Vatican v. Kremlin

Traders on the Rome Stock Exchange cocked pious ears one day last week to whispered tips that Pope Pius XII is busy as a beaver getting together a new European Four-Power Conference excluding Russia. Delightedly they watched as renewed hope of peace upped stocks for point gains.

The Vatican wraps its diplomatic moves in as thick a fog as the Kremlin. But two mysterious talks of the Pope with British Minister to the Vatican Francis D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne, a talk with German Ambassador to the Vatican Carl Ludwig Diego von Bergen, two "very important" talks with Dictator Mussolini's friend Father Tacchi-Venturi, two meetings of the Sacred Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs in the office of the Papal Secretary of State, hinted how seriously the Holy Father had buckled down to the task of preventing an Anglo-Soviet Pact.

Said the Catholic Avvenire d'Italia: ["Pope Pius'] peace efforts have passed from the first to the second stage, from the motherly advice of the Church to motherly services. . . ." Said Lavoro Fascista archly: "An exalted voice has conducted rather discreet but undoubtedly efficacious diplomatic action." Together with the rest of the Italian press, it hailed a return "to the spirit of Munich."

Though appeasement peeps from Prime Minister Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax were credited to papal efforts, Britain went forward last week with its plans to send Chief of the Central European Bureau of the Foreign Office William Strang to carry its latest message to Moscow in the tiresome seesawing of Anglo-Soviet bargaining. Though Russian vanity was nicked because Prime Minister Chamberlain did not visit the Kremlin in person, observers of practical Diplomat Strang's busy career (companion of Captain Anthony Eden on his 1935 swing through Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Prague; translator for Hitler and Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, Munich; British charge d'affaires in Moscow during the difficult spy trial of the Metropolitan-Vickers engineers) thought he had a better chance than bigwigs to find the elusive formula, clinch an Anglo-Soviet agreement. The fact that he is no great friend of Russia was also counted upon by the British -- who have found themselves on the selling side of the deal -- to give the Russians the idea that Britain, too, could take a pact or leave it.

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