Though the Witnesses in Italy numbered only about a hundred in 1946, three years later they had 64 congregations—small but hardworking. The clergy were worried. Unable to refute the Bible truths preached by Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholic clergy pressured government authorities to try to get rid of them. Thus, in 1949, Witness missionaries were ordered out of the country.

Repeatedly the Roman Catholic clergy sought to disrupt or prevent assemblies of the Witnesses in Italy. They used hecklers to try to disrupt an assembly in Sulmona in 1948. In Milan they put pressure on the chief of police to cancel the permit for a convention at Teatro dell’Arte in 1950. Again, in 1951, they got the police to cancel permission for an assembly in Cerignola. But in 1957, when the police ordered a Witness convention in Milan to be closed down, the Italian press objected, and questions were raised in parliament. The Rome weekly Il Mondo, of July 30, 1957, did not hesitate to state that the action had been taken “to satisfy the archbishop,” Giovanni Battista Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI.

[Picture on page 493]

In spite of clergy opposition, thousands flocked to Witness conventions in Italy (Rome, 1969)