News Brief

Bitterly assailing anti-Semitic persecution in Germany, Jean Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris, last night branded Nazi racial theories as a “defiance of sane observation of facts, of true science and of the spiritual traditions of the universe. The Catholic newspaper La Croix published a letter by Verdier Joseph Ernest Cardinal van Roey, Primate of Belgium, in which the French prelate warned that doctrines proclaiming the alleged superiority of one “race” over another amounted to “the most abject materialism” and led the way to “the most shameful practices.”

The results of this ideology, Cardinal Verdier pointed out, had already revealed themselves just beyond France’s borders where, “in the name of the rights of race, thousands upon thousands of men are tracked like wild beasts, despoiled of their property and turned into pariahs vainly seeking a refuge and a morsel of bread.”

“May God protect us from these theories and their application!” the Cardinal exclaimed “May He keep us from this racism which our civilization repudiates in the name of biology, history, true philosophy, law, traditional morality and the Christian religion! It is humiliating when we read declarations as strange as: ‘Right is the expression of the needs of blood and this right has value only in the degree that it serves the race.”

The Jewish periodical Universal Israelite published an open letter to the mother of Ernest vom Rath, slain German diplomat, appealing to her to intercede on behalf of German Jews persecuted as a result of the killing of her son by a young Polish Jew. Expressing sympathy for Frau vom Rath’s grief, the magazine declared: “We address ourselves to you in this Jewish review to implore a gesture of pity in favor of our co-religionists in Germany who also are the innocent victims of the assassin of your son. The crime which brought you such great bereavement and which we condemn without reservation, was a pretext for unleashing horrors and passions against the Jews of Germany.”