From the beginning of his episcopacy as the third bishop of the Diocese of Fargo, Bishop Muench published an annual Lenten Pastoral Letter. The pastoral letter of 1946, “One World in Charity,” written before he was named Apostolic Visitor to Germany, was translated into German and read througout Germany after his appointment.

ONE WORLD IN CHARITY

LENTEN PASTORAL OF 1946

BY HIS EXCELLENCY
THE MOST REVEREND ALOISIUS J. MUENCH, D.D.
BISHOP OF FARGO

TO OUR VENERABLE BRETHREN OF THE CLERGY
AND TO OUR BELOVED RELIGIOUS AND
FAITHFUL OF THE LAITY

HEALTH AND BENEDICTION

DEARLY BELOVED IN CHRIST:

For the first time in the history of Christian nations, powerful governments are making the exercise of Christian charity impossible through official regulations. We are practically told that it is wrong to love our enemy and to do good to those who have done us evil.

Christian charity is not permitted to play the role of the good Samaritan. Food rations to the enemy are measured out according to a “disease and unrest” formula, carefully determined by calories, and not in accordance with weights and measures of Christian charity.

Horrible stories of starvation, disease, and death are still coming to us from European and Asiatic lands. The savagery that the war excited in the hearts of men is incredible. Once more is verified the saying of the ancients: “Homo homini lupus — Man is a wolf to his fellowman.”

We can no longer be silent. If we Christians do not raise our voices in behalf of mercy, compassion, and charity, will the pagans in our midst do so? In these hate-laden times we must dare to be brave, and fearlessly voice our convictions, lest fear become “the parent of cruelty.”

No longer can we allow ourselves to be afraid of our virtues. Kindness and generosity must step forward boldly and claim their right to be heard, indeed claim their right, in the name of the charity of Christ, to do their deeds of mercy toward everyone in need, be he friend or foe.

In a pointed and pithy phrase Mr. Churchill told England’s citizens some months ago that they must put aside the “craven fear of being great.” That admonition needs also to be addressed to us.

If our statesmen have shrunk to pigmy size because of their cowardice to proclaim the rights of Christian mercy, then let us, though in humble positions of citizenry, rise to the full stature of Christ and with Him proclaim the Lord’s great law of love. Fear must not make us traitors to this law.

The architects who are blue-printing the structure of peace have issued no specifications for charity for the One World which they want to build. Charity is not so much as mentioned in any of their statements on the future peace.

It would seem that they have closed and tightly sealed their books of history. Surely, they are not consulted, or else they would see that peace has never yet been built on foundations of hatred and revenge. Charity has been civilization’s most successful builder.

With thoughts that breathe and words that flame we must proclaim our faith in the power of charity. Nations long to create One World. By Christ’s all-powerful law of love the goal can be achieved — One World in Charity.

An Eye For An Eye

Reading reports on barbaric cruelties committed before and during the recent World War II our hearts bleed with pain. No age records similar brutalities. The atrocities described in the history of the wars and conquests of the Greeks and Romans, or in the history of the invasions of pillaging and murdering hordes of Huns and Goths, or in the history of the terrible Genghis Khan pale into insignificance alongside the horrible events of our age.

We shall not wonder at all, when historians will have had access to the entire record of the black and bloody happenings of these times, that they will call our age This Barbaric Age.

Truly, the lights of human civilization have been extinguished. To our shame we shall have to own that we were destined to live in the darkest of all dark ages. There has been a complete black-out of all that is decent and human. The torture chambers and dungeons of medieval days, at their worst, reveal nothing comparable to the cruelties practiced by humans on humans in our day. Let no one venture even as much as to mention again the Inquisition or Bartholomew’s Night. Maidanek, Belsen, Buchenwald, Lidice, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki will cry out to their victims to arise and tell their story of horrible bestialities.

The bombing of civilians in unfortified cities, the holocausts in them of defenseless men, women, and children, flame-throwing and jellied gas — these and other cruel methods of total warfare create horror in the human mind at their mere mention.

Then came the end of the war, but not the end of further atrocities — looting and pillaging, starvation and death by deliberate calculation, forced migration of millions from their homes and lands, indignities against womanhood and even against the choicest lambs of God, the violation of sanctuaries and temples, and other outrages of godlessness.

Men who were created a little less than the angels lowered themselves by their ferocious deeds below the level of the beasts of the jungle. To them apply the words of the prophet: “They are cruel, and will have no mercy.”1 Because of their cruelty mankind bleeds today from a thousand wounds.

