GIANTS ACT like giants, hence their undertakings are on a gigantic scale. Years are reckoned by decades, decades by centuries. Geographical areas are made to embrace nations or even continents, while the histories of institutions and of races are seen in perspectives not easily comprehended. Because of this, their actions, being in harmony with their extraordinary magnitude, will escape the notice of individuals unable to size up the vast historical panoramas which, although clearly scrutinizable by retinas of gigantic forms, yet are partly blurred and often wholly invisible to others.
The Catholic Church, the greatest surviving giant in the world, is a colossus with no peer in antiquity, experience and above all, in her determination to dominate the human race. To reach such a goal, she will suffer no rivals, tolerate no competitors, put up with no enemies.
Giants who, like her, were found roaming in the deep valley of history, she fought with bloody claws and a ruthlessness to shame the Attillas, the Genghis Khans and all the other scourgers of civilization. Many she led to their destruction; others she subjugated for good; some were annihilated, but some resisted and escaped all her guiles. More than one survived, and even fought relentless battles that echoed with sanguinary echoes in the corridors of the centuries and that are still being fought as ferociously as in olden times, now, in the very midst of the twentieth century.
Vatican diplomacy is the oldest diplomacy in the world. Most of those it fought were either shrunk to nothing by time or blotted out by history, and to modern ears all its multifarious intrigues would sound as hollow and as unreal as they have become strangely unrelated to the ever-bewildering events of our day.
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