Religion: C. E. F.

Protestant missionaries followed and profited spiritually by the course of British Empire. Last week in Italy’s Ethiopia, to some 75 Protestant men and women of God came tardy realization that not they but Roman Catholics will follow the course of Italian Empire. For some weeks, Protestant missionaries leaving Ethiopia have found it impossible to reenter. Last week occurred the first expulsions of missionaries, three U. S. and seven British. Upon these, semi-official abuse was heaped from Rome by the Giornale d’Italia which called them “either spy agents or exponents of that dangerous fanaticism of religious disintegration so characteristic of Protest-antism.”

Already about its holy business in Ethiopia last week was a “Catholic Expeditionary Force,” a mission headed by Archbishop Giovanni Maria Emilio Castellani, 49, lately of Rhodes. Under this able Franciscan, Vatican-trained native missionaries, white priests and what the Protestants called “swarms of nuns” were pitching in to “reclaim” 5,000,000 Copts to the Catholic faith, with which the Ethiopian Coptic Church was allied in early times and again for a few years in the 17th Century. From Vatican City came report that Italy and the Church’s C. E. F. will follow the British empire-building policy of nowhere attempting to impose faith by force.