While travelling in Luxenbourg an American citizen, Mr. Law rence Fernsworth, says he found functioning " a fierce militant and effec dye anti-clerical party which had gone so far as to debar priests from access to the schools even for the teaching of religion, on the grounds that the priests misused their privilege to engage in propaganda and in political activities."
He made this and other accusations in a well known U.S.A. magazine, The New Republic, and the Minister for Luxembourg in the United States, M. Hugues Le Gallais, has taken Mr. Fernsworth to task.
HIS DEFENCE
" If the author of the article had studied the question more closely," he writes, " he would have noted that during the 25 years preceding the German invasion, not only was the Catholic population in complete harmony with the clergy, but that furthermore the relations existing between the Luxembouig State and the Catholic Church, as well as other religious faiths, for example Protestant and Jewish, were of the [mgt.
" The State and the Churches each worked within their own spheres and there was no interference from either side. The Luxembourg State paid the salaries of the ministers of each faith, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish. All school programmes (elementary, high school and college) included religious instruction. The ministers of the various faiths came to the schools to give religious instruction.
" Catholic priests and religious Sisters not only had the right to teach religion, but they could also teach in public
chools, provided they had passed the ;tate examirOtions. As a matter of fact, natty nuns taught in the elementary nubile schools and the staffs of high schools and colleges included priests as professors of languages and sciences.
" At no time in its history has the Luxembourg State debarred Catholic priests from its access to its schools."
DANGEROUS GROUND
He then points out: " Since many of your subscribers are probably not readers of the Catholic press, and very likely have little or no access to the public or private pronouncements of the Catholic clergy, it might very well be that Mr. Fernsworth's charges will sow the seeds of ' suspicion and hostility ' in their minds.
" I hope you will permit me to point out diat Mr Fernsworth's dichotomy is the familiar strategem used so successfully by Flitter in many areas, but quite unsuccessfully against the Catholic Church in Germany, i.e.. the device of ' Divide and Conquer.'
" All along Hitler posed as the friend of the ' good Catholics,' the ' spiritual Catholics ' It was only the clergy that he opposed—first the immoral clergy,' next the • political clergy. And any Catholic priest or bishop who, on ethical grounds. opposed ' the campaign of (the German) doctors and social workers' to enforce human sterilisation as a cure of ' poverty, disease and crime ' was a political clergyman: So was any priest or bishop who expounded the traditional Catholic doctrine of the dignity of the Inman soul, and who taught that, as a consequence, the theory of the totalitarian state was contrary to Catholic teaching."