Catholics on the Crisis

Isolationists lost a long-hoped-for ally last week when ten official spokesmen for the U.S. Roman Catholic Hierarchy announced their stand on Christianity and the war, formally divorced Catholicism and Isolationism. Instead, the prelates:

1) Declared "we cannot avoid the repercussions of a world cataclysm" (i.e., the U.S. is not isolated).

2) Urged "respect and reverence for the authority of our civil officials" (i.e., the church will not oppose the President's interventionist program).

3) Deplored "the presumption of those who, lacking authority, strive to determine the course of action that the church should take" (i.e., a rap at the seekers of Catholic political backing).

The statement was issued by the ten Archbishops and Bishops on the administrative board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, who were "deputed in the annual meeting of the Bishops of the U.S. to express their mind on the crisis of Christianity"--a crisis they called "the most serious since the church came out of the catacombs."

The document's seven carefully worded pages, crammed with lengthy quotations from Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, are a prime example of ecclesiastical double talk, significant mainly for what they left out.

Thus the prelates impartially called Naziism and atheistic Communism "the two greatest evils of today, which would destroy all spiritual values," but made a distinction between the political systems and the peoples of both Germany and Russia that tacitly permits Catholics to back U.S. aid to Russia. A reference to "enjoying, as we do, a well-ordered liberty in a free country" implied their belief that the Government's policies are being formed by due democratic process. And by studiously omitting from the statement everything that might conflict with these policies (such as the Hoover food plan for Occupied Europe, which 20 prelates, including two present N.C.W.C. board members, endorsed last March) they showed their readiness to keep in step with the Government program.

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