Allan P Berry is a highly respected New Zealand philatelist and we are very pleased to publish this article.

Before telling the story behind the fascinating cover illustrated in Figure 1, a description is necessary. The envelope has the Arms of the House of Representatives printed in blue on the flap. It is franked with a horizontal pair of the 9d. value of the Centennial of New Zealand postage stamps, over printed ‘Official’. The stamps are cancelled INVERCARGILL/N.Z./6 PM/22 JAN/1942 with the slogan POST EARLY/ IN THE DAY. It is addressed to Brigadier James Hargest DSO, New Zealand Expeditionary Force, British Prisoner, Croce Rossa Italiana, 6 Via Puglie, Rome Italy. On the flap, the sender is identified as Mrs Jas Hargest (wife), Southland in the same handwriting as that of the address. Similarly, in the same handwriting, there is the superscription ‘Service des Prisionnieres de Guerre’ on the front. The letter has been censored, the censor tape being tied to the envelope by the cachet PASSED BY CENSOR N.Z.115. A different hand in different ink has added the superscription ‘Prisoner Of War Post’, at the same time reinforcing the ‘Se’ of ‘Service’ where the original has been covered by the censor tape. In pencil, ‘Croce Rossa Italiana, 6 Via Puglie, Rome Italy’ has been crossed out and ‘Fronte d’Amore (Sulmona)’ added in pencil and underlined in red.

As Brigadier Hargest was a Member of Parliament at the time, it is probable that the House granted him leave of absence “for the duration” so some of the privileges, including the right to Official Stamps, would be retained. The 1940s were the days before Members of Parliament were given electorate assistance, but they were given a monthly voucher that could be exchanged at any post office for postage stamps. In his absence, Mrs Hargest probably did much of the electorate work, including using Parliamentary stationery, cashing the voucher and asking for a variety of official stamp values.

The two stamps paid the 1/6 airmail letter to Great Britain. Censorship was carried out in Dunedin. The route the cover took is revealed by the date of cancellation in Invercargill – January 1942. The date is after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour – when the American trans-Pacific civil airmails ceased – but before the collapse of the India – Australia BOAC/QANTAS airmail services on the Japanese capture of Singapore in February. Therefore the cover would have been flown from Auckland to Australia, on to India and via the Horseshoe Route to West Africa and from there by sea to London. It appears that onwards transmission charges were ignored and it is likely that the letter was sent by sea to Lisbon [Portugal], a neutral country, and from Lisbon to the International Red Cross committee in Switzerland, who would have sent it on, as addressed, to the Italian Red Cross in Rome. It was then forwarded to the Prisoner of War Camp in Italy, the name translating, somewhat inappropriately, as ‘Fountain of Love’.

So, the cover can be properly interpreted as to route and rate, but there is more to it than that. The sadness is in the background. Brigadier James Hargest wrote a book about his adventures as a Prisoner of War, entitled Farewell Camp 12, which was published by Michael Joseph in 1945(1). From the Introduction to the book, one reads:

“Brigadier James Hargest was born in Southland, New Zealand, in 1891. The son of a farmer, he bought a sheep farm on his own at Rakauhauka on his return from the 1914-1918 war. For fourteen years he was a member of the New Zealand Parliament and represented Awarua, the southernmost electorate in the world. Having held a Territorial Commission since 1911 he left with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1914 as a second-lieutenant serving in Egypt, Gallipoli and France and attaining the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in command of the Second Otago Regiment at the age of twenty-six. Wounded at Suvla Bay he was invalided back to New Zealand but returned to action the following year. For those services he was awarded the M.C., D.S.O. and the Legion of Honour and was twice mentioned in despatches. From 1925-30 he was an honorary aid-de-damp to the Governor-General of New Zealand. In January 1940 he left New Zealand as commander of the Fifth Infantry Brigade, which included the Maori Battalion, going first to England and subsequently joining the Division in the Middle East. In Greece his brigade defended the Olympus Pass. Of the 4,000 troops he took to Crete to defend the Maleme aerodrome less than 900 returned to Egypt. In November 1941, during the second Libyan campaign, he was captured by the Germans at Siudi Aziz and taken before Rommel. Imprisoned in the British Generals’ Camp near Florence he escaped later and when he returned to England in November 1943, having travelled through Switzerland, France and Spain, he became the highest-ranking British officer to escape in either war. For his services he was awarded two Bars to his D.S.O., the C.B.E. and the Greek Military Cross. During his journey across France he made many contacts with the resistance movement, and in England broadcast a number of talks for the BBC on the strength and resilience of the French people. He went back to France on D-Day as New Zealand’s observer with the 5oth (Northumbrian) Division. On August 12, 1944, he was killed by a shellburst, and is buried in Normandy near the little church at Roncamps”.

