Deal

Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI were reported last week to be more irritated with each other than they had been in years. Mme Genevieve Tabouis, famed French liberal journalist, declared that Mussolini was infuriated because the Pope, in condemning Fascism's new anti-Semitic policies, and in throwing the Church's weight behind Italy's Catholic Action (lay organization), had cried: "Who strikes at the Pope, dies." She asserted that Mussolini was full of Napoleonic ideas of waging open war against the Vatican, that the Pope was fearful, that the Holy See was considering, after the death of the present Pope, holding an election conclave elsewhere than in Vatican City. Some French Catholics had heard even wilder rumors, that the Vatican had sounded the French Government about the feasibility of moving the Holy See, bag & baggage, to liberal, tolerant France.

Il Duce and the Pope, however, last week negotiated a breathing spell for Catholic Action. After a series of conversations, President Lamberto Vignoli of Italian Catholic Action and Achille Starace, Fascist Party Secretary, reaffirmed an agreement made in 1931. By this deal, Catholic Action stays out of politics; its leaders may not be antiFascist. In return, the Party guarantees that no measures will be taken against its members who are also members of Catholic Action. In effect, reaffirmation of the deal served notice on Fascist Catholics that they must toe the party line--no matter what the Pope's views on anti-Semitism or other "political" matters.

But if Fascists thought that by muzzling Catholic Action they had washed up ''any conflict or dissension between State and Church"--Mussolini's spokesman Virginio Gayda immediately so declared--they were sadly mistaken. On Sunday the Pope walked alone out of his summer villa at Castel Gandolfo (something he had never done before), delivered a vigorous impromptu address to missionary students summering nearby. Said he: "Beware of exaggerated nationalism as of a real curse. ... It is a real curse of divisions, of strife almost amounting to war."

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