THK TABLET; June 21st, 1962

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 199, No. 5848 FOUNDED IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, JUNE 21st, 1952

NINEPENCE PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE CHURCH AND RACIAL RELATIONS

The Statement o f the South African Bishops MICHAEL, CARDINAL FAULHABER

A Great Leader of German Catholicism

THE MOOD OF BERLIN Fears for the “ Katholikentag.” By David Walker

THE ITALIAN CENTRE

Movements Towards an “ Anti-Totalitarian Front.” By Bernard Wall

ACTON, CATHOLIC AND LIBERAL An Appreciation on the Fiftieth Anniversary of his Death. By Roland Hill

BUTLER OF THE “ANALOGY” Reflections on the Bicentenary. By Christopher Hollis

M. GROMYKO COMES TO TOWN T HE Soviet Government has changed its diplomatic representatives in four capitals. M. Gregory Pushkin, Ambassador in Eastern Germany, has been replaced by M. Ivan Ilyichev ; M. Alexander Panyushkin is leaving Washington to be the new Ambassador in Communist China, and his place will be taken by M. Gregory Zarubin, formerly in London ; and the fourth and most important appointment is that o f the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, M. Gromyko, to the court o f St. James. He occupies the second place in the Soviet diplomatic hierarchy. He was in Washington for ten years, including three as Ambassador, and, as Soviet delegate to the United Nations from 1946 to 1948, he has made a name for his walk-outs and vetoes. Ordinarily Soviet Ambassadors have not much power ; they are delegates rather than representatives, and every one of their actions is controlled. But M. Gromyko is not an ordinary Ambassador.

way it offered of advancing the disruption of colonial empires. This was as an object which also appealed to the late President Roosevelt, although he saw it as a good thing in itself, in terms of political freedom for Asiatic and African peoples, not as a preliminary to the addition to the areas ruled by the Communist Party. Korea may well provide M. Gromyko with his most fertile soil. The Astonishing M. Pinay

This is an im portant change, and it is natural to conjecture that London is considered to provide special opportunities ju st now. Soviet thinking rests on a conception o f the working class as having a special interest, incurably hostile to the other classes in the community. Over and over again since the war, as before it, the disciples of Lenin have concealed their disappointment when the working classes have not behaved as the theory says they ought, have shown themselves patriotic where they ought only to be showing themselves proletarians who recognize the Soviet Union as the workers’ real and only Fatherland. The Western European working classes have all proved strangely complex and recalcitrant to men looking a t them in the light of the pure Marxist word ; and none more disappointing than the British, as the late Mr. Ernest Bevin personified them. All the same, there is a good deal of suppressed but real Marxism in the British Labour movement, which might be warmed into greater life and assertion, and might a t any rate disrupt, a t the lowest, the Labour movement itself, but perhaps also the basic unity of Britain, and so the Anglo-American solidarity.

But London is also the centre of a great colonial Empire, and, if the Kremlin has been disappointed in some o f its European hopes, its work in Asia and Africa has been found very rewarding, although it is still at a relatively early stage. One o f the great advantages of the United Nations Constitution, in which M. Gromyko became so proficient, was the

The French political scene a t the moment is a t one of its most interesting phases since the Spring o f 1947, when M. Ramadier dismissed the Communists from his Cabinet and the latter attempted reprisals in the form of industrial unrest. In th a t year also General de Gaulle launched his Rally. Since then, up till the advent o f the astonishing M. Pinay, the successive Governments o f the Fourth Republic spent their short periods o f office in uneasy Coalition punctuated by crises, whilst the Gaullists and Communists awaited the seemingly inevitable bankruptcy of the regime. The second legislature, which began in June, 1951, seemed doomed to the same futility as M. Pleven and M. Faure came and fell. A tors Pinay vint; et le Premier en France began to govern the country. The results are being seen in almost every sphere of political activity. There is a first-class crisis among the Gauilists ; the Communists have been challenged with considerable success ; the Government has easily faced the challenge of the debates on the Budget and the “ sliding scale” for wages ; and the Pinay loan is showing excellent first results. There is certainly a new atmosphere abroad in France this year.

The most spectacular development of this month was the public revelation of a deep split in the Gaullist RPF. The background to this difference o f opinion as to the policy which the Gaullist group should follow in the Assembly began when a substantial fraction o f the group supported M. Pinay’s nomination as Premier, in defiance of the strict orders of General de Gaulle. Since then many more Gaullist Deputies have supported the Premier : and without their support the “Pinay experiment” would have been still-born. At the end of May, forty Gaullists publicly appealed to the General to foreswear his injunctions to systematic opposition o f the present Cabinet (and any other, which is the General’s