Common Cause

During last week's busy days--while he was preparing for the opening of the first Congress in which his supporters may not have clear sailing--Franklin Delano Roosevelt paused to attend to a seemingly small matter. He picked George MacDonald, rich public utilitarian of Manhattan, to head a committee to distribute 3,000,000 bus. of surplus U. S. wheat to non-combatants in Spain. Giving wheat to Spaniards of both sides impartially amounts to friendly aid to Spanish Loyalists, who need bread far worse than Generalissimo Franco's side. As such it is another gesture of democratic solidarity against dictators.

But the President's appointment was still more notable, for George MacDonald is one of the foremost U. S. Roman Catholic laymen, a hereditary papal marquis. In effect the President won a diplomatic ally for his anti-fascist gesture.

Accident it may have been that the President's callers last week included Roman Catholic Bishop James Ryan of Omaha and Rev. Maurice Sheehy of Catholic University; that he appointed Roman Catholic Frank Murphy, Governor-reject of Michigan, to be his Attorney General (see col. 3); that the Pan-American Conference at Lima, so largely the creature of Franklin Roosevelt and Secretary Hull, was praised last week by L'Osservatore Romano, the Pope's daily, after the totalitarian press had belittled it. The significance of these things, planned or unplanned, was that events appeared to be rapidly creating a community of interest between democracies and the Vatican.

No more Roman Catholic than Franklin Roosevelt are Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax who, when they go to Italy this month, are reported planning to visit the Pope and to entertain the Cardinals at the British legation in Vatican City. They know, as does the U. S. State Department, that if the democracies are obliged to set up a bloc to protect their interests from fascist encroachments, the Roman Catholic Church may be a useful ally, not only as a powerful church but as a temporal state with one of the ablest diplomatic corps in Europe. As Franklin Roosevelt well knows, in Washington hard by the British Embassy, a palatial building is now being completed to house the Apostolic Delegation from the Vatican. Should events go so far that the U. S. decides to renew diplomatic relations (broken off in 1868) with the 108.7-acre Vatican State, only a change of name would be necessary to transform the building into a Papal legation.

> The President extended to June 30 the Government's silver subsidy, whereby it pays 64.64-c- per troy ounce for new-mined U. S. metal (world price 43-c-).

> Eamon de Valera, Prime Minister of Eire, accepted an invitation to be an overnight guest, May 7, at the White House. Object of trip: world's fairs.

> In Washington's Sibley Memorial Hospital, Mrs. Roosevelt cut a red ribbon tied around a baby incubator to dedicate a premature birth station endowed by the Variety Club. Said she: "I am not surprised that show people have done this. They are the most generous people I know. . ."

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