Excerpt from The Catholic World, Vol. 88: A Monthly Magazine of General Literature and Science; October, 1908, to March, 1909

Needless to say this lamentable expression of opinion pro duced much excitement throughout the country. The Catholic women delegates were loud in their protests, so much so that the President of the congress, Countess Spalletti Rasponi, and some others tried to explain away their vote as being less anti Christian in its intention than people assumed. Others have attributed their protest against religious teaching in the schools to the extremely unsatisfactory manner in which apparently it is often imparted in Italy by state teachers, who have little or no faith themselves. These explanations, however, do not carry one very far, and many of the best friends of the feminist movement in the peninsula, such as the well-known Rassegrza Nazz'onale, have hastened to dissociate themselves from a vote which may go far to discredit the whole agitation. The Cz'w'lta Cattoliea, which has always been an unsympathetic critic of emancipated womanhood, drew up and issued a vigorous and effective protest against the Malnati resolution, as being anti Christian, anti-patriotic, and anti-educational, and was enabled to publish in its next issue (may 16) a long list of signatories containing an imposing array of Roman patrician names. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the vote, the outcome of skillful engineering rather than of any widely spread convie tion, has met with openly expressed disapproval in all save Socialist and definitely anti-clerical organs.

Personally the moral I draw from this regrettable incident is the urgent need for the active participation of Catholic women in all that concerns_women's life and interests. It is a familiar spectacle to see deliberate absentees wringing their hands over what has been done in their absence. They usually forget that they are responsible for what occurs only in a less degree than the actual participants. Why were they not present to oppose it? The days are gone by in Italy as elsewhere when women could be content to be mere onlookers of contemporary poli tics; and if Catholics are not prepared to organize and educate themselves for the defence of their ideals and beliefs, they will undoubtedly witness the triumph of doctrines they detest. It is at least a hopeful sign of the times that a magazine so conservative and orthodox as the Cz'oz'lta Catlolz'ea should, at this juncture, have published an article from the pen of Pete Pavis sich, s.j. (june emphasizing just this aspect of the problem. No one will accuse the learned Jesuit of minimizing the impor tance of those very points on which the utterances of some of the ladies assembled in Rome gave cause for alarm. But brush ing aside mere exuberance of language, and making allowances for an occasional violence of denunciation due in part to the excitement of the occasion, he has discerned the real importance of the congress, and the value of much of the work aecom plished by it. He has the courage to welcome what is, to Italians, the innovation of a women's congress, and acknowl edges freely the need for women's co-operation in the solving of social problems and their entire competency to pronounce on many of the topics under discussion. He applauds all that women have to say concerning thrift and co-pperation, the need for labor legislation and the special dangers of emigration for women and children. He has nothing but praise for their treat ment of all subjects connected with maternity, with domestic hygiene, with infant mortality, with the prevention of alcohol ism and of the spread of tuberculosis. Even on the more de batable ground of legal rights, he acknowledges that modern Italian legislation has unfortunately adopted some of the worst features of the Code Napoleon where women are concerned. He admits the justice of the demand for the reckerc/ze de la paterm'te', for a single moral st