LOVE FOR THE CARDINAL'S ENEMIES

CHRISTIANS who read the terms of the press interview which Stalin has given to the International News Service, in which he seems to suggest the possibility of a rapprochement between West and East, will find it hard just now to dissociate this apparently constructive gesture with the fate of a Cardinal lying in a Communist prison and undergoing a mock trial after the terrorist pattern for no better reason than that he has stood firm for religion.
Let us not be misunderstood. It .would not be unnatural if many of us felt that the outrageous treatment meted out to a great Prelate and Prince of the Church cut across the possibility of any sort of contact with his torturers, except indeed fcr such contact as a burning hatred and a deep longing for redress and revenge might create. Yet to allow ourselves to be dominated by any such feelings would not only be to offend gravely against the supernatural truths in defence of which Cardinal Mindszenty and others are suffering, but also to betray the millions throughout the world who are already the victims of too much hatred in our days.
Strange as it may seem, the only final Christian answer to Stalin, to his puppets in Hungary, to the black police and torturers of' the Innocent, is love—that love and forgiveness for our enemies which even on the natural plane has always in the end defeated the tyrant because it is the one reaction totally incomprehensible to him and against which he has no weapon.
RUT this positive, supernatural
Christian love must not be confused with any negative sentimentality which clouds the judgment and blurs the distinctions between even the grossest of crimes and what is right; still less may it be confused with a subconscious cowardice which calls for appeasement because the latter seems to be the only way of saving something of our own skins.
Christian love demands that we see in all our fellow-human beings, even the cruellest of our enemies, the imprint of the hand of God who made them and whoa will finally judge them as He will judge us; it demands that we shall have in regard to them no other wish than that Christ's Precious Blood shall wash away their sins as we hope and pray that the same Precious Blood will wash away ours; it demands that we shall never forget that all human judgment is judgment by appearance, whereas God's judgment is by reality—and who dares to say that his own sins, committed in the face of the light and grace of God poured into his soul, will count in the end for less than the sins of any of his neighbours who, maybe., have lived in darkness and ignorance But Christian love does not demand that we shall close our eyes to the differences between good and evil, right and wrong, nor refuse to take such prudent steps in the physical and political order as seem necessary to our judgment if a right order of things is to be shaped out of disorder.
Now, by any sort of moral standard the outrage against Cardinal Mindszenty is a wrong, justly and accurately described as crying to heaven for vengeance. A social regime which demands that a respected, saintly and beloved religious leader shall be dragged by a tyrant's police from his home, be thrown into prison, be indicted on far-fetched, selfcontradictory, extravagant and ridiculous charges, be tortured into confessing to them, and finally be made to go through the farce of a totalitarian trial, is a radically evil regime.
We emphasize the horrible nature of this particular mockery of justice not merely because of the dignity of the victim but because we know of the fate of hundreds of thousands who have suffered in the same way or worse.
A social regime which permits, and indeed glories in such perversions must be a regime which has not even a vestige left of respect for the human person. Such respect has been rubbed out by a long practice in converting the human personality into a mere instrument of the leaders' craze for power—power which benefits no one except such as have sold their humanity in order to share in it.
IF Sovietism is capable of such
monstrosities in the very face of civilised world opinion about the basic rights of man, then it cannot be prudently considered capable of co-operating with others for a common and morally significant end, such as world peace must be. Thus the quality of our Christian love for those who have their degree of responsibility for such crrnes---and none of us can wholly divorce ourselves from responsibility for a state of a world in which this perversion can grow—cannot blind us to the need for caution when it is suggested that this sort of evil can be imported into the construction of a better world. It cannot be.
On the contrary, we have the duty to take all measures necessary to preserve what can be preserved of freedom and justice, as well as to lay down the prudent conditions of any physical and political contact with those whose present conduct denies them the right to be partners in
this aim. But let us not forget our sp'ritual duty to express our love both by creating around us a finer climate of freedcm and justice and by praying that the very shame of such crimes as are being perpetrated in the East of Europe will jerk the persecutors of Cardinal Mindszenty into something nearer resembling the human being as God willed him to be.