Word: sturzo
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Early Life: Born in Caltagirone, Sicily, Sept. 5, 1901, christened Mario Scelba (pronounced Shell-ba). His poor family sharecropped land owned by Don Luigi Sturzo, Italy's great political priest who founded what is now the Christian Democratic Party. Don Luigi was the boy's godfather, paid for his law studies in Rome, employed him as his private secretary, thus launched him in politics...
...affairs of the determinedly anti-church regime, which had shorn, the Vatican of property and political authority in Italy. But as the political peril to religion developed on the left, the ban slowly relaxed. At the end of World War I, a scholarly Sicilian priest named Luigi Sturzo persuaded Pope Benedict XV to let him form a political party of Catholic laymen. Don Luigi promised that he would resolutely avoid church control, and he kept his promise...
...Luigi Sturzo's creation, the Popular Party, set out to bring Christian morality and principles into distinctly non-Christian Italian politics-"a center party of Christian inspiration and oriented toward the left," he called...
Riots & Parades. In an Italy tossed between Marxist riots and Blackshirt parades, Don Luigi and De Gasperi tried desperately to head off Fascism by proposing a coalition with the Socialists, but their efforts failed. After Mussolini took over, Sturzo fled into exile in 1924, and De Gasperi became leader of the party...
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...