The Vatican and Mussolini's Italy [1 ed.] 9789004328792, 9789004308596

Citation preview

The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy

The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy By

Lucia Ceci Translated by Peter Spring

leiden | boston

The translation of this work has been funded by seps – segretariato europeo per le pubblicazioni scientifiche Via Val d’Aposa 7, 40123 Bologna, Italy [email protected] - www.seps.it Original title: L’interesse superiore. Il Vaticano e l’Italia di Mussolini. Cover illustration: L’Illustrazione Italiana, 62, 15 December 1935. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ceci, Lucia, 1967- author. Title: The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy / by Lucia Ceci. Other titles: Interesse superiore. English Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Translantion of: L’interesse superiore : il Vaticano e l’Italia di Mussolini. Roma : Laterza, 2013. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Identifiers: lccn 2016036655 (print) | lccn 2016042389 (ebook) |  isbn 9789004308596 (hardback : acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004328792 (e-book) | isbn 9789004328792 (E-book) Subjects: lcsh: Fascism and the Catholic Church--Italy--History--20th century. | Catholic Church--Foreign relations--Italy. | Italy--Foreign relations--Catholic Church. | Church and state--Italy--History--20th century. | Mussolini, Benito, 1883–1945. | Italy--Politics and government--1922–1945. | World War,  1939–1945--Italy. | World War, 1939–1945--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. | World War, 1939–1945--Causes. Classification: lcc dg571 .c43313 2017 (print) | lcc dg571 (ebook) | ddc 322/.10945--dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036655

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isbn 978-90-04-30859-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-32879-2 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa.Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Abbreviations vii Introduction 1 1 Religion, War, Nation 12 1.1 ‘La Mala Educación’ 12 1.2 Political Anticlericalism, Pornographic Anticlericalism 26 1.3 The ‘Guerrone’ 44 1.4 A Gory Ideal of the Fatherland 53 2 Transitions 59 2.1 The Right Time 59 2.2 The Caltagirone Antipope 66 2.3 An Anti-modern Pope? 73 2.4 Lending Credence to the New Power 78 2.5 Discreet Agreements 83 2.6 The Superior Interests of the Church 88 2.7 The ‘True’ Nationalism and the ‘Non-opposition’ 94 3 The Holiest of Nations 104 3.1 The Italian Way to Holiness 104 3.2 A Bumpy Road 115 3.3 A Look beyond Italy 123 3.4 Conciliation and Competition 129 3.5 Two Exclusive Faiths 144 4 The Most Roman of Empires 156 4.1 A War Machine 156 4.2 Mother Rome 164 4.3 Pure, Strong, Modern: A Catholic Virility 172 4.4 A War for Empire-Building 178 4.5 Against ‘Hybrid’ Unions 189 4.6 A Crusade Just Like the Old Ones 196

vi 5 Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown 206 5.1 ‘Hit the Pope and You Die’ 206 5.2 A Solitary Reconsideration 214 5.3 The Speech that Enraged Mussolini 222 5.4 Inexpiable Sin? 232 5.5 Adverse, But Not Too Much 240 6 Punishment and Purification 252 6.1 Time Out 252 6.2 At Mussolini’s Side to Prevent the War 255 6.3 Ongoing ‘Non-belligerence’ 261 6.4 Oscillations 264 6.5 The Early Signs of a Changing Policy 275 7 Atonement 285 7.1 Divine Providence Doesn’t Go to Salò 285 7.2 ‘A Poor Christian’ 296 7.3 Nothing to Apologize about 299 Bibliography 307 Index of Names 330 Index of Subjects 342

Contents 

List of Abbreviations aas Acta Apostolicae Sedis aci Azione Cattolica Italiana (Italian Catholic Action) adss Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la ­Seconde Guerre Mondiale asdmae Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri Italiano, Rome aa.ee.ss. Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari Arch. Nunz. Archivio Nunziatura arsi Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome asv Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City Congr. Concist. Relat. Dioec. Congregazione Concistoriale, Relationes Dioecesium fuci Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (Italian Catholic Federation of University) giac Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica (Italian Catholic Youth) guf Gioventù Universitaria Fascista (Fascist University Youth) iri Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (Italian ­public holding company) onarmo Opera Nazionale per l’Assistenza Religiosa e Morale degli Operai (Catholic organization for industrial workers) onb Opera Nazionale Balilla (Fascist schoolchildren’s organization) psi Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party) psis Partito Socialista Italiano in Svizzera (Italian Socialist Party in Switzerland) pnf Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) ppi Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party) rsi Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic) s.rr.ss. Segreteria di Stato, Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati, Archivio Storico b. busta fol. folio fasc. fascicolo pos. position r. recto v. verso

Introduction The damage inflicted by Fascism is becoming ever clearer. Fascism in fact has: 1. created a confusion between party, Italy, and the Duce. Result: the Duce’s whim is Italy’s ruin; 2. destroyed any freedom of action and discussion. Result: the ­Italian people have by now been reduced to a flock of sheep who run wherever the shepherd, with his stick, propels them; 3. educated generations in violence. Result: everyone is a hero, ready to raise his fists, sure that the others won’t have any option… but to take a beating; 4. followed a line of arbitrary acts, incivilities, clashes, threats and bullying in foreign policy. Result: it has ensured that the whole world is opposed to Fascism; 5. heralded, prophesied, and proclaimed an empire. Result: it is exhausting itself in a savage and costly colonial war, which will only have two aims: that of wasting money and conquering inhospitable lands. […]; 6. proclaimed the greatness of Italy to the four corners of the world. Result: today […] a weak and undeveloped people possesses an air of being the greatest people on earth; 7. deified the Duce, making everyone kneel down to this god. Result: there’s no longer any political life, no longer any chance of preparing new energy to meet the inevitable needs of the future. 8. claimed and imposed on everyone the most absolute and intransigent docility. Result: nothing is left but a mob of slaves, ever ready to say yes, to clap their hands, utterly full as they are … of enthusiasm; 9. concentrated all powers, all resources, all ages in the hands and organizations of the State. […]; 10.  created a whole labyrinth of laws, conventions and associations that place everything and everybody at the mercy of the State.1 This coherent analysis of the characteristics and evils of Fascism is not the work of a militant antifascist. The document was written on 1st December 1935 by Monsignor Domenico Tardini, one of Pius xi’s closest aides, at a time when 1 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, Conflitto Italo-etiopico, 1935, pos. 967, vol. i bis, fols. 63–64 “Previsioni e giudizi di Mons. Tardini sul conflitto tra l’Italia e l’Etiopia”, 1st December 1935. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_002

2

Introduction

the regime, with the war in Ethiopia, was reaching the height of its popularity. It wasn’t a document for private consumption, but an official memorandum written with care by one of the major exponents of the diplomatic action of the Holy See, and intended for the prelate’s audiences with the pontiff. Tardini grasped all the ills of the regime. He identified all its liberticidal and totalitarian aspects. He articulated all the dire consequences of the dictatorship for Italian society as a whole. But at the same time he placed the Holy See outside this situation and these dynamics. The lucid analysis conducted in the Secretariat of State and presented to the Pope seemed in short not to imply any responsibility on the part of the Vatican: neither for the rise of the dictatorship and the popular consent it had won up until that time, nor for the positions to be taken, in public, in the future. The fact is that, on the level of public debate, the question of the Church’s responsibility during the two decades of support for the Fascist regime was never subjected to any critical reflection. Italian Catholicism avoided the fundamental question: why did the Catholic world, which was able to recognize the crimes of the regime, and clearly to spell them out, remain so susceptible to its propaganda and its seduction? The German bishops reacted very differently: following Germany’s unconditional surrender, they lost no time in launching publications and systematic studies on the Church’s relations with Nazism. The Argentine bishops, to take a different but familiar case, accepted John Paul ii’s appeal for purification and made solemn atonement for their acquiescence and complicity in the desaparecidos. Italian Catholicism did neither the one nor the other. Ever since the collapse of the regime, the question of how the positions adopted by the Holy See, episcopal hierarchy, clergy and laity towards Fascism should be judged was simply sidelined or rather it was placed within a wider perspective aimed to define the cultural and political parameters within which the Church would place her influence and organization in the post-war period. What prevailed was an approach intent not only to avoid a critical reflection on the responsibility of Catholics for the support of dictatorship, but also to underline, instead, the role they had played in the struggle against Fascism. Regenerated in her political credibility by the major campaign of charitable assistance, which, in the name of Pius xii Defensor civitatis, priests and bishops had conducted on behalf of the Italian population during the German occupation, the Catholic Church emerged from the ventennio with her prestige not seriously dented by her embrace with Fascism. Thus, she was able to present herself, at the end of the war, as the sole protagonist able directly to take into her hands again the reins of Italian society. Palmiro Togliatti’s confident prediction, following the Lateran Pacts, that the price of

Introduction

3

the Church’s collaboration with Fascism would be a “mass rebellion” in the form of “schism and heresy”, was resoundingly repudiated by later events.2 On the historiographical level, vice versa, the relations between the C ­ atholic Church and Fascism have not been repressed. They have, and especially in more recent years, been closely scrutinized. They have been re-evaluated in the light of fresh evidence. A new season of historical revision and historical understanding has been inaugurated. Dismissive interpretations, polarized only on the denunciation of complicity between the cudgel of the Blackshirt and the aspergillum of the priest, now seem like a thing of the past – an obsolete cultural and political phase.3 The same may be said of apologetic interpretations conjured up in defense of the policies that the ecclesiastical institution adopted towards the dictatorship of Mussolini; their poor quality attests perhaps to the lack of significance attributed to the question.4 The history of relations between the Catholic Church and Fascism can now boast of a fruitful period of research over the last decade. New scenarios were opened to historical study after the ecclesiastical sources relating to the pontificate of

2 Ercoli, “Fine della ‘Questione romana’”, Stato operaio (February 1929), then in P. Togliatti, L’opera di De Gasperi. I rapporti tra Stato e Chiesa, Milano: Parenti, 1958, 169–187, quotations 185–186. 3 Conceived in circles of the opposition abroad during the years of the dictatorship, interpretations of this kind gained in popularity thanks to the publication, or re-publication, of some writings of Gaetano Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi. Salvemini’s interventions on the relations between the Vatican and Fascism have been reprinted in G. Salvemini, Opere, ii, Scritti di storia moderna e contemporanea, vol. 3, Stato e Chiesa in Italia, (ed.) E. Conti, ­Milano: ­Feltrinelli, 1969. The most significant work of this branch of research is however represented by the book of E. Rossi, Il manganello e l’aspersorio. L’uomo della Provvidenza e Pio xi, ­Firenze: Parenti, 1958. Two years later less categorical conclusions were reached by the young ­American ­scholar Richard A. Webster, a pupil of Salvemini himself at Harvard. In his book The Cross and the Fasces, Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford: Stanford ­University Press, 1960), Webster, though acknowledging Ernesto Rossi’s role as interpreter of the relations between Church and Fascism, underlined the uneven and fluctuating character of these relations. 4 Among the first proponents of the “irreducible incompatibility” between the regime and Catholic organizations we must undoubtedly place the conte Giuseppe Dalla Torre, editorin-chief of the L’Osservatore Romano from 1920 to 1960 and author, in 1945, of a little book entitled Azione Cattolica e Fascismo (now in Idem, I cattolici e la vita pubblica italiana, Roma: Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1962). The main tendency in Catholic circles was, in any case, to avoid studies that dug too deep. Emblematic in this sense was the veil of silence raised round Arturo Carlo Jemolo’s book, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni (Torino: Einaudi, 1948).

4

Introduction

Pius xi became accessible to scholars between 2003 and 2006.5 But cases in which the results of this flurry of research have crossed the Alps or the Atlantic Ocean and become familiar to foreign scholars are rare, due to the fact that the Italian language is known only to a tiny minority in the world. Only a new generation of scholars, who like myself have embarked on research in today’s global society, has begun to engage with the international debate and with the Anglophone public in a more direct, pro-active and systematic way. It seems to me therefore important, and emblematic of a new phase in historical studies, that this work (winner of the “Friuli Storia” Prize for Studies of Contemporary History in 2014) should now be published in an English edition. I felt the need to conduct a comprehensive reconstruction of the relations between the Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy, after having long studied the role of Catholicism both in Italy and in the Italian colonies in the 20th century. This led me to reconstruct, from a new perspective, the history of the encounter between the Catholic Church and Fascism by knitting together into an historical narrative the most significant and innovative findings that have emerged from the rich source material that has accumulated in more recent years. The new sources in the Vatican Archives have in fact permitted historians to throw fresh light on individual aspects: the accession of Mussolini to power, the war in Ethiopia, the racial laws, and the comparison between Pius xi and Pius xii. In this book, by contrast, I will try to offer a more comprehensive reconstruction of the encounter, sometimes the clash, between the Church and Fascism, with the aim of understanding the reasoning that led Catholics to support a dictatorial, warmongering and racist regime. The profusion of data and problems has led me to privilege a line of argument focused on the highest levels of civil and religious government: ­Mussolini on the one hand and the Vatican on the other. This is not merely a narrative e­ scamotage. For all their diversity, the Church and Fascism shared a hierarchical organization based on principles of authority, discipline and obedience. Moreover, the doctrine and the prevalent practice in the Catholic Church during the ventennio leave no doubt that the Pope and his episcopal hierarchy exerted on the faithful a precise role of direction and of guidance, from which no sphere was in principle excluded. And to this central source of orientation Catholics, whether organized or not, had constantly to refer to draw the guidelines for their own actions and moral choices. “Subjects” of the Church, as they were called by Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in his Catholic Catechism of 1932 – essentially the laity – were called to obedience in particular to 5 For a historiographical summation of this research see L. Ceci, “La Chiesa e il fascismo”, Studi storici 55 (2014): 123–137.

Introduction

5

the Pope.6 Of course, in Fascist Italy, the average Catholic believer could have barely been aware of the constant rivalry, the constant tug of war, between the Pope and the Duce to achieve a monopoly over the conscience of Italians, except for the bitterest moments of the conflict over Catholic Action in 1931 and 1938. From the Lateran Pacts onwards, in fact, the upper hierarchy of the Vatican adopted a dual political strategy towards the regime: on the one hand, fervent support for the government of Mussolini, manifested or corroborated in public pronouncements, and, on the other, the claim for a separate identity. Contrasting with the totalitarian ambitions of Fascism, this separate identity was tenaciously defended and jealously guarded. It was pursued in confidential negotiations with the political powers. By no means, however, does the painstaking reconstruction of the behind the scenes machinations exhaust the scope of our enquiry, especially when Fascism became a State and everything became amplified and more complicated. For, as the Church reinforced her collaboration with the regime, the active participation of Catholics in the new mass realities of the 20th century was accelerated. Of course, the history of relations between the Church and Fascism cannot ignore the epochal turning-point of the Lateran Pacts. These historic documents stamped the seal on the reconciliation between the Fascist regime and the Catholic Church. Signed by the head of the Italian government and the Secretary of State in the Sala dei Papi at the Lateran, they were hailed by Catholics as an event of the highest significance. The Concordat was the solemn sanction of the public and official role of Catholic religion in Italian society. It was the celebration of the metamorphosis of the Fascist State into a Catholic State. In its aftermath, the Church played an important role in extending and stabilizing support for the regime. On the other hand, the totalitarian ambition of the regime, the sacralization of the State as an alternative religion, and the influence this had on the languages, rites and myths of politics, led Fascism to compete with the Church in the formation of a national ethos. In response to the all-encompassing political claims of the regime, Catholicism accentuated, in turn, its own character as a totalitarian organization in its own way, by making significant inroads into the new realities of urban life, forging new links with the middle classes, and developing modern forms of associated life.7 6 Catechismo cattolico a cura e studio del cardinal Pietro Gasparri, was the first Italian version approved by the author, Brescia: La Scuola, 1932, 120. Gasparri’s catechism had first been published in Latin in 1930 (Catechismus catholicus cura et studio Petri cardinalis Gasparri c­ oncinnatus, Città del Vaticano: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1930). 7 R. Moro, “Il ‘modernismo buono’. La ‘modernizzazione’ cattolica tra fascismo e postfascismo come problema storiografico”, Storia contemporanea 19 (1988): 625–716.

6

Introduction

When, on 18 September 1938, in the midst of the Czechoslovak crisis, Pius xi condemned the totalitarian pretensions of contemporary states, he would do so in the name of a rival form of totalitarianism. He would assert that only the Church had the right and the duty to vindicate the totality of her power over individuals; so only the Church could rightly be recognized as a “totalitarian regime – totalitarian de facto and de jure”.8 It is only in the dramatic final phase of the pontificate of Pius xi that the category of ‘totalitarianism’ can, I believe, be legitimately applied to the Church. It presumably alludes, in this context, to the aspiration of the ecclesiastical institution to recover an integral role, and thus re-conquer society for the Church. That explains why the role of Catholic Action – the active role of the Catholic laity in Italian society – proved to be the sticking point for Pius xi. He threw his habitual caution to the wind when, on 28 July 1938, he warned the Duce that any attack on Catholic Action was an attack on the Pope himself. The Church, in short, aspired to recover the ground she had lost with the processes of secularization. So, in the end, two different forms of totalitarianism, two different models of the total inculcation of man, two patterns of mass mobilization, ended up by clashing with one other.9 This is the backdrop against which I have attempted to reconstruct the relations between Mussolini and the Vatican and to elucidate the dynamics of rivalry, defense and mutual influence that characterized the relation between the two camps during the ventennio. As for Mussolini, his pro-Catholic volteface had begun, for reasons of political expediency, soon after the foundation of the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919. It was motivated by his wish to woo a broader and more socially diversified constituency. Thus began the collusion between Church and Fascism, reinforced by their shared ‘totalitarian’ claims and by their shared perception of the common enemies by which they were assailed (freemasonry, Protestantism, Judaism, liberalism, communism, etc.). The research underlying this book makes no claim to present a comprehensive history of those years. Like any historical exposition, it is selective.10 The interwoven strands between relations of an economic nature, for example, are 8 9

10

Thus Pius xi in his speech to the French Federation of Christian Trade-Unions, in Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 3, 1934–1939, Torino: sei, 1961, 814. For an exposition of the concept of totalitarianism applied to the Church, see the conclusions of D. Menozzi and R. Moro, published in the volume edited by the same scholars, Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia), Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004, 373–387. See D. Diner, Raccontare il Novecento. Una storia politica, Milano: Garzanti, 2007, 9 (First published in German: Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung, München: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1999).

Introduction

7

only fleetingly touched upon. The specific regional or provincial situations, characterized by the strength of local traditions or professional affiliations, are also largely ignored. On the other hand, a strong emphasis is placed on the different nuances that influenced the themes of the nation and war at the religious, cultural and political levels. For it was these questions that galvanized the main transformations that took place in the Catholic world. And by looking closer at these questions, we can better define the far-reaching contaminations that were taking place between the two formative agents – Church and regime – in the construction of a collective consciousness that left its indelible mark on the Italian mind during this period. The book devotes close attention to the positions adopted by the Catholic Church towards State anti-Semitism, which historians have mainly studied by concentrating on Germany and on the vexed role of Pius xii. To understand the attitudes of Italian Catholicism towards the anti-Jewish policies adopted by the Fascist government, I have considered it essential to recall the role played by a Catholic culture that placed its indelible stamp on the formulation and dissemination of anti-Jewish prejudices in the course of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century: from the hoary clichés of deicide to the perceived Jewish monopoly of finance, the purported conspiracy of International Jewry aimed at subverting Christian societies, and, not least, after the Russian Revolution, the nexus between Judaism and Bolshevism. These and other models of Christian anti-Semitism were widely revived during 1937, and especially in 1938, by a significant part of the Catholic episcopate and press. They ended up applying traditional Catholic prejudices to Fascist (racially motivated) anti-Semitism, thus demonstrating how ineffectual the Catholic culture’s response was to the regime’s discriminatory policies against Jews. Regarding the Holy See, I felt it was important to highlight the positions adopted by the top ecclesiastical hierarchy towards the first laws on race: those issued by the Italian government in the colonies of East Africa after the conquest of Ethiopia, when Pope Pius xi and his closest aides, however much they denied on the doctrinal level that any differences between races could ever exist, decided nonetheless to support Fascist policy for reasons of Realpolitik. In the second half of 1938, by which time the scale and virulence of anti-Semitic policies in Europe had become abundantly clear to the Holy See, Pius xi initiated a reform of the Church’s doctrine to condemn racism and anti-Semitism. But his decision, however, came too late and was strongly obstructed by the Roman Curia. So it was easy for his successor Pius xii to return to a political stance that privileged the diplomatic détente both with the Italian and German governments. Seen from a global perspective, anti-Semitism still represented for the Holy See a lesser evil than Soviet Communism.

8

Introduction

It is well known that, following the signing of the Lateran Pacts, Pius xi r­ evived and accentuated the theme of an Italian primacy, à la Gioberti, projecting it on a global scale.11 The restoration of God to Italy and of Italy to God, which the Lateran Pacts had sanctioned, suggested the idea of a projection of the Catholic foundations of the nation at the public and institutional level. An exemplary value was conferred on the status achieved by the Church in the country that was the seat of the papacy. It was regarded as the sign of a mission assigned by Providence to Italy and of her predestination to form the central axis of a project of Christian civilization that transcended the nation state. Keeping all this in mind, it is easier to understand why the government of Mussolini should have integrated so many Vatican policies. Yet, it is not only in her rapport with the regime that the attitude of the Holy See during this period can be understood. For the importance played by the world scenario as a whole cannot be ignored – due, in general, to the international role that is embodied in the very nature of the Apostolic See; and, in particular, to the dramatic events at the global level that the Church had to come to terms with during the period covered by this book. It goes without saying that reasons of exposition and concision led me to select only some aspects from the enormous mass of source materials offered by the Church’s international role during this period. Precisely for this reason I feel I should point out the main aspects that I will try to emphasize at the interpretational and narrative levels in the following pages. In defining the relations between the Vatican and the government of Mussolini, we cannot underestimate the link between the decisions taken by the Holy See in her relations with the regime and what was happening in the Soviet Union, in Spain, in Germany, and in Mexico. Especially since the mid-Thirties, the Holy See rashly placed trust in her ability to exert influence on Mussolini to curb both the expansive force of the Comintern and the aggressiveness of Nazi Germany. In contrast to the traditional periodization, the history recounted in this book does not begin in 1922, nor does it end in 1943. It begins with the childhood of Benito Mussolini in the final years of the 19th century, and it ends with the sudden collapse of his puppet regime, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, on the shores of Lake Garda in 1945. My decision to opt for this longer time frame came from the need to take into account the changes that took place in Italian society and, within it, the role of Catholicism, within an historical 11

See F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale. Dal Risorgimento al secondo dopoguer­ra, Bologna: il Mulino, 2006, 29ff. Vincenzo Gioberti had, in the 1840s, famously propounded the supremacy of Italy as the seat of the papacy and the moral and civil primacy of the Italian people.

Introduction

9

continuum. This meant to some extent downplaying, or rather by placing in a different light, the exceptional nature of the ventennio. But a wider perspective is justified, I believe, by the need to show what a crucial role was played, by the years of the Great War, both in laying the foundations of fascist ideology and in fuelling a process I describe as the ‘nationalization’ of Italian Catholicism. The ‘cultural turn’12 of historiography on the First World War has allocated to the religious discourse, indeed, an essential place in defining the symbols and representations that fuelled the mobilization of war and played a crucial role in the interwar period.13 It was amid the Armageddon of trench warfare that the great messianic hopes were born and were destined to be dashed in an après-guerre bereft of all redemption.14 And during the conflict new forms of the sacralization of war were experimented, destined to be amplified in the Fascist wars in Ethiopia and Spain.15 Moreover, it was based on the myth of the Great War, its exaltations, its patriotic fervors, its atrocities, that the ‘new men’ modelled their own political message.16 It was by that myth that Catholics became fully Italian citizens and were imbued, for the first time, by a spirit of national patriotism.17 Summarily reviewing the events of the final phase of the Second World War in Italy, from the armistice on 8 September, to Salò and Mussolini’s arrest at Dongo, the focus of the narrative remains concentrated on the attitude of the Church to the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In adopting this focus, it has not been my intention to downplay the role played by Catholics in the Resistance 12

J. Winter and A. Prost, The Great War in History. Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the P­ resent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 25–30. 13 Very influential, in this sense: A. Becker, La guerre et la foi: de la mort á la mémoire, 1914–1930, Paris: Armand Colin, 1994, and S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14–18, retrouver la Guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. For a brief but incisive historiographic review see C. M ­ aurer, “Vingt ans d’histoire religieuse de la Grande Guerre”, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religion und Kulturgeschichte/Revue suisse d’histoire religieuse et culturelle 108 (2014): 19–29. The main historiographic results in English can be retraced in the relevant entries of the Collective Bibliography published by the International Society for First World War Studies, and available online. 14 E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1993 (English translation: The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 15 Religione, nazione e guerra nel primo conflitto mondiale, (ed.) D. Menozzi, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 3 (2006). 16 G.L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 17 R. Moro, “Nazione, cattolicesimo e regime fascista”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 1 (2004): 129–147.

10

Introduction

in the two years from 1943 to 1945, nor to minimize the importance of the grassroots action in defense of the stricken populations conducted by the bishops and clergy once the country had become the theatre of a guerrilla war. I briefly mention these crucial events, but their treatment, due to the many dynamics and numerous protagonists associated with them, requires separate treatment. Within the great transformations that took place in societies, states, international policies, and in the Catholic world itself, during the period considered in this book, it seems to me that some fundamental criteria and some longterm parameters can be grasped in the line adopted by the government of the Church, and more specifically by the papacy. First and foremost I would argue that there existed a prevailing tendency of the Holy See, under Pius xi as under his successor, to judge a government or a political movement on the basis of its attitude to the claims of the Church, her room for maneuver, her ability to fulfil her role in society, in short, her ‘liberties’. *** This book was developed thanks to many opportunities for discussion with several scholars, both at home and abroad, on the major theme of relations between the Catholic Church, totalitarian regimes and democratic political systems in the 1930s. These discussions were prompted not only by the opening of the Archives for the Pius XI years, but also by the willingness of scholars of various countries to conduct analyses of the policies adopted by the Holy See towards different national situations. I cannot name here all those to whom I am indebted at the international level, but I would especially like to thank Professors Alfonso Botti, Fabrice Bouthillon, Jean-François Chauvard, Emilia Hrabovec, David Kertzer, Daniele Menozzi, Laura Pettinaroli, John Pollard, Eugena Tokareva, Giorgio Vecchio, and Hubert Wolf. Several of these discussions were promoted thanks to the research project on Historical problems of the Twenties and Thirties in the Vatican Archives: international order, democracies and totalitarian regimes in the Church of Pius xi, funded by Italy’s Ministry for Universities and Scientific Research. As part of the team of scholars involved in the project, I had the opportunity to benefit from such experienced and challenging colleagues as Emma Fattorini, Carlo Felice Casula, Alberto Melloni, Francesco Piva, and Maurizio Pegrari. To all of them I owe a wealth of suggestions, queries, and reflections. The present volume benefited immensely from the constructive discussions occasioned by the research projects and teaching commitments conducted with my colleagues of Contemporary History at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Here, in the Department of History, Humanities and Society, I had the

Introduction

11

privilege of working with such scholars and friends as Professor Silvio Pons, who always was of great help with his deep knowledge of the history of the twentieth century, and Professor Gianluca Fiocco, who never fought shy of a discussion of content, closely monitoring my text with an eagle eye. Special thanks are also due to Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy: his integrity, dedication and perceptive remarks have meant much to me. In their discussion of my manuscript with me, Professors Tommaso Caliò, Alessio Gagliardi and Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli proved invaluable; they helped me with the intelligence that distinguishes them. The support of my university was no less important for enabling me to complete this work. Because of this, I wish to express my deep thanks to the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and to its Rector, Professor Giuseppe Novelli. In this work, as in other research projects I have conducted in recent years, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the rigor and courtesy of the staff of the Vatican Secret Archives, beginning with its Prefect, H.E. Monsignor Sergio Pagano. In addition to the special thanks I would like to express to him for his work both as archivist and as historian, I wish to add my gratitude to all his assistants. Moreover, with regard to the Historical Archives of the Section for Relations with States of the Secretariat of State, I want to express my gratitude, in particular, to H.E. Monsignor Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations with States of the Secretariat of State, and to Dr. Johan Ickx, Director of these Archives. Within the walls of the Villa Sacchetti, in the great hall of the Laterza publishing house, I benefited too from observations of Anna Gialluca, Giovanni Carletti, and Francesco Bartolini: they made this a much better book. I’m grateful as well for all the support I received at Brill for publishing this book in English: thanks especially to Laura Morris, Stephanie Paalvast, and Ester Lels. Thanks, finally, to the translator Peter Spring, for his professionalism and his willingness to follow the whole project.

chapter 1

Religion, War, Nation 1.1

‘La Mala Educación’

Benito Mussolini despised priests. It was against the clergy that the young socialist agitator directed his most ferocious attacks. His was a total assault against the conduct, the principles, and the very persons of priests. Mussolini was more than an agnostic; he was an atheist – just as his father Alessandro was, and just as were the majority of socialists in the Romagna. To explain the young Mussolini’s aversion to religion and to priests, Margherita Sarfatti – ­author of the first biography of Il Duce (1925) – placed the emphasis on Benito’s terrible experiences as a child in the Salesian boarding school at Faenza. A writer and art critic of great sensibility towards the aesthetics of propaganda, Sarfatti set herself the task of tracing the extraordinary portrait of Italy’s new Caesar, her man of destiny.1 To that man she had been confidante, lover, and intellectual mentor. To create the legend, Margherita spun a web of contradictions that subtly augmented the fascination exerted by Mussolini: the son of a blacksmith who disdained the masses, the internationalist who became the prophet of a new nationalism.2 The accomplished Sarfatti (born into a wealthy family, brought up in the family palazzo on the Canal Grande in Venice, married at the age of 18) tried to recreate in her biography the first metamorphosis of the man destined to guide the fate of Italy. She transformed the blaspheming socialist who had spent much of his youthful energy vilifying the Italian priesthood, the pretume italiano (as he contemptuously called it),3 into the champion of Fascism who aspired to become the defender of Catholic romanità. It was thus, in The Life of Benito Mussolini, first published in English in London in 1925 and only in the following year in Italy with the title Dux, that Sarfatti recounted Benito’s ‘prison’ in the Salesian boarding school at Faenza.4 The young Benito had arrived at the boarding school of Don Giovanni Bosco (founder of the Salesians) in September 1892. He was nine years old. He had 1 Ph.V. Cannistraro and B.R. Sullivan, Margherita Sarfatti. L’altra donna del duce, Milano: ­Mondadori, 1993, 332–343. 2 Ibid., 337. 3 B. Mussolini, “I patriotti”, La lotta di classe (7 October 1911), now in Idem, Opera omnia, (eds.) E. and D. Susmel, Firenze: La Fenice, 1951–1963, vol. 4, 75–76. 4 On the influence of this book on the collective image of Mussolini see L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 43ff.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_003

Religion, War, Nation

13

completed his first two years in primary school at Dovia (or Dovia di Predappio, in the province of Forlì-Cesena). He had been an alert, intelligent, but ­rebellious child. His unruly, pugnacious character was still vividly recalled by his school friends at Predappio in their oral reminiscences to another biographer, Antonio Beltramelli, in 1923.5 To prevent the young Benito from turning into a juvenile delinquent, his mother Rosa Maltoni thought of the Salesian boarding school at Faenza. It seems that the school had been recommended to her by one of her friends, Palmira, and that she had succeeded in convincing her husband Alessandro, making him believe that it was a secular college.6 It was to be a traumatic experience for the innocent young boy who, in Sarfatti’s reconstruction, “was very fond of birds” and in particular “a certain breed of small owls”, and who had regularly gone to church at Dovia with his mother and grandmother.7 In describing his first religious experiences, Sarfatti lets Benito speak for himself. It is he himself who recounts the deep emotion aroused in his ingenuous soul by the “lights from the candles”, the “penetrating odor from the incense”, the “colors of the sacred vestments”, the “long-drawn-out singing of the congregation” and the “sound of the organ”.8 In short, the child, up until that moment, was on the right road to becoming a good Catholic. But then he arrived at the boarding school. To Margherita the statesman Mussolini divulged the most lacerating of the various humiliations he had suffered at the hands of the strict Salesian masters. One such experience was the occasion on which, for some “grave infraction”, he had been deprived of recreation for twelve days: Four hours per day, relegated to a corner, he remained motionless, on his knees, under the surveillance of a teacher, while the other boys were enjoying themselves. He doesn’t remember too clearly, but it seems to him that to make the punishment even harsher, they scattered kernels of maize on the floor. What is certain is that at the end of the twelve days, he had two deep wounds on his joints. ‘Mussolini, you have a conscience black as hell’, the rector of the college whispered in a somber voice into his ear. ‘Go to confess yourself tomorrow’.

5 A. Beltramelli, L’uomo nuovo, Milano: Mondadori, 1923, 70. 6 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 222. 7 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1925, 31. 8 Ibid.

14

chapter 1

But the spirit of the little boy, in a state of quivering revolt, did not let itself be cowed. To escape the obligation of confession, so vilely imposed on him, he spent the night in the open, interminable hours of darkness, crouched behind a pillar in the courtyard. Two dreadful guard dogs barked at him; the ten-year-old boy trembled; if they attacked him, they would tear him to pieces. But, however much he trembled, he didn’t want to give in. ‘No, no! They humiliated me too much. I was determined to have my revenge!’9 Admittedly, Sarfatti, the “female dictator of culture”10 who was dedicated to investing the fledgling Duce with powerful emotions, so that the Italians could more easily identify with him,11 omitted to point out that the ‘infraction’ in question was the attempted stabbing of a classmate.12 That doesn’t alter the fact that the two years that Mussolini spent at the Don Bosco were the toughest of his childhood and adolescence. In the boarding school, religion was part of an educational system based on punitive methods, close surveillance, and treatments differentiated on the basis of the different social status of the boarders: “In conformity with the evangelical equality preached by Christ, the Salesians had divided us into three tables: noble, middle and common. The first paid sixty lire per month, the second forty-five and the last, thirty. I, naturally, sat at the common table, which was the most numerous”.13 Such humiliations would be recalled anew in his Conversations with Emil Ludwig, in the spring of 1932: “Could I ever forget the ants in the bread of the third class? But the fact that we children were divided into classes is something that still makes my blood boil!”14 Religious services and prayers punctuated, as in every Catholic boarding school, the main moments of the day. The day began with mass, celebrated every day before breakfast, immediately after the reveille bell had rung at six in winter and at five in summer. All the lessons began and ended with a prayer, while during lunch one of the older pupils would read out aloud the Bollettino salesiano. Then, in the evening, the boarders, before re-entering their dormitory, would go with 9 10 11 12 13 14

M.G. Sarfatti, Dux, Mondadori, Milano 1926, 39 (omitted from the original English edition). Thus Ph.V. Cannistraro and B.R. Sullivan, Margherita Sarfatti, 364. On the application of these rhetorical procedures to Mussolini see A. Gibelli, Il popolo bambino. Infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò, Torino: Einaudi, 2005, 256–257. B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 231. Ibid., 224–225. E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (1932), Milano: Mondadori, 1965, 195.

