Religion: Imprisoned.Ye Visited Me

Back to the Vatican last week flew the only envoy the U.S. has sent to the Holy See since 1867, tight-lipped Protestant Myron C. Taylor. No explanation was vouchsafed for his return. So speculation began buzzing.

When Steel Tycoon Taylor was first accredited to Rome at Christmas 1939, the purposes were obvious: 1) to help Pope and President pursue (in the Roosevelt phrase) “parallel endeavors for peace” during the “phony war”; 2) to tune in on the reports Pius XII got from his diplomatic corps, then the best in Europe. But today Hitler’s armies have packed most of the papal legates back to Rome, and the Vatican, with many more Catholics living under the swastika, has become more and more neutral while the U.S. grew more and more belligerent.

Increasing Axis pressure is making the Pope much more truly “the Prisoner of the Vatican” than his predecessors were from 1870 to 1929. The Vatican radio and the Vatican daily Osservatore Romano are now on an almost exclusive diet of non-controversial items. If Hitler wins, Pius XII may face as unpleasant an ordeal as Pius VII, whom Napoleon hustled away from Rome and kept a prisoner in France from 1809 to 1814.

Protestants, who opposed the Taylor appointment as an infringement of the historic U.S. separation of Church and State, made no immediate move to protest his return to the Vatican, which he left 13 months ago after an operation presumably not expecting to return. But the Christian Century, which led the earlier anvil chorus of objection, editorialized pungently:

“We are left with no alternative but to interpret Mr. Taylor’s return as a diplomatic effort on Mr. Roosevelt’s part to win the Vatican to the support of the Allies by overcoming the long established Papal prejudice against Communism and the Soviet Union. The Vatican has been in a tight place ever since the war began, first because Stalin’s alliance with the Axis embarrassed its relations with both Spanish and Italian Fascism, and now because Hitler’s vast military successes have made him as great a menace to Catholic interests as Stalin formerly was. Can Mr. Taylor show His Holiness how to cut this Gordian knot?”