The Vienna School of Ethnology and the Vatican, 1923–1945: selected chapters

Abstract

This study is devoted to the question of what position the main representatives of the Vienna School of Ethnology occupied in the Vatican. Based on materials from the Vatican archives, it discusses in which areas and to what extent Father Wilhelm Schmidt and his entourage influenced the Roman Curia. Separate chapters are devoted to the Vatican missionary exhibition of 1925, thanks to which the Ethnological Missionary Museum was subsequently opened in the Lateran Palace. Pius XI and Wilhelm Schmidt are considered representatives of early urgent anthropology. A very important question is whether it was Schmidt who pushed the Holy Office to act against Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. In addition, the contextualization of Schmidt’s manuscript «The Most Ancient Humanity» (German: «Älteste Menschheit») discovered in 2013 sheds new light on the process of preparing an encyclical against racism. The last section examines a notebook from the archives of the Society of the Word of God in Rome. It provides evidence that at the end of World War II, Schmidt, while in exile in Switzerland, with the help of the Vatican, secretly supported a resistance group fighting for the independence of Austria.