Religion, War, Nation

15

their teachers, divided into teams, to the theatre room. There they would recite a collective prayer of thanksgiving, then one by one they would kiss the headmaster’s hand. Having reached their dormitory, the boys would then get undressed in silence, so as not to disturb the reading (again!) of the Bollettino salesiano. Discipline and formal respect for religion were the two components that Mussolini found most insufferable to bear. Of the third component, fear, he only became fully conscious years later. The young Benito was certainly not original in denouncing the long-consolidated mainstays of religious education; nor was he particularly acute. For instance, he later described the fear instilled in him by preparation for First Communion: In the week before the day fixed for my First Communion, I did not go to school. They had placed me together with the other communicants and had entrusted us to a friar whose job it was to prepare us to receive Jesus in a worthy and holy way. From morning to evening – catechism, rosaries, sermons, sacred history. They made us learn by heart two or three psalms in Latin, which we repeated aloud, without any of us understanding a thing. On the evening before the event, the friar addressed us with a menacing exhortation. “Beware – he told us – lest any of you present yourself to receive the host unless you have a soul complexly pure of every sin. Confess everything! Don’t try to hide yourselves. God sees you and can strike you. At Turin a young boy came to take the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin, but no sooner had he knelt at the balustrade of the altar than he was struck by a grave illness and fell dead to the ground, as if struck by lightning”. This episode filled us with terror. I thought it was true. I believed that this youth had been reached by the finger of God. I feared for myself. The friar gave us some other useful instructions. He told us to observe the strictest fast; he warned us that if the particle [of the host] were stuck to our palate we should not put our finger into our mouth to remove it, and other exhortations of this kind. I was very worried. I confessed myself on Saturday evening. I kept nothing back: the sins I had committed, those I had not committed, but thought of, and those I had neither thought of nor committed. Melius erat abundare quam deficere. The image of the boy struck dead never left me for a minute. At night, I made another diligent examination of conscience. I rummaged, and rummaged again, I searched like a thief through all the furniture and fittings of my “interior world”, I turned it all upside-down and discovered other pardonable sins that I had f­orgotten

16

chapter 1

on my first interview with the confessor. In the morning, I hastened to ask for a “supplement” of confession, which was granted to me: new penitence and new absolution.15 Once the first year had passed, however, Mussolini was ever less willing to accept the strict religious regimen imposed by the Salesians. He decided no longer to attend morning mass, pretending on several occasions to be ill, and undergoing frequent and harsh punishments as a result. Finally, dejection, indiscipline and rebellion exploded in the episode of violence mentioned above, which precluded any chance of continuing his education at the Don Bosco. On leaving the boarding school at Faenza in June 1894, Mussolini completed his studies at Forlimpopoli, at the Istituto Giosuè Carducci, whose ­headmaster was the brother of the poet. There he remained until July 1901. In this transfer, too, some biographers have wished to see a sign of predestination. A ­fellow-student of Mussolini later recounted to Silvio Bertoldi the spontaneous i­ntuition vouchsafed to the Bard of the goddess Roma when faced by a barely sixteen-year old Mussolini during a visit Carducci paid to the institute in 1899: “a very talented youth who could cause a lot of good or a lot of harm to Italy”.16 It would of course be an exaggeration to suggest that the years of childhood and adolescence prefigured Mussolini’s political career, as the hagiographers of the regime claimed to demonstrate during the ventennio and apologists of the illustrated magazines in the post-war period. No less exaggerated is the ­importance attributed by the peddlers of pseudo-folklore to his alleged romagnolità, to the fact of having been born and bred in a region seething with ­agitators of every kind.17 It was not the Romagna, but quite different circumstances, that helped to shape the political culture of Mussolini, beginning with his voluntary exile in Switzerland, which marked the beginning of his real activity as a political agitator in the circles frequented by Italian working-class and socialist emigrés. Above all, it was the ten years that he spent in Milan from 1912 to 1922 that were to prove decisive in his political formation. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine, in fin-de-siècle Italy, a region more shot through with political ferments than was the Romagna: anarchists, republicans, M ­ arxists (both orthodox and heterodox varieties), internationalists, anti-clericalists

15 16 17

B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 230–231. On Carducci’s brief encounter with the adolescent Benito: S. Bertoldi, Mussolini tale e quale, Milano: Longanesi, 1975, 26–27. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920, Torino: Einaudi 1995 (1st edition 1965), 4.

Religion, War, Nation

17

and garibaldini were thick on the ground, and what they all had in common were revolutionary prospects, variously formulated, variously expressed. Just such a revolutionary political culture had been inculcated in Mussolini by his father Alessandro: beginning with the name he chose for his son, in honour of Benito Juárez, the Mexican revolutionary of Zapotec origin who had studied law and who, having risen through the ranks of the judiciary to become President of Mexico in 1861, had placed the fight against ecclesiastical privileges at the center of his own government programme. He closed the convents and nationalized their property.18 The internationalist blacksmith of Dovia was a born anarchist who became a socialist, rather like another ­Romagnole ­anarchist, the Imola-born Andrea Costa, who had renounced his anarchist principles in 1879, espoused the socialist cause, and was later elected to Parliament in 1882, an election to which Alessandro too had contributed. His ­socialism never coincided with Marxism; it always remained interlaced with anarchist ferments.19 This meant inter alia that the violent action against religion and against priests – tools of repression in the hands of the bourgeoisie – was an essential ingredient in the struggle for the triumph of the good, the beautiful and the true. “O priests – he wrote in May 1889 – the day is not far distant on which you will cease to be useless and false apostles of a lying religion and on which, abandoning the past of falsehood and obscurantism, you will embrace truth and reason, and consign your cassock to the purifying flames of progress and don instead the honorable jacket of the manual laborer”.20 The influence of Carducci, on the other hand, was recalled by Mussolini himself many years later. That was on 21 June 1921 when he made his debut in Parliament and pronounced his first speech in the chamber in Palazzo ­Madama on the occasion of the traditional debate on the policy of response to the speech of the Crown that had opened the 26th legislature. Mussolini’s speech was important, even epochal, and it is one to which we shall have to recur. It suffices here to cite the allusion to the spell cast on the young Benito by the author of the Inno a Satana, undoubtedly mentioned by the new mp to attenuate the much-rumored atheism of his youth, but nonetheless plausible:

18

19 20

Juárez: historia y mito, (ed.) J. Zoraida Vázquez, México: El Colegio de México, 2010. On the conflict between Church and State under Juárez see M. Savage Carmona, “Cultura católica y modernidad liberal”, in La cruz de maiz. Política, religión e identidad en México: entre la crisis colonial y la crisis de modernidad, (ed.) M.I. Campos Goenaga, M. De Giuseppe, México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011, 133–162. V. Emiliani, I tre Mussolini. Luigi, Alessandro, Benito, Torino: Baldini e Castoldi, 1997, 25ff. The passage is quoted in R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 7.

18

chapter 1

All of us, between the ages of 15 and 25, drank at the well of the literature of Carducci. We hated the “old and cruel Vatican wolf” of which Carducci spoke, I think, in his ode To Ferrara. We had heard him speak of “a pope shrouded in mystery” to which he had opposed a poet as bard of the true Augustus and of the future. We had heard him speak of a Tiberina “sated [sic] with black tresses” who would teach the pilgrim adventuring towards St. Peter’s about the rubble of a nameless ruin.21 However effective, Mussolini’s quotations from Carducci were somewhat garbled and had no little malice, especially the last – not only because Tiberina was not “sated”, but a “virgin” with black tresses, and said to the pilgrim “I am the ruin/Of a nameless infamy”, but also because Mussolini forgot to mention that the verses in question came from another ode written by C ­ arducci, namely the one dedicated to the memory of Giuseppe Monti and Gaetano Tognetti Martyrs of Italian Law, the two young Roman patriots arrested in the autumn of 1867 for having participated in the civic insurrection in support of the ­garibaldini marching towards Rome, and guillotined on the Velabrum on 24 November 1868 (when Pius ix was Pope). This, for Carducci and many contemporary observers was the Vatican infamy that had made such a deep ­impression on public opinion and in the press, and had fomented popular unrest in the streets of Rome.22 Even though it was not at Forlimpopoli that Mussolini was trained as a political activist, it was there, during his years of study at the Istituto Giosuè ­Carducci, that he had first erected his anticlerical barricade against the Church. As he would write in his autobiography of 1911–1912, following this period of study and of life, concluded with his graduation in the summer of 1901, he had abandoned “ecclesiastical practices […] for some considerable time”.23 It would however be the years spent in Switzerland – from 1902 to 1904 – that would mark in a decisive way the essential traits of the political personality of the young socialist and characterize their anti-Christian stamp. It was at Lausanne, in particular, that Mussolini was introduced into the Italian socialist circles in the city, consisting mainly of unskilled workers, bricklayers,

21 22

23

Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxvi, Discussioni, 21 June 1921, 89–98. G. Carducci, Giambi ed epodi (1906), libro 1/6. Per Giuseppe Monti e Gaetano Tognetti Martiri del Diritto Italiano. The last stanza reads: “E tra i ruderi in fior la tiberina/Vergin di nere chiome/Al peregrin dirà: Son la ruina/Di un’onta senza nome”. See G. Verucci, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848–1876, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996, 284–285. B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 242.

Religion, War, Nation

19

carpenters and blacksmiths, all of them involved in one way or another in the building trade and regarded with little sympathy by the Swiss population. It was at Lausanne – where the Federazione Italiana in Svizzera and the Sindacato Italiano Muratori e Manovali, had their offices – that Mussolini got to know Giacinto Menotti Serrati in 1903. With this revolutionary socialist, who had only recently returned from New York, and with the Russian agitator Angelica Balabanoff, Mussolini shared both political experiences and Bohemian life.24 Balabanoff (for whom Margherita Sarfatti would reserve some rather unflattering epithets: ‘ugly’, ‘small, misshaped, hunch-backed’, a ‘freak’ of Slavic nature, ‘hysterical’, ‘ostentatiously shameless’, even if ‘extraordinarily intelligent’ and endowed with a brilliant and ‘infectious’ oratorical style)25 was to remain close to Mussolini for a decade. And it was her Benitočka, whom she would elect to have at her side as assistant editor-in-chief of Avanti! (daily of the Italian Socialist Party) in 1912.26 It was to him that she would reveal the holy grail of historical materialism, showering him with books on history and political economy, and opening up for him new horizons in German philosophy.27 The revolutionary Mussolini presented by Renzo De Felice acquired a particular component of his socialism from Serrati: namely, an aggressive ­anti-religious activism that identified tolerance with reformism.28 This was a far from orthodox position for an Italian socialist to hold at the turn of the century, committed on the contrary to a partial rectification of the anticlericalism that had represented an essential component of its own educational action towards the masses.29 At least since the 1890s, an approach of more direct MarxistEngelsian derivation, tending to downplay, or reduce to a secondary level, the theoretical implications of the religious problem and privilege instead the real needs of political action, began to be asserted in the Socialist Italian Party (psi).30 The reform of the party’s anticlericalism had been prompted not only by the German Social Democratic Party, which in its Erfurt Programme of 1891 had defined religion as a “private affair”, but also by the wish to stem the anarchicBakuninist component by overcoming the pitfalls of its simplification in the 24

See A. La Mattina, Mai sono stata tranquilla. La vita di Angelica Balabanoff, la donna che ruppe con Mussolini e Lenin, Torino: Einaudi, 2011. 25 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 114–115. 26 See A. La Mattina, Mai sono stata tranquilla, 51 ss. 27 Y. De Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, (ed.) F. Perfetti, Bologna: il Mulino, 1990, 4–6. 28 See R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 39. 29 S. Pivato, “L’anticlericalismo ‘religioso’ nel socialismo italiano fra Otto e Novecento”, Italia contemporanea 154 (1984): 29–50. 30 On the attenuation of anticlericalism in the Italian Socialist Party see G. Zunino, La ­questione cattolica nella sinistra italiana (1919–1939), Bologna: il Mulino, 11–22.

20

chapter 1

religious field. Towards the end of the century, the need to demolish the constricting walls within which Italian socialism had cultivated its own attitude to Catholicism also inspired the reflections of the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Labriola. At the same time, Gaetano Salvemini began to make his ­appeals, altogether new in tone, to Italian socialism, urging it to take seriously the Catholic forces in the country and abandon the triviality and superficiality that had characterized the anticlerical activism of previous decades.31 In the rhetoric of the psi’s painstaking work of propaganda, aimed in the first place at redeeming the peasant masses from their immemorial poverty and deprivation, “the dialogue – formal and substantial – with Christianity is constant”.32 Much of the socialist propaganda linked to the rural world focused on the egalitarian themes of the primitive Church, and dissociated itself explicitly from anticlericalism, which it regarded as a product of bourgeois culture. For example, a strong commitment was made, at the turn of the century, by personalities like Camillo Prampolini in the rural world of Reggio Emilia and of Francesco Paolini in that of Lazio and Umbria; they helped to develop a socialist educational strategy enriched with references to the Gospels and, as such, easier for peasants to understand and accept.33 Pamphlets, periodicals and handbills thus preached a form of socialism committed to recovering some aspects of primitive Christianity without renouncing the critique of the ecclesiastical institution, indeed by attributing characteristics of spiritual rebirth precisely to the social revolution. Moreover, the modernist ferment itself had produced a first direct rapprochement between Socialists and Catholics, which may not have produced any startling results but had helped to dissolve the image of Catholicism as a compact and impervious doctrinal bloc.34 In an article published at Christmas 1902, the then nineteen-year-old Mussolini had himself insinuated the motif of the proletarian Jesus, betrayed through the course of centuries by men of the Church.35 But within the world of Italian socialism he began to follow, indeed to promote, the more decidedly and 31 32

33

34 35

Ibid., 15–20. Thus G. Turi, “Aspetti dell’ideologia del Psi (1890–1910)”, Studi storici 21 (1980): 61–94. On aspects of the propaganda of the psi between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century see M. Ridolfi, Il Psi e la nascita del partito di massa, 1892–1922, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1992, 181ff. A. Nesti, “Gesù socialista”. Una tradizione popolare italiana (1880–1920), Torino: Claudiana, 1974, and S. Dominici, La lotta senz’odio. Il socialismo evangelico del “Seme” (1901–1915), Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1995. P. Scoppola, Crisi modernista e rinnovamento religioso, Bologna: il Mulino, 1969, 311. B. Mussolini, “Il Natale umano”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (27 December 1902), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 25–26.

Religion, War, Nation

21

violently atheist, anti-religious and anti-Catholic agenda.36 In doing so, he followed not so much in the footsteps of Serrati, as an outlook that was prevalent in the circles of Italian socialism in Switzerland. Thus, in the pages of Avvenire del Lavoratore, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party in Switzerland (psis), a line of programmatic and relentless anticlericalism had begun to be implemented since 1900, as a direct response to the spread among Italian workers of the Opera Bonomelli, a charity founded by Monsignor Geremia Bonomelli and aimed at providing welfare to disadvantaged emigrants. Antonio Vergnanini, writing from Berne, had described its various ramifications, all of them Catholic: clubs, beer halls, soup kitchens, amateur dramatic societies, bands and fanfares, even evening dances. This explains why the ‘campaign against clerical propaganda’ was a policy guideline adopted by the psis at its Lugano conference in February 1902. It was aimed at propaganda different from that in use in Italy, and founded on public discussion of every economic, political or religious question with conferences, debates and schools.37 Free thought was in any case the obligatory currency among Italian exiles and intellectuals in Switzerland, most of them congregated in Geneva. It was here that a longstanding member of the psis, the printer Luigi Piazzalunga, had founded the ‘Biblioteca Internazionale Razionalista’, a series of books and pamphlets on which Serrati and Mussolini both collaborated – the former by acting as editor and by publishing two pamphlets, La Bibbia è immorale and La dottrinetta razionalista, which enjoyed considerable diffusion and proportionate confiscation; the latter by publishing the text of a lecture entitled L’uomo e la divinità (1904), which we will return to later. When in 1906 Serrati was prosecuted for defamation by the Opera Bonomelli, he found himself having to defend himself from the accusation of ­being anti-Italian: – a charge conducted through the well-known thesis, propagated especially among Italian emigrants and colonists, which identified ­Catholicism as one of the distinctive traits on which the Italian identity was founded. “Who speaks of Italy here? – Serrati is said to have replied – I’m the son of a fervent follower of Garibaldi, who taught me the love of freedom; you are the priests who have always struggled against freedom and the integrity of Italy”.38 Serrati presented, in short, quite different credentials of italianità. He thus sought to justify his conduct by linking himself with the main democratic protagonist of the Risorgimento – involved in a constant polemic against the Catholic Church 36 37 38

P. Scoppola, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, Bologna: il ­ ulino, 1966, 363. M A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione 1899–1911, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972, 76. Ibid., 76–77.

22

chapter 1

and the papacy after 186039 – and by alluding to the idea, of Machiavellian origin and still widespread in the average Italian culture and opinion of the time, that the Papal State had historically represented the major obstacle to the achievement of the unity of the Italian peninsula. However, Serrati’s battle against priests and Catholicism did not have its root in the liberal anticlericalism of the Risorgimento. Serrato thus expressed his dislike of what he called “the new philistines of homeopathic politics who have invented a cure for anticlericalism, anti-alcoholism, and secular morality”.40 In his view, the struggle of labour against capital was the priority. His battle against the clerical army was thus focused on other issues: the secular propensity towards a resigned acquiescence which was translated into non-involvement in the workingclass struggle, or even into strike-breaking, supported, in his view, by priests and more particularly – in the context of Swiss emigration – by the Opera Bonomelli. Yet, in the anti-religious campaign, Musssolini was closer to another Italian socialist than he was to Serrati, namely Angelo Oliviero Olivetti. This was a man in whose house he was a guest on several occasions and who was distinguished in Lugano for the centrality he attributed to the anti-religious struggle in political and trade-union action. He was one of the few whose role in the creation of fascism Mussolini, reluctant to mention those who had contributed to his political ascent and ideological formation, would recognize publicly once the regime was fully established.41 The Piedmontese lawyer, who had been pressured into crossing the frontier in 1898, formed part of the executive committee of the psis since 1902, but his interests were predominantly cultural and very soon had come to be concentrated on propaganda for free thought. In dispute with the positions by now adopted by the Socialist Parties of the main European countries, Olivetti asserted, also in opposition to Serrati, that socialism was, in the first place, anti-religious: “The wish to insist on the immoral and Jesuitical formula that religion is a private affair, is an aberration”.42 The question was particularly close to Olivetti’s heart. In September 1904, he intervened with Angelica Balabanoff in one of the most important international congresses on Free Thought, held in Rome, and dedicated to ‘the work 39 40 41 42

See G. Verucci, Cattolicesimo e laicismo nell’età contemporanea, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2001, 214–222. A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione, 77. B. Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Enciclopedia Treccani, 1932), in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 34, 122. L’Avvenire del lavoratore (10 September 1904).

Religion, War, Nation

23

of confessional charities’. The Russian intellectual spoke on what had by now become a classic theme of Marxism: the Church at the service of capital. But Olivetti tackled a new and quite specific question, linked to the present-day militancy of the Church among Italian manual workers in Switzerland: Priests and emigration.43 The breach between Olivetti and Serrati would however take place on the terrain of trade-unionism, which became for the former so central as to force him to abandon the psis and to found Le Pagine Libere at Lugano in 1906. This fortnightly review of ‘politics, science and art’ was destined to become one of the most important organs of Italian revolutionary trade unionism. Its contributors included Paolo Orano, Arturo Labriola, and, as we shall see, Mussolini himself. Among Italian emigrants in Switzerland Mussolini speedily made a name for himself for his brilliance as a public speaker and especially for his ability to conduct public debates. His favorite subjects, during this period, were antireligious and anti-militaristic.44 He moved between Berne, Lausanne, G ­ eneva, Basel and Zurich, earning his keep by working as an unskilled labourer and jack-of-all-trades. It was on one of these occasions that he tackled the religious question in a more specific manner. Already in February 1903, ­Mussolini had taken the floor during a conference held by Alfredo Taglialatela in Lausanne. Member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and pastor in Rome, Taglialatela was in Switzerland for a series of missionary conferences among Italian emigrants.45 Some questions had remained open in the debate, and so it was ­decided to organize a subsequent debate dedicated to the existence of God. ­After some postponements, the debate between Mussolini and Taglialatela took place in the Grande Salle of the Maison du Peuple on the evening of 26 March 1904.46 In a hall packed with thousands of people who had paid to witness the debate, Mussolini launched his personal challenge to God. It was ­perhaps the first great public debate in which he engaged as protagonist, and the pressure was on him to make an impression on his comrades. According to Balabanoff, 43 44 45 46

Congresso internazionale del Libero Pensiero (Roma, 20, 21, 22 September 1904). Contributo al tema delle opere di carità confessionali, Lugano: Coop. Tip. Sociale, 1904. A. Balabanoff, Il traditore Mussolini. Piccole curiosità non del tutto inutili a sapersi, (ed.) M. Giudice, Milano: Casa editrice Avanti!, 1945, 18. R. Bassanesi, “Il contraddittorio di Mussolini sulla divinità”, Protagora 33 (1964): 51–66. In his autobiography of 1911–1912 Mussolini reported, erroneously, the date of 23 March for the public debate: B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 254.

24

chapter 1

Benito Mussolini began by saying: “Give me a watch. I’ll give ten minutes’ time to the Almighty. If he fails to strike me down within this period of time, that means he doesn’t exist. I challenge Him”.47 Each of the two speakers spoke for one hour. Each had the right to an extra half-hour to reply to his adversary. The whole meeting took place in an atmosphere of mutual respect and ended just short of midnight. Four months later Mussolini summed up his argument in the pamphlet L’uomo e la divinità, a pocket-sized booklet of 47 pages, the first of the ‘Biblioteca Internazionale ­Razionalista’ publications.48 It’s now a bibliographical rarity, since Il Duce, during his first years in government, seems to have ordered the withdrawal of the few copies that had entered Italian public libraries.49 It consists of four parts: Mussolini’s intervention at the conference in Lausanne, revised and supplemented; a résumé, with commentary, of the main passages of Taglialatela’s reply; Mussolini’s further refutation, which is only found in the written text, since the Methodist pastor had obtained the privilege of being the last to speak; and a brief appendix on evangelism. Mussolini’s arguments were not inspired by the historical materialism of Marxist inspiration, but were developed from some cobbled-together postulates, ultimately positivistic in derivation. The task that confronted Mussolini at the debate, moreover, was to show himself well prepared and convincing to a largely uneducated public. The thesis was epitomized by Mussolini in these terms: “God does not exist. – Religion in science is absurd, in practice immoral, in man a disease”.50 The demonstration of the non-existence of God revolved around the affirmation of matter as the only existing reality proved by science; on the contradictions between the various conceptions of God; on the negation of every form of creationism; and on the idea that religion was the result of man’s fear and ignorance. In socialist and anarchist circles, Mussolini’s intervention was considered a great success. The anarchist weekly in Genoa, L’Allarme, spoke enthusiastically about it, hailing its author as “our dear friend B.M.”, and underlining the contrast between him and the “sinister face of the illustrious rascal Serrati” who poked his head down from the gallery, “wishing, he too, this shameless 47

48 49 50

A. Balabanoff, Il traditore Mussolini, 18. The episode inspired the incipit of the film Vincere (2009), even though, for screenplay purposes, the director Marco Bellocchio placed it at Trento. B. Mussolini, L’uomo e la divinità, Lugano: Biblioteca internazionale di propaganda ­razionalista, 1904. R. Bassanesi, Il contraddittorio di Mussolini sulla divinità, 64. B. Mussolini, L’uomo e la divinità, 1.

Religion, War, Nation

25

man, to make his presence known”.51 Henceforth Mussolini was considered the expert on the question.52 For the ‘Biblioteca Internazionale Razionalista’ he also translated from the French, and annotated, A.H. Malot’s I ciarlatani neri!.53 The psis branch in Geneva commissioned him to conduct a campaign against religious ‘sects’, including the one in Lausanne in June where he participated in a public debate with a major personality of European socialism, Émile Vandervelde. The Belgian evangelizer was among the 23 interlocutors of an international inquiry on socialism and anticlericalism, launched by the review of the French Gauche Le Mouvement socialiste between 1902 and 1903, as a contribution to the formulation of the stance to be adopted on the proposed legislation on the separation between State and Church: the famous Loi de séparation des Églises et des État, which was to be finally approved on 6 December 1905.54 Margherita Sarfatti would recall the episode in her biography of Mussolini, reserving for Vandervelde the role of ‘bête noir of revolutionaries’. He was, she says, “not a man of turbulent spirit or of sanguine, nervous, disposition”, and had a crude, old-fashioned notion of socialism, ‘at once scientific and evangelical’, even comparing him with the Emilian santone Prampolini: Vandervelde came to Geneva, just for the purpose of speaking of Jesus Christ, a theme of evangelical propaganda close to the heart of the ‘santone of Reggio Emilia’ ever since the time of [Mussolini’s] pamphlet La predica di Natale, on the subversive Jesus Christ and the communism of the apostles.55 However it was Vandervelde who emerged victorious from this contest.56 ­ ussolini, indeed, in his autobiography of 1911–1912 would admit so much, M saying that the meeting had been ‘disastrous’.57 The Belgian parliamentarian has defended the Erfurt thesis of religion as a private affair – a thesis already ­expounded in some of his writings and in his replies to a questionnaire of 1902–1903. He supported the notion that socialists had to fight for the ­separation of the Church from the State, accept all those who had decided 51 52 53

A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione, 79. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 36. A.H. Malot, I ciarlatani neri!, Lugano: Biblioteca internazionale di propaganda razionali­ sta, 1904. 54 É. Poulat, “Socialisme et anticléricalisme. Une enquête socialiste internationale (1902– 1903)”, Archives des sciences sociales des religions 10 (1960): 109–131. 55 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 104–105. 56 Ibid. 57 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 257.

26

chapter 1

to combat capitalism, and defend in any case the freedom of religious conviction. Mussolini opposed Vandervelde with a line of uncompromising atheism, maintaining that the struggle against the Church was an essential component of the socialist battle. He had written so already in his article on ‘the horrors of the convent’, published in the journal Proletario on 30 August 1903 – an article in which he had presented a report on the survey conducted by the socialist Arbeiter Zeitung on the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, which had brought to light the atrocious system of physical punishments inflicted on the ­convent girls: “­ Making the sign of the cross on the ground with their tongue; kept kneeling on two sharp stones; blindfolds and asses’ ears; fasting to the point of starvation; straightjackets; vigils over the corpses of companions who had died following the infamies subjected on them; beatings over the palm of the hand with iron rods; long religious exercises, interminable days of work”.58 The disciplinary regimen – which doubtless excited some autobiographical ­resonance – was not considered an exception, but was, in his view, but a further confirmation that “torture lies hidden in the intimate spirit of religion”. It was a demonstration that religion emerged from the restricted sphere of the ‘private affair’, to reveal itself blatantly as an “institution that tends to political power to perpetuate ignorance and economic exploitation”. Against it, consequently, there remained nothing but disdain and repudiation.59 1.2

Political Anticlericalism, Pornographic Anticlericalism

The anticlerical agenda long remained the fil rouge of Mussolini’s political and journalistic activity. When, on returning to Italy, he stopped at Oneglia (Serrati’s hometown), after a couple of years spent between Dovia and Tolmezzo, he obtained, thanks to his contacts with Serrati, the de facto editorship of the local socialist weekly La Lima. He then proceeded to sign almost all his articles with the pseudonym ‘Vero eretico’ (True Heretic). In his articles the religious theme erupted often and sometimes in a tasteless way: for instance, when on 21 March 1908, in an anecdotic interjection, he told a joke about crocodiles and missionaries: Some African explorers, having recently returned to London, say that the crocodiles have formed the wise habit of only eating missionary priests and friars! 58

B. Mussolini, “Gli orrori del chiostro”, Il Proletario (30 August 1903), now in Idem., Opera omnia, vol. 1, 37–39. 59 Ibid.

Religion, War, Nation

27

Strange! At the same time they have lost their other bad habit of crying after their meal.60 In other cases, the vulgarity went to more violent extremes, but at least was prompted by political questions of greater moment. For instance, in an article published in La Lima on 4 April 1908 the ‘Vero eretico’ directed some of his most rabid darts, Carduccian in inspiration, against ‘the old wolf’ of the Vatican: Through the empty modern phraseology borrowed for the occasion, the old wolf has tried to dissimulate its reactionary nature, but failed in the attempt. […] We have to recognize that the Catholic phalanxes lack shame, but not daring. But your game is up, O black microbes, as lethal for the human being as the microbes of tuberculosis. History will condemn you! You are the pale shadows of the Middle Ages. Don’t profane the word freedom, you who set alight the bonfires round the stake. Don’t speak to us of Christianity. The old dirge no longer moves us.61 And he concluded with a profession of anti-Christian faith which seemed, because of his use of the first person plural, to extend to socialism as a whole or, at least, to the local section of the psi: “We are decidedly anti-Christian and consider Christianity as the immortal stigma of contempt for humanity”.62 The volte-face operated by Pius x in Vatican policy towards the Kingdom of Italy, and the repercussions of the French conflicts between State and Church following the secularizing measures of 1905, had given renewed strength, in the language of Italian Socialists, to the notion of the ‘clerical peril’.63 The threat was now perceived to be all the stronger, because an initial rapprochement with the Church had been improvised at the elections for the ­Chamber of Deputies in October, called by the Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti to ­exploit the wave of emotion generated by the first general strike in Italy’s

60 61

Vero eretico, La Lima (21 March 1908), now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 110. Vero eretico, “La libertà nera”, La Lima (4 April 1908), in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 111. 62 Ibid. 63 See the two papers of E. Decleva, “Anticlericalismo e lotta politica nell’Italia giolittiana”, 1, “L’‘esempio della Francia’ e i partiti popolari (1901–1904)”, 2 “L’estrema sinistra e la formazione dei blocchi popolari (1905–1909)”, Nuova rivista storica 52 (1968): 291–354, and 53 (1969): 541–617.

28

chapter 1

­history, organized by the Socialists in the previous month. Authorized by partial exemptions to the non expedit, the first Catholic deputies had thus entered Parliament.64 These first modest experiments in rapprochement with moderate Catholics, strengthened by the spectre of the ‘red peril’, had led to a silent collaboration between a significant part of the Italian political class and the Catholic movement. Having abandoned their former demand for a material restitution of all the State’s ill-gotten gains, Italian Catholics, in turn, now accepted the ‘hypothesis’ of the Liberal State, and sought to maneuver within it to ensure that the Church and the papacy in Italy enjoyed sufficient clout and influence in the political institutions, in legislation and in society. This was the climate in which the Minister of Public Instruction Luigi Rava published a regulation on 6 February 1908, which obliged local authorities to ­ensure religious teaching in primary schools, if the majority of c­ ounselors ­declare their support for it. Consequently, the question of the non-­confessional nature of state schools once again came to the fore and inflamed public ­debate.65 In February 1907, Leonida Bissolati, together with other Socialist and Radical deputies, had presented a motion to the Chamber in which the government was asked to abolish every form of religious education. But only in the last week of September, when the Rava regulation was already in force, did Parliament examine the motion. Two political alignments clashed during the debate: that of the opposition parties of the left which aimed at the total secularization of public education, and that of the majority Liberal forces in Parliament, favorable to guaranteeing religious education in the form prescribed by the new regulation – not because they recognized the intrinsic value of religion, but because they thought that the ideals of the Catholic tradition could help to protect the social order against the dangers of subversion represented, in their eyes, by the advance of the worker movement.66 The Catholic Unions, which had succeeded the dissolved Opera dei Congressi, had met for their national congress in Genoa from 28 to 30 March 1908 to establish a unified policy on schools to be adopted in the political situation of the day. The delegates voted for a motion in support of the widest possible restoration of Catholic education in school curricula. Discussion also focused on what tactic should be followed in the imminent general elections. Some, 64 65 66

G. Formigoni, I cattolici deputati (1904–1918). Tradizione e riforma, Roma: Studium, 1988. L. Pazzaglia, “Stato laico e insegnamento religioso in alcuni dibattiti del primo Novecento (1902–1904)”, Pedagogia e vita 42 (1980–1981): 379–416. L. Pazzaglia, “Cultura religiosa e libertà d’insegnamento nella riflessione di Tommaso ­Gallarati Scotti”, in Rinnovamento religioso e impegno civile in Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, (eds.) F. De Giorgi and N. Raponi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1994, 91–136.

Religion, War, Nation

29

such as the Count Edoardo Soderini, suggested that candidates be posed the question of religious education in schools as the essential condition for obtaining the vote of Catholics.67 It was this that, in April 1908, aroused the fury of Mussolini – the man who some fifteen years later would, with the Gentile reform, designate the teaching of the Catholic religion as the cornerstone of primary education. He now attacked the Catholics of Italy gathered for their congress in Italy, dismissing their claim to invoke “the freedom […] to kill ­liberty” and obtain from the State the authorization “to poison the children of the people with Christian teaching”.68 In the meantime, the socialist Mussolini was busily strengthening his formulation of an anti-Christian conception through the study of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence he acknowledged for the first time in a three-part essay published in the Pensiero romagnolo between 29 November and 13 December 1908 as a response to a lecture on the German philosopher given by the socialist activist and journalist Claudio Treves at Forlì some time previously.69 As the familiar theme went, variously treated in previous years, of an obscurantist, repressive and liberticide Christianity, a further accusation was now added to the charge-sheet: the religion of the Nazarene had opened the way to the triumph of the “morality of renunciation and resignation”. As a consequence, the right of the strongest, the rock-bed of Roman civilization, had been subverted by the Christian precepts of love for our neighbor and compassion.70 Mussolini’s attack on the Church animated all his activity as a journalist and agitator during the months he spent in Trento. He arrived in the irredentist city on the evening of 6 February 1909, to assume the twin posts of secretary of Trentino Secretariat of Labour and of editor-in-chief of its organ, L’Avvenire del lavoratore. His appointment had probably been supported by Serrati and Balabanoff. It was based, at least in the official motivations, on the particular ability demonstrated by Mussolini in anticlerical propaganda. On 29 January 1909, the Secretariat’s executive committee had in fact announced news of the arrival of the ‘comrade’ Benito Mussolini in the following terms: Finally our new Executive Committee at its last meeting was able to close the competition for the post of Secretary of the Trentino Secretariat by the appointment of comrade Benito Mussolini from Forlì. 67 68 69 70

Atti del congresso per la istruzione ed educazione cristiana del popolo italiano, Firenze: Ufficio centrale dell’Unione popolare fra i Cattolici d’Italia, 1908, 35. Vero eretico, La libertà nera, cit. B. Mussolini, La filosofia della forza (Postille alla conferenza dell’on. Treves), in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 174–184. Ibid., 179–180.

30

chapter 1

The choice could not be better, because Benito Mussolini, apart from being a proven fighter, is a fervent propagandist, experienced especially in the field of anticlericalism; he is a cultivated young man, and perfectly understands the German language, something of great advantage to our movement. He will be with us in the early days of February. Sure as we are of interpreting the sentiment of all our comrades, we therefore extend a brotherly welcome to him and express our hope that he will be able to bring to our life a new influence and conviction, by which to weaken the arrogant obduracy of the clerical hydra which still reigns supreme everywhere, spreading a thick veil of obscurantism over minds and yoking its miserable serfs to the vilest servitude.71 In Trentino, which was then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the contention between Socialists and Catholics was long-standing. Catholics formed the most influential political force in the region. In the regional capital, Trento, they controlled two newspapers: La Squilla, a weekly edited by Father Costantino Dallabrida, and especially Il Trentino, the most read daily in the region. Its editor-in-chief since 1905 was Alcide De Gasperi, who, despite being still in his early twenties, was one of the major exponents of political Catholicism in Trentino.72 More generally, Catholics exerted major leverage over the economic and cultural life of the region, not least because in the field of cooperation, agricultural credit, and professional and cultural associations they enjoyed the support of the Austrian authorities. The attack against the clerical majority formed part of the policy of the Italian Socialist Party of Cesare Battisti, with which Mussolini had almost daily contacts.73 In Trento, Mussolini certainly did not become an irredentist, even though in contrast to his comrades in the psi he acknowledged the reasons that had led to irredentism in the first place (in this case to wrest Trentino from its A ­ ustrian yoke). On the other hand, he radicalized the struggle against the Catholic ­hegemony that had been pursued in previous years by Battisti, by whom he was invited to contribute to Il Popolo and its weekly supplement Vita Trentina. Mussolini’s diatribe against the Catholics was virulent and extreme. The past 71 72 73

“Cronaca cittadina: il nostro nuovo Segretario”, L’Avvenire del lavoratore (29 January 1909), now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 282. P. Pombeni, Il primo De Gasperi. La formazione di un leader politico, Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, 79–118. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 64, and A.J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley- Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1979, 80–81.

