Pope and Pastors

Last week Luigi Cardinal Lavitrano, Archbishop of Palermo (Sicily), issued a pastoral letter. Chiding was His Eminence's tone. He cited statistics showing that "66% of the Italians do not hear Mass on religious holidays, and only 12% of Italian men receive Holy Communion on Easter."

Cardinal Lavitrano's pastoral gave point to a gentle scolding which Pope Pius XII delivered, on the same day, to all the parish priests of Rome--whose bishop he is. Speaking of "our times, in which religious ignorance is profound and full of peril," the Holy Father told his priests to bestir themselves, pay less attention to administrative duties, more to preaching. Said he: "Preach with simplicity, aiming at that practical sense which comes to the mind and guides the spirit. It is not scintillating and learned fluency that conquers souls, especially today, but rather the word of conviction that comes from the heart and goes to the heart."

Pleasing to the Pope last week was word that the pastors of his U. S. flocks have heeded his encyclical of last autumn, are trying to "untie the knotty and difficult social question" (TIME, Nov. 20). The 16 bishops and archbishops of the administrative board of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (chairman: Most Rev. Samuel Alphonsus Stritch, new Archbishop of Chicago) published a statement on The Church and Social Order.

Based upon the great social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, the bishops' statement reaffirmed the Church's defense of private ownership, denounced the principle of supply & demand as applied to labor, urged not only a living wage but a security wage for workers, called for stabilization between wages and prices. The bishops espoused anew the "true remedy" of Pius XI, who was opposed both to socialism and to extreme individualism (those who "are liberal only to the extent that they wish to be liberated from all social responsibility").

"The true remedy," wrote the bishops, "will be found ... in accomplishing two reforms in our social order. In the first place there must be re-established some form of guild or vocational groups which will bind men together in society according to their respective occupations, thus creating a moral unity. Secondly, there must be a reform of morals and a profound renewal of the Christian spirit which must precede the social reconstruction. . . ."

By no means to be confused with the totalitarian form of the Italian corporative state, the guild system of Pius XI was blueprinted by the U. S. bishops only to this extent: "The chief qualifications of these vocational groups or guilds . . . are that they are autonomous, embrace whole industries and professions, are federated with other constituent groups, possess the right of free organization, assembly and vote, and that they should dedicate them selves to the common good and with governmental protection and assistance function in the establishment of justice and the general welfare in economic life."

To one U. S. pastor the bishops' statement was a Godsend. The Rev. Charles Edward Coughlin, who was mysteriously missing from the air two Sundays ago, came back like the Cheshire cat last Sunday. As if nothing had happened, as if he were the most orthodox of Catholic preachers, Father Coughlin draped himself with bishops, gave his audience--which must have been much larger than usual after the week's build-up--a sound sermon on the N. C. W. C. statement. Of the Christian Front, of G-Man Hoover, of his enemies, of other subjects which it had been darkly hinted he would mention, he said nary a word.

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