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¶ SCHISM IN CHINA. Pope Pius XII was fearful of forcing the Catholics in China into deeper schism by excommunicating the Chinese bishops who are making valid but unauthorized consecrations, hence went no farther than deploring their action in one of his last encyclicals. Insiders are waiting to see whether. Pope John will take a tougher line.
¶ LATIN AMERICA. With one-third of the world's Catholics (172,271,000), Latin America has the smallest number of priests per capita in the world—one to every 4,810 Catholics. In addition to the relatively low educational level of the churchmen there (even including bishops), the Catholic Church is threatened in Latin America by a major development of Protestant missions. Protestant missionaries in Latin America have increased since 1916 from 1,689 to 6,303, and the number of Protestants has gone up from 169,880 to 4,614,000.
Formidable as may be the new Pope's problems, they shrink somewhat when measured against past challenges to the papacy—an institution that spans Christian history from persecution under Nero to persecution under Khrushchev, has dealt with inimical philosophies from stoicism to existentialism, has survived dangers from its own corruption during the Renaissance to physical attack during the Italian Risorgimento. Whatever threats Christianity will face under Pope John's reign will not necessarily be greater than the invasion of the Lombards from whom Gregory the Great (590-604) saved Rome. Whatever tests await Pope John's diplomacy will recall that behind him lies the record of Hildebrand (Gregory VII, 1073-1085), who kept Henry IV of Germany waiting barefoot in the snow for three days and established the spiritual authority of the church over the temporal power of monarchs. And no schismatic efforts of the Chinese Communists to divide Chinese Catholics from the church in Rome could result in a more apparently hopeless tangle than the Schism of 1378, which reached a climax with three competing Popes.* three Colleges of Cardinals, three sets of bishops, priests and tax collectors.
To judge from his record so far, Pope John XXIII will face the dangers and confusions of his era with the patience expressed by his favorite maxim of government, and probably with more force than it suggests. The maxim: Omnia videre, multa dissimulare, pauca corrigere—to see everything, to turn a blind eye on much of it, to correct a little.
*He has written a five-volume history of the 16th century saint, who spent years as archbishop of Milan, near Pope John's own town of Sotto il Monte.
*John II (533-535) was the first Pope to take a different name on acceding to the papacy. The reason: his original name was the inappropriately pagan one of Mercury.