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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 5. May 6, 1958

Angels v. Assassins

Angels v. Assassins

The whole controversy on the virtues of Catholicism that has been raging in your pages, and especially the interchange between yourself and Mr. Hall, highlights all the blind prejudice and stupid oversimplification that follow when discussion on a religious theme is raised along narrow sectarian lines.

The blame must, I fear, be laid at your editorial door. It was the blaring trumpet-blasts of your first two editorials that awoke the chorus of discordant echoes. To make exaggerated and swaggering claims on behalf of the faith into which one had the (good or bad) luck to be born, without any serious attempt at any intellectual argument, is to invite diatribes of abuse in return. It is a familiar pattern in New Zealand, and one which has had a disastrous effect on the traditional tolerance which was a national characteristic of the stock from which we are derived. Roman Catholic bigotry breeds Protestant bigotry, and vice versa.

It is almost hopeless to try to straighten up the substance of the resultant discussion. To Mr. Hall, the Church of Rome is a sinister secret society of schemers, obscurantists and asassins. To you, it is an army of angels robed in dazzling white. Since both viewpoints are so wildly wide of the truth, it is only natural that the arguments marshalled in support of these viewpoints are based on myth rather than fact.

Just one example: Your comparative treatment of the Spanish Civil War. I believe it can be amply documented (a) that this war was not engineered by the Vatican, and (b) that the impressively attested tales of Republican atrocities are a medley of distortion and fabrication. Let us get this straight—there were Roman Catholics on both sides in the Spanish Civil War; there were also heretics and infidels on both sides. The war was not about religion at all, although the fascists exploited religion for their own ends —apparently with some success, if one is to judge by the delusions about the war cherished by many Roman Catholics in New Zealand. The issues were also confused by the disruption behind the Republican lines set off by an unholy alliance of conservatives and communists.

But still, broadly, the Spanish Civil War was a battle between fascism and democracy—a sort of curtain-raiser to World War II. Religious bigots do great disservice to democracy by attempting to represent it as anything else — as by almost everything else they do.

—C. V. Bollinger.