LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS PIUS XII
TO PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA*

22 August 1940

The return to the United States of Your Excellency’s Personal Representative to Us, for the purpose of recruiting in the homeland the forces so generously spent in the fulfilment of his noble mission, affords Us a welcome opportunity of sending you Our cordial greetings and of reiterating Our appreciation for the presence of Your Envoy near Us. In the light of experience, We now have further and ampler proof of the wisdom which inspired Your Excellency to despatch your Representative to Us, as We also have cause to rejoice at the felicity of choice which led you to entrust this important post to the Honorable Myron C. Taylor.

These first months of mission have occasioned Us great satisfaction and, in spite of the dark foreboding of the hour, We express Our hope in a future which shall see the re-establishment of a general and enduring peace. Although the horrors of the war increase and Our sorrow deepens with every passing day, We are redoubling Our prayers and our endeavours to find a practicable way to such a peace, as will bear within it the promise of permanency, and free men from the heavy incubus of insecurity and of perpetual alarms. In Our unceasing search for that peace which will be no longer be, as so often in the past, a parenthesis of exhaustion between two phases of conflict, but rather, by the grace of God, a golden era of Christian concord dedicated to the spiritual and material improvement of humanity, We feel a distinct sense of comfort in the thought that We shall not be without the powerful support of the President of the United States.

It is therefore with heartfelt good will that we again assure Your Excellency of Our prayer for your continued health and happiness and for the prosperity and progress of the American people.

*Actes et Documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale, vol. 1 p. 512-513.