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3 “NO O QUARTER UARTER CAN AN BE E GIVEN IVEN” Catholics, Communists, and the Construction of the Public Interest O n November 24, 1936, a St. Mary’s College student from North Beach named Joseph L. Alioto delivered a prize-winning speech in San Francisco . Alioto would go on to graduate in 1937 and then to earn a law degree at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In an address entitled “The Catholic Internationale” to the St. Ignatius Council of the Young Men’s Institute, Alioto, who would later be elected mayor of San Francisco, warned his audience: “Communism has attained the position of a universal power [and] stands today as a cancer in the world’s social organism.” Given its international scope and its appeal as a “counterfeit religion,” only a true religion “that is likewise international,” he argued, would be able “to cut away this cancerous growth . . . There is only one power in the world which answers that description: the Roman Catholic Church. The battle lines . . . are clearly marked: It is to be the Catholic Internationale arrayed against the Communist Internationale ; Rome against Moscow; Christ against Anti-Christ.”1 Alioto’s speech propelled him into the front ranks of Archbishop John J. Mitty’s Catholic Action “crusade.” Participants called themselves “soldiers” enlisted in the cause of “Christ the King,” and they took their cue from the archbishop’s urging that “no quarter can be given” in the battle against communism. The struggle between Catholic Action activists and the Communist Party profoundly influenced the debate over how to define the public interest in San Francisco from the early 1930s through the 1950s. During this period, the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco contained more than 400,000 Catholics living in thirteen Bay Area counties from Santa Clara in the south to Mendocino in the north, organized into 174 parishes “NO QUARTER CAN BE GIVEN” 45 served by 600 priests. Catholic leaders claimed that the city’s sixty parishes embraced fully half of San Francisco’s population, but a Census Bureau count made in 1936 put Catholics at 28 percent of the population and 68 percent of all church members. While the size and proportion of San Francisco’s Catholic population cannot be described with complete assurance, there is no doubt about the city itself, which increased in size from 634,394 to 775,357 during the period. Only Los Angeles among Western U.S. cities ranked higher in population than San Francisco; number 11 in the nation in 1930 and 1950, it had twice the population of Seattle in 1930 and was 25 percent larger than Houston (number 14) in 1950.2 Religion was intertwined with ethnicity in the history of San Francisco during the 1930s and 1940s, but the city’s ethnic and religious makeup then was dramatically different from what it is today. During the Depression and World War II years, Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, their children, and their grandchildren made up nearly two-thirds of a population that was 94 percent of white European background. Not all of those Irish, German, and Italian San Franciscans were Catholics, but Catholics were predominant in the blue-collar workforce, and they filled executive, middle-level, and lower-echelon positions in business, government, and the professions. Not all Catholics practiced their religion, but a sizeable number—a “critical mass”—of the city’s Catholics took their faith seriously by attending Sunday Mass, by providing financial support to their parish churches and the archdiocese, and by participating in outdoor neighborhood and citywide religious ceremonies. Devout Catholics brought their faith-based convictions to bear in the public realm, as well.3 Catholic activism in San Francisco’s public life did not begin in the 1930s; rather, it evolved by means of episcopal leadership and lay initiative in response to the encyclical letters of popes Leo XIII, Pius X, and Pius XI. And the popes’ doctrinal pronouncements were themselves intended as religious resources to be deployed in a transnational struggle against socialism, communism, and other expressions of the “modernism” that appeared to threaten Catholic Christianity . Archbishops Patrick W. Riordan (served 1884–1914), Edward J. Hanna (served 1915–1935), and John J. Mitty (served 1935–1961) recruited and trained new priests; enlisted laymen and laywomen in the work of the church; built new schools; and used sermons, homilies, and the archdiocesan weekly newspaper, The Monitor, to communicate the meaning and the significance of the papal encyclicals and to implement Catholic...

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