Hmm, this time line sort of sounds like it ended being worse for Catholics than the original timeline, perhaps the worse since the american colonial period where early on just being suspected of being catholic meant you could be legally put on trial and executed if being found guilty of being catholic and in later colonial periods they were simply barred from politics but I suppose someone had to get the short end of stick.
But the Trinitarian Ecumene is a real alternative. It clearly would be the creation of very theologically and spiritually sincere believing Catholics, and not Protestant except in the technical sense that it is among the list of churches the Roman Catholic hierarchy counts as schismatic. The point is Trinitarians did not want to leave the Church, the Church left them, and they conclude, I suppose, that actually the real Church did not expel them, they embody it, and are saving it from abuse and prostitution.
When I was raised as a conservative Catholic I made much of the doctrine, as I understood it, that Catholics could be defined by our acceptance of the Pope's ex cathedra pronouncements...even though already, as a teenager, I found some of these very problematic. The whole doctrine on human sexuality seemed like an instrument of torture to me, yet I felt I must be damned for not accepting it with good cheer. Anyway I went around telling more liberal classmates that if they didn't adhere to the Pope's pronouncements they were not really Catholics. Yep, without any irony, having not seen the appropriate Python sketches, I literally asserted a fanatical devotion to the Pope!
Well, it is always hard for me to be sure I can draw any valid conclusions about "what I would think if I were still a Christian;" I am not a Christian and I have subjective reasons for this and my mentality would be somewhat different in ways I can hardly predict if these reasons were refuted to my conviction. But doing the best I can with a lot of training and reading of CS Lewis and Tolkien etc, my impression is now that a great many defining decisions that I projected a Vatican I (when the doctrine of papal infallibility was first put forth as a confirmed item of Catholic faith, which is by the way pre-POD here of course) model of "the Pope speaking ex cathedra under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit" actually were arrived at by Councils, such as the Council of Trent which established a lot of Counterreformation policy in early modern times. I would think it would be quite natural then for Red Catholics --that is to say, Trinitarians--to revive and recognize these historic facts and find an authentic Catholic identity around doctrine shaped by councils of clergy and laity, and relax the absolutism of anyone's "infallibility." The pre-Vatican councilar reality made the Catholic Church much in the tradition of other religions such as Islam, where it is taken as doctrine that God would not permit a faithful community to arrive collectively at wrong decisions--individuals most certainly could err, sinfully or just by mistake, but providence would ensure that a rightly guided community would arrive at the correct consensus over time and space--with the result that Islamic law, which begun in a quite flexible and rationalistic mode, has gotten frozen on the grounds that rulings made centuries ago had adequate depth of time and space behind them to be certain of their correctness for all time. Ironically, another similar kind of reasoning was adopted by the Bolshevik Party; Lenin's "democratic centralism" said that on any important doctrinal issues, diversity of opinion might exist until the highest party organs had debated the matter; with the majority of Bolshevik functionaries being well trained in doctrine, intelligent, and committed to the cause, one could again be sure the correct doctrine would be hashed out among these luminaries (with due input from the party masses of course) and to deviate from the consensus of the central organs after they had settled an issue would be a sign of some severe flaw--either poor reasoning, or bad faith.
I trust that the Worker's Party is pretty skeptical of taking that kind of logic to its conclusion, and recognizes considerable range of thought and that mere disagreement even with a popular opinion does not in itself prove bad faith--deeds will presumably count for a lot, and whether words are meant to create trouble for its own sake or express a different perspective will be a matter of judgement good comrades must always be challenged to make.
A similar spirit carrying over into the Trinitarian Ecumene would I think, though I am not 100 percent sure I feel, carry over the basic good heart of Catholicism culturally and spiritually, while avoiding the arbitrary and reactionary elements.
So in answer to your comparison of the plight of Catholics in Reds UASR 1930s and '40s, insofar as one defines Catholicism as "a fanatic devotion to the Pope" as I actually did, yes, it is persecuted and criminalized.
But unlike the Reformation period in English speaking countries carrying over to the Wilkes riots in the later 18th century and the Know-Nothings in America a century after that, people who have an essentially Catholic attitude toward theology, general doctrine, and spiritual and cultural practices have a perfectly safe and respected place to go.
Well, I imagine it is a bit of a liability in the Worker's Party and thus in UASR government to be deeply devoted; atheism is preferred strongly--but there are other parties in government than the WP and I am confident even the more actively atheist WP members know or know of quite a few excellent comrades who are so despite, as they see it, being besotten with religion seriously. It will be a puzzlement to some of these atheists to whom religion is plainly a bosses' deception designed to mislead how these comrades can be good, but they darn well know from their deeds before, during and after the revolution they are anyway. Over time I suspect it might become plainer how Christianity can in fact be fully compatible with Red Communism--I am not suggesting a wave of religiosity but rather a growing appreciation that it wasn't entirely the poisoned thing the revolutionary generation assumed, and I am suggesting the Trinitarians along with other characteristic American faiths never die out completely.
I expect in fact that the core of Trinitarians who deeply and sincerely believe in the literal teachings will decline in numbers, but never vanish away...and the penumbra of cultural Trinitarians, people raised in the Church and even some people attracted to it who weren't, who are less sure about the literal truth of God, immortal souls, the Last Judgement, angels, devils, saints active in the world, and all that but still value the gathering, and live in a sort of quantum indeterminacy musing "well, maybe it is true, some of it, in some way, and anyway this is good stuff to think about" will be quite large.
Over time I think it would become uncool, just considered pointlessly rude and mean, to go around actively attacking the solidly faithful--adherence to Rome is a different matter of course, since there there is a reactionary agenda, and Trinitarians will surely regard the Popes as basically all a lot of antiPopes, probably cutting some slack for misguided sincerity to pre-1930s figures on a select basis but all adherents to Rome after 1933 are making a perverse political choice. This would not apply in Catholic countries under bourgeois or worse regimes, where the Trinitarian path is not open and the living spirit of the true Church is still captive and perforce must submit to the Roman curia. I also think Trinitarians would wistfully regard themselves as heirs and custodians of the "true Rome," not a city people live in but the role the central authority of Rome was supposed to play in an uncorrupted Church. They remain Roman Catholics in that sense anyway.
So it comes down to, does one deplore persecution of Catholics because they are Othered--in this sense I still regard myself as a sort of cultural Catholic--there is plenty of harsh and deserved criticism of the abuses of the faith from people from within the family as it were who know it well; when someone who was never of Catholic background starts to opine on what those Papists have got wrong, I tend to be suspicious and skeptical. Though I have heard stuff that sounds fair and spot on; I'm not saying outside perspectives are not valid, just that I have reason to fear quite a few have mixed up in them plain old bigotry. If so, not to worry so much; the UASR is not doing a lot of that. A little, but too many comrades, both atheists who have turned their back firmly and people who still think there is some living spirit there they should not abandon, come from this tradition to let it be steamrollered.
Or does one deplore specifically breaking with Rome itself? Such a person would have a much darker view of what the Reds mean to the Church
as such people would value it.
