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Catholics throughout the world, for Mussolini, who with the help of his Fascist party had exercised complete control over Italy in all its political, economic, cultural and social affairs for nearly twenty-two years, who had rendered it a great many immense services in development and the economy and given it a prominent position in world politics, and who had devoted particular attention to giving its rising generation a Fascist upbringing, establishing the ‘Balilla’ system to give children a Roman military education and founding special institutes that enrolled more than six million children, then establishing primary schools that led an entirely military life (I visited some of these institutes and observed their spirit of enthusiasm and the distinctive Fascist education in which they were raised), this same Mussolini, despite his cunning, skill and power, could not oppose the Church’s spiritual dominion over the souls of the Italian people, and from the beginning of his rule had no choice but to meet the demands of the ‘Vatican,’ conclude a treaty with it, which he signed with Cardinal Gasparri, and recognize its official authority as an independent sovereign state with foreign ambassadors accredited to it, even at the most critical moments of the war; indeed, the ambassadors of America and England and other representatives of states at war with Italy resided in Vatican City, which squats on the chest of ‘Rome’ and occupies one of its districts, covering no more than forty-eight feddans, and there those ambassadors enjoyed all diplomatic privileges and communicated by coded telegrams, conveying to their countries news of Italy and the Axis states and their military secrets, which they could easily learn because they lived in the very heart of the Italian capital, while vast sums of money and millions of American dollars poured into the Vatican state’s coffers from Catholic communities in America and elsewhere at a time when the Italian currency had fallen in value until a single dollar was worth hundreds of Italian lire, enabling Allied agents to buy many people’s consciences and learn military secrets and news of the ships carrying gasoline to Marshal Rommel, whose expedition had then reached El Alamein and had nearly swept through the British forces in Egypt and Palestine and utterly destroyed the Jewish national home, and Rommel’s mechanized forces were in desperate need of gasoline, but the ships carrying it to them from Italy were sunk at sea or taken to ‘Malta,’ and only a scant few reached Rommel’s expedition, insufficient to meet its needs, thereby paralyzing Rommel’s movement and giving the British forces under General Montgomery sufficient opportunity to assemble against Rommel’s Afrika Korps and repel it, and this situation, arising from the presence of Allied embassies and their associated intelligence offices and agents in