ical activities, of cooperation in true and pure Christian charity, in conferences of St. Vincent de Paul, and in many other ways, such as zealous work for the missionaries abroad.
33. In the presence of such facts and of such a documentation, with an eye and a hand on the reality of things, We say, as We have always said, that to accuse Italian Catholic Action of engaging in politics is a real and true calumny. The facts have demonstrated what was the real target aimed at when Catholic Action was struck, and what was the thing that was being prepared. Rarely has the fable of the wolf and the lamb been exemplified so strikingly; and history will recall it.
34. We, certain on the point of being concerned with and restricting Ourselves to the field of religion, have never been able to believe that We could be considered as a "foreign power," especially by Catholics and by Italian Catholics. And thanks to this apostolic power which is now, unworthy though We be, entrusted by God to Us, the good Catholics of all the world consider Rome as the second country of each and every one of them. It is not so long ago that a statesman, who will remain certainly among the world's most celebrated men, a man neither a Catholic nor a friend of Catholicism, in a full political assembly said that he could not consider as a foreign power that authority which twenty million Germans revered, honoured and obeyed. To say then that "no Government of the world would have permitted the continuance of the situation created in Italy by the existence of Catholic Action" it is necessary absolutely to ignore and to forget that in all other States of the world, as far as China, Catholic Action exists and lives, and the organizations frequently resemble even to the smallest details the Italian Catholic Action. In some countries the organization is even more highly developed than in Italy. In no State of the world has Catholic Action been so hatefully treated, so truly persecuted (We do not see what other word conforms to the reality of the truth of the situation) as in this, Our Italy, and in this, Our episcopal seat of Rome. An "absurd situation" indeed exists, but it has been created against Us, not by Us.
35. We have assumed a heavy and tedious task. But it has seemed to Us a definite duty of charity and of paternal justice. In this spirit We have fulfilled our purpose of putting in their true light various facts and truths, which some children of Ours (perhaps through incomplete knowledge) had distorted and placed in a false light, causing harm to Our other children.
36. There is one first consideration and conclusion. From all which We have explained and still more from the events themselves as they have been evolving, it results that the so-called political activity of Catholic Action, the alleged manifest or disguised hostility of some of its partisans against the regime and the party, as well as its being also "the eventual refuge and haven of those refugees who, up to the present, have been spared" by the regime because they have sheltered under the banner of Catholic Action itself is only a pretext. That which was desired and that which has been attempted is to tear away from Catholic Action and, through this process, to tear away from the Church the young - all the young. So true is this, that after all the talk about Catholic Action, aim was taken only at the Associations of the young. Nor were these attacks limited to Associations of the young affiliated to Catholic Action. Rough hands were laid upon Associations of a simply devotional character, upon works of pure piety and of primary catechetical nature, such as sodalities of the children of Mary and patronages. So far did this go that in many cases the grossness of the acts was recognized by the perpetrators themselves as a blunder.
37. This essential point is abundantly confirmed from various sources. It is confirmed first of all by many antecedent statements made by personalities more or less responsible and also by persons representative of the regime and of the party and which have had their complete commentary and definite confirmation in the latest events.
38. This confirmation is made all the more explicit and categorical, We were almost about to say solemn and violent, by the individual who not only represents all, but who can do all, and who confirms it in official or quasi-official publications dedicated to the young, in interviews and in articles to be published abroad before they are published in Italy, and also, up to this very moment, by messages and by communications to representatives of the press.
39. Another reflection immediately and inevitably present itself. No attention has been paid to Our oft-repeated assurances and Our protests. There has been no attention paid to your protests and assurances, Venerable Brethren, concerning the true nature of Catholic Action and its work, and concerning the sacred inviolable rights of souls and of the Church.
40. We say "the sacred and inviolable rights of souls and of the Church," and this is the reflection which concerns Us more than any other, being the more grave. Again and again, as is well known, We have expressed Our thought - or rather the thought of Holy Church - on these important and essential matters, and it is not to you, Venerable Brothers and faithful masters in Israel that it is necessary to say more. But we must add something for the benefit of those dear people committed to your care whom, as shepherds of souls you nourish and govern by divine mandate and who would hardly ever be able in these days, save for you, to know the thoughts of the common Father of their souls. We repeat: "The sacred and inviolable rights of souls are of the Church"; because this matter concerns the right of souls to procure for themselves the greatest spiritual work of the Church, the divinely appointed and so mandatory of this teaching and of this work in that supernatural order which is established in the blood of the Redeemer and is necessary and obligatory for all of us if we are to share in the divine redemption. It concerns the right of souls so formed to share the treasures of the redemption with other souls, thus participating in the activities of the Apostolic Hierarchy.
41. It was in consideration of this double right of souls that We lately declared Ourselves happy and proud to wage the good fight for the liberty of consciences. No indeed (as someone, perhaps inadvertently, has represented Us as saying) for "the liberty of conscience, which is an equivocal expression too often distorted to mean the absolute independence of conscience and therefore an absurdity in reference to a soul created and redeemed by God.
42. Besides, there is involved another right of the Church equally inviolable - the right to fulfil the imperative Divine Commission entrusted to her by her Divine Founder, to bring to souls, to bring to every soul, and the treasures of truth and of good, doctrinal and practical, which He Himself brought to the world. "Going therefore teach ye all nations... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you" (Matthew xxviii, 19, 20).
43. How great is the importance of childhood and adolescence in this absolute universality and totality of the divine mandate to the Church, has been shown by the Divine Master Himself, the Creator and Redeemer of souls, by His example and particularly by those memorable words which are also so formidable: "Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come to Me... who believe in Me, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven... whose angels always behold the face of the Father who is in Heaven. Woe to that man who shall scandalize one of these little ones!" (Math. xix, 13; xviii, 1, et seq).
44. And here We find Ourselves confronted by a mass of authentic affirmations and no less authentic facts which reveal beyond the slightest possibility of doubt the resolve (already in great measure actually put into effect) to monopolize completely the young, from their tenderest years up to manhood and womanhood, for the exclusive advantage of a party and of a regime based on an ideology which clearly resolves itself into a true, a real pagan worship of the State - the "Statolatry" which is no less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction with the supernatural rights of the Church. To propose and to promote such a monopoly to persecute for this reason Catholic Action, as has been done for some time more or less openly or under cover to reach this end by striking at the Catholic Association of Youth as has lately been done; all this is truly and literally to "forbid the little children to go to Jesus Christ," since it impedes their access to His Church and where His Church is, there is Jesus Christ. This usurpation goes so far as to snatch the young from Christ and His Church even with violence.
45. The Church of Jesus Christ has never contested the rights and the duties of the State concerning the education of its citizens; indeed, We Ourselves have recalled and proclaimed them in Our recent Encyclical Letter on the "Christian Education of Youth." Such rights and duties are unchallengeable as long as they remain within the limits of the State's proper competency, a competence which in its turn is clearly indicated and determined by the role of the State, a role which, though certainly not only bodily and material, is by its very nature limited to the natural, the terrestrial and the temporal.
46. The universal and divine mandate with which the Church of Jesus Christ has been incommunicably and exclusively commissioned by Jesus Christ Himself, extends to the supernatural, the celestial, the eternal and to that order of things which on the one hand is of the strictest obligation for every rational creature and which, on the other hand, must, by the very nature of things,