The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, l927. UNHAPPY ITALY.

Evening Star, Issue 19637, 17 August 1927, Page 6

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17, 1927. UNHAPPY ITALY.

The arrest of live priests in the Udine diocese by the Fascist authorities raises the-interesting question of the relationship between idussolini amlllic church in Italy. The reason given for the arrest of tlio live clerics is that they have been concerned in anfci-Fas-eist intrigues which the authorities can no longer tolerate. It is very little indeed winch the authorities in Italy are prepared to tolerate to-day. Associations arc dissolved; the right of assembly no longer exists; elections are suppressed or falsified; the Press is silenced; anti-Faseists arc sided upon, their correspondence is intercepted, and their houses arc searched. Italy to-day is split up by the Fascists into a minority of masters to whom every tiling is permitted and a majority of slaves deprived of all rights and protected by no moral law. It is natural that the question should be asked as to where the church stands in this matter. The overwhelming bulk of the oppressed are her adherents, and the church is one of the very few organised forces remaining in Italy. A good deal of light has been thrown on the situation by Galtano Salvemiui. Ho was professor of history in the University of Florence and a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. He is now an exile in America, having suffered imprisonment and been deprived of his civil rights and property because he opposed Fascism. Both in England and the United States he has lectured and written on Fascism, and ho has explained why, in his opinion, the clergy can never take the initiative in a rising against the Fascists. The official teaching of the Catholic Church does not authorise active revolt against established authority. Pope Pins XT. forbids the clergy to become involved in political strife. Ho mildly deplores the doctrines and methods of the Fascists, but wraps such criticism np in an abundance of personal praise of Mussolini. “ If the mass of the lower clergy 7 were not tenaciously anti-Fascisfc,” writes Professor Salvemini, “tho pro-Fascism of Pope Pins XI. would be more decided and declared.” And to-day, in Italy, tho parish clergy and the people among whom they live are in tho great majority stubbornly anti-Fascisfc. Alary priests have had to suffer Fascist reprisals; the parish priest of Argenta was beaten to death by the Fascists. All that it appears possible for tho priests to do in tho meantime is to keep to their churches and stand aloof from politics. Only alter (lie breakdown of Fascism, in Snlveminrs opinion, will the parish clergy issue freely from their churches and try to gather the peasantry again around tho church. But it will remain to be seen whether the peasantry will then forget the Fascism of tho Pope in the antiFascism of the clergy. It will bo noticed that Professor Salvemini has no doubts about the breakdown of Fascism. He counts out the Italian army as well as the church as one of the organisations by which the overturning can bo accomplished. According to him Italy’s foreign p* iicy as directed by Mussolini is the Achilles heel of Fascism. “There is,” he writes, ‘‘in the Fascist mentality

a strange mixture of megalomania and persecution mania. On the one hand the Fascists are convinced that all neighbors are threatening Italy; on the other, they are ever threatening all their-neighbors to prevent them f:om threatening Italy.” This is corroborated by a cable appearing in to-day’s issue stating that important Italian military manoeuvres are progressing in the Alps in- a theoretical war against Germany or Austria, while the Swiss newspapers arc asking yhat Mussolini's object is in arranging for the largest concentration since the war. Iho Fascists, having demolished every opposition in Italy’s internal polity, have to find other obstacles against which to discharge their excitement. Not finding these obstacles in their own country, they have to seek them abroad. It is the familiar story of dictatorship leading to war as an outlet for internal troubles. Hut in Salvemini’s view matters need not go so far as actual hostilities. “When Mussolini is pushed by domestic difficulties to make in his foreign policy a blunder bigger than the blunder of Corfu, bigger than the shameful Garibaldi blunder, then all other Governments will bo compelled to preserve the peace of the world. Then they will deal with Mussolini, and with the Fascist militia likewise, as they did with "Wilhelm IT. and the German array in November, I9IS. They will declare that they refuse to have anything to do with Mussolini, and that they wish to deal only with the Italian people after it has boon restored to liberty. War will not bo needed to make this slop successful. This impulse, of an emotional origin, will set in motion against the dictatorship the whole of tho Italian people, and tho dictatorship will collapse.”