Religion: Open Letter

In a 10,000-word pastoral letter last month, the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Spain detailed the reasons why they hope the Rightists will win the Civil War (TIME, Sept. 13). To Spain’s Bishops this week was addressed an open letter which few of them would very likely ever see. It was signed by 150 U. S. Protestant churchmen and pedagogs, men of the calibre of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, John Dewey, Dr. Daniel Alfred Poling, Editor Guy Emery Shipler of the Churchman, Methodist Bishop James Chamberlain Baker of San Francisco, President William Allan Neilson of Smith College. Agitated as U. S. churchmen often are with the moral aspects of foreign affairs, the letter signers felt that the Spanish pastoral needed rebutting.

Most shocking declaration in the pastoral, thought the letter writers, was that the Civil War is “an armed plebiscite.” Replied their letter: “An ‘armed plebiscite’ is an obvious absurdity, sinister in the contempt it reflects for democratic procedure.” Taking Catholic partisanship in the Spanish war as partisanship against democracy, the U. S. letter asked: “Is this to be the policy of the Catholic Church in other democratic countries, where antecedents of the present Spanish struggle were fought to a conclusion centuries ago, and Church and State permanently separated? . . . Certainly the contrast between the respected and secure position of the Church in America and its troubles in Catholic Spain demonstrates conclusively that separation of Church and State is as beneficial to the Church as it is to the State. Yet we cannot help being disturbed by the fact that no leaders of the Catholic Church in America have raised their voices in repudiation of the position taken by the Spanish hierarchy.”

Reverend Dr. Francis X. Talbot, editor of America, a Catholic weekly, retorted that this was a “perverted attempt to link Catholicism with undemocratic and unAmerican principles.”