The Waterbury Democrat., 1931-02-14
In To-day's Mail Pope Plus Merely Played A Role in a Great Drama
 as Have All His
 Predecessors.
To the Editor of the Democrat:-
Predecessors.


 First I want to compliment the Waterbury Democrats report on it's accuracy. and the beauty of the trans lation of the first worldwide radio message of His Holiness, Pope Plus xI. The latin of Plus XI like that of Leo XII in his world-famous encyc- licalis a living language, not dead one. l heard His holiness delivering the original, and I thought: Here is scholar and linquist using the prose of Cicero and Tacitus, If not exactly as their contemporary. yet with apparently mother-tongue-ne ito coin new word as the Latin of the letters of Prudentius, or St Jer- ome when he sat down to translate the Gospel of St. John from the original Creek
 But what I am writing this letter for is this: it seems that the editorial writers, with the usual look of vision of what part the popes have played in history, are assuming that the present pontiff was beginning a new role in the world because he made use of the latest instrument of sci ence and invention to carry his mes sage to the farthest ends of tne earth.
 It will be admitted, l imagine, that John Henry Newman, who was not born into the church but entered it in his forty-fifth year after he had convinced himself of the accur- acy of Catholic history, knew what he was saying when he wrote the following in the introductory lecture of his ''Idea of University"
 'St. Peter has spoken, it is he who has enJolned on us what seems so unpromising. He has spoken and he has q claim on us to trust him. He is no recluse, no solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter on the dead and gone, no projector of the visionary. He for eighteen hundred years has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If ever there was q power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself to the prac- ticable. ard has been happy in his anticipations, whose words have been facts, and whose commands pro- phecles, such is he in the history of ages, who sits from generation to generation in the Chair of the Apostles. as the Vicar of Christ, and the Doctor of His Church. These are not words of rhetoric, gentlemen. with the apostle are on the winning side. From the first, he has looked through the wide world, of which he has the burden; and according to the needs of the day, and the in- spirations of his Lord, he has Set himself, now to one thing, now 0 another; to all fin reason and N nothing in vain. He came first upon an age of refinement and luxury like our own. and in spite of the persec- utors. fertile in the resources of his prna1fv h,a aonp cafharoA c,,t nP classes of society. the slave the soldier-the high-born lady -. and the sophist, materials enough to farm a people in his Masters honor. The savage hordes came down in torrents from the north, and Peter went out to meet them, and by his very eye he sobered them and backed them in their full careers. They turned aside and flooded the whole earth. and only to be the more surely civilized by him, and to be made ten times more his children than the lawless populations which he had overwhelmed. Lawless kings arose, sagacious as the Roman, pas- sionate as the Hun, yet in him they found their match, and were shat tered, and he lived on. The gates of the earth were opened to the east and the west and men poured out to take possession; and he went with them by his missionaries, to China, to Mexico, carried along by zeal and charity, as far as the chill dren of men were led, by enterprise, covetousn=ss. or ambition. What gray hairs are on the head of Judah, whose youth is renewed like the eagles. whose feet are feet of harts, and underneath the everlasting arms!"
 If John Henry Newman was right, the Holy Father Thursday was merely playing. somewhat dramatic ally to be sure, and in slightly changed manner. the part the suc- cessors of St. Peter have been play ing for nearly nineteen hundred years. HIsToRICAN