THE .PAPACY AND POLITICS SIR,—Mr. Denis Mack Smith's article is
marred by his omission to mention Pius XI's condemnation in about 1926 of Charles Maurras's ultra-Right-wing party. the Action Francoise. The ban lasted from then till the accession of Pius XII in 1939 and was applied with the utmost rigour, members of the party being refused the sacraments during their lives and Christian burial • after their deaths. It was a bold decision, since although Maurras himself had no pretensions to being a Christian of any sort most of his adherents had hitherto been pillars of the Church in France and many were members of the traditionally Catholic a ristocracy. Mr. Smith also omits all mention of Pius XI's denun- ciation of Hitler's racialist doctrines, first on his visit to Rome in the 1930s and later in a Papal document addressed to the German people and entitled (if I remember rightly) Mit Brennender Sorge.
Mr. Smith does not give his reference for his state- ment to the effect that Leo XIll denounced democracy and 'denied that rebellion against legitimate authority could possibly be justified.' These allegations are contrary to the same Pope's encyclical Libertas , raestantissimunt, published in 1888, in which it is stated that it is not of itself wrong to prefer a demo- cratic form of government' and (in another place) that, while obedience is enjoined, 'where the power to com- mand is wanting, or where a law is exacted contrary to reason, or to the eternal law, or to some ordinance of God, obedience is unlawful, lest while obeying man, we become disobedient to God.'
Mussolini's statement that war was a 'beautiful thing' and a 'moral purifier' was, 1 suggest, neither more nor less heretical and immoral than Winston Churchill's statement in 1940 that if Hitler were to invade Hell we should come to some arrangement with the Devil. Both these statements are simply the current coin of politicians' claptrap, and were the Vatican to denounce all such effusions everywhere it would commit itself to a never-ending stream of denunciation. In my submission the Vatican has taken a wise course in confining its modern political utter- ances, for the most part and subject to some excep- tions, to serious topics such as communism, socialism, liberalism, the racialism of Hitler and the extreme nationalism of Maurras.—Yours faithfully,
R. L. TRAVERS
4rtillery Mansions, Westminster, SW I
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