President, Pope & Peace

Myron Charles Taylor is 67 years old and has been in delicate health since an operation for gallstones 15 months ago. Only a matter of supreme importance would have taken President Roosevelt's personal envoy back to his post at the Vatican last week. Such a matter, beyond doubt, was the message Envoy Taylor bore from his President to Pope Pius XII.

Myron Taylor alighted at Rome's airport late one afternoon, weary from a Clipper flight across the Atlantic, a long conference with Ambassador to France Admiral William Daniel Leahy in Barcelona, another exhausting flight to Rome.

He went early to bed. Next morning he was up betimes and off to the Vatican for a conference of nearly two hours with Papal Secretary of State Luigi Cardinal Maglione. That afternoon he spent an hour and ten minutes with the Pope.

To reporters who wanted to know what his message was, Envoy Taylor had only one answer: "I am the message." Not a word leaked out of the Vatican about the subject of the conversations. Italian newspapers were forbidden even to mention Myron Taylor's name--a prohibition that was soon violated by fire-eating Editor Roberto Farinacci of Regime Fascista, who heatedly hissed that Envoy Taylor had come to get the Pope's approval of President Roosevelt's war aims.

That may have been so, but peace aims would have been a better guess. The Roosevelt-Churchill eight-point program, issued after their meeting last month, was strikingly similar in essential philosophy to the five "precepts for the conclusion of a lasting and just peace," which Pope Pius broadcast last Christmas Eve. In only one important point did the two programs differ: the Pope failed to condemn "Nazi tyranny."

That the Pope would take a strong stand against Nazi Germany, while refusing to take a stand against Godless Communist Russia, was perhaps too much to expect. But if the President, as spokesman for the world's democracies, and the Pope, as spokesman for the world's Catholics, could agree on one program of peace aims, then each would gain a valuable moral ally. Not only in the U.S. and Latin America, but in France, Spain, Portugal, and even in Italy and Germany, Catholics would be influenced. As for Russia, she could do little but subscribe to the program.

The Pope's mind was on peace. This week he issued a solemn call to prayer for peace during October. Said Osservatore Romano, organ of the Vatican: "May this solemn supplication asked by the Pope serve to hasten the prophetic day when all humanity . . . will find again . . . true prosperity of both individuals and nations."

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