Father Palmiro's Party

The Romans could not have been more surprised if bronze St. Peter, stepping down from his white marble pedestal, had crossed the nave waving the Red Flag and crying "Sovietti da per tutto!" (Soviets everywhere!).

Palmiro Togliatti, who as boss of Italy's Communists believes there is no God but Stalin, came down in a fiery oratorical chariot to rescue the Catholic Church. By the grace of Togliatti, the Italian Assembly last week put into the Republic's Constitution this clause: "The Roman Catholic apostolic religion is the only religion of the State." Approval meant that 1) the Republic would stand by the Lateran Treaty which Mussolini made with the Vatican; 2) every Italian would be taxed to support the Church; and 3) education would be Catholic.

Had Togliatti been struck with light on the road to Damascus? Had he gone mad?

Neither. With typical Communist cynicism he had maneuvered his party into the parliamentary driver's seat. He had (to paraphrase Disraeli) caught Premier de Gasperi's Christian Democrats bathing and walked off with their vestments.

Tonsures & Feathers. Here, as cabled by TIME'S Rome Correspondent Emmet Hughes, is what happened:

Nervous excitement had swept the floor of the Palazzo Monte Citorio as the Assembly reached the Lateran question. Nobody but Togliatti and the Communists--and they were saving their surprise--was sure how the vote would divide. In the jammed public galleries there was a solemn checkerboard of Jesuit black, Franciscan brown, Dominican white--set off by the bright springtime pinks and blues of .snappily dressed women. The heads that craned forward were alternately tonsured and gaily feather-plumed.

The first speeches were predictable enough. Christian Democrat Premier Alcide de Gasperi spoke firmly, if not very eloquently, for the Lateran reaffirmation his party wanted: Christ's divinity was "the crucial question ... of our positivist age. . . ." Then he descended to pragmatism with an arithmetical statement that Togliatti later turned into a trap. Out of 45,526,750 Italians, said De Gasperi, "45,349,221 are Catholics."

Martyrs & Mistresses. Qualunquist deputies of strident Journalist Guglielmo Giannini's party shouted "Amen" and "Hooray." The Socialists cried: "Coercion . . . ecclesiastical oppression." Italy's outstanding Jewish figure, grey-bearded, shambling, 67-year-old Republican Deputy Ugo Della Seta--his whole body trembling with indignation, his-hands wildly clutching the air--shrilled: "Remember those non-Catholics who fought and died . . . who were martyred in the Ardeatine Caves! It is un-Christian to place religious minorities in a status of inferiority!"

Actionist Deputy Piero Calamandrei, rector of Florence University, told a Boccaccio-flavored anecdote to express his opposition to the contradictions of a Constitution which proclaimed both religious equality and the preferential position of one faith: "This reminds me of the old man in Florence who had two mistresses, one young and the other old. The man's hair was partly black, partly grey. Each of his mistresses wanted him completely for herself. So the young mistress tore out all his grey hair, while the old one tore out all the black. The poor man's head of course was as bald as this Constitution's promises are empty."

In the galleries, tonsured and feathered heads nodded assent or shook in disapproval. Then came something that set all heads spinning.

Dialectics & Devils. That day was Palmiro Togliatti's 54th birthday. He obviously intended to enjoy the day. Togliatti began by reminding the Christian Democrats that he himself had studied canon law (at Turin University) and needed no help in its interpretation. He recalled his words to last year's Communist Party Congress: "Since the . . . Church will continue to be the very center of our country--and hence any conflict with it would disturb the consciences of many citizens--we [Communists] must arrange carefully our relations with the Catholic Church."

Togliatti told the Assembly's Christian Democrats: "Sometimes you speak as if you were the only defenders of the freedom of Catholic conscience." Deftly, he picked up De Gasperi's statistics as proof that millions of "Catholics" vote with the Italian Communist Party (4,000,000 last June).

Then Togliatti removed all doubt: he and his party would vote for confirmation of the Lateran Treaty because, he explained pontifically, "We are rightly considered the most advanced working-class party and . . . the working class does not want the country divided for religious reasons."

Speaking as the Kremlin's apostolic legate in partibus infidelium, Togliatti summed up: "We know that there exists in Russia a regime of religious freedom."

Togliatti's sinuous dialectic had been so smooth that it evoked chuckles and even admiration from his enemies. In the stunned galleries one old woman kept biting her lip and shaking her head in reluctant respect, mumbling: "He's a clever devil, he's a clever devil!" But a representative of the Vatican's Osservatore Romano gritted his teeth so hard that he lost a filling.

Togliatti's address had decided the issue, and all the deputies knew it. But the debate dragged on in desultory fashion till 2 a.m., when the Assembly's strangest alliance won by a vote of 350-to-149.

"Our Work Is Finished." What were Togliatti's motives, and what did he achieve? The paramount fact was that the Communists' support of the Vatican coincided, with jeweled precision, with the new Italian Communist strategy of shifting attention and activities from the industrial north, traditionally anticlerical, to the agrarian south. In recent weeks the Communists' best agents and organizers have been moved down from Milan and Turin (where, said a Communist editor in conversation last week, "our work is already finished"), to concentrate on the peasants. Togliatti's tactic had undercut the Christian Democratic Party's appeal to the peasants that the real choice lay between Christian democracy and Red atheism.

But Togliatti had a second motive. This had been a supreme opportunity to display himself as arbiter of Assembly decisions. The Kremlin's legate had proved to De Gasperi and the Christian Democrats that--alone--they could not carry off one of their most cherished objectives. Socialist Pietro Nenni, after a year of playing footie with the Communists, now knew that Togliatti could give him a splintering kick in the shins at will. If Nenni and his Socialists were ever to walk again, they might have to make peace with the disaffected Socialists of Giuseppe Saragat in a last, desperate effort to save the Italian moderate left from total annihilation.

All sides knew that Communism had won a major victory on Catholicism's home ground. It was indeed a happy birthday for Palmiro Togliatti. Yugoslav Communists next door picked a new legend for their Italian coreligionists: "Father Palmiro and his Communist Curates."

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