Catholicism & Fascism

The first fascist movement to come to power, Italian fascism, did so in a country that was 99 per cent Catholic and the seat of the papacy, and ‘clerical fascist’ movements came to power in another two overwhelmingly Catholic countries, the first Slovak Republic and the Croatian Independent State. Fascist movements and regimes in other European countries also entered into relations with the Roman Catholic Church, and in broader terms, many Catholics, individually and collectively, were closely involved with fascist movements and regimes in the inter-war years. This article analyses the complex relationships between fascism, the institutional church, and Catholics more generally. It examines the initial attitudes of fascist movements to Catholicism/the Catholic Church, the encounter between fascism and Catholicism, and the interests and common enemies that brought them together in this encounter."

• John Pollard, "Fascism and Catholicism"
  The Oxford Handbook of Fascism
  http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199594788.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199594788-e-10

"Fascism is another word for the Catholic right-wing."

• Christopher Hitchens
  

"The advice given by the Pope to individual Catholics and to nations should be remembered, for during the following decade [after WW1] that emphasis on the necessity for strengthening authority, on the blind obedience owed by subjects, and on the duty of everyone not to allow difference of wealth and social ideology (i.e. Socialism) to incite class struggle, was to become the slogan of Fascist Totalitarianism."

• Avro Manhattan, 1947
  The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century, p.68

"In Catholicism I find the absolute completion of Judaism."

• Henri Bergson

Clerical fascism - combines religious elements with fascism, support by religious organizations for fascism, or fascist regimes in which clergy play a leading role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_fascism