Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times:
De Gasperi, for his part, never recognized in Mussolini anything except a destructive radical: ‘Bolshevism in black’, as he put it. His own Partito Popolare Trentino was welcomed by Don Luigi Sturzo into the Catholic Popular Party,
which might have ruled inter-war Italy but for Mussolini’s putsch.
De Gasperi disliked Italian parliamentary politics (‘an equestrian
circus’), with their theatricals and oratorial tricks, which he always
spurned. But he hated the big totalitarian state still more. As he said
at the last Partito Popolare National Congress, 28 June 1925: ‘The
theoretical and practical principles of fascism are the antithesis of the Christian concept of the State, which lays down that the natural
rights of personality, family and society exist before the State.’
Fascism was just ‘the old Police State reappearing in disguise, holding
over Christian institutions the sword of Damocles’. Hauled before a
fascist tribunal in November 1926, he insisted: ‘It is the very concept
of the fascist state I cannot accept. For there are natural rights which the state cannot trample upon.’
So if you are an authentic Christian, Jew or Muslim, you are a member of your religion and family first, and then a citizen of the state? So perhaps Christians and Muslims as well as Jews have loyalties above the state? So perhaps Jews are not so different? So perhaps Jews don’t need to be so squeamish when accused of dual loyalties?
Should not all righteous people be slaves to moral codes above that of state law? Codes that spring from God?
