Pope Snubbed

To complain that one is not getting enough press publicity is to appear undignified and ridiculous--unless one is a personage inherently dignified and sacred. Last week the Vatican daily, Osservatore Romano, complained that the Supreme Pontiff's latest encyclical, dealing with Education, had received the very meagrest publicity in the Fascistized press of Italy.

"The importance of this document." said Osservatore with bitter sarcasm, "has evidently escaped the editors . . . though it was the longest and one of the most important encyclicals ever issued by the Holy Father. . . . "Some newspapers of Rome published only a few lines. Others ignored the encyclical entirely. Only one gave it as much as half a column--and this when treating of the words of the Bishop of Rome!"

In accounting for the snub, Osservatore avoided the real reason, scathingly suggested that the Italian press now has no room for the pronouncements of His Holiness because it devotes its space to "reports of prize fights and raids on houses of ill fame."

But fact is that such sensational news is now played down by explicit order of Dictator Benito Mussolini. He wages a ceaseless campaign to keep the press clean, constructive and, of course, subservient. Every Fascist also knows that the only thing which keeps the Pope off the front page in Italy and puts him among the quack nostrum and miscellaneous columns is a recent, quasi-secret order from Il Duce. Moreover, of all recent papal utterances, the encyclical on Education was most explicitly the sort of thing Il Duce will not countenance. In effect the Supreme Pontiff laid down the rule that the three agencies which ought to be charged with the education of the young are, in descending order of importance: 1) the Church; 2) the Home; 3) the State. This is an absolutely flat contradiction of Dictator Mussolini's insistence that the State should be supreme in education, with even the Home subservient to the State, with the Church relegated to imparting chiefly religious instruction.

The New York Times, only U. S. newsservice to carry the mammoth encyclical in toto, proudly announced that this was the longest single radio message ever transmitted from Italy (some 12.000 words), required 14 1/2 hours of dot-and-dash work due to "unfavorable conditions," whereas "under favorable conditions an average of 1,000 words per hour can be maintained."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.