Brother Against Brother

For the first time ever, a Roman Catholic archbishop took to the radio last Sunday to denounce a fellow member of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy. It was another example of how strong feeling on the war is beginning to run, for the target of the broadcast was a nationwide radio speech made July 6 by Pope Pius XII's friend and former assistant at the Vatican, Bishop Joseph Patrick Hurley of St. Augustine.

Bishop Hurley proclaimed Naziism a worse enemy than Communism, clearly favored U.S. intervention. Last Sunday Archbishop Francis Joseph Beckman of Dubuque militantly took issue with him on both points.

Archbishop Beckman denounced the "dictatorship pseudo-officially canonized by a brother cleric"--a reference to Bishop Hurley's suggestion that President Roosevelt alone should decide upon U.S. entry into the war. He assailed the practice of "the secular and even the Catholic press to place official interpretations on the pronouncements of clerics newly returned from abroad" (i.e., Bishop Hurley, who until last fall was stationed at the 'Vatican). He bemoaned the fact that "sadly enough the flagpole on the White House lawn has never lacked for clerical adornment."

The Archbishop also cried out against "the coddling of Communists in every responsible branch of our Government," said that Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" had "a phony ring" abroad, called them a slogan which "is just another mask for the imperialism of the New World." Perhaps significantly, his speech was replete with quotations from Cardinal O'Connell of Boston, dean of the U.S. hierarchy.

Archbishop Beckman's speech set another precedent: he is the first Catholic of his rank openly to show himself an anti-Semite. Emphasizing his words so that they sounded even more anti-Semitic than the text indicated, he echoed some words of Father Coughlin: "Too long . . . the American people have been led around by the nose . . . robbed, kicked and abused by the high-and-mighty masters of international finance. ... It is high time that the Catholic Church in particular and all good Christian-Americans put aside their differences, unite in the common cause of Americanism and . . . put out these pirates."

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