"Vatican and Kremlin"
Sra,-1 have never read so queer an assessment of a book as the recent review by Goronwy Rees of Blanchard's Cotnmunism, Democracy and Catholic Power. A reader of the book would find it hard to recognise it from the account Mr. Rees presents. The state of mind in which he approaches it is revealed by his abundant denunciations. Mr. Blanchard is described as "hardly able to write sensibly about" the Roman Catholic Church; as living "in mortal fear of being contaminated by the skirts of the Scarlet Woman" (the Scarlet Woman comes in again before the review finishes); as only stooping to facts when convenient; as pursuing a kind of mad logic "; as bringing "bushels of nonsense" to market, and so on.
Blanchard's book is an able, well-documented work of 332 pages. Whether we agree with his conclusions or not it deserves serious con- sideration and is not going to be demolished by abuse. The thesis he puts forward is different from what is alleged. He sets out to show "the struggle of democracy against the Kremlin is one phase of the war of ideas, and the struggle of democracy against the Vatican is another. The underlying issue in both phases of the struggle is the same—the rule of the world by free minds." "In general it is political Catholicism as a world power which concerns me in this book."
Let us take one specimen of the reviewer's method. He tells your readers that from Mr. Blanchard's point of view it is not worth mentioning that the Kremlin has overwhelming Yorce to compel accept- ance of its beliefs while the Vatican has none, and he professes surprise that theft is not a comparison drawn between the Red Army and the Swiss Guard. Much of Mr. Blanchard's book is taken up with explain- ing the dominance over human minds of the infallible supernatural authority of the Pope. Through that, he argues, human liberty is endangered, and he cites the doctrine and practice of the Roman Church in coercing those who disagree with it. When he—rightly or wrongly— charges the Vatican with "corruption of human intelligence by systema- tically cultivated superstition" he expressly notes: "It has no secret police of its own" (p. 105) and, again, "the encroachments of course have been strikingly different [from the Kremlin] in kind and degree, but they challenge democratic institutions unmistakably, whether they take the form of a school system which teaches the gogpel of restricted and anti-scientific thought or of invading military columns." (p. 292). So your reviewer's facetiousness about the Swiss Guard is out of place. If Mr. Blanchard's contentions are to be refuted very different methods
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