CROSS OR SICKLE?
THE war of sickle and cross is fully joined throughout Eastern Europe, and there can be no question from which quarter the aggression comes. The example of Russia is being religiously—the word is both appropriate and strangely the opposite—followed by Russia's satellites. In the Soviet Union organised religion, never a very spiritual or a very potent religion, has virtually ceased to exist, though such glimpses of fact as do occasionally flicker across the Russian frontier suggest that some millions of persons in steppe and city are still vaguely seeking after God, if haply they may feel after him and find him. In predominantly Roman Catholic Poland open warfare between State and Church has so far been avoided; the Church is too powerful to be lightly challenged. But in Hungary, with the secularisation of the Church schools and the silencing of the fearless protests of Cardinal Mindszenty by his arrest and sentence to life imprisonment, and in Czechoslovakia by the measures taken against the Church and in particular its leader and spokesman Monsignor Beran, the State has declared aggressive war on every citizen constrained by his conscience to pay heed first to God and only afterwards to men. Now the Vatican has replied, with its solemn pronouncement of excommunication of all members of the Catholic Church who either openly identify themselves with Communism or for gain or political advantage acquiesce in its doctrines and practices. The crisis of the fight between faiths, if Communism may be dignified by that name, has been reached. The Governments of Czecho- slovakia and Hungary may give ground, or the sentence of excom- munication may prove a fuseless bomb. Not many weeks are needed to settle that for better or worse.
The conflict, whether latent or overt, is inescapable, not indeed universally, for in a rightly-ordered State, based on the Christian philosophy of life, the good citizen can serve God and the State at once. In our own country it is only rarely, and in the narrowest field—as for example in the matter of conscientious objection to military service, where in fact the State deliberately refrains from pressing its full claim—that any incompatibility arises. But there are countries today where the dogma of the supremacy of the State, not over the individual only but over powerful organisations like the Church (the more powerful, the more feared and hated), is categorically asserted and ruthlessly translated into action. In those States there can be neither accommodation nor compromise on the Church's side. Its leaders have recognised that to the full. They see only suffering before them and promise their followers no other lot. " You must, if necessary," wrote Mgr. Reran in a pastoral letter read in Czechoslovak churches at the end of June, " be prepared to follow the hard path of the Christian martyrs." It is that path, in fact, that the Pope himself invites Catholics in Eastern Europe to tread, for he could never have doubted what the reaction to his decree of excommunication would be. The effect in Czechslovakia has been immediate. The orders of the Church are countered by the orders of the State. The Vatican directed that the decree should be read in all churches last Sunday. The Government announced that every priest reading it would be guilty of treason and would be treated accordingly. The choice was between God and Caesar, and how the conflict has gone is as yet only partially known. Some priests who read the Vatican edict were arrested and fined, but on electing to go to prison instead were released. That is only an affair of outposts. The main battle has yet to be joined.
It is a battle which neither Britain nor America can observe in uninterested detachment. The issue happens at the moment to be between Catholicism and Communism. Actually the field of con- flict is far wider. On the one side it is Christianity—which unites Protestants and Catholics far more than any differences divide them. On the other it is totalitarianism of whatever colour. Hitler was hardly less bitter a foe to the Churches than Stalin, as men like Faulhaber and Galen and von Preysing and Niemoller could testify. Totalitarianism is the ultimate foe, and it is because Communism is totalitarian through and through, totalitarian in all its practices, however specious some of its professions may be, that it must be opposed to the death, as Nazism and Fascism were when totalitar- ianism assumed those particular forms. In a democratic country the question whether the customary tolerance should be exercised towards a creed whose basic dogma is intolerance, and whose exponents would be ruthlessly intolerant if they came to power, is not altogether easy to answer. But if we have faith in democracy, in the capacity of the average man to discern between good and evil, we shall need no weapons against Communism other than we already possess. But tolerance must never degenerate into in- difference. Communism both in theory and in practice must be denounced for the evil thing it is. The claim that the hackneyed " from each according to his ability to each according to his need " is as much a Christian as a Communist doctrine (which is broadly true) must be met by an exposure of Communist theory—that the State is supreme and that the individual has no rights, spiritual, political or social, against it—and a demonstration of the uniform and unvarying dependence of Communist Governments through- out Europe on informers, secret police, imprisonments without trial, slave-labour camps and all the hideous apparatus of des- potism with which Russia since 1917 has made all mankind familiar.
Illusions about Communism must be diligently dispelled. That unhappily is impossible in many countries of Europe. But it is possible here, and words spoken and written in Britain find ways of reaching beyond its shores. A classless society may be good ar bad—or in the last resort unattainable, even in Russia—but the condition of even an attempt at its attainment is the class-war, and that is fundamentally evil. Communism everywhere is a foe to liberty. In what Communist country could any of President Roosevelt's Four Freedoms survive ? Freedom of belief, freedom of the soul there may indeed be, for the soul is beyond the reach of man's malignity. But to teach the belief, to preach the Gospel to every creature, or to any creature at all beyond the four walls of a one-room home—that can be prevented by laws relentlessly enforced, as they are relentlessly enforced in Russia today. Communism may have brought some material benefit to the masses in Russia, though it is impossible to measure how much, or decide whether democracy would not have done it better ; where standards were Lo low it was no great achievement to raise them a little higher. In this country it has only one aim—destruction.
Every institution religious and political is the antithesis of Com- munism. They must all be destroyed before Communism can find a footing. The destructive work is ceaselessly in progress. Today it is in the docks; tomorrow it may be in the coal-mines. Or rather the process—the tireless boring, sapping, tunnelling, mining —is perpetual. If the tares only sometimes appear above the surface it does not mean that tares are not always being sown. Simple men fall victims to plausible speech, and intellectuals, often supremely foolish outside their special sphere, lend a gilt-and-tinsel reclame to the insidious crusade.
These arc sombre days, dark indeed for Christians of different faiths who arc standing for cross against sickle in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland and, though we know less of their lot, in Eastern Germany. We can do little for them, save letting them know that they are never out of mind. Yet it need not, and must not, be doubted that the future is with the cross. A corn- pelted faith, whether Christian or Communist, is no faith. The moment the compulsion slackens or stops it withers away. And in countries where thought and political action is free, where men can speak their minds and cast their votes as they will, Communism makes no progress. It is making none in Britain or in France (powerful though it is there) or in Italy or Western Germany or Scandinavia or the Low Countries. It must never be allowed to. Conservatism and Labour must recognise it as a common foe and never fall into such preoccupation with their own antagonisms as to ignore, or fail to counter, Communist machinations. Between democracy and Communism, there can be no compromise or truce. Between the Churches and Communism there can be even less. Methods of resistance must be carefully concerted. It is by no means certain that the Vatican's way is the best. The Holy See has brought its last weapon into play. If that proves ineffective what remains ? For some it may be literal martyrdom. For others ceaseless vigilance. This is war, bloodless, but war no less. And in war the soldier can commit no crime like sleeping at his post.
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