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"The place of the priest," a churchgoing Italian is likely to grumble, "is in the sacristy, not the public square." In the 92 years since Italy became united, it has had for Premiers one Protestant, one Jew, several agnostics and many Freemasons, but never a practicing Catholic until Alcide de Gasperi took office.
Catholicism was the state religion under the kings, but few in the royal house were steady communicants. Italians recall that the late Queen Elena enjoyed telling ribald stories about priests, and some even insist that Victor Emmanuel III, on one of the infrequent occasions when he attended Mass, got mixed up at the holy water font and seemed to think he must wash his hands there. To be a Communist is, by decree of the Vatican, a mortal sin, but in some Italian towns the best place to find the leading Communists together is at Sunday Mass. And Catholics in politics sometimes sound like old Senator Tom Heflin lobbing one of his Confederate cannonballs at "the Pope of Rome" Not until the birth (in 1910) of the political party now led by Alcide de Gasperi were Catholics of modern Italy free to participate in politics. Under Pius IX's 1868 Non Expedit decree (it is not expedient), a Catholic could "neither elector nor elected" be; Pius deemed it a surrender for Catholics to join in the 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.
Don 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 it.
Among his early and most promising recruits was a somber, mustached man named Alcide de Gasperi. Of pure Italian blood, De Gasperi had been an Italian citizen only since the end of World War I.
The small Alpine town near Trent where he was born, the son of a minor tax official, was part of Franz Josef's Austro-Hungarian empire. A passionate Italian Irridentist at 17 and a political prisoner before he got out of school, De Gasperi got his first legislative experience in the Austrian Parliament (he still speaks excellent German, as well as good French, hesitant but serviceable English).
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.
But he quickly got on Mussolini's black list—he dared to condemn the Fascist murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti and to ask the King to dismiss // Duce.
Within two years he was in jail.