War is brutal, and makes men brutal. World War I produced its foul and ugly crop of vicious gangsters. We remember only too well the criminal and horrifying episodes of gangsterdom in our land. With no regard for either life or property they held nothing sacred.

In Europe and Asia gangsters of a new type, pitiless and savage, rose to positions of power. They boasted of their totalitarian power; with reason, for they controlled not only a strong secret police but also military might of unheard of proportions. These black-hearted and cold-blooded gangster overlords set up concentration camps, the real horrors of which came to light only after the war, exterminated millions of persons because of theories of race inferiority, and dragged into labor slavery men whose countries they overran with lightning invasion. Nor was youth spared. Children as young as ten years of age were kidnapped into slavery, and babies, born on trains carrying women destined for exile, were thrown from the windows. Were it not supported by facts, such barbarism is unbelievable.

The armies of occupation of Hitler and Stalin ushered in a reign of terror in Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and the countries of southeastern Europe.

The brutish things that took place the year that Soviet troops occupied Lithuania, when Hitler and Stalin were still collaborators in crime, are graphically described by the Lithuanian Bishops: “This evil year of terror will ever be marked with shame in history. Thousands of Lithuanians were literally slaughtered, put into jail, or banished to far regions of the Soviet Union. Within the mere space of three days, June 14-17, 1941, nearly 40,000 persons were deported, irrespective of age, calling, or health. Children and old people, women and men, were crammed into cattle-cars without food or water. Large numbers died in the railroad stations before the trains even moved. Nothing more was ever heard of those who were deported.”

The lot of hundreds of thousands of Poles was just as tragic when Stalin’s armies overran Poland in 1939 and occupied it until Hitler attacked Russia in June, 1941. Wives were separated from their husbands, and children from their parents. Healthy men were taken off into the slavery of labor camps, and old men, women, and children were forced onto roads, strewn with the bodies of not hundreds but of thousands of their countrymen. The dispersal of Polish refugees is one of the most horrifying episodes in the historical annals of nations. Today they are found in the British Isles, Italy, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, India, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, the Union of South Africa, and in South American countries. What terrible things befell civilian populations through bombing from Warsaw to Rotterdam, from Coventry, London, Cologne, Berlin and Dresden to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, need not be told. All this is still fresh in the minds of men. The war was a total war, and total, too, in its atrocities.

Brutalities hidden behind a veil of secrecy continue. Hundreds of thousands are still separated from wife and children, forced to work in mines and factories under conditions of slavery not much different from that practiced by the Romans in the case of conquered peoples.

Are we not making ourselves partners in the crimes of Hitler by now doing the very thing we once condemned and fought against? The hypocrisy is colossal. The fact that this forced labor goes now under the name of human reparations does not alter the fact that it is nothing less than labor slavery. We are wretched hypocrites if we do not denounce as a crime what we were quick to denounce when done by the enemy. The law of justice has no double yardstick for measuring misdeeds of friend and foe.

Worse than labor slavery are the mass expulsions of approximately 20,000,000 persons — Poles, Hungarians, nationals of the Baltic States, Germans of old Austria, and Prussia. Driven from family homesteads, in some instances several hundred years old, these miserable, uprooted people, homeless, famished, and desperate, suffered and died as few people before in all history. Secret and military police ordered them out in numerous cases on only three hours notice, permitting them to carry no more than some sixty to seventy pounds of baggage, with food enough only to take them to the frontier; money was limited to a ridiculously low sum; all other property was confiscated. History describes the atrocious outrages committed against the Acadians when they were expelled from their homeland, but never has anything so tragic happened on so colossal a scale as in these forced migrations.

The tongue grows mute in trying to describe the agony of these doomed people. The very ink in the pen freezes to ice as it moves to tell this story of horror. What dreadful misery! The sight of it caused a newspaper columnist, known for his humane sentiments, to write: “Very soon, if the American news photographers do an honest job, as there is every reason to believe they will, the American people will see movies of starving German men, women, and children, which will rival in horror the pictures of Buchenwald concentration camps, where Germans tortured Germans. But these will be pictures of torture inflicted by reason of an Allied policy of indifference, or misguided revenge, or plain blundering.”2

A great deal of this misery is due, of course, to the chaotic conditions that arose out of a war as total in its destruction as World War II. Those responsible for the outbreak of the war and those who carried it on in an inhumane way can not escape condemnation for their heinous guilt.

