Pietro & Paul

At the Archway of Bells, the main entrance to Vatican City, the unfamiliar guest had to show his special pass to the Swiss Guards. Once admitted, however, he was whisked to the Apostolic Palace and received by Pope Paul VI in a private, 50-minute audience--twice as long as the pontiff normally gives, and longer than the audience granted to John F. Kennedy. The visitor: Italy's tough old Socialist Party chieftain, Pietro Nenni, 74, an unregenerate unbeliever and onetime Stalin Prizewinner.

Dark Mutter. Rome was startled, and with reason. "Nenni is the first Italian Socialist to pass through the doors of the Vatican," trumpeted the Socialist newspaper Avanti, while many of his fellow Socialists were scandalized. And, though Nenni and the Pope did little more than exchange pleasantries, Rome's neo-Fascist II Secolo muttered darkly that the meeting "never should have taken place," being a dangerous and unnecessary concession to Communists and fellow travelers.

Nenni, of course, is hardly a fellow traveler these days, having split with the Communists over the 1956 Hungarian revolt and finally joined the Christian Democrats as Vice Premier in the present government. But he is after all, an agnostic who still vigorously upholds the Socialist Party's long tradition of anticlericalism, attacks Vatican exemption from dividend taxes, and refuses to support his coalition partners, the Vatican-backed Christian Democrats, on state aid to parochial schools.

Still, no party can afford to be too anticlerical in Italy, where even the Communist mayor in the comic novel comes to Don Camillo to have his child baptized Lenin. And the Communist Party's amazing 18% gain in votes in the 1963 elections (partly at the expense of Nenni's Socialists) was credited by many to the much-publicized friendly reception given by Pope John XXIII to Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei.

Good for Votes. Pope Paul could not fail to notice that Nenni was among the ranking government officials at the airport to see him off on his trip to the Holy Land last year. Then, last December, Nenni was on hand with greetings when Paul returned from India. On that occasion, the Pope went out of his way to wonder why "we are destined to meet only on such occasions." When Nenni departed to discuss John's Pacem in Terris encyclical at a recent Manhattan conference (TIME, Feb. 26), Paul's best wishes were relayed to Nenni at the Rome airport. On his return, Nenni requested his audience.

The welcome he got should be good for a lot of votes, and if the faction-ridden Christian Democrats ever lose an election, the Vatican might not oppose Nenni for the premiership. Nenni himself can hardly be unaware that a former Socialist, Giuseppe Saragat, who reconverted to Roman Catholicism three years ago, succeeded to the presidency early this year.

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