In the summer of 1938, between the tragedy of Munich and that of Prague. Pacelli went to preside at the Eucharistic Congress at Buda-Pesth. He was housed royally in the royal castle, and the fleet-less Admiral Horthy had long and very cordial conversations with him. Hungary is counted a Catholic country because 64.9 of its population is described as Catholic. It is Fascist, but as the star of Mussolini paled before that of Hitler, Horthy had linked the fortune of the state he despotically controlled with that of Germany. German armies could march through Hungary or use its stretch of the Danube whenever they needed. It had been unjustly treated at Versailles, and it looked to Hitler as it had earlier looked to Mussolini, to recover for it a large and rich slice of Yugo-Slavia. It was another of Hitler's bloodless victories and, as he had the sense not to interfere with Hungary's Church or institution's, the Papacy was content. It was one more Catholic Fascist state for the grand alliance, and Czecho-Slovakia was already doomed in the eyes of thoughtful observers.
The year 1939 then opened with very grave anxiety in all democratic lands. What would be the feeling of the Black International outside those countries?
You have only to turn back a few years and compare its feeling at the time when, at the beginning of 1930, Pacelli virtually took over the rule of the Church. Then the Church of Rome was disintegrating more rapidly than ever before. The steady loss by leakage until 1914 had been succeeded, as I showed, by a catastrophic loss of between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 in about ten years. Russia, the principal source of the new corroding force, had made good and was preparing to offer to the world something which Rome had always declared impossible: a great civilization built without the least religious inspiration, for no one questions that the constructive class in Russia was entirely atheistic. Without anything that could justly be called persecution of religion this class had communicated its atheism to something like 100,000,000 people within its own frontiers, won tens of millions in China and even French Indo-China and Siam, and crossed the Pacific and devastated the Church from Mexico to Patagonia. The same influence had pervaded Europe and had in Germany and the southern half of the continent detached tens of millions of Catholic's from the Church. I have given the figures and the evidence.
Such had been the situation and the outlook of the Church in 1929. In the ten years of Pacelli's tenure of office as Secretary of State there had been a dramatic change. The triumphant spread of Russian irreligion had been completely arrested, and that country was isolated by a great wall of international hatred and slander. Italy and Spain were again prostrate at the feet of the priests. We will not say that it did not matter two pins to the Vatican whether the men who went to church and sent their children to Catholic schools once more were blessing or cursing the Church in their hearts as long as they obeyed, but we may certainly say that it was regarded by the Black International as a magnificent triumph that the tens of millions of apostates dare not open their lips and that their children were all handed over to the priest. Italy and Spain were once more Catholic countries. Portugal and Hungary were in line, and, while Germany, resisting both threats and blandishments, was still a very unsatisfactory ally, it had at least destroyed the Socialist-Communist force that had made havoc in the Church. The proud anti-Papalism of Czecho-Slovakia was in the dust, and France was on cordial terms with the Vatican. The rot (liberation?) had been stopped in South America, which presented an almost unbroken compulsory-Catholic front, and in the Far East the alliance with Japan opened up a golden prospect of a Catholic monopoly of missions in the one-fourth of the earth over which the flag of the Rising Sun was expected to wave.