What is terrible beyond all words, however, is this that by a cold, calculated policy of revenge, suffering and death are brought upon millions of people, for the most part persons who are not responsible either for the outbreak of the war or its horrors. What responsibility, for instance, can be placed on little children, or on children born since the end of the war? What justification can be made for a war on helpless people, particularly the aged, women, and children? Why must they suffer bitterly and die wretched deaths just because some policy-makers in top-levels have revived the Mosaic idea of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth?3

We reject this policy of vengeance because Christ in His Sermon on the Mount rejected it,4 because He taught us to look upon our fellowmen, friend or foe, as our brethren, to love all men, even our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, and to pray for those who persecute us. We take our teaching from Christ, and most certainly we will never, never take it from the hate-mongers in our midst, other Hitlers in disguise who like him would make of a whole nation a “crawling Belsen,” as one newspaper correspondent put it. In this matter we are with Christ, and being on His side we know that we are right.

Men have talked and written much of building One World. It will never be built by those who hate, and hating take their inspiration from the hard teaching of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It will have to be built by those who believe in Christ’s law of love. They shall be the builders of One World in Charity.

Intervention of Mercy

As Christians we have no choice but to accept Christ’s law of mercy. We can not follow the law of tooth and claw. This is the law of the beast in the jungle. We are not beasts. In body we are like an animal, but in soul we are like to God. We were created in His image. We are His children. Being His children we must imitate Him in all our human deeds.

Such imitation is directly commanded by Christ. “Be merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful.”5 In a large number of places the Holy Scriptures praise the infinite mercy of God. Our God is “a God of compassion and mercy,”6 writes the Psalmist. Again he tells us that the Lord is “plenteous in mercy.”7 With Him “there is merciful forgiveness.”8 We beg God not to withhold His “tender mercies,”9 but rather to let His tender mercies come to us,10 for “the Lord is good to all, and merciful toward all His works.”11 In view of the great mercy of our Father in heaven we fail in our duty as His children if we do not strive to be merciful to all, friend or foe.

Indeed, is He not merciful to us poor sinners? Again and again we offend Him by sin, and again and again we go to Him to beg His mercy. Pleading for His mercy and receiving it, are we any better than the merciless servant of the parable of our Lord if we do not show mercy toward our fellowmen?12 The lower they have fallen, the more must we be anxious to show them mercy, so that by means of it we may raise them up to a better life. We expect God to make a “soft” peace with us. How, then, can we make a “hard” peace with our fellowmen?

True, this is not the way of a harsh, cruel world. But then as Christians we do not follow the way of the world. We follow the way of Christ. Christ’s way is the sure road to peace.

We deeply deplore the fact that claims of mercy receive scant recognition in the postwar remaking of the war-torn world. When have we heard any statesman of the great powers, who are assuming the responsibility of shaping the future peace among nations, raise his voice in behalf of mercy for the fallen foe? Hatreds have gone so deep that statesmen fear using Christian words in their official proclamations. They seek to appear tough before all the world. If there is even only a semblance of compassion in their utterances, they hasten to say at once that they are not seeking to coddle the enemy, or that they are not trying to make a soft peace.

Genuine peace should be neither hard nor soft. It should be just and charitable. Such a peace will be a fair and generous peace, and will have lasting value.

In some quarters it is not popular to make a plea for mercy. We make it nevertheless, and make it in the consciousness that Christ commands us to be merciful. It may be difficult to put aside the pagan within us with his hard and cruel law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and to put on Christ with His law of mercy, kindness, and love, but we have no option. We have to be either for or against Christ.

In making a plea for mercy for the conquered we do not mean to set aside the claims of justice with regard to proven war criminals. Nor do we mean to say that the conquered people should receive priorities over the distressed, starving people in liberated countries. We give our full assent to the policy expressed by Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, in his statement of December 11, 1945, defining official policies for Germany, namely, that “in terms of world supply of food shipments from the United States, liberated areas must enjoy a higher priority than Germany throughout this first postwar winter.” Every right-thinking person can see the reasonableness of such a policy.

But as Christians and as Americans we raise our voice in indignation against an official inhumanity which does not permit the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to ship relief supplies to either Germany or Japan, and besides does not even allow private relief agencies to send and distribute food, clothing, and medicines to war-stricken people living a pitiable life in the ruins of their bombed-out cities. We condemn these inhumane and cruel regulations of the War Relief Control Board. Having condemned the atrocities of the Nazis, how can we sit by and not condemn atrocities perpetrated under official directives? We make our own the question of the editorial writer: “For, if we hold the individual German responsible for not investigating Belsen and doing something about it, will we not one day be judged for our present apathy?”13 We sat in severe judgment of the vile atrocities that were committed by Nazi gangsters. Shall we not sit in judgment now of the atrocities that are being committed in the name of retributive justice, which in actual fact, however, is not justice but plain revenge. Let us give heed to the words of the Divine Judge of Nations: “As you have judged, so will you be judged by the same rule; award shall be made as you have made award, in the same measure.”14

The conclusion of all this is that we must vigorously demand the intervention of mercy in international affairs. We can not profess to have given up isolationism in international politics, finance, and trade, and then turn about to become the rankest isolationists in matters of simple human decency. If we did not fight for a human world, for what did we really fight?

