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c h a p t e r 2 3 War and Revival 564 IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1939, as Europe moved inexorably toward war, Pope Pius XII issued an appeal for further negotiations among the quarreling nations, much as his predecessor, Benedict XV, had done in 1914. That neither succeeded does not distract from the nobility of their efforts . And there was also, according to one observer, a hint of the romantic in Pius’s attempt, or so Catholics in the archdiocese of St. Paul were informed on the second day of the Second World War. “When the Supreme Pontiff decided to broadcast to the world his earnest plea for world peace, Rome was overcast by a cloudy, rainy day. Immediately before the Holy Father’s moving message was read, there appeared in the skies a resplendent double rainbow.”1 A sign, it seems, to endure contradiction over the next six ghastly years. The secular politicians fared no better. At the end of September 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned to London from Munich. We have achieved, proclaimed the British prime minister to thunderous applause, “peace with honor, peace for our time.” Less than a year later, even as the pope was­ speaking—Prague having already been seized by the Germans—Hitler’s panzers crossed the frontier into Poland. Shortly after that the Soviets, linked now to the Nazi regime by the infamous nonaggression pact, occupied the eastern part of that unhappy country. Thus came the fulfillment of Marshall Foch’s gloomy prophecy of 1919 with regard to the Treaty of Versailles. “This is not peace,” he said. “This is a truce for twenty years.” As the Second World War began, Minnesota Catholics, like most Americans , assumed a thoroughly isolationist stance. Polish Americans certainly had no sympathy for the German aggressor, nor, as the Nazi juggernaut swal1 . CB, September 2, 1939 (attribution only to the NCWC News Service). I War and Revival 565 lowed up much of Western Europe, had those of French, Belgian, or Dutch extraction. But the quarrel, they believed, was essentially a European one, the decadent Old World up to its bloody old tricks again, a vast ocean away. Only a generation before, young Americans had had to strap kit bags and­ rifles on their backs and go “over there”—to the strains of Catholic vaudevillian George M. Cohan’s patriotic ditty—and bring about a dubious victory at enormous cost. Never again. As for the violence besetting the Far East, separated from the United States by an even broader ocean, it appeared more­ remote still: inscrutable little yellow men slaughtering one another for no discernible reason. To be sure, over the next two years, public opinion was deeply moved by the heroism of the British people standing alone and sustained by little more than Churchillian eloquence. No one who heard him can ever forget the gravely mellow voice of Edward R. Murrow reporting back to America by radio as the bombs were falling all around him during the Blitz: “This, is London.” But other voices were also heard during these years of ambivalence, none more frequently and stridently, particularly among Catholics, than that of­ Father Charles Coughlin, the Michigan populist whose Sunday afternoon broadcasts were listened to, it was claimed, by as much as one third of the national radio audience. Coughlin was an early and ardent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt—“The New Deal is Christ’s Deal” he famously asserted—but as the 1930s progressed his views took on a different emphasis. Whether or not radical anti-Semitism became his obsession remains a matter of dispute; the fact is that his growing contempt of “Jewish-dominated capitalism” led him to remarkable misjudgments—that, for instance, the vile Nazi Kristallnacht of 1938 was “a persecution of the Jews only after Christians had been persecuted .” Minnesotan Charles Lindbergh made no secret of his admiration for German efficiency and industrial capacity, while Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain, the Irish Catholic Joseph P. Kennedy, loudly supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, and once the war began he doubted, just as loudly, that Hitler could or even should be defeated. The civil war in Spain contributed much to this mixed picture. Most Americans sympathized with the Republic despite its reliance on the military aid of the Comintern and the Soviet Union, but, though atrocities abounded on both sides, Catholics by and large identified with General Franco’s Nationalists who, whatever their connection to the fascist dictators, did not shoot priests and...

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