The Anti-Catholicism of H. G. Wells

Eye opening! His early sci-fi is not bad, but The Outline of History is a piece of rubbish.

From Catholic Answers

By Karl Keating

Actor Raymond Massey is remembered by most people, if they remember him at all, for portraying Abraham Lincoln twice—first in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, and then in How the West Was Won (1962), where he had a nonspeaking role. But when Massey comes to my mind, the image I have of him is of the dual roles he played in Things to Come (1936), an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s book The Shape of Things to Come (1933). That book, subtitled The Ultimate Revolution, was the sequel to Wells’s The Outline of History (1920), a popular and wide-selling recapitulation of the history of the world, from its geologic origins to the present.

Things to Come was directed by William Cameron Menzies, who would go on to direct Gone With the Wind, and was produced by Alexander Korda, who later would co-produce the Orson Welles movie The Third Man, one of my favorites. The cast of Things to Come included two of the early twentieth century’s top British actors, Ralph Richardson and Cedric Hardwicke. The plot appealed to every boy who had relished Wells’s science-fiction books, such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, and to every man with a martial spirit, since the movie had to do with the aftereffects of a future world war.

Things to Come

The movie’s story begins at Christmas 1940 and is set in Everytown, which might represent London. Just as festivities end and visitors bid one another good-bye at the home of John Cabal, played by Massey, air raid sirens sound. War has broken out, the sequel to World War I. Unlike the real World War II, this war does not end in six years. It drags on for decades. After an interlude showing relentless battlefield destruction and suggesting war’s futility, the story picks up again in 1970. Western civilization has been destroyed utterly. All national governments have collapsed, and all trade has ceased. Technology has rusted away, and in Everytown people live amid ruins. Only the elderly recall operative machines and electricity. Wells was prescient when, in 1933, he predicted that the next world war would begin at the end of 1940. He was not quite sixteen months off. He was less accurate, fortunately, in guessing how that war would progress.

In his book and in the motion picture based on it (Wells wrote the screenplay), the world is revived by an air dictatorship called Wings Over the World. During the war engineers, mechanics, and scientists manage to isolate themselves from its effects by gathering at Basra, Iraq—chosen by Wells, perhaps, in homage to mankind’s first recorded civilization, that of the Sumerians. These technocrats refer to themselves as “the Brotherhood of Efficiency” and “the Freemasonry of Science.” They are “the last trustees of civilization, when everything else has failed.” Over a course of decades they bring back and perfect technology, taking control of the air and the seas, and eventually reinstitute civilization—which is to say technology cleansed of religious encumbrances—by taking over the many little fiefdoms into which society has collapsed, conquering them not with force of arms but with “sleeping gas,” which allows the new overlords to disarm the many local militias.

The subjugation of Everytown accomplished, the movie fast-forwards to 2036. Everytown has been reconstructed in a marvelous way. Like all other cities, it now is underground, the glory of progress. It appears to be the capital of the new civilization. Chief among its leaders is Raymond Massey in his second role, that of Oswald Cabal, great-grandson of John Cabal (notice the conspiratorial surname). The leadership is readying mankind’s next leap: a moon shot. That term is literal, because the space capsule will not be launched atop a rocket but will be shot out of a gigantic “space gun.”

Cedric Hardwicke’s character, a sculptor named Theotocopulos (perhaps named after the painter and sculptor El Greco, whose real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos), represents those opposed to further progress; they think the world state has produced a society that is hygienic but stale, meticulous but soulless. (In his book The Shape of Things to Come, Wells makes clear that progress to this point involved getting rid of churches, which were “cleared away like dead leaves.”) Theotocopulos incites a mob to head for the launch pad and destroy the space gun because there has been enough progress and it is time for mankind to “rest.” The mob arrives too late, and the capsule heads for a circuit of the moon, carrying Cabal’s daughter and the son of Cabal’s associate Raymond Passworthy, played by Edward Chapman.

In the movie’s final scene Cabal stands on a parapet with Passworthy. They catch a glimpse of the capsule as it passes overhead. Passworthy laments, “Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?” Cabal replies with a Wellsian paean to progress: “Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and its winds and waves, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. And then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.”

The Outline of History

These words are an example of the attitude that underlay The Outline of History. Wells believed human progress to be inevitable. As a materialist and a determinist, he thought of progress mainly in terms of things and their ever wider distribution, but he also thought it necessary and desirable to eliminate prejudice and superstition, both of which, he thought, found their support in religion. Do away with religion, and half the battle for progress is won.

