“To abolish this Magna Charta of the conscience is to strike at the very heart of the work of the Church, which is all the more serious because Paragraph 5 of the decree stipulates that the Ministry of Police may imprison the priest in question, in order to force a statement without the case having been submitted to a tribunal.”
Yet all this was happening during the first year of the occupation. Already the highest spiritual authorities of Norway found themselves in the position of having not only to protest against a particularly intolerable act, but also to enunciate a judgment upon the whole of the methods of the occupation, which judgment appears on Page 16 of the pastoral letter, and which I shall read to the Tribunal (last paragraph):
“For this reason the bishops of the Church have placed before the Ministry some of the acts and official proclamations about the government of society during these latter times, acts and proclamations which the Church finds in contradiction with the Commandments of God and which give the impression of revolutionary conditions prevailing in the country, instead of a state of occupation by which the laws are upheld as long as they are not directly incompatible with this state of occupation.”
This is a very correct juridical analysis; and now, if it please the Tribunal, I should also like to read a last sentence which preceded this, on Page 16:
“When the public authority of society permits violence and injustice and exercises pressure over souls, then the Church becomes the guardian of consciences. A human soul is of more importance than the whole world.”
I shall now ask the Tribunal to take the file entitled “Belgium.” I point out immediately to the Tribunal that this file does not include any document book. This statement, which deals with very general facts, will be supported as being evidence by the report of the Belgian Government, which has already been submitted by my colleagues under Document Number RF-394. The section which I now take up is a general section concerning military administration in two cases, in Belgium and France; and I shall begin with the file concerning Belgium.
In Belgium the usurpations of national sovereignty by the occupying power are imputable to the military command which committed them either by direct decrees or by injunctions to the Belgian administrative authorities who in this case were the Secretaries General of the Ministries.
Concerning the setting up of this apparatus of usurpation I shall read out to the Tribunal two paragraphs of the Belgian report, Chapter 4, concerning Germanization and nazification, Page 3, Paragraph 3:
“The legal government of Belgium, having withdrawn to France, then to London, it was the Secretaries General of the Ministries, that is to say, the highest officials in the hierarchic order, who, by virtue of Article 5 of the law of 10 May 1940, exercised within the framework of their professional activity and in cases of urgency, all the powers of the highest authority.”