An Appalling Indifference

An editorial by Father James Coleman in a parish magazine, The Kevi-news, is reprinted in that excellent paper The Wanderer. Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara, C.P., who was a prisoner of the Communists, is quoted as contrasting what he hoped to find on his return to America—Catholic organizations, colleges and schools “aroused to do battle for those who were suffering persecution for justice’s sake”—with the “appalling indifference” that he found. I was reminded of a conversation with the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, shortly after the June 17 rising. I was at the time working for the American administration in occupied Germany and had been much impressed by a group of students in an East German university who were wearing the badge of their Catholic Students’ Union. “Those boys and girls,” said the Bishop, “are living with the thought of martyrdom as a possibility. When they send representatives to our Catholic Reunion in West Germany the contrast between them and our easy-going young Catholics living in security is overwhelming. They might be inhabitants of another planet.”

A Christian Problem

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Sir Arnold Lunn

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Religious Persecution

An editorial by Father James Coleman in a parish magazine, The Kevi-news, is reprinted in that excellent paper The Wanderer. Bishop Cuthbert O’Gara, C.P., who was a prisoner of the Communists, is quoted as contrasting what he hoped to find on his return to America—Catholic organizations, colleges and schools “aroused to do battle for those who were suffering persecution for justice’s sake”—with the “appalling indifference” that he found. I was reminded of a conversation with the Catholic Bishop of Berlin, shortly after the June 17 rising. I was at the time working for the American administration in occupied Germany and had been much impressed by a group of students in an East German university who were wearing the badge of their Catholic Students’ Union. “Those boys and girls,” said the Bishop, “are living with the thought of martyrdom as a possibility. When they send representatives to our Catholic Reunion in West Germany the contrast between them and our easy-going young Catholics living in security is overwhelming. They might be inhabitants of another planet.”

A Christian Problem