Clerical support gave cover for Catholic teaching to be used to justify not only anti-Judaism but outright anti-Semitism, Gallagher maintains. He discovered an unpublished 1940 essay in which Protestant theologian Paul Tillich wrote about his fear that “the Fascist type of clerical anti-Semitism” would do just that—and this was “the type of Father Coughlin and the ‘Christian Front.’” Gallagher writes that through then-popular Catholic Action, the support of priests like Curran and Brophy gave the anti-Semitic activity of the Christian Front the sheen of a lay apostolate.
The book’s narrative sags a bit as Gallagher explains all this, but the story becomes a page-turner when it comes to a groundbreaking investigation of Moran and the Christian Front in Boston. The anti-Semite priests of Brooklyn continued to be players; they visited New England to provide Moran with the clerical cover he needed. On October 24, 1941, Fr. Brophy addressed Christian Front leaders at the Westminster Hotel in Copley Square, declaring that Coughlin “has striven at all times to link up the scattered forces of the Mystical Body of Christ into a single battle line so that with united force, we might remain unwavering against the common enemy.” Gallagher continues: “Brophy did not have to specify who that enemy was, but, going off-script, he explained the obvious. ‘How can any of us today trust the Jews,’ he shouted, ‘when Jesus couldn’t?’”
In 1941, Moran completed his transition into what Gallagher terms an unregistered foreign agent for the Nazi government, a federal crime that the Boston office of the FBI failed to pursue. Moran became a willing tool for Scholz’s campaign to undermine the U.S. military. He screened a Nazi propaganda film glorifying Germany’s army in action, delighting Joseph Goebbels when he learned of the Christian Front audience. He spread unfounded stories of dismal conditions on Army bases to discourage recruitment. He stoked resentment by claiming meat was served to Catholic soldiers on Fridays but that Jewish troops were given time off for Passover. In later talks, he went further, claiming that Jews were given the soft assignments and that they had profited from selling tainted food to the military—strikingly similar to Adolf Hitler’s lies about Germany’s Jews. Moran became so enmeshed in the Nazis’ cause that he spoke out about which of two competing rifles should be standard for the U.S. Army and Marines, advocating for the rifle preferred by German intelligence.
Moran met his comeuppance through a thirty-something Irish-Catholic Bostonian, Frances Sweeney. She adhered to a “forward-looking Catholicism” in which “anti-Semitism was antithetical to the Gospel’s promotion of the law of love,” Gallagher writes. She was an effective communicator and well connected with liberal intellectuals in Boston; she was a secretary to Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks at Harvard. Sweeney founded the Irish American Defense Association to counter Moran’s Christian Front, scheduling its first public meeting at Faneuil Hall on what turned out to be the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Moran arranged for Fronters to arrive early, fill the auditorium, heckle Sweeney, and storm out—a plan they carried out despite the death and carnage in Pearl Harbor.
Much like Moran, Sweeney was backed by a foreign government—British intelligence funded her work. Unlike Moran, Sweeney had no idea of this. Gallagher writes that Sweeney’s funding came through a contact who had to be “a true friend,” that is, someone she trusted. Gallagher was able to discover much about this covert British campaign in the United States, but he could not come up with proof of the contact’s identity.
Sweeney undermined the Christian Front by supplying leads about its activities to newspapers, especially the Boston Herald. She launched a Rumor Clinic to fact-check false, anti-Semitic rumors, sharing her findings with the press. She prompted a Boston Herald story reporting that the Christian Front sold Nazi propaganda books both before and after the United States entered the war. Much condemnation and a showy police raid followed; Sweeney’s modern publicity campaign had clearly won the upper hand over Moran and the Christian Front. She was ahead of her time. As Commonweal wrote in a story published after her death in 1944—she had a congenitally weak heart—she became “Boston’s one-woman crusade against anti-Semitism.”
Gallagher writes that when the Second Vatican Council spoke out in 1965 against anti-Semitism and the notion of Jewish deicide, “The church of Francis Moran was being displaced by the church of Frances Sweeney.” Coughlin, Cassidy, Moran and the Christian Front left a legacy as well. “In so many ways,” Gallagher writes, “right-wing politics has come around to the Christian Front style.”
Nazis of Copley Square
The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front
Charles R. Gallagher
Harvard University Press
$29.95 | 336 pp.
Interested in learning more? Assistant editor Regina Munch also interviewed Charles Gallagher about Nazis of Copley Square for the Commonweal Podcast. You can listen to that episode here: