seen your glorious predecessor, the austere old man already past his ninetieth year, so inflamed with Avrath when the Dean of the Sacred College,[1] in its presence and the presence of the diplomatic corps assembled to congratulate him on his birthday, spoke offensively of the young Christian democrats of Italy, that he had not the force to answer on the spot the fierce accusations of the wearer of the purple: but the next day he made known to the public through the press that in the young men lay the future of the Church, that their work, in order that it might succeed to her profit, ought not to be opposed, but rather encouraged by authority with words of counsel and of consolation.
You have turned your back upon your predecessor and paralysed the acts and the institutions which rendered his Pon-
- ↑ Luigi Oreglia di Santo Stefano, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, and still Dean of the Sacred College.—Tr.
