“NEW ORDERS” CONTRASTED

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 December 1940, Page 4

“NEW ORDERS” CONTRASTED

THE POPE AND HITLER [BRITISH OFFICIAL WIRELESS.] RUGBY, December 28. The “Yorkshire Post,,” in commentiing on the Pope’s five peace points, recalls his Holiness’s statement of a year ago, and says:— , . “Between these two pronouncements, separated by 12 months of shattering events, there is a significant difference. A year ago the Pope was chiefly concerned to emphasise the principles which the outbreak of war violated. In this year’s Christmas message he turns his eyes towards the future. He speaks, as Hitler often boastfully speaks, of ‘a new order for Europe.’ “But it is soon obvious that between Hitler’s ‘new order’ and the Pope’s, a bottomless gulf is fixed. The first principle of the Pope’s new order is triumph over hatred, and the renunciation therefore of the systems and practices from which that hatred constantly receives fresh nourishment. Is this one of Hitler’s triumphs? Ask the suffering Jews or the tortured Poles, ask the prisoners in concentration camps; listen to the torrent of hatred and lies that Goebbels pours out daily across the world. “The Pope’s second principle is triumph over mistrust, which is an eternal barrier to that fidelity to the observance of pacts, without which it is impossible for nations to live safely together. In October, 1933, Hitler told Rauschnnig: ‘I am willing to sign anything. Why should one not please others and facilitate matters for oneself by signing pacts, if others believe that something is thereby accomplished or regulated? Why should I not make ap agreement in good faith to-day and unhesitatingly break it tomorrow if the future of the German people demands it?’ “The Pope’s fourth principle speaks of triumph over the germs of conflict in the field of world economy.’ Here indeed is a vital task to which all countries must set themselves most earnestly after the war, but Hitler dreams of accomplishing it by a method of his own. His world economy would be a world-wide system of slavery, with vassal peoples toiling for the benefit of German masters.

“The world will say that the Pope has passed sentence on certain unnamed criminals, b.ut that there is no mistaking who stands in the dock. The Pope’s five principles are principles that Hitler arid Mussolini have constantly defied. By the Pope’s Christian standard the dictators are decisively condemned.”