Can we obtain the intervention of mercy? We can if with determination and persistence we force our religious and moral convictions on postwar policy-makers. “The average American can compel such action by keeping track of his government’s short-comings and writing letters to Congress. To neglect this duty is in a sense to ‘pass by on the other side’.”15

But possibly there is not enough food to go around? “Fortunately, this is not true. Agricultural and nutrition experts are in agreement that there are sufficient stocks of wheat in the United States to avert starvation for every man, woman, and child now alive in Europe. There are additional supplies of all kinds in Canada, Argentina, and in other countries of the Western Hemisphere.”16

We condemn, too, a conspiracy of silence on the part of a large influential segment of our press for not making known to the American people the real plight of the European people. Our people are generous; they would respond with full hands to give even of what they need themselves to help stricken people. Most certainly, they would not do less than the people of Great Britain who, even at the expense of their meager rations, have organized aid for their former foes. Were the American people given a picture of the suffering and misery of these people, they would force their Government to do what the Government of Denmark has done, despite the memories of hardships under Nazi occupation, in sending food and clothing at public expense to more than 200,000 civilians who had fled from Eastern Germany in order to escape the onrush of the Red armies at the close of the war.

We applaud the Christian courage of the American Friends Service Committee. They say: “With great humility, we Quakers undertake to speak for the crushed and silent masses in Germany. We believe that millions of Americans share our conviction that they must be fed insofar as it is within our power. This is no humanitarian impulse merely. We speak under a compelling sense of the power of love to heal our wounded universe. For, in this world of ours there are certain moral laws which operate irresistibly whether we acknowledge them or not. If we Americans want a rightly ordered world, we must put in operation the methods that will build it. The feeding of starving children is a sure step toward peace. We must try to see their human faces and feel for them in their agony. We must realize clearly that starvation produces abnormality in character, and that almost more important than food is the touch of a kindly human spirit with its creative power of hope and faith and courage.”

God’s “mercies are many.”17 Our mercies also must be many. The war is over. We must not continue it against the common people, for they in the end are the real sufferers and not the wealthy or those who have access to black markets. An American soldier would loathe to make war on helpless people, and thank God he does not do so. He finds ways and means to circumvent heartless directives of heartless swivel-chair administrators in far-off official Washington.

We want to build One World in Charity. Charity has the noblest of all programs of intervention. Charity is worldwide in its scope; knows neither walls nor frontiers; is not race conscious; asks not who is friend or foe; is color-blind, inquiring not what is the tint of the skin of a person in need. Under its sway all men are brothers under the fatherhood of God and in the brotherhood of Christ. Men want to build one world in peace. It can be done, but it must be done in charity — One World in Charity.

Bread On The Waters

The intervention of mercy must be carried by strong ideals of charity. Unless inspired by motives of charity, mercy can not remain vigorous in action.

Certainly, mercy can not be based entirely on grounds of self-interest or gain. With sinking hearts Christians learned from the official statement of the Department of State on the Policy of the United States of Reparations and Aid to Germany: “The present standard of supply in Germany, so far as the United States is concerned, is still governed by the ‘disease and unrest’ formula.” In other words, if starving people through disease become a menace to our men in the armies of occupation, and if through unrest they become a threat to peace, supplies will be given them, otherwise not. We repudiate such a heartless policy. It can not be productive of good. It forgets the blessing promised those who are merciful: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

A policy of mercy motivated by charity contains within it the promise of a good peace. It builds up good will, without which there can be no enduring peace. A humane policy of mercy will give proof to conquered peoples that we are determined to redeem the pledge given Christmas, 1944, by the late President Roosevelt: “This country has no desire to crush or exterminate the German people.” Mindful of this pledge we can not approve the policy of a hard peace which would reduce the population “until there are only 40 million Germans left out of the 70 million now alive,” writes an American newspaper correspondent.18 He adds grimly that “most Americans would not enjoy watching the process.” Who but men perverted in mind and in heart would want to see people going to their death through a slow process of starvation?

