Nos. 29 & 30

In the 15 years of his pontificate, Pope Pius XI has given the world his views on countless holy and mundane subjects, in innumerable informal messages and in 28 encyclicals or circular letters. During his grave illness of the past four months, however, His Holiness was generally thought to have said his last say. But the doughty Pontiff heartened his flock by rallying toward the beginning of Lent, and last week Pius XI released his 29th encyclical, a 13,000-word denunciation of Communism, suddenly and startlingly followed this on Palm Sunday with No. 30, addressed to the faithful of Germany and forecasting a rupture between the Holy See and the Third Reich.

To the world in general, the Pope's blast against Communism was able but not new. Catholics who read an official abstract of the encyclical, issued by the Vatican, found little in it which their priests and publicists had not ceaselessly voiced, at the Pope's orders, during the past year.

It was simply that the Church is against Communism, the theory of which scholarly Pius XI deftly synthesized in four sentences: "The doctrine of Communism was founded on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism previously advocated by Marx, of which the theoreticians of Bolshevism claim to possess the only genuine interpretation. According to this doctrine, there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal and man.

Even human society is nothing but phenomena and a form of matter evolving in the same way. By the law of inexorable necessity and through the perpetual conflict of forces, matter moves toward the final synthesis of a classless society." Offering no concrete alternative to Communism, "Since this is not [the Church's] field," Pius XI nevertheless begged for Catholic "equilibrium of truth and justice" in a passage which liberal Catholics hoped was a rap at Fascism. Since the Church now appears to get along well with Fascism of the Italian variety, the rap seemed to apply to Naziism. Three days later this was amply confirmed when the Pope dispatched to Germany a circular letter so full of dynamite that copies of it had to be delivered to the Reich clergy in the dead of night by trusted Catholic motorists and motorcyclists. Secret police confiscated a few copies but on Palm Sunday priests and bishops throughout the Reich bravely mounted their pulpits, read to the faithful the Pope's blunt rejection of Nazi doctrines of "blood and soil" and his sharp protest at Nazi violations of the concordat which the Church "with grave misgivings" had ratified in 1933 (TIME, July 17, 1933).

Chief current grievance of the Church is that the Reich is outlawing parochial schools, justifying this violation of the concordat by means of elections in which the Church claims that Catholic parents are intimidated. Thus last week in the 80% Catholic Saar and the neighboring Palatinate, parochial schools were declared abolished because only 268 children were registered for them, as against 13,478 for Nazi schools. This and other breaches of the 1933 treaty impelled the lope to threaten last week: "God is our witness that we have no more earnest desire than the re-establishment of real peace between State and Church in Germany. But if such peace is not to come we are prepared to defend our liberties in the name of the Almighty, whose arm has not been shortened."

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