The bomb outrage perpetrated at Milan on Thursday, the 12th of April, is one of a long series of crimes which have gained for the fair name of Italy an unenviable notoriety.

Bombs have been exploded in other countries, revolvers and daggers have been used by other nationals, but statistics are there to prove that for the last century Italians both in and outside their country have been the authors of the greater number of these horrible political assassinations. One has to go back to the early second half of last century to find a parallel to what has recently occurred at Milan : to 1858 when Orsini made the attempt upon the life of Napoleon III, or 1867 when Monti and Tognetti blew up the Serristori Barracks in Rome. On both occasions, as at Milan, the result was a veritable and indiscriminate slaughter of innocent persons. Agesilao Milano, Luccheni, Angiolillo, Carserio, Oberdank, Passanante, Acciarito, Bresci, Crispi, Gallenga and others more recent all belong to that infamous class of Italians who have dishonoured their Mother Country before the civilised world.

The Italians are a warm-hearted, generous and chivalrous people, they belong to a highly civilised and cultured race; their family ties are intense, their respect for women and children borders the romantic. How comes it then that sweet and gentle Italy is responsible for this brood of monsters called political assassins? An exhaustive answer can only be given when a true and real history of Modern Italy is written.

‘HAVE you never heard of Cupid and Pish!’ exclaimed once, with a contralto’s disdain, the English Alboni, Madame Patey (nee Whytock), when General Clark Kennedy ventured to inquire why she called her favourite dog Pish? The Dog Pish could well be the Patron Dog of the Rationalist Press, of blatant atheists like Sir Leslie Stephen : they turn on the orthodox or would-be orthodox believers and exclaim : ‘ Have you never heard of Cupid and Pish, of physical pain and moral deformity, of avoidable suffering, of Torquemada and Galileo and Voltaire and Calas and Noah and the morbid imagination of diseased nuns, of Cupid and Pish?’ Saint and theologian and ignorant Catholic know what can be known concerning Pish. . . .

On a top shelf Leslie Stephen’s Essays on free thinking and plain speaking gathers dust between Buchner’s crass Kraft und Stoff and Pétrone (that Manon Lescaut of antiquity for precocious schoolboys) close to poor George Tyrrell’s later volumes, Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and Spiritual Diary, and the Scottish Criminal Trials.

In the course of two interesting articles in the April and May numbers of Blackfriars, Fr. Aelred Whitacre has developed a view of Bd. Robert Bellarmine which would have gladdened the heart of the ‘Advocatus Diaboli.’ Blessed Robert, we are to believe, was a man torn between two loyalties, that to truth and conviction on the one hand, and that to his own Order and its Superiors on the other. In the event, it was the latter which prevailed. Arnica veritas, sed magis arnica Societas is in substance Fr. Whitacre’s verdict. Such a view of one whom the Church has been pleased to honour with beatification is piquant, and, could it be sustained, might well cause grief to those who respect the Church’s decisions. Fortunately, however, for a great man’s reputation, Fr. Whitacre would appear, from the manner in which he has endeavoured to prove his point, not to have had access to the findings of recent research on the life of Bellarmine. His reading, it would seem, has been in the main confined to Serry’s eighteenth-century Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae, a partisan document, long since discredited, and known to all students of the subject as utterly untrustworthy.