"To Restore Sanity"

"With the fall of Barcelona, for years the most poisonous anti-Christian centre in the world, the war in Spain approaches its conclusion. No one save those whose loyalty to Moscow is certain will regret the end of the conflict. . . . Making Barcelona, formerly the centre of anarchism and antiChrist, the capital of a Christian nation will do much to restore sanity to the world."

To Dr. Patrick Scanlan, managing editor of the Brooklyn Tablet, the collapse of the Spanish Loyalists last week (see p. 14) looked like a clean-cut Christian victory. Yet it was also a Fascist victory. Even as Roman Catholic editors wrote of it, General Franco, to them a "Christian Gentleman," set in motion a device which might well seriously embarrass his Christian followers. He signed a "cultural treaty" with Adolf Hitler, by which Spain and the Third Reich undertook to give "fiscal preference" to one another's cultural works. Banned in each state were to be all publications unfavorable to either Government.

The Hitler-Franco treaty appeared to put the Franco imprimatur upon the works of Alfred Rosenberg, Germany's pagan, anti-Christian ideologist, and upon the Voelkischer Beobachter, which has sounded the Nazi tocsin against Catholicism "until the point of total annihilation." If enforced, the treaty would suppress in Spain the Vatican's Osservatore Romano, which has called Hitler "anti-Christ," the Pope's encyclical With Burning Sorrow, which denounced Nazi racialist principles. In short, the terms of the treaty were directly at variance with a Franco pledge, cited last week by Jesuit America, that "not one Spanish right or privilege will be sacrificed to any foreigner . . . and Spain's people will see to it, with their life's blood, that the pledge of her leaders is kept and her honor preserved."

Thus last week the Roman Church's policy of picking & choosing among governments brought it face to face with a dilemma. Pundit Dorothy Thompson, who mortally hates Fascism, discussing the implications of the "cultural treaty," blackly warned Catholics: "If, in the eyes of millions of people, Fascism and Catholicism should become identified, it might be very unfortunate for Catholicism in all democratic countries."

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