Orthodox Russia for strengthening its Balkan policy. The camp of the Habsburgs was shared by Germany, which, having long given up the “Kulturkampf,” made use of the Catholic centre for the support of its autocratic policy, and adroitly promoted the Catholic element at home and abroad, especially in Turkey and the Far East. The other side comprised Protestant England, anti-clerical France, and Orthodox Russia, and this alone inevitably proved a determining factor with Conservative Vatican circles at the very outset. Orthodox Russia, before the war, was regarded by Catholic Rome as a bogey penetrating into Central Europe, struggling for influence in the Balkans, and harbouring designs against Constantinople and St. Sofia, while the whole of the Byzantine heritage—which incidentally France and England had assigned to Russia by the agreements on the dismemberment of Turkey in the spring of 1915—was no longer merely a bogey, but an immediate danger hovering above Rome. Anti-clerical pre-war France, which had carried out a breach with Rome, had ruthlessly imparted a lay character to schools, administration, and army, and had no representatives at the Vatican, would, in the opinion of several important Catholics, have expiated this policy by sustaining a defeat. Liberal England, the centre of unrestricted religious research and development, from which Protestant thought was disseminated throughout the world, formed a new danger to the policy of the Vatican. In fact, the Entente contained only two elements—and they were comparatively weak—which provided a counter-argument to these considerations on the part of the Vatican: Catholic Belgium, with its eminent Cardinal Mercier, and the French Catholics, with whom, however, their nationalistic tradition and their Conservatism soon proved too strong for their Catholicism, and resulted in openly expressed dissatisfaction with the attitude of the Vatican. Then the Entente was joined by anti-Vatican Italy which, during the war, never ceased to carry on its old struggle with the Vatican, and in the London Pact inserted an article making it impossible for the Vatican to take any share in the peace negotiations, and thus frustrating one of the chief aims of Vatican policy during the war.
When the United States entered the war and the Russian revolution broke out, the objections of the Vatican to the Quadruple Entente were strengthened by the final arguments which, as a matter of fact, had exerted an influence from the very beginning: Wilson’s democratic ideology and his struggle
