Billot v. Pope

Turning against Rome a face that looks like a vise with two deep sockets for eyes, Louis Cardinal Billot, 81-year-old Frenchman, a foremost theologian, renounced his red hat and repaired last week to France to enter a monastery as plain Father Billot. The alleged cause of his resig nation was the Pope's placing Leon Daudet's newspaper L'Action Francaise on the Index Expurgatorius (thus banning it at once from all Roman Catholic homes). His Holiness' policy was based on the conviction that the wily, obstreperous editors of L'Action were using their paper (devoted to the royalist cause) as the organ of a school of thought whose doctrines are absolutely irreconcilable with Catholicism. The Cardinal's objection was said to be based on a conviction that political activities of royalist Catholics should not be censured by the Pope.