INTERNATIONAL: The Vatican and the Peace

Pius XII last week used his annual Christmas message to expound the Vatican’s views on world politics. This was the first of six wartime Christmases at which Fascist guards have not stood ominously at every entrance of Vatican City. And this time, without giving democracy direct support,* the Pope clearly lined up the Roman Catholic Church with a democratic organization of the postwar world.

Pouring his pontifical periods in precise Italian into the microphone in his library, Pius XII declared: “Beneath the sinister lightning of the war that encompasses them, in the blazing heat of the furnace that imprisons them, the peoples have . . . awakened from a long torpor. . . . Taught by bitter experience, they are more aggressive in opposing the concentration of dictatorial power . . . and call for a system of government more in keeping with the dignity and liberty of citizens. These multitudes . . . are today firmly convinced . . . that had there been the possibility of censuring and correcting the actions of public authority, the world would not have been dragged into the vortex of a disastrous war. . . .

“The Church has the mission to announce, to the world, which is looking for better and more perfect forms of democracy, the highest and most needed message that there can be: The dignity of man. . . .”

But Not Communism! Having thus as a matter of foreign policy described the Roman Church, once the staunch defender of the divine right of rulers, as an organ of democratic society, Pius XII was at lengthy pains to make plain that by democracy he did not mean Communism: “[The State] should in practice be the organic and organizing unity of a real people. The people and the shapeless multitude (or as it is called the masses) are two distinct concepts. The people lives and moves of its own life energy. . . . The masses, on the contrary, wait for the impulse from outside, an easy plaything in the hands of anyone who exploits their instincts. . . .”

United Nations. The Pope then laid down the kind of peace which the Vatican would support: “The authority of [a society of nations] must be real and effective over the member states in such wise, however, that each of them retains an equal right to its own sovereignty. . . . An essential point in any future international arrangement would be the formation of an organ for the maintenance of peace, of an organ invested by common consent with supreme power … to smother in its germinal state any threat of isolated or collective aggression.”

Hope for the Vanquished. “That any people, to whose government—or perhaps even partially to themselves—the responsibility, for the war is attributed, should have for a time to undergo the rigors of security measures … is quite understandable from a human point of view and in practice will in all probability be inevitable.

“Nevertheless even these peoples must have a well-founded hope—commensurate to their effective collaboration in the work of reconstruction—of being able, together with the other States with equal consideration and with the same rights, to be associated with the great community of nations.”

War Criminals. “No one certainly thinks of disarming justice in its relations to those who have exploited the war situation in order to commit real and proved crimes against the common law, and for whom supposed military necessity could at most have offered a pretext, but never a justification.

“But if justice presumed to judge and punish not merely individuals but even whole communities together, who could not see in such a procedure a violation of the norms which guide every human trial?”

At Teheran, when the Pope’s interest in certain measures was raised, Stalin is supposed to have asked: “How many divisions has he?” The Pope still has no divisions. But with 204 million Roman Catholics in Europe and 107 million in the Western Hemisphere, and with one of the ablest foreign offices in Europe, the Vatican’s views on the peace will be taken into practical account.

* He repeated the words of Leo XIII’s encyclical, “Libertas” (1888): “The Church does not disapprove of any of the various forms of government, provided they be per se capable of securing the good of the citizens.”