The Outline of History was praised by many historians, not a few of whom shared Wells’s philosophic presuppositions, but it was a work with many weaknesses that left it open to widespread criticism. The most persistent critic was Hilaire Belloc, who in 1926 published A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.” Belloc objected to Wells’s overarching thesis but particularly to his niggling and ham-handed portrayal of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. He said, for example, that Wells devoted more space to ancient Persia’s war with Greece than to Jesus Christ. In a series of two dozen articles that appeared in various Catholic periodicals and eventually were collected in his Companion, Belloc tore into Wells relentlessly, criticizing not just The Outline of History but also Wells the man. Wells responded with six articles of his own but had trouble getting them published. They came out as a fifty-six-page book called Mr. Belloc Objects to “The Outline of History.” Like Belloc, Wells made use of ad hominem attacks. Belloc closed the exchange with another short book of his own, Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History.”

In The Shape of Things to Come, which was a novel rather than a history book, Wells’s anti-religionist posture was not as visible as it had been in The Outline of History. He was dealing with made-up characters, not with real-life figures and actions. Despite that, it seems that his animosity toward Christianity, particularly toward Catholicism, had increased as he aged. His hatreds boiled over in Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (1943), published when Wells was 77. The original edition was brought out in Great Britain by Penguin Books. The American edition was published by Agora Publishing, which also issued such books as Behind the Dictators, a “factual analysis of the religious origins of Nazism and Fascism,” written by L. H. Lehmann, a former Catholic priest and the editor of The Converted Catholic Magazine; Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by Charles Chiniquy, another former priest; and Forgotten Women in Convents by Mary Conroy, a former nun. The dust jacket to the American edition of Crux Ansata describes the book as Wells’s “frank convictions about the meddling policies of the Roman Catholic church. . . . Written in his usual dignified and scholarly style, this latest work of the famous British author is like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room.”

Crux Ansata

Why Wells chose Crux Ansata as the title for the book—which was republished as recently as thirteen years ago—is not entirely clear. The term means “cross with a handle” and refers to what is commonly known as the ankh, a T-shaped cross with a loop at the top. The ankh appears in Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and represents eternal life. Egyptian gods frequently were portrayed holding an ankh in each hand, with arms crossed, or carrying a single ankh by its loop.

This short book—only 116 pages—was written not long after Wells retired from his post of Minister of Allied Propaganda. It begins abruptly and candidly, with the first chapter titled “Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?” He argues that “Not only is Rome the source and centre of Fascism, but it has been the seat of a Pope, who, as we shall show, has been an open ally of the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis since his enthronement. He has never raised his voice against that Axis, he has never denounced the abominable aggressions, murder and cruelties they have inflicted upon mankind, and the pleas he is now making for peace and forgiveness are manifestly designed to assist the escape of these criminals, so that they may launch a fresh assault upon all that is decent in humanity. . . . Why do we not bomb Rome? Why do we allow these open and declared antagonists of democratic freedom to entertain their Shinto allies and organize a pseudo-Catholic destruction of democratic freedom?”

A seminal slanderer of Pius XII

Note Wells’s antipathy toward Pius XII and his characterization of him as sympathetic to the Nazis and unfriendly toward those persecuted by the Nazis, such as Jews. Wells’s attack preceded by twenty years Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy, which generally is regarded as the origin of the many falsehoods disseminated about Pius XII’s actions during World War II. Perhaps Wells is due more of the credit (or blame). Note also that Wells seems unaware that the pope, when he was Cardinal Pacelli, wrote the 1937 encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (“With Burning Concern”) for Pius XI. The first encyclical written in German, it was a clear and extended condemnation of Nazi ideology.

Wells calls Pius XII “the open enemy of everything creative and reconstructive in the world.” He says, “It is necessary to insist upon his profound ignorance and mental inferiority. . . . In the atmosphere in which Pius XII was educated, what chance had he to acquire even the most general ideas about modern biology or modern thought? . . . A modern British or American out-of-work living on the dole and reading the abundant literature of an ordinary public library, can, if he has the curiosity, acquire a knowledge of modern biology and modern thought and modern ways of life incomparably greater than the equipment of any Pope who has ever lived. . . . [T]he Pope, any Pope, is necessarily an ill-educated and foolish obstacle, a nucleus of base resistance, heir to the tradition of Roman Catholicism in its last state of poisonous decay, in the way to a better order in the world.”

(If Pius XII suffered from “profound ignorance and mental inferiority,” it was of a curious sort. He earned a doctorate degree, and his facility with languages was such that he was able to converse in no fewer than ten, including Europe’s most difficult, Hungarian. Wells was not known for facility with any language other than English.)

The curiously shrinking Church

Two-thirds through Crux Ansata Wells makes a strange excursus. He finds it necessary to allege, as one chapter title puts it, “The Continual Shrinkage of the Roman Catholic Church.” He asserts, “The number of practising Roman Catholics is enormously exaggerated.” The Church actually has “contracted into the actively malignant and still dwindling body it is today.”

For this numerical claim Wells relies on the writings of Joseph McCabe (1867–1955), a one-time Franciscan priest who became a Freethinker and Rationalist. During his long life McCabe gave thousands of lectures and wrote hundreds of books and booklets, almost all of them attacks on the Catholic Church and its history. (McCabe was not known for his modesty. In an advertisement for his Complete Outline of History, he wrote, “Joseph McCabe, the author of this 8-volume masterpiece, is considered the world’s greatest authority on history.”)

