PRESIDENT AND POPE
CHRISTMAS oratory has been voluminous and various. General von Brauchitsch has been assur- ing the German people that they must win because their cause is right. M. Daladier has assured the French that victory must be theirs because of the rightness of their cause. King George, in his broadcast address on Sunday afternoon, declared that we were engaged in a conflict against wickedness, and therefore inferentially that our cause was just. Herr Hess affirmed that Herr Hitler had been raised up to give final peace to Europe. This in its way is the most interesting pronouncement of all. Herr Hitler has been " raised up." By what force? By what agency? Such a phrase postulates, if not a God who directs the affairs of nations and of men, at least that indeterminate and impersonal power less committally referred to as Providence. But Nazi Germany has cast off God as the great Germans of past centuries knew Him. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. But the God of Martin Luther is not the God of Herr Hitler or Dr. Goebbels or Herr Baldur von Schirach. Not for them the Judge of all the earth. They have gone back to the tribal gods of the morning of history, the German Woden and Thor and the company of northern legend. If Herr Hitler has been " called," " raised up," by anyone it must be by that resuscitated deity to whom the prophets of the Nordic Baal make constant and clamorous appeal.
What are we to see in these diverse invocations? One more repetition of the claims of rival combatants to the support of God, best dealt with by ruling both out of court and denying validity to either? For that easy abdication of all critical judgement there is nothing to be said. We do not presume in this conflict to call ourselves the executors of God's will. It was in far other language that King George expressed himself on Christ- mas Day, when in his closing words he spoke not of God's arm to strike but of God's hand to guide—" May that Almighty Hand guide and uphold us all." And when in an earlier sentence the King declared that we were fighting against wickedness he was stating a simple, plain and incontrovertible fact. It is well from time to time to recall why this conflict has been joined, not to fan fires of hatred but to keep it clear before our eyes what this thing is—not Germany, but Hitlerism—that must be destroyed if settled peace is ever to come to Europe. Herr Hitler secured power in Germany by the expedient of the Reichstag fire, which gave him the excuse for banning the Communist Party and thus securing a Parliamentary majority ready to register his will and turn him from constitutional Chancellor into dictator. From then brute force, exercised in Germany by the S.S. guards and the secret police, with its army of innumerable spies, against Socialists, against Jews, against the Confessional Church, against Roman Catho- lics, and outside Germany by the armed forces of the Reich against Austria, against Czecho-Slovakia, against Poland—brute force expressing itself consistently in hideous and unspeakable barbarities—has been the damning and distinctive mark of Hitlerism. There is no sign that the instrument will be abandoned till it is struck from Hitler's hands and the hands made power- less.
That task Britain and France have taken on them- selves in execution of the pledge they gave to Hitlerism's latest victim. They may be left to carry it through to the end alone. No one can know that, for no one can foresee how the war may spread. But what- ever other nations may decide about material support, the mobilisation of the moral support of the world in defence of those values which men of any conscience and moral sense anywhere have always recognised is a factor that may have great, perhaps decisive, influence before the struggle ends. What we are fighting is quite literally a denial of God. Nazi Germany by its acts, Nazi Germany's ally, Russia, by words as well as acts, fling defiance at every principle associated with the God whom millions of Englishmen and Italians and Americans and Frenchmen, and millions more in a score of countries in Europe and outside it, worship. Political issues and territorial and dynastic are involved in this war, but so are moral and spiritual issues which nations making any moral or religious profession have no right to subordinate or ignore. A national leader who 1.,cog- nises that truth and acts on it is rendering high and necessary service to humanity.
More than one does recognise it, but it has fallen to two in particular, President Roosevelt and the Pope, to say the timely word at a moment when some hope exists that it may bear fruit. The letter Mr. Roosevelt has addressed to Pius XII, appealing for united support for those ideals which all men of goodwill and men of religirus faith uphold, points to the only foundation on which enduring peace can rest. We have been told more than once, and it is true, that what we are fighting to save is Western civilisation, and that Western civilisa- tion must have a Christian basis. Mr. Roosevelt's actions and his words alike testify to the hold that conviction has on him. Without taking the controversial step of renewing formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican he has appointed Mr. Myron Taylor as his " personal representative " in the Vatican City, and in announcing the step has indicated his hope, which will certainly be fulfilled, that it will mark the beginning of full co-operation between Pope and President, primarily for mediation leading to peace, but not less essentially for the establishment of that peace, when it comes, on sure foundations. His appeal is to " all the Churches of the world which believe in a common God " to throw their weight into this great cause, and the alliance in such a crusade of the temporal head of the greatest predominantly Protestant country in the world and the spiritual head of a Roman Catholic church numbering 36o millions is a step which opens up vast and beneficent potentialities for all mankind.
It can hardly have been a mere coincidence that while President Roosevelt's letter to the Pope was on its way the Pope himself was addressing to the College of Cardinals a constructive and impressive allocution on the condition of the world in the first Christmas season he has celebrated as Holy Father. There was no flinch- ing from stark realities, and condemnation of the damnable was unsparing. " Premeditated aggression," His Holiness declared, " against a small and laborious people, on the plea of a threat which neither existed nor was possible, atrocities, illegal use of means of destruc- tion against non-combatants and refugees, the aged, women and children, the flaunting of freedom anti human life—these acts call for vengeance from Heaven." By that unanswerable sentence Germany stands condemned no less than Russia, and not a nation in the world will challenge the justice of the condemnation. From that what follows? Certainly not that the Allies can congratulate themselves on rallying the conscience of the world as a constituent of victory. In some measure that may be happening, and we can be thankful for it. But what the President's letter and the Pope's address must mean if they mean anything is that the Europe and the world of the future must be shaped in the light of those Christian principles whose eternal justice Protestant and Catholic equally recognise. They may involve for every country sacrifices and surrenders. If we look for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God—not Mr. Chamberlain or M. Daladier or President Roosevelt or the Pope—it is God's will for the world that we must seek to discover and, having discovered it, to apply. If King George appeals to " that Almighty hand " to guide, he pledges his people to accept the guidance wherever it may lead. And so doing he aligns himself with Pope and President.
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