Religion, War, Nation

31

of the Church, the private life of priests, the excommunication of modernizers, the political action of De Gasperi, the election of the first ‘Catholic deputies’ – every occasion and every argument was seized upon to attack the ‘old and cruel Vatican wolf’.74 That this was to be the leitmotif of comrade Mussolini in Trento was clear right from his first public intervention in the city. When on the evening of 17 February he met for the first time male and female workers at the Workers’ Association, he seized the occasion to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Giordano Bruno (burnt at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori on 17 February 1600). And he succeeded in capturing the attention and sympathy of his auditors who, according to the report published in Battisti’s daily on the following day, formed the idea that they had before them “an excellent public speaker, a persuasive propagandist, a scholar, a man of conviction, and an enthusiast”: Yesterday evening, at 8:00 pm, a large number of male and female workers gathered in the Workers’ Association where comrade B. Mussolini, new secretary of the Secretariat of Labour, was to speak for the first time to the public, commemorating the anniversary of the death of G. Bruno. And – it has to be admitted – this first meeting of Mussolini with our workers could not have been more congenial or had greater success. He was listened to with the greatest attention and was able to make himself understood by his auditors, who grasped that they had before them not only an excellent public speaker and persuasive propagandist, but also – and especially – a scholar, a man of conviction, an enthusiast able to instil his excellent lecture with the result of his serious studies, with the force of his convictions and with the enthusiasm of a man who has a faith, who defends it and who wishes to inculcate it in others.75 The focus on the dissident Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, on his life and his theories, was clearly aimed at launching the final assault against churchmen of every age and making the “irrefutable affirmation” that socialism had no option but to be the “adversary” of clericalism: Comrade Mussolini first examined, on the basis of historical records and appropriate quotations, the whole history of Christianity and 74 75

The quotation of Carducci is once again that of B. Mussolini, “Vecchia vaticana lupa ­cruenta”, (Il Popolo, 9 August 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 206–208. “Cronaca di Trento”, Il Popolo (18 February 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 283.

32

chapter 1

­ atholicism. He then drew an effective picture of the period that precedC ed Giordano Bruno and that in which the Grande Nolano lived. He then detailed the phases of his life, and of his trial, and described, in eloquent terms, the tortures inflicted on the martyr. After presenting his audience with this vivid and moving biographical outline, he went on to describe Bruno’s theories, the accusations brought against them at the time and the reasons that led the Church of Rome to wage war against the great philosopher. After that, briefly but with expert and often entertaining touches, he tackled the work of the church ‘in less graceful times’ and that of the work of the church in our own time, and explained the historical, philosophical and political reasons why socialism was and must be the adversary of clericalism: the clericalism which would – if it could – revive also in our own day […] the age of the stake and of the sentences of the Holy Office.76 Within a month, the reference to the Holy Office (antecedent of the Inquisition) would pass from the history books to current affairs. For the eagerly awaited decree of the Holy See’s Supreme Court, which confirmed the excommunication of the priest Romolo Murri, arrived on 22 March 1909. The Vatican intervention was prompted by mainly disciplinary questions. Murri, founder of the Christian Democratic Movement, had succeeded in the space of a few years in involving the new Catholic generations, urging them to live in their own century. That meant jettisoning the theocratic projects of which the ecclesiastical organization was the tenacious proponent. It meant not allowing the Church to be paralyzed by the Roman Question and positively accepting the values and institutions of democracy. But it also meant paying attention to the social question, the problems of workers. It meant reaching deals with the ­Socialist Party on this terrain.77 In the Italy of Giolitti, and at just the same time as political alliances were being forged between Liberals and moderate Catholics, the Christian Democratic Movement inspired by Murri had succeeded in making a breakthrough in various areas: in the North as in the South, but especially in Emilia Romagna and in the Marche.78 The first ecclesiastical censure 76 77 78

Ibid. Giordano Bruno’s nickname, the Grande Nolano, derives from his birthplace, Nola in Campania. D. Saresella, Romolo Murri e il movimento socialista (1891–1907), Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1994. G. Vecchio, “I seguaci e i sostenitori di Murri in Italia: geografia e identità di un movimento”, in Romolo Murri e i murrismi in Italia e in Europa cent’anni dopo, (eds.) I. Biagioli et al., Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2004, 299–349.

Religion, War, Nation

33

was imposed on the priest in 1907, following the accentuation of the anticlerical tones in his many interventions pronounced during conferences and ­meetings or published in the press. Murri was suspended a divinis on 14 April 1907, ­after Pope Pius x had condemned the National Democratic League, founded by the Marchigian priest in 1905 as an alternative Christian political movement to that of clerical moderatism, with his encyclical Pieni l’animo (28 July 1906).79 Then, in September 1907, came the banning of the ‘heresy of the 20th c­ entury’80 with the publication of the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in which Pius x, apart from formulating a detailed condemnation of modernism, had issued a wide range of disciplinary measures aimed at eradicating its presence in the Catholic Church. Murri however was not discouraged by such condemnations. He moved forward and presented himself in the general elections of 1909 as candidate of the National Democratic League in the electoral college of Montegiorgio (Marche) in opposition to Arturo ­Galletti, the candidate supported by orthodox Catholics and by the Archbishop of Fermo. The priest, all too conscious how important it was to capture the vote of the electorate of the left, based his whole electoral campaign on anticlerical issues and succeeded in gaining the support of the psi and of its most important exponents.81 Murri’s election, proclaimed to the sound of the workers’ anthem and to cries from the crowd of ‘Down with the Vatican!’,82 was hailed with enthusiasm by the most important exponents of the psi. But in the Church his position became untenable. It led to his excommunication a vitando on 22 March 1909, followed by constant attacks from the Catholic press.83 In spite of Socialist support for Murri’s candidacy, Mussolini had not failed to turn him into a polemical target, though rushing to his defense at the time of his excommunication. During his first public debate with De Gasperi, held in the Birreria Corona at Untermais on the afternoon of 7 March, Mussolini indifferently lumped together – as exponents of clericalism – intransigent Catholics, moderate Catholics, and social-democratic Christians. All of them 79

80 81 82 83

P. Scoppola, “Cattolicesimo e democrazia nelle vicende della Lega democratica nazionale”, in Idem, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, 110–169, and G. Vecchio, Alla ricerca del partito. Cultura politica ed esperienze dei cattolici italiani del primo Novecento, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1987. G. Verucci, L’eresia del Novecento: la Chiesa e la repressione del modernismo in Italia, ­Torino: Einaudi, 2010. A. Botti, Romolo Murri e l’anticlericalismo negli anni de “La Voce”, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1996, 34–36. D. Saresella, “Murri deputato e il mondo socialista (1909–1913)”, in Romolo Murri e i murrismi in Italia e in Europa cent’anni dopo, 185. M. Guasco, Il caso Murri dalla sospensione alla scomunica, Urbino: Argalia, 1978.

34

chapter 1

were united, in his view, by the wish to set aside the struggle against the roots of social injustice – in other words, the dualism between workers and the owners of the means of production.84 The aim was clear: to eliminate once and for all any prospect of collaboration between Christian Democrats and Socialists. The “socially-minded Christian Father Romolo Murri who is presenting himself at Porto San Giorgio [sic] with a programme that is almost socialistlike” was placed on the same level as the giornali neri that had attributed the Messina earthquake to the hand of God.85 Christian democracy was dismissed as “a wretched attempt destined to failure”, “an organism bristling with contradictions”: Modifying, or attempting to modify what divine providence has established is tantamount to committing a sacrilege. […] The Christian ­Democrats admit the partial improvements of the working class, but they don’t tolerate the disappearance of patronage: they don’t dare to eliminate the bourgeoisie: their action is a compromise, just as their theory is an equivocation and pretence.86 News of the excommunication of Murri was published by Mussolini himself (under the pseudonym ‘Verdiano’) in the pages of the Avvenire del Lavoratore on 27 March. The tone of his announcement, at once solemn and derisive, tended to dismiss the consequences of the Vatican intervention. The piece as a whole betrays a very superficial understanding of what was happening in the Catholic world in this crucial moment of transition: The newly elected member of parliament in the electoral college of Porto S. Giorgio [sic] has been officially excommunicated by the Vatican. We don’t have any difficulty in believing that he will be the first to laugh over the pontifical decree. Today a papal Bull of excommunication has the value of a soap bubble. All of us, for one reason or another, have been excommunicated and not one of us takes the Vatican sentence seriously. Tempora mutantur. Once upon a time an excommunicated king came to Canossa in the middle of winter, spent three days kneeling in the snow between the castle’s 84

R.A. Webster, “Il primo incontro tra Mussolini e De Gasperi (marzo 1909)”, Il mulino (­ January 1958): 51–55. 85 B. Mussolini, “Perché ci organizziamo”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (11 March 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 25–26. 86 Ibid.

Religion, War, Nation

35

second and third circuit of walls and, were it not for the Countess Matilde, the pope would never have pardoned the reprobate. Today the secular arm no longer exists or, in other words, there’s no longer a gendarmerie, an army at the service of the pope. There are admittedly a few hundred Swiss Guards, but they are the laughing-stock of all the urchins of Rome! Luther burned the papal excommunication in the presence of a huge crowd; will Romolo Murri present the spectacle of a little paper bonfire to his faithful electors at Porto S. Giorgio? For the sake of completeness, we recall that the papal document ends literally with the following words: ‘From the House of the Holy Office, 22 March 1909. Signed Aloisio ­Castellano, notary of the Holy Roman Universal Inquisition’.87 The conclusion, typically Mussolinian/Carduccian in style, was to say the least irreverent: Ah! ah! ah! So there’s still a Holy Office and a Holy Roman Universal Inquisition. But for whom? Go on! Old scarecrows of the Middle Ages, hide yourself away once and for all! In the age of enlightenment, you continue to regale us with the language of shadows and we homerically continue to laugh in your face. And to you Signor Aloisio Castellano, to you notary – no less! – of the Holy Roman Universal Inquisition we say the word pronounced by Cambronne at Waterloo: report it, if you like to your master… Do you remember it? M[erde]….88 In the same edition of the workers’ paper Mussolini made fun of the bigots and went so far as to jeer at the sacrament of the Eucharist, with heavy-handed comparisons between the particle of the host and the ‘good beefsteak’ which priests and Catholics were said to prefer.89 In the weeks that followed tensions mounted. Mussolini’s attacks on the clergy and the Church intensified. The Catholic press dredged up Mussolini’s penal record and threw it onto the scales. It accused the L’Avvenire del lavoratore of pursuing an impious and anti-religious line. Il Trentino attacked Mussolini and his friends for having 87

Verdiano, “Don Romolo Murri scomunicato”, L’Avvenire del lavoratore (27 March 1909), now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 47. 88 Ibid. 89 Spazzino, “Dedicato ai bigotti”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (27 March 1909), now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 48.

36

chapter 1

transformed public life into a contest of fisticuffs and insults. The judiciary also entered the field. The State prosecutor Carlo Tranquillini tried to order the closure of the Avvenire del Lavoratore and the seizure of the editions so far published with the motivation that it was the most dangerous paper of the region because it preached anarchy, atheism, war against the clergy, and class hatred. Nevertheless, his request was blocked by the central authorities, worried by the repercussions such a measure might have, but also because the first demonstrations in defense of the newspaper of the Labor Secretariat and its editor had already taken place.90 However, the political consequence of Mussolini’s frontal assault on religion and the clergy were before everyone’s eyes; he had succeeded in transforming anticlerical agitation into an attack on the government and in persuading an ever-growing part of the hitherto somnolent public opinion in Trentino to turn against Catholics and against the government authorities that supported them. In Mussolini’s contributions to the paper insults continued to be the order of the day. Apart from the recurrent epithets of ‘black charlatans’91 and ‘clerical sewers’,92 one priest, don Barra, was even described as a ‘rabid dog’ and a ‘poor fool’ for having criticized the moral conduct of socialists in Trentino.93 Another priest, don Chelodi, was showered with such defamatory epithets as ‘microbe’, ‘miserable’ and ‘liar’ for having resuscitated Mussolini’s penal record in the Voce Cattolica.94 References were also made to this or that provincial priest guilty of financial irregularities, or more particularly of obscene acts, an argument designed especially to titillate the prurience of readers. It was thus that ‘comrade’ Mussolini went to the alpine village of Susà, in Valsugana, to ‘interview’ a ‘saint’, Rosa Broll. The article in question appeared in the socialist paper Il Popolo on 12 June 1909. The peasant woman, now in her fifties, recounted the sad story of her life to Mussolini. At the age of sixteen, she had been seduced by the local curate and had become his mistress. The priest had staged a fake marriage, making the young girl believe he had been dispensed from his vows. The two had lived together for several years in the priest’s house, procreating several children who had either died within a few months or been abandoned. The discovery of the last to be born on the threshold of a church in Levico had triggered the public scandal and the trial, in which efforts were 90 91

R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 72–73. B. Mussolini, “Un cane idrofobo”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (10 June 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 150–151. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 B. Mussolini, “A don Chelodi”, Il Popolo (4 June 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 138.

Religion, War, Nation

37

made, but in vain, to convince the woman to confess that the abandoned child, who later died in its twentieth month, was not that of the curate but of a vagabond. The invention of ‘sainthood’, backed up with a rigmarole of miracles and apparitions, deposed Broll, was all the work of the ingenious curate, as a way of justifying her fixed presence in the priest’s house.95 The article, as was to be expected, met with considerable public success, so much so that in the following month it was published as a separate pamphlet “at the repeated insistence of comrades who don’t read or can’t read daily newspapers”.96 It was, according to its author, a publication that served the socialist cause, because it revealed the lies, superstitions, and colossal deceptions practiced by the clergy, profiting from the ingenuousness of peasants. In the follow-up to this fortunate Boccaccesque vein, comrade Mussolini gave the best of himself in the novel L’amante del cardinale. Claudia Particella. To Emil Ludwig, who in 1932 asked him for his judgement on the books he had written in his youth, Il Duce replied: “the story of the cardinal is a horrible piece of pulp fiction; […] I wrote it with political intentions, for a paper. At that time, the clergy was really vitiated by corrupt elements. It’s a book of political propaganda”.97 According to Margherita Sarfatti, this story was no more than a feuilleton, “a hodgepodge, without beginning or end”. It revealed “a great relish for the tragic, as well as for vivid colors and heavy shades”, and might almost “have been written as the basis for a future film”.98 Its motivations were not so much politically induced as prompted by the needs of marketing. The novel was in fact serialized; it appeared in 57 instalments in an appendix to Il Popolo between 20 January and 11 May 1910 with Battisti’s support: The idea of writing a historical novel in the vein of Dumas père, with the aim of defaming the Church and the clergy, was born in Mussolini in Trento. He spoke about it with Cesare Battisti, who suggested the real historical episode on which it was based; and, since he liked Mussolini’s romantic prose, he encouraged him to write the novel.99 Mussolini penned the novel at Forlì, where he had settled after his expulsion from Trentino by Austria following his arrest in September 1909. “The reality 95 96 97 98 99

B. Mussolini, “La Santa di Susà”, Il Popolo (12 June 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 153–159. B. Mussolini, La Santa di Susà (intervista), Trento: Soc. Tipografica Ed. Trentina, 1909. E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, 190. M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 151–152. E. and D. Susmel, Nota informativa, in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 33, viii.

38

chapter 1

is simple – he is reported to have said to Yvon De Begnac – Battisti wanted to help me. Claudia was my sole source of income during the period following my expulsion from Trento. It was I who made the instalments of the novel go on and on, and who multiplied its chapters”.100 The story, sad and squalid, which rapidly boosted the circulation of Il Popolo,101 told the sentimental and erotic adventures of Cardinal Carlo Emanuele Madruzzo, prince-bishop of Trento in the 17th century. In 1938 Ignazio Silone called it a “pornographic anticlerical novel”,102 a judgement with which Il Duce himself must secretly have concurred, since he never permitted its publication in book form in Italy, nor did he approve the English edition in 1928.103 In effect, the novel consists of a succession of lascivious images, situations and settings, written in an insipid and clichéd prose. It tells of repressed desires, broken vows, poisonings, and various obscenities, the whole novel evocative of the most uncurbed luxury, an insult to the misery of the people. “The Church of Rome, besides, − we read on one page – had set a bad example”: The successors of the throne of Peter had been stained by the most ­ einous crimes. Even immediately after its political triumph under Conh stantine, the Church of Rome, transformed from Christian to Catholic, had gone through grave schismatic crises and the gravest crises of the moral order. […] The popes were the epitome of the universal iniquity. […] If the first regents of the Church chosen for the spiritual salvation of the people gave such scandalous examples, how could one claim that juveniles should 100 Y. De Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, 21. 101 “Claudia Particella represented a stroke of good fortune for Il Popolo. Every so often its progenitor, exasperated and capricious, threatened to bump her off, this creation of his that he had placed in the world just for the fun of it, but that was now taking him interminably by the hand! Cards arrived from Cesare Battisti imploring him not to do so. ‘Don’t kill her, for heaven’s sake! The subscriptions are being renewed’”. Ibid., 112. See M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 152. 102 I. Silone, La scuola dei dittatori (1938), Milano: Mondadori, 1977, 40–41. 103 After the publication in the appendix of Il Popolo, the novel was published in an English translation (by Hiram Motherwell) in New York in 1928 (The Cardinal’s Mistress, Albert & Charles Boni, New York 1928) and in London in the following year (Cassel, London 1929). The first Italian edition of the novel came out in 1961; it was published in the volume of the Opera omnia edited by Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, dedicated to Mussolini’s youthful works (B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 33, 39–147). The novel was not separately published in Italian until 1972: L’amante del cardinale (Claudia Particella), Firenze: La Fenice, 1972.

Religion, War, Nation

39

rigidly follow the evangelical precepts of resignation, renunciation and penitence? The whole Catholic hierarchy was infected, from the Pope right down to the lowest cleric in an alpine village.104 From the invectives reserved for Catholics and the Church during this period, only Father Murri was spared. Not that Mussolini shared the positions of the Marchigian priest, but his case represented in his view the living confirmation of the obscurantism that was inseparable from the Catholic Church, the demonstration that the papacy of the 20th century was identical with the papacy that had condemned Luther and sent Giordano Bruno to the stake. “The Vatican today – wrote Mussolini in 29 July 1909 commenting on the placing on the Index of four of Murri’s works – is identical with the Vatican of the 16th century. It is the den of intolerance and of a band of thieves”.105 Defending Murri also meant attacking the Catholic De Gasperi. Though expressing his solidarity with the setbacks of Christian Democracy in the crisis that had overcome it following the dissolution of the Opera dei Congressi, the leader of the Partito Popolare had in 1904 backtracked on his relations with Murri, with whom he had been in correspondence since 1902. Then, after Murri’s excommunication, he had disowned him, an act accompanied by a scrupulous condemnation of modernism, which would later lead him to brand Murri a ‘poor apostate’.106 De Gasperi replied to Mussolini’s attacks on the Vatican for its condemnation of Murri and of modernism consistently with a stalwart defense of the motivations of Rome. Ever since then the leader of Trentino had revealed an acutely realistic sense in his persuasion that the political action of Catholics was impossible without reaching an understanding with the institutional Church, whose leadership was not so much feared as legitimated, consistent with the view that no form of disobedience to the hierarchy was even remotely conceivable.107 His experience in Trentino abruptly terminated by his expulsion, Mussolini’s diatribe against Catholics ceased to take first place in his political and journalistic agenda, though without disappearing entirely. Thus, in October 1909, at Forlì, he led a demonstration against the execution by firing squad of 104 Ibid., 120–121. 105 B. Mussolini, “Tenebre e luce”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (22 July 1909), now in Idem., Opera omnia, vol. 2, 188–190. 106 A. De Gasperi, I cattolici trentini sotto l’Austria: antologia degli scritti dal 1902 al 1915 con i discorsi al Parlamento austriaco, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964, vol. 2, 241. 107 L. Bedeschi, Il giovane De Gasperi e l’incontro con Murri, Milano: Bompiani, 1974, 83.

40

chapter 1

Francisco Ferrer, which ended with the throwing of stones against the bishop’s residence and the demolition of the votive column in honor of the Madonna del Fuoco.108 Three months later, on 6 December, he took part in the noisy protest against a lecture given by Father Agostino Gemelli on the healing of pilgrims at Lourdes in the light of the scientific evidence.109 He erupted with swearwords and obscenities into the pulpit of the church of San Mercuriale, where the Franciscan was awaited, and was served with a charge for violent affray, from which he was acquitted a few weeks later. Most of Mussolini’s political activity as head of the branch of the Socialist Party in Forlì and as editor of the party’s weekly La lotta di classe was concentrated, however, on other questions, linked to the conflicts between farm ­workers and sharecroppers and the use of threshing machines. In spite of this, he presented an intractable anticlerical order of the day at the first congress of the Socialist Collegial Federation, held at Bussecchio on 10 April 1910. ­Approved by a large majority, it declared the incompatibility between religious faith and socialism, decreed the automatic expulsion from the party of members who went to church, and obliged them to avoid religious marriage, the baptism of children and participation in other forms of public worship: The collegial congress maintains the incompatibility between the practice of the Catholic, or other, faith and coherence with socialist principles, and decrees the expulsion from the party of members who follow religious practices or tolerate them in their children. It thus makes it a precise obligation of socialists to avoid religious marriage, the baptism of children and all other religious ceremonies.110 Though not all the delegates at the congress agreed to this intransigent view, there were even those who, with the secretary’s support, went further and proposed that members be invited to remove all religious images and symbols from their homes. The fact that the war in Libya saw Mussolini in the front line in the protest against the Italian ‘imperialist’ adventure is well known. Indeed, he was arrested on 14 October 1911 and condemned to eighteen months in prison, later 108 R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 81. 109 Ibid. To an analysis of the miracles of Lourdes Gemelli had dedicated an article, published in the previous year: “Le guarigioni di Lourdes dinnanzi alla scienza”, La Scuola cattolica (1908): 15–32. 110 B. Mussolini, “Per il socialismo forlivese”, La lotta di classe (10 April 1910), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 3, 74.

Religion, War, Nation

41

­reduced to five-and-a-half. Opposed by the Socialists, the resumption of colonial policy by the Giolitti government had been accompanied by important convergences with some sectors of Italian Catholicism. On the economic level the intervention in Libya had been supported by the Banco di Roma, which had close links with the world of Catholic finance, then led by Ernesto Pacelli. The Libyan war had also generated a new rapprochement between nationalism and the Catholic Church, to which a significant contribution had been made by Giovanni Grosoli’s newspaper trust, the expression of a Catholicism that aspired to be a more active participant in Italian political life. Some bishops had publicly blessed the troops leaving for North Africa. At the Settimana sociale at Assisi, opened on 24 September 1911, there had been enthusiastic demonstrations of Catholic support for the Libyan war, presented as a new modern crusade against the Turks.111 The influential Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica passed over the new colonial adventure in silence and on 12 October 1911 went so far as to affirm that “as far as the conquest of Tripoli is concerned, there’s no diversity of view”.112 On 5 October, in a letter to the Corriere della Sera, the Bishop of Cremona Geremia Bonomelli had written: “Alongside the Italian flag I see the Cross being raised; alongside the beneficent eloquence of civil works I see the eloquence of religion being spread”.113 To dampen the excessive enthusiasm of Catholics the Holy See had intervened, discouraging on several occasions the participation of bishops in ­patriotic demonstrations of support for the war and even in ceremonies in honor of the fallen.114 Not that the Vatican condemned at the time the ­legitimacy of colonial expansion per se, but it wished, in this case, to observe a scrupulous neutrality, feeling itself authorized to do so by the persistence of the Roman Question. A week before his arrest, Mussolini had, in the pages of his party organ La lotta di classe, launched a bitter diatribe against the patriotic ardours of Italian priests and their gazetteers. He castigated what he called ‘clerico-­nationalist’ interventions and, appealing to Karl Marx, attributed the enthusiasm of 111 See L. Ganapini, Il nazionalismo cattolico. I cattolici e la politica estera in Italia dal 1871 al 1914, Bari: Laterza, 1970, 171ff., and F. Malgeri, La guerra libica (1911–1912), Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1970, 236–254. 112 G. Martina, “La Civiltà cattolica e il problema coloniale italiano”, in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, Roma: Ministero per i Beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1996, vol. 2, 905–913. 113 “Le parole del vescovo Bonomelli per la conquista della Tripolitania”, Corriere della sera (5 October 1911). 114 G. Giusti, “La diplomazia vaticana e la guerra di Libia”, in Pio x e il suo tempo, (ed.) G. La Bella, Bologna: il Mulino, 2003, 741–752.

42

chapter 1

­ atholics for the Libyan war to the economic interests of the Banco di Roma. C Mussolini touched here on themes destined to become crucial in Fascist Italy, albeit in a very different context: the relation between Catholics and the Italian nation, the centrality of the Roman Question, the close network of links between the Vatican and the world of finance, the role of the Church in the education of the young, and the war: We need to […] interrogate Karl Marx to understand the intimate reason for the patriotic enthusiasm that inflames the sacred Tripolitanian ardour of the Italian clergy [il pretume italiano]. It’s a fact that up till yesterday the clergy ground their teeth in their attitude to official Italy. The Vatican showed itself ever more inflexibly hostile to the secular power that had illegitimately ‘seized’ the Eternal City. Even during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations demonstrations in support of the temporal power of the Church were not lacking in the Italian and Austrian press. […] Even in the jubilee year the two powers, the civil and the ecclesiastical, did not agree on a truce, indeed seemed to accentuate their antagonism and their incompatibility. And yet now the miracle has happened. Caesar extends his hand to Peter and, as Enotrio Romano sang: Da quella stretta umano sangue stilla.115 The Quirinal and the Vatican have become reconciled. The priests, who up till yesterday were authentic and perfect herveists116 in their attitude to Italy, are now the patriots par excellence. Their various papers, the Avvenire and the Corriere d’Italia, beat all records for patriotism. No one surpasses them. None more than they are more solicitous for the fortunes of Italy, none better than they are able to appeal to the romantic and adventurous sentimentality of youth. In truth, the most fervent Italian nationalists today are priests. Irony of history? 115 The verse is that of Carducci: “Quando porge la man Cesare a Piero,/ Da quella stretta sangue umano stilla:/ Quando il bacio si dan Chiesa e Impero,/ Un astro di martirio in ciel sfavilla”: G. Carducci, Via Ugo Bassi. Enotrio Romano was a pseudonym adopted by Giosuè Carducci. 116 The term derives from Gustave Hervé (1871–1944), French socialist, who from his initial pacifist and anti-militatristic positions allegedly shifted, after 1912, to an ultra-­nationalistic line, and who after the March on Rome became an enthusiastic admirer of Mussolini. See M.B. Loughlin, “Gustave Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Another Example of French Fascism?” Journal of Contemporary History 36 (2001): 5–39.

Religion, War, Nation

43

Economic determinism, replies Marx. The patriotic expressions of clerico-nationalist journalism and literature are nothing but the iridescent and illusory coloration of a different and more prosaic reality. Under the poetry there’s prose; behind the words there are figures: i.e. the dividends of the Banco di Roma. Economic interest: that’s what determines the spiritual and political attitudes of priests. The doctrines of economic determinism once again find their confirmation in facts. L’amour propre, national pride, patriotic sentiment, are commonplace, rhetorical devices to inebriate the public, but if we rip apart the purple veil of ideologies, we’ll find that it is economic interests to be safeguarded with the brutal force of arms. The present-day patriotism of priests is to be explained by the economic determinism of Marx. It’s perhaps the first time that the Vatican has found itself at Italy’s side in its war against a foreign nation, because in previous centuries it was always on the side of foreigners against Italy. This Banco di Roma however explains this exception to the rule. Business is business.117 Mussolini’s condemnation of the dire consequences of the marriage between political power and religion provided the cue for a little book on Jan Huss which was supposed to be be published in 1911, but which did not appear until the last days of May 1913, in a series called the ‘Historical Collection of the ­Martyrs of Free Thought’.118 Here too the same verses from Giosuè Carducci recur: “Quando porge la man Cesare a Piero/da quella stretta umano sangue stilla”,119 cited here as a gloss of some passages in which Mussolini described the great corruption of the Church in the 15th century and the treason of the Emperor Sigismund, guilty of having acquiesced in the death sentence passed on the Bohemian reformer. The aim of this ambitious little book was, in any case, made abundantly clear in its very first pages – that of arousing in readers a “hatred for any form of spiritual and profane tyranny, be it theocratic or Jacobin”.120 In the Italy of 1913, however, anticlericalism was no longer à la page. In view of the first elections by universal male suffrage, due to be held at the end of October, the variegated Catholic world now made its entry into active political life, albeit in a subaltern role vis-à-vis the Liberal nomenklatura, by promising its electoral support for those candidates judged reliable. This operation was 117 “I patriotti”, La lotta di classe (7 October 1911). 118 B. Mussolini, Giovanni Huss il veridico (Roma: Podrecca e Galantara, 1913), in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 33, 271–327. 119 Ibid., 293. 120 Ibid., 273.

44

chapter 1

the result of over two hundred electoral deals between ‘­Giolittian’ candidates and the ecclesiastical authorities of their respective electoral colleges. These deals were reached, no doubt, under the threat of a possible socialist backlash, but were also recognition of a de facto situation – the attenuation of a radical antagonism between Church and Italian State. From then onwards, for several years, the religious question lost the centrality it had in the previous period in Mussolini’s political activity. Only on the eve of his entry into Parliament did it re-appear, though in a completely different guise. 1.3

The ‘Guerrone’

In the battle joined in favor of interventionism and in the years of the Great War, Mussolini did not understand the importance that this shift in mentality was gradually assuming for Catholics. From their neutrality, he drew nothing but ammunition for further attacks. On 13 December 1914, a month after his expulsion from the Socialist Party, he attacked Benedict xv, accusing him of being philo-Austrian and of wishing to exploit his own position of neutrality to solve the Roman Question in the Church’s favor and against Italy.121 During the war Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, continued to present the Vatican as the main enemy of the nation. He went so far as to demand the suspension of the Legge delle Guarentigie, the law (approved on 13 May 1871) that regulated the relations between Italian State and the Holy See until the Lateran Pacts were signed in 1929. He called this law ‘a joke’. In the midst of a European conflagration, it guaranteed, he claimed, ‘impunity’ to a Pope hostile to Italy and ready to betray her.122 On 19 September 1916, once Mussolini had been drafted into the army and sent to the front, a blasphemous editorial with the title Barabba, was published in his paper, inveighing against ‘the vile Rabbi with the red hair’, ‘his even viler rabbinical priests in their black soutanes’ and all the saints: Let us kick in the backside – laughing – the vile Rabbi with the red hair, and his rabbinical priests in their black soutanes […]. Let us cast the 121 So Mussolini in his speech at Parma on 13 December 1914, published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 17 December 1914 with the title Per la libertà dei popoli per l’avvenire dell’Italia, now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 7, 76–81. 122 See some articles in Il Popolo d’Italia, censored between 1916 and 1918, and now published in an appendix by R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 704–706 and 723–724.

Religion, War, Nation

45

s­ tatues of the old saints onto the dunghills that smoke and fatten the earth. And let’s make a bonfire or a barricade of every tradition that genuflects and offers its neck. […] And, as a stage-set, let Christ be nailed once again to his Cross on Golgotha.123 This little editorial ignited a fierce controversy that spread through the nation. L’Osservatore romano spoke of ‘incendiary Satanism’ and ‘abominable blasphemy’, calling for the censor’s intervention. The Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Andrea Ferrari, condemned Mussolini’s paper, and prohibited all the faithful under his jurisdiction from reading it (‘a grave sin’). Other reprimands followed from parish priests of the Milanese archdiocese, including an official protest to the Holy See, which, through Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, presented a memorandum to the Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, deploring the failure to censor the ‘horrible articles’ of Il Popolo d’Italia.124 Posted to the front, Mussolini, now a bersagliere, and raised to the rank of corporal in August 1916, derided the religious devotions of his troops and, after Caporetto, pointed his finger against the ‘black defeatism’ of those (Catholics) who had been guilty of having helped, with their appeals for peace, to bring the Germans to the banks of the Piave:125 in short the usual thesis of anti-­modern and anti-national Catholicism. Changes, however, were taking place; and they affected many aspects. On the institutional level the war made it abundantly clear to the Holy See that any pursuit of the Roman Question was unsustainable due to all the limitations it posed to the papacy’s international political involvement. It brought home to the Vatican hierarchy the need to focus on the aspect of sovereignty and discard the problem of territorial dimension.126 For it was the absence of sovereignty that prevented the Holy See from participating in international conferences and major summits, given that these took place exclusively among sovereign states. And, as Benedict xv wrote in his first encyclical Ad beatissimi on 1st November 1914, such a disability would not permit the Pope to play an effective role in the pursuit of peace.127 On another level, the war played a 123 Jean-Jacques [Ottavio Dinale], “Barabba”, Il Popolo d’Italia (19 September 1916). 124 On the affair see R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 324–325. 125 See, for example, the article of B. Mussolini, “ Il convegno di Udine”, Il Popolo d’Italia (27 December 1917), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 10, 169–171. 126 On the ‘turning point of the Great War’ in the solution to the Roman Question see R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dalla Grande Guerra al nuovo Concordato (1914–1984), Bologna: il Mulino, 2009, 41–97. 127 English translation of the encyclical downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va).

46

chapter 1

decisive role in bringing the Catholic masses closer to the national cause. The explosion of the conflict initially seemed to Benedict xv the tragic confirmation of a catastrophist vision of the history of mankind. His predecessor Pius x Sarto, who only survived to witness the first few weeks of military operations, had already grasped the enormity of the cataclysm that was about to engulf the whole of Europe: “Eminence, things are going badly – he was heard to remark to his Secretary of State Rafael Merry del Val – the Great War (Il Guerrone) is coming!”128 The last intervention of Pius x before his death on 20 August was more sombre in tone than ever before. The future – he told the cardinals in the secret consistory of 27 May 1914 – seems afflicted by terrible evils, punishment for the very grave errors of all those, also within the Church, who believed in the triumph of modernity.129 It was left to the new Pope, however, to furnish the key to the interpretation of the Guerrone: the gigantic bloodbath was divine punishment for the States that had been divorced from the holy religion of Christ, and had failed to observe the norms of Christian wisdom in laws, ideas and customs.130 It followed that the nations would only re-conquer peace on condition that they returned to the doctrine of the Gospel and of the Church. During the war, the Holy See constantly strove to promote humanitarian initiatives and was tireless in pressing for a cessation of hostilities. After three years of bloody conflicts in which millions of young men had lost their lives, Benedict xv sent his celebrated Peace Note of August 1917 to the Heads of the Belligerent Peoples, calling “for the material force of arms to be substituted by the moral force of law”. The war, he said, was a calamity, which the Holy See would do all in her power to hasten its end, even raising the possibility that the Church might abandon her support for the justification of war.131 But in the belligerent countries religion had been enrolled as a weapon to justify and sanctify the war as a crusade against evil. Catholics, just like Protestants and Orthodox, concurred to produce a fusion between Christianity and nationalism unparalleled in the history of Europe.132 After the papal intervention, the Italian Catholic world, which had on the whole supported the Holy See’s policy of neutrality, and accepted the need “to 128 R. Merry del Val, Pio x (Impressioni e Ricordi), Padova: Il Messaggero di S. Antonio, 1952, 112–113. 129 Pius x, Allocutio habita occasione impositionis bireti novis cardinalibus die xxvii maii mcmxiv, in aas, vol. vi, 260–262. 130 See D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento. Verso una delegittimazione religiosa dei conflitti, Bologna: il Mulino, Bologna 2008, 17ff. 131 For an analysis of the papal document and the process of its drafting see ibid., 36–46. 132 See S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14–18, retrouver la Guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 2000.