There are certain inaccuracies in the foreword. While Brigadier James Hargest escaped through Switzerland before the Italian surrender, other senior officers also escaped after the surrender, one of whom was his good friend Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor who also went on to serve in Normandy. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records show that Brigadier James Hargest is now buried in Hottot-Les-Bagues War Cemetery, Calvados, France.

The dedication of the book reads: “To my son Geoffrey who died of wounds in Italy in March 1944″.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records show that Second Lieutenant Geoffrey Robert Hargest died on 3oth March 1944 and is buried in Cassino War Cemetery, Italy. A Father and Son killed in the same year, the memorial to both being the story behind a cover in my collection, recently acquired at auction as it shows an interesting usage of one value of the 1940 Centennial set, overprinted ‘Official’.

Reference:
1. Hargest Brig. J. “Farewell to Campo 12″. Pub. Michael Joseph Ltd. (1945).

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A few hundred feet from the Porta Pia, in the wall which the Emperor Aurelian built to protect Rome from the barbarians, are three marble tablets marking the spot where, on September 20, 1870, the cannon of King Victor Emanuel 11 breached the fortification permitting his army to enter and occupy the city in the name of the new Italian nation. Every year thereafter for more than half a century, on the anniversary of the event, the national government and the municipality of Rome held formal commemorative services before these tablets.

Last year no such ceremony was observed. The few persons who gathered about the spot were individuals – cautious, even furtive suspect members of the proscribed Masonic orders. This break with official tradition was Mussolini’s announcement to the world that his government intends if possible to heal the breach which has existed between Church and State – or, as it is more commonly phrased, to “solve the Roman Question.”

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Prime Minister. Undated photograph.

Long before he came to power Mussolini publicly proclaimed the necessity of a restoration of cordial relations with the Church. Even in the days when he was suspected of republicanism, and even of a kind of “national Bolshevism,” he asserted in parliament that it was absurd that a state should remain at enmity with the church which ninety-five per cent of its citizens regarded as divinely authorized. Promptly after his accession to power he took several steps to make evident his government’s regard for the Church and its appreciation of the part of religion in the national life. He restored to the schoolrooms the Crucifix which previous laical governments had removed; he restored religious instruction as a regular (instead of merely supplem   entary) part of the curriculum of the public schools, and placed it again in clerical hands; he increased the stipends paid by the government to the parish priests as an offset to the seizure of Church property by the government in 1860 and 1870; and (while not interfering with the free exercise of other cults) reaffirmed the Catholic faith as the national religion of Italy.

Then for fully three years he carried on unofficial and informal “conversations” (never publicly authorized) with the Vatican, mainly through the intermediation of a Jesuit priest, Father Tacchi-Venturi. Finally, some eight or ten months ago, it was discreetly made known simultaneously through the official press of the government and of the Vatican that an informal understanding had been reached on some of the more difficult points, providing a basis of discussion for any future negotiations.

Here, for the moment, the matter rests. It is premature to say, as newspapers have on occasion announced, that “the Roman Question is virtually solved,” or to predict that it will be solved in the near future. All that can safely be said is that these informal conversations have provisionally cleared away most of the difficulties which formerly made the Roman Question, as was commonly said, “insoluble.”

II

Much of the popular difficulty in understanding the present situation is due to a misconception of what the Roman Question is. It does not arise out of any claim on the part of the Vatican for the restoration to it of the territories which it ruled politically before 1860 or 1870. The Roman Question is not a territorial question in the ordinary sense of the term. Rather, it is a question of the quality of the relation which should subsist between the Holy See and the secular power in general, and the Kingdom of Italy in particular.

Pope Pius IX

On the morning of September 20, 1870, when the Italian armies were at the gates of Rome, Pius IX ordered his generals not to resist attack, but not to surrender the city except in face of an overt act of war. This gesture was not, as is sometimes supposed, intended to convey that the spiritual arm may not fight the secular with its own weapons. The armies of Pope Pius had actively resisted the King’s troops when they invaded Romagna in 1860. Neither in 1870 nor at any other time has the Vatican acknowledged that it is intrinsically improper for the Pope to have, and to use, armies, police, and the other paraphernalia of civil authority. In this case Pius of course saw the hopelessness of military resistance and wished to avoid bloodshed. The reason for his refusal to surrender the city before it was attacked was that this act might be interpreted as a voluntary renunciation of his rights. He wished to make it evident to the world that his position as temporal sovereign had been taken from him by force and without his consent.

