politics, but I just heard yesterday of the
twenty three and meters leak and I'm just like, oh, I'm so glad
I never did that. Information just being leaked to hackers, And apparently hackers
have been targeting specific gene groups to make a statement on Israel and Palestine for
example. So if such a thing, if such a dystopian nightmare could happen
in your wildest imagination, like, don't become paranoid. But that is something
to take into consideration the trade off, and they're typically when freedoms are taken
away, there is no going back. That is a one way process.
Once it's set in motion, typically only goes towards their centralization and totalitarian control.
With these stories, Communism was implemented pretty rapidly in these countries. So
Cuba is a good example of a sort of gradual approach because when Fidel seed
power after the revolution in the late fifties, when which aus did Batista,
who was basically not very popular among any demographic, so people were ready for
a change and they put their hope in Fidel. He actually lied and claimed
that he was not communist. He was famous for saying the revolution is as
green as palm trees and sort of alluding to the fact like this this is
not red this is not communists, and of course, within several years it
became obvious that he was lying. One person I interviewed named Arturo, who
survived that period, talks about how he never fell for Castro's lives, and
that was impressive to me because towards the beginning, it seemed many people did
have hope that he was telling the truth. He talks about how he grew
up reading reader's digest. He would get an American somehow American readers Digest from
his neighbor, and he developed these critical thinking skills, and he also through
that developed an understanding of how communism was implementing itself in the rest of the
world. So I think he remembers reading about Cardinal Vincenti from Hungary, who
many people I interview remember his story and as like this watershed moment where they
came to this realization about communism, and he was very wary of Fidel's lines
after this. So I guess this just speaks to the importance of education into
developing these soft skills of critical thinking where people like to kind of turn away
from the humanities and call it a useless job, especially in the age of
AI, but it's girding your mind to be able to recognize bias, for
example, when you come across it and lie and political projects that might be
simmering under the surface, but the truth won't come out until later. So
interesting. Kristian van Union is the author of When the Sickle Swings, Stories
of Catholics who survived Communist oppression. Kristin When is the book out? It
is out officially on November twenty first, but available for pre order right now
at Sofia Institute dot com. Fantastic congratulations on the book. We talked to
Sophia authors pretty often, but just as we're closing out here, can you
let us know a little bit about Sophia for people who aren't familiar. Yes,
so Sofia Institute Press is a Catholic publisher. We publish about six or
seven new books monthly, and that's a combination of reprints or you might hear
from me again and new and upcoming authors who really deals with anything from the
spiritual life to these more political texts, and basically how to live within this
world, how to navigate as a practicing Christian in kind of this almost dystopia
that we're currently in. Well, I appreciate you coming on to talk about
this book. Christen, thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on
this one. Thank you, Emily. Take care. Of course you've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist or radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashinsky,
culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon with more. Until
then, be love versus freedom and anxious for the fray. Heard the fame
by ser reason, and then it faded away