Word: lateran
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...climax of this sweetness-&-light campaign conies when "Father Palmiro" and his Communist Curates vote for the reaffirmation of the Lateran Pact (TIME, April 7), thus depriving the Christian Democrats of their most effective antiCommunist weapon-the charge that the Communists fight Christianity. Says a Communist observer: "You might say that Togliatti decided for the moment to dispense with the crude sickle in favor of the more delicate rapier. And instead of the hammer, we find Terracini's parliamentary gavel more effective...
...Parties. Last June, the Christian Democratic Party, Communism's strongest enemy, polled over eight million votes. But it slowly dissipated this advantage by failing to carry out any of its promised social reforms, by letting the Communists steal its thunder on every major issue (such as the Lateran Pact), and by being just plain badly organized...
Nervous excitement had swept the floor of the Palazzo Monte Citorio as the Assembly reached the Lateran question. Nobody but Togliatti and the Communists-and they were saving their surprise-was sure how the vote would divide. In the jammed public galleries there was a solemn checkerboard of Jesuit black, Franciscan brown, Dominican white-set off by the bright springtime pinks and blues of .snappily dressed women. The heads that craned forward were alternately tonsured and gaily feather-plumed...
...first speeches were predictable enough. Christian Democrat Premier Alcide de Gasperi spoke firmly, if not very eloquently, for the Lateran reaffirmation his party wanted: Christ's divinity was "the crucial question ... of our positivist age. . . ." Then he descended to pragmatism with an arithmetical statement that Togliatti later turned into a trap. Out of 45,526,750 Italians, said De Gasperi, "45,349,221 are Catholics...
Then Togliatti removed all doubt: he and his party would vote for confirmation of the Lateran Treaty because, he explained pontifically, "We are rightly considered the most advanced working-class party and . . . the working class does not want the country divided for religious reasons...