Several pronouncements by Mgr. Ruch, the Bishop of Strasburg, within the past few weeks, have drawn attention to one of the most intricate and difficult problems of the Church in France since the War. Without attempting to present the whole problem that is involved, it is of considerable interest to note the attitude which has been adopted by the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ whose conduct during the trying years since the War has shown him to be one of the most courageous and outspoken and also one of the ablest members of the French hierarchy. He has had to face a situation more embarrassing and more complicated than has any other bishop in France. Nothing proves more strikingly both the simplicity and the courage with which he has faced his duties than his own reluctant disclosure, made at a banquet of the Catholic Young Men’s Association in the spring of last year, that he had been prevented by the Pope himself, year after year since the War, from resigning his bishopric and retiring to a Carthusian monastery.

The circumstances which led to that revelation have already been described in BLACKFRIARS. Mgr. Ruch was speaking in reply to a campaign of persistent misrepresentation of his own conduct by the Action Francaise. It was not that the Action Francaise had attacked him personally. On the contrary, it was they who gave him the title of the ‘patriot Bishop of Strasburg,’ and proclaimed, week after week—until he was forced into making public the most intimate secrets of his spiritual life—that the Vatican had attempted to remove him from his bishopric because of his sturdy patriotism as a citizen of France. The facts were actually the direct opposite.