Religion, War, Nation

47

preserve impartiality in relation to all the belligerents”, became converted to war. There was a devout wish for peace, but neutrality could not be absolute, conditioned as it was, according to the traditional doctrine of the Church, by the decisions of government, the only legitimate holder of power. In their attitude to government Catholics would show how obedient, indeed how patriotic, they could be as citizens. They were Italians – like everyone else, more than everyone else. During the years of the war, religion led the process of trying to find a sense to it all; it furnished motivations and explanations for a military clash which, as a result of the destructive potential of the weapons used and the stalemate produced by the balance of forces in the field, was increasingly assuming the character of mutual extermination. To this holocaust, it was difficult to assign any easily understandable rationale, still less any consolation, by appealing to the laws of human society.133 Only religion could provide reason or comfort. On the front it was the military chaplains who channelled the widespread need for the welfare and protection of soldiers towards forms of religious devotion replete with saints, images of Our Lady, sacred hearts, religious medallions, consecrated water, etc., and yet who tried in many cases to attenuate their more superstitious expressions.134 Some of them, such as the priest from Asiago, Father Giovanni Rossi of the 11th regiment of Grenadiers of Sardinia, happily extended their mission to become the main epistolary interlocutors of those who, at home, were prone to anguish, given the lack of any news about their son, father, or husband at the front, or of those, resigned to loss, who sought information on the last moments of life of their loved ones.135 Even far from the battlefields bishops, priests and Catholic associations were in the front line in trying to imbue the war effort with religious sense. They tried to assuage as far as possible the experience of death, remove it from the mental horizon of millions of men, though without renouncing their primary role of comforting the bereaved with consolations of faith.136 And, for the 133 D. Menozzi, “I cattolici italiani nel primo conflitto mondiale”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 900–904. 134 See R. Morozzo della Rocca, La fede e la guerra. Cappellani militari e preti soldati 1915–1919, Studium, Roma 1980. See also J. Houlihan, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 135 The correspondence in question has only been published in recent years: Chiedo notizie di vita o di morte. Lettere a un cappellano militare della Grande Guerra, (eds.) G. Borella et al., with an introduction by M. Isnenghi and an anthology of letters, Rovereto: Museo storico italiano della guerra, 2004. 136 M. Malpensa, “Il sacrificio in guerra nelle lettere pastorali dell’episcopato”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 905–924.

48

chapter 1

first time, an explicit patriotic sense was promoted in the Catholic women’s associations, which traced their origins back to the beginning of the century and were now actively involved, on the home front, in the task of supporting and alleviating the suffering communities.137 From one point of view, it was the triumph of what has been described as the ‘ethics of resignation’, a terrain on which Catholics, also in the eyes of the military authorities, had greater qualification, and greater credit, than anyone else.138 As a result, liberal secularism was deprived of one of its historically most effective weapons: the denunciation of Catholicism as a force alien to or in radical conflict with the nation. Having jettisoned the condemnation of the national myth born from the French Revolution, large groups of Catholics now became committed defenders of the idea of nation, in which they began to feel themselves an integral part.139 This process took different forms, had different expressions, unified by the conviction that Catholicism had left its own indelible stamp on the national identity and that only by returning to her own religious essence would Italy rise to become the guide of nations, in conformity with the providential design that had chosen her as site of the papacy. The Milanese Franciscan Agostino Gemelli, whom many Italians already knew as a physician, psychologist and polemicist, had more recently gathered around him a small group of disciples. Later, after the war, they would, under Gemelli’s leadership, establish the ­Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Already in 1915, ­Gemelli had used “shocking words”140 against the Germans, describing them as ­“hard-headed and with hearts fattened with beer”.141 Recalled to the front in the summer of 1915 as assistant medical officer of the territorial militia, ­Gemelli was rapidly promoted to the rank of captain at the Supreme Command in Udine, where he directed a laboratory for psycho-physiological research on Aviation preparatory to the selection of pilots. In these same years, Father Agostino, in his frenetic activity of patriotic and religious mobilization, shuttling between Milan and the military front,142 had published a pamphlet 137 C. Dau Novelli, Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile, Roma: Ave, 1988, 223–277. 138 Thus M. Isnenghi, G. Rochat, La Grande Guerra 1914–1918, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008, 240–244. 139 E. Gentile, La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel xx secolo, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2006, 136–143 (English translation: La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the 20th Century, Madison-London, University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 140 G. Formigoni, L’Italia dei cattolici. Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica, ­Bologna: il Mulino, 1998, 81. 141 A. Gemelli, “Quanto durerà la guerra attuale?” Vita e Pensiero (August 1915): 81–82. 142 S. Luzzatto, “Un chierico grande vestito da soldato. La guerra di padre Agostino Gemelli”, in Gli Italiani in guerra. Conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai nostri giorni,

Religion, War, Nation

49

on the Principle of Nationality, in which he foresaw the clash between religion and patriotism, between faith in God and love of fatherland, through the full papal recognition of the consecration of the Italian nation as a sovereign State.143 What Gemelli meant by patria he had already made clear: motherhood, earth, memory, history, and the race assigned by God.144 It was on the basis of these considerations that Father Agostino developed, together with his indefatigable assistant, Armida Barelli, the idea of organizing a great national ritual, of a kind variously experimented in France, Germany and Austria, which involved consecrating the Italian army and the image of the nation at war to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was a new ‘crusade’ for the triumph of the country under arms and for the collective recognition of the spiritual supremacy of Catholicism over Italian society.145 So, on 5 January 1917, according to the announcement disseminated by the organizing committee, two million souls, from the mud of the trenches to the parishes, joined in reciting the solemn act of consecration, and receiving in the course of the event a little tricolor flag with at its center not the usual coat of arms of the House of Savoy, but an image of the Heart of Jesus, accompanied with a leaflet with the text of the consecration and instructions on its benefits. Yet, Gemelli’s activism also aroused many negative reactions. The military authorities prohibited the display of the Italian flag with the image of the Sacred Heart, judging it incompatible with the military code, or the prescribed uniformity of military dress; it also seemed to insinuate temporal ambitions on the part of the Church. Among Catholics, too, doubts of various kinds were registered. And if a priest like don Primo Mazzolari expressed his personal doubts about a religiosity replete with medals and superstitions,146 the hierarchy of the Franciscan Order made Gemelli understand the disastrous reception that his patriotic fervour had met with in Benedict xv.147 Not even Corporal Benito Mussolini was insensitive to the nationalistic furore of the Sacred Heart. On 30 December 1916, he wrote as follows from

143 144 145 146 147

(ed.) M. Isnenghi, vol. 3/1, La Grande Guerra. Dall’intervento alla “vittoria mutilata”, (eds.) M. Isnenghi and D. Ceschin, Torino: Utet, 2008, 452–462. A. Gemelli, Il principio di nazionalità, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1917. A. Gemelli, “La psicologia della disciplina militare”, Vita e Pensiero (20 September 1915): 129–130. S. Lesti, Riti di guerra. Religione e politica nell’Europa della Grande Guerra, Bologna: il ­Mulino, 2015, 95–152. P. Mazzolari, Diario (1905–1926), (ed.) A. Bergamaschi, Bologna: Edizioni dehoniane, 1974, note of 30 April 1916, 489. R. Morozzo della Rocca, “Benedetto xv e il nazionalismo”, Cristianesimo nella storia 17 (1996): 541–555.

50

chapter 1

­ oberdò del Lago, on the Carso front near Trieste, in his war diary published in D installments in the columns of Il Popolo d’Italia: Father Michele passed through the trenches, offering us a tricolor flag as a badge and a leaflet. I accepted the badge, then had the leaflet given to me. It is the “solemn consecration of the soldiers of the Royal Italian Army to the Sacred Heart of Jesus”. I do not comment, I transcribe. In the leaflet there’s an instruction, which says: Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the greatest hope of our times. All of us can obtain the Heart of Jesus through faith and love. He himself, appearing to the Blessed Margaret Mary in France, said: ‘You will only lack succour if I lack power’. Look at the French at the battle of the Marne: all seemed lost, when General Castelnau had the inspiration of invoking and consecrating the army to the Sacred Heart. And the result was the wonderful victory that saved France. We too want a victory, a twofold victory: one over our political enemies, for the greatness of our country, the other over ourselves to purify and raise us. But for both, if we want great things, we have a need for exceptional means. And that’s why devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is indicated to us… Then there’s also an “act of consecration”, which ends in a “Credo, P ­ ater, Ave, Gloria”. I repeat – wrote Mussolini at the end of his diary entry – I don’t ­comment; I transcribe, I copy… the document.148 That his was a merely patriotic comment he himself pointed out a few days later in a letter to Giuseppe De Falco, editor-in-chief of the Popolo d’Italia who, in the absence of Mussolini, had assumed the role of director.149 The birth of popolarismo in Italy and its transformation into a national party, the Partito Popolare Italiano (ppi), was another decisive stage in the active incorporation of Catholics in the Italian State. According to Federico Chabod, indeed, it was “the most significant event in Italian 20th-century h ­ istory” when 148 B. Mussolini, Il mio diario di guerra (1915–1917), in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 34, 104. ­Published in instalments in Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s war diary was published as a separate work after the March on Rome (Milan: Imperia publishing house of the Partito Nazionale Fa­ scista, 1923). 149 The letter, published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 26 February 1917, in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 8, 354.

Religion, War, Nation

51

compared with the previous century.150 The appeal launched on the foundation of the ppi, and released to the press by the founding father of popolarismo, don Luigi Sturzo, on the evening of 18 January 1919, in a room in the Santa Chia­ra hotel in Rome, contained a declaration of intense patriotic pride, whose neo-guelph roots were revealed in the idea of Italy’s “great civilizing mission”.151 But in Luigi Sturzo’s political thought (of which popolarismo was the expression) the nation was indissolubly linked to an idea of Christian democracy and the principle of nationality contrary to any form of imperialism. The consciousness of the new political opportunities created by the dissolution of the Central European and Ottoman empires, was translated not into an appeal for territorial aggrandisement, but, at most, into a recognition of the legitimacy of a peaceful expansion of Italian civilization at the commercial and cultural levels. Moreover, it represented a colonial policy that would not subordinate cooperation between states to Italian interests. The ever stronger appeals to the nation induced Catholic culture to furnish itself, alongside the usual categories of patriotism and nationalism, with a third category, that of ‘extreme nationalism’ as the antithesis of a ‘sound, moderate, just’, and hence morally legitimate nationalism.152 The main exponent of this interpretation was, for several years, Father Enrico Rosa, a staff-writer of La Civiltà Cattolica who up until this period had mainly been delegated to monitoring the ideological clash over modernism.153 Already in January 1915, the Jesuit, who would become editor-in-chief of the fortnightly review of the Society of Jesus on 20 April of the same year, had drawn a contrast between what he called ‘true nationalism’ and the exclusive and egoistical patriotism of the liberal nationalists, which, in its more extreme forms, led to the glorification of war and the justification of the conquest of other nations.154 Now, three years later, the same Rosa explicitly introduced the category of ‘exaggerated 150 F. Chabod, L’Italia contemporanea (1918–1948), Torino: Einaudi, 2002 (1st edition 1961), 43. 151 G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1966, 17–45. 152 D. Menozzi, “Cattolicesimo, patria e nazione tra le due guerre mondiali”, in San France­ sco d’Italia. Santità e identità nazionale, (eds.) T. Caliò and R. Rusconi, Roma: Viella, 2011, 19–43. 153 For a reconstruction of the biography and cultural development of Father Rosa see the study, albeit dated and apologetic in character, of A.M. Fiocchi, Enrico Rosa S.I., scrittore della “Civiltà Cattolica” (1870–1938), Roma: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1957. For the polemic against modernism see A. Zambarbieri, Il cattolicesimo tra crisi e rinnovamento: Ernesto Buonaiuti ed Enrico Rosa nella prima fase della polemica modernista, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1979. 154 [E. Rosa], “Nazionalismo e amor di patria secondo la dottrina cattolica”, La Civiltà C ­ attolica 66/1 (1915): 129–144.

52

chapter 1

­ ationalism’, or hypernationalism, identifying in fratricidal strife and in the n arms race the ethical parameters within which the call to the nation became unacceptable for Catholic doctrine.155 Since the time of Pius ix, each issue of La Civiltà Cattolica, before being printed, was delivered to the Vatican to be revised personally by the Pope or, in some case, by the Secretary of State. A few days later, the director would be summoned in audience and would receive from the Pope the proofs of the fascicle with observations and corrections. So there existed a very close affinity between the positions of the Jesuit review and those of the Holy See, even though in some circumstances La Civiltà Cattolica assumed more conservative positions than those hoped for in the Vatican.156 It therefore comes as no surprise that the category of exaggerated or extreme nationalism also entered into the first encyclical of Pius xi, Ubi arcano Dei consilio, issued on 23 December 1922. Though the Pope, in the official text in Latin, used the expression ‘immoderatum nationis amorem’, the term nationalism, accompanied by such adjectives as ‘immoderate’ or ‘exaggerated’, appeared in vernacular translations of the encyclical.157 The reference in this case was undoubtedly to the turning point represented by the war and the strong appeal that the glorification of the nation exerted in contemporary life. But probably Pius xi’s strictures on nationalism were also drafted against the background of the nationalistic reaction of Action Française and of its leading ideologue, Charles Maurras. Though the movement’s cultural matrix was non-Catholic, it recruited many of its members in circles traditionally close to the Church. As far as Italy itself was concerned, the Pope certainly did not ignore the fusion between nationalists and Catholics that had begun to take place in 1913, when the former began to speak of the Church in defence of order and patriotism, and against the perils of anticlericalism and freemasonry.158 Still less could he ignore what, in terms of consecration of the nation, had taken place at Fiume between 12 September 1919 and December 1920, when the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the city with units of rebel soldiers and nationalists, and proclaimed the annexation 155 [E. Rosa], “Le ‘giuste aspirazioni dei popoli’”, ibid., 69/2 (1918): 490–502, in particular 492. 156 G. Martina, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia (1814–1983), Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003, 301–314. 157 Thus the English translation of Ubi arcano Dei consilio downloadable from the Vatican website speaks (in no. 25) of true love of country being “debased to the condition of an extreme nationalism”. See D. Menozzi, Cattolicesimo, patria e nazione tra le due guerre mondiali, 20. 158 See R. Moro, “Nazionalismo e cattolicesimo”, in Federzoni e la storia della destra ita­liana nella prima metà del Novecento, (eds.) B. Coccia and U. Gentiloni Silveri, Bologna: il ­Mulino, 2001, 49–112.

Religion, War, Nation

53

of the city to the Kingdom of Italy against the Allied peace terms at the Paris Peace Conference.159 In those months Monsignor Achille Ratti was in Warsaw as nuncio apostolic, and also from that distant vantage-point had witnessed the dramatic events of a nation at war to defend its frontiers.160 But the Holy See, through three distinct apostolic administrators, had followed at close hand the fate of Fiume.161 1.4

A Gory Ideal of the Fatherland

The mingling between nationalist rhetoric and the language of the Catholic tradition was expressed in some experiences with an ardor such as to restore to the Church a new centrality in Italian society and subsume them totally to the values of patriotism and nationalism. That’s the case of the Dominican father Reginaldo Giuliani. His is an extreme case. His trajectory cannot be considered representative of the ecclesiastical world, but he did exemplify, in exaggerated form, the coincidence between some developments in the Church during these years and those secular experiences that were to lead from patriotic ardor to Fascism. Born in 1887, Giuliani had been called up in 1916, sent to the front as a military chaplain and employed on the Carso and at Tonale with the 55th Infantry Regiment of the Marche.162 After the battle of Caporetto he had been redeployed to the shock troops (the Fiamme Nere) of the Third Army and with them was halted on the line of the Piave. On the eve of the planned assault, he exhorted his troops like a commander: “May God guide you! Italy is with you!”163 Heroism, patria, blood, glory, sacrifice – such was the lexicon of his sermons on the front, with a transfer of metaphors from the Catholic tradition to the secular discourse of patriotism and war. In the midst of the First World War, the chaplain had preached to his soldiers on the theme of the ‘noble death’. 159 On the importance of the Fiume adventure in Fascist ideology see M.A. Ledeen, D’Annunzio a Fiume, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1975, and C. Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione. Artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. 160 R. Morozzo della Rocca, Le nazioni non muoiono. Russia rivoluzionaria, Polonia indipendente e Santa Sede, Bologna: il Mulino, 1992. 161 Thus A. Guasco, “‘La città assunse l’aspetto della guerra civile’. La Santa Sede all’osservatorio di Fiume (1919–1925)”, Cristianesimo nella storia 31 (2010): 79–100. 162 G. Cavagnini, “Le prime prove di un mito fascista. Padre Reginaldo Giuliani nella Grande Guerra”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 976–992. 163 Ibid., 989.

54

chapter 1

He had impressed on them the coincidence between the martyr who dies for his country and the martyr who dies for his faith: This fervent love for our own brothers (since the Church is a gathering of brothers), this heroic sense of the community, also teaches us the love for our own nation, our own race, our own blood. The martyrs, as Jesus himself, laid down their lives for their fellowmen: and you too, O fine heroes of our fatherland, sacrifice yourselves for your brothers! In one of the terrible battles on the Carso, a chaplain found a bersagliere with horribly mutilated arms and legs tangled amid the broken barbed wire of the Austrian trenches. But his face (a bronzed and youthful face) was radiant and almost transfigured. […] May the martyrs of religion and of the fatherland be your masters in supporting with patience and serenity the sufferings that impend over the duties of soldiers: for then glory and happiness shall not fail one day to surround your inestimable heroism!164 Giuliani, who ended the war with three medals for gallantry, remained in the army as an orator and propagandist. Throughout the month of May 1919, he celebrated and preached in the church of Sant’Antonio Nuovo at Trieste.165 His discharge arrived in September, but instead of doffing his grey-green military uniform and donning once again his white Dominican habit, Father Reginaldo joined the army of volunteers led by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who in September 1919 occupied the city of Fiume. The first example of subversive adventure hatched amid Italy’s post-war frustrations was tolerated by the authorities and financed by nationalist circles. The adventure of Fiume was a laboratory of languages, rites, symbols, and forms of communication, but most of all it was an anticipation of the role that extra-parliamentary action was about to play in the crisis of the country. In the months in which the victors gathered at Versailles to decide on the post-war frontiers of Europe and its new constitutional order, Giuliani dedicated himself to feverish activity as lecturer and preacher, and wrote a book of memoirs of his experiences with the shock troops, the Arditi, on the C ­ arso front.166 Wherever he was given the chance of speaking, he extolled the g­ lorious destiny that awaited victorious Italy and proudly vindicated his ­devotion to the 164 Ibid., 985. 165 G. Cavagnini, “Nazione e provvidenza. Padre Reginaldo Giuliani tra Fiume ed Etiopia (1919–36)”, Passato e Presente 28 (2010): 43–67. 166 R. Giuliani, Gli arditi. Breve storia dei reparti d’assalto della Terza Armata, Milano: Treves, 1919.

Religion, War, Nation

55

‘gory ideal of patria’.167 The waning of the illusion of a greater Italy, after the signing of the peace treaty in Versailles, led the chaplain of the Fiamme Nere spontaneously to join the legionaries in the adventure of Fiume without bothering about getting permission from his superiors. His bombastic oratory and gesturing in Fiume, which made him a protagonist alongside D’Annunzio, was expressed, in extreme form, in an orgy of images aimed to give life to dead matter, all the rhetoric of the new nationalism. Thus, on 13 October 1919, in his commemoration of Lieutenant Aldo Bini and Brigadiere Giovanni Zeppegno, both of whom had fallen a few days previously during a reconnaissance flight over Fiume and Susak, Giuliani, in an open-air ceremony, paid tribute to the two young aviators and to all the volunteers who had hastened patriotically to the liberation of the city. Perhaps inspired by the presence of the Comandante (D’Annunzio) in the piazza, Father Reginaldo pronounced an oration in which he intermixed religious motifs and references to classical symbology with continuous allusions to the baptism of blood, the sacredness of fire as a symbol of regeneration, the zeal of the warrior, and the fusion of life and death: Perpetual commemoration of the holocaust city [Fiume] for the volunteers who flocked to its liberation, and who are so well represented by the serene immolation of these young aviators. Before this altar today the curses of those who accused a Neronian god as perpetrator of the disaster are shattered. The idea that sacrifice is the solid foundation of every great exploit, that blood is their infallible baptism, shines out here, like the light of the meridian sun […]. Blood soaked the land that they wanted to redeem; their bodies remain as the new seal of the ancient spirit of Italy. But their souls shall return to heaven, which they loved as their true fatherland. May this cross, higher than the slender masts of our powerful warships, more resplendent than our sea, gather in its immortal arms the two young spirits purified in this new fire lit by the Eucharistic sacrifice and by the prayers of the people. May it gather them up and restore them to heaven, to the highest heaven where light and joy reign eternal.168 Giuliani felt, with D’Annunzio, that change was in the air – in society, in politics, in communication. Not by chance did his conduct seem extravagant to the Master General of his Order, Ludwig Theissling, who just for this reason 167 Ibid., 46. 168 Ibid., 47.

56

chapter 1

placed him under surveillance. Nor is it by chance that D’Annunzio trusted him and chose to have him at his side on many occasions. In the most controversial of their encounters, Giuliani blessed the gold and silver dagger ­donated to the poet by the women of Fiume. The date was 20 January 1920; the scene, the Cathedral of San Vito in Fiume. And inside the cathedral the words of D’Annunzio, at the end of the service officiated by Father Reginaldo, rang out, as audacious as ever. He spoke of the ‘sacrament of steel’, and the man of prayer, who had blessed the precious dagger, he apostrophized as the ‘armed priest’.169 It was too much for his superiors, and not only for them. On 3 February 1920 Il Popolo d’Italia, in an editorial with the title Cross and dagger, apart from reporting the episode, suggested that the Dominican was faced with having to choose ‘between Church and Fatherland’: The incorruptible Catholics pronounce anathema, but a true Christian will not hesitate to choose between the temple in which an Italian hero, who is also, thanks to his incomparable destiny, the greatest living poet, is honored, and the large city churches and small country churches illustrated by the electoral posters of the Partito Popolare.170 Giuliani’s reply was published ten days later. He denied that he had permitted D’Annunzio to speak in church (nor would he ever have asked him to do such a thing) and declared that no one would ever ask him to choose ‘between Church and Fatherland’.171 In early February the provincial father of the ­Dominicans, Benedetto Berro had, on the other hand, ordered Giuliani to abandon Fiume immediately, on pain of suspension. After three weeks, having received no reply, he wrote to the military ordinary, Monsignor Angelo Bartolomasi, asking him to trace the chaplain and have him brought back to the convent. Bartolomasi, the first military bishop in the history of Italy, had experienced in prima persona war and its sacralization. Since June 1915 he had been the highest ecclesiastical disciplinary authority of all the chaplains in the Italian armed forces, and during the war had travelled tirelessly along the front line to officiate masses, hold meetings with chaplains, meet the troops, console them in life, and bless them when dead.172 From this privileged vantage-point Bartolomasi had realized how far the language of the nation and of war had 169 For a report of the event: “Nella chiesa di S. Vito per l’offerta del pugnale vivo”, Vedetta d’Italia (21 January 1920). 170 “Croce e pugnale”, Il Popolo d’Italia (3 February 1920). 171 “Una lettera di Reginaldo Giuliani”, Il Popolo d’Italia (13 February 1920). 172 R. Morozzo della Rocca, La fede e la guerra, 10.

Religion, War, Nation

57

appropriated the religious lexicon to assume a sacred dimension of its own, as he bitterly pointed out in an extraordinary page of his notes to which he gave the title Incongruities: To express strong and sublime sentiments during the war, recourse is had to ecclesiastical, liturgical language. Someone who dies for the fatherland is called martyr. The Patria, the cause and ideals for which we are fighting are called holy. We celebrate at the altar of the motherland. We invoke hell, as the supreme punishment for those responsible for the war. We exalt faith in the destiny of the fatherland. We desire the baptism of enemy fire. We inflict excommunication on the proponents of neutrality. The soldier’s bread is called Eucharist (D’Annunzio). The 10 Commandments are invented for hatred of the enemy. The battles of Podgora and San Michele… become Calvaries. The medical officers and women nurses, a Priesthood. But when even so much as a mention is made of religion and Christianity in official documents, recourse is had to vague formulas: noble sentiments, religious duties and sentiments.173 There remained of course the regret, expressed in the last lines, that the new rhetoric on the nation was not matched by the effective official recognition of the Catholic religion. This was the essential ‘incongruity’ for Bartolomasi. That there was a need, as Father Enrico Rosa had begun to surmise, to distinguish and spell out the Catholic position on nationalism was clear. It was also undeniable, even if Bartolomasi does not admit it, that chaplains in their grey-green military uniforms and under the orders of their military bishop had contributed, explicitly or not, together with other sections of the Italian Catholic world, to give warfare, and the very ‘phraseology’ used to describe it, an unexpected and far from negligible resonance. Mobilized by the search for Giuliani, the highest authorities of the Church, who were not insensible of how far such ‘incongruities’ had been given ‘extreme’ form in the adventure of Fiume, took almost a month to recall him from

173 Quoted in S. Lesti, “Autorità, dovere, sacrificio. Il discorso di guerra di mons. Angelo ­Bartolomasi”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 8 (2011): 57. The passage, undated, is attributable according to Lesti to the period of the Great War.

58

chapter 1

the city. In the meantime, the chaplain had had time to preach for Lent to the hot-headed young legionaries, and, on 21 March, to bless, in the Piazza Dante, the flag of the Legione fiumana in the presence of the Comandante, who received the oath of the new battalions of recruits. ‘Ardor’, ‘youth’, flame’, ‘blood’, and ‘purity’: these were the strongest keywords of the last sermon preached by Father Reginald at Fiume. At the end of the ceremony, the chaplain left the city. D’Annunzio’s intervention on his behalf with the military ordinariate, put in writing on the very day of his departure, was of no avail. ‘Torch of love and lamp of sacrifice’: Giuliani, according to the poet, was epitomized by this image. The expression would become the title of the children’s book, Il Cappellano degli Arditi, published by Salani in its series ‘Piccoli libri della Patria’ in 1941.174 Giuliani had died a few years previously, fighting in Ethiopia in the ranks of the Militia. The new language of the nation which emerged during the Great War, and which was given its extreme expression during the adventure in Fiume, lent itself to being monopolized by Fascism and being shaped and connoted in ways that would leave their indelible stamp on the mentality of Italians, and, not least, of the Catholics among them. 174 S. Riva, Il cappellano degli arditi. (Padre Reginaldo Giuliani), Firenze, Salani 1941, 59–60.

chapter 2

Transitions 2.1

The Right Time

“I sought the pulse of the crowd and understood that, amid the general disorientation, my public was there”. In these words, penned in October 1939, ­Mussolini can be said to have summed up the analysis that, twenty years earlier, had led him to the foundation of the Fasci di combattimento, the Fascist Combat Leagues.1 The disorientation to which he referred was that of the setbacks and ambitions, the fears and hopes of the post-war period, during which political and trade-union life rapidly recovered in the attempt to curb or redirect the hardships and changes produced by three years of world war. Listening to the “pulse of the crowd” in 1919, Mussolini still did not hear the heartbeat of Catholicism. He intuited that political life had swung to the left, but having slammed the door on the Socialists, it seemed to him there were essentially two new forces from which he could seek support for his political aspirations: the ex-combatants and the Futurists. Amid the turmoil of the post-war period in which the incorporation of the Catholic masses in the Italian State gave every indication of having taken a road of no return, it was mainly the Futurists who had raised themselves into the paladins of anticlericalism, at least during the brief trajectory that saw Filippo Tommaso Marinetti involved in the foundation of a Futurist Political Party.2 The manifesto of the Party, launched in the pages of the paper Italia futurista in February 1918, proclaimed a form of “utterly intransigent and integral anticlericalism” as the basis of its own political programme. Italy and Rome – it asserted – should be swept clear of churches, friars, candles and madonnas in a violent and resolute way; marriage should be gradually devalued in favor of free love, and hence divorce made easy. Points 5 and 6 of the manifesto read as follows: 5. The current rhetorical and quietist anticlericalism [is] to be replaced by a violent and resolute anticlericalism of action, in order to liberate Italy and Rome of its theocratic medieval past, which would be able to choose a suitable land in which slowly to die. 1 Y. De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia. Storia di un regime, Roma: Editrice La Rocca, 1950, 158. 2 On the political views of Italian Futurists see E. Gentile, “Il futurismo e la politica”, in ­Futurismo, cultura e politica, (ed.) R. De Felice, Torino: Fondazione Agnelli, 1988, 105–159.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_004

60

chapter 2

Our utterly intransigent and integral anticlericalism represents the basis of our political programme; it does not admit half measures or deals; it clearly demands expulsion. Our anticlericalism aims to liberate Italy of churches, priests, friars, nuns, Madonnas, candles and church-bells. […] The one religion: the Italy of the future. It’s for her that we fight, and perhaps shall die, without being able to concern ourselves with the forms of government destined necessarily to follow the fatal fall of the theocratic and religious medieval past. 6. Abolition of marital authorization. Easy divorce. Gradual devaluation of marriage to make way for the gradual advent of free love and children of the State.3 For Marinetti the illusion of political ascent rapidly came to grief, as we shall see, in May 1920, when Mussolini distanced himself from the Futurists and began to identify the right wing as his most promising constituency. A few months before this happened Marinetti, intervening at the first congress of the Fasci di combattimento at Florence, had maintained, amid ovations and applause, the need to ‘de-vaticanize’ Italy: Fascists! – said Marinetti – There is no greater danger for Italy than the black [the clerical] peril. The Italian people, who have dared, wished and achieved the immense, heroic and victorious effort of the Great War, determining, with their victory, the victory of elastic and genial futurism over teutonic, cubic and professorial passivism, would fail in their mission if they did not know how energetically to liberate this beautiful peninsula, agile and pulsing with life, from its fatal papal infection. We cannot but wish, demand, and impose the expulsion of the papacy, or better still, to use a more precise expression, ‘de-vaticanization’.4 Up until that moment, the anti-Catholic line of Mussolini and of the movement of the Fasci di combattimento, founded in Milan on 23 March 1919, had ­remained clearly pronounced and as intransigent as ever. Thus, the programme of the Fascist movement of June 1919, published in Il Popolo d’Italia a few months before the elections in the same year, included “the expropriation 3 The document is published, in an appendix, in R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 738–739. 4 “Il discorso di Marinetti al Congresso dei Fasci di Combattimento”, Roma futurista 2 (2 November 1919): 1.

Transitions

61

of all properties of the religious congregations and the abolition of all bishops’ revenues, which constitute an enormous liability for the Nation and a privilege for the few”.5 The demand was repeated, in the same terms, in the ‘Postulates of the Fascist Programme’ of May 1920.6 “The fact that this demand should appear in Fascist programmes among the provisions of a financial order – as Pietro Scoppola has rightly observed – is fairly indicative of how much economic questions had come to outweigh anything else; but it’s also interesting to observe that a similarly radical demand does not figure in the programmes of the Socialist Party during the same period”.7 So, on the front of the anticlerical struggle, Mussolini was still firmly in the vanguard. He continued to proclaim himself proudly “anti-Christian in the manner of Nietzsche”.8 And in Il Popolo d’Italia, on 1st January 1920, he wrote: We have torn up all the revealed truths, spat on all the dogmas, rejected all the paradises, and scoffed at all the charlatans – white, red, black – who peddle miraculous drugs to give ‘happiness’ to mankind. […] Two religions are contending today to win dominion over spirits and the world: the black and the red. The encyclicals today are sent out from two Vaticans: that of Rome and that of Moscow. We are the heretics of these two religions. We alone are immune from the contagion.9 Mussolini’s philo-Catholic volte-face was excogitated for purely political reasons. It coincided with the shift to the right of the Fascist movement – a ­revisionist move decided after its resounding failure in the elections of ­November 1919, which forced Mussolini to seek a wider and more socially diversified constituency.10 In the second congress of the movement of the Fasci di Combattimento, held in Milan from 24 to 25 May 1920, Mussolini dismissed Marinetti’s demand that an uncompromising aversion to the papacy be propounded.11 His words clearly indicated his wish to trace a viable political road 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

The document is published in an appendix, in R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 742–743. Ibid., 746–748. P. Scoppola, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, 364. See E. Gentile, Contro Cesare. Cristianesimo e totalitarismo nell’epoca dei fascismi, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010, 88. B. Mussolini, “Tra il vecchio e il nuovo. Navigare necesse”, Il Popolo d’Italia (1 January 1920), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 14, 230–232. E. Gentile, Storia del Partito fascista 1919–1922. Movimento e milizia, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989, 69–162. R.J.B. Bosworth, Musssolini, new edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, 117.

62

chapter 2

towards the conquest of power. To this end, without forcing the pace, what was needed, in his view, was an unprejudiced pragmatism, an unblinkered political evaluation of the Italian reality: As for the Papacy – said Mussolini – we need to be clear: the Vatican represents some 400 million people scattered all over the world and an intelligent political approach ought to use this colossal force with a view to its own expansion. I am, today, completely outside any religion, but political problems are political problems. No one in Italy, unless he wants to unleash a religious war, can attack this spiritual sovereignty.12 The new policy line thus adumbrated induced Marinetti to quit the Fascist movement a few days after the end of the congress. During these same months another protagonist of the Italian avant-gardes, the Florentine intellectual Giovanni Papini concocted with the publisher Vallecchi a Storia di Cristo, a book that would shortly prove a publishing sensation due to the huge number of copies sold, both in Italy and in the world (it was translated into twentythree languages). From his early days in belle époque Florence, the founder of the literary review Lacerba had turned God himself into the narrator in Le memorie d’Iddio, inviting mankind to “become atheists” immediately and en masse.13 But now, in the Storia di Cristo, published in the spring of 1921, he sang a very different tune. He tried to condense in it what he now saw as the only possible salvation for Western civilization, led into the abyss by the triumph of modernity: the real life of Jesus of Nazareth, his violent and bloody death, his resurrection. What divided the Memories of God the Father from the History of his Son was, of course, the Great War. It was during what he called the “ferocious ablution” of its “immense decimation”14 that Papini had gradually matured his return to Roman Catholicism. He now prepared to assume the role of bard of the apocalypse that had remained vacant following the death of Léon Bloy,15 and place his pen at the service of the hierocratic project of restoring the societas christiana.16 Only a publisher as astute and unscrupulous 12 13 14 15 16

B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 15, 125. G. Papini, Le memorie d’Iddio, Firenze: La rinascita del libro, 1911. On the Florentine intellectual see the study of M. Isnenghi, Giovanni Papini, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1972. G. Papini, Storia di Cristo, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1921, 623. Thus E. Gentile, L’apocalisse della modernità. La Grande Guerra per l’uomo nuovo, Milano: Mondadori, 2008, 264. See M. Ciliberto, “Tra ‘societas christiana’ e cesarismo: Giovanni Papini”, in Giovanni P­ apini, (ed.) S. Gentili, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1983, 83–91.

