Foreign News: EUROPE'S CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS

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In France, the party's name is Mouvement Republicain Populaire. In theory, it stands only a few steps away from mild Socialism, but in practice it sits mostly in the center. It began in the heroism of the French underground. For more than a year between the fall of France and Hitler's attack on Russia, the French Resistance was organized and dominated by courageous young veterans like Georges Bidault, now French Foreign Minister; Pierre-Henri Teitgen (now M.R.P. president). "The prominence of so many individual devout Catholics in the Resistance," reported one student of France, "saved the church in France." For some time, the M.R.P. was the largest party in France. Now worn and watered down after eight debilitating years in the cockpit of French party politics, it now attracts about 12% of the French electorate. Best known for its support of family allowances, which arrested the decline in France's birth rate, the M.R.P. is parted from its ideological neighbors by an anxious controversy over church schools.

In West Germany, Christian Democracy is the party of conservative Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, but is still flavored by the Christian Socialism of the Catholic Labor movement. Mitbestimmungsrecht, for example, the radical program under which many German workers share in the management of industry, was energetically pushed by Catholic labor. Where France's M.R.P. works in a nominally (97%) Catholic community, Catholic Adenauer's party works in the shadow of historic Catholic-Protestant cleavage in Germany. But it numbers thousands of Protestants in its coalition (they total about 30%), and it has elected Protestant Hermann Ehlers as its vice chairman. Many German Protestants complain, nevertheless, that if Adenauer "were more of a German and less of a Rhineland Catholic," he would slow down his drive for a united Europe and pay more attention to uniting West Germany with the Protestant (and now Communist-ruled) East Germany. Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union comes before the voters this year. High personal prestige and West Germany's remarkable prosperity are in his favor.

Diverse as are their political environments and their religious faiths, Western Europe's Christian Democrats are loosely organized into a kind of clearinghouse for Christian parties representing 20 million voters: Last fall it set up a committee to try to define Christian Democracy, but it has still to agree on a definition. Yet Christian Democracy, like so many idealistic abstractions, demonstrably exists. Its faith is demonstrated by the high character of its leaders, whose performance shows that what eludes definition need not pass understanding. Christian Democracy may well take its credo from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."