Though the numbers of the middle class are lamentably small even in Rome, there is a greater and more deplorable paucity farther south. In the agricultural districts a man is either a laboring tenant or a landholder, except for those few who are village artisans, tradesmen, or are in the liberal professions. It requires well-divided ownership of land or diversified industries, as in the United States, to create that sturdy enlightened and independent middle class which is the strength of any nation. The army of returned emigrants are the nearest approach to a middle class to be found in many of the southern communes.
A man should certainly be able, under nearly all circumstances, to find a better use for his pen than in uttering derogatory statements concerning any other man or class of men engaged in the service of God, no matter what their beliefs or his own convictions may be; but the relation of the Italian priests to the millions of emigrants that have come or will come to the United States is of such importance that it would be cowardly not to give an honest expression concerning them. In a general sort of way the poor provinces are referred to, just as is Spain, as “priest-ridden”; but to the average American that is a term of indefiniteness.
[Illustration: Morning in the Village and Vineyards]
The thought of a Catholic cleric always brings to my mind the memory of the Rt. Rev. M. F. Howley, F. R. S. C., the noble and self-sacrificing Bishop of Newfoundland; of Father Tommaso laboring among the poor Italian miners of the Pennsylvania anthracite regions; of priests in frontier missions of the great Canadian Northwest; of priests in the slums of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, and other cities; of men whom I know, admire, and revere. So, judging the Italian clergy by them and by them alone, I do not believe prejudice of any sort could be charged against what is hereafter said.
Nor is it the Italian clergy as a whole or a major portion that is open to criticism, except as it contributes to the continuance of the oppressive, vitiating system whose acute wrongs are wrought by the minority in the cloth.
Rome, as the centre of the tremendous fabric of the Church, witnesses not only the focussing of the beneficent operations of the Church at large, but of the condemnable workings of the provincial clerics as well. There the true root of the trouble is most nearly laid bare, and it seems strange indeed that something so unworthy should exist under the very walls of the Vatican.