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The Christian News-Letter, 97 (3 Sept 1941) [1-4]

Dear Member,

The writer of the previous number of this News-Letter introduced herself in terms of apology which will serve at least equally well for the present writer: I shall therefore not attempt to amplify or vary what she said in her first paragraph, but accept it as an introduction for myself also. 2

<sc>the christian education of france</sc>

We know little of the situation in either occupied or unoccupied France; and those of us who have French friends receive no news, or hardly more than that they are still alive. Our public preoccupation, also, is with the foreign policy of the Vichy government and its immediate consequences for us. Yet it is of very great importance, in the long run, that we should take every opportunity of informing ourselves about the domestic policy of that government, and of the changes taking place inside France. For the problem of France will be one of the most vital and difficult of all the post-war problems; and we need to remind ourselves that the France which we shall have to get to know – after a period of isolation of the two countries from each other for which there is no parallel in history – may be different from the France which we knew up to fifteen months ago. For that reconstruction of understanding which will be essential, we shall need all our powers of imagination, sympathy and tolerance; and also all the information about the steps in France’s development that we can meanwhile obtain. The article in The Timesof August 14th, therefore, meagre as it is, deserves our careful attention. 3

As for the abolition of political parties, we know well that there were formerly far too many for parliamentary government to be anything but a tedious farce; and we know how prevalent was political corruption and venality. As for the abolition of Free Masonry, we must remember that the Grand Orient was a very different affair from Free Masonry as known in Britain – I have always understood that relations between the two bodies were broken off long ago. 4 On the other hand, the abolition of secret 180societies seems to have come rather late, for it arouses our recollection of the fact that some of the most dangerous of these, in the years before the war, were freely said to have been abetted and subsidised by Germany, if not even created by German machinations. What gives us the gravest anxiety, is the statement (in The Timesarticle cited) that “Jews have been given a special status, based on the laws of Nuremberg, which makes their condition little better than that of bondsmen” [5]. 5 Anti-semitism there has always been, among the parties of the extreme Right: but it was a very different thing, as a symptom of the disorder of French society and politics for the last hundred and fifty years, from what it is when it takes its place as a principle of reconstruction. If this is what is happening, we can only hope that there has been, or that there will be, some organised protest against such injustice, by the French ecclesiastical hierarchy: unless we are also optimistic enough to hope that these measures are only taken under the strongest pressure from Germany, and that no French government, once that government was master in its own house, would enforce such measures or keep them on its statutes. But unless the French Church, and the Protestant bodies in France rise to protest, we must feel serious doubts about the way in which the revival of Christian France, advertised from Vichy, is to be carried out. 6

In Spain – a country which I do not know – it may be that the vast majority of the population, however anti-clerical, is Christian and Catholic at heart. France has had a very different story. We may deplore the French Revolution, but we must accept it as a fact. In no...

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