Workers in interwar Europe were likely more “deviant” than “media people” in 1990s America

In my previous post, I noted that it is likely that the threat posed by an activist working class to the Catholic Church was likely a very important driving factor behind stigmata stories in the southwestern quarter of Europe during the interwar period. This is true even if my original imagination — that the stigmata stories were designed to directly convert the workers — is unlikely to be true because the Church viewed converting the working classes as a fundamentally hopeless cause. The fact that the Church made few efforts other than by political power to do so suggests that no belief existed within the Catholic hierarchy that European workers could be converted from their fundamental anti-religion stance.

Indeed, the evidence I can gather reminds me of Peter Kreeft’s article ‘A Defense of Culture Wars’, which I read as a young man in the late 1990s as part of his book Ecumenical Jihad to a mixture of utter ridicule and some agreement. Kreeft used a poll by the supposedly secular Wirthlin Agency — of whom I have not heard from any other source so I can doubt how secular it might have actually been — to illustrate differences in belief between the general population and “media people” (whom Kreeft defined as those involved in any of journalism, public education, or entertainment):

Issue	Support by general population		Support by “media people”
Cheating sexually upon spouse is wrong	>90		50
Regular attendance at religious services	50		9
Abortion should have minimally some restrictions	72	(Wirthlin)	3
	80	(other sources)

The impression one obtains from church and other political histories, however, I have always envisioned as implying that the industrial working class of Europe between about 1860 and 1945 was even more “deviant” from the opinions and practices of the remainder of society. Pat Buchanan in his The Death of the West doubted this — indeed suggesting the working classes even in Europe were socially conservative — but he is unsupported by other sources. During periods of weak class struggle European workers accepted passively  the system as it was, but when the gains mass class struggle could potentially produce were revealed, European workers always constituted the vanguard of social change.

Almost certainly, the proportion of industrial workers in Europe over this period who attended religious services was extremely small, probably 5 percent or less. Contrariwise, amongst the ruling and middle classes, and the rural population, church attendance was typically very widespread (with some exceptions, for example the latifundia regions of interior Spain). From what I can gather, the proportion of all Europeans between 1860 and 1945 attending religious services was reasonably similar to 1990s America. This would mean Europe’s industrial working classes stood much further apart from the rest of society. Although abortion was not legalised outside the USSR and Scandinavia until the 1960s or 1970s, it is probable that the great majority of Europe‘s industrial workers had long supported eliminating restrictions upon it (and upon homosexual relations) since before the Bolshevik revolution.

Moreover, if we extended the survey beyond sexual issues to economic ones, the views of media people in 1990s America would become less “deviant”, whereas those of workers in Europe between 1860 and 1945 would undoubtedly remain equally or more so. Additionally, because media people lack power to transform society — they have zero control either as bosses or producers over fundamental mechanisms of production — their deviant views and practices are extremely unlikely to transform society. Contrariwise, after World War Two the Boom Generation of Europeans (born after the war) confirmed in its social beliefs and practices to that which European workers had established within their own cultures as early as 1860, but was radically different to the remaining sectors of European society in this period.

Hiding the basic threat against which stigmata stories were built

Today, as my brother and I repeated a familiar discussion about the origins of miracle stories like Thérèse Neumann and Marthe Robin, we made a now-unusual lapse into German on a slightly different note:

“Es war eine politische Geschichte”
“Das stimmt nicht! Die Arbeiter war im großen und Ganzen nicht Kommunisten. Die Kirche wollte Sankte Thérèse!”

The problem with what my brother says is that, whilst in ordinary circumstances German workers did not show overt sympathy or any evidence of support for revolutionary socialism, when other workers demonstrated what class struggle could achieve, German workers overwhelmingly supported revolutionary socialism because they saw that it was infinitely better for the majority than capitalism.

It was this support that allowed the Bolshevik Government to survive against the intervention of 22 foreign armies. The threat of revolution at home compelled the ruling classes of Western and Central Europe to compromise. Part of the resulting compromise was withdrawing from Russia and not hosting a White Russian government-in-exile.

When the stigmata stories of Thérèse Neumann (and Marthe Robin) were developed, the Catholic Church was living in fear of a workers’ revolution in Western Europe that would have expropriated the Church’s immense wealth, and left its priests and bishops under mortal threat of execution. The peasantry stood important in the success or failure of workers’ revolution. If the workers were able to give the peasants land by expropriating the big landowners (including the Church), they would support it, but if they failed to do this, the peasantry was very likely to support the Church. Given the uncompromising hostility between the Church and the workers, the peasantry was extremely critical in the battle for power.

Even if it is unlikely any peasant shifted from the side of the workers to that of the Church upon observing supposed miracles, repeated exposure, like that to the struggles of workers on the other side, was bound to have effects. This would probably be true even for merely promoted miracles in the local area.

In the case of the Fatima Marian apparition, there is no doubt of course that it was aimed at the threat of workers’ revolution expropriating the Church. As Portugal in 1917 had a much less developed working class than Germany or France, it is logical that the threat loomed even larger even if less explicit in these slightly later stigmata miracles.