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This relation may prove as painful to the Church as it is to the democracies. Two-thirds of the world's 331,500,000 Catholics live in Europe under the dictatorships. By contrast there are only 21,500,000 Catholics in the U. S., but the U. S. is by far the Church's richest province and the Vatican has become increasingly dependent on it for financial support. Now that South America, with its 61,000,000 Catholics, is working in antitotalitarian harness with the U. S., the Vatican may soon be put on the horns of a dilemma. One horn is tacit participation in the spoils of Fascist victory—which patriotic Italian bishops (who, like Cardinal Kinsley, do not necessarily represent the Vatican's views) have steadily urged since June. They want the Vatican to take suzerainty over the Holy Land, should Italy seize it. The other horn would be to oppose the governments to which two-thirds of the Church's communicants owe their temporal allegiance.
How the Vatican may resolve its relationship with the dictators and democracies, no man can tell. Pope Pius last fortnight took refuge in metaphor. "Peace," said His Holiness to a thousand pilgrims, "is a white dove that, finding no place to land over a ground covered with corpses and submerged in a deluge of violence, seems to have returned to that ark of the new alliance, the heart of Jesus, to reappear only when it will finally be able to pluck from the tree of the gospel the green branch of brotherly chanty among men and peoples."