I have not visited Italy since 1956, so that these impressions of current journalism there are at a slight remove: but I have kept up with various periodicals printed in Italy through 1957 and into 1958. These are mostly Catholic—though very different in other respects—, my recent reading of non-Catholic Italian journalism being almost limited to the two chief ‘neutral’ newspapers of the North, the Corriere della Sera (Milan) and La Stampa (Turin), and to glances at the ‘highbrow’ anticlerical review II Ponte (Florence) and the equally anticlerical but far more widely sold II Mondo (Rome).

A word, to start with, on the post-war situation of Italian Catholicism. It seems an odd one, at first sight; powerful yet unstable. Politically, post-war Italy has been run by Catholics. The Resistance was, superficially at least, more Communist than Catholic, and until 1948 the situation seemed very dangerously fluid; but that year the Christian Democrats won their decisive victory at the polls, and they have stayed in power, though with reduced majorities, ever since; in the teeth of a fiercely sustained opposition from right, left and centre, not to speak of their own internal disagreements and such minor nuisances as the Montesi affair. Two chief factors—apart from the deep, if somewhat sluggish, attachment of most Italians to their Catholic heritage— have contributed to this real, if limited, Catholic predominance in Italian public life since the war: the high political intelligence and personal integrity of De Gasperi and the prestige of Pius XII.