It would have been difficult for any Pope to acknowledge that the Holy See cannot rightfully exercise temporal sovereignty. The States of the Church – a broad belt of territory stretching from Rome to Ancona and cutting the Italian peninsula in two – had been definitely under the political sovereignty of the Roman pontiffs since they had been consolidated by the “fighting Pope,” Julius II, in the early sixteenth century, and for centuries before that the claim of the popes to political jurisdiction over Rome and adjacent territories had been more or less formally recognized. Pius IX could hardly be expected to acknowledge that his predecessors had ruled unlawfully.

The settlement contained in the Law of Guarantees of 1871 was, from the government’s point of view, extremely generous toward “Italy’s distinguished guest.” It granted the Pontiff free and unrestricted enjoyment of the Vatican Palace and adjoining edifices; of the Chancellery in the Corso Vittorio Emanuele; and of the villa of Castel Gandolfo on the shore of Lake Albano.¹ Although all ecclesiastical edifices were declared national property, the Church was granted unrestricted use and administration of them for purposes of worship. The government further granted a large annual sum to the Pontiff to compensate him for his loss of direct revenue from the territory seized.

But as is well known, Pius IX refused to accept the Law of Guarantees, or to admit that the Italian government was rightfully and lawfully in possession of Rome. He asserted that the Law was a “unilateral instrument” imposed by one of the parties to the controversy, not agreed to by both, hence without juridical validity. He refused to touch the money which the government offered, and which ever since has regularly figured in the government budget, only to be paid back into the treasury as unclaimed after the legal five-year period. He refused to set foot on the soil which, he asserted, had been illegally seized, for by so doing he would be accepting the protection of the Italian government and thus acknowledging its sovereignty.

The Pope has thus remained a “voluntary prisoner” in the Vatican Palace. Within its confines he maintains, so far as convenient, the appurtenances of worldly sovereignty – an army in the form of the Swiss Guard,²  a personal escort in the Noble Guard, and what might be called a police force in the Palatine Guard. His public functions have their full quota of court ceremonial. And he continues to grant patents of nobility. (Not a few Americans hold Papal titles.) In short, temporal sovereignty is not only asserted, but, in a symbolic way, maintained.

It may be that in the mind of Pius IX the restoration to Papal sovereignty of the city and province of Rome was an essential act of restitution on which he must insist. For many years the “black,” or Vatican party, reflected the Vatican’s attitude toward the new government. They went about in mourning on every September 20 and draped their windows in black. Socially, they refused to mingle with the “governmentals,” and it was the supreme social error to invite a “black” and an “Italian” to the same dinner party. Even to-day young ladies of the “black” set affect distinct fashions and a distinct code of etiquette.

But conditions have changed greatly since the time of Pius IX. The popes do not pretend, and the Vatican has never formally maintained, that the dignity of the Holy See is dependent upon the exercise of political power over certain specified territories. What is essential, in the Vatican’s view, is the recognition of the Pope’s sovereign status. The Pope may be a sovereign almost without territory, so long as it is recognized that he is a sovereign. The claim is based upon practical necessity, as will be shown later. But primarily it is a claim for the regularization of an anomalous legal situation. The Pope might, conceivably, renounce all temporal claims. But he cannot, in the Vatican’s view, be deposed by an act of violence and a unilateral decree from the position which the entire world for centuries acknowledged as pertaining to the Pontiff by right.

The City of Rome was taken from the Pope by an act of war – Pius IX insisted on putting this into the record. There has never been a treaty of peace agreed to by both parties. In strict technicality, the relation between the Vatican and the Italian government is still that of a state of war. On what terms the two parties shall mutually agree to end this state of war is the nub of the Roman Question.

III

It is the territorial aspect of the dispute which has chiefly occupied the attention of writers. Before the War, and even recently, various schemes of settlement were proposed. There was the famous “corridor” to the sea which was to permit the Pontiff and his emissaries free access to foreign nations without crossing Italian soil. There was a proposal that the Pope be granted unrestricted sovereignty over the “Borgo di San Pietro,” lying between the Vatican and the Tiber, or over the “Leonine City.”

