Extract from a letter from Frederick H. Boland to John J. Hearne (Ottawa)
(410/37) (Confidential)

I have just been reading your report 660/10 of the 21st December about your interview with the Minister for External Affairs on the subject of the Stepinac resolution.¹ We are sending a copy of the report to the Taoiseach at once.

I am sorry that you should have been exposed to such an exhibition of irascibility and bad manners. I am not sure that the Taoiseach should not tell Turgeon,² when he comes, that he read your report with pained surprise. What do you think?

We are sending a copy of the report to the Ambassador to the Holy See for his confidential information.

It is not easy to divine precisely why St. Laurent should have taken so hostile an attitude. Is it possible that he has been badgered by Catholic circles in Quebec to take a public stand about the Stepinac trial and that he took a poor view of our official démarche as a potential addition to his embarrassment? However vain he may be, or however concerned he may have been to impress Pearson with his official objectivity, it is difficult to understand how he could have been so testy without some such personal cause for irritation.

His remarks to you were rather silly. For your confidential information, we sounded both the British and the Americans as to their views at quite an early stage - before the debate took place in the Dáil at all. Both regarded the trial and sentence as a pure infamy, and we got the impression that, were it not for the attitude they were adopting at the time as regards intervention in the internal affairs of Franco-Spain, they would not have allowed the argument that the trial was a domestic matter to prevent them making downright public statements about it. The State Department in Washington gave us their view quite bluntly but confidentially as being that the trial was not a judicial process at all but an arbitrary act of executive policy.

St. Laurent's observation that 'We Quebec Catholics don't accept the usual view of freedom of conscience' is rather comic. Strictly between ourselves, the terms of the Dáil resolution were framed in consultation with the highest ecclesiastical quarters and with the very closest advertence to the Encyclical 'Libertas Praestantissima'.³ The terms of the resolution evoked spontaneous expressions of enthusiastic approval from Cardinal Griffin and the Administrative Council of the NCWC in Washington. The Archbishop of Dublin referred to it in a private letter as 'this resolution, most accurately Catholic in its terms....'.

St. Laurent obviously chose to ignore the words 'in the manner He Himself has ordained'.

[matter omitted]