INTERNATIONAL: No Dove

Unless Premier Viacheslav Molotov pulls a dove out of his hat addressing a session of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union this week (an unlikely possibility), the last phase of the peace drive petered to a close last week at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. One after the other the world’s Big Men—Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Chamberlain—had reneged, bungled, excused or disqualified themselves from the job of proposing the one Big Plan the world had spent two months hoping for—a Peace Plan.

Last Big Man up was Pius XII. Like some of the others, he had made private peace negotiations. Now, in the first encyclical of his reign, he grieved that “our advice, if heard with respect, was not, however, followed.” Summi Pontificatus accepted War II as an inevitable finish fight, although its author pledged himself to try to “hasten the day when the dove of peace may find on this earth, submerged in a deluge of discord, somewhere to alight.”

A Pope’s first encyclical traditionally establishes the spiritual tone of his reign. Pius’ was to be the restoration of the faith and the re-establishment of the family group. But to non-Catholics the chief interest in the Pontiff’s 13,000 words was not spiritual but political, and politically, even though it despaired of peace now, the encyclical was extraordinary.

Able diplomatist that he is, His Holiness had foreseen that the Allies would fight. He had been “convinced that the use of force on one side would be answered by recourse to arms on the other.” More important, devout Catholic that he is, he knew which side he was for, and, unlike his predecessors during War I, said so.

It certainly did the Allies no harm when 61,000,000 German and Polish Catholics were told by their Supreme Ruler that “the idea which credits the State with unlimited authority” was abhorrent to him. “To consider the State as something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed cannot fail to harm the true and lasting prosperity of nations,” read the Encyclical. Again, the Pontiff wrote that the totalitarian system of government was an idea which “robs the law of nations of its foundation and vigor, leads to violation of others’ rights and impedes agreement and peaceful intercourse.”

Pius also made Nazis squirm on the subject of Poland: “The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization, written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits . . . the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace.”

Throughout the Encyclical, Pius expressed his horror of war in his strongest terms. It was “the baneful seed of violence and of hatred for which the sword today plows the blood-drenched furrow”;

“this Apocalyptic foresight of disaster”; “tragic whirlpool”; “death and desolation, lamentation and misery.” He could only hope that, when victory came to either side, there will be a just peace made without the “temptations of victory.” And to bring that about His Holiness put his trust in those “statesmen who before the outbreak of war nobly toiled to avert such a scourge from the peoples” (evidently not Herr Hitler); and those “millions of souls in all countries and of every sphere who call not for justice alone but for love and mercy” (obviously not the Nazis).

If the “peace offensive” needed anything further to bring it to an end, it was Herr Ribbentrop’s announcement in Danzig that the war was on.