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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 32, 11 August 1904, Page 19

articles on rural co-operation, village banks, and suchlike institutions that have been the instruments of tiie rapid agricultural revival winch has swept over Lcmibardy, the Venelo, etc, and is fast forcing its way downwards through the varied and .somewhat antagonistic peoples that inhabit the long peninsula which is now known as ' United Italy.'

But there is a sting in the aitit!e. ami in the usual place— the tail. It is sheathed m the following extiact : ' Illiteracy is going fast ; the laboier reads his papers and pamphlets ; he captures the parish councils ; he has deseited the priests, since the pnests organised blacklegs ; and listens to the Protestant preiu-her, \v<ho heie only, in Italy, makes headway ' It would be easy to show, by a generous anthology of the evidence of Protestant writers, the grotesque untruth of the statements made above regarding Catholic priests and Protestant preachers. The animus of the writer (or his informants) from whom the 'Farmer' quotes is shown both by his omissions as well as by hi*, positive statements. Why, for instance, did he conceal the commanding puDiic fact that ' the economic renaissance ' in Italy began i,n der the aegis of the Church, through the real, energy, and organising capacity of the bishops (including the present Pope) and priests of Northern Italy, and thrown the action of lay associations under their guidance and control 7 They it was who set the farmer and the agricultural laborer on the upward track, organised "Ullage banks, co-operative societies, and all the varied paraphernalia of one of the biggest and most successful movements of the kind that have been witnessed during the past fifty years ? And why were not the public told that to this hour the clergy are up to Their eyes in the movement which they originated , that in Lombardy and the adjoining provinces.— where co-opera-tion began and where it has achieved its greatest triumphs—they are the tried and trusted leaders of the rural and village population , and thai in these iovmces the peasant iv take rank among the pmest, the most pious and the most devotedly Catholic on the face of the earth ?

Ciatta ci cova,' as those Italian peasants -ay — there's something undei lying all this elaborate suppression of fact. And that something appears to be the easy-going credulity of the omniscient Bntisher who strides through the country without being able 1o s«>y so much as ' good-morrow ' in its language, and with a settled conviction that ' nothing good can come out of Nazareth '—by which we here mean the (Ihurch( I hurch of Homo The writer apparently swallowed, without, examining it, some missionary ' tale |of a far-off land,' wholly uiuonseious of the great nnd costly failuie oi Protestant evangelisation among the Catholics of Italy. This is especiclly the case in Noith Italy, the home of eo-opeiaticn The anti-Catholic Rome coi respondent of the ' Berliner Tagblatt ' vviote some time ago with alarm to his paper concerning It he gieat and growing influence of the ' dencals ' m North Italy. The pne^s (he said) were still exercising great influence over ".he people, *oi ' whilst the niling classes in general care little or nothing for the common people or the peasantry, the clericals are everywhere establishing loan banks, popular bureaux, etc. Under these circumstances,' he adds, ' it is easy to understand that clericalism, oeing so ready to come to the help of the poorer classes, is beginning to find sympathy in the extensive strata of the country population.' The same (he said) is on ' all over the country,' South and Centre and North, and 'if an untrammelled vote were taken to-day, the people would get rid of the King and the Lodge, of wihich he is the creature and the tool.' We could , nil over a column of this paper with Methodist and other non-Catholic testimony to the failure of Protestant missionary work in Italy— and especially the testimony of the Secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society. But

these are matters that have already been treated in cur news and editorial columns, and there is no need to tin os h that old straw over again.