Transitions

63

as Attilio Vallecchi could have grasped that Papini with his Storia di Cristo had tuned into the new culture of the age, oscillating between febrile catastrophism and the restless search for certainties: a culture personified by those ­intellectuals who, before the war, had been variously protagonists of the ­Futurist movement and whose volte-face had been captured by Antonio Gramsci in a letter to Trotsky in 1922. Trotsky had asked him for news about the Italian ­Futurists. Gramsci replied: “The most important exponents of pre-war ­Futurism have become Fascists, with the exception of Giovanni Papini who has become a Catholic”.17 As for Mussolini’s volte-face, that took shape in the following months when Fascism began to grow into a mass movement, trouncing the organizations of the far left with the violence of its Fascist action squads and presenting itself to the middle classes, landowners and industrialists as the paladin of Italian civilization and the defender of bourgeois society from the threat of the Bolshevik revolution. The volte-face coincided in some respects with that of the ­Italian nationalist movement in 1912–1913,18 when men like Luigi Federzoni and Alfredo Rocco had urged that the anticlericalism typical of the nationalism in the early years of the century be jettisoned, and that Catholics be offered a return as active protagonists at the heart of Italian culture and society, as a necessary premise for political success.19 But the discontinuity, in that case, had not been quite so radical, since in the very same years in which Mussolini was attacking the “old and bloody Vatican wolf” and its “black microbes”, Enrico Corradini had shown an attention to the Catholic Church, however vague in its nostalgia for a dogmatic authority, in evident convergence with the French nationalism of Maurras and Barrès, and with an explicit appeal to the universal mission of Rome.20 The fact however does not alter the substance of the volte-face: the Catholic religion had once again become an instrumentum regni in Italy. The repudiation of the anticlerical and anti-Catholic past characterized Mussolini’s electoral campaign for the general elections in May 1921. He was elected and entered the Chamber together with 35 other Fascist mps. Against 17

18 19

20

Gramsci’s letter is quoted in G. Cattaneo, “Giovanni Papini, prima della conversione e dopo”, in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo. Aspetti e figure della cultura e della politica dei cattolici nel ‘900, (ed.) G. Rossini, Bologna: il Mulino, 1972, 242. R. Molinelli, “Nazionalisti cattolici e liberali”, Rassegna storica del Risorgimento 52 (1965): 355–378. R. D’Alfonso, “Il nazionalismo italiano e le premesse ideologico-politiche del Concordato”, in Stato, Chiesa e relazioni internazionali, (ed.) M. Mugnaini, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003, 60–103. R. Moro, “Il mito dell’impero in Italia fra universalismo cristiano e totalitarismo”, in ­Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo, 320–325.

64

chapter 2

the background of the violent clashes between Fascists and their adversaries that had blighted the electoral campaign, there was eager anticipation to know what political line would be adopted by the Fascist leader once he had entered Parliament. His revirement, in its highest institutional guise, was expressed in his parliamentary debut: his intervention in the Chamber of Deputies on 21 June 1921, on the occasion of the traditional debate in response to the speech of the Crown. Mussolini devoted significant passages of his inaugural speech to the religious question. The anticlerical line, practiced – as we have seen – up until the previous year, was now stripped of the political significance that it had effectively assumed. It was dismissed, shrugged aside, as a youthful folly borrowed from the Carduccian mainstream.21 All this now seemed “somewhat anachronistic” to the Fascists, whom Mussolini described as “eminently unprejudiced spirits”. But apart from severing a link with his past, Mussolini also spelled out some programmatic points that further clarified his thoughts on the religious question. He now placed on the order of the day the resolution of relations between Italy and the Vatican. He affirmed the need to guarantee material aid to the Vatican, and henceforth showed his intention to assume the role of privileged interlocutor of the Holy See on the political and parliamentary level in such a way as to outflank, or rather outstrip, the Partito Popolare: There is a problem that transcends […] contingent problems and to which I want to recall the attention of the representatives of the Partito Popolare, and it is the historic problem of the relations that may intercede not only between us Fascists and the Partito Popolare, but between Italy and the Vatican. […] Italy, profane or secular, ought to furnish the Vatican with the material aid, the material concessions for schools, churches, hospitals, and so on, which a secular power has at its disposal.22 Mussolini, lastly, introduced a theme which would assume a growing centrality in the Fascist symbolic world. It was destined to become one of the main focuses of the cultural rapprochement between Catholics and Fascists. The new approach to the Catholic question and the Vatican was to be mediated through the idea of Rome, of its Latin and imperial tradition, embodied by Catholicism: “I affirm here – said Mussolini – that the Latin and imperial tradition of Rome is today represented by Catholicism”. And referring to a well-known affirmation of Theodor Mommsen, he continued: 21 See supra, Chapter 1, 17–18.. 22 Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxvi, Discussioni, 21 June 1921, 97.

Transitions

65

If, as Mommsen said some 25 or 30 years ago, there is nothing that remains in Rome without a universal idea, I think and affirm that the only universal idea that exists in Rome today is that irradiated by the Vatican.23 It was an idea, that of romanitas, that had quickened and tormented the men of the Risorgimento, before and after 20 September 1870.24 But here the Risorgimento interpretation was presented with the inflection impressed on it by the nationalists. The mission of the nation, in contrast to the Mazzinian ideals, had now lost every connotation of duty to humanity. The emphasis was placed instead, more pragmatically, on the imperialist duty of the right to rule. As for the suggestions of the Giobertian ‘primacy’, albeit present or implied in Mussolini’s words, they were manipulated to other ends: the presence of the papacy in Italy demonstrated the country’s imperial vocation and justified her future ambitions.25 In a few sentences, the Fascist leader placed on the agenda proposals and prospects that would soon be met with a favorable response from Pius xi, his aides, and from many Catholics. The trajectory traced by Mussolini in his parliamentary debut was confirmed at the time of the transformation of the Fascist movement into a party. That took place at the third congress of the Fasci di combattimento, held in Rome in November 1921. Already in the Linee programmatiche of the party, published in Il Popolo d’Italia a month before the congress, we find a re-affirmation of the “most absolute respect for all religious faiths; complete freedom for the Catholic Church in the practice of her spiritual ministry; solution of the dispute with the Holy See; conservation and reinforcement of the authority of the State in terms of eventual interferences of the clergy in civil life”.26 Mussolini in short dangled the prospect of a ‘conciliation’ with the Vatican, but hemmed it in with a good deal of caution and tactical reservation,27 as clearly emerges in his speech in the Augusteo, pronounced at the congress for the foundation of the Fascist Party on 9 November:

23 Ibid. 24 See F. Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1990 (1st edition 1951), 179–323, and A. Roccucci, Roma capitale del nazionalismo (1908–1923), Roma: Archivio Guido Izzi, 2001. 25 On the modulations of the idea of Rome in the vision of Mussolini and in the Fascist ideology of these years, see E. Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2007, 33–55. 26 “In attesa del terzo Congresso nazionale fascista. Linee programmatiche del Partito ­Fascista”, Il Popolo d’Italia (8 October 1921). 27 R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 81–84.

66

chapter 2

Before repealing the Legge delle Guarentigie [the law regulating relations between the State and the Vatican] a good deal of caution is needed. Vatican diplomacy is more skilful than that of the Consulta. Respect for every faith needs to be imposed, because, in the view of Fascism, religion forms part of the field of the individual conscience. Catholicism may be used for national expansion.28 The programme of the new party was published on 27 December 1921. Any reference to the expropriation of the properties of the religious congregations has vanished from it. On the other hand, the principle of the sovereignty of the State over the Church is reaffirmed: “The State is sovereign and this sovereignty cannot nor must not be encroached on by the Church, to which the w ­ idest freedom in the exercise of her spiritual power needs to be guaranteed”.29 The shift in emphasis, in the framework of a substantial accommodation of the Vatican, was the result of both the tug-of-war engaged in by Mussolini to hold together the anticlerical pressures still widely present within the Fasci di combattimento and the attempt to accredit the party in the eyes of the Holy See as a strong and reliable interlocutor. This latter line implied a struggle on all fronts against the Partito Popolare – in Parliament, in the press, in the exploitation of the violence of the Fascist action squads. The attacks against the exponents of the Catholic party were intensified in the course of 1922, when the crisis of the Liberal State, incapable of curbing the spread of Fascist violence due to the inherent weakness of precarious governments, reached its most acute phase.30 In the meantime, the National Fascist Party (pnf), with over 300,000 signed-up members, an armed militia, youth and women’s associations, flanked by trade unions comprising a million or so members, had emerged as the strongest organization in the country and was now preparing to seize power. 2.2

The Caltagirone Antipope

The growing power and influence that Fascism was assuming in the country was underestimated during this phase by the most important Catholic politician at the time, the Sicilian priest and co-founder of the Italian Popular 28 29

30

B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 17, 221. The Programme of the pnf is published, in an appendix, in R. De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, vol. 1, La conquista del potere (1921–1925), Torino: Einaudi, 1981 (1st edition 1966), 756–763. G. Albanese, La marcia su Roma, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2006, 19–83.

Transitions

67

Party (ppi), Don Luigi Sturzo (born in Caltagirone in 1871). The ppi, of which Sturzo had become general secretary, had obtained an intake of 100 mps in the general elections of November 1919, second only to the Socialists (with 156 mps) in the Chamber of Deputies. What had become the second largest Italian political party had found its electoral base and its local representatives in the widespread and flourishing grassroots network of Catholic organizations and associations that had existed well before its foundation. Specifically, these comprised Catholic trade-union organizations, peasant leagues, rural banks, professional associations, Catholic social, cultural and youth clubs that were spread through all the dioceses of Italy. Such a thriving popular base, while it ensured the ppi’s mass support, also aroused resistances and fears in those curial circles that had strong reservations about the ‘progressive’ innovations introduced by Sturzo and his scepticism of the tradition of a Catholicism sympathetic to the more reactionary appeals of the political right: the reason why “the shadow of ‘progressive’ heresy always flickered over Sturzo’s decisions”.31 In May 1921, on the eve of the general elections, Sturzo had denied, in a speech given before a packed Augusteo in Rome, the possibility that Fascism could ever emerge as a political party with its own “programmatic substructure”, or would ever be able to develop “its own autonomous life”.32 The electoral results once again proved favorable to the Partito Popolare. Its members in the Chamber of Deputies increased to 107, while those of the Socialist Party decreased to 123, also as a result of the schism in January 1921 – a schism from which the Italian Communist Party (pci) had derived its birth. Exponents of the ppi entered the government led by the Socialist Reformist Ivanoe Bonomi and the following two governments premiered by the ‘Giolittian’ Luigi Facta. In his already cited speech in Parliament of 21 June 1921, Mussolini had brushed aside the episodes of Blackshirt violence against ppi campaign meetings as “a few blows with the cudgel” and “a sacrosanct fire set to a paper that had defined Fascism as a criminal association”.33 The Partito Popolare – he had concluded – ought to choose: “either our friend or our foe or neutral”.34 On that very same evening Sturzo and Mussolini had met, on the initiative of the Patriarch of Venice Pietro La Fontaine and with the intermediation of the Venetian Fascist Giovanni Giuriati, at the priests’ house on the Via del Macao, where the 31

32 33 34

G. De Rosa and F. Malgeri, “L’impegno politico dei cattolici”, in Storia dell’Italia religiosa, (eds.) G. De Rosa, T. Gregory, A. Vauchez, vol. 3, L’età contemporanea, (ed.) G. De Rosa, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995, 253. L. Sturzo, Discorsi politici, Roma: Istituto Luigi Sturzo, 1951, 74–106, in particular 86–88. Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Leglislatura xxvi, Discussioni, 21 June 1921, 96. Ibid., 97.

68

chapter 2

cardinal was living.35 It was clear, however, that Sturzo and his party, with their objective of assigning a decisive role to Catholics in giving a democratic orientation to political action, posed a real obstacle to the affirmation of Fascism.36 Popolarismo and Fascism, Sturzo and Mussolini, moreover, found themselves engaged on the same terrain and on behalf of the same social classes – the one to give to the petty and middle rural bourgeoisie the right to civil and democratic citizenship within the State; the other to use these same forces against the peasant leagues, and re-establish order in rural areas.37 It was in January 1922, while Blackshirt violence was dominating political life in much of northern and central Italy, openly challenging the State with its thuggery, that Sturzo identified Fascism with a new clarity.38 Speaking in Florence on the third anniversary of the foundation of the ppi, and on the eve of the crisis of the Bonomi government, Sturzo emphasized the subversive and anti-democratic spirit of Fascism. It was, declared the Sicilian priest, a “youthful revolt” based on “the alternation of rhetoric and violence”. It channelled “the extreme effort of defense” of a middle class that had lost its trust in the institutions and politicians that represented it.39 The renewal of the old Liberal State could only be ensured, according to Sturzo, by forging a democracy inspired by Catholic principles, by promoting local autonomies, by achieving a new balance in the social and economic forces of the country, and by recovering a marginalized rural Italy. The fact is, however, that the Fascist promise of restoring tranquillity and order both to the countryside and to the cities met with the favor of a large part of the Catholic world, all the more so now that Mussolini was declaring his repudiation of any form of anticlericalism and posing as the champion of Catholicism. The death of Benedict xv on 22 January 1922 presented the occasion for intervening anew on the Catholic presence. This was the Pope who had accompanied, albeit with some resistance, the birth of the ppi and had officially removed the non expedit (the Vatican’s policy of non-participation in Italian 35

36 37 38 39

The episode has been reconstructed by Silvio Tramontin on the basis of the diary of Cardinal La Fontaine. See S. Tramontin, “Mussolini, la questione romana e i rapporti con i popolari in un documento inedito”, Humanitas 20 (1970): 409–475. G. De Rosa and F. Malgeri, L’impegno politico dei cattolici, 254. F. Malgeri, “Il Partito popolare italiano”, in Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia, (ed.) F. Malgeri, vol. 3, Roma: Il Poligono, 1980, 134. F. Piva, “Dalle lotte contadine al Partito Popolare (1871–1924)”, in F. Piva and F. Malgeri, Vita di Luigi Sturzo, Roma: Edizioni Cinque lune, 1972, 251–252. The speech was given in the Sala della Pergola in Florence, on 18 January 1922, to mark the third anniversary of the foundation of the Partito Popolare Italiano. L. Sturzo, Discorsi politici, 182–214.

Transitions

69

politics). His pontificate was commented on by the Fascist leader in the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia two days later. Benedict’s achievement was summed up in a way that left out support for democratic Catholicism and downplayed the condemnation of war as a “futile massacre”.40 Once again, and in a more pronounced way, however, Mussolini restated his belief that an accommodation of Catholicism within the Fascist dialectic should revolve around the motif of romanitas. It was Rome that had conferred on the Church, and by extension on Italy itself, a universal and imperial vocation: The pope is an emperor, albeit an elected emperor. He descends in a direct line from the empire of Rome. His political and spiritual dominion extends to some four hundred million human beings, scattered all over the world, so that one can say that the Catholic empire, which has its capital in Rome, is the largest and oldest empire in the world. […] The force of Catholicism – the very word says so – consists in its universalism. That’s why Rome is the only city in the world that can be called ‘universal’.41 Mussolini, however, continued, to show extreme caution about the political and diplomatic implications of these remarks, and about the resolution of the Roman Question: “We musn’t – he said – delude ourselves. That a détente in relations between Church and State in Italy is desirable and possible is something we have maintained for some time in the columns of this paper and ­elsewhere, but we have to realize that the Catholic Church cannot overstep her mark”.42 The dispute with the ppi and its secretary touched its most violent levels in the months of the first and second Facta government. Now that he saw that the conquest of power was within his grasp, Mussolini feared more than anything an alliance between the popolari and the socialisti riformisti which might give rise to a government able to put a stop to Fascist violence, restore legality, and block his path to power. In those months, Sturzo became the main target of his political battle: the Sicilian priest was likened to a Socialist wheelerand-­dealer, while Fascism was presented as the only reliable bulwark for the ­Catholic Church. The most aggressive tones in the dispute were touched on by Mussolini during the extremely grave crisis opened by the resignation of the 40 41 42

B. Mussolini, “Vaticano”, Il Popolo d’Italia (24 January 1922), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 18, 16–18. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 16.

70

chapter 2

Facta ministry, in an article, threatening in tone, published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 27 July 1922 under the title Noi e il Partito Popolare. Once again, Mussolini restated his message that Fascism was neither anti-Christian, nor anti-Catholic, indeed that it recognized in Catholicism “the synthesis between Judaea and Rome, between Christ and Quirinus”. But the heavy guns in his arsenal were reserved for Sturzo, who in his words was the unequivocal “tool of Satan”, while the policy of his party was castigated as “materialistic, tyrannical and anti-Christian”. The Partito Popolare – wrote Mussolini – is at once religious and profane. It begins with Christ and ends with the devil. Don Sturzo, it is said, still celebrates mass, i.e. sacrifice, renunciation, the acceptance of this vale of tears, and [Guido] Miglioli practises the class struggle as the most ­extreme of socialists. How does one reconcile the Christian “love of one’s neighbor” with the preaching of hatred against some categories of men? […] We are faced by a Party infected with socialism, hence anti-Catholic, hence anti-Christian. The Partito Popolare declares war on Fascism, and war it shall have. The modalities of this war depend on local circumstances; the further developments of this war are unpredictable, but it would be no cause for surprise if the struggle against the insupportable tyranny of the sharks of the Partito Popolare were to result in an anticlerical insurrection, a good deal less vacuous than the anticlerical campaigns of former times. In the upper echelons of the Vatican there are those who wonder whether the birth and origin of the Partito Popolare might not result in enormous damage for the Church. […] There are, in short, two popes in Italy: the first, don Sturzo, has the care of the flesh; the second, Pius xi, the care of souls. Is not don Sturzo, by any chance, the anti-pope and a tool in the hands of Satan? From a thousand symptoms it is by now clear that major storms will blow up on the horizon of the Church if the Partito Popolare continues to degenerate in its materialist, tyrannical and anti-Christian policy.43 However, in the summer of 1922 the ‘new man’ of Italian politics still did not inspire sufficient confidence in the Vatican if, in August, La Civiltà Cattolica would more than once accuse Fascism and its leader of violence, armed 43

B. Mussolini, “Noi e il Partito popolare”, Il Popolo d’Italia (27 July 1922) now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 18, 318–320.

Transitions

71

squads, ­punitive actions and campaigns of intimidation.44 The conclusion, for the ­Jesuit review, could only be one and it was clear: “Catholics – we read in the number dated 19 August 1922 – could neither […] approve of, nor support ­Fascism”, because it was “opposed”, at least as much as Socialism, “to the most elementary principles of Christianity”.45 In spite of the many professions it had made in favor of the Church “to anaesthetize consciences”, Fascism – the review explained in its following number, dated 2 September – was incompatible with the “spirit of Catholicism” and would be “fatally in collision” with it: A party that erects violence into a system, and that glorifies and parades it, as if it were destined to tramp the road of the most blatant tyranny, is thus in perfect antagonism to the spirit of Catholicism, and would be fatally in collision with it, in spite of the thousand and one declarations to the contrary made by the leaders of Fascism to anaesthetize consciences.46 On 18 September, on the eve of the National Council of the ppi, eight S­ enators on the right wing of the party addressed a long letter to Sturzo in which they explained their opposition to any prospects of reaching a deal with the Socialists or to any shift of the party to the left. The eight signatories of the letter included the conte Carlo Santucci and Giovanni Grosoli, respectively chairman and vice-chairman of the Banco di Roma.47 These two Senators were very much at home in the salons of the Vatican and highly obedient to papal directives. This was reason enough to lead some to suspect that the initiative was a signal to prepare the way for the collaboration of the Catholic right with the Fascists. The formation of a right wing of the ppi as an alternative to Sturzo’s leadership, moreover, had had authoritative sponsors among senior aides of Benedict xv in the previous year, but had been blocked by the Pope, who had showed how irremovable he was on the idea of the political unity of Catholics.48 Now, by contrast, the Holy See, in its search for an authoritative interlocutor able 44 45 46 47 48

See, for example, the pages of contemporary news items in La Civiltà Cattolica, 73/3 (19 August 1922): 369–376, and ibid. (2 September 1922): 467–473. Thus the article “La guerra fratricida in Italia e il ‘grido di pace’ del papa”, La Civiltà C ­ attolica, 73/3 (1922): 361–365, quotation 363. So in the contemporary news items, ibid.: 472–473. G. De Rosa, I conservatori nazionali: biografia di Carlo Santucci, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962, 83ff. G. Sale, Popolari e destra cattolica al tempo di Benedetto xv, Milano: Jaca Book, 2006, 127–131.

72

chapter 2

to reach an accord between the Vatican and the Italian State, seemed eager to cut itself loose from don Sturzo. Thus, while Mussolini dared in his arrogant speeches to suggest analogies between Fascism and Christianity,49 a circular of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State dated 2 October 1922 recommended Italian bishops and parish priests to remain uninvolved in the squabbling between the political parties. This meant, in effect, dissociating the responsibility of clerics and of the Church from the ppi and showing a degree of open-mindedness in not ruling out the possibility of reaching a compromise with the Fascists. The circular was prominently published in the Giornale d’Italia on 19 October, under a headline in which the Vatican explicitly disavowed the Partito Popolare.50 Twelve days later Mussolini rose with the consent of the sovereign to the government of the State, after having ordered the March on Rome and threatened a mobilization of Fascist Blackshirts with a view to a revolutionary conquest of power.51 The fortnightly review of the Society of Jesus, which on the eve of the March on Rome had defined Fascism, in an editorial penned by its authoritative director, Father Enrico Rosa, as a “paroxysm of Italian disunity, […] impotent effort of the old liberalism, of freemasons, nouveau riche industrialists and landowners, journalists, politician and the like”, which could never win the approval of Catholics,52 had rapidly to revise its judgement on Mussolini to underline the legitimacy of Fascism in the eyes of the Catholic world. The Father General of the Society of Jesus, Wlodozmierz Ledóchowski, and – it seems – the new Pope, Pius xi, had intervened on the question.53 49

50

51 52 53

“Faiths in their initial phase – Mussolini had written on 18 August 1922 – are intransigent. They open a road for themselves in the world with spiritual violence, which is almost always followed by practical violence. […] Christ himself did not preach a sermon to the moneychangers in the Temple […]. He had grasped that with certain people the only espe­ ranto to be used to make oneself understood is the whip” (B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 18, 357–358). Speaking at Udine on 20 September of the same year he had called Rome “one of the few cities of the spirit that exist in the world”, and attributed to the Eternal City “one of the greatest spiritual miracles recorded in the pages of history”, having transmuted “an oriental religion” into “an universal religion”, disseminated by the consular legions to the four corners of the earth. This Rome, he concluded, the Fascists would turn into “the beating heart, the winged spirit of imperial Italy” (ibid., 412). “Il documento del Vaticano che sconfessa il Partito Popolare”, Il Giornale d’Italia (19 October 1922). See A. Repaci, La marcia su Roma, new revised and enlarged edition, Milano: Rizzoli, 1972, 715–716. A. Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919–1929, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, 86–87. E. Rosa, “L’unità d’Italia e la disunione degli italiani”, La Civiltà Cattolica 73/4 (1922): 97–110. See G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, Milano: Jaca Book, 2007, 26–27.

Transitions

2.3

73

An Anti-modern Pope?

Achille Ratti had been elected Pope on 6 February 1922, on the fourteenth ballot. He was sixty-five years old. The name of Pius xi, chosen by the new Pope, was probably intended to signal continuity with Pius x. This is also attested by his appointment as head of the Holy Office of Rafael Merry del Val, one of the key men of the anti-modernist crackdown implemented by that Pope, and to whom he had previously served as Secretary of State. Admittedly Achille Ratti had not hitherto shown any markedly uncompromising sympathies. During the years in which he had worked at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, indeed, he had forged a network of relations especially concentrated in circles of major cultural and scientific enlightenment.54 When the storm launched by the Vatican against modernism had touched his Archbishop, the Cardinal of Milan Andrea Ferrari, Ratti had not failed to express words of solidarity to him, though without going so far as to expose himself publicly against the excesses of integrism.55 The decisions of the hierarchy merited absolute obedience, as shown by his decision at Christmas 1907 to refuse communion to Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, a contributor to the review Il rinnovamento, a periodical condemned by the Congregation of the Index.56 Confirming Merry Del Val as head of the Holy Office or Cardinal Gaetano De Lai as head of Consistorial Congregation meant accepting the need to place a counterweight to the designation as Secretary of State of Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, former Secretary of State of Benedict xv: a man regarded as the expression of the ‘liberal’ group that had played a decisive role during the Conclave in the election of Achille Ratti. The choice was an unusual one, because it was customary for a new pope to install a cardinal different from that of his predecessor as head of the oldest and most influential office of the Roman Curia. When Cardinals Merry del Val and De Lai had promised their own support to Ratti during the conclave they had done so on condition that Gasparri be removed from the post of Secretary of State. The reply was a firm negative, and the reply to subsequent overtures even more categorical: “I’m sorry this would probably not be the only error I would commit on the throne of St. Peter, but undoubtedly it would be the first”.57 54 55 56 57

G. Vecchio, “Achille Ratti, il movimento cattolico, lo Stato liberale”, in Achille Ratti Pape Pie xi, Rome: École française de Rome, 1996, 69–88. Ibid., 74–75. N. Raponi, Tommaso Gallarati Scotti tra politica e cultura, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1971, 85–86. G. Spadolini, Il cardinale Gasparri e la Questione Romana, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1972, 259–260.

74

chapter 2

The exordium of a pontificate destined to be decisive in the history of the papacy and in that of the 20th century was distinguished by a striking gesture: the blessing imparted to the crowd from the central balcony of St. Peter’s, a gesture that the popes had not made for over half a century, ever since the breach of the Porta Pia had marked the end of the Papal State. The proclamation of Cardinal Ratti’s nomination as Pope was greeted by those who hailed him as l’italianissimo, according to an observer as sharp-sighted as Arturo Carlo ­Jemolo in the Nuova Antologia,58 but, even more than his predecessors, Pius xi was faced by having to come to terms with a period marked by the dramatic centrality of international political developments: four dictators (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Franco) who threatened the European balance of power, the financial crash in 1929, a colonial war, the serious clash between Church and government in Mexico, a civil war in Spain, racial laws in Germany and Italy, and preparations for the Second World War.59 On questions of international policy the first measures taken by Pius xi were in continuity with the line traced by his predecessor, as was also shown by his decision to confirm Gasparri as Secretary of State. Pius xi was impelled by the same preoccupation as Benedict xv: that of resolving the post-war conflicts between the nations that had either won or lost the Great War, and by similar reservations about the peace treaties.60 But the successor of Della Chiesa placed the diplomatic activity of the Holy See in a clearly hierocratic horizon: “peace would only be restored within an order of collective life which he described as ‘the social reign of Christ’, in other words the organization of a human society that would recognize the supreme sovereignty of the Savior and hence of his vicar on earth”.61 It is no accident that Pius xi would dedicate his second encyclical Quas primas published on 11 December 1925, on the closure of the Holy Year, to the theme of the Kingship of Christ.62 The document,

58 59

60 61 62

A.C. Jemolo, “Pio xi e la nuova situazione politica del Papato”, Nuova Antologia (16 February 1922): 379. F. Margiotta Broglio, “Pio xi”, in Enciclopedia dei papi, vol. 3, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000, 621. Nor can we fail to refer to the classic study of L. Salvatorelli, Pio xi e la sua eredità pontificale, Torino: Einaudi, 1939. J.F. Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 75ff. Thus D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 53. An English translation of Pius xi’s encyclical Quas primas can be downloaded from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). A detailed analysis of the encyclical in D. Menozzi, “Regalità sociale di Cristo e secolarizzazione. Alle origini della Quas primas”, Cristianesimo nella storia 16 (1995): 79–113.

Transitions

75

which introduced the feast of Christ the King, assigned a supreme role to the Church, as a global alternative to modern civilization. Prospecting apocalyptic scenarios in a world in which seeds of discord had been sown, and in which bitter enmities and rivalries reigned between nations, the encyclical urged the heads of civil society “not to neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ”, nor to ignore Christian principles in the establishment of laws and the administration of justice: Nor is there any difference between the individual and the family or the State; for all men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In him is the solution of the individual, in him is the solution of society […]. If the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ.63 The feast of Christ the King, prepared by the post-war Eucharistic congresses, would, the Pope declared, be the effective remedy against “the plague which now infects society […] the plague of anti-clericalism, its errors and impious activities”.64 Moreover, the Kingship of Christ would represent the justification for the Church’s government over the world. It was rooted – as Pius xi did not fail to point out – in the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to which families, armies, and nations throughout the Catholic world had been consecrated in previous decades.65 The bleeding heart of Jesus symbolized the divine affliction for the de-christianized results of the modern world; and its cult, relaunched in the years of the Great War, lent itself to driving the theocratic project for the re-Christianization of society. The main animator of devotion to the Sacred Heart was, as we have seen, Father Agostino Gemelli, who had accentuated the nationalistic aspects of the 63 Pius xi, Quas primas, no. 18. 64 Ibid., no. 24. 65 D. Menozzi, “La dottrina del regno sociale di Cristo”, in Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo, 17–55. To Menozzi we also owe the main and most detailed studies on the Sacred Heart; among his many contributions we may mention, in particular, that to the volume Sacro cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società, Rome: Viella, 2001. See also A. Zambarbieri, “Per la storia della devozione al Sacro Cuore in Italia tra ’800 e ’900”, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 41 (1987): 361–432, and F. De Giorgi, “Il culto al Sacro Cuore di Gesù: forme spirituali, forme simboliche, forme politiche nei processi di modernizzazione”, in Santi, culti, simboli nell’età della secolarizzazione, (ed.) E. Fattorini, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1997, 195–211.

76

chapter 2

cult, to the point of consecrating the army of the Kingdom of Italy to it. In the post-war period, Gemelli had succeeded in even more ambitious objectives. To the Catholic University of Milan, which he had founded and directed, he gave the name Sacred Heart. The inauguration of the first confessional institute for university education had taken place, with great solemnity, on 7 December 1921, in the presence of the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Achille Ratti, who only two months previously had been appointed as head of the Ambrosian archdiocese. Father Agostino’s objective was to form a Catholic ruling class obedient both to the nation and to the Church. His was a plan that, as had clearly emerged since 1919, had little in common with the popolarismo of don Luigi Sturzo – the political project of a non-confessional and democratic party.66 In an Italy that was groping its way through the rubble and traumas of the ­post-war years Gemelli’s programme was extreme; it aimed at realizing the ‘thesis’ of a complete Catholic conquest of the nation through the formation of a close-knit and highly visible confessional leadership. The international political situation had already been touched on by Pius xi in his first programmatic document, the encyclical Ubi arcano Dei consilio, of 23 December 1922.67 In it, he outlined the doctrinal framework of his own pontificate. He defined in it the central coordinates of a precise political theology.68 He aimed to resume the programme of Pius x to “restore everything in Christ” and that of Benedict xv to ensure the victory of peace. The two programmes were summed up in the subtitle of the encyclical: “the Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ”. Ubi arcano Dei consilio describes a present afflicted with the direst catastrophes: the material and moral ruins of the Great War, the crisis of the clergy, moral degradation, and exaggerated nationalism. Such evils had been produced and diffused by modernity, the progressive abandonment of God by society, the expulsion of Jesus Christ and doctrine from schools, from legislation, and from the family. The Pope paints a sombre vision of the modern world that is almost apocalyptic, a cupio dissolvi, which contrasted with the conception of history, nourished by unusually wide learning, animated by scientific curiosity and imbued with a quiet optimism, which Ratti had developed in the years of his religious formation:69 so much so as to appear “too learned” and “too much a child of his time” to an ­intellectual nourished by 66 67 68 69

G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare italiano, 62ff. An English translation of Pius xi’s encyclical Ubi arcano Dei consilio (23 December 1922) can be downloaded from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). Thus F. Bouthillon, La naissance de la Mardité. Une théologie politique à l’âge totalitaire: Pie xi (1922–1939), Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001, 42. G. Vecchio, Achille Ratti, il movimento cattolico, lo Stato liberale, 77–82.

Transitions

77

what has been called a ‘Catholicism of darkness’ such as Domenico Giuliotti.70 In Ubi arcano Dei consilio the profound pessimism of the analysis, the mistrust in man’s own ability to redeem himself, opened the way to what he perceived as the only solution: that of realizing the Kingdom of Christ, which meant submitting modern society to the moral guidance of the Catholic Church and extending her moral authority to governments, peoples, and international policy, with the conviction that only medieval Christendom was worthy of the title ‘true League of Nations’: When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another’s word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. […] No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity.71 The main weapon in the ‘holy battle’ to restore the power of the Church in public life would be Catholic Action, in close obedience to papal directives. The encyclical condemned all the disagreements that unhappily existed in the Catholic Church and that threatened the absolute unanimity with Rome. It coined the category of ‘moral, legal and social modernism’ to brand the tendency not to observe Catholic doctrine in its entirety: on the social question, on the right to property, on the relations between Church and State, between religion and fatherland, between nation and nation, and on the prerogatives of the papacy and the episcopate.72 Pius xi thus proposed a political theology constructed around a monolithic and authoritarian view of Catholicity. It was a system well-suited to an embrace with Fascism: for both shared an authoritarian, anti-liberal, anti-­democratic and hierarchical root. But it was also a system that, precisely by virtue of its 70

D. Giuliotti-G. Papini, Carteggio, vol. 1, 1913–1927, (ed.) N. Vian, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984, 424–426, in particular 425. The expression “Catholicism of darkness”, referred to Giuliotti, is that of Carlo Bo, Prefazione, ibid., x. 71 Pius xi, Ubi arcano Dei consilio, no. 45. 72 G. Verucci, L’eresia del Novecento, 97–98.

78

chapter 2

a­ ll-inclusive character, could not but vie with the totalitarian claims of the State that Mussolini was about to construct. 2.4

Lending Credence to the New Power

Achille Ratti had met Mussolini for the first time in Milan on 4 November 1921. The future Pope had arrived in the Ambrosian archdiocese only a few weeks previously, on 8 September 1921, soon after he had been raised to the College of Cardinals. He had come to Milan after three years spent in Warsaw, first as apostolic visitator for Poland and Lithuania, then as nuncio for Poland and ecclesiastical high commissioner for the territories of Upper Silesia and Eastern Prussia.73 Monsignor Ratti had been greeted in a triumphal manner on his ­arrival in Poland, but soon found himself in a Poland at war, riven by nationalistic currents, exasperated by the plebiscite for the maintenance of ­German ­sovereignty over Upper Silesia and by the attempt of Marshall Pilsudski to extend Polish influence into the Baltic area as an anti-Russian buffer. This was a very difficult situation for the Holy See, in which it was necessary to proceed along a knife edge to ensure the impartiality of the Church.74 In those ­circumstances Ratti had given proof of not exactly brilliant diplomatic gifts: considered philo-Polish by the Germans, he had ended up by disappointing also the Poles, who had threatened to break off relations with the Holy See when the Cardinal of Breslau Bertram had issued a provision in which the nondiocesan clergy was prohibited from participating in any political activity. In the spring of 1921, the Holy See’s Secretariat of State was left with no option but to recall the nuncio, in spite of the reputation of courage he had won in August 1920 at the time of the Bolshevik invasion of Warsaw, when he had refused to leave the city with the Polish government and the diplomatic representatives of other countries. Shortly after he was raised to the Sacred College on 15 June 1921, Ratti was transferred to Milan to replace the recently deceased Ferrari as head of the archdiocese. He remained there until the conclave of 2 February: a period of five months which saw Ratti inaugurate the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, chair a conference of Lombard bishops, and authorize Fascist militiamen to attend religious celebrations in uniform. However, it was just the religious ceremony to commemorate the Unknown Soldier that provided

73 74

F. Margiotta Broglio, “Pio xi”, 619–620. On this period see in particular R. Morozzo Della Rocca, Le nazioni non muoiono, 281ff.

Transitions

79

the occasion for the first meeting between the cardinal and the leader of the Blackshirts. The Archbishop, Mussolini later recalled, had demonstrated ‘great courtesy’ and had permitted the Fascist action squads to enter the cathedral with their pennants.75 More or less during the same period Cardinal Ratti, in a conversation with Giacomo Boni, the archaeologist who had spent a quarter century directing the excavations in the Roman Forum,76 had spoken of Mussolini as ‘a formidable man’, at least according to what is reported years later by a French journalist: He’s a man, my son, who is advancing with great strides and invading everything like a force of nature. He is a new convert, because he comes from the ranks of the far left. He has the zeal of a novice that impels him to press forward. […] He is the future. It remains to be seen how all this will turn out and the use he makes of his strength.77 The show of strength Mussolini had demonstrated with the March on Rome was not followed by the enunciation of any clear position on the part of the Holy See. The Pope – commented L’Osservatore Romano in its 30–31 October 1922 issue – intended to remain “above any political contest”, though with­ out renouncing his guiding role that presides “spiritually over the destinies of all Catholic nations”.78 Besides, reassurances about the support that Fascism would guarantee to the Catholic faith and to the Church had reached the Vatican.79 Admittedly, on 29 October, Father Rosa, who hadn’t had time to adjust the line of his editorials in La Civiltà Cattolica to the new papal position, was accosted by a group of Blackshirts in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome and, to the sound of obscene songs and anticlerical jeers, invited to make the Fascist salute to their pennants.80 But a few days after the formation of the new ­government, Cardinal Gasparri, in an interview given to a French journalist, called Fascism a necessity for Italy. The country, he said, was threatened 75 76

77 78 79 80

G. Castelli, La Chiesa e il fascismo, Roma: L’Arnia, 1951, 46. On the relations between Boni and Mussolini between 1922 and 1925 see now the fine study of P.S. Salvatori, “Liturgie immaginate: Giacomo Boni e la romanità fascista”, Studi storici 53 (2012): 421–438. L. Valti, “Celui qui ouvrit le Vatican”, L’Illustration (9 January 1937): 33. Thus in the editorial note commenting on the message of the “Holy Father to the Bishops of Italy”, L’Osservatore Romano (30–31 October 1922). See the report sent to the Secretariat of State following the March on Rome, reprinted in G. Sale, Popolari e destra cattolica al tempo di Benedetto xv, 175–193, in particular 188. D.A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy, London: Oxford University Press, 1970 (1st edition 1941), 131.

