Conservative Catholicism and American Philanthropy

This chapter focuses on political theorist Waldemar Gurian, one of the first Catholic émigrés to return from exile to visit Germany in 1948. During the occupation period and the early 1950s, Gurian utilized U.S. wealth to fund a stream of publications, lectures, and educational programs intended to establish a union between the United States and Europe's Catholics. His writings depicted the United States as the guardian of Catholic ideals, autonomy, and communities and insisted that an alliance with the United States presented the only effective path toward defeating Catholicism's ultimate enemy, the Soviet Union. With the massive support of the American diplomatic and cultural apparatus, Gurian and other émigrés worked to popularize these ideas among German Catholics. By the mid-1950s, their efforts helped forge an alliance between Catholics, West Germany, and the United States, a bond that became the backbone of the Cold War effort in Europe.