8.     Fruits of the Agreement: Skin‑deep Catholics

A pact made under the conditions stated above in section V would bring immense benefits to Com­munism, If it were to be fulfilled exactly, for new generations of ill‑prepared and lukewarm Catholics would arise, perhaps reciting the Credo with their lips, but with their minds and their hearts saturated with all the errors of Communism. In short, they would be Catholics only in appearance and on the surface, and Communists in the most profound and authentic layers of their mentality. After two or three generations formed in such a coexistence, what would be left of Catholicism in the peoples?

May we make a comment on this subject which confirms these assertions. It concerns the very grave pastoral and practical risks which result sometimes from the unavoidable acceptance of the hypothesis even when the thesis is faithfully adhered to.

While enjoying full liberty in the present‑day laicist regime born of the French Revolution, the Church has seen millions and millions of men fall away from her fold. As His Excellency the Most Reverend Monsignor Angelo Dell'Acqua, Substitute Secretary of State, said, "as a consequence of the religious agnosticism of the States, the sense of the Church" (has become) "weakened or almost lost in modern society." (Letter to His Eminence Cardinal D. Carlos Carmelo de Vasconcellos Motta, then Archbishop of Sao Paulo, on the occasion of Thanks­giving Day of 1956). What is the ultimate reason for this fact? Public institutions, as we said before (cf section VI, no. 1), exert a profound influence over the majority of men. They accept these institutions habitually, and even without perceiving it, as a model and source of inspiration for their whole way of thinking, of being, and of behaving. And laicism, in being adopted by the States, entirely led astray an immense number of souls. This certainly would not have happened if Catholics had been much more zealous in taking advantage of the unrestricted liber­ty of word and action which they enjoy in the liberal regime in order to spread and defend all of the teachings of the Church against the lay State. How­ever, they did not take advantage of this liberty as much as they should have, because in very many cases, by being in a laicist atmosphere, they lost the living notion of the tremendous evil that laicism is. They continued to affirm rarely, and merely with their lips, the antilaicist thesis; however, they ended up by considering the hypothesis normal.

Now, in a Communist regime, in which the errors are inculcated by the State with much more insist­ence than in the laicist, liberal regime, either souls will allow themselves to be swept along in an even much greater profusion or they will act against these errors much more than they did against the influence of laicism from the French Revolution until the present day.

Anyone who believes that this would be tolerated by any Communist regime has not the slightest idea of what Communism is.