The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe by Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch (review)

BOOK REVIEWS651 regime's imposition of autarchy as an economic doctrine, which Richards argues , was done not so much for economic reasons as for cultural ones, namely, to keep out foreign influences and, further, to make Spaniards suffer for having supported the Republic. Much of the regime's rhetoric, and Richards' as well, is biological: liberalism "infects" and the "cure" is hard work and austerity. Furthermore , the Church's view of suffering as necessary for salvation was placed in a political context. The destruction of the Spanish economy by the war and the resultant widespread starvation after 1939, led Franco, with the approval of some clergy, to claim that this suffering was a "spiritual punishment, the punishment which God imposes upon a distorted life, upon an unclean history." Richards has found every embarrassing clerical statement and sermon to back his view, again ignoring those clergy who opposed this rationale, including Cardinal Isidro Goma, the Primate of Spain. As a corrective to Richards' unbalanced views, there is Stanley Payne's objective and measured The Franco Regime (1987). Reading Payne's chapters on the war and the immediate postwar period and comparing them with Richards' book makes one wonder if they are writing about the same period. José M. Sánchez Saint Louis University The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Strugglefor the Soul ofEastern Europe. By Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch. (New York: Geoffrey Chapman. 1999. Pp. xiv, 351. $39.95.) Historians have generally not studied religion, and, as a result, the dynamic impact of religion upon significant events has been underestimated. This book, written by a journalistjonathan Luxmoore, and his wife,Jolanta Babiuch, who is a lecturer at Warsaw University's Institute of Sociology, helps to shed light on the pivotal role that the Catholic Church played in bringing down the Soviet empire. With verve and drama, the authors tell the story of Catholicism's confrontation with Marxist-Leninist ideology in the twentieth century. Using the life of John Paul II, from his birth in Wadowice, Poland, to his present reign as pope, as a thread to weave their story, Luxmoore and Babiuch explain how the Church at first failed to address the problems precipitated by the industrial revolution and thereby helped to open the door to radical ideologies that promised social and economic justice, then suffered horrific persecution at the hands of the ideologists, then endured marginalization as Franklin D. Roosevelt aligned himself with one of the chief ideologues,Joseph Stalin, even after Hitler was going down to defeat, and finally moved to a leadership position in the struggle against Communism under Pope John Paul II and soon brought the Iron Curtain down. The story is interesting and based on church documents and mainly secondary sources, but it is somewhat one-dimensional. It covers church policy, to 652BOOK REVIEWS be sure, and shows where the Church had shortcomings and where it had strengths, but it never really comes to grips with the dynamic role of the Catholic Church in world history. As a result, it fails to explain the fundamental role of religion in sustaining the West against Communism and, by the same token, in weakening Soviet society because the Communists attacked religion and thus cut the taproot of social order. Furthermore, while the study rightly places John Paul II at the head of the drive to bring down the Soviet empire, it does not appreciate that the pope, like earlier popes, still had no troops or weapons to move the Communist authorities, and so had to wait until a leader appeared in the most powerful of the Western states who would take a moral stand against Communism and use the threat of force to back up his words. As it turned out, two leaders emerged: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. In combination with the pope, they abandoned the policy of debilitating compromises with the Communists, and Communist society quickly imploded. The book does make the cogent point that the entire century was largely a struggle between religion and ideology, a fact that most historians fail to grasp as they focus solely upon economics, politics, or national security. However, the authors do not develop and explore their insight. Religious...