Mass of Expiation

Ever since he ascended the Papal throne in 1922 Pope Pius XI has employed every weapon in his spiritual arsenal to stop Russia's cold-blooded anti-religion campaign. He has placed Russia under the particular care of St. Therese. His commission on Russian affairs has forged new and special weapons of prayer, indulgence, invocation, propaganda. Last week His Holiness startled all Europe with a bitter denunciation. To his vicar general, Cardinal Basilic Pompili, Bishop of Velletri, he wrote:

"[The Soviet] disseminates moral, cultural and also economic decadence by agitation which is both unfruitful and inhuman and in which the sons are instigated to denounce their parents and destroy religious buildings and emblems and. above all, contaminate their souls with all the vices and the most shameful materialistic aberrations. The promoters of these iniquities wish to strike by this agitation at religion and God Himself and to bring about the ruination of minds and even human nature itself."

He announced that on March 19, festival of St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, he would celebrate a solemn mass of expiation, propitiation, reparation, for Russia's sacrilege, would make special appeal to Russia's ancient protectors, St. Basil, St. Nicholas, St. Cyrillus, St. Therese. He asked all Christians to join him, offered confident assurance: "Divine providence on the moment designated by it will prepare to give the necessary means to repair the moral and material ruins of those immense regions, which constitute a sixth part of the whole universe."*

The Papal thunder rumbled over Western Europe, set off sympathetic detonations. In Paris, the French Protestant Federation held a service, protested against Russian persecution. Present was Dr. Eulage, the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan of Paris. Grand Rabbi Israel Levy of France sent a representative. In London, the arch-Tory, arch-Anglican Morning Post conceded: "We shall not in this case complain if the Archbishop of Canterbury follows the lead of Rome."

Thunderstruck, the Communist party's official organ, The Daily Worker, replied in kind: ". . . [it is] the most violently criminal document ever issued by the Church in the course of its long history of crime, outrage and war-making."

*The last word is no doubt an error in translation.

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