THE CURIA
itself with its own energies and its own means, and that it needs neither missionary priests nor subsidies, it becomes an established bishopric inside the great hierarchical system. Thus one may say that the Propaganda is, as it were, the Church's botanical garden — a term that indicates sufficiently well how significant it is and how great an amount of work it accomplishes.
Spreading the faith in countries where the political situation is difficult is sometimes entrusted to the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and sometimes missionary activity as such involves political measures. For good reasons the Propaganda desires that missionaries who serve one folk group or territory shall be of different nationalities; but every state tries with all the means at its disposal to establish a monopoly of its own missionaries, realizing that a country which has been Christianized by missionaries speaking its language thereby becomes a fertile field for its trade and its policy. Accordingly the Prefect of the Propaganda is an important political personage whom statesmen and diplomats surround jealously.
It is very surprising to learn that a considerable portion of Europe belongs to the terræ missionis, for this term includes the diaspora i. e., Protestant countries with a scattered Catholic population. The three Scandinavian kingdoms are Apostolic Vicarates, and the diaspora regions of North and Central Germany were only recently — the final change took place when the Concordat with Prussia was signed in 1929 — transformed from Apostolic Vicarates and Prefectures into dioceses, in so far as they were not incorporated in older dioceses. Therewith there finally ended a situation whereby the Catholics of Hamburg, Saxony, Mecklenburg and Holstein were made to live under the same ecclesiastical authorities who supervise the newly converted Zulus and Bantus.
When the reigning Pope dissolved the administration of the Oriental Church from the Congregation of the Missions this was looked upon as an act of respect to the ancient rite of the East and as a grant to the Uniat Greek Church of equal rank with the Latin Church. The Pope gave this measure especial significance by himself taking the presidency of the new Congregation for the Oriental Church, and thus giving it a rank next to that of the Holy Office and equal to that of
