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Still elaborately neutral was Pope Pius himself, though Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, has lately found a good word for the totalitarian way of life, in marked contrast to its pro-Ally attitude in the months before Italy entered the war. Meanwhile the Holy See's endorsement of the Petain regime in France brought it minor benefits, such as the Carthusians' return to their Alpine eyrie, the Grande Chartreuse.
One sure sign of the Vatican's attempt to do business as usual is its dickering with Germany. As Cardinal Pacelli, Pius XII negotiated the German-Vatican concordat of 1933. The Nazis have violated it ever since. Recently the Vatican began trying to clarify the future status of apostolic nunciatures at The Hague and Brussels, the future of German Catholics, the position of Catholics in Austria and Czechoslovakia. But there was a significant omission : relief for the worst persecuted Catholics of all, those in the German slice of Poland. In the interests of diplomacy the Vatican appears willing to let their situation slide until the end of World War II.
Yet Catholics had no hope for a concordat with Germany as favorable as that which went into effect Aug. i between the Vatican and Portugal (a dictatorship friendly to Britain). The Portuguese Government gave back to the Church nearly all the religious property it took over when Church & State were separated, gave civil value to Catholic marriages, promised to let the Church maintain its own schools.
The Vatican in return agreed to appoint only bishops acceptable to Portugal, to regulate missionary activities in the Portuguese colonies, added that "the Church . . . does not propose to take over or even to protect any function that belongs to Caesar, whoever he may be." New Problems. Both for the Catholic Church and for the democracies the continuation of this policy, if fascism makes good its hold on Europe, promised to raise new difficulties. To a Catholic-Fascist-Latin bloc—such as might eventually be formed by Italy, Spain, Petain's France and Portugal—the Church could not in its own interests refuse moral support. It could not remain hostile even to Germany if the Nazis moderated their hostility to Catholicism.
U. S. Catholics already sense that possibility. The Commonweal, U. S. Catholic liberal weekly, thus touched on it: "The Church obviously cannot choose for States a temporal form of government to support or condemn. . . . An operating secular government, on the other hand, necessarily has a temporal form and organization which makes the structure of other governments of great political importance, since their form will have an effect on itself.
The rise of the dictator States has brought two problems of this kind. The relation of the Church to the dictatorships has to be carried to some tolerable solution. The relation of the dictatorships to non-dictator nations like our own has to be resolved. . . ."