‘The Great Pity’ of France

Extract

Maurice Barrés, that great Frenchman whom the Church buried as a Catholic although he had not officially returned to her fold, had written of ‘The Great Pity of the churches of France.’ It was at the time of Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes’s iniquitous anti-clerical laws for which France is paying with her heart’s blood to-day.

How many Catholic hearts are now again aching for the great pity of the Church of France ! Not that, as yet, the iron heel of anti-Christ is pressed home on that Church. Hitler has had, so far, to restrain the tactics of open persecution so long followed in Catholic Germany and that have reached their unashamedly sadistic peak in Poland. But it seems as if the great Catholic renaissance operative in all ranks, those of the intelligenzia and of Labour alike, had availed nothing for the salvation of Church or country.