All these and similar schemes evaporated not only because the Vatican refused to sponsor them, but also because no Italian government would consider ceding territory to a “foreign power.” “Not a single Italian citizen, not an inch of Italian soil” became something like a sacred refrain in Italian politics. And Mussolini himself has recently repeated very nearly these words.

To evade this difficulty, it was once proposed that the Pope be granted unrestricted sovereignty, pro forma, over the Vatican which he now merely “enjoys.” To this suggestion Benedict XV is said to have replied, “Ah, but the Vatican is a palace, not a territory.”

Benedict XV as Cardinal Della Chiesa in 1914

For although the territorial aspect of the question is almost indifferent to the Vatican, it is not quite so. Or rather, it is not important how much territory the Pope is to rule over as sovereign, but it is essential that there be some. For, argues the Vatican, it would be absurd to accord the rank of sovereign to the Pope and then deny that he has a right to exercise it anywhere. And besides, a certain amount of territory is absolutely necessary to enable the Pontiff to exercise his spiritual dominion free and unhampered. The Vatican formula is that the “liberty and independence” which the Pope claims must be not only “real and perfect,” but also “manifest to the faithful of the whole world.”

Between these two claims – that the Vatican must have some territory and that the Italian state cannot cede an inch – there would seem to be a hopeless deadlock. This deadlock has been provisionally resolved, in a most ingenious manner, in the course of the informal conversations of the past eighteen months.

Behind the Vatican, to the west and southwest, there lies a large tract of land which is almost uninhabited. A portion of this land, perhaps of four or five square miles, is, according to the present tentative plan, to be added to the Vatican territory and constitute the material evidence of the Pontiff’s “liberty and independence.”³ But it need not be ceded by Italy in a political sense. It can first be cleared of its Italian inhabitants, technically speaking, by permitting them to take up legal residence elsewhere. Then it can be purchased outright by the Vatican. Since, in the meantime, the Italian government will have acknowledged the Pope’s sovereign status, it will not contest his right to exercise its functions over what belongs to him. But these functions need never become the occasion of a clash of political authority. There could be no clash over fiscal matters, for the State has never taxed Church property. There can obviously be no question of military affairs. Policing, care of roads and sewers and such like, could continue to be maintained by the Italian state; this would introduce no legal difficulty into the situation, since the Italian carabinieri frequently keep order during functions in St. Peter’s (which is an “edifice contiguous to the Vatican” and hence reserved to the Pope under the Law of Guarantees) although they never pass beyond the Bronze Door which symbolically separates the Kingdom of Italy from the domain of the Pope. If, then, there can never be an occasion for the Kingdom of Italy to contest the rights which the sovereign Pontiff exercises over this territory, his temporal status will be intangible, while Italy’s sovereignty will not have been diminished by an inch or a citizen.

This is not offered as a prophecy of the form which the ultimate material settlement will take. Many new factors may arise to modify it. But it presents, in broad outline, the type of settlement which at the present time is actually accepted by both sides as offering a practicable basis for further, and formal, negotiation.

IV

But it was not for the discovery of this formula that the solution of the Roman Question has waited these many years. What has made any approach to agreement seem so difficult (and to many students impossible) is the immaterial, imponderable factors involved.

For the first three or four years of Mussolini’s rule it seemed to many observers uncertain how long he would last. It is a fundamental of the Vatican’s policy that it cannot make agreements of first importance with individual statesmen, nor even with governments merely, but only with the nation itself, through a stable state truly representing the nation.

Once Mussolini’s political survival seemed reasonably assured, it was necessary to discover what his concrete intentions toward the Church were. The Duce has a reverberating anticlerical past, and is the author of impassioned pamphlets in praise of Giordano Bruno and other rebels against ecclesiastical authority. Further, he had inherited the policy of the Nationalist Party, which had fused with the Fascists just after the “March on Rome.” The Nationalists were ardent proponents of a reconciliation with the Vatican, but for purely political and nationalistic reasons, which they did not always explain with the requisite discretion. Their aim was popularly interpreted as being that of “hitching the Vatican to Italy’s chariot wheel.”

Benito Mussolini reviewing adolescent RSI soldiers, 1944.

This fact aroused the misgivings of other nations. It is commonly understood in Rome that there were diplomatic efforts on the part of several governments to prevent a solution of the Roman Question. It required some time for Mussolini to establish the doctrine that no third power might exercise any pressure, direct or indirect, in any future negotiations between himself and the Vatican. The reaffirmation some eight months ago in the official Vatican organ, the Osservatore Romano, that the Roman Question was exclusively a matter between the Italian Government and the Holy See was rightly taken as indicating that a decisive stage in the informal negotiations had been successfully passed.

