Catholic Intellectuals and Transnational Anti-Communism: Pax Romana from the Spanish Civil War to the post-1945 World Order

Abstract This article analyses the conditions and ideas motivating cross-border connectivity among young Roman Catholic intellectuals during the trans-war era of the 1930s and 1940s. It examines Pax Romana, the Swiss-based international association of Catholic students and graduates, as it navigated between fascism and resistance in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during the global conflict of 1939–45. The organisation was headed successively by two young activists from Spain, Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, a legal scholar from Madrid who fought for Franco, and Ramon Sugranyes de Franch, a Catalan literary specialist who went into exile in 1936. Comparison of their parallel careers forms the central narrative cord of the article, illuminating the complex relationship of national to global Catholic fractures between conservative nation-statists and political and social pluralists. The Pax Romana congress held in Spain in 1946 was pivotal in accounting for the transnational legacy of that country’s civil war. The wartime ‘humanist’ critique of Franco’s ‘crusade’ made by key Catholic public thinkers was both disseminated and challenged and its relevance to Europe’s future assessed. Ruiz-Giménez, as its president, used the organisation from Spain to legitimate the country’s regime, aided by sympathetic foreign nation-statists. Sugranyes, in contrast, gravitated in the early 1940s to Fribourg in Switzerland, Pax Romana’s headquarters—via Geneva, Paris and southern France—encountering and allying with progressive Catholic exiles from Italy and Spain and French anti-fascist resisters. Although taking different routes, both men ultimately transcended their nationally rooted religious and political assumptions through dialogue across boundaries.