Monday, Jan. 23, 1939
Lifters, Keepers
Pius XI, head of the Roman Catholic Church, last week received Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Britain. Fresh from visits with Benito Mussolini (see p. 18), Mr. Chamberlain was received with private pomp in the Vatican. What the Pope and the Prime Minister said in their half-hour chat remained officially undisclosed. Unofficially the Pontiff was reported to have pressed on the Prime Minister documents dealing with the destruction of Catholic lives and property in Loyalist Spain, and declared that, "as a means of restoring Christianity" to Spain, the Holy See put its hopes in a Franco victory. Mr. Chamberlain was said to have replied that he hoped the Spanish war would end soon.
In his partisanship in the Spanish war, the Pope followed the advice of his Spanish bishops. But a majority of U. S. Catholics, according to a recent Gallup poll, do not see eye to eye with the Holy Father and the Spanish hierarchy. The Gallup figures: 58% of Catholics who take sides favor Franco, about 33% of all Catholics sympathize with neither side; thus, Franco partisans number only some 38% of U. S. Catholics, and in the general population they are even fewer: 24%.
The Catholic pro-Franco minority last week did a workmanlike job of sitting down hard on the U. S. arms embargo on Spain, which many a friend of the Loyalists had hoped to have lifted during the present session of Congress. The "Lift the Embargo" campaign had the support of President Roosevelt's passing reference to the injustice of such measures in his opening message to Congress. But the lifters, badly stage-managed, strained a muscle in their first heave last week.
Bearded, scholarly Dr. Fernando de los Rios, Spanish Ambassador to the U. S., no friend to clericalism in Spain, invited a number of U. S. Catholics to visit Loyalist Spain, see for themselves that there is today no religious persecution. Ambassador de los Rios received a prompt reply from one of the invitees, blunt, Irish-born Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley of Baltimore. Calling the Ambassador a "common, ordinary liar," the Archbishop said:
"I guess he would have me come over wearing my clerical collar--and get murdered. . . . Any word or action of the Spanish Loyalist Government friendly to the Church must be taken as a sign of fraud, or of self-deception, or of the repudiation of its principles."
That night in Washington some 800 delegates representing 274 organizations met to urge lifting the embargo. A rival "Keep the Embargo" meeting packed in 4,000, turned 2,000 away. Adroitly its sponsors presented not only Catholic churchmen as speakers but a Protestant onetime Ambassador to Spain, Irwin Laughlin, and a one time counsel of President Roosevelt (during his second term as Governor of New York State), Martin Conboy, who argued neutrality's case.
By next day, Congressmen, always sensitive to letters and telegrams, were getting plenty from the embargo-keepers.
Nevada's Senator McCarran, good Roman Catholic and father of two nuns,* declared that any attempt to lift the embargo "will be met by Senate opposition that will be remembered for a long time to come."
* Also a divorce lawyer.
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