Pope Pius XII excommunicates all communist Catholics | July 13, 1949 | HISTORY

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 …