Clerical fascism is an ideological construct that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with theology or religious tradition. The term has been used to describe organisations and movements that combine religious elements with fascism, support by religious organisations for fascism, or fascist regimes in which clergy play a leading role. For Catholic clerical fascism, the term Catholic integralism is sometimes used.

Examples of dictatorships or political movements involving elements of clerical fascism include those of Antonio Salazar in Portugal, Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, Ante Pavelic and the Ustashe in Croatia, Miklos Horthy in Hungary, the Iron Guard movement in Romania, and the government of Vichy France. The regime of Francisco Franco Bahamonde in Spain has been described by some as clerical fascist, especially after the decline in influence of the Falange beginning in the mid-1940s. With the exception of the Croation Ustashe movement, scholars debate which other examples in this list should be dubbed, without reservation, clerical fascist.

Some scholars consider certain contemporary movements to be forms of clerical fascism, including Christian Identity and possibly Christian Reconstructionism in the United States; some militant forms of politicized Islamic fundamentalism; and militant Hindu nationalism in India (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party).

See also:

• Ustashe
• Iron Guard
• Fascism section on fascism and the Church
• Theocracy

Further reading

• Randolph L. Braham and Scott Miller, The Nazis Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, [1998] 2002). (ISBN 0814327370)

• Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991). (ISBN 0080410243)

• Nicholas M. Nagy–Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania (Iaşi and Oxford: The Center for Romanian Studies, 2001). (ISBN 9739432115)

• Charles Bloomberg and Saul Dubow, eds., Christian–Nationalism and the Rise of the Afrikaner Broederbond in South Africa, 1918–48 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). (ISBN 0253312353)

• Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance (Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner, 1995). (ISBN 1555875351)

• Ainslie T. Embree, ‘The Function of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation’, in Accounting for Fundamentalisms, The Fundamentalism Project 4, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 617–652. (ISBN 0226508854)

• Partha Banerjee, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and BJP of India (Delhi: Ajanta, 1998). (ISBN 8120205042)

• Walter K. Andersen. ‘Bharatiya Janata Party: Searching for the Hindu Nationalist Face’, In The New Politics of the Right: Neo–Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies, ed. Hans–Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 219–232. (ISBN 0312211341 or ISBN 0312213387)

Vatican policy

• Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of Dictators 1922–1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973). (ISBN 0340023943)
• Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000) (ISBN 0253337259)
• Livia Rothkirchen, ‘Vatican Policy and the ‘Jewish Problem’ in Independent Slovakia (1939–1945)’ in Michael R. Marrus (ed.),The Nazi Holocaust 3, section 8, Bystanders to the Holocaust (Wesport: Meckler, 1989), pp. 1306–1332. (ISBN 0887362559 or ISBN 0887362567)