Last week, I went to a meeting at Conway Hall on the subject of a National Investment Bank; I do get around. Conway Hall was once, for a Catholic, suggestive of dangerous freethinking; not so much now. On the way out, there was a sale of old books and pamphlets from the Rationalist Press library, which had its home here. I am a sucker for this sort of thing and unhesitatingly spent 50p on the “Report of the International Congress, September 9-13, 1938 of the World Union of Freethinkers.”
It was a riveting read, not least because those attending were perfectly well aware of the dangers that were to be realised the following year. Among the resolutions passed at the congress were the following: “Deeply affected by the situation in which Czecho-Slovakia, a free and democratic country of the highest culture has been placed by an aggressive power, [it] protests against the brutal and hypocritical intervention by a foreign country in the internal affairs of this country”; and, more poignantly: “The Congress expresses its horrified condemnation of the persecution of the Jews.”

But while the freethinkers gunned for fascism, it saved most of its firepower for the old enemy: the Church. And although I had intended to have a good laugh at the account of the session on “The Present Religious Reaction and the Menace of the Vatican,” I felt salutary embarrassment to be reminded of some less happy aspects of the Church’s past, of which the Concordat with Hitler was the most obvious.