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Fate

forced to compromise and they signed an agreement by which the Pope got £19,000,000 in cash (which he is rumoured to have invested in America and lost in the ensuing depression) and State bonds—the sum, with accumulated interest, allotted to the Papacy in 1870 [see Papal States]—and independent power in the Vatican City (108 acres of Rome, with its own postage, railway station, etc.). They signed also a Concordat by which the Pope got control of all schools and colleges below the universities (control of which both professors and Fascists heatedly opposed), the establishment of Catholicism as the State-religion, the endowment of the clergy, the protection of the property of monks, a law of religious marriage, drastic penalties on all criticism of the Church, the enforcement of the Church's Holy Days, relief from taxation for the clergy and Church property, and the expulsion of all ex-priests (who were very numerous in Italy) from the Civil Service.

Fate

This sordid bargain, hailed in the world's Press as a beautiful reconciliation of the secular and spiritual powers, was followed by bitter recrimination on both sides. Mussolini, who, to secure his own power, had sold the rights to win which half a million Italians had died in the nineteenth century, had to defend himself against his own followers, and the bold language he used caused the Pope to denounce him publicly as “a heretic ” (Osservatore Romano, May 30, 1929). Against his statement that he had “made no concessions ” the Pope claimed all the powers of a mediæval Pontiff. This extraordinary document, showing that the Papacy has not altered a line of its claims, was concealed by the Press from its readers in Great Britain and America. A translation of parts of it is given (direct from the Osservatore) in McCabe's Papacy in Modern Politics, 1937, p. 58

Fate

Mussolini made further concessions in 1931 and began to attend church, in 1932. In the same year he wrote the opening part of the article “ Fascismo ” in the new Enciclopedia Italiana, and in this he derided the Christian ideal of peace and glorified war as the agency which “ alone raises the energy of man to the highest pitch and impresses a seal of nobility upon the nations which have the manliness to undertake it ”; while in the same year British newspapers printed only his public and passionate avowals that Italy sought peace and had no thought of aggression. The Pope, keeping his part of the criminal bargain, said nothing, and permitted the Italian Church and hierarchy to bless the rape of Abyssinia [see]. What sinister part the new Pope played in the recent war will in time be revealed. See McCabe's book (as above) and F. A. Ridley, The Papacy and Fascism, 1939.

Fate

Fate. Literally “ that which has been spoken.” In most religions this refers to the decrees of the gods. The equivalent Greek word, “ moira,” meant a share or portion of property, hence a person's lot in life, and finally the vague, impersonal (apart from the poetic myth of the Three Fates), inexorable, and generally sombre power which allots it. The word has no meaning to-day except as an expression for a tragic happening. Literary men have occasionally used the idea as an artistic expression of the constant failure of man's aspirations and achievements, but from the scientific point of view this is mere verbiage. We do not know of the existence outside man of anything more powerful than man (the race of men) himself. He is now equipped by science with such power that when all men, or the majority, are agreed upon a constructive plan, and war and wastage are excluded, human effort will decide the future, apart from such rare convulsions of nature as great earthquakes or eruptions.

Fathers

Fatherhood of God. [See Brotherhood of Man.]

Fathers

Fathers, The Christian. In the early ages of the Church the word “ Papa ” (father) was applied to all bishops, but it fell into disuse in Europe, or was restricted to monks and Popes. “ Fathers of the Church ” then came to mean the more prominent of the prelates and writers of the Church until the thirteenth century. The edition of their works, and of the decrees and letters of all Popes to Innocent III, which is used in quotation here is the Migne collection of Latin and Greek Fathers (the two