During the past 2,000 years, Christianity has evolved from a small group of fishermen recruited on the Sea of Galilee to become the world’s oldest continuously operated religious institution and largest Abrahamic religion. Of all the Christian denominations, including Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism remains the largest denomination.1 In 2018, the population of practicing Catholics was equivalent to the population of the People’s Republic of China, or 1.33 billion adherents. Traditionally Europeans dominated the church (21.5 percent). However, the majority of global Catholics are now composed of North and South Americans (48.3 percent), while the fastest growing communities are in Africa, at more than 17 percent.

This chapter focuses on ideology and collaborationism. The first section suggests that in the autumn of 1940, Baudouin sought to develop a culturally driven ideological alternative to collaboration with Nazi Germany. The second section explores the French Fascists’ lack of support for collaborationism with Italy. The absence of sustained collaboration with Rome meant that there was limited scope for Vichy to slip from involuntary to voluntary collaboration. The relationship between state collaboration and collaborationism with Fascist Italy was, therefore, virtually the opposite of that with Nazi Germany. While short-lived and limited in nature, it was Vichy that led attempts to forge ideological collaboration with Rome rather than the French Fascists. And while collaborationists continued to press for greater collaborationism with the Nazis after the full occupation of France deepened state collaboration with Berlin, Vichy’s pursuit of state collaboration with Rome lasted longer than any pursuit of collaborationism.

What do the religious institutional structures look like in Catholicism and Sunni Islam? In order to trace how religious institutional structures may shape the early evolutions of religious parties, this chapter explores the historical development of structures of religious authority and how they looked when religious parties arose. The focus of the analysis for each religion varies to reflect the historical trajectories of their religious institutions and what such different trajectories mean for the analytical narrative of this book. The analysis proceeds in chronological order and begins with Catholicism to be followed by Sunni Islam. In the case of Catholicism, the focus is less on the evolution of religious institutions and more on how divergence from orthodoxy and orthopraxy are handled within the Catholic Church. As the religious authority in Catholicism, the Church’s handling of divergences is key to understanding how it dealt with the rise of Catholic parties. In the case of Sunni Islam, the focus remains on the historical evolution of religious authority, paying close attention to the parameters of major shifts in the eleventh and early twentieth centuries.

In Chapter 5, I explore Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican and argue that liberation of the enslaved Africans in Brazil, Portugal and Spain was part of a wider Atlantic question. By allying himself with these different constituencies in the Atlantic, Mendonça emphasised that his call for freedom was universal – abolition should go beyond the African frontier to include New Christians and Indigenous Americans. Mendonça’s evidence-based court case challenged the established assertion that Africa was a slaving society that already practised and willingly aided the European Atlantic slave trade. His evidence demonstrated how the mechanics of the Atlantic slave trade operated in Africa, and how violence was used as a strategy for maintaining the institution of slavery. The accused were the Vatican and the Italian, Portuguese, and the Spanish political governing authorities, and Mendonça brought together African accusers from different organisations, confraternities and interest groups. This is a significant reinterpretation of slavery and abolition, revealing a new understandings of Mendonça’s criminal court case in the Vatican as a Black Atlantic abolition movement.

Chapter 6 investigates the debate about the freedom of enslaved Africans in the light of the tussle between Mendonça, his family and the Portuguese Overseas Council. The chapter examines the Crown’s slave legislation of 18 March 1684, seeing it as a direct response to Mendonça’s court case in the Vatican. It looks at the sphere of the Overseas Council’s jurisdiction in relation to the internal affairs of the kingdom, that is, Portugal, and its attempt to overturn Mendonça’s court case verdict in the Vatican via a discreet anonymous letter. It examines how Mendonça marshalled his legal arguments to uphold the Vatican’s verdict . The chapter argues that the court case was a tussle between Philipe Hari I and João Hari II of the House of Ndongo and the Overseas Council, which vetoed a decision that Philipe Hari I would continue payment of baculamento, that is, make tax payments in enslaved people. I contend that Mendonça, in taking his criminal court case to the Vatican, sought not only the abolition of African slavery and liberty for Indigenous Americans and New Christians, but also to shake off the burden of his own family’s involvement in the slave trade.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

This chapter focuses firstly on the expansion of internment and confinement between 1915 and the beginning of 1917 in Europe and outside it. It traces the differences among the various belligerents in the treatment of enemy aliens, the living conditions in the camps, and the national, gender and generational composition of the inmates. It also concentrates on the one hand on the popular pressure in support of the wholesale internment of enemy aliens and, on the other, on the broadening of the humanitarian activities pursued by international non-governmental organization such as the International Committee of the Red Cross that actively promoted the exchange of prisoners of war and civilian internees. The second part of the chapter addresses the spread of a nationalistic economic discourse that boosted the intensification of the economic war and the attack on enemy aliens' property with the creation of new state bureaucracies and the beginning of the liquidation of sequestered assets. The chapter shows how the capacity of the state to enforce such policies was continuously put to the test by the effect of the war on politics and by its military evolution.

The Vatican was one of the seminal Cold Warriors, rejecting communism as early as the 1840s. It had hoped for the “containment” of Soviet-style expansionism into Europe during World War II, i.e. even before the United States adopted that term into its official Cold War vocabulary in 1946-47. However, the Vatican realized by the late 1950s that ideological rigidity damaged its own interest—ensuring the continued existence of functional churches behind the Iron Curtain. Mainly for this reason, it decided to engage with the communist world in the 1960s, although its policies were fraught with political danger and disappointments. Its major success in the European Cold War—the restoration of the Polish Church to independence—only occurred in the context of détente in German-German and European affairs in the early 1970s.