The Issue

The sensational news from Europe's battlefronts last week threatened to overshadow the emergence of a sensational development in Europe's political setup:

P: The only effective government of Poland, Lublin's National Committee of Liberation, was preponderantly Communist.

P: The Marshal of the Yugoslav Army was a Communist.

P: For the first time in history, Communists held cabinet posts in the governments of France, Italy, Rumania, Greece. They might soon hold similar posts in the governments of Bulgaria. Czechoslovakia, Finland, eastern Germany (after the Nazi defeat).

This fact did not escape the Vatican's seismographic political sensitivity. To the world, Pope Pius XII broadcast an eloquent, timely pronouncement on social reorganization of the postwar world and safeguarding of the peace.

The Pope made three important points:

P: The social reorganization of mankind is a necessity. ("Christian thought insists in this new order on the raising of the proletariat, and the achievement of this in a firm and generous way appears to every true follower of Christ not only as an earthly progress but also as fulfillment of a moral obligation.")

P: But private property is a natural right, necessary to the preservation and proper development of the family and of the individual. ("It is not less true that private property is a natural fruit of labor, a product of intense activity of man, acquired through his energetic determination to ensure and develop with his own strength his own existence and that of his family and to create for himself and his own an existence of just freedom, not only economic but also political, cultural and religious.")

P: The ensuing peace must be defended, if necessary, by the sword: right needs might. ("The sword can--and indeed at times must--open the road to peace. The shadow of the sword may be cast over the transition from the cessation of hostilities to the formal conclusion of peace. The threat of the sword may loom inevitably within juridically necessary and morally justifiable limits even after the conclusion of peace, to safeguard the observance of rightful obligations and prevent a temptation to conflict.")

Then the Pope sounded a warning: ". . . fidelity to the legacy of Christian civilization and its powerful work against all atheistic and anti-Christian currents . . . cannot be sacrificed for any temporary advantages or any shifting combinations." This could be, and was at once interpreted as a papal reminder that Communism is antiChristian.

But Pope Pius' words went deeper than politics. What he raised was the basic moral issue that now divides men into two great camps--conservative and revolutionary: Is the social reorganization of society to be the work of men acting under God, or the work of men for whom the human mind itself is the highest final authority? In political terms, would Russia's civilization, which is materialist and collectivist, or western civilization, which is idealist and individualist, dominate the postwar world? On all other issues--forms of government, economic and social organization--men and nations could compromise, but on this basic issue they could not compromise.

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