80

chapter 2

with anarchy and King Victor Emanuel iii had done well to entrust the post of prime minister to Mussolini rather than order the troops to open fire on the Blackshirts.81 A good impression, too, had been produced in the Roman Curia by the participation, on 4 November, of Mussolini, the King and the government in its entirely in the mass celebrated in the basilica of Santa Maria degli A ­ ngeli for the victory anniversary. La Civiltà Cattolica emphasized that for the first time the commemoration of victory had, by order of the government, unified ­“religion and fatherland in a single sentiment”. This was “a new development” – ­continued the note – “after so many years of official oblivion of God, whose name our rulers no longer dared either to invoke or pronounce”.82 This was in fact the first time that this ceremony was held in the Eternal City. It was a ceremony widely repeated in post-war Europe and embodied in an especially effective and spectacular way the paramount need for national reconciliation in a show of collective mourning.83 The Victory holiday had been introduced by the second Facta government on 23 October 1922,84 but the solemn celebration of the event was ordered by the Mussolini government at its first cabinet meeting, on the proposal of the prime minister himself. The programme and ritual of the celebration then introduced would remain substantially unchanged in the following year. The religious service celebrated in the church of Santa ­Maria degli Angeli, in the presence of the king, major representatives of the State, and members of the government, including the prime minister, would be followed by the arrival in Piazza Venezia, the ascent to the Altare della ­Patria at the foot of the Victor Emanuel II monument, and the tribute of a minute’s ­silence at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, paid by the highest authorities of the State on their knees. This was one of the most powerful expressions of the political mysticism of Fascism; it was a ‘foundation myth’ of its symbolic world, a sacralization of its political message.85 Yet, this was an aspect on which one of the most practiced men in the government of the Holy See did not expatiate at the time. In a 81 82 83

84 85

“Le fascisme et le Vatican”, Le Journal (11 November 1922). “Cronaca contemporanea”, La Civiltà Cattolica 73/4 (1922): 352–353. See G.L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York, ­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, and J. Winter, Sites of Memory. Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. M. Ridolfi, Le feste nazionali, Bologna: il Mulino, 2004, 145ff. See E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista, 74ff., and M. Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture in the Interwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997, 82–99.

Transitions

81

c­ onversation in the following days, Cardinal Gasparri confided his satisfaction to Baron Napoléon Eugène Beyens, Belgian ambassador to the Holy See: Mussolini – His Eminence informed me – told us he is a good Catholic and that the Holy See has nothing to fear from his part. To begin with, he insisted on the presence of all his ministers, and of the King himself, in the mass celebrated in Santa Maria degli Angeli on 4 November, in tribute to the Unknown Soldier. Before the monument to Victor Emanuel, where the mortal remains of this soldier are laid to rest, he ordered everyone to kneel and pray for one minute; a minute that must have seemed interminable to the several free-thinkers present, but everyone bent their knees and knelt down.86 The Cardinal then concluded: “Let’s give him a few months’ credit, before making a judgement of the revolutionary coup d’état, which he has carried out in a masterly way”.87 In the Curia, the ‘credit’ would seem to have been speedily repaid. For, in his first speech as premier in the Camera dei Deputati on 16 November 1922, the head of the government promised a “particular” respect for Catholicism and the Church. And he ended his speech by invoking God’s blessing on himself: “May God help me to lead my arduous struggle to a victorious end!”88 During the next two years the youngest prime minister in Italy’s history issued a series of provisions in favor of the Church, which fulfilled claims and requests that had been ignored, or contested, for sixty years by successive Liberal governments of the kingdom. Mussolini was able to realize them thanks to the contribution of senior administrators in the ministerial machinery like Amedeo Giannini,89 who was not among the first wave of Fascists, having worked in the prime minister’s office with Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, before being moved to head the Press Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1920, and then, in 1923, appointed councilor of state and general secretary of the ministry’s legal department.90 Mussolini’s respect for the Vatican in this phase did not amount to a systematic policy, but was rather expressed in a series of p ­ rovisions, 86

N.E. Beyens, Quatre ans à Rome 1921–1926. Fin du pontificat de Benoit xv, Pie xi, les débuts du fascisme, Paris: Plon, 1934, 136–137. 87 Ibid. 88 B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 19, 23–24. 89 R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 105. 90 G. Melis, “Giannini, Amedeo”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 54, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000, 485–489.

82

chapter 2

f­ragmentary but of strong symbolic value, which tried to address the desi­ derata of the Holy See. The government thus pledged its commitment to the indissolubility of marriage and its opposition to divorce. The display of the crucifix in school classrooms, and successively in all public offices, was made obligatory; funds were made available for the reconstruction of churches damaged in the war; school fees for private schools were pegged to those for public schools; provisions were made for the introduction into the civil calendar of various religious holidays; ecclesiastics were exonerated from military service. The government also intervened to keep afloat the Banco di Roma, which had a central role in the control and direction of the main Catholic banks. The Grand Council of Fascism declared that Fascism was incompatible with one of the historic enemies of the Church: freemasonry. Other provisions went in the direction of the protection of morality from a crackdown on gambling to measures to curb pornography and alcoholism. The real demonstration that Mussolini and his ministers intended to give the coup de grace to ‘secularism’ seemed, however, to be given by the Gentile reform of schools, announced by the minister on the day following his appointment as Minister of Public Instruction on 31 October 1922, and culminating in the royal decrees of the spring and autumn of 1923. The teaching of Catholic religion thus became obligatory in state primary schools. State examinations were extended to all students, irrespective of what kind of school they were attending and private schools were granted complete freedom to teach their own curriculum.91 It would very soon become clear, however, that the Gentile reform was inspired not by any direct intention to support the Church, but by the indirect aim to stimulate the ability of Catholic teaching to compete at the national level with a view to enriching higher education: universities, thought Gentile, ought to be highly selective as a training-ground for the ruling class.92 And it certainly did not escape the ecclesiastical hierarchies how far the role of Catholic teaching in primary schools was, or would become, subservient to a Gentile’s view of religion as elementary and total Weltanschauung: necessary in primary schools to help children acquire a first understanding of the world and acquire ethical rules of conduct. However, primary education would ultimately be destined to be replaced by philosophy, which would teach older pupils the ethical State and the authority that the philosopher of Castelvetrano

91 92

M. Galfrè, Una riforma alla prova. La scuola media di Gentile e il fascismo, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2000. A. Gaudio, Scuola, chiesa e fascismo. La scuola cattolica in Italia durante il fascismo, 1922–1943, Brescia: La Scuola, 1995.

Transitions

83

considered spiritually superior because more rational.93 Reservations to the reform were on the whole modest.94 The overall judgement was positive. The organs of the press closest to the Holy See, L’Osservatore Romano and La Civiltà Cattolica, predictably applauded the royal decrees on schools. So too did ­Gemelli’s review Vita e Pensiero. The only real criticism came from don Sturzo and from the left of the Partito Popolare; neither failed to see the underlying political design, of which the reform formed part, or the totalitarian ambition of the ideology which lay at its basis.95 In the meantime, the first secret contacts took place between the government and the Holy See on the Roman Question. 2.5

Discreet Agreements

Provisions in the ecclesiastical field of 1922–1923 did not radically differ, in substance, from the political line pursued by the last Liberal governments.96 Their introduction, however, would now pursue a new objective: to demonstrate that the national government was able to implement, improve and surpass the programme of the Partito Popolare in the defense and promotion of Catholic interests. A few weeks after the March on Rome Mussolini personally took the initiative in seeking to establish a contact with Cardinal Gasparri.97 In other government circles, too, similar overtures were made. Fulvio Milani, for example, newly appointed Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of J­ ustice and Religious Affairs, made arrangements to meet the under-secretary of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Monsignor ­Giuseppe ­Pizzardo.98 Milani was an mp of the Partito Popolare, which then had two ministers in the Mussolini government: Stefano Cavazzoni (Labour) and Vincenzo Tangorra (Treasury), and a further three under-secretaries: Giovanni 93 94 95

96 97 98

G. Turi, Giovanni Gentile. Una biografia, Firenze: Giunti, 1995, 318. G. Verucci, Idealisti all’Indice. Croce, Gentile e la condanna del Sant’Uffizio, Roma-Bari: ­Laterza, 2006, 49ff. An analysis of the various positions of Catholics on the Gentile reform can be found in L. Ceci, “Il dibattito sull’insegnamento della religione tra le due guerre”, in La religione istruita nella scuola e nella cultura dell’Italia contemporanea, (eds.) L. Caimi and G. Vian, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013, 117–141. F. Margiotta Broglio, Italia e Santa Sede. Dalla grande guerra alla Conciliazione. Aspetti politici e giuridici, Bari: Laterza, 1966, 249–251. Ibid., 108. This is what emerges from the new Vatican documentation published in G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 35ff.

84

chapter 2

Gronchi (Industry and Commerce), Umberto Merlin (Liberated Territories), Ernesto Vassallo (Foreign Affairs). In ecclesiastical affairs, to which he had been assigned by the Minister Aldo Oviglio, Milani at first moved with caution, even refusing the proposal, which came from Pizzardo, to get in touch with Gasparri. The time for official talks had not yet come. Hence, the idea of an exploratory meeting with don Giovanni Minozzi and Father Giovanni Genocchi. The former enjoyed the esteem of many politicians for having organized during the war the soldiers’ houses on the front or immediately behind it, in which infantrymen during periods of furlough could unwind, listen to music, watch films, and be helped to write letters home. At the end of the war don ­Minozzi had founded with Father Giovanni Semeria the Opera Nazionale ­Mezzogiorno d’Italia, a charity for the assistance of orphans of war. ­Genocchi, of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, had an adventurous life behind him; it had led him from the Mediterranean to Asia, from Australia to Latin A ­ merica.99 For over fifteen years, he had moved in an area of institutional collaboration between the Italian State and the Holy See. He had frequented government ministries and Catholic associations no less than the fashionable salons of the capital. His name had been passed to the Holy Office on the occasion of the major campaign against modernism in 1909–1910. A few years later, in 1916, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office had ordered him to make a public retraction for a statement he had made on miracles which was considered erroneous.100 His immediate submission had however permitted Genocchi to regain the Pope’s trust, with the result that Benedict xv sent him as apostolic visitator to Ukraine in 1919.101 It was Genocchi who reported the details of his meeting with Milani to the Secretariat of State. Milani – wrote Genocchi in a report dated 19 January 1923 – had proposed a secret meeting, “in a place hidden from the curiosity of journalists and others”.102 He wanted to know what were the desiderata of the Holy See for improving the financial state of the clergy, but more especially to discuss specific problems. He considered the definition of method a priority: the initial talks should be secret, not official and they should be mediated by a ‘person of trust’ who would not give rise to suspicions.

99

R. Cerrato, “Genocchi, Giovanni”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 53, Roma: I­ stituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1999, 731–732. 100 G. Verucci, L’eresia del Novecento, 52–54 and 92–93. 101 R. Morozzo Della Rocca, Le nazioni non muoiono, 258ff. 102 The document is published in G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 314–315.

Transitions

85

Not officially, which is out of the question at the moment, but privately by way of the exchange of information – continued Genocchi –, Milani would like to know what project the Holy See would prefer and anything new it would have to suggest. Otherwise, the plans he proposes to present could be incongruous. Maximum confidentiality is needed and in these affairs, as perhaps in others, a person of complete trust would be needed, someone who would not give rise to suspicions. Conte Santucci has also spoken with Milani, but he is too busy. Milani thinks a priest would be better.103 Genocchi suggested the name of don Minozzi, but the Secretariat of State preferred to wait a little longer before choosing its own unofficial intermediary with the Italian government. In his wish to create a direct rapport with the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Mussolini preferred instead to use as his intermediary the conte Santucci, who not by chance had skirted around Milani’s proposal. In early January, the head of the Italian government wrote to the chairman of the financially unstable Banco di Roma to tell him of his wish to have “a very confidential meeting with His Excellency [Cardinal] Gasparri”, possibly in the apartment at the Palazzo Guglielmi, which had the convenience of having two entrances: one on the Via del Gesù 56, the other on the Piazza della Pigna 6, so that the two could enter the building from two different doors without anyone suspecting a meeting between them.104 The overture led to Gasparri and Mussolini meeting in the Palazzo Guglielmi on 19 or 20 January 1923. The conversation between them – of which there are no direct sources – was probably confined to generalities. In the Vatican’s view, the government had been in power for too short a time and it was first necessary to understand what its staying-power might be. Giacomo Acerbo, then under-secretary in the prime minister’s office, had opportunity to gather Mussolini’s first impression, having accompanied him in the limousine and waited for him at the corner of the Piazza della Pigna: “We need to proceed with extreme caution – the Duce is reported to have murmured, as if to himself, in the car – since these distinguished gentlemen are very capable, and before entering into preliminary conversations, they want to be sure of the stability of our government”.105 The other point of view, that of Gasparri, was registered by the banker Santucci: “The cardinal came out from the entrance on the Piazza 103 Ibid., 315. 104 The meeting between Gasparri and Mussolini is reconstructed in F. Margiotta Broglio, Italia e Santa Sede, 107–110. 105 Thus Acerbo in a page of his memoirs, published in an appendix, ibid., 548–549.

86

chapter 2

della Pigna and on leaving said to me: I’m very satisfied by the meeting; he’s a first-class man. We agreed that for the time being it’s not sensible to discuss in full the Roman Question, and that it will suffice for the immediate future to confine ourselves to making relations between the Vatican and the Italian Government more respectful and benevolent”.106 Santucci was left with the doubt whether the two had also discussed the Banco di Roma. The doubt must soon have been dispelled, as a few weeks later the head of the government asked him to resign from his chairmanship of the bank “for reasons of health”.107 Almost certainly, they had discussed the question of a person of trust through whose intermediation they could remain in contact. That they identified the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi seems clear, for the meetings between the latter and Mussolini began shortly after. At the time the Jesuit could count on a close-knit network of relations, formed during the years in which he had held (since 1914) the post of general secretary of the ­Society of Jesus – a post that became of crucial importance during the period of World War i, when the Father General of the Order Wlodzimierz Ledóchowski, of Polish origin but of Austrian citizenship, was forced to abandon Rome, delegating a large part of the responsibility for the running of the Order to his general secretary. During this period, Tacchi Venturi had thus entered into contact with many personalities of the Italian political world, including Prime Ministers Boselli and Orlando. Of special importance was his friendship with the Councillor of State Amedeo Giannini, whom he had got to know early in 1920, and with Senator Salvatore Contarini, under-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.108 The mystery of the first meeting between Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini, during which various hypotheses were advanced,109 was solved by the opening of the Roman Archive of the Society of Jesus for the years of the pontificate of Pius xi. In his memoirs, dictated by the by-now blind Jesuit in the autumn of 1951, Tacchi Venturi recalled his first meeting with Mussolini with some precision: But that brings me to the 28 October 1922. Less than two months previously the Duce, Benito Mussolini, had become Dictator of Italy, installing 106 Thus Santucci in his Nota riservatissima, reproduced in an appendix, ibid., 441–443. 107 Ibid. Italics in the text. 108 For a biographical profile see S. Tramontin, “Tacchi Venturi, Pietro”, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in Italia 1860–1980, (eds.) F. Traniello and G. Campanini, 2, I ­protagonisti, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1982, 631–633. 109 See for example F. Margiotta Broglio, Italia e Santa Sede, 110–111, note 7, and G. Sale, ­Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 54.

Transitions

87

himself in the former Palazzo Chigi, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been transferred from the Palazzo della Consulta. I then thought to obtain from the new master of Italy the reply that we had long awaited, and, thanks to the good offices of the young Press Secretary, Dr. Amedeo Giannini, soon to be appointed Councillor of State and Ambassador, I was received by the Sicilian Senator Salvatore Contarini, a man of great acuity of mind in grasping the real state of political questions and in energetically seeking their solution. The sagacious diplomat, sparing of words and even more of writing, having heard what I wished, fixed me in the eye and said to me: ‘Do you know Mussolini’? No, I replied, I’ve never seen him. And he then added: ‘wait a moment, I’ll go and ask him if he would be willing to receive you’.110 Tacchi Venturi was received immediately and profited from the meeting to pose the question to Mussolini that had formerly been posed by Benedict xv, about the possible sale of the Biblioteca Chigiana to the Holy See. This was a richly endowed and prestigious library, which comprised a precious collection of manuscripts, deriving its origin from the Sienese library of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later to become pope as Pius ii), incunables, and over 26,000 printed books of historical, literary and ecclesiastical interest, whose inestimable value was very clear to someone like Pius xi, who had been Prefect of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Mussolini’s reply, as Tacchi Venturi would recall, surpassed even his most optimistic expectations: the government would not sell the Library to the Vatican, but would present it as a gift to the Pope. Having listened to the purpose of my visit, and after I had described to him briefly what prestige would accrue to the regime if it were to accede to the wishes of the Holy See, devoted as ever to the progress of letters and of science, he [Mussolini] replied to me solemnly and with grave accent: ‘The Government will not sell the Library, but make a gift of it to the Pope’. It’s superfluous to say how dumbfounded I was by this unexpected reply. But no less than my astonishment was predictably that of the Holy Father himself, whom I immediately apprized of Mussolini’s offer.111

110 arsi, Fondo Tacchi Venturi, vol. 76, Pietro Tacchi Venturi, “I miei ricordi (1861–1891–1931)”, dictated on 15 November 1951. 111 Ibid.

88

chapter 2

Two months later the transfer of the Biblioteca Chigiana was formalized in a session of the Council of Ministers on 28 December 1922, in which the government approved the transfer of the whole precious bibliographical resource of the Chigiana to the Vatican Library.112 But far more challenging negotiations awaited the Jesuit in the following years. 2.6

The Superior Interests of the Church

On 5 July 1923, Cardinal Gasparri entrusted a letter for don Sturzo to Tacchi Venturi. It was a letter in which the Secretary of State forwarded the Pope’s thoughts on the only option that the Vatican now contemplated for the secretary of the Partito Popolare: resignation. Now, having pondered everything carefully before God, the Holy Father considers that in current circumstances in Italy, a priest cannot, without causing grave damage to the Church, remain in the direction of a party, indeed as head of the opposition of all the parties antagonistic to the Government, under the auspices of freemasonry as is by now wellknown. His Holiness therefore wishes to make known to don Sturzo that he would do something pleasing to the Holy Father, and praiseworthy for himself, if, in consideration of the superior interests of the Church, he were to resign without further ado as political Secretary of the Partito Popolare.113 So Mussolini’s objective of raising himself into the sole paladin of the interests of the Church had been achieved, thanks not least to the support he had met with in Catholic circles.114 On 10 April 1923, on the eve of the opening of the ppi congress in Turin, the ‘clerico-fascist’ right of the party had adopted a motion which bore the signatures among others of Egilberto Martire, Cesare Nava and Giulio de’ Rossi dell’Arno, and in which the party’s full backing of the Mussolini government and the expulsion of the left of the party were demanded.115 At 112 See P. Rajna, “L’alienazione della Chigiana”, Marzocco 28 (1923): 1. 113 I draw the quotation from G. Caronia, Con Sturzo e con De Gasperi: uno scienziato nella politica, Roma: 5 lune, 1979, 316–317. 114 For an analysis of Mussolini’s self-transformation into a defender of the Church see J.F. Pollard, The Vatican and Italian Fascism. A Study in Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 31–37. 115 G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare italiano, 351–352.

Transitions

89

much the same time an appeal was published by the Catholic National Union, inspired by Ottavio Cornaggia, in which Catholics were invited to give their complete support to the Fascist government. The thesis, presented by the profascist press, that the appeal was a sign of a schism within the ppi promoted by the highest spheres of the Church, was repudiated by L’Osservatore romano, but it was undeniable that a change of climate was to be felt in the Vatican.116 Opening the congress at the Teatro Scribe in Turin, Sturzo vindicated the raison d’être of the Partito Popolare as a democratic force and reaffirmed the gulf that separated it from Fascism. Basing himself on the observations made by Francesco Luigi Ferrari, the young (33-year-old) lawyer from M ­ odena, ­militant in the ppi ever since its foundation and editor of the anti-fascist and ­democratic-Catholic review Il Domani d’Italia,117 Sturzo maintained the incompatibility between the conception of the State appropriated by the Partito Popolare and that of Fascism, especially in relation to the totalitarian and nationalistic aspects of the latter. He also castigated those Catholics who “pass with such facility under the banners of other parties”. In civil and political activities, the programme of the ppi was realized, he said, “in antithesis” not only to “secular liberalism” and “socialist materialism”, but also to the “pantheist state and the deification of the nation”, which together formed “the great heresy” inherited from the 19th century.118 We have arisen – declared the leader of the Partito Popolare – to combat the secular State and the pantheistic State of liberalism and of democracy. We also combat the idea of the ethical primacy of the State and the absolutist concept of the nation, which amounts to much the same thing. For us the State is the society that is politically organized to achieve specific ends; it does not suppress, does not abolish, does not create the natural rights of man, of the family, of class, of community, and of religion; it only recognizes them, protects them, coordinates them, within the limits of its own political function. […] For us the State is not a religion […] For us the nation is not a spiritual entity absorbing the life of the individual; 116 Ibid. 117 In an article published in the Domani d’Italia on 18 February 1923, Ferrari had attributed to Fascism a “pagan-Roman conception of the State”, observing that this was revealed as dangerous especially for Catholics: F.L. Ferrari, “Per un atto di sincerità e coraggio”, Il domani d’Italia (18 February 1923), now in Idem, “Il domani d’Italia” e altri scritti del primo dopoguerra (1919–1926), (ed.) M.G. Rossi, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982, 66–70. 118 The text of Sturzo’s speech in Gli atti del Partito popolare italiano, (ed.) F. Malgeri, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1969, 395–416.

90

chapter 2

it is the historic complex of a people, which acts in the solidarity of its activity and develops its energies in the organisms in which every civil nation is ordered.119 The ppi – he concluded – would not issue any ‘blank cheque’. The positions of the right wing of the party were rejected by the votes at the congress, which expressed its support for the defence of the proportional law and called, with ­Alcide De Gasperi, for cooperation with the government on a case-by-case basis, an approach that precluded any form of ‘collaborationism’ implying a ­blanket delegation of authority.120 Fascist reactions to this speech were immediate. Il Popolo d’Italia called it the “speech of an enemy”. On 24 April Mussolini convened the ppi ministers and under-secretaries in his government and called on them to resign. A wave of Fascist violence was unleashed against Catholic organizations: the office of the Catholic associations of Benevento was ransacked on 21 April; a religious procession in Savona was assaulted on 30 April; Fascist action squads held a demonstration at Santo Stefano in Ravenna on 29 April to prevent children from receiving first communion and confirmation from the Archbishop, who was then making his pastoral visit to the diocese.121 The ppi deputies then divided in the parliamentary debate on the Acerbo law, according to which two-thirds of the seats would be awarded to the list that polled only 25% of the votes. It was at this point that the pressure against the ppi intensified. On 26 June, writing in the Corriere d’Italia – star of the ­Grosoli newspaper trust –, Monsignor Enrico Pucci, whose declarations, also in the past, were thought to be well accredited in the Vatican, warned Sturzo not to create any embarrassment for the Holy See.122 On 30 June a highly visible ­protest march of ‘National Catholics’ appeared in the streets of the capital. It enjoyed the participation and endorsement of aristocrats and careerists linked to traditional Catholicism, who proclaimed their unconditional support for the Fascist government, since it had, they said, openly recognized and honored “those religious and social values that constitute the basis of every sound political regimen, and had, in opposition to outdated democratic and sectarian ideologies, professed principles of discipline and the hierarchical order of the

119 120 121 122

Ibid., 403–404. Ibid., 416–428. G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare italiano, 383–384. Thus E. Pucci, “Una parola chiara”, Corriere d’Italia (26 June 1923).

Transitions

91

State in harmony with the religious and social doctrines that have always been affirmed by the Catholic Church”.123 Against Sturzo and the ppi the Fascists unleashed a violent campaign. To induce the ecclesiastical hierarchies to crush the resistance of the Sicilian priest, they threatened to bring in legislation against the religious congregations and Catholic schools. If the ppi deputies had not voted in support of the Acerbo law – as Mussolini had let it be known in the Vatican – Fascist action squads would have occupied the parishes of Rome. The Holy See gave way to this explicit blackmail, considering that the cold-shouldering of the ppi and the abandonment of her support for Sturzo were acceptable bargaining chips in reaching a deal with the Fascist government that would ensure the work of the Church in Italy and spare the very life of the priest of Caltagirone. Through Tacchi ­Venturi, Mussolini made known to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State both the moment in which Sturzo should tender his resignation, and when it should be made public.124 Sturzo resigned as political secretary of the ppi on 10 July. His resignation was motivated in conformity with the advice, or instructions, given to him by the Pope and the Secretary of State through their usual intermediary Tacchi Venturi: the offensive against the Church, begun on the occasion of the PPI opposition to the Acerbo law, was not to be allowed to go any further. After don Sturzo’s bombshell decision, some ppi deputies, instead of abstaining in the vote on the Acerbo law, in accordance with the decision of their parliamentary group, voted in favor. They included such big shots as Martire, Mattei-Gentili, and Cavazzoni. The immediate consequence of their vote in favor of the law was their expulsion from the ppi, followed shortly after by the abandonment of the party by a group of senators, including Grosoli, Crispolti and Santucci who were the ppi exponents most often seen in the salons of the Vatican. Was the political situation in Italy in this summer of 1923 really (as some have supposed) still “fluid”?125 Was it still so difficult to predict that the country was on the eve of the establishment of a dictatorship? The Holy See knew only too well that Fascist violence was spreading in the country with the beatings, abuse, and even murders of citizens. Often it was the Catholic press, L’Osservatore Romano or La Civiltà Cattolica, which reported such attacks in their pages. In the summer of 1923 ppi administrations were forcibly dissolved, 123 In P. Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo. Documenti e interpretazioni, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1976, 75–76. 124 G. Caronia, Con Sturzo e con De Gasperi, 322–323. 125 As maintained by Roberto Pertici in his book Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 109.

92

chapter 2

party offices and newspapers favorable to the ppi ransacked, and Catholic scouts and members of Catholic youth clubs attacked. In Turin, on 1 August, a group of youngsters were beaten up by the Fascist Militia because they were wearing the badge of the Catholic youth movement Gioventù Cattolica. In Como a gang of B ­ lackshirts destroyed the offices of the Catholic paper L’Ordine without ­sparing a picture of the Sacred Heart.126 In Pisa the club rooms of ­Gioventù Cattolica were vandalized. Gasparri would write about the matter, on behalf of the Pope, to Cardinal Maffi, bishop of the city, to express his sorrow and alarm. But basically the Secretary of State dissociated the episode from any wish, still less any order, of Mussolini. He classified it not as a political, but as a criminal act, declaring that violent actions such as this were the work of “criminals under the guise of fascists”: The repetition of these crimes – Gasparri wrote to Maffi – is of deep concern to the Holy Father and must also be a source of anxiety to every Catholic who has at heart the honor of Our Holy Religion, as also to every good Christian anxious to uphold Italy’s good name. The civil and political authorities have deplored such criminal actions, also inflicting the justly deserved punishments for them; but unfortunately such condemnations and threats have hitherto not had the desired effect. We can only hope that, in future, the competent authorities will take steps, more than in the past, to prevent grievous events of this kind, and that, if by any misfortune they were to be repeated, they will not hesitate, in obedience to the orders they have received, to punish their perpetrators severely.127 Ferrari, in his speech to the ppi congress in Turin on 12 April, had, on the other hand, warned of the threat of dictatorship with his usual unflinching lucidity: It seems to me – he had said – that to speak of collaboration today is to speak of something outside the realms of reality. […] If we examine the facts, if we examine the events that have taken place from November to the present day, we cannot but be convinced how impossible it is to speak of collaboration, how impossible to discuss collaboration, for the simple reason that the Fascist National Party, which has by now installed its dictatorship in the country, wishes to surround itself with other parties that are willing to be yoked to its chariot.128 126 G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare, 420. 127 Ibid., 420–421. 128 The quotation is taken from Gli atti del Partito popolare italiano, 431.

Transitions

93

On 23 August 1923, Fascist thugs cudgelled to death an archpriest, parish priest of Argenta, don Giovanni Minzoni, on the threshold of his parsonage. He was guilty in their eyes of having refused to serve as chaplain of the Fascist Militia, and especially of having been ecclesiastical assistant to a group of some seventy boy scouts and of having dissuaded them from participating in the activities of Fascist youth organizations.129 The situation, in short, was not so ‘fluid’ – the slide into despotism all too clear. But the Pope and his closest advisers seemed to believe that Mussolini and Fascism still deserved trust, in view of all they had done to the benefit of the Church and all that they still promised to do: to solve the Roman Question. It wasn’t only a tactical complicity, the result of mutual exploitation, but more intimate and substantial – between Catholicism and Fascism there were “essential consonances”.130 The cult of authority, the corrosive criticism of liberal-democratic thought, in its fundamental core, i.e. in its individualism, the overriding need for order and discipline, the mistrust of any form of discussion, represented the mainstays of a rapport, of a mutual complicity, reinforced by the perception of the existence of common enemies such as freemasonry, liberalism, and communism.131 This remained true even if the key to the complicity between Catholicism and Fascism in this period seemed especially linked to the theme of the nation. It was the indissoluble duality between faith and fatherland that prevailed in public discourse. Some intuited immediately how much this sentiment was propagated by the exponents of clerico-fascism, those who had praised, already in this phase, the ‘intimate fusion of the Catholic spirit with the love of Italy’, the identity between ‘fervent Catholic and sincere Fascist’, between ‘Catholic and Italian’.132 Ermegildo Pistelli, member of the congregation of the scuole pie, distinguished Latinist at the University of Florence and well-known contributor to the Giornalino della domenica, a newspaper prodigal in its justification of Fascist violence, glorified in his columns the connection between the Italian nation and Catholic faith. He went so far as to propound a religion of nationhood culminating in a deification of the ­nation.133 According to Piero Misciattelli, the ‘intimate ­harmony’ 129 For a detailed account of the episode see L. Bedeschi, Don Minzoni il prete ucciso dai f­ ascisti, Milano: Bompiani, 1973. 130 See G. Miccoli, “La Chiesa e il fascismo”, in Fascismo e società italiana, (ed.) G. Quazza, Torino: Einaudi, 1973, 202–203. 131 See the observation of P.G. Zunino, Interpretazione e memoria del fascismo. Gli anni del regime, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 143ff. 132 A. Masetti Zannini, Religione e fascismo, Bologna: Bononia, 1924. 133 See in this connection D. Menozzi, “Cattolicesimo, patria e nazione tra le due guerre ­mondiali”, 23–24.

94

chapter 2

between the religious and the political power was at the basis of a new national ­expansion.134 In Rome, the Opera della Preservazione della Fede, a Catholic pressure group founded in 1899 with the task of combating ­Protestant propaganda in the capital, drew on the nationalistic lexicon in transforming its dispute into a wider polemic. The campaign against the development of a complex of Methodist schools on Monte Mario was thus turned into a battle against the foreigner, Protestantism into a form of ‘propaganda against Italy’ – a subtle infiltration of the country by outsiders. The slogan was: “Barbarians get out!”135 These were affirmations born from the pragmatism of those who sensed in what direction the dominant culture was moving and were willing to trade the national-patriotic and symbolic arsenal for a lexicon that could be bent to the needs and opportunities created by a profoundly different political climate. 2.7

The ‘True’ Nationalism and the ‘Non-opposition’

In the politique politicienne of the day the thesis of an indissoluble rapport b­ etween Catholicism and the Italian nation lay at the basis of the programme of the Centro Nazionale Italiano, founded in Bologna on 12 August 1924 by the secessionist right wings of respectively the ppi and the Catholic National Union.136 As explained by Aristide Carapelle, one of the promoters of the movement, the idea of founding the Center was summed up in the formula ‘God and Fatherland, Religion and Fatherland, Church and State’.137 Two developments, in particular, help to explain its creation: the campaign for the moral question and the possibility of an alliance between ppi and psi. The Centro Nazionale in fact took shape during the national crisis that followed the disappearance – the murder, as would later be learned – of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June.138 That prompted the Partito Popolare, led since May by Alcide De Gasperi, to participate in the secession of the parliamentary 134 P. Misciattelli, Fascisti e cattolici, Milano: Imperia, 1924, 101–117. 135 “I protestanti americani e le loro bravate per la conquista di Monte Mario”, in Fides 33 (1923): 65–68, quoted in M. Paiano, “Contro ‘l’invadente eresia protestante’: l’Opera della Preservazione della Fede in Roma (1899–1930)”, in Chiesa cattolica e minoranze in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, (ed.) R. Perin, Roma: Viella, 2011, 74. 136 G. De Rosa, I conservatori nazionali, 90ff. 137 A. Carapelle, Il Centro nazionale italiano, Roma: Stab. Tip. Corriere d’Italia, 1928. 138 M. Canali, Il delitto Matteotti. Affarismo e politica nel primo governo Mussolini, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997.

Transitions

95

minority, which took the name of Aventine.139 The party’s daily Il Popolo was then conducting, under its editor Giuseppe Donati, a campaign of denunciation of the complicities that had led to the kidnapping of the Socialist deputy, and in July 1924, on the initiative of Filippo Turati, plans were afoot for a possible alliance between psi and ppi as an anti-Fascist opposition. The Popolari – had said De Gasperi on 16 July during a meeting of the provincial secretaries of the ppi – does not accept the criterion reaffirmed also on this occasion by the clerico-fascist press, of the absolute incompatibility of a parliamentary collaboration with the Socialists. There is no reason to believe that parliamentarians of the ppi lack the ability and the will to preserve the same purity of their own thought and the independence of their own action that Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia demonstrated, when, for well-defined purposes of parliamentary action and government, they tried to join or were accepted into Cabinets, in which Socialists were present either as a majority or minority.140 De Gasperi’s opening to the Socialists had not been welcome in the Vatican. ­ lready on the eve of the Aventine Secession, L’Osservatore Romano had A warned of the dangers of a “fatal leap in the dark”. In the face of a party that was “strongly organized and ready to react”, any political volte-face would be impossible without “danger for the nation”.141 By the end of July, Pius xi, however, had reached the view that a clear, reasoned and definitive intervention by the Holy See was needed on the crucial political debate then taking place. In his audience of 29 July, he therefore asked Father Rosa to define with the ­Secretary of State the contents of an article which would express the position of the Holy See on any possible collaboration between ppi and psi.142 La Civiltà Cattolica, in the meantime, had intimated what the position of the higher ­echelons in the Vatican on the negotiations opened within the Aventine opposition was, stigmatizing, already in its regular feature Cose italiane of 2 August, De Gasperi’s statement as “inopportune” and expressing scepticism

139 G. Grasso, I cattolici e l’Aventino, Roma: Studium, Roma 1994. What is known as the Aventine Secession took place when opposition mps took the joint decision on 26 June 1924 to abandon parliamentary activity until the Mussolini government had clarified its own position on the disappearance of Giacomo Matteotti. 140 See G. De Rosa, Il Partito popolare, 490–491. 141 “Per la giustizia”, L’Osservatore Romano (25 June 1924). 142 G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 169ff.

