From Our Own Correspondent Thous.
The Catholic Church is assuming even greater importance, and is attracting more and more attention in France. Her enemies are obliged to be careful to take her into account.
It would be false, of course, to say that anti-clericalism is dead. Only yesterday we heard in the street the cry: " Read the
Populaire! . anti-Eascist and anticlerical paper . . . political editor Leon Blum! "—and it was a woman shouting this at the top of her voice in Montmartre.
" The J.O.C. Better Than Us" But all the same this aggressive anticlericalism has fewer supporters than formerly. Take, for instance, the National Union of School-teachers (Syndicat national des Instituteurs) whose anti-clerical atti tude cannot be doubted. At its annual Congress in August a M. Rollo, secretary of the Defense idiotic, made this astonishing statement: " The Church is making great efforts to get hold of the young. Everywhere groups of the J.O.C. are forming, and the other day the J.O.C. held a Congress of a sort that we are quite incapable of organising . . . against all these creations of the Church we have absolutely nothing except our goodwill. We get absolutely no support from the groups of the Left . . , The Church is anxiously occupied with the social problems, while the majority of school-teachers do not give the working classes the help they should give,"
Thus a militant anti-clerical admits the beneficent activity of the Church and admits that anti-clericalism has been abandoned by the Left.
Radicals Uphold Clergy
Moreover, in the Ere Nouvelle, the organ of M. Herriot, a series of articles has appeared which repudiate anti-clericalism on behalf of the Radical Party, which for half-a-century has gloried in it, and render homage to the unique contribution made by Christianity to our civilisation.