Church & Democracy

Two statesmen talked peace at Hyde Park in the autumn of 1936. One was gaunt, dark-eyed Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli. Papal Secretary of State. The other was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Last year Cardinal Pacelli became Pope Pius XII. Last Christmas President Roosevelt, striving to halt World War II, recalled their talk of peace on earth. To the Pope he wrote: "In their hearts men decline to accept for long the law of destruction forced upon them by wielders of brute force. Always they seek . . . to find again the faith without which the welfare of nations and the peace of the world cannot be rebuilt." To the Vatican as his special envoy he sent Steelman Myron C. Taylor. At that time much hope was built on the Vatican lining up on the side of the democracies. But World War II spread further. Last week the Vatican appeared to be working out its own policy.

On Both Sides. Good Catholics put patriotism next to religion. Because the Catholic Church is as widespread as its name implies, wars often line up one nation's Catholics against another's. Typical last week was Arthur Cardinal Kinsley, Catholic leader in Britain. His Eminence announced that he would give every British Catholic soldier, sailor and aviator (2,250,000 in all) a personally blessed crucifix of bakelite (to save metal) with the crucified figure "sunk into the cross so that it can't catch in the wearer's uniform." Then Cardinal Kinsley went on the air to preach a holy war against the Nazis.

To Britain's warring millions he cried: "You are on the side of the angels in the struggle against the pride of rebellious Lucifer."

Equally typical was the Italian Bishop of Terracina, who in a vibrant pastoral letter to his flock declared: "We ought most fervently to address our prayers to the God of Hosts that he may deign to bless the officers and soldiers and crown their sacrifice and heroism with complete victory. We should particularly pray for the return of the holy places and especially the Cenacle and the Holy Sepulchre, which will receive the veneration due to them only when the flag of Catholic and Fascist Italy flies above them."

Pope & Caesar. To the Catholic Church such declarations are merely the passing contradictions of mundane affairs. In world affairs the policy of the Vatican has long been guided by two main principles:

1) ability to find a modus vivendi with every form of government it has ever encountered (exception: Communism);

2) never to become identified with any one government, or type of government. The projection of this policy under recent conditions has led the Vatican into steps not foreseen by the democracies.

To French bishops Pope Pius XII fortnight ago sent a letter, in which he spoke to quasi-fascist France as kindly as he did to the Polish hierarchy and faithful last autumn. The Pope predicted that God would "bring about reawakening of the entire nation." Last week the Vatican let it be known that negotiations for a new concordat were "progressing satisfactorily" with Germany, thanks to Nazi approval of the patriotic loyalty of German Catholics since World War II began.

Still elaborately neutral was Pope Pius himself, though Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, has lately found a good word for the totalitarian way of life, in marked contrast to its pro-Ally attitude in the months before Italy entered the war. Meanwhile the Holy See's endorsement of the Petain regime in France brought it minor benefits, such as the Carthusians' return to their Alpine eyrie, the Grande Chartreuse.

One sure sign of the Vatican's attempt to do business as usual is its dickering with Germany. As Cardinal Pacelli, Pius XII negotiated the German-Vatican concordat of 1933. The Nazis have violated it ever since. Recently the Vatican began trying to clarify the future status of apostolic nunciatures at The Hague and Brussels, the future of German Catholics, the position of Catholics in Austria and Czechoslovakia. But there was a significant omission : relief for the worst persecuted Catholics of all, those in the German slice of Poland. In the interests of diplomacy the Vatican appears willing to let their situation slide until the end of World War II.

Yet Catholics had no hope for a concordat with Germany as favorable as that which went into effect Aug. i between the Vatican and Portugal (a dictatorship friendly to Britain). The Portuguese Government gave back to the Church nearly all the religious property it took over when Church & State were separated, gave civil value to Catholic marriages, promised to let the Church maintain its own schools.

The Vatican in return agreed to appoint only bishops acceptable to Portugal, to regulate missionary activities in the Portuguese colonies, added that "the Church . . . does not propose to take over or even to protect any function that belongs to Caesar, whoever he may be." New Problems. Both for the Catholic Church and for the democracies the continuation of this policy, if fascism makes good its hold on Europe, promised to raise new difficulties. To a Catholic-Fascist-Latin bloc--such as might eventually be formed by Italy, Spain, Petain's France and Portugal--the Church could not in its own interests refuse moral support. It could not remain hostile even to Germany if the Nazis moderated their hostility to Catholicism.

U. S. Catholics already sense that possibility. The Commonweal, U. S. Catholic liberal weekly, thus touched on it: "The Church obviously cannot choose for States a temporal form of government to support or condemn. . . . An operating secular government, on the other hand, necessarily has a temporal form and organization which makes the structure of other governments of great political importance, since their form will have an effect on itself.

The rise of the dictator States has brought two problems of this kind. The relation of the Church to the dictatorships has to be carried to some tolerable solution. The relation of the dictatorships to non-dictator nations like our own has to be resolved. . . ."

This relation may prove as painful to the Church as it is to the democracies. Two-thirds of the world's 331,500,000 Catholics live in Europe under the dictatorships. By contrast there are only 21,500,000 Catholics in the U. S., but the U. S. is by far the Church's richest province and the Vatican has become increasingly dependent on it for financial support. Now that South America, with its 61,000,000 Catholics, is working in antitotalitarian harness with the U. S., the Vatican may soon be put on the horns of a dilemma. One horn is tacit participation in the spoils of Fascist victory--which patriotic Italian bishops (who, like Cardinal Kinsley, do not necessarily represent the Vatican's views) have steadily urged since June. They want the Vatican to take suzerainty over the Holy Land, should Italy seize it. The other horn would be to oppose the governments to which two-thirds of the Church's communicants owe their temporal allegiance.

How the Vatican may resolve its relationship with the dictators and democracies, no man can tell. Pope Pius last fortnight took refuge in metaphor. "Peace," said His Holiness to a thousand pilgrims, "is a white dove that, finding no place to land over a ground covered with corpses and submerged in a deluge of violence, seems to have returned to that ark of the new alliance, the heart of Jesus, to reappear only when it will finally be able to pluck from the tree of the gospel the green branch of brotherly chanty among men and peoples."

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