Word: sturzo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After World War I, De Gasperi joined the Popular Party (Christian Democratic) founded by Don Luigi Sturzo. A Sicilian priest, Sturzo was convinced that Christianity, in order to survive in the 20th Century, must rely on "good deeds" of a new kind-social and political action...
...Gasperi succeeded Sturzo as leader of Italy's Christian Democracy, ran up against Benito Mussolini. Mussolini forced De Gasperi out of the window. His party was banned and he became, like thousands of his fellow Italians, an outlaw. He was jailed twice. His health broke. In 1929, Pope Pius XI gave him a post as Vatican librarian at $80 a month. To eke out his salary, he gave language lessons, occasionally worked as ghostwriter for foreign correspondents...
After more than a decade in the Vatican, Alcide de Gasperi returned to the world. During the war, he and his friends secretly began to organize, from Sturzo's old forces, the Christian Democratic Party. De Gasperi represented his party on the National Committee of Liberation, which fought a guerrilla war against the Germans; there he sat with Communists. At the 1946 elections, no one was more surprised than De Gasperi when his loose, ill-organized party polled 8,000,000 votes, and emerged as the largest in Italy. It seemed that a good many Italians wanted precisely what...