"Lies! Insult!"

To the same Palazzo Venezia where he and U. S. Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson talked peace (TIME, July 20), Benito Mussolini last week summoned the directors of the Fascist Party for a talk very warlike indeed. He was not now dealing with States powerful in arms or economics. The Papal State could only hurt him morally. He thought it had hurt him morally when Pope Pius XI smuggled his anti-Fascist encyclical up to Paris for promulgation (TIME, July 13), and therefore Il Duce and his party directors issued a sizzling hot rejoinder last week. Excerpts:

"The Fascist Directorate protests against the LIES . . . contained in the foreign comment obtained from Vatican sources, criticizing the Balilla [Fascist boys'] organization, which is the strength, pride and certainty of the Fascist regime. . . .

"The Fascist Directorate vigorously protests against the affirmation in the recent papal encyclical according to which the Fascist oath is taken for the sake of bread, or career, or life. . . . It rejects the grave insult. . . . The Fascist Party . . . is a fighting organization on a military pattern, which made a revolution and has the imperious duty of defending it against everyone. . . .

"The Directorate . . . rejects with indignation . . . the statement contained in the recent encyclical--which was nothing short of a veritable appeal to foreigners--that Freemasons are again highly regarded in the ranks of the Fascist Party. . . . But in this connection the Directorate must point to the monstrous alliance which has been formed between the Vatican and Freemasonry, which are now tied by their common hostility to the Fascist regime."

But this counterblast was not moral victory enough for Il Duce. Simultaneously the council of directors decided to wipe out the effects of the Pope's message by 1) establishing a separate Party bureau for Balilla propaganda, granting it $50,000 from the Party coffers forthwith; 2) mobilizing the entire party (873,000 adults and 642,000 youths) on the Piave battlefields as a demonstration that Fascism is a military force not to be underestimated.

"Less Grave." In the Vatican, Pope Pius pondered the Fascist retort. He was disturbed by the extent of the controversy which has raged ever since Lavoro Fascista charged editorially that the Vatican's 15,000 Catholic Action clubs were meddling in politics and the Vatican newspaper, Osservatore Romano, made it a political war (TIME, June 8 et seq.). The Pope was more disturbed by the manner in which his encyclical had been interpreted as a challenge. After he had pored over Mussolini's retort, he let it be announced that he felt relieved. The Vatican spokesman said:

"The communique from the Directorate is judged to be less grave than it might have been, in view of the existing state of tension and in view of the fact that it came not from the Government but from the directing body of the Fascist Party.''

Bombs. "The existing state of tension'' was illustrated during the week when someone, presumably an unruly Catholic or Freemason, sent a shipment of 40 fountain-pens to Fascist officials. When two Party leaders in Genoa opened theirs, BANG! went the bombs concealed within them, dealing painful wounds. And late one night Papal Secretary of State Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was startled in his work by an explosion inside the Vatican City walls. It was a cocoa-tin bomb which several hours earlier the sextons of St. Peter's Cathedral had found close to the Pope's private altar and had turned over to the papal gendarmes, who put it in a Vatican City field. There it destroyed trees, smashed windows. Fascists said antiFascists had laid the bomb to discredit them. Premier Mussolini rushed his own police to join the search. Few days later the Pope prayed for a miracle "to make the blindest of the blind to see."

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