'Disgust' at honours for Red leaders
SEVERE criticism of the Prime Minister's invitation to Marshal Bulganin and Communist chief Nikita Kruschev to visit Britain next spring was made by Fr. Paul Crane, KJ., secretary of the Catholic Social Guild, in Manchester last weekend.
At a Knights of St. Columba rally in the city, Fr. Crane said of Sir Anthony Eden's action:
" 1 view with complete and unutterable disgust the invitation extended by the Prime Minister to two Soviet tyrants to come and be publicly welcomed in an island which was once proud of its freedom.
" We should not refuse to talk with the Russians. But we should not receive them in this country with the panoply of public honour.
" An England cheering tyrants through her streets is not a country in which, any longer, some of us at least would wish to live. For the day she does that. the England we love will have died."
'Satellite' West
The idea behind the invitation, Fr. Crane said, was wrong because it was based on emotional wishful thinking which mistook a change of face on the enemy's part for a change of heart.
And there has been no evidence of any change. The cold war may now he being fought with a grin instead of a scowl, but the new look in Russian diplomacy does not constitute a prelude to peace.
" It has been adopted to lull the West into a false sense of security and so into disarmament, which is an essential prelude to the endowment of Western Europe with satellite status."
The invitation was also wrong, Fr. Crane said, because it gave grave scandal to thousands of people enslaved behind the Iron Curtain.