The policy of calculated starvation was condemned by the Colmer Congressional Report: “If a hard peace requires the elimination of eight to ten million Germans, it would be much more humane to eliminate them at once. The Committee does not feel that the American people can face the responsibility for permitting wide-spread starvation in Germany.” It should be noted that William M. Colmer, Representative from Mississippi, headed a Committee of eighteen Congressmen who, on a trip to Germany, saw with their own eyes the shocking situation that arose out of a studied and designed policy of vengeance. General Eisenhower in his testimony before a Congressional Committee expressed himself quite bluntly when he asked whether the horrible conditions in Germany would not make “men wonder if it was worth while to have taken up arms against the Nazis.” As Americans we must condemn a policy of vengeance because it besmirches our fair name for just and generous dealing with a fallen foe, and also because it endangers the peace for which we fought.

To make a Hitlerian peace would destroy the faith of people in democracy. The indictment of an entire nation can not be justified in the light of principles of democracy. We expressed our horror when the Nazis proclaimed the doctrine of racial guilt against all the Jews. Rightly we condemned such a doctrine. Shall we now profess it in the kind of peace we are making? “What incentive under this plan,” asks the Colmer Committee on Postwar Economic Policy, “exists for Germany to turn to democratic ways?” Justice Robert H. Jackson, prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg, repudiated the notion of collective responsibility. He said in his address opening the trial: “We know that the Nazi party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know that it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionaries, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists.”19

In truth, it would be unjust to indict all the German people, women and children, who had no voice in domestic politics, as well as to indict the countless numbers of anti- Nazis, many of whom suffered for years in concentration camps. Resistance to the Hitler movement was stronger than the American people generally know. In its leading editorial “Petrusblatt”, Berlin’s first Catholic newspaper in seven years, declared that the paper’s predecessor “would not bow before the spiritual terror of Nazi socialism. For five long years, from 1933 to 1938, we waged a journalistic battle against race hatred, lies, and injustice. Persecutions of Christians, oral and written warnings, interrogations, threats — nothing deflected us from the course charted for us by our bishops.” An amazing story will be told when the facts of the underground movement against Nazidom during the war are brought to light.

Measures of re-education in ideals of democracy will fail in both Germany and Japan if to the terrible sufferings consequent upon the war new ones are added deliberately in cold blood by advocates of a hard, vengeful peace. Instead of shattering the faith of the conquered nations in the basic principles of democracy we should leave nothing undone to strengthen them by reaffirming, in both word and deed, democracy’s fundamental teaching that the inalienable rights of man, among which are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and his birth in equality, are endowments, not of governments or of men, but of the Creator.

A policy of mercilessness leads to cruelty, and therefore to injustice. Men will not carry for long burdens of injustice. They will take up arms and fight. The history of reparations after World War I give us a warning lesson. Reparations were atrocious in their injustice. “In reality,” wrote Ambassador William C. Bullit, “they were so unworkable that they produced financial and economic chaos, and had to be revised.”20 In 1923 Pius XI issued words of warning but his voice was drowned out by the shrill clamor of the hate-hawkers of that day. He was accused of wanting a soft peace for the enemy. Now in retrospect we see that he was right when he urged statesmen to join social charity with justice lest intolerable burdens of reparations create bitterness and hatred, and lead to another war.21

Far-seeing men recognize that a policy of revenge acts as a boomerang, and will in the end harm our interests. In despair, starving people become fertile soil for fascism and communism, or in their hunger they turn to banditry and immorality. Under conditions of disorder peace can not thrive, and how then can world prosperity result of a kind such as men now plan? To strip a people, not only of its household goods, but also of its tools and machinery of production impoverishes them. “If the whole future recovery of Europe is to be geared to fear of the bogey of Germany, reduced in its boundaries and stripped of its war-making capacity as Germany is, the recovery of Europe becomes a hopeless problem.”22

Poor people are poor markets for the goods we produce in field and factory. We shall hurt our own farmers and industrial workers, if, by a stupid, indeed insane, policy of a hard peace, we destroy one of our biggest markets. Full employment will become a phantom which men will chase but never overtake; it will serve as an election slogan to deceive the worker, but will not fatten his pay envelope.

In the light of cool facts one can see the sanity of the comment made by the LONDON ECONOMIST on Mr. Baruch’s plan to make Germany a nation of goat-herders and foresters: “Unfortunately, very few voices have been raised to state the simple fact that Mr. Baruch’s plan is immoral, uneconomic, and unworkable.” A more devastating statement could hardly have been delivered in such few words.

Europe will become a great liability to the American taxpayers, as the lend-lease plan was despite solemn pledges to the contrary when it was enacted, if hate prevents recovery on the European continent. It will serve the best interests of American tax-payers if all the people of Europe are put on a self-help basis as fast as possible. The propaganda charge of war guilt must be revised, reparations must be scaled down to reasonable levels, pledges given to nations large and small, conquerors and conquered, must be scrupulously kept, humility must replace the pharisaical righteousness of “peace-loving” nations. In this way only will an era of full employment be made a reality.

