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A year and a half in prison almost broke De Gasperi's health. The Vatican finally negotiated his release. Through the long Fascist night, he worked on the Vatican library card-index system for $80 a month, eked out enough to support Signora de Gasperi and four daughters by ghostwriting and translating. Out of this experience came a patient, frugal, unobtrusively devout man who had suffered less than some under totalitarianism, but enough to want to spend the rest of his life fighting it. He bought a sorely needed dark blue suit and went out to revive the Popular Party. This time, De Gasperi called it the Christian Democratic Party, and by 1944 had built it strong enough to make him a minister without portfolio in the provisional postwar regime. Soon he became Foreign Minister, in 1945 Prime Minister. In 1946 Italy voted itself a republic and made the Democristiani the biggest political party.
Don Luigi Sturzo has returned to Rome, but not to the party. In a small convent run by the Canossian Daughters of Charity on Mondovi Street, just off Rome's New Appian Way, 81-year-old Don Luigi sits in his study amid untidy stacks of books, pamphlets and newspapers. Easily tired, susceptible to colds, he rarely emerges from his simple, two-room apartment. The last time he visited the Vatican, only 15 minutes away, was during the Holy Year of 1950. The old priest complains that Layman de Gasperi has tied Christian Democracy too closely to the church. "I criticize them from time to time," he explains, "but that is because it is my vocation to be a political critic.
It does not mean I disown them." The creed of Christian Democracy is in the party's 1946 manifesto: "While Communism strives for the supremacy of society, and liberalism for the supremacy of the individual, democracy aims at realizing the synthesis of individual rights and social duties . . . and consequently wants to create a state in which all classes cooperate . . . We did not fight against the barrack-state in order to substitute for it the executioner-state. We are aiming at the school-state, capable of re-educating character." A schoolmasterly solicitude that demands the best instead of appealing to the worst is not the cheapest way to win popularity. A philosophy of cooperation has sometimes meant walking when running was called for. Sometimes the struggle has involved forcing through Parliament—always with respect for the rules, and usually against the bloodthirsty assaults of the Reds and the Blacks—changes about which many people had misgivings. Biggest example: the new electoral reform law under which any coalition of parties getting more than 50% of the vote will get 64% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. De Gasperi has lived long enough in tyranny's shadow to respect the rights of minorities; he is convinced, however, that democracy must be made strong enough to survive the parliamentary assaults of those who oppose parliamentary government.