Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 16, 1908

A Jew as Mayor of Rome

CATHOLIC journals and Catholic leaders in general are shocked and convulsed over the fact that a Jew has been elected mayor of the city of Rome. To add to the perturbed state of Catholic feeling, the new mayor has held the highest office in the grand lodge of Masons in Italy. The Freeman Journal declares that the situation “is absurd, monstrous, anomalous, incredible—but there it is, and what will come out of it is a perilous secret to be revealed in the near future.” The papal official organ, Osservatore Romano, says this of the situation:—

To impose on the city of Rome a mayor who is an Israelite and former grand master of Free Masons is a brutal and outrageous expression of the “bloc’s” program. [He was elected by a vote of the aldermen.] The struggle is not only political, but religious as well, in this war declared against the Eternal City, its faith, its traditions, and the sentiment of its true sons now tyrannized over by foreign sojourners in the city. An Israelite and Free Mason mayor, prejudiced against the administration of this Catholic municipality is an audacious provocation against the sentiments of Catholics throughout the world, an outrageous offense to our city, and an indelible stain on us all.

The “bloc,” to which the journal above quoted refers, was a coalition of all the municipal parties against the Clericals to prevent the latter from evading the state laws in matters of educational and religious establishments. “With a formidable clerical majority in the city government,” says the American Israelite, “it has heretofore been possible to conduct certain municipal departments somewhat after the fashion of the days of Pius IX, national laws to the contrary notwithstanding.” In this, as in many other things, Rome is reaping what she has sown. It certainly is an anomalous condition that the very heart of the papacy, in a city ninety-five per cent Catholic, a representative of that race most despised by Roman Catholicism should be elevated to the highest honor in the gift of the municipality. But it was due to the high-handed operations of the representatives of the hierarchy.