The Havas News Agency reported from Vatican City today that the unqualified condemnation which Pope Pius XII heaped on totalitarian, racist and materialistic theories of government in his encyclical “Summi Pontificatus” caused a profound stir in Rome as well as the Vatican.
Although it had been expected that the Pope would attack ideologies hostile to the Catholic Church, few observers had expected so outspoken a document, the Havas dispatch said.
He condemned first of all, the dispatch said, doctrines which confer on “the state and the collectivity unlimited authority which subordinates all ends and means to national strength.” With equal vigor he denounced racial theories which prevent “all possibilities of true union and fecund collaboration among peoples.”
The Pope specifically expressed sympathy for dismembered Poland, calling it “that well beloved nation which deserves the fraternal human sympathy of the whole world and which awaits the hour of resurrection.”
He also criticized governments which “in principle consider treaties ephemeral and tacitly reserve the right to annul them whenever they find it convenient.” Such an attitude, he said, results from “a fatal dynamism, a collective egoism turned solely to establishing its own rights without recognizing the rights of anyone else.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
