"Pray for France"

Vichy's continued surrender of Jews to the Nazis last week brought forth one of the war's most eloquent documents--a brief pastoral letter from Jules Geraud Saliege, the semiparalyzed Archbishop of Toulouse. Said the Archbishop in full:

"There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality, that impose duties and confer rights. These duties and these rights derive from the very nature of man. They may be violated. No mortal has power to suppress them.

"That children, women, men, fathers, mothers should be treated as a wretched herd, that members of the same family should be separated from one another and embarked for unknown destinations, was a sad spectacle reserved for our times to see.

"In our diocese moving scenes have been enacted in the camps of Noe and Recebedon [concentration camps from which Jews have been surrendered to the Nazis]. These Jews are men, these Jewesses are women; these aliens are men and women. All is not permissible against them, against these men and women, against these fathers and mothers. They belong to mankind. They are our brethren as are so many others. No Christian can forget that. France, beloved motherland; France, who preserves in the conscience of all her children traditional respect for the human individual; chivalrous and generous France, I do not doubt that you are not responsible for these errors."

Promptly Vichy forbade publication of the letter. It was too late. The Archbishop's denunciation had already been read in hundreds of pulpits. Underground it was sweeping through France.

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