96

chapter 2

of alliances with “­parties only too well known for their anticlericalism”.143 In the opening editorial in the same number of the Jesuit review, signed by Father Rosa, the judgement on the current political crisis was, to say the least, minimalizing, even in its title.144 Giacomo Matteotti – wrote Rosa – was not a “martyr”, but a “victim of the common political delinquency”, for which the Socialists were just as much to blame as the Fascists – the former for having used violence as a weapon of political contest, the latter for having used it in the action of government as a weapon against the Socialists. In the last analysis, therefore, the original blame for the “political delinquency” must fall on the Socialists. It is not by chance that the firm core of the Fascist rulers, concluded Father Rosa, came from the ranks of Socialism. As for the way to overcome the crisis, the editorial underlined the rejection of any ‘leap in the dark’ and the duty of Catholics to obey the government in office: The public good requires that when any kind of government remains de facto the only subject of civil authority in a nation – however doubtful the legitimacy of its origins and even more so the exercise, i.e. the use or abuse, of authority itself –, to that government we owe, in whatever is legitimate, i.e. in whatever is not incompatible with the public good and the social order, docile obedience, not to consolidate its power, but to prevent a greater evil, such as the advent of a government even worse than the previous one, in other words, the triumph of disorder and anarchy. The article which more exhaustively expressed the judgement of the Holy See on the crisis underway in Italy was published in La Civiltà Cattolica on 16 August, the day of the finding of Matteotti’s body in the wood at Quartarella, with the title La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte dei partiti politici. It bore the signature of Father Rosa, but had been revised and approved by the Pope in person.145 It emphasized first of all the risks of civil war and recalled the doctrine on the obedience that Catholics owed to de facto governments. This obedience – Rosa added – was all the more merited by Mussolini and by his ministers since they could boast of “undeniable merits” in their benevolent attitude towards the Catholic faith. The Church, besides, was preparing solemnly to celebrate the Holy Year of 1925. Who better than the present head of the government could guarantee security, order and tranquillity to the thousands 143 “Cose Italiane”, La Civiltà Cattolica 75/3 (1924): 274. 144 E. Rosa, “La delinquenza nella vita pubblica e gli opportuni moniti della Chiesa”, ibid., 193–206. 145 G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 173.

Transitions

97

of pilgrims who would shortly arrive in the Eternal City? The article then addressed the more pressing question: the possibility of a coalition between ppi and psi, firmly branding any such alliance as inappropriate, inopportune, and illegitimate: If the Fascist government were forced to relinquish power, it has been suggested on various sides that it would be replaced by the Socialist Party allied with the Partito Popolare. This prospect more than ever aggravates the question and must give food for thought to every serious citizen, and far more so to the ecclesiastical authority, however much it would wish, as it ought, to maintain itself outside and above any party and any merely political contest. Therefore […] we feel bound to say clearly that any such collaboration, under present circumstances and on the evidence we have from both the one side and the other, would be neither appropriate, nor opportune, nor legitimate.146 The message was precise and definitive, as was well understood by politicians, public opinion and Catholics.147 Among the latter, there were also some readers of La Civiltà Cattolica who put pen to paper to defend the ppi and even, in some cases, to accuse the Jesuit review of being philo-Fascist. In one of these letters, sent from the province of Trento on 19 August, Fascism was defined as “the worst possible plague that the Lord could have visited upon Italy”.148 In another, dated 21 August, a priest from Lodi, Francesco Mantovani, openly stigmatized the judgement expressed in Father Rosa’s “wretched article”: So you have nothing to say about the fact that Catholics support and flank the genuinely criminal association presided over by the government, which has now given rise to the criminal epilogue of the assassination of Matteotti and which governs on the basis of tyranny, and the suppression of the most elementary liberties, with threats to public order made permanent by the party’s Militia. On the other hand, you find it immoral that Catholics should aspire to a democratic regime […] perhaps in an alliance with the Socialists […]. 146 Thus E. Rosa, “La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte dei partiti politici in Italia”, La Civiltà Cattolica 75/3 (1924): 297–305. 147 See G. Grasso, I cattolici e l’Aventino, 47ff. 148 The letters are published in A. Guasco, “‘La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte’. La Santa Sede, il delitto Matteotti e l’alleanza popolari-socialisti”, Cristianesimo nella storia 33 (2012): 845–874.

98

chapter 2

That the Church, as ever, should take all that is good that is offered to her and apply it to her holy aims, we can agree. But that the system of Fascist iniquity should have the consent of Catholics, never.149 Sturzo’s position in support of an active collaboration between the Aventine forces, including the Socialists, as a means to provide a way out of the crisis and give a breath of hope to the democratic institutions, was published in Il Popolo on 6 September.150 The rectification, this time, came directly from the Pope. The occasion presented itself on 8 September, during an audience granted to university students returning from the congress of the fuci (Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana) in Palermo. The Church and the Pope – said Pius xi – had every right to intervene on political questions by “furnishing indications and directives that Catholic souls have the right to request and the duty to follow”.151 He then proposed an approach that upset one of the cardinal mainstays of democratic Catholicism, namely the idea of a lay, democratic and non-confessional party. The Pope in fact recommended that the ecclesiastical authority should make precise political choices: When politics approach the altar, then religion, the Church, and the Pope who represents her, have not only the right but the duty to give indications and directives, which Catholic souls have the right to request and the duty to follow. Thus, the greatest political line of conduct was traced by the Divine Master himself when he said: Date Caesari quae sunt Caesaris, Deo quae sunt Dei; and the apostles too touched on the gravest ­political questions when they taught omnis potestas Deo.152 Pius xi then repudiated the possibility of any accord between Catholics and Socialists. He stigmatized as ‘rash’ the comparisons that had been made (by whom is not divulged, but the reference was clearly to De Gasperi’s speech) with other European contexts: “it’s one thing to be faced by a party that had already arrived at power and quite another to open the road to this party and give it the chance to gain power”. The two things – he concluded – “are ­essentially different”. The Vatican’s line had thus been spelt out. On 23 September, the Holy See reaffirmed the absolute prohibition for priests to participate personally in the 149 Ibid. 150 L. Sturzo, “L’unità morale degli italiani”, Il Popolo (6 September 1924). 151 Text in Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 1, 1922–1928, Torino: Sei, 1960, 257–259. 152 Ibid., 258.

Transitions

99

political struggle and to write in party newspapers; it did so through a circular of the Secretary of State “on the special political circumstances of the present time”: Since the excitement of souls due to the present political turmoil […] is so animated in Italy, it is not possible for a priest, whose mission, by divine will, is the universal mission of charity and peace, to be in any way a partisan. To this should be added the consideration that a priest’s participation in the political struggle would not be without dangers, either for his person or for the Church. This however does not mean that the priest is not free to exercise, according to conscience, the rights due to him as a citizen for the greater good of religion and society.153 At much the same time as this circular was issued, Gasparri advised don Sturzo to cease his collaboration with Il Popolo, resign from the party and leave Rome as soon as possible; the Fascists had already ransacked his Roman apartment while he had been a guest of the principe Rufo Ruffo della Scaletta and rumors were circulating that, like other anti-fascists, he could be assassinated.154 Through a friend don Sturzo obtained a passport from the Holy See, not wishing to apply to the Fascist government for one, and left Rome on 25 October 1924, accompanied by Angelo Belloni, an exponent of the ppi in Adria. He reached London on the 27 October after a brief stopover in Turin. Perhaps he had in mind a brief journey abroad. He could hardly have imagined that it was the start of an exile lasting 22 years. The centrality of the discourse on the nation and its connections with Catholicism had always been clear to don Sturzo, as we have already seen in the previous chapter. But in his writings the condemnation of nationalism now emerged with even greater clarity.155 In January 1924, Sturzo had published a book called Popolarismo e fascismo. He had written it in large part in 1923 on the proposal of the young publisher and militant anti-fascist Piero Gobetti, after Sturzo had relinquished the post of political secretary of the ppi. He had dedicated important pages in this book to the question of nationalism and its relation with Catholicism. It was not a question of denying the “principle of nationality”. This represented “a public constitutional principle” that was realized “in the historical process” and by passing from the abstract or 153 A. Guasco, “La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte”, 865. 154 For don Sturzo’s exile see F. Malgeri, “L’esilio e le ultime battaglie politiche (1924–1959)”, in F. Piva and F. Malgeri, Vita di Luigi Sturzo, 276–277. 155 D. Menozzi, Cattolicesimo, patria e nazione tra le due guerre mondiali, 25.

100

chapter 2

potential sphere to reality once the political and economic conditions were ripe for the creation of the nation state.156 Nationalism was something else. For its prophets – argued Sturzo – “the nation is everything, the pan. The nation, in this view, is more than the ragion di stato, it is absolute. […] It is nationalism that deifies the nation”.157 Pagan in origin, immoral in aim, the theoretical principle of nationalism was, from the Catholic point of view, inimical to the moral equality of man and subversive of the social order and the rule of law: The theoretical principle of nationalism has a pagan and immoral f­oundation, for several reasons: it considers the nation as the primary foundation of ethics and the absolute raison d’être of human society; it subordinates the individual to the iron law of collective rule: the nation as an end in itself; it suppresses the moral equality of human beings and peoples in the fundamental conditions of human nature; and raises force and violence to legitimate means of social order and superimposes them over the state and the laws.158 “Nationalism will be the next heresy to be condemned”, had written the French Catholic intellectual Maurice Vaussard in his reply to the famous inquiry of 1923, to which Sturzo too had replied.159 In the view of the priest of Caltagirone, just as the Christians of the first centuries had transformed Greco-Roman paganism, so Catholics were now faced by the task of imbuing with ethical sense, without too much condescension, “every form of nationalism” in order to lead States “from hegemonic selfishness and egocentrism to a better and more salutary evaluation of human and Christian universalism”.160 This was a task that ought to be translated into choices of international policy inspired not by “imperialist dreams of domination”, but by “a policy of convergence between peoples, economic cooperation, and moral elevation”.161 Catholic universalism in short could not be corrupted into a tool of power and domination over other peoples, but should play the role of pacification to the benefit of the world community: 156 L. Sturzo, Il Partito popolare italiano. Popolarismo e fascismo (1924), Bologna: Zanichelli, 1956, 202–204. 157 Ibid., 208. 158 Ibid., 214. 159 Announced by the review Les lettres in January 1923, the inquiry on nationalism had been held in the course of the year. M. Vaussard, Enquête sur le nationalisme, Paris: Spes, 1924. 160 L. Sturzo, Il Partito popolare italiano. Popolarismo e fascismo, 215. 161 Ibid., 217.

Transitions

101

Only if Catholicism be not shriveled into a national religion, or privileged as an instrument of power, or linked to the destinies of some nations against others, shall it be able to continue its moral mission in the world: only then would the struggle among peoples be pacified and internationalism progress.162 Sturzo’s democratic Catholicism, shared by an intellectual minority in Italy,163 took very different roads than those pursued by the rampantly nationalist Catholics of the Centro Nazionale. From the deputy Egilberto Martire to the minor town councilor of Bologna, Antonio Masetti Zannini, to the journalists Angelo Maria and Emilio Nasalli Rocca in Piacenza, the propagandistic cliché was always the same and revolved round three propositions: Providence had assigned a destiny of greatness among nations to Italy; the Catholic religion and the presence of the papacy in Rome were at the basis of this greatness; Fascism had given to the country the role that rightfully belonged to her in the world scenario.164 The diversity of meanings attributed to the concept of nationalism induced Pius xi to return to the question. To the question of ­nationalism – as we have seen – the Pope had dedicated a significant passage of his encyclical Ubi arcano Dei consilio. But in September 1924 it was left, once again, to Father Rosa to specify, especially for Italian Catholics, what form of nationalism best conformed to the teaching of the Church. He did so in Turin, intervening in the eleventh Settimana Sociale of Italian Catholics, which had that year as its theme Social Authority. The event drew a large crowd, also responding to the political tension that could be felt in the air, in the aftermath of the trauma caused by the murder of another mp, the Fascist Armando Casalini, killed on 12 September in a tram in the capital by a young Communist, who wanted to revenge the assassination of Matteotti. It was essential, the Vatican felt, that clear words be spoken in Turin. On 18 September Agostino Gemelli had spoken, greeted with ovations like a star, on prevention in the social field. The ultra-patriotic Father Reginaldo Giuliani had also re-appeared. He had not been assigned the role of a speaker at the conference, but his presence did not pass unobserved and he made one or two general comments on its work.165 162 Ibid. 163 R. Moro, “L’opinione cattolica su pace e guerra durante il fascismo”, in Chiesa e guerra. Dalla “benedizione delle armi” alla “Pacem in terries”, (eds.) M. Franzinelli and R. Bottoni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2005, 244ff. 164 See D. Menozzi, Cattolicesimo, patria e nazione tra le due guerre mondiali, 26–27. 165 “Significato e portata della Settimana sociale”, La Stampa (20 September 1924).

102

chapter 2

Father Rosa intervened on the last day of the Settimana Sociale, 19 September. He spoke of what he perceived to be the true and false nationalism.166 The distinction between the categories of patriotism, nationalism, and illegitimate nationalism – already suggested by Father Angelo Brucculeri in an article with the title Patria e patriottismo, published in the Jesuit review in the previous year167 – was further specified. Apart from emphasizing the ethical parameters within which the appeal to the nation could be considered legitimate for Catholic doctrine, Father Rosa furnished some more precise political guidelines. The nationalism formulated by the Liberal currents that had ended up by deifying the fatherland was “false”. That, propounded by “the more violent Fascism”, was equally false, though the repudiation seemed to imply that a legitimate nationalism also existed in Fascism. The ‘true nationalism’ praised by Father Rosa was the one that did not sacralize, did not deify the nation, but that assigned to it a providential role for the affirmation of Catholic civilization in the world; but on one condition: that it should conform its legislation to the natural order established by God to discipline the rules of civil society, of which the Church was sole interpreter. And the Church of Pius xi had no intention of delegating the management of so delicate a question to a petty organization like the Centro Nazionale. This is the reason why Pius xi would disavow it a few years later. More generally, in the Pope’s view, any mediation by the Catholic laity appeared superfluous, if not dangerous, in the new situation.168 It was better to detach Catholics from party politics and re-direct them towards a less compromising activity and one more directly controlled by the Holy See, i.e. in the ranks of Catholic Action. To this end, the largest Catholic mass organization had also been revamped and given new statutes in October 1923.169 As for the political struggle, there would soon be no more room left for democratic party politics. A line had been drawn under the Matteotti crisis by Mussolini’s famous speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 3 January 1925, in which he had assumed political responsibility for the crime committed against the Socialist deputy. It was a watershed moment: Fascism now began to morph into a fullyfledged dictatorship.170 At the end of 1925 Donati left Italy because of the grave 166 E. Rosa, “Il vero e il falso nazionalismo”, in Settimane sociali d’Italia, 11, L’autorità sociale nella dottrina cattolica, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1924, 237–261. 167 A. Brucculeri, “Patria e patriottismo”, La Civiltà Cattolica 74/4 (1923): 10–20. 168 P. Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo durante il pontificato di Pio xi, 380. 169 See especially L. Ferrari, Una storia dell’Azione cattolica. Gli ordinamenti statutari da Pio xi a Pio xii, Genova: Marietti, 1989, 34–74. 170 On this development we may refer to the classic study of A. Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (1965), Torino: Einaudi, 1995, 47ff.

Transitions

103

threats made against him following the inquiries published in Il Popolo on the Matteotti crime. A year later Ferrari too took the road into exile. The two ppi exponents would continue, with Sturzo, their political struggle abroad, trying to make others understand the dangers that Fascism represented for democracy and for peace in Europe. In the meantime, the ppi, like the other anti-fascist parties, fell victim to the exceptional laws for the defense of the State; it was forcibly dissolved on 9 November 1926. The Vatican, for its part, preferred to pursue a line of ‘non-opposition’ to Fascism,171 which was in practice equivalent to promoting its ascent. It was a choice that was prompted by a mentality traditionally prevalent in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, on the basis of which it was judged a priority to defend the ‘liberties’ and room for maneuver of the Church irrespective of political regime. It was also a choice that seemed all the more legitimate since the Mussolini government had given tangible signs of its benevolence to the Church. But it was also a decision coherent with the priorities placed on the agenda by the Secretariat of State – first and foremost the ‘Conciliation’ with the Italian State. 171 Thus R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 110.

chapter 3

The Holiest of Nations 3.1

The Italian Way to Holiness

In 1925 Pius xi succeeded in celebrating the jubilee on its traditional date.1 Mussolini’s parliamentary speech on 3 January had passed over the event in silence, followed by the chamber at Montecitorio itself, but the churches and streets of Rome were abuzz with sermons, celebrations, illuminations, and processions. Some 600,000 pilgrims arrived from various countries; the wealthier, for the first time, by airplane, even by hydroplane. They came from Argentina, Canada, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia.2 They found a city in which the great basilicas were ablaze at night, thanks to the massive use of electricity – a city modernized by the building works completed for the occasion, in particular an enlarged central railway station (Stazione Termini). The civic authorities had also taken the step of restoring Christian symbols to their proper place, restoring the cross to the Campidoglio and demolishing, together with other buildings, the clubrooms of the Circolo Giordano Bruno, too close for comfort to the colonnade of St. Peter’s. Over one million visitors, including children and schoolchildren, crossed through the Vatican Walls to visit the World Missionary Fair that Pius xi had chosen to hold in his own gardens for the Holy Year. With over a 100,000 artefacts exhibited in twenty-four pavilions, it was the biggest exhibition that the Church had ever mounted in its history.3 The exhibits included African sculptures of crucifixes and madonnas, Chinese vases painted with scenes portraying the Christian churches of the Far East, curious head-rests used by the Congolese to sleep without rumpling their sumptuous ceremonial coiffeurs, but also more utilitarian objects such as anatomical pieces and photographs, microscopic specimens and wax moulages which illustrated terrible diseases such as leprosy and the plague, in the eradication of which Catholic missionaries had helped to spread Western medicines, and thus to disseminate the latest 1 See G.M. Vian, “Gli anni santi di Pio xi”, in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 4, (ed.) F. Margiotta Broglio, Firenze: Giunti, 2000, 117–131. 2 That the jubilee pilgrims had come from the four corners of the earth would be emphasized by the Pope himself in his summing up of the jubilee during the Consistory on 14 December 1925 (Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 1, 497–500). 3 See L. Scaraffia, “Dalle reliquie al museo”, in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 4, 103–109.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_005

The Holiest Of Nations

105

advances of scientific progress of a positivistic stamp. The aim of the Fair was to bring together geographically far-removed cultures and to document the Church’s commitment to evangelization, with the primary objective of widening support for the missions. For the first time in the jubilee tradition, the streets of the Eternal City were plastered with colored posters dominated by the image of Bernini’s angel from the Ponte Sant’Angelo with the cross in his hand, against the backdrop of the dome of St. Peter’s and accompanied by the motto Pax Christi in regno Christi in Latin, Italian, French, English and German. The doctrine of the social Kingship of Christ, consecrated by the introduction of the feast of Christ the King, thus became the emblem of the Catholic reconquest. But the community of saints, reinforced by new canonizations during the jubilee year, also helped in the ambitious project. The Carmelite nun Thérèse de Lisieux, the curé d’Ars Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, and the humble shepherdess of Lourdes Marie Bernadette Soubirous were the most celebrated of those raised to the altars or launched on the road to sainthood in 1925. They were very young women and men of faith who in their life had been distinguished not by the more heroic virtues, but by having achieved holiness in a simple life, apparently far removed from the triumphalism of the Kingship of Christ. With them Pius xi began to design a model of sainthood, which in the following years he would reinforce through a considerable number of canonizations.4 Exemplary among them was the dazzling hagiographic career of Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the first Blessed and then the first Saint created by Pius xi, less than thirty years after her death. An assiduous reader of Histoire d’une âme, the fortunate spiritual autobiography of the Carmelite nun which represented a model of holiness accessible to everyone, Ratti, already in 1923, had placed Thérèse of Lisieux alongside the “true giants of saintliness”: Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Filippo Neri, Carlo Borromeo, and Teresa of Ávila.5 In the eyes of the Pope, according to the testimony of his personal secretary, Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri, an essential message was epitomized in the exemplary life of the Carmelite nun: 4 On the general characteristics of this model, see R. Rusconi, Santo Padre. La santità del papa da san Pietro a Giovanni Paolo ii, Roma: Viella, 2010, 488–490. 5 Thus Carlo Confalonieri in his Pio xi visto da vicino, new edition with the addition of two appendices edited by G. Frasso, Torino: Edizioni Paoline, 1993, 171–172. On the importance of devotion to Thérèse of Lisieux in the spiritual development of Achille Ratti see E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini. La solitudine di un papa, Torino: Einaudi, 2007, 39–44 (English translation: Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican. Pope Pius xi and the speech that was never made, Cambridge: Malden – Polity, 2011).

106

chapter 3

There is something at least as equally pleasing to God as the great virtues, be they apostolic, be they brilliant in science and fruitful in great works […] It is simplicity and the sincere humility of the heart, the entire devotion to the duties of one’s own state in whatever step of the human hierarchy one stands, constant prayer, generous willingness to make every sacrifice, continuous self-immolation, abandonment to and trust in the God who disposes of us; and, above all, […] true charity.6 With unusually rapid progress up the ladder of sainthood, Thérèse of Lisieux was proclaimed protectress of all Carmelite missions (1923), patron of the charity of St. Peter Apostle for the Indigenous Clergy (1925), co-patron with Francis Xavier of missions (1927) and patron of Russia (1928).7 She was canonized on 17 May 1925. To mark her canonization, Saint Peter’s Basilica was illuminated throughout the night with thousands of lanterns and torches. It was “a wonderful sight”, wrote the young Giovanni Battista Montini, at the time a junior scriptor in the Secretariat of State. More or less the same terms were used by the Illustrazione del Popolo, which dedicated a cover story to the event on 31 May.8 The canonization of the ‘petite Thérèse’, together with that of other transalpine Catholics, was also a sign of the particular attention that the Holy See then showed towards France. In the background perhaps lay the prospect of a second ralliement with the government of Paris, after tensions had been heightened following the extension of secular legislation to Alsace and Lorraine.9 Another aspect that weighed on relations with France was the Holy See’s condemnation of Action Française under the ideological leadership of Charles Maurras, with its ambiguous mixture between totalitarian nationalism and Catholic integralism – a condemnation which Pius xi would officially confirm the following year.10 In any case, the premise, also diplomatic, from which Pius xi’s policy of sainthood took its first steps, was a good deal more complex than it appeared to Monsignor Carlo Salotti, at least according to the panegyrics that the well-known Roman ecclesiastic devoted to the canonizations and beatifications celebrated during the Holy Year.11 Salotti’s 6 7 8 9 10 11

C. Confalonieri, Pio xi visto da vicino, 172. N.J. Chaline, “La Spiritualité de Achille Ratti”, in Achille Ratti Pape Pie xi, 159–170. Illustrazione del Popolo 22 (31 May 1925). See further F. Bouthillon, La naissance de la Mardité, 127ff. See J. Prévotat, Les catholiques et l’Action française. Histoire d’une condamnation. 1899–1939, Paris: Fayard, 2001. C. Salotti, I santi e i beati proclamati nell’anno santo 1925. Panegirici tenuti in Roma in occasione dei tridui solenni, Torino: Sei, 1927.

The Holiest Of Nations

107

language was not just militant, but military.12 It bore the brand of the Great War, a sign of how much this experience had been seared onto the mental world of Italian Catholics. Saints and the canonized were seen as soldiers who marched under a common banner, who fought in the trenches, or who, in defense of the nation, were ready to repulse attacks with the sharp weapons of the word. But a particular admiration for France also transpires from Salotti’s ­panegyrics. France was the “fatherland of saints and of combatants” – from Clovis to Joan of Arc, from the Crusades to the war against the Huguenots, and to the members of the religious orders who had been expelled from their convents after the law of separation between Church and State, and had hastened to the defense of the ‘land of their birth’ in 1914.13 France, of course, had also been the nation of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution in 1789, the Holy See’s ­condemnation which had been confirmed, during the jubilee, by the  beatification of the thirty-two nuns executed in Orange in July 1794, followed by the beatification, in 1926, of the martyrs of September 1792.14 According to Salotti, in any case, the Church, however persecuted it was, would always vanquish in the end; the holiness and ignorance of the curé d’Ars would finally prevail over the irreligion and naturalistic culture of Voltaire, just as the illiterate peasant girl of Lourdes would tower over the great scientist Jean-­ Martin Charcot. For Italian saints, too the moment of revanche had arrived – first and foremost Francis of Assisi, the 7th centenary of whose death was celebrated in 1926. Mussolini had given his personal imprimatur to the celebrations by consecrating the 4th October of that year as a national holiday. In the formidable campaign of awareness-raising and promotion that brought over a million pilgrims to Assisi, a recurrent slogan was the catchy epithet devoted by Gabriele D’Annunzio to the poverello of Assisi in the funerary oration he had pronounced on the Campidoglio in 1919: “the most Italian of saints, the most saintly of Italians”.15 This was even though Piero Misciattelli, member of the Society of Franciscan Studies, was convinced that it was someone else who had coined the phrase – either Cesare Cantù, Tullio Dandolo, or perhaps Niccolò 12 13 14 15

See F. De Giorgi, “Linguaggi militari e mobilitazione cattolica nell’Italia fascista”, Contemporanea 5 (2002): 253–286. See G. Verucci, “I simboli della cultura laica e delle istituzioni civili”, in Santi, culti e simboli nell’età della secolarizzazione, 235–245. Ph. Boutry, “Hagiographie, histoire et Révolution Française. Pie xi et la béatification des martyrs de septembre 1792 (17 octobre 1926)”, Achille Ratti Pape Pie xi, 305–355. D’Annunzio’s oration in S. Migliore, Mistica povertà: riscritture francescane tra Otto e Novecento, Roma: Istituto storico dei cappuccini, 2001, 326.

108

chapter 3

Tommaseo.16 The idea of a ‘national’ form of sainthood may have been recent, but it was not unprecedented; it had cropped up in the liberal Catholicism of the mid-19th century and had been relaunched on the wave of growing nationalism in the early years of the following century.17 Yet, it was only in the Italy of the new Constantine, of the ‘new hero’ engendered by the war, and only in the year in which Margherita Sarfatti published her biography of Mussolini, and forged the lexicon for the cult of the Duce,18 that the idea of proclaiming the patron saints of Italy took shape. Apart from Francis, there was also Catherine of Siena. A complex role was assigned to them both. It implied the search for a specific placement within the omnivorous pantheon of Fascism, at a time when the process of ‘Conciliation’ between Italy and the Holy See was in a phase of acceleration.19 It was no simple matter, admittedly, for the saints to find a foothold in the Fascist mythology of the early 1920s, obsessed as it was by the search for genealogies that would give it firm roots in Italian history, and prone to encourage, like Gentile, a ‘soft’ religiosity linked to local traditions: down to earth, rooted in the countryside, rural, even rustic, and far from the anarchy of the more abstruse flights of mysticism.20 In the hierarchy of national sainthood the highest places were occupied by those who had the strongest pressure groups behind them: Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and John Bosco.21 The lower level was occupied by those saints who nonetheless enjoyed great and abiding popularity, such as Rita of Cascia, Anthony of Padua, and the Archangel Michael, and who became patrons of specific sectors of the army during military campaigns.22 Lesser fortune was enjoyed, for example, by the great Saint Benedict of Norcia, as even a sponsor as illustrious as Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster could do little to promote a cult that tended to remain on too erudite a level,23 even if there were those, such as the priest Paolo Ardali, who tried to link the ideal of Benedictine monastic life with the agrarian 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Thus Misciattelli in L’ Italia francescana nel settimo centenario della morte di S. Francesco, S. Maria degli Angeli: Tip. Porziuncola, 1927, 382. T. Caliò, “‘Il ritorno di San Francesco’. Il culto francescano nell’Italia fascista”, in San Francesco d’Italia, 45–65. M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 15–18. R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 111ff. See P. Angelini, “Religiosità popolare”, in Dizionario del fascismo, (eds.) V. De Grazia and S. Luzzatto, Torino: Einaudi, 2005, vol. 2, 488–494. See T. Caliò, “‘Il ritorno di San Francesco’. Il culto francescano nell’Italia fascista”, 48. Santi del Novecento: storia, agiografia e canonizzazioni, (ed.) F. Scorza Barcellona, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998. See T. Caliò, “‘Il ritorno di San Francesco’. Il culto francescano nell’Italia fascista”, 48.

The Holiest Of Nations

109

policy of Fascism.24 Nor was there any lack of examples of sainthood chosen (and exploited) ad hoc: Maria Goretti, the ‘child saint’ who died in 1902 following an attempted rape and who was introduced into Fascist propaganda for the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes,25 and Cardinal Guglielmo Massaja (1809–1889), whose apostolate in Africa would be re-elaborated in a colonialist vein on the occasion of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.26 As for the Marian cult, the role of patron saint of military Aviation had been assigned, on the proposal of Gabriele D’Annunzio, to Our Lady of Loreto ever since 1920, even though it was not until the following decade that the great Marchigian sanctuary would especially enjoy renewed popularity, when it would be promoted as a little home-grown Lourdes: as a destination for trains run by Unitalsi for the transport of invalids as part of a specific political initiative.27 Being born and bred in Italy became, in any case, the sine qua non for saints to reach the highest rungs in the pantheon of Fascism: not only had they to be Italians, but they had to have won specific merits for the greatness of the nation. It was a condition that ended up being introjected by the ecclesiastical hierarchies, in whose hagiographic promotion the italianità of the saints progressively took the place of romanitas. This too was a sign of reconciliation: for hitherto romanitas had connoted (in an anti-Italian sense) the canonizations promoted during the pontificates in which the dissension between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See on the still unresolved Roman Question had still been strong.28 It was Mussolini himself who conceived the idea of including Francis of Assisi among the ‘great Italians’. In the message broadcast for Italian 24 25

26

27

28

P. Ardali, Croce e aratro (San Benedetto e il fascismo), Mantova: Edizioni Paladino, 1929. A reconstruction of the events relating to the process of canonization of Maria Goretti can be found in G. Rossi, “Maria Goretti”, in Il grande libro dei santi, (eds.) C. Leonardi et al., Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 1998, vol. 2, 1320–1323. For a reconstruction of Guglielmo Massaja’s missionary work in a colonialist perspective see L. Ceci, “Letture politiche di una vicenda missionaria: Guglielmo Massaja nella propaganda colonialista”, in Guglielmo Massaja 1809–2009: all’Africa attraverso l’Africa, (ed.) P. Magistri, Roma: Società Geografica Italiana, 2009, 91–105. On the life and work of the Capuchin friar and later Cardinal see the study of M. Forno, Cardinal Massaja and the Catholic Mission in Ethiopia. Features of an Experience between Religion and Politics, ­Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2013. On the ‘nationalization of sanctuaries’, and of the Marian sanctuary at Loreto in particular, see E. Fattorini, Italia devota. Religiosità e culti tra Otto e Novecento, Roma: Carocci, 2012, 73–76. T. Caliò, “Corpi santi e santuari nella Roma della Restaurazione”, in Monaci, ebrei, santi. Studi per Sofia Boesch Gajano, (ed.) A. Volpato, Roma: Viella, 2008, 129–137.

110

chapter 3

embassies abroad on 28 November 1925, but then disseminated more widely in the form of small printed images of the poverello, he placed “the most saintly of saints” among the supreme representatives of the great heritage of the new Italy, alongside Dante, Christopher Colombo, and Leonardo da Vinci: The highest genius of poetry, with Dante; the most audacious navigator of the oceans, with Colombo; the most profound intellect in the arts and in science, with Leonardo; but Italy, with St. Francis, also gave the most Saintly of Saints to Christianity and to humanity. For, together with nobility of mind and of character, simplicity of spirit and the ardor of ideal conquests and, where necessary, the virtues of renunciation and sacrifice, are inseparable from our people.29 The question of sacrifice was a salient theme of the Franciscan centenary; it was often evoked in connection – in this case too – with the harrowing experience of the Great War. In the ceremony of 12 September 1926 in which, in the presence of King Victor Emanuel iii, the great bell – the Campana delle Laudi – forged thanks to the contribution of all nine thousand Italian comuni, was raised to the top of the Torre del Popolo, the podestà of Assisi, Arnaldo Fortini, summed up the image of Francis in that of the “Saint of sacrifice”, to whose song, he claimed, the “song of the bayonets” could be likened: That which is sung over the point of the bayonets, that which is silent in the depth of the soul of our infantrymen, who shared with Francis a great heart and a spirit of sacrifice for the salvation of others, the song of simple men who, dressed in the grey-green habit, they too, like the saint, mortified their body and made their way through the world having as their companions Obedience, Humility and Poverty.30 The glorification of sacrifice was not, of course a specific trait devised by Catho­ licism to give a meaning to death in battle.31 The horror aroused by slaughter 29

30 31

Il Capo del Governo alle rappresentanze italiane all’estero (Rome, 28 November 1925), in F. Torchiani, “4 ottobre 1926. San Francesco, il regime e il centenario”, in San Francesco d’Italia, 76–77. A. Fortini, Il ritorno di San Francesco: cronaca del settimo centenario francescano, 1926– 1927, Milano: Treves, 1937, 212–213. See further M. Kilani, Guerre et sacrifice. La violence extrême, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. On the theme of sacrifice for the patria in Italian nationalist discourse, see A.M. Banti, Sublime madre nostra. La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2011.

The Holiest Of Nations

111

on a hitherto unimaginable scale in the Great War had however brought home the inadequacy of the idea of sacrifice as expiation, through war, both for the community and for the individual, that had represented a crucial theme in the reflection of Joseph de Maistre and had been widely absorbed into Catholic thought in the 19th century.32 In a syncretism of religious and patriotic sentiments, a mysticism of sacrifice was then developed to confer an order, a sense, a raison d’être, on the disorderly, insensate and irrational death of thousands of young men in the Great War and on the mourning of their families, such as to make their loss comprehensible and supportable.33 In the Franciscan celebrations the theme of ‘sacrifice’ went hand-in-hand with that of the ‘soldier Saint’ and with that, even more touching, of the ‘infantryman Saint’, especially on the day of remembrance, 4 November. In the poster prepared for the occasion by the National Association of those mutilated and disabled in the war we read: The day of Vittorio Veneto falls after that of All Saints and that of the Dead to signify that Victory is achieved through Faith and Sacrifice. […] Italians, to celebrate the Victory in its three mysteries, joyful, dolorous and glorious, we have chosen the city of the Saint who was warrior, and who in his life and in his character anticipated the spirit and the image of the infantryman in his humble courage, in his strength, and in his generous poverty.34 The analogy drawn between Saint Francis in his rock hermitage and the soldier holed up amid the bleak crags of Trentino was forcefully restated in the words of the man who had come to personify the thousands left mutilated by the war, Carlo Delcroix, who had lost his eyes and his hands amid the snow fields of the Marmolada in February 1917.35 In other interventions Francis was assimilated not to the simple infantryman but to the Duce himself. It was Mussolini who was now proposed as the supreme model of suffering, ardor and sacrifice, as he is in Paolo Ardali’s little book San Francesco e Mussolini, published in the ‘Biblioteca di cultura fascista’ in the centenary year 1926: 32

33

34 35

See G. Miccoli, “La guerra nella storia e nella teologia cristiana. Un problema a molteplici facce”, in Pace e guerre nella Bibbia e nel Corano, (eds.) P. Stefani and G. Menestrina, Bre­ scia: Morcelliana, 2002, 91–110. On the post-Great War theology of sacrifice, on the theme of self-sacrifice for the nation, and on the integration of Italian Catholics in the nation state, see the essays edited by Daniele Menozzi, in the monographic section “Sacrificarsi per patria. L’integrazione dei cattolici italiani nello Stato nazionale”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 8 (2011): 3–109. The text of the poster in A. Fortini, Il ritorno di San Francesco, 283. Ibid., 290–291.

