Politics After Pilgrimage

A troop of German Catholic youths were still in a holy daze from their visit to Pope Pius XI in Rome, as they came down out of the Alps on their way back into Nazi Germany. Harsh awakening came at the border where waited Nazi border police. No Nazi is permitted to wear a Nazi uniform outside of Germany, but these pious Nazi youths had worn, while genuflecting before Pope Pius, the livery of Adolf Hitler--thus committing a peculiar sort of Nazi lese-majeste. At the border the returning youths were set upon, their uniforms roughly seized and ropes tied around their Catholic middles in imitation of St. Francis of Assisi. Scattered in the scuffle were Holy Year medals, rosaries, scapulars and prayer leaflets.

That this de-uniforming of his young visitors deeply offended Pope Pius appeared last week in the Vatican's official organ, Osservatore Romano, expressing "pained disgust" at the fact that Germans who had "spent a few days in the residence of a sovereign with whom the Reich is in relations of friendship, should be punished as if they had committed a sin. . . . Christ also received a rope when He was arrested, questioned, attacked and mocked because He was accused of having indulged in politics after a pilgrimage of love and redemption."

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