SIR,-1 do not like the San Francisco pronouncements any better than Er. Owen Dudley; but they are the inevitable outcome of recent history, which has been determined by war potentials and agglomerations of power. Few of the smaller nations can feed themselves and if they need help they must suit their policy accordingly, and
give up arbitrary nationalism. The fact that the power vested in Moscow and Washington is ugly and threatens to be tyrannical does not render beautilul Prague or Warsaw: and is it not the fact that the Poles in evicting millions of Germans from their immemorial homes are now committing atrocities on a scale which dwarfs both Belsen and Hiroshima ? And who can say that the Poles never provoked their neighbours before this war ?
We must dig deep to lay the foundations of justice. and weigh the evidence from more sides than one.
ROBERT SENCOURT.
Sia.-71 am in entire agreement with Fr. Owen Dudley's letter, but is it not futile to suppose that the Triple Alliance of British Imperialism, American Commercialism and Russian Communism have or will ever have any desire to establish a reign of Christian justice? Does the " Peace of Christ" appeal to those whose ultimate aims are not the salvation of souls? Is it not illogical to think that the Peace of Christ can be established and maintained by any society other than the Church which Our Lord founded for that purpose? You have permitted me several times to point out how in the ninth century the Pope restored the political unity of Latin Christendom and established a Christian system of world government for the maintenance of the Peace of Christ and the enforcement or the Christian moral code. Owing to the unfortunate and unavoidable hereditary and territorial limitation of the Electoral College this ideal system of world government failed to retain its essential super-national status. Why not remedy this mistake and start again? That the world as a whole acknowledges the right, even the duty, of Christian leadership in temporal matters is clear from the repeated criticisms of the Spiritual Power for not giving full and prompt judgments, on world events. This universal criticism of the Holy See is quite natural because (according to many theologians) when there is no temporal leader of Christendom, the temporal leadership returns to the Vicar of Christ whence it issued. But Christ did not ordain the Spiritual Power to command and judge temporal matters so that when the temporal leadership is vested in the Pope it must often lie dormant. To his Vicar, however, Christ gave the power of making and unmaking Christian rulers capable of ruling in the name of God, whose duty it is to hold Christians united and to enforce the observance of the moral teaching of Christ and His Church. It seems obvious that unless Christians will submit to a temporal unity based on the spiritual unity they will soon find themselves forced to submit to powers hostile to all Christian ideals of justice and ordered freedom. They will become slaves under .the rule of force. The restoration of the political unity of Christendom would be fiercely and ruthlessly opposed by all those who think it a menace to their contrary aspirations-yet, if we desire to avoid slavery and perhaps the destruction of the entire world is there not more hope to be looked for in Rome than In San Francisco?
GEOFFREY HOUGHTON BROWN.
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