the right of
the papal government to control their civic conduct. In protest
against the alleged usurpations of secular power Pope Pius IX.
promulgated, in 1883, the memorable decree _Non Expedit_, by which it
was declared "inexpedient" that Catholics should vote at parliamentary
elections. Leo XIII. maintained a similar attitude; and in 1895 he
went a step further by expressly forbidding what hitherto had been
pronounced simply inexpedient.

At no time, before or after Pope Leo's decree of prohibition, was the
policy of abstention widely enforced, and very many Catholics, both in
and out of Italy, warmly opposed it. The stricture was applied only to
parliamentary, not to municipal, elections; yet in the two the
percentages of the enfranchised citizens who appeared at the polls
continued to be not very unequal, and there is every reason to believe
that the meagerness of these percentages has been attributable at all
times to the habitual indifference of the Italian electorate rather
than to the restraining effects of the papal veto. None the less, in
the strongly Catholic province of Bergamo and in some other quarters,
the papal regulations, by common admission, have cut deeply into what
otherwise would have been the normal parliamentary vote.

*445. Relaxation of the Papal Ban.*--In the elections of 1904 many
Catholics who hitherto had abstained from voting joined with the
Government's supporters at the polls in an effort to check the growing
influence of the more radical political groups, justifying their
conduct by the conviction that the combatting of socialism is a
fundamental Catholic obligation. Pope Leo XIII. was ready to admit the
force of the argument, and in June of the following year there was
issued an encyclical which made it the duty of Catholics everywhere,
Italy included, to share in the maintenance of social order, and
permitted, and even enjoined, that they take part in political
contests in defense of social order whenever and wherever it was
obviously menaced. At the same time, such participation must be, not
indiscriminate, but disciplined. It must be carried on under the
direction of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and with the express
approval of the Vatican. Theoretically, and as a general rule, the
_Non Expedit_ remains. But where the rigid application of the law
would open the way for the triumph of the enemies of society and of
religion (as, from the papal point of view, socialists inevitably