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¶ Toward Communism behind the Iron Curtain, the Pope's policy has been "pastoral," i.e., he has tried to get along with the Communist regimes as long as they allow the Church to perform even a minimum of its functions, in order to spare the faithful persecutions and the prospect of martyrdom. There is also a "muscular"' faction in the Church—among its spokesmen are Cardinals Ottaviani, Canali and New York's Spellman—which believes that the Red regimes are slowly strangling Catholicism in Eastern Europe, and that it might be better to take a tough line, even if this should force the Church to go underground. Pius, gentle by nature, and diplomatic, will not accept this view unless there is clearly no alternative.
¶ On social issues, he has followed Leo XIII (1878-1903), who perceived, like Marx, that the key to the Western World was the worker. In his famed social encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Leo proclaimed the worker's inalienable right to a decent living, the employer's duty to provide it, and the right of both to private property. Pius XII has reasserted Leo XIII's line. In 1945, he approved (reluctantly) the daring social experiment of the French worker-priests.*
Answer to Stalin. This week, after the ceremonies in Santa Maria Maggiore, the Pope appeared on the balcony of the church before the great crowd, and stretching out his arms, he spoke his blessing urbi et orbi—to the city and to the world. It was more than a traditional phrase. Pius XII is part of his city, as he is part of his Church. But he has also shown for all the world a deep feeling that is above its theological and political dividing lines.
He has been guardian rather than daring reformer, diplomat and preacher rather than crusader. He has (in his own phrase) "sown among ruins." He has shown his time that Stalin's famous question was not so much cynical as naive, and that anyone who perceives power only in divisions, or in bread and machines, sees the world about as realistically as a pre-Copernican astronomer.
In that perhaps unspectacular sense, he too has faced Attila on the march.
* Leo I (the Great), Urban II, Leo X, Pius VII.
* A recent children's book, Catholic Truth Thru the Keyhole, makes the point in a cartoon strip that shows the Lord remonstrating with St. Peter about all the undeserving characters in heaven. "I didn't let them in, Lord," replies St. Peter. "Your Mother pulls in all her friends through the window." The last panel shows Mary pulling up several sinners on a huge rosary.
† I.e.. the belief that Mary went bodily to heaven after death.
* Recently a German Protestant churchman, so the story goes, gave the Pope a cardinal bird. But the old. established birds would have none of the newcomer, and the Protestant cardinal had to leave the papal household.