THE TABLET. January 13/7*. 1951
THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA
VOL. 197, N o . 5773
FOUNDED IN 1840
LONDON, JANUARY 13th, 1951
SIXPENCE
PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER
AMBASSADOR TO SPAIN The New Chapter in British-Spanish Relations FACTORIES BEYOND THE ELBE
The East German Five Years’ Plan A WAVE OF “NEO-FASCISM” IN ITALY
The Rise o f the M .S .I . By Giuliano Santoro
A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
Douglas Hyde’s Narration
The Foundation o f Nicholas V
SISTER CELINE RETURNS FROM RUSSIA The Story o f a Nun from the Slave-Labour Camps. By Mollie McGee
THE GATHERING UNITY P RESIDENT TRUMAN, addressing Congress on the state of the Union, told his compatriots :— “The threat is a total threat and the danger is a common danger. All free nations are exposed, and all are in peril ; their only security lies in banding together. No one nation can find protection in a selfish search for a safe haven from the storm.” He said something which still needs to be taken to heart in Europe as well as in America. Pierre Brisson, in the Figaro on Monday, dealt trenchantly with the lingering traces of an intellectual neutralism among the French, which he characterized as the most impudent of all falsehoods, “ since no one supposes that in front of placards on the frontier labelled ‘Neutral territory, No admittance,’ the tanks of the Red Army would be suddenly filled with respect and would halt.”
But, of course, the temptation to want to contract out persists, and it is one of the factors in the rapid revival of nationalist sentiments in Italy that the nationalists and neoFascists suggest that they can keep Italy neutral, where the de Gasperi Government has admitted the nation to the Atlantic Alliance. In so far as the growing strength of Italian neo-fascism—a correspondent describes it on another page —draws strength from the Communists, too much should not be made of it. The Communist Party ranks were swollen with those who had been Fascists before the defeat, and took refuge in the Communist ranks, and who now judge it welltimed and safer to leave the Communists for a nationalist party. What these men have been able to keep all through is their preference for strong totalitarian government, their anti-clericalism, their anti-liberalism, their dislike of the kind of society for which the Western allies stand. What would be much more serious in Italy would be signs of a weakening in the solid majority that put the Christian Democrats in power ; and no part of the policy that Signor de Gasperi’s Government has followed is more under attack than its courageous acceptance of the obligations and the risks of the Atlantic Alliance. It is not difficult for unscrupulous adversaries even to pretend that the oft-reiterated desire of the Holy See for peace carries an implied criticism of what the Christian Democrat Government has done. This can only be said by those who confuse, either wilfully or through stupidity, the love of peace with the love of helplessness. A strong man can be just as anxious to live in peace as a helpless one ; the only difference is that he has a much better chance o f doing so. Peace is the passionate desire of all civilized people, a desire whose very strength in Great Britain contributed very powerfully to the coming of war in 1914 and 1939.
The long history of the Catholic Church has been lived among wars and rumours of wars ; through all the centuries of her dominant influence in Christendom there was a land frontier to the East and dangerous enemies the other side of it ; and there would have been no survival of Europe if the Church had not accepted and blessed the business of arms and given it a very high place as a vocation for a Christian devoting his strength to the common good. The Hope for Peace
The Catholic Parties and Catholic public opinion are at the heart of the majority opinion which, in every country of Western Europe, sees and accepts the elementary truths which President Truman has just repeated. There has been a triumph both of common sense and of the more universal ideas over the pacifist and the nationalist influences which are both present in every Catholic community and have been particularly in evidence in France.
One very old form of French Catholicism goes back in its intense nationalism to the ancien régime, and kept its devotees in opposition to the Third Republic not merely because the Third Republic was anti-Christian but because it also seemed to be corroding and destroying the national life. Another tendency, of much later date, has sought to reach the proletariat as men without a fatherland, and to detach the Church as far as might be from anti-Communism. These tugs-of-war, if the term be apt, are not decisively terminated in France or anywhere else, and we must expect there will be many more attempts to represent the lofty aspirations and ideals which the Holy Father puts before men in such a way that they can be used to confuse and weaken the will to make the sacrifices which a resolute collective defence of Europe involves. Yet far and away the best prospect for peace is for every country in the great Atlantic Alliance to vie with its partners to see who can do, not least, but most. The more they do, the more resolution they show, the less likely are any of them to be attacked. M r. Bevin’s Dismay
This point was made with refreshing definiteness and clarity by the new American Ambassador to Britain, Mr. Gifford, to the Pilgrims’ Dinner o f welcome. At that same dinner Mr. Ernest Bevin talked about Marshall Aid and recovery in a way that made it only too plain that in the inner circle o f the British Government what has happened internationally had all come as a most unwelcome surprise. Men thus taken by surprise cannot but be reluctant either to face or to express the magnitude o f the crisis ; because the greater the peril now the harder it must be to explain why the
