Luigi Sturzo a Londra: Carteggi e documenti (1925-1946) (review)

The Istituto Luigi Sturzo is one of Europe's principal research centers on Christian Democracy and honors one of the chief voices of twentieth-century political Catholicism. A Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo founded Italy's Partito Popolare in 1919 and led it until Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime and Pope Pius XI combined to end it in 1926. Sturzo left Italy and lived the next twenty or so years of his life in exile, much of it in Britain and America, until he returned to Italy after World War II and assumed the role of elder statesman for the Christian Democracy before his death in 1959. The institute that bears his name has devoted a great deal of its energies to the publication of Sturzo's Opera Omnia. A first series of publications covered Sturzo's own major works; the second focused on his lesser pieces and speeches, while the third collected his "scattered" notes and letters ("scritti vari"). The work reviewed here appears as volume IV-5 of the Third Series.

A preface by the head of the institute, Gabriele De Rosa, and extensive commentary and notes by Giovanna Farrell-Vinay enhance the collection. Sturzo recognized international developments as the key to all politics, and this volume's chief strength is its emphasis on his interest in world affairs. The Spanish Civil War provides the central issue here and serves the most valuable insights. During his London years, Sturzo's chief correspondent was the British journalist Henry Wickham Steed (usually referred to in Farrell-Vinay's editing as "Steed"). Wickham Steed recognized Sturzo's brilliance in a 1925 tract on Fascism, contacted him, and the two developed a "working friendship" (amicizia di lavoro) that lasted through World War II. Much of the business between the two men concerned translating and publishing Sturzo's work in English although efforts with the British Committee for Civil and Religious Peace in Spain and endeavors to aid war refugees occupy key parts in the book. Sturzo seems to have been his own non-governmental organization before there were such things. Wickham Steed is the major but not the only one of Sturzo's correspondents in this collection. Letters appear from an interesting mix, figures such as Jacques Maritain, Anthony Eden, Robert Vansittart, and Salvador de Mandariaga. The collection concludes with an exchange between Wickham Steed and Carlo Sforza, the anti-Fascist exile and postwar foreign minister. Sturzo left London and arrived in New York in September of 1940 with ten British pounds in his pocket, and many letters in this collection represent correspondence after that date. In Farrell-Vinay's laudable zeal to publish all of Sturzo's correspondence, however, some of the material seems rather pedestrian. Quite a few of the missives are one- or two-sentence notes agreeing to meet here or there at this or that time. At one point she needlessly devotes a footnote to explain the translation of "your obedient servant" into a rather clumsy Italian as "Suo obbediente servitore." One final, albeit minor, puzzle confronts the reviewer. Why are the English-language letters translated into Italian but the ones in French remain in the original? Such quibbles, moreover, do not invalidate the conclusion that Giovanna Farrell-Vinay has awarded us with a solid collection of the heroic Sicilian priest's letters written during his London exile, and then some.