112

chapter 3

[Mussolini’s] life of great renunciation, suffering and sacrifice, both mental and physical, his will to overcome, his altruistic vision of a superior end to be tenaciously achieved at no matter what cost, even of life itself, his love of his humble fellowmen, his warrior spirit, his ardor in battle, his indefatigable zeal, the activity and virtue by which he transformed and dominated his time, and finally the harmonization of all his qualities in a superior, calm, serene, and luminous atmosphere in his innermost being, liken him, more than could ever be imagined, with the Saint of Assisi.36 The coincidence between the Duce and Saint Francis was particularly evident, according to Ardali, by looking at the photographs of Mussolini in the war: The finest pages of this virtue, which reveals him as the most quintessentially Italian among Italians are those of the Great War. I have – Ardali continues – below my eyes a photograph of Mussolini on the march: his face is haggard and suffering, but serene and strong. It reminds me of a painting of Francis of Assisi of the 13th-century Sienese school: identical penetration of gaze, identical nobility in posture; only the halo is lacking.37 The images proposed, the comparisons drawn, had been rendered even more plausible by the aura created round Mussolini after the series of attempts on his life, beginning with that on 7 April 1926, when he was wounded in the nose by a pistol shot fired by Violet Gibson, an Irish lady with mental health problems, and culminating in the abortive assassination attempt in Bologna on 31 October, when Mussolini escaped a shot fired at him during a parade celebrating the March on Rome; the presumed perpetrator, the fifteen-year-old Anteo Zamboni, was immediately lynched.38 The Duce’s apparently miraculous escape was hailed, in Italian churches, by Te Deums of thanksgiving, while the hand of providence was claimed to explain the failure of the assassination attempts. After the Bologna episode, the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Alessio Ascalesi, dean of the Sacred College, spoke of the “destiny” that Mussolini was called to fulfil: “for the good of our Italy and perhaps of the entire world”.39 In the same days L’Osservatore Romano, associating itself with the sentiments 36 P. Ardali, San Francesco e Mussolini, Mantova: Edizioni Paladino, 1926, 5. 37 Ibid. 38 B. Dalla Casa, Attentato al duce. Le molte storie del caso Zamboni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2000. 39 I derive the quotation from E. Rossi, Il manganello e l’aspersorio (1958), new edition, (ed.) M. Franzinelli, Milano: Kaos, 2008, 127.

The Holiest Of Nations

113

already expressed by the Pope and the Italian episcopate in response to the attempt on the prime minister’s life, thanked “the Divine Goodness that had intervened to render it vain” and emphasized that “the people” had “caught sight of the hand from heaven”.40 The evocation by authoritative prelates, and by the Vatican newspaper itself, of such momentous terms as destiny and providence to explain the danger escaped by the strong man of Palazzo Chigi helped to reinforce a sense of “the charmed life of the Duce”, and to fuel the tendency to recognize miraculous qualities in Mussolini and magic narratives in the exploits of Fascism.41 Explicitly embraced in the self-representation of Fascism, it was a tendency rooted in popular credulity, in the popular susceptibility to the fascination of ‘apparently miraculous narratives’, according to a mechanism that belongs more properly to advertising. It was taken so far as to recognize in Mussolini thaumaturgic properties, miracle-working qualities, including even the ‘miracle’ of having stopped the lava from flowing down the side of Etna during his visit to Sicily in June 1923.42 In the little printed images and postcards of the Franciscan centenary, aimed at disseminating the cult of St. Francis at the popular level, the image of Italy’s strongman was coupled with that of the saint in what has been called a ‘bi-directional’ rapport of patronage. This is the message we can draw from a comparison between two postcards representing Mussolini and St. Francis: in the first the saint is represented in the act of protecting the Duce from possible assassination; in the second the role of patronus is assigned instead to Mussolini, who is hailed as “the great protector of the Christian faith”.43 Yet in those same years the Church of Rome had taken steps to curb popular credulity in terms of charisms and miracles. For example, it had opened an inquisitorial file on an obscure Capuchin friar who, in a small backwoods town in Apulia, San Giovanni Rotondo, had claimed in 1918 that he, like Francis, had received the stigmata, and who thanks to this miracle had become the object of mass popular devotion: Padre Pio of Pietrelcina.44 The theologians commissioned by the Holy Office in 1920 to verify the claimed saintliness of 40 41

42 43 44

“Un nuovo esecrabile attentato contro l’on. Mussolini”, L’Osservatore Romano (2–3 November 1926). The expression is that of A. Gibelli, Il popolo bambino, 219–249. On the development of the ‘cult of the Duce’ in these years, see Ch. Duggan, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, London: The Bodley Head, Random House, 2012, Chap. 4. A. Gibelli, Il popolo bambino, 247. For the two postcards see E. Sturani, “Il fascismo in cartolina”, in Modernità totalitaria. Il fascismo italiano, (ed.) E. Gentile, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2008, 125. For a critical historical reconstruction of the life and cult of Padre Pio see S. Luzzatto, Padre Pio. Miracoli e politica nell’Italia del Novecento, Torino: Einaudi, 2007 (English

114

chapter 3

the friar and the genuineness of his wounds had reached contrasting conclusions. According to the French Father Joseph Lemius, procurator general of the oblates of Mary Immaculate and consultor of various Vatican congregations, Padre Pio had produced the first signs of the stigmata in his hands and feet “by the sheer force of meditating on the wounds of Our Lord” but had then “completed them by chemical means”. This is at least what he wrote in his testimonial on Father Pio da Pietrelcina, signed in January 1921.45 A different opinion was reached by Monsignor Raffaele Carlo Rossi, the apostolic visitator sent by the Holy Office to San Giovanni Rotondo a few months later. Skeptical about the miracles attributed to the Capuchin, even sarcastic about the local promoters of his claimed sainthood, the prelate maintained nonetheless that Padre Pio’s wounds were genuine.46 Otherwise, however, there could be no doubt: not one of the claimed miracles could be substantiated. Hence the decision of the secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Merry del Val, to order the Curia generalizia of the Capuchins to impose maximum isolation on Padre Pio in his contacts with the faithful and, if possible, send him away from San Giovanni Rotondo. The opposition of the throng of devotees, while it rendered vain the Vatican restrictions and the threat to have the friar forcibly transferred, did not stop the inquiries of the Holy Office, which now assigned a further investigation to the person held to be the most reliable in matters of stigmata, Father Agostino Gemelli. The Franciscan had long been engaged also in his role as physician and psychologist, in combating with scientific arguments the fake ecstasies and other abuses of popular devotion. In a famous article from 1924, Gemelli had recognized in Saint Francis the sole supernatural wounds in the history of the Church.47 Then, in April 1926, he produced the most pitiless document ever penned about Padre Pio. The Apulian friar – maintained Gemelli – presented clear characteristics of ‘mental deficiency’ and forms of psychopathic disorder with compulsive tendencies to self-harm; the Holy Office ought to have imposed complete isolation on him and have him removed from the suggestive atmosphere of San Giovanni Rotondo.48

45 46 47 48

translation: Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010). Ibid., 132–138. Ibid., 138–154. A. Gemelli, “Le stimate di San Francesco nel giudizio della scienza”, (Vita e Pensiero, October­1924): 580–603. See S. Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 186–188.

The Holiest Of Nations

3.2

115

A Bumpy Road

The assassination attempt survived by Mussolini at Bologna had the unfortunate consequence of provoking the promulgation of emergency laws that eliminated all the constitutional guarantees of the freedom of citizens recognized by the Statuto Albertino (Constitution granted by Carlo Alberto of Savoy to the Kingdom of Sardinia on 4 March 1848). The statute involved the forced dissolution of anti-Fascist parties and the imposition of very heavy penalties for anyone attempting to resuscitate them; the suppression of opposition newspapers; the introduction of a special tribunal and the death sentence. These laws had been promulgated just a few months after the government had implemented a series of measures on various fronts that had been particularly welcome to the Catholic Church; and it was these, and not the legislation that abolished civil liberties, that drew the attention, and excited the applause, of the Catholic press. The measures in question included, e.g.: those against blasphemy in schools and public institutions; those that protected public decency in dancehalls and on beaches – laws that prescribed even what form bathing costumes and bathrobes should take and that prohibited dancing in bathing apparel. Especially appreciated by the Vatican were the interventions of the Minister of the Interior Luigi Federzoni to prevent the publication in the press of the ever more frequent reports of suicide and prohibit propaganda for birth control. News of suicides, the minister had pointed out, had the character of blatant anti-Catholic apologia, while the commitment to boost the birth-rate represented one of the areas that showed a complete coincidence between Fascist morality, based on the subordination of individual interests to the greatness of the nation, and the rationale of Catholic ethics.49 To reinforce the image of a substantial accord with the Church, Mussolini himself, under pressure from Pius xi, had taken steps to ‘regularize’ before God his relationship with Rachele Guidi, marrying her according to the Catholic rite on 28 December 1925, ten years after the civil marriage from which Edda, Vittorio and Bruno had already been born.50 To the same end, within the next three months, as Edda Ciano would later recount, he took the necessary steps to ‘regularize’ his three children by submitting them to first communion and confirmation, “all in one go”.51 49 50 51

G. Verucci, La Chiesa nella società contemporanea. Dal primo dopoguerra al Concilio Vaticano ii, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989, 50–51. R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 80, note 1. So claimed Edda in a later interview: E. Ciano, La mia vita. Intervista di Domenico Olivieri, (ed.) N. Caracciolo, with the collaboration of E. Bruni, Milano: Mondadori, 2001, 20.

116

chapter 3

That the freedoms of the press and of association had now been suppressed could not, perhaps, unduly discompose an institution that, through its Holy Office and Index of prohibited books, continued to oppose freedom of conscience and of the press in ecclesiastical practice. The most spectacular case occurred just at this time, between 1925 and 1926, when Ernesto Buonaiuti, distinguished scholar and Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Rome, suspected of heresy ever since the time of the anti-modernist crackdown and already suspended a divinis on 18 March 1924, was inflicted with one of the harshest penalties that the Code of Canon Law could possibly prescribe: personal excommunication that deprived him of his ecclesiastical dress condemned and proscribed all his publications, and warned the faithful not to be deceived by this priest, judged corrupted, or by his teachings.52 The decree of excommunication, in the drafting of which Father Agostino Gemelli and Father Enrico Rosa had cooperated, was followed by the request of the Minister of Education Pietro Fedele, made on behalf of the government, that Buonaiuti be suspended from his teaching activity at the University of Rome to facilitate negotiations between Italy and the Holy See.53 It was in this climate, emphasized by the celebrations of the 7th Franciscan centenary, that talks between the Fascist government and the Holy See made significant progress towards a ‘Conciliation’. On 4 October 1926, the national feast-day of Saint Francis, Mussolini wrote an autographed letter with which he conferred on State Councilor Domenico Barone the “strictly confidential” commission to negotiate with the Holy See to prepare the basis for an official accord.54 Contacts had begun in July on the initiative of a prelate in the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Monsignor Luigi Haver, whose idea of having the Vatican represented at the talks by his lawyer friend Francesco Pacelli, brother of the nuncio in Berlin, had borne fruit.55 At the end of 1925 the commission instituted by Minister of Justice Alfredo Rocco, and chaired by the former right-wing exponent of the ppi Paolo Mattei Gentili, had presented a draft revision of the Legge delle guarentigie favorable to the Church; the draft was prepared in the same months in which Senator Carlo Santucci 52

53 54 55

On the career of Ernesto Buonaiuti, major exponent of Italian modernism, see L. Bede­ schi, Buonaiuti, il Concordato e la Chiesa. Con un’appendice di lettere inedite, Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1970, and G.B. Guerri, Eretico e profeta. Ernesto Buonaiuti, un prete contro la Chiesa, Milano: Mondadori, 2001. G. Verucci, L’eresia del Novecento, 113–125. F. Pacelli, Diario della Conciliazione, (ed.) M. Maccarone, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1959, 207. On this phase in the negotiations see R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 120–123.

The Holiest Of Nations

117

had independently drawn up, not without tacit Vatican consent, a proposal for the reform of the existing legislation. Nonetheless, no sooner had the work of the commission been completed, than a letter from Pius xi to Cardinal Gasparri, dated 18 February 1926, was published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The letter represented a denial of the possibility of intervening in the ecclesiastical legislation, unless the Roman Question were first resolved, subject to an accord with the Holy See. Therefore, in the Vatican, efforts were now focused on a bilateral accord that would supersede any unilateral decree by the Italian State, as envisaged by Rocco in the 1925 commission, and, before him, by prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando in his talks with Monsignor Bonaventura Cerretti, secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, on the margins of the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919.56 Such a bilateral accord would imply the recognition, right from the start, of the independent sovereignty of the Church. Mussolini’s compliant attitude and the start of bilateral negotiations therefore implied a substantial change in approach: “for the first time an Italian government implicitly recognized the principle of the Church as societas perfecta which is a key component of the conception that the Church has of herself and which liberalism, wedded on the one hand to the idea of religion as a private affair and on the other to the principle of the exclusive sovereignty of the State, had repudiated”.57 On the morning of 5 October 1926 the Spanish Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, secretary of the Holy Office and delegated by Pius xi to bring the Pope’s blessing for the Franciscan centenary at Assisi, appeared in the newly restored Palazzo Comunale and publicly thanked the man who held the reins of the government of Italy, “visibly protected by God”, for having “raised the destinies of the Nation, increased its prestige throughout the world”, and ensured that religion be “respected, honored and protected”.58 On the following day the cardinal legate left the birthplace of the poverello amid gun salvos from the batteries placed on Monte Subasio and fanfares of a military band. He was escorted down to the railway station by a garde d’honneur followed by a procession of 25 automobiles. Perhaps on his journey back to Rome, Merry del Val meditated on the words pronounced on the previous day by the Minister of Education Pietro Fedele, present as government representative at the festivities in Assisi, on the many affinities between Franciscanism and Fascist 56 57 58

Ibid., 111–120. Thus P. Scoppola, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, 387–388. For a report of the events of the centenary day in Assisi and the quotations of the cardinal legate, see the pages of the contemporary coverage of the event in La Civiltà Cattolica 77/4 (1926): 175–178.

118

chapter 3

Italy, and on the many favors that the Duce had shown towards the Church. According to La Civiltà Cattolica, indeed, the minister’s words contained “something more than a mere participation in the centenary celebrations or a tribute to His Eminence the Cardinal Legate”.59 The Jesuit review alluded to the possibility of opening a discussion on the solution of the Roman Question proposed by Mussolini’s extremely devoted brother, Arnaldo, in an editorial published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 18 September;60 an editorial, however, that had aroused the bitter reproof of L’Osservatore Romano due to some passages in which the Catholic religious sentiment was subordinated to the mere “ethnic character of the nation”.61 Due to its universal nature – declared the Vatican organ – C ­ atholicism was irreducible to such categories as romanitas, Latinity, or the nation. It seemed clear that cracks were beginning to appear in the tacit understanding between the Fascist regime and the Church. The basic sympathy shown by the Holy See towards Mussolini, as expressed in the public interventions of its most authoritative representatives, co-existed with genuine fears and resistances to a government that was beginning voraciously to encroach on ground formerly filled by Catholic associations and to usurp Catholic educational principles. The main papal concern was now (and in the future) the education of the young. It is fair to say, however, that there were those in the Vatican who had not remained inert to the acts of violence committed by Fascists against Catholic priests, activists, teachers, and associations between 1925 and 1926, especially in the provinces in which the presence of the ppi had been strongest. The violence escalated especially after the appointment, on 12 February 1925, as general secretary of the pnf, of Fascist strongman, ‘legalizer of Fascist illegalism’, and self-styled ras of Cremona, Roberto Farinacci.62 The recrudescence of violence, for which Monsignor Ferdinando Roveda was commissioned to draw up a report for the Secretariat of State, was repeatedly remarked on in the pages of L’Osservatore Romano and La Civiltà Cattolica,63 59 60

Ibid., 178. A. Mussolini, “Politica complessa”, Il Popolo d’Italia (18 September 1926), on which see F. Torchiani, “4 ottobre 1926”, 92–93. 61 “Il cattolicesimo nella sua natura e missione universale”, L’Osservatore Romano (24 September 1926). 62 Farinacci had frankly epitomized the aim of his own action as general secretary of the pnf in the slogan “legalizing fascist illegalism” (R. Farinacci, Un periodo aureo del Partito Nazionale Fascista, Foligno: Campitelli, 1927, 31). On the ras of Cremona see L. Santoro, Roberto Farinacci e il Partito Nazionale Fascista 1923–1926, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008. 63 See G. Sale, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, 209–246.

The Holiest Of Nations

119

and the question of Fascist intimidations and vandalism against exponents and activities of the Catholic world entered into the confidential talks between Mussolini and the ever more active Tacchi Venturi. On behalf of Pius xi, the Jesuit transmitted to the head of the government the concerns felt by the Holy See on various fronts: the teaching of religion in the schools of the Alto Adige, which the Church wanted to be imparted in the mother tongue in opposition to the government directives that prescribed Italian even for German-language pupils; the suppression of the Catholic schoolteachers’ association in favor of the Fascist guild; and more generally the destiny of Catholic trade-union organizations, after the Palazzo Vidoni pact (2 October 1925) had put an end to trade-union freedom.64 Despite these areas of attrition, Pius xi decided to avoid any explicit condemnation of the violence and of the new provisions of the government. The one threat that Pius xi relayed to Mussolini toward the end of 1925, through his usual intermediary Tacchi Venturi, was to “publicly raise his voice” to defend “the natural right” of ethnic minorities – e.g. children in the Alto Adige – to learn the rudiments of Christian doctrine in their mother tongue, but the leverage produced by the threat was zero.65 Thus, anyone who listened to or read the speech pronounced by the Pope on 14 December 1925, a speech in which he summed up the achievements of the Church in the year that was then coming to a close, could not have come away with the impression that there had been any tensions at all between the Holy See and the Fascist regime. Pius xi reviewed the many initiatives of the jubilee, rejoiced over the “spiritual triumphs” it had brought, announced the promulgation of the encyclical that would institute the feast of Christ the King and explained its purpose.66 He did not fail to make political references to specific governments; but the governments in question were Chile, accused of adopting a regime of separation between Church and State, Mexico, Argentina, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia: countries in which “the sacred rights of the Church, i.e. the right of God himself and of the Church”, were not respected. As for Italy, the Pope touched on the need to resolve the Roman Question, emphasized the great steps forward made “for some time in favor of the Church and of Religion”, especially praised the country’s rulers and administrators for having ensured efficient services during the Holy

64 65 66

F. Margiotta Broglio, Italia e Santa Sede. Dalla grande guerra alla Conciliazione. Aspetti politici e giuridici, Bari: Laterza, 1966, 152–161. Ibid., 153. Text of Pius xi’s speech in Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 1, 494–503.

120

chapter 3

Year, made a vague mention of the “many difficulties by which the country was afflicted” and thanked God for having averted a “criminal attempt” against the prime minister’s life. Things became complicated when the measures taken by the Fascist government impacted more invasively on the education of youth. On 3 April 1926 it approved the law that established the National Fascist Youth Board for the assistance and physical and moral education of youth (Opera Nazionale Balilla or onb), placing it under the direct supervision of the prime minister’s office. The new organization placed the new generations firmly under the sign of the littorio (the bundled fasces with the axe: fascist symbol par excellence). Its underlying aim was to indoctrinate the young, reinforce support for the regime and project it into the future, given that the state schools following the Gentile reform were being increasingly revealed as inadequate for the task. The aim of the organization was: (a) to inculcate youth with a sense of discipline and military education; (b) provide them with paramilitary instruction; (c) gymnastic and sporting tuition; (d) spiritual and cultural education; (e) professional and technical training; and (f) religious education and assistance.67 The establishment of the onb was the regime’s most important intervention in the field of education; it called for the inculcation, or rather indoctrination, of youth with the ideals of the Fascist State.68 Through its two Fascist paramilitary formations (balilla for boys aged between 8 and 14 and avanguardisti for those aged between 14 and 17), the onb further aimed to establish a monopoly over youth organizations for boys between the ages of eight and eighteen, even if this meant undermining, or eliminating, Catholic youth clubs and scout groups. It was especially the latter that were the target of the regime’s totalitarian crusade, due to many similarities between their character-forming programme and that of the onb. The intention however was to clamp down on the scout movement in general and not just on Catholic scouts. It was in 1916 that Mario di Carpegna had founded, amid the suspicions of priests and bishops, the Italian Catholic Scouting Association, revamping on a confessional basis the method of the Italian scout movement established four years previously

67 68

N. Zapponi, “Le organizzazioni giovanili del fascismo 1926–1943”, Storia contemporanea 13 (1982): 599. See C. Betti, L’Opera Nazionale Balilla e l’educazione fascista, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1984.

The Holiest Of Nations

121

on the initiative of the Piedmontese physician Carlo Colombo.69 Sport, contact with nature, hierarchical structure, honor, patria: these were the pillars of the Italian scout movement, which absorbed the cult of the body and the interest in physical exercise, no less than the model of the ‘armed nation’, that had developed in Italy in the later 19th century, especially in the big cities.70 Papal approval and the incorporation of catechesis in the scouting educational project helped to soften or remove the initial mistrust of bishops in Catholic scouts and to foster the remarkable growth of the Association, which, at the time of the foundation of the onb, could claim some 26,000 members. The danger represented by the new organization was immediately intuited by the Holy See, in spite of the government’s attempt to obtain Vatican approval by incorporating within its structure chaplains appointed by the military Ordinariate for religious assistance. Vatican doubts and suspicions about the new body are clearly expressed in the memorandum dating to early January 1926 and drawn up by Monsignor Domenico Tardini, general ecclesiastical assistant of the Catholic youth movement Gioventù Cattolica and minute-writer of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs: Attention is drawn to the communiqué issued by the Stefani [press] agency after the last Council of Ministers held on 1st January 1926. According to this communiqué a draft law is being prepared which would institute a National Board for the civil and moral education of youth. Reference is also made in this communiqué to religious assistance which would be provided by special chaplains. The following questions are posed: (1) what guarantees could such a state body give for the moral formation of youth? (2) Why is it that a Council of Ministers should announce in advance the nomination of future chaplains? Would not such an announcement, in this case, be the responsibility of the ecclesiastical authorities? And have these latter been asked whether they intend or not to proceed to the assignment of the chaplains in question? Has the 69

70

Contacts between former aides of Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement, and Italian educators in the early years of the century had led to the founding of the Giovani Esploratori Italiani in 1910. See B. Pisa, Crescere per la patria. I Giovani Esploratori e le Giovani Esploratrici di Carlo Colombo (1912–1927), Milano: Unicopli, 2000, and P. Dal Toso, Nascita e diffusione dell’Asci: 1916–1928, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2006. See G. Bonetta, Corpo e nazione. L’educazione ginnastica, igienica e sessuale nell’Italia liberale, Milano: FrancoAngeli 1990.

122

chapter 3

text of the draft law been communicated to the legitimate ecclesiastical authorities, since this would be the only basis on which to establish whether it is appropriate or not to assign chaplains to the aforesaid body and also to make any observations in good time? (3) And shall these chaplains be limited to religious assistance alone? Is not moral formation also their exclusive task (and not that of state bodies)? (4) What would be the consequences of provisions of this kind on Catholic youth organizations? All these doubts cannot but arouse grave concerns in those whose duty it is, as part of their ministry, to devote themselves to Catholic youth assistance.71 However much focused on specific questions, Tardini’s doubts clearly raised questions about the operation as a whole and implied a more fundamental concern about the very objectives that lay behind the planning of a state body which would pursue, if not monopolize, the moral formation of youth, a field in which the Church, traditionally, had a great deal to say and do. Such apprehensions were all the greater, since the foundation of the onb was accompanied by a new wave of violence against Catholic youth organizations, which were targeted with the usual pretext that they were a cover for ppi militants. In this circumstance, too, Pius xi tried to intervene with the head of the government through his usual intermediary Tacchi Venturi.72 At the same time he saw to it that the leaders of Catholic associations should not participate in the committees set up for the regulation of the onb, to prevent them from furnishing any kind of endorsement of the new body.73 The government, however, was determined to press ahead with the abolition of Catholic scouts. So the question ended up entering into the preliminary skirmishes that accompanied the diplomatic negotiations for a ‘Conciliation’. The Holy See, which rejected on principle any state or party monopoly of education, concentrated its efforts on the independence of Catholic Action, but was forced to give ground on the scout movement. The decrees of 9 January 1927, implementing the law for the establishment of the onb of 3 April 1926, prohibited any organization dedicated to the physical, moral and political education of youth other than the 71 72

73

I derive the quotation of Tardini’s memorandum (preserved in asv) from O. Stellavato, “La nascita dell’Opera nazionale balilla”, Mondo contemporaneo 2 (2009): 26–27. On the special position of Tacchi Venturi in this period, see D.I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini. The Secret History of Pius xi and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, New York: Random House, 2014, Chap. 7. O. Stellavato, “La nascita dell’Opera nazionale balilla”, 26–30 and 36–40.

The Holiest Of Nations

123

associations headed by the Opera Balilla itself. Catholic scout units were only permitted if they had already been established, exclusively in comuni with a population higher than 20,000 and with the obligation to use the onb acronym on their banners. To reaffirm the exclusive competence of the Holy See to decide on the destiny of Catholic associations, while recognizing what was perceived to be a fait accompli, Pius xi, on 24 January 1927, himself took the necessary steps to abolish Italian Catholic scout troops in comuni with less than 20,000 inhabitants.74 After the closure of the Federation of Italian Catholic sports associations in 1927, as a consequence of the sporting institutions being concentrated in the hands of the government and of the decrees for the implementation of the onb, a decree law was issued on 9 April 1928 that abolished any organization aimed at the physical, moral, spiritual and professional education of youth, with the exception of those headed by the onb. The Pope’s resistance prevented these provisions from being applicable to Catholic Action, but failed to stop the liquidation of the Italian Catholic scout movement. On 6 May the General Council of the Association of Catholic Scouts announced that, without waiting for the application of the decree, the provincial commissioners had dissolved all the Association’s scout units and submitted their resignations to their respective bishops. The act of self-abolition was accompanied by a letter from the Secretary of State Gasparri on behalf of the Pope. It was devoid of any remonstrance or criticism of the Mussolini government, a clear sign that what was paramount for the Holy See at this time was to conclude the negotiations for the ‘Conciliation’.75 3.3

A Look beyond Italy

Although Pius xi assigned to Italy, at the time still a ‘Catholic nation’, a primacy projected on a planetary scale, akin to that claimed by the Piedmontese priest and Risorgimento ideologue, Vincenzo Gioberti,76 the government of Mussolini was just one of the many governments with which the Holy See had diplomatic relations. The project of Catholic ‘reconquest’ and the diplomatic relaunch of the action of the papacy on the international level, 74 75 76

See further S. Rogari, Santa Sede e fascismo. Dall’Aventino ai Patti lateranensi, with unpublished documents, Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1977, 179. Ibid., 238–239. The claimed primacy of Italy, according to Gioberti (Primato morale e civile degli Italiani, 1843), consisted in the indissoluble link between the Catholic principle and the national genius. See F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale, 29ff.

124

chapter 3

formulated in its doctrinal aspects in the encyclical that had opened his pontificate (Ubi arcano Dei consilio), was experiencing important new developments in the mid-1920s. First and foremost Pius xi’s attitude to the League of Nations changed. At the start of his pontificate, Ratti, dissociating himself from the line adopted by his predecessor, had virtually disowned the Geneva-based intergovernmental organization, affirming, for example in his Studiorum ducem (1923),77 that true peace could only be re-found within a transcendental o­ rder such as the ‘Kingdom of Christ’, which would recognize the essential foundations of the community of nations in the vision propounded by the Church or better still in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, to whom the encyclical was dedicated. Such a position was not inseparable from the dissatisfaction felt in the Vatican for the lack of interest shown by the League of Nations in the protection of ecclesiastical interests in the world and in the first place in Palestine, but it was also prompted by the fear lest the leadership assumed in Geneva by Protestant countries such as Great Britain and by secular governments such as France, in combination with masonic influences, could promote the spread of anticlerical attitudes. Various signals were sent by the Holy See in 1926. The solution of the Ruhr crisis, openly supported by the Vatican, and Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, had given heightened prestige to the organization. Nor could the Holy See remain indifferent to the strong position in support of the League of Nations adopted by the great Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work in Stockholm, which had brought together over 600 delegates elected by thirty-one Protestant churches in August 1925.78 The change in attitude can be gauged from the pages of the Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica which typically registered the mood in the Curia. In March 1926 Father Angelo Brucculeri, to whom the review usually assigned the discussion of social problems, signed an article in which he showed the acceptability of the League of Nations. He connected the League with the work of one of the founders of the periodical, the Jesuit philosopher Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio, among the most prestigious Catholic theoreticians of international law, who in his magnum opus, the Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale (Palermo, 1840– 1843), had mapped out the features of an international organization, so-called

77

78

Italian text of the encyclical Studiorum ducem (29 June 1923) downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). For an analysis of Pius xi’s attitude to the League of Nations see D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 52ff. Ibid., 66–67.

The Holiest Of Nations

125

etnarchia, placed under the moral direction of the Pope.79 In August 1926 Brucculeri went even further, expressing dissent from those who were criticizing the work of the League of Nations due to Germany’s failure to join it, and urged Catholics to defend the Geneva-based organization from the “swarms of those who were beleaguering it in order to abolish or weaken it”.80 In the autumn of 1926, lastly, the French Jesuit Yves de la Brière, among the most prolific and authoritative interpreters of the Catholic position in the field of international law, on returning from a journey to Rome, wrote an article in Études in which he alluded to a personal audience he had had with Pius xi, and maintained that, according to his direct sources, the Apostolic See had no interest in having a permanent seat at the League of Nations, in view of her claimed superiority over it. At the same time the Pope hoped – wrote de la Brière – that he could enlist the support of those Catholics who had worked for a positive collaboration, with the aim of being involved in the deliberations in which the ecclesiastical interests in the world were at stake.81 Pius xi’s international policy was also expressed by the ratification of a large number of concordats, comparable in number only with those signed in the age of the Restoration. The most important and controversial were the concordats respectively with Italy and with Germany, both because they served as the prototype for later accords with the Spain of Franco, the Portugal of Salazar and the puppet Vichy regime; and because there is no doubt that, in the international community, these concordats had contributed to the legitimation of the States in question.82 But Pius xi was the protagonist of other alliances of concordat type, most of them linked to the birth of the new States that had arisen from the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires: with Latvia (1922), Bavaria (1924), Poland (1925), Romania (1927), Lithuania (1927), Czechoslovakia (1928), Prussia (1929), Baden (1932), Austria (1933), and Yugoslavia (1935), to which should also be added the partial accords with France in 1924 and 1926, with Portugal and with Ecuador (1937). Obviously, by the very nature of these alliances, the Holy See did not enter into the merits or demerits of the political regimes, but adapted itself to de facto situations, placing in the forefront the defense of ecclesiastical interests. Indeed, ever since 1922 and 79 80 81 82

A. Brucculeri, “Un precursore italiano della Società delle Nazioni”, La Civiltà Cattolica, 77/1 (1926): 305–405, and ibid., 77/2 (1926): 28–37 and 121–131. A. Brucculeri, “Lo spirito della Chiesa e l’organizzazione internazionale”, ibid. 77/3 (1926): 305. Y. de la Brière, “Impressions romaines. Le Vatican et le Quirinal. Le pape et la Société de le Nations”, Études 63 (1926): 606–620. See further F. Margiotta Broglio, “Pio xi”, 624–625.

126

chapter 3

throughout the 1920s, Vatican diplomacy had tried in various ways to establish official relations also with the Soviet government, in spite of the arrest of numerous Catholic priests and the execution by firing squad, in March 1923, of a bishop, Kostanty Romuald Budkiwicz, who was sentenced to death for having disobeyed the government’s directives against religious education and for having organized clandestine seminaries.83 Mexico proved a particularly vexing problem. The Holy See’s conflict with the Mexican government had further deteriorated in the mid-1920s. A process of secularization of vehemently anticlerical inspiration had followed the promulgation of the secular Constitution and separation between Church and State in 1917. Secularization was relaunched, and further radicalized, by President Plutarco Elías Calles in 1926 with the promulgation of stiff new antiecclesiastical legislation, which decreed the closure of Catholic schools and seminaries, the expropriation of churches, the dissolution of all religious orders, the imposition of a fixed number of priests in relation to the number of Catholics, the expulsion of foreign priests, the prohibition of public worship outside churches, and even a ban on priests wearing the soutane. After the failure of non-violent resistance to these measures, some Mexican Catholics had recourse to armed struggle, giving rise to the revolt of the cristeros, the pejorative epithet given by the government to the rebels, derived from their motto “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” The revolt, fuelled by apocalyptic tensions and enlivened by popular religious legends and devotional practices, assumed the character of a mass movement, while its guerrilla tactics troubled the Mexican army for several years.84 It was just from the situation in Mexico that Pius xi took his cue in reviewing the Holy See’s achievements over the past year in his allocution on 20 December 1926. Introducing the Consistory convened for the nomination of two new Cardinals, the Pope denounced the persecutions suffered by the Catholics in the Latin-American country “under the pretext of laws which are laws only in name, because they are manifestly contrary to any kind of law, human or divine”.85 He defined as martyrs worthy of the admiration of all 83 84

85

For Vatican relations with the Soviet Union see L. Pettinaroli, La politique russe du SaintSiège (1905–1939), Rome: École française de Rome, 2015. Obligatory is the reference to the classic study of Jean Andre Meyer, La Cristiada, in its three volumes, La guerra de los cristeros, El conflicto entre la iglesia y el estado: 1926–1929, and Los cristeros (México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973). More recent studies include M. Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion Michoacán 1927–1929, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, and the collection of essays in Las Naciones frente al conflicto religioso en México, (ed.) J.A. Meyer, México: Tusquets, 2010. Text of the allocution in Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 1, 643–651.

The Holiest Of Nations

127

mankind, and even of the angels in Heaven, those archbishops and bishops, priests, religious and laity who had suffered “violence and maltreatment, exile and imprisonment, and tortures and outrages more insufferable than death itself”, though there had been no lack of those who had chosen death, “for the honor of God, for the dignity of their consciences, for practical coherence with the faith they professed, and for their unflinching fidelity to the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, to the Vicar of Christ and to all his directives”.86 Pius xi then turned his attention to France to proclaim the incompatibility of Catholicism with the nationalist movement of Action Française, in which many members of the clergy were militants, explicitly asserting that it was not “licit for Catholics to join or cooperate in programmes or schools that placed political involvement before religion and that made religion subservient to it”. Nor was it licit, he added “to expose oneself or others, especially the young, to teachings and influences dangerous for faith and morality, for Catholic education and formation”.87 The papal condemnation was solemn, even including newspapers and writings that were considered erroneous and dangerous and that violated Catholic dogma and Catholic morality. The judgement on Action Française, Pius xi predicted, could prove “opportune and useful” even beyond the frontiers of France. The allusion, probably, was to the Italian case, tackled by the Pontiff in the latter part of his speech. Without making any mention of the end of the Liberal State, the proscription of opposition parties, or the imprisonment of anti-Fascists, who included various Catholics, Pius xi began by condemning the assassination attempt on Mussolini in very strong terms. The “insane” gesture against the man who “is governing the destinies of the country with so much energy” had – he said – aroused “indignation” and “horror” in the Pope. Ratti recalled, once again, the decisive intervention of divine providence and what he called the “hurricane [uragano!] of jubilation, rejoicing, and thanksgiving” aroused by the escape of the head of the government from danger, going so far as to describe as “portentous” the fact that he had emerged unharmed from the attempt on his life. Pius xi’s focus then shifted to other matters. He contrasted the support and 86

87

“They went to their death – continued Pius xi – acclaiming Christ the King, holding their Rosary in their hand and praying; sowing in their blood, like the ancient Martyrs, the emulation of their faith and their courage, strewing their way with flowers of martyrdom which shall never be lