Lost In The ‘50s, Too
America
Magazine, Pope Pius XII and the New World Order
By Walter L. Matt (RIP)
Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the April 26, 1951 issue of The Wanderer, when my father was editor of that newspaper. We reproduce it here to illustrate just how long the globalists (including their liberal Jesuit accomplices at America) have been hard at it, as well as to demonstrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
MJM Last week the Jesuit review America asserted apodictically that the Holy Father in his address to the World Federalist Congress in Rome, on April 6th, 1951, had "endorsed unequivocally the World Federalist movement." To this and other naïve and onesided assertions by America we took exception in this column, pointing out that though the Pope, quite in accordance with his august predecessors on the Chair of Peter, champions of course a Christian reconstruction of the world and has worked unceasingly and consistently toward that goal, he by no means "unequivocally endorsed" all the principles, methods and leadership of the United World Federalist organization.
What he did, rather, was to stress the fact that there is a right and a wrong kind of Federal world government and that the right kind must be truly Federal—that is, must be an association of sovereign States which does not take the form of a "mechanical unitarianism." To attempt world government through this forced, mechanical "unity," deciding all questions by simple majority vote of a world parliament, would merely bring into play, he warned, the "disintegrating forces from which the political and social order has already suffered too much."
But this, apparently, is not the way Fr. Edward A. Conway, S.J., read the Pope’s address. In this week’s (April 29th) America, Fr. Conway, himself a partisan in the controversy on World Federalism, since he admits having to "defend" his presence on the national advisory board of the United World Federalists, Inc., "confesses" to his readers how "hard-pressed" he had been to defend his presence on the UWF national advisory board in the face of strong opposition from Catholic circles.
"Unfortunately for me," he writes with pleasing simplicity, up to April 6, 1951, the Holy Father had never made "a clear-cut and quotable statement dealing directly with world Federal Governments." In other words, Fr.
Conway admits, it had been impossible for him to find some apt Papal quotation to resolve his "embarrassment." He, Fr.
Conway, tried hard but failed, up until April 6th, 1951, to justify his position on the advisory board of the United World Federalists, Inc. His failure to do so prior to that date—the date, according to Fr. Conway, when the Holy Father’s address gave "solemn approbation" to the World Federalists— had been largely due to widespread and ‘irresponsible’ opposition to the United World Federalists. This opposition had come, says Fr. Conway, not only from such "misrepresentative" arguments as adduced by Mervin K. Hart, Joseph P.
Kamp, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a number of other nonsectarian organizations, but also from "respectable Catholic organizations" such as the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic War Veterans, etc/, etc. All this was most "disturbing," says Fr. Conway, to himself, of course, and to the United World Federalists. So they decided, he says, "to do something about it."
They got Thomas H. Mahoney— Boston attorney, prominent Catholic, and himself chairman for three years of United World Federalist policy committee—to show in a booklet the alleged affinity between "Catholic statements from St. Augustine to Pius XII" and "corresponding UWF proposals." In this booklet, according to Fr. Conway, Mr. Mahoney, "eschewing all argument," (sic!) "simply asked his readers to ‘draw their own reasonable inferences from the comparison.’ The similarities were sensational."
Unfortunately, however, this booklet by Mr. Mahoney made "little impression in some Catholic communities," according to Fr. Conway. Various "die-hards" in the Catholic opposition just couldn’t see it Mr. Mahoney’s way. That this may have had something to do with Mr. Mahoney’s own Ordinary, Archbishop Cushing of Boston, having definitely taken issue with the World Federalists, Inc., Fr. Conway does not suspect.
In fact Fr. Conway’s silence about Archbishop Cushing’s position in this matter (see Brooklyn Tablet, March 25th 1950) makes one wonder whether here, too, all criticism of UWF can simply be dismissed as "the aberrations of an intransigent nationalism which denies or spurns the common bonds linking the nations together."
At any rate, after explaining all the difficulties he had had defending his position with the UWF heretofore, Fr.
Conway finally got hold of the Holy Father’s address of April 6th. From this address Fr. Conway tries to "assure and inspire all Catholic Federalists" by culling a total of twenty-four lines. But even this meagre quotation, though it is cited without one syllable of the many essential reservations and warnings which were the substance of the Pope’s address, is not, as Fr. Conway would have it, an unequivocal endorsement of the United World Federalists, Inc., or, as he puts it, an endorsement of this "nonsectarian movement." It is one thing for the Pope to endorse the general purpose or end to which the world Federalist dedicate themselves; it is quite something else again for Fr. Conway or anyone else to interpret or misinterpret this to mean the unqualified endorsement of a particular organization, specifically a "nonsectarian" organization.
That the Pope is urging all Catholics to help re-build a disintegrated world into a structure organically inter-related and functional in all its component parts; that he pleads with them not to be indifferent to the problem of establishing a world comity of nations based on the natural and moral law but to strive by all means to take the lead in this regard—this, of course, goes without saying. But that the Pope is pleading with Catholics to become members of the World Federalists, Inc., or to fall in line with or take dictation from a nonsectarian and far from unquestionable organization or group—this is a far-fetched inference which only a "hard-pressed" partisan in such an organization might hazard!
It is, to my way of thinking, not unlike suggestion that the Popes, having pointed out world abuses which have led to Communism and having declared that the Church, too, is opposed to such abuses were urging Catholics to join the Communist movement or at least the great international and humanitarian movement known as Freemasonry and thus bring to the world that peace and that tranquility which all the world longs to see!
It wouldn’t do, however, for me to end discussion of so important a problem as world peace and world order on the shallow reasoning of starry-eyed partisans of World Federalists, Inc.
Certain it is that whilst we question various endeavors in this regard, this is not to discourage but rather to spur Catholics to make a distinctively Catholic contribution to the problem of world reconstruction and peace. The April 6th address of the Holy Father, although it has nothing "quotable" in favor of World Federalists, Inc., surely is not the first instance in which Christ’s Vicar has pleaded for a workable solution to the modern barbarism of total war, world war, class war, together with all their enervating and socially destructive concomitants.
Farther back than the knowledge or recollection of many of us goes, the Popes have truly been urging One World,--not, however, in the superimposed and arbitrary sense that many today would have it, but in the sense presupposing in first place that spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation which is begotten only by a common faith or at least by generally accepted principles in the social, economic and moral spheres.
But where today do we find such prerequisites for world unity? Where in our modern, cynical, skeptical, disjointed and apostate world do we see manifest that spirit of genuine solidarity among nations and peoples and classes which once prevailed but which, since the onslaught of the Reformation and Enlightenment, has been patched up again and again with devious and, so far, short lived and inadequate makeshifts and plans?
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