12.          Scalabrini to Pius X¹²

         Piacenza, March 1, 1904

Most Holy Father,

I am happy to present to Your Holiness the enclosed offering of L. 2,000 from my missionaries in North America. I beg you to accept it with the usual kindness and to impart the Apostolic Blessing they implore to the zealous donors.

            Once concluded the fifth pastoral visitation to the Diocese on April 1, I plan to go to South America. I would like to give there, as I did in

the North, a course of spiritual exercises to the Missionaries, to the Sisters of the Italian orphans, who have been collected in number of about 300 in our orphanage of Ipiranga, and then visit the missions and the colonies of our emigrants.

            I believe all this would help raise the morale of those poor people and to do some good.

            If Your Holiness is still of the opinion expressed to me orally, I assume you will grant me the permission that I now humbly ask, to carry out that plan. However, I do not hide, Holy Father, that at present I am somewhat disturbed and uncertain, and I tell you openly the reason. On the 14th of this month Your Holiness received in private audience a certain Paolo Ligutti, a former Franciscan friar, the most sacrilegious and underhanded slanderer I have ever known. That breed of priests, St. Cyprian described in such dark colors, who without knowledge of their Bishop were running to Rome to ruin good name and honor, is not yet extinct. Ligutti is unfortunately one of these. Right in these days I had to communicate to him with the relative censure (and perhaps he foresaw this) the quite negative result of a judicial procedure that had to be instituted against three respectable ecclesiastics of Piacenza for very serious accusations of immorality he had invented against them because they were not favorable to his undertakings without foundation and principles of healthy and solid education. Returned from Rome, however, he trumpeted the audience he had in his newspaper (undeserving of praise), adding to the pompous title Il Giovane Italiano – Corriere Nazionale (The Young Italian – National Reporter) the words: Cordially blessed by the Holy Father Pius X. With this label he now tries to give credibility to his eccentric ideas and to cheat the simple even more. I will not speak of the impression created on reasonable persons: it is easy to imagine. On my part, I felt I should suspend any judicial act against that poor fellow to avoid at all costs the appearance of some conflict between the true or presumed praises of Your Holiness and my behavior towards him. Now – forgive me Holy Father if I dwell too much on this case – the rumor circulates that he came to Rome requested by the Holy See to inform Your Holiness about most serious and unspeakable accusations against a religious Community whose great wrong in his eyes has been to have three times rejected an eccentric woman he now keeps with himself. I can assure you, Holy Father, that the facts he has denounced exist only in his sick and wicked imagination. I am ready to provide Your Holiness with the proof that we deal with a real mystery of iniquity. The former friar holds it against the

Bishop and the wiser clergy because they refuse to support his eccentricity. The former nun holds it against the Congregation from where it has been expelled exactly because it was expelled. Hence all their malevolent inventions.

            No doubt, however, God will humiliate the slanderer.

            Prostrate to kiss your holy feet and imploring the Apostolic Blessing, I have the honor to confirm myself with sentiments of the deepest veneration

Of Your Holiness most devoted son,

[Scalabrini]