A policy of mercy that casts bread on the waters will prove to be the best policy in the long run. “Cast thy bread on running waters,” advises the Sacred Writer, “for after a long while thou shalt find it again.”23 Like a ship heavily laden with precious goods, deeds of mercy assure a large return to their doer. To create One World in Charity through such a policy must be the chief task of statesmen. If they fail in this, they will have failed mankind.

With Malice Toward None

Charity is needed to rebuild a broken world. If millions starve to death, and if more millions eke out a pitiful existence, are robbed, and raped, and fall prey to disease, it is bad for order, recovery, morale, the freedoms of democracy, and prosperous security. If the continent of Europe becomes a slum of tens of millions of pauperized people, neither prosperity nor peace can prevail. Charity must spearhead the way to a new and better order.

Charity must not be exclusive, else it is no longer charity. For, charity is universal; it embraces all men, friend and foe. True charity forbids the exclusion of enemies from deeds of beneficence.

To the Jews of old the Lord said: “If thy enemy be hungry, give him to eat; if he thirst, give him water to drink, for thou shalt heap hot coals upon his head, and the Lord will reward thee.”24 Vengeance is definitely damned. “He that seeks to revenge himself, shall find vengeance from the Lord . . . Forgive thy neighbor if he hath hurt thee, and then shall thy sins be forgiven to thee when thou prayest. . . He that hath no mercy on a man like himself, how does he beg mercy for his own sins?”25 Indeed, how will a hateful and vengeful man dare ask God for mercy on account of his — his atrocities, if, hating his enemy, he will not show him mercy? The Psalmist prays a curse on his own soul should he be vengeful to them who had done him evil. “If I have rendered evil to them that paid me evil, let me deservedly fall empty, before my enemies. Let the enemy pursue my soul, and take it, and tread down my life on the earth, and bring down my glory to the dust.”26

Victor nations could reflect with much profit on these words. Will their glory be brought down to the dust, will they be trampled upon, on some other day, by other powerful nations because in their pride of victory they dealt mercilessly with their enemy? The history of nations can easily answer these questions. Once mighty in their valor and proud in their glory, they are no more. The decline and fall of nations fills the pages of history with many doleful tragedies.

To Christians, too, come commands of mercy and love to a fallen foe. “But I say to you who are listening,” cried out Christ in His Sermon on the Mount, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you . . . And if you love those who love you, what merit have you? And if you do good to those who do good to you, what merit have you? For, even sinners do that.”27 Who would dare call himself a Christian and yet wilfully cast aside these commandments of Christ?

St. Paul re-echoed the teaching of the Divine Master in these words: “Be not wise in your own conceits. To no man render evil for evil, but provide good things not only in the sight of God but also in the sight of men . . . Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but give place to the wrath, for it is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord, But if thy enemy is hungry, give him food; if he is thirsty, give him drink, for, by so doing thou wilt heap coals of fire upon his head. Be not overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.”28 How does this teaching apply to our conquered enemies? Good Christians know the answer.

Happily few in numbers, there are those who reject this teaching of the God of Israel and of His Christ. Theirs is a law of revenge. They are blind to the fact that, in rejecting the law of love of enemy, they really accept the teachings of Nazidom. Cruelly they advocate the decimation of Germany because “she is relatively too strong and too large population-wise.”29 Brutal, is it not? Surely such a one is not a Christian, but may he even call himself an American? Another writes: “We have been told that if we don’t give to Europe there will be mass starvation, and Europe will go Communist. Well, what’s so bad about that — for Europe. Both things are the best thing that could happen — for Europe.”30 Not all brutal men lived in Germany or Japan. Such utterances explain how Hitler could find men to execute his cruel policies of extermination of what he called inferior races and peoples. To our shame we must admit that we also have proud master-race advocates in our country.

The hearts of these depraved overlords are left cold, possibly even rejoice with hellborn glee, that our policy in Japan may result in the death of 8,000,000 by starvation and exposure.31 Their lust for vengeance is sated when they are told that “the unhappy continent of Europe faces one of the blackest, saddest winters since the chaos of the Thirty Years War. Cold, famine, and misery vie with each other in the ruins of last year’s battlefields, and the terrible specter of potential epidemic, already creeping in the gutted ruins of great cities, threatens to sweep out across a frightened world. More than 20,000,000 desperate and homeless people are now milling east and west, north and south across the Continent. Tuberculosis is rife. The very young and the very old especially are beginning to die in droves as the autumn leaves fall.”32 Many months have passed since this was written, and winter is now almost gone, but in the meantime death reaped its huge harvest, and sickness fed on undernourished bodies, and black despair gripped the hearts of countless millions. Gluttons for hate and revenge are having their fill.

