"Spiritualty We Are Semites"

This week listeners at Europe's 36,000,000 radio sets might have heard New York's Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman preaching civil disobedience. The Archbishop's OWI broadcast (his first), rebroadcast by BBC, eloquently urged Hungary's nine million Roman Catholics* to disobey their Government's new anti-Semitic decrees.

Said Monsignor Spellman:

"Almost on the feast of Pentecost (May 28), the day on which the Church of Christ emphasizes the supranational, supraracial character of her mission, we learned that the Government of Hungary had agreed to enforce against the Jewish people a code of discriminatory laws. We were told that this unhappy segment of Israel in Hungary is being herded into ghettos after its homes and its shops had been systematically looted and pillaged.

"This announcement has shocked all men and women who cherish a sense of justice and of human sympathy. It is in direct contradiction of the doctrines of the Catholic Faith professed by the vast majority of the Hungarian people. It is a negation of the noblest pages of Hungarian history and cultural tradition. . . .

"It seems incredible, therefore, that a nation which has been so consistently true to the impulses of human kindness and the teachings of the Catholic Church should now yield to a false, pagan code of tyranny because of blood and race. How can men of good will fail to heed those solemn words of Pope Pius XI: 'Abraham is called our patriarch, our ancestor. Anti-Semitism is not compatible with the sublime reality of this text. It is a movement in which we Christians cannot share. Spiritually we are Semites.'

"To this day, the coinage and the postage stamps of the country bear the figure of Mary, the Mother of Mankind. It would be all the more tragic, therefore, if a people so devoted to Mary, the Jewish Maiden who was the Mother of the Messiah, freely countenance cruel laws calculated to despoil and annihilate the race from which Jesus and Mary sprang.

"It is incredible that a people with such profound Christian faith, with its glorious history, with the oldest parliamentary tradition of the Continent, would join in a hymn of hatred and willingly submit to the blood lust and brigandage of tyranny. No man can love God and hate his brother. No one who hates his brother can be a faithful follower of the gentle Christ."

* The 1,000,000 Roman Catholics in Texas and Oklahoma last week were commanded to cooperate with Protestants and Jews, Purpose: to help rebuild "a broken civilization." The unusual order was mainly the work of San Antonio's Archbishop Robert Emmet Lucey, but the six bishops in the area also signed it. Wrote the prelates: "For Catholics this is a c ommand."

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