Religion: No Smiles for Cain

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The Vatican was not happy about Nikita Khrushchev's glad-handing barnstorm through the U.S., opposed the proposed (and now postponed) trip of Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi to Russia. Last week tough-minded, conservative Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office, took the occasion of a Mass before a group of refugees from Communist countries to deliver some hard words.

"No one desires peace more than you who have felt the lacerations of war," he said. "[But] just as Cain cannot murder Abel without protest, as entire nations cannot be held in slavery with no one taking the part of the oppressed, so one cannot speak of true peace, but only of acquiescence and coexistence with the murderer . . . But [some] still stretch out their hands to the new Antichrists and even race to see who can first shake hands with them and exchange sweet smiles . . . Can a Christian confronted by one who massacres Christians and insults God smile and flatter? Can a Christian opt for alliance with those who prepare for the coming of the Antichrist in countries still free? Can we consider any distentione when the face of Christ once more is spat upon, crowned with thorns and slapped?"

Shortly after Cardinal Ottaviani's blast, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano was out with a condemnation of all groups and movements which have supported Marxism, thereby raising some troubling questions for Christian Socialist and Social Democratic parties. "Even socialism opposed to Communism," declared L'Osservatore, "cannot be reconciled with the profession of Catholicism. Nobody can be a good Catholic and a true Socialist at the same time."