" CATHOLIC HERALD" . ANSWERS ENGLISH SOVIET PAPER'S ATTACK ON THE POPE

By the Editor Soviet Weekly, a newspaper 'printed and published in this country under the aegis of the Soviet Embassy, has thought fit to publish in its issue of June 14 as a leading article an attack on the Holy See, derived from Moscow Radio. The article is entitled Quo Vadis,Vatican? Excerpts are printed in the adjoining column.
Attacks on the Church and the Pope are an old Moscow custom. The present ones may well take their petty place within the dark shadow of bitter persecution against Christianity which started in 1918 and the number of whose murdered victims cannot be counted.
But it becomes a somewhat different matter when a newspaper, widely circulating in this country and sponsored by an Embassy, takes it upon itself to disseminate, as a matter of editorial policy, the vilest and most hypocritical slanders against the person who to millions in the British Empire is Vicar of Christ and Holy Father, who to far more millions is the leading figure of Christendom and the greatest spiritual and moral authority in the world.
Free speech indeed obtains under our traditions and laws—traditions and laws which contrast so startlingly with the hermetically sealed empire of the secret police—and we shall not complain of its abuse by the representative in this country of an Allied Power.
But its abuse in this manner has at least one effect. It frees others to make a full and fair use of its protection.
AN ANSWER NEEDED
This newspaper, in common with all responsible publications in this country, has abided by the policy of courtesy and charity towards an Ally whose fighting men and women have played a heroic part in the common battle. As a Catholic newspaper, it felt at times and increasingly of late that matters of such spiritual and moral importance were arising that seine careful criticism muet be made. Even so, it will not he possible to find in our editorial files any abuse, any mud-slinging, any irre.sponsible attack on our Ally —nor have we been slow in paying our sincere tribute, not only to thc valour of Russia, bta even to certain aspects of the popular social and economic revolution of which Soviet Russia has been the chief theatre.
And to-day we have no intention of competing wiih the language, let alone she patent intention, of Soviet propagandists when they are ordered to help their Government in its plans of destroying opponents by fair et foul means.
But the attack on the Papacy in the Sorkt Weekly demands an answer from a Catholic paper. The answer could be given under many heads, but we doubt whether the gentlemen at the Russian Embassy would understand a single word
of any exposition of the spiritual role of the Holy See. Why should they ? They turned their back on Christ thirty years ago, and they remain proud of the feet.
We propose. however, to make one single point—a point which, we repeat, by no metals exhausts the matter and indeed must necessarily be something of
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