[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] 5114—The weekly arrival of
The Spectator is very welcome for two reasons. I enjoy your able presentment of a case with which I am not in sympathy, and I admire your readiness to publish spirited protests against your editorial policy. Sympathisers with the Spanish patriots have discovered that the Censorship of the Left Wing Press is more efficient than the censorship of Rome.
Will you allow an English exile to register a belated and
friendly protest against your editorial comments on Mr. Malone's letter in your issue of October 2nd ? I am startled by your assumption that Communist atrocities are not directed against Christianity as such but only against " the dominant Churches in the two countries, mainly on account of their political and social attitude."
I have just seen in South Mend a film depicting the tithe
war in England. If, as a protest against the exactions of the Anglican Church, Anglican clergy were crucified and Anglican nuns burnt alive, you would not attribute such exuberances to left-wing idealism. And surely you must be aware of the fact that Communism by its constitution is committed to a ruthless war on Christianity in all its forms. Roman Catholicism was not dominant in Russia nor responsible for Czarism, yet the Catholic Monsignor Budkiewicz was executed because he refused to stop teaching the Christian religion. " As for your religion," said the prosecutor, " I spit on it, as I spit on all religions." Baptists in Russia did not escape the persecution which has all but blotted out
the Orthodox Church. • • Will you forgive me if I add that the chief impression
produced on my mind by the British Press has been evidence of growing animosity against the Catholic Church ? Most Anglicans claim to belong to the Catholic Church, and some, thank God, bear in their hearts the stigmata of the wounds which are being inflicted on the Church in Spain: But there are others who instinctively sympathise with every attack upon that Church, which—on their own theory--they should regard as a branch of the Church to which they claim to belong. To belong to the Catholic family is to remember that the Church has its human side, and to realise that though rich -Catholics in Spain, like richer Protestants in England, have acquiesced too easily in an unfair distribution of wealth, we should not ,smugly criticise our Mother when she is the victim of a murderous assault. The Catholics who have trodden the Via Dolorosa of the Spanish Cavalry have helped to atone by their sufferings not only for their sins but for ours. To belong to the Catholic family is to share not only in the merits of the Catholic saints, but in the penances of the Catholic sinners, to say ntea culpa for Catholic sins and not, as is the habit of too many of those who claim the Catholic name, tua eulpa.
Spain Christianised and civilised the American continent. But for Spain the Mediterranean would today, perhaps, be a Moslem lake. But for Spain,. Europe might tomorrow be a province of Atheistic Russia. Dee gratias for the Dons.
You claim that atrocities have been committed on both sides. But surely there is a world of difference between the shooting of combatants as a reprisal for bestial horrors, and the attacks on defenceless priests and nuns. Mr. Mason, American correspondent of the New York Times, describes the finding of a crucified priest and of a nun whose face had been. slashed by a knife, and of many other corpses of nuns who had been murdered.
. The Spaniards and the Moors have both given great cultures to the world, and it is very right and proper that Moors who believe in God should be fighting on the same side as Catholics against that Atheism which is as barren of cultural as of spiritual fruit.
. Your readers may have missed an incident which was not generally reported in the British Press. Colonel Mosconi°, Commandant of the Alcazar, spoke on the telephone to his son who was the prisoner of the Reds, and whose life was ()tiered by the Reds in exchange for the surrender of the Alcazar. The Colonel ordered him to die like a hero. Which he did. A few centuries earlier a Moorish General attempted to secure the surrender of his opponent by a similar threat. And when the threat failed the Moor spared the son of his chivalrous opponent. I commend this historic precedent to the Bishop of Winchester and to all those victims of racial prejudice who profess to be shocked by the alliance of Spaniards and Moors against Asiatic Atheism. The power to provoke hatred is. as Christ prophesied, a note of the true Church. That the Catholic Church still .inspires hatred is proved not only by the bestial outrages of the Spanish Communists munists but by the lukewarm attitude of the British Press to the great epic of Notre Dante University, South Bend, Indiana.
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