PEASANTS WRECK CATHEDRAL.

Taranaki Daily News, 30 April 1921, Page 9

PEASANTS WRECK CATHEDRAL.

RELIGIOUS RIOTS IN ITALY. Milan, February 2. Disastrous religious rioting is reported in various parts of the country. A horde of unemployed peasantry stormed the Tuscania Cathedral in the Roman province. In the fury of iconoclasm, the invaders smashed up altars, crucifies, pictures and statuary. They soaked.in petroleum the gorgeous raiment of the Madonna and afterwards set it afire. Besides material destruction, estimated at over £4OOO, almost the whole of the rich treasury of Votive offerings; engraved gold and silver, representing the gifts of many generations of pilgrims, was ruthlessly pillaged. Sanguinary disorders occurred at Casteliammare di Stabia, in the Gulf of Naples, over the action of the Socialist Town Council in misappropriating the bulk of the public worship budget for the upkeep of the local Chamber of Labor.

During fighting around the Town Hall a marshal of Carabinieri and the Chief Commissioner of Police, together with two sailors, three civilians and a young woman, were shot dead. Fifteen demonstrators were grievously wounded. A hundred councillors and municipal employees flung bombs and fired on the crowd from the windows and balconies of the municipal buildings. Fierce political strife between Scialists and Clericals in Central Italy has resulted in the arrest of three more priests on murder charges. Don Silvio Agrestine, parish priest of Peggiodome, in the province of Perugia, was riding homewards on horseback when he encountered the Mayor of jhe place, Signor Achille Laurenti, with whom he had been engaged in bitter controversy anent municipal administration.

Angry words were exchanged, and his adversary threw a stone in contempt, whereupon the priest is said to have turned in the saddle and shot the Mayor through the ribs with a sporting gun. That evening the Mayor died. The priest, who had fled, gave himself up to justice to-day at Spelete.

The other case concerns Don Luigi Lippi, parish priest of Tassignano, near Lucca, and his Brother, Father Francesco Lippi, chaplain in the same village. Both clergymen had been sorely provoked by the insolent behavior of a proletarian pot-house orator, Paclo Bartolueer, whose corpse was subsequently discovered, riddled with revolver shot, in a little square fronting the presbytery. A crowd of indignant peasants from Capanneri, the murdered man’s native village, marched on Tassignano, and surrounded the presbytery, with the intention of inflicting lynch law; but the timely arrival of military reinforcements enabled the priests to be taken safely to Liicca Prison, where they were formally accused of conspiracy to kill, §