All suspicions that the Dominicans were indulging in kidnapping were soon laid to rest when the Prior delivered his prisoner into the hands of the Cardinal Archbishop at Milan on the morning of this same July 27. So far this boy’s vocation had involved merely one Pope, four Cardinals, the Master-General, a very worried Bishop and the English Queen’s agent in Rome. But they had reckoned without the Countess. As she was living in Antwerp there was an inevitable time-lag of about a month. She was as much distressed as her apostate husband, and was to prove far more active. Perhaps it was increasing illness that prevented the Earl from further participation in the dispute. Having written to Digby and to his wife, he seems to have left the matter in their capable hands.

The Countess did not hear of the fatal news until July 28, exactly a month after Philip’s clothing. By then he was safely lodged in the Archbishop’s palace at Milan, but of course she had no inkling of that. She wrote to her husband to express her sorrow, and to comfort him with the thought that there would be at least a year before Philip could be professed. The action of the Dominicans was so manifestly unjust that a letter to the Marquis de Velada, Governor of Milan, would, she hoped, be sufficient. He could if necessary call in the authority of the Nuncio there to force the fathers to surrender their ill-gotten novice.

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.