"Entitled to Pronounce"

Canon law of the Roman Catholic Church forbids priests to take sides in political conflicts or civil wars. But Catholic theologians make a broad distinction between material, partisan politics and politics in which moral issues are involved. A priest may attack sterilization laws from the pulpit but not denounce a political party as such. On this controversial subject, much misunderstood by non-Catholics, Pope Pius XI last week made a pronouncement. He gave his august backing to an eminent European prelate who had written: "The hierarchic authority is perfectly entitled to pronounce on any political party or political movement in so far as that party or movement opposes religious well-being or the precepts of Christian morals."

Last year His Eminence Joseph Ernest Cardinal van Roey, Primate of Belgium, ordered Belgian Catholics to vote against the Rexist (Fascist) Party of Le Degrelle on (TIME, April 19). Recently Cardinal van Roey wrote his clergy explaining that such orders of the hierarchy, even entering as they do the political sphere, are binding upon the faithful from the moment they are issued. The controversy which followed Cardinal van Roey's letter became so heated that ...he submitted his views to the Pope. From Pius XI the Cardinal last week received assurance that his teachings are completely in line with modern papal encyclicals.

The Catholic Church considers its current war against Communism as moral, not partisan. As vigorous an anti-Communist as any churchman in North America is His Eminence Jean Marie Rodrigue Cardinal Villeneuve, Archbishop of Quebec. No believer in freedom of the press, where it "accords the license to teach all error, gossip all calumny, and provide revolutionaries with a means to sing the benefits of revolution." Cardinal Villeneuve has been credited with suggesting Quebec's "Padlock Law." By this statute the Attorney General (Premier Maurice Duplessis ) may have any individual's home raided, any organization's office raided and padlocked, on the strength of his belief that it is disseminating Communism (TIME, Nov. 22). Most unfortunate recent victim of the Padlock Law was a Jewish Cultural Circle in Montreal whose 950-volume library was gutted by police, 800 books being confiscated as looking suspicious --they were in Yiddish and Hebrew.

The Catholic Church is the largest in Canada, representing 41% of the popula tion, 85% in the French-speaking Province of Quebec. Last week a vehement protest against the Padlock Law was registered by a religious minority group, the Social Service Council of Canada, in which the principal Protestant churches participate. The council called the law "dangerously vague, beyond the authority of the Province of Quebec, contrary to the fundamental rights of a British citizen, contrary to public policy in Canada and menacing to the educational rights of religious minorities."

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