For Joe:"Phooey!"

One of the most influential U.S. Roman Catholic churchmen lashed out last week at Joe McCarthy's kind of antiCommunism. Tyranny, the Most Rev. Bernard James Sheil told 2,500 cheering delegates to the C.I.O. Auto Workers' international educational conference at Chicago, cannot be fought with more tyranny. And since McCarthy launched his Red hunt four years ago, "we have been victims ... of a kind of shell game. We have been treated like country rubes, to be taken in by a city slicker from Appleton."

Bishop Sheil, 66-year-old founder and general director of the Catholic Youth Organization and auxiliary bishop of the Chicago archdiocese, also tore into the argument that, while McCarthy's means may be questionable, they are justified by his ends.

The Case of Hitler. "That all decent Americans are against Communism [goes] without saying," he told the delegates. "The problem is no longer one of alerting people to the danger of Communism . . .

The problem we are facing is what do we do about it ... what constitutes effective antiCommunism? More than that, what kind of anti-Communism is moral? What kind of anti-Communism is proper in a freedom-loving country like ours? . . .

"If anti-Communism is immoral, it is not effective. You cannot effectively fight Communism with more immorality. If anti-Communism flouts the principles of democracy and freedom, it is not in the long run effective. You cannot effectively fight tyranny with tyranny. . ,

"It is not enough to say that someone is anti-Communist to win my support. It has been said that patriotism is the scoundrel's last refuge. In this day and age, anti-Communism is sometimes the scoundrel's first defense . . . One of the noisiest anti-Communists of recent history was a man named Adolf Hitler. He was not wrong because he was antiCommunist. He was wrong because he was immorally anti-Communist . . . and inevitably, [he] was a dismal failure . . ."

This nation, he went on, must "cry out against the phony anti-Communism that mocks our way of life, flouts our traditions and democratic procedures and our sense of fair play, feeds on the meat of suspicion and grows great on the dissension among Americans which it cynically creates and keeps alive by the mad pursuit of headlines."

The bishop conjectured that America is in danger of losing its sense of humor. "What kind of a spectacle are we becoming?" he asked. "If we Americans could stand off in space and look at this foolishness, the mad, merry search for the spotlight that has been going on for two or three years in the name of antiCommunism, I think our native sense of humor--our ability to laugh at ourselves, to recognize that we had been taken in--would save us, if nothing else."

Then he demanded: "Are we any safer . . . because General [George] Marshall was branded as a traitor? No, we aren't. But we are a little less honorable . . . Are we any safer because nonconformity has been practically identified with treason? I think not . . . Are we any more to be feared by the Communists because of all the hundreds of headlines the Senator from Wisconsin has piled up? I don't believe so ...

"This kind of ridiculous goings-on is seriously described as antiCommunism. If you will pardon a very lowbrow comment, I say, 'Phooey!'"

Bishop Sheil added: "What I have said is my personal opinion. I am not speaking for the Catholic Church but only for myself, a citizen . . . Other Catholics may agree or disagree with the judgment I have reached . . . Although the Church takes no position, and will not, on such a matter of public controversy, the Church does take a position on lies, calumny, the absence of charity and calculated deceit. These things are wrong . . . They are morally evil, and to call them good, or to act as if they were permissible under certain circumstances, is itself a monstrous perversion of morality.

"They are not justified by any cause--least of all by the cause of antiCommunism, which should unite rather than divide all of us in these difficult times."

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