As Bad or Worse?

COMMUNISM, DEMOCRACY AND CATHOLIC POWER (340 pp.)--Paul Blanshard-- fleacon ($3.50).

Paul Blanshard has two bogeymen of almost equal fearsomeness: one dwells in the Kremlin, the other in the Vatican. It is hard to say which one makes his hackles rise higher, but each time he claws at Stalin he manages to scratch the Pope. His 1949 bestselling American Freedom and Catholic Power (168,000 copies) painted a terrifying picture of a totalitarian church at war with U.S. democracy. His new one is Communism, Democracy and Catholic Power. It enlarges on and reiterates his earlier theme, but something new is added: the Kremlin and the Vatican are really quarreling brothers under the skin, each trying to set up "authoritarian control over the minds of men."

Blanshard spends a good deal of his book methodically proving that Communism is an evil thing. It is a sound and lucid indictment. It is also an exercise carried out to prove that Roman Catholicism is just as bad or worse.

His method is a series of direct comparisons between the activities of the two in such areas as "thought control," "discipline and devotion" and "the strategy of penetration." Blanshard has satisfied himself that Stalin and the Pope aje pretty much birds of a feather, though he does indulge in such naive conclusions as: "The Communist Party, with all its faults, is tremendously interested in improving the receiving capacity of the Russian mind." Readers can fairly ask: To receive what?

What worries Author Blanshard is "the Roman Catholic church-state, a unique blend of personal faith, human compassion, clerical exploitation, and submissive ignorance." He is not likely to convince anybody not already convinced. His claim that the church, in its long history, has often stood with undemocratic factions throughout the world is something too well documented for Catholics to deny. But Catholics can also remind Author Blanshard that Catholicism is to them a religion and not a political system; in all good conscience, they can be as good democrats as he is. Above all, in the embattled world of 1951, Blanshard's book will strike many Americans as an irrelevance. It was the man in the Kremlin who once asked--and waited for the laugh--"How many divisions has the Pope got?"

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