Wells says McCabe is “one of the most able and interesting and learned of all anti-Catholic writers,” calling him “a Franciscan monk” (the proper term is friar). He says McCabe can be described as “the ultimate Protestant, that is to say he has no scrap of religious belief left in him. . . . He writes with an erudition and an amount of knowledge that put him by himself as the most capable critic the papal system has ever had.” Wells reports that McCabe “emerges with a possible maximum of 180 million Catholics, including a large proportion of children (50 millions) and illiterates, probably 100 millions, in the world population of 2,000 millions. The Pope, [McCabe] says, certainly has not more than 50 million subjects upon this planet who can write their own names.

A few pages later Wells offers a different total, saying, “The Pope is now the head of only about fifty millions of semi-literates scattered about the planet, trailing after them a blind entirely ignorant multitude of ‘Faithful’; a following of ignorant men, women and children that does not exceed at the outside 120 millions all told.” If true, that would have meant that Catholics constituted only five percent of the world’s population, a preposterously low figure. (Today Catholics are 17 percent of the world’s population, the same proportion as when Wells wrote.)

Theology not Wells’s strong suit, either

Wells is no better in theology. Referring to two men who were burned at the stake in 1440 for being accomplices in multiple murders, Wells says, “This, I understand, will cause them considerable trouble at the Resurrection,” an indication of how little he understood basic theology. As for the Resurrection, so for the Trinity. Wells says, “The filioque is a subtle [idea], and a word or so of explanation may not seem amiss to those who are uninstructed theologically. . . . The [Eastern] attitude seems to incline a little toward the Arian point of view [in fact it does not]. The Catholic belief is that the Father and the Son have always existed together, world without end; the Greek [O]rthodox idea is tainted by a very human disposition to think fathers ought to be at least a little senior to their sons,” a grotesque misreading. At least he follows with sound advice: “The reader must go to his own religious teachers for precise instruction on this point.”

Toward the end of Crux Ansata Wells sums up his argument this way: “[O]ur case against the Catholic Church is that, albeit it originated in a passionate assertion of the conception of brotherly equality, it relapsed steadily from the broad nobility of its beginnings and passed over at last almost completely to the side of persecution and the pleasures of cruelty.” This echoes what Wells says early on in a short chapter called “The Essential Weakness of Christendom”: “Christianity early ceased to be purely prophetic and creative. It entangled itself with archaic traditions of human sacrifice, with Mithraic blood-cleansing, with priestcraft as ancient as human society, and with elaborate doctrines about the structure of the divinity. The gory entrail-searching forefinger of the Etruscan pontifex maximus presently overshadowed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the mental complexity of the Alexandrian Greek entangled them. In the jangle of these incompatibilities the Church, trying desperately to get on with its unifying task, became dogmatic and resorted to arbitrary authority.”

This is high dudgeon indeed and may sound convincing to those unread in Church history. Wells repeats a common motif: He sees a pastoral and serene Christianity so long as its Founder was on the scene, followed by centuries of aggrandizement by those who claimed to be his true interpreters. The real Jesus, the social insurgent, becomes lost to history; the Catholic Church becomes a vehicle for the personal advancement of its leaders at everyone else’s expense. It is a glorious picture, appealing to adolescents and those with an adolescent’s command of history, but it falls to pieces if Wells’s claims are researched one by one.

A British “Know Nothing”

Writing chiefly for a British audience in wartime, Wells worries that British Catholics bear allegiance to an Italian dressed in white: “The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church puts the Faith before any other social or political consideration, and the Roman Catholics in any country and under any form of government constitute an essentially alien body.” (This reads as though written by a member of the American Know Nothing movement of the 1850s.) Wells speculates about what will come after World War II concludes: “[I]t will become plainer and plainer that it is no longer a geographically determined warfare of governments, nations and peoples, but the world-wide struggle of our species to release itself from the strangling octopus of Catholic Christianity. Everywhere the Church extends its tentacles and fights to prolong the Martyrdom of Man.” The war is not so much about Nazism or Fascism—certainly it has nothing to do with Communism, which Wells does not mention—but about Catholicism, which is the root of all the other problems.

Wells’s last book was Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945). He meant Mind in general, but the title applies to his own mind as well. The book is a work of despair. Mankind is coming to a purposeless end. In Macbeth’s phrasing, our lives are tales “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is nothing to look forward to and no meaning in what is now past. Gone from Wells is the optimism expressed by Oswald Cabal, the expectation of “conquest beyond conquest.”

Wells died, in August 1946, with no sign of having eased his hatred of the Catholic Church. He had advised his readers, “Fight intolerance with intolerance. We have tolerated the Roman Catholic Church in England for more than a century, believing that it would play a game of candour. We know better now.”

Poor Wells. Wherever he is, he truly knows better now.