Propaganda has done its deadly work. On the one hand, it has fixed on entire nations collective responsibility and war-guilt, and, on the other, it has created in victor nations a pharisaical attitude of righteousness. The Lord’s parable of the pharisee and the publican who went up to the temple to pray, the one proud and boastful, the other meek and humble, could be well applied to the present-day international situation.

Fortunately, there are those who remember Edmund Burke’s dictum: “I know of no way of indicting a whole people.” There are men in Congress who, refusing to join in the hymn of hate, courageously declare after a calm appraisal of the facts: “Those Germans who suffer will in the main be the very old who generally opposed Hitler, and the very young who are hardly responsible for him.”33 There are those in our land who recall the brave words of the immortal Lincoln; “With malice toward none and charity toward all,” and ask that they be applied to international relations.

Statesmen would be sure of creating a better world if they gave heed to the sage words of Pius XII: “Do not ask from any member of the family of peoples, however small or weak, for the renunciation of substantial rights or vital necessities which you yourselves, if it were demanded of your people, would deem impracticable.”

If we would serve our country well, we must not be cowards. Fearlessly we must proclaim Christ’s law of love of enemy. It may bring us reproach and condemnation from those who know not Christ, but realizing that a peace based on justice and inspired by charity is the only kind of peace that is sensible, why should we be disturbed about what men will say? As Christians we have no choice but to be on the side of Christ, and we may be confident of this, that being on His side we are on the right side.

The history of two thousand years bears testimony to the fact that where men sincerely and faithfully followed the teaching of Christ there peace became a fact. Hitler held up to scorn Christ’s teaching on meekness, kindness, mercy, and charity. He and his partners in crime declaimed that these are “soft” virtues and may no longer be preached. Arrogance, pride, and hatred have once more crashed into ruin. Shall we follow their leadership by now trying to build one world on foundations of “hard” vices — on ill will, malice, and hate? Shall we allow his ideas to prevail in the work of postwar reconstruction? Shall we make ourselves partners of vindictive, inhuman, immoral, and un-Christian treaty provisions that will be nothing less than spawning grounds of another war?

To us Christians comes the duty to speak out. We must breach the wall of silence that shuts out the voice of Christ. With malice toward none we must put forth every effort to build One World in Charity. As in St. Paul’s day, so still in ours, charity is the greatest of all virtues, the motive-force for all other virtues, the golden bond of perfection.

The New Order in Christ

We entered the war with high ideals. We were assured by the late President Roosevelt that the war would not be one of vengeance but one to establish a new order in the spirit of Christ. Mr. Churchill spoke of the war as a crusade for the preservation of the rights of men. Peoples were cheered by these assurances.

The events since the close of hostilities, however, justify the gloom that has settled over the minds of men. Even before the end of the war it became clear that solemn pledges and promises would not be kept. What dismal fate the Atlantic Charter suffered is known to all the world.

Right has not become might. On the contrary, might is extolled as the only means for the preservation of peace. “Peace must rest on power,” is the crisp, clipped statement of the head of our government. Instead of taking the leadership among nations to bring about progressive disarmament and abolition of peacetime military training a powerful machine of propaganda is put to work urging the maintenance of armies and navies on a scale larger than ever before.

The race of armaments that would be started thereby among nations receives little consideration. Back-breaking taxes would be loaded on the common people of all lands. The standard of living would necessarily be lowered, or certainly it could not be raised because of the expenditure of money for guns and ships. The flower of youth would be torn from wholesome home surroundings and from the peacetime arts of education, vocation, and culture, and would be subjected to the poisonous atmosphere of immorality and irreligion associated, unfortunately, with life in army barracks. Like an octopus militarism would begin to coil its tentacles around our democratic institutions.

This is not the new order in Christ which people were encouraged to envision. Instead of stating principles for a good peace plan “we have compromised and sought to make mere piece-meal settlements. Instead of honest, promising discussion even on diverging plans, we are witnessing a return of the tragedy of power politics and the danger of balance of power arrangements which, with the substitution of mere expediency for justice, have begotten war after war.”34 Small nations have been sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Brave little Finland has been mutilated; Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia have been absorbed by force into the Union of Soviet Republics; the Balkan States in southeastern Europe have been made the stooges and allies of a scheming totalitarian government; rebel governments have been set up, as in Iran, in defiance of pledges given the Allied Powers, and presented to them as accomplished facts; and tragic Poland partitioned by her own Allies can not call her soul her own.

