On July 13, 1949, the Vatican releases its “Decree Against Communism” to the public. The Cold War-era edict, issued by Pope Pius XII on July 1, excommunicates all communist Catholics.
As head of the Roman Catholic church through most of World War II and the first decade of the Cold War—and a fervent anti-Communist—Pius XII authorized the Holy Office to expel from the church any Catholic who joined or even collaborated with “godless” Communists.
Franklin C. Gowen, the acting representative at Vatican City to the U.S. Secretary of State, wrote a letter dated July 15, 1949, describing his meeting with a Vatican representative named Giovanni Battista Montini, who discussed the pope’s decree. Montini described communism as the “irreconcilable enemy” of the Catholic church and all of Christianity.
Since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, with its classless, atheistic underpinnings, communism had posed a profound existential threat to Catholicism. Like his predecessors in the Vatican, Pius XII feared that communism's spread would upset longstanding social order and undermine the foundations of Christian civilization. With Eastern Europe quickly regrouping under the Soviet wing directly after World War II, those fears accelerated. Pius also had personal reasons for his anti-communist leanings. While serving as a Vatican diplomat in Munich in 1919, he had been confronted by communist revolutionaries who had broken into his residence and demanded his car at gunpoint.
Yet, even before Pope Pius died in 1958, many priests—especially in communist-governed countries like Poland and Hungary—ignored the decree and did not bar active communists from the church’s sacraments. Many priests interpreted the decree as applying only to communist leaders rather than rank-and-file members of the party. The decree was revoked with the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
Pius XII, who presided as pope from 1939 to 1958—one of the most challenging periods in modern European history—left a controversial legacy. Critics have derided his failure to denounce the Holocaust during World War II. Defenders countered that Pius (previously Eugenio Pacelli) walked a difficult wartime tightrope, secretly provided sanctuary for thousands of Jewish and Catholic war refugees, and couldn’t verify reports of atrocities. The latter claim was refuted decades later by documentation showing that he knew about mass gassings as early as 1942. In recent years, moves to beatify Pius (a step toward achieving sainthood) have stalled due to the lack of an associated miracle.