A further difficulty, and one which has bulked most largely in the daily news, arises from the fact that a solution of the Roman Question almost necessarily implies the negotiation of a concordat between the Vatican and the Italian Government. Although the two treaties are technically distinct, they are naturally under discussion contemporaneously. The rather vivacious debates which have on two or three occasions been carried on by the press of the two parties have had as their subject matter topics connected with the concordat rather than with the Roman Question as such.

A concordat, of course, is merely a diplomatic agreement between the Church and a government specifying rights and privileges to be accorded and guaranteed. In the case of the anticipated Italian concordat, many of these points are already decided or implied by present practice, such as the status of religious education in the public schools and the right of religious orders to own corporate property. As for the appointment of bishops, it is a principle of the Catholic Church that such appointments are made by it alone; but when cordial relations subsist between it and the civil authorities it desires to make appointments acceptable to the latter and may give informal notice of its intentions. This will presumably be the practice in Italy under the expected concordat. But it is still early to speculate concerning such details.

The greatest difficulty appears to have arisen over the broad question of the position of the Church in the new Italian state, and the division of authority, especially in regard to education. The Vatican and the Fascist Government are two absolutisms facing each other, each ruled by a very firm willed and energetic man. Moreover, each is constantly being pushed from behind by partisan zealots. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that the negotiations have sometimes been difficult, and indeed on several occasions have come to a temporary impasse.

Pius XI

The Pope has shown little desire to complain of the present educational system in Italy in practice. But he has several times denounced Fascism’s theoretical assumption of a state monopoly over the education of the young, and the Fascist doctrine that the individual exists for the State. The doctrine of the Church, on the other hand, is that the individual exists for the glory of God; that the unit of society is not the State but the family.

Mussolini has put his theory into practice by absorbing into the machinery of the State or of the Fascist party nearly all social and educational organizations such as labor unions, co-operative societies, charitable organizations, athletic clubs, and the like. Pius XI has apparently not objected to the process as such. He gave a kind of formal blessing to the Fascists’ nation-wide children’s organization, the Ballila, when he permitted the diocesan authorities to appoint priests as spiritual advisers to the clubs. But the Vatican will not concede that State – perhaps some future anti-clerical or frankly atheistic state has an inherent right to a monopoly of the education of the youth to the exclusion, conceivably, of Christian agencies. To concede this would be equivalent to a renunciation, on the part of the Vatican, of the Church’s ancient claim to be a authorized teacher; and further, might constitute a precedent which could be used against it in some future dispute with an unfriendly government.

When, recently, Pope Pius made a vigorous public statement to this effect, Mussolini startled the world by promptly ordering the absorption of the few score thousand remaining Catholic boy scouts into the Ballila. But this incident was in truth only one more of those occasions upon which two parties to negotiations, faced with an apparent impasse, publicly restate their positions and the limits beyond which they cannot make further concessions. The Osseruatore Romano hastened to explain that the Pope’s statement “was confined solely to a moral plane, and was in no wise politically and did not constitute intervention in the affairs of the state.” The informal negotiations have accordingly resumed, although no hint has yet been given as to the formula which will eventually be found in this particular difficulty.

V

There are numerous incidental but far-reaching advantages which might accrue to the Italian government as a result of the settlement. Millions of devout Catholics will no longer be taught by their priests that the Italian State is a “despoiler of the Church.” Missionary schools throughout the Near East and the Orient may place additional emphasis on the Italian language, and on Italian history and literature. And the dissemination of a nation’s language opens the road for its merchants. Again, one may guess that Mussolini has his eye on the coveted privilege, now enjoyed by France, of defending Christian interests in Syria and Palestine – a privilege which incidentally gives its holder a good deal of political leverage. If some future French government were to offend the Vatican, the latter might well transfer the privilege to the friendly Italian State.

But what is the Vatican going to do with its little plot of ground to the south west? In what way will the Pope’s liberty and independence be made manifest to the faithful of the whole world? Any answer to this question must be based on speculation. But this much can be said of the measures suggested below: they have been discussed by responsible persons in the course of the recent negotiations; and they would be consonant with the known policies and intentions of the Vatican.

It has always been asserted by Italian anti-clericals that the Pope’s liberty and independence are in no way limited under the Law of Guarantees. It is, they say, true that he no longer has his own posts, telegraph, and railroads. But he may use the Italian mails, wires, and trains freely. He may send and receive emissaries to and from foreign lands without hindrance. His diplomatic pouches transported over Italian soil are respected as scrupulously as would be those of any sovereign on earth.

True, the Vatican replies. But these facilities are granted as privileges, not acknowledged as inherent rights and, therefore, are revocable. Who can say that they might not be limited by some future unfriendly government, or revoked in time of war?

In point of fact, it is not on record that in the last War the Pope’s diplomatic correspondence was interfered with, although there were incidents and mistakes capable of two interpretations. The famous Papal peace appeal, of which the Italian government strongly disapproved, was carried out of Italy in the Vatican diplomatic pouch, by a courier traveling on the Italian railways. Although the German and Austrian ambassadors to the Holy See were withdrawn, emissaries from and to the Pope went to and from enemy countries (via Switzerland) as freely as to and from the Allied nations.

All this is true (overlooking the not very important “mistakes”) yet it might not be true another time. And anyway, as the Vatican has doubtless observed to Mussolini in the course of the recent conversations, there was during the War a deal of recrimination and partisan accusation due precisely to the fact that the Pope’s international status had not been clearly defined. Exactly because he was exercising his diplomatic functions by courtesy of the Italian government, it was never certain what his rights were, or what they would be to-morrow. In the heat of war passion, the Vatican was constantly being accused of overstepping the proper limits of neutrality, whereas, because of the anomalous situation, no limits had ever been defined.

Once admitting that on his five square miles of territory the Pope enjoys unrestricted sovereignty and intangibility, many things become possible. On this ground all embassies and diplomatic missions to the Holy See might be housed and lodged. In case of war in which Italy was engaged, the ambassador of a hostile country would remain as a matter of course. His person and archives would be inviolable simply because they were located on inviolable territory.

But this is not all. Modern science has strangely altered some of the fundamental terms of the Roman Question. Although, even in the event of war, the Vatican would normally send its diplomatic pouches out over the Italian railways, in extraordinary cases the Pope might prefer to radio his secret instructions to his nuncios in code. Pius XI has already accepted from John Hays Hammond, Jr., the gift of a moderately powerful transmitting apparatus (he has long had a receiving set in the Vatican) for scientific experiment. There is nothing to prevent his installing on the new territory a high-power station for practical and diplomatic purposes. There might also be on this five square miles of territory a commodious aërodrome. The Vatican’s diplomatic pouches and the Vatican’s diplomats might travel to their destination in Vatican airplanes. True, it is technically possible for such planes to be shot at by anti-aircraft guns. But such an attack would be nothing short of an act of war. And if the Pope’s claim to inviolable liberty and independence had once been solemnly acknowledged, such an act of war would evoke the condemnation of the entire world.

To sum up the Vatican’s case in the Roman Question, one may fairly say that the Pope claims spiritual (and disclaims political) authority over Catholics throughout the world; but whereas political sovereignties are geographically compact, his is scattered and universal. The Vatican bases its case upon the right of the Pope at all times to exercise his spiritual authority over this widespread and diversified empire, and upon the necessity of his possessing whatever is juridically and materially essential to its exercise.

One need not be surprised to find the radio and the airplane some day included among these essentials. For although the Roman Church is one of the most conservative and perhaps the oldest of living institutions, it is in the world, and, in many of its outward manifestations, changes as the world changes.

¹ In conjunction with the last named, it is amusing to note how a pleasantry has given rise to many a solemn newspaper canard. There is a legend that Pius IX, in his “voluntary imprisonment” in the Vatican, observed that if he was to “enjoy” Castel Gandolfo he would have to fly there. Now that flying has become a commonplace, the sensational press frequently carries a news item to the effect that on such and such a night the Pope secretly took an airplane from the Vatican grounds to spend a few hours at his countryseat.

² But not without a sense of humor. There is an anecdote, apparently authentic, to the effect that Pius XI, passing through the vatican halls, discovered one of his Swiss Guards asleep at his post. He nudged the sleepy trooper and said, in a stage whisper, “Wake up. The enemy is coming.”

³ It is to be noted that the words “temporal” and “sovereign” are being muted in the current discussion of the Roman Question. This is not because either concept has been officially repudiated by the Vatican, but merely because the words retain the connotations of other, and more acrimonious days. The words “manifest” and “independent” convey, in the Vatican’s view, the essence of what was formerly meant to be conveyed by “temporal” and “sovereign.”

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Taken from photos and P.14. They were issued between 10 Jan and 2 April,1941.

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