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PARTISAN REVIEW
This might explain why, for all the prestige and respect he enjoys,
De Gasperi is constantly treading on quicksand. That he has not yet
disappeared in it is a proof that he is at least as astute as he is colorless.
How difficult De Gasperi's position might become from one moment
to another, and how essentially equivocal is the political force of the
Demochristian party, was shown recently by two episodes that are
probably not unrelated. The first was the attack launched at the end
of July against De Gasperi by Luigi Gedda, Vice President General of
Catholic Action and (even more important ) President of those
Comitati
Civici
which are an organ of Catholic Action and at the same time, the
electoral machinery that brought about the Demochristian triumph of
1948; the second, at the beginning of O ctober, was the resignation of
Dossetti, leader of the left wing, from all Party jobs and even from his
post in Parliament.
Gedda's journalistic attack against De Gasperi's " exasperated demo–
cratic praxis" appeared (in the official organ of the
Comitati)
at the
same time that, apparently through Gedda's own intercession, the
Pope received in private audience a group of Sicilian fascists headed
by one Cucco, Minister of Propaganda in Mussolini's "republic" in
1944. The neo-fascists were ecstatic and proclaimed that the Pope,
besides "talking affably to our representatives" had expressly agreed
that an amnesty for the victims of political persecution (i.e., the few
fascists that are still more or less hampered by the formal existence
of the "epuration laws" of 1945) was desirable.
This of course was followed by a denial by the
Osservatore Romano
that the H oly Father had touched on any political subject whatsoever
during the audience, and also by a note in the same paper saying that
the importance of Gedda's article " should not be exaggerated." At
the same time, the President General of the Catholic Action implicitly
criticized Gedda in a statement to the effect that the popular vote had
proved that the Demochristian Party enjoyed the support of the
majority, hence its action should not be " systematically obstructed."
The next day, however, Gedda published another article attacking
democratic fanaticism.
Catholic maneuvering is unfathomable, and sometimes bottomless,
but it is never without significance. The Gedda cpisode certainly reflects
the preoccupations of an important section of Italian Catholicism which
never quite liked the Demochristian compromise, and which now feels
both encouraged by the mounting strength of the right within the coun–
try at large, and worried by the perspective of a further decrease of the
Catholic vote at the next elections.
