Flight to Rome

Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman, a chubby little man with twinkling eyes, looked down from the plane's windows on to the red & gold of Spanish soil, stretching below like a scarred and, crisscrossed piece of hide. From the air the land looked peaceful. But its people were sullen, impoverished, embittered, under a Fascist dictatorship which had claimed that the Spanish Civil War was a crusade for the Roman Catholic Church.

Only the chubby little man knew what was. likely to await him when he left Madrid and flew, on to Italy, another Catholic country impoverished, embittered, corrupted by Fascism. He traveled as the Apostolic Vicar of Roman Catholic chaplains in the U.S. Army and Navy, and as the Archbishop of New York, wealthiest Catholic See in the world. More than that, he was as anti-Fascist as a Russian soldier, as American as ice cream.

Frank Spellman was the first American bishop ever consecrated at St. Peter's in Rome, and he may have been called to Rome to receive the red hat of a cardinal. It was also possible that he had been called to discuss political problems involving the servants of the Church. Whatever his mission, Archbishop Spellman's visit concentrated the attention of world diplomats on the Vatican for the second time within a fortnight.

Long View. The appointment of Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, as Italian envoy to the Holy See (TIME, Feb. 15) placed him in Vatican circles where he could mingle with envoys of nations at war with Italy. If Italy chooses to bid for peace, Ciano may have a chance to counteract the disgrace of his removal from Mussolini's Foreign Office and, capitalize on his many contacts with Britons and Americans.

President Roosevelt in 1939 recognized the Vatican's unique position in world diplomacy, sent retired Steelman Myron Taylor to Rome as the President's personal emissary to Pope Pius XII. Taylor since then has been three times to Rome, is now in the U.S.

Able to view world problems in terms of thousands of years, the Vatican has an advantage over diplomats enmeshed in appeasement and expediency. Yet the Church has no armed forces to enforce its will. In a Europe converted by Hitler into a snarl of new nationalistic and chauvinistic hatreds, the problems of the Vatican as an international institution are increasingly apparent.

War Problems. The Church regards the spread of Communist doctrine and Russian influence as its first problem. The second is the eradication of Fascist ideologies, which, like Communism, strike at the roots of the Church--a fact which some churchmen have not always recognized. As a solid, conservative force foreseeing the maelstrom of postwar Europe, the Church hopes to be able to bulwark itself in time.

One means of opposing a Russian sphere of influence would be a Catholic Federation, pivoted on a Catholic Austria-Hungary, supported by Danubian agrarian parties and possibly involving exiled Otto Habsburg, who apparently has potent friends in high places. Poland would be a northern anchor, Italy the southern anchor of such a federation. But, should restoration of the Habsburgs meet with too great resistance from socialist Freemason Czechs and pro-Russian Yugoslavs, an Eastern European Catholic Federation might be contrived, binding Catholic groups together in a Balkan cordon sanitaire from Poland to the Mediterranean.

Invasion of Hitler's Europe may be aimed through the Balkans. If so, one result could be a misunderstanding with the Russians, whose armies would be in the north while Allied armies were moving in from the south. The best hope of avoiding such a misunderstanding is a complete rapprochement with Moscow. Lacking that, the plans credited to the Vatican appeared to be among the few under real consideration. High sources in Washington reported that at least some U.S. support had been given to these plans.

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