"Black Bread Better Than Submission"
By a Staff Reporter
Norway's Quisling Government is not above offering bribes to secure support for itself. One of the people they have attempted to lure with promises of material guin is Mgr. Mangers, the Catholic Bishop of Oslo.
" Look here," they said. " If you will acknowledge us as head of the State we will take over all your financial burdens, pay the debts on your churches, on your schools, pay the salaries of your clergy-in fact, we will pay everything. All you have to do is to make a public submission to (There is a familiar ring about thew words which recalls the Temptation in the Desert.)
Mgr. Mangers gave them an answer which was short and sherp. "1 and my clergy would rather eat black bread than acknowledge you." That was all. and the would-be bribers retired.
This story was told to me by Lieut. Carl P. Wright, Norway's only Catholic M.P., when I met him at the Norwegian Institute in London last week.
Lieut. Wright escaped to this country two years ago after a terrible experience of Gestapo cruelty. Two young bullies battered his head against the stone walls of the prison in an effort to make him give away the names of his fellow-workers in the underground movement.
HIS SCHEME Now that he is back in London after two years in the Navy, be is putting into operation a scheme which he has been planning eve' since he arrived in England. It is to form a Norwegian Catholic section of St. Olaf's Association in London. St. Olaf's Association, which has its headquarters in Oslo, exists to foster the growth of the Catholic Church in Norway: to further the writing and publishing of Catholic literature and generally to act as a link between the numerically small