| Crux Ansata | |
| Author: | H. G. Wells |
| Publisher: | Penguin Books |
| Pub Date: | 1943 |
Crux Ansata, subtitled 'An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church' (1943) is one of the last books published by H. G. Wells (1866–1946). It is a scathing, 96-page critique of the Roman Catholic Church.
Crux Ansata was published in 1943, during the Second World War, by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth (Great Britain): Penguin Special No. 129.[1] The U.S. edition was copyrighted and published in 1944 by Agora Publishing Company, New York, with a portrait frontispiece and an appendix of an interview with Wells recorded by John Rowland.[2] The U.S. edition of 144 pages went into a third printing in August 1946.[3]
Wells, then living in London under the regular German Luftwaffe bombings from across the English Channel, extensively attacks Pope Pius XII and calls for the bombing of the city of Rome. He also condemned mixed marriages, the involvement of the church in education, and funding for Catholic schools. He urged Britons to “avoid true and social intercourse with Roman Catholics" stating "We have tolerated the Roman Catholic Church in England for more than a century, believing that it would play a game of candor. We know better now."[4]
The book also forms a hostile history of the Roman Catholic Church, deeply imbued with anti-clericalism. Wells, by then an atheist, had a long history of anti-Catholic writings spanning decades.[5] [6]