This is not the new order in Christ for which we fought. Might is made right. Indeed, peace is made to rest on power, but it is not peace. The atomic bomb will shatter such a peace.

Two billion dollars were spent to erect atomic bomb plants. If that sum of money were spent to build in the lives of men, through church and school, strong principles of justice and charity, a power would be released in mankind so tremendous that a lasting peace would be ensured. We still have faith in moral and spiritual values, because we have faith in man if he is given a chance for good against the terrific odds of evil in the world.

But instead of promoting interests of religion evil forces push them into the background and even completely stifle them. In all Russia there is but one Catholic priest, and he is there because he enjoys the extraterritorial rights and privileges of the French Embassy. Polish bishops of the Byzantine Rite have been driven into exile, or are languishing in prison. Of the Latin Metropolitan Sees in Poland only two still have their Ordinaries. Poland today has less than half of its full total of fifty-one bishops. The Church is allowed to do her work only under severe limitations. Catholic schools are practically non-existent. The Church has no right to exist except as a stooge of the State. Conditions in the Baltic States are no less horrible. Russian communists “promoted beliefs and practices incompatible with Christian teaching, sought to subvert the influence of the churches over the people, expelled the teaching of religion from all schools, and reshaped the educational system and particularly the education and training of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian youths on a progressively militarized footing and for the object of maintaining a dictatorship of one, single Communist Party.”35 Similar treatment is accorded religion in the Balkan States. The news on religious persecution that succeeds in escaping from there over the walls of censorship is shocking.

Important above all other things of importance, religion is given no consideration in any of the conferences of the Big Powers. Statesmen seem not to realize that, instead of building a solid mansion of peace, they are but erecting a tower of Babel. Much is said of the need of re-educating the enemy in democracy, but it hardly occurs to the advocates of such a program that education without religion will not serve the cause of democracy well. Much is said, too, of reconversion in the business world, but hardly a word is breathed of the need of reconversion to moral and spiritual values. Occasionally men of affairs call attention to the need of a return to God, but their voice is like that of one crying in the wilderness.

How can there be a new order in Christ, if in the affairs of nations there is not even as much as a thought of Christ? Secularism, divorcing religion from the affairs of men, yesterday sowed the wind, and today reaps the whirlwind. Ruins are piled up everywhere.

For building a new order in Christ, good will, reciprocal confidence in all peoples, and collaboration of all are the imperative need of the present hour. Therefore, “motives of hate, vengeance, rivalry, antagonism, unfair and dishonest competition must be kept out of political and economic debates and decisions,”36 This demands that fairness toward all nations, big and small, must be observed. Apt are the words of the Sacred Writer: “Who can say, my heart is clean, I am pure from sin? Diverse weights and diverse measures, both, are abominable before God.”37 The different standards of justice used in international relations are one of the abominations of the times, a real menace to peace.

For building a new order in Christ, respect for truth must be restored. Lying propaganda and arbitrary censorship have created one-sided judgments and false assertions, and have misled public opinion so that the electorate sways in its ideas like reeds shaken by the wind.38 War propaganda tells only one side of the story; it is at best a half-truth. In other instances, it deliberately uses untruths to mislead the enemy, or to build up home morale, or to cover up blunders in administration. Another species of untruth is based on a misuse of words for the purpose of confusing the thinking of men. Lenin advocated this method as a device of revolution, and his present-day followers are using it with no little effect in foreign policy negotiations.

For the building of a new order in Christ, finally, the totalitarian state, whose strength is “cruel and bloody tyranny” must be eliminated. Such a state lowers man to a mere pawn in the game of politics and makes him a cipher in economic calculations. In relations with other nations it changes frontiers with a stroke of the pen, deprives people of natural outlets for the products of their industry, and drives millions of men from homes and lands, tearing them out by the roots and wrenching them from a civilization and a culture which they had striven generations to cultivate. Arbitrarily it sets bounds to the desire of men to migrate to other lands and to colonize them. “All this constitutes a policy contrary to the dignity and welfare of the human race.”39

If men submitted themselves to the law of love of God and of neighbor, evil forces such as have destroyed peace on earth would be disarmed of their strength. In his Christmas Tree address President Truman rightly remarked: “In love, which is the very essence of the message of the Prince of Peace, the world would find a solution of all its ills.”

We all must work harder than ever to make Christ’s law of love prevail in our hearts and in the hearts of others so that through it we may help to create One World in Charity.

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