MARYLAND: Wrath Comes to the Archbishop

“We of the United States are fighting side by side with Stalin, the greatest murderer of men the world has ever known . . . the man who murdered the old Bolsheviki, the slayer of millions of his own people, the man who in sheer savagery grinned while 3,000,000 people were dying in the Ukraine for lack of food which he had taken from their mouths. . . .

“I have no more confidence in Stalin than I have in Hitler. [He] is quite capable of turning on the United States, were that to suit his purposes. More than one dog has bitten the hand that fed it.” This outburst from Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley, the spiritual leader of Catholics in Baltimore and Washington, made big headlines in the press, both sacred and profane. The Archbishop spoke before Hitler’s little yellow friends made a treacherously planned attack on the U.S.

Even priests who then agreed with the Archbishop’s outright attitude did not necessarily approve of the Archbishop’s downright expression of that attitude. Practically all U.S. citizens—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—had long felt a twinging distaste for Joseph Stalin the Communist, a twinging admiration for Joseph Stalin the Soldier. After war came to the U.S., all U.S. citizens, including Catholic priests and bishops, had to revalue their feelings about Communist Joe Stalin, who might prove extraordinarily useful in helping the U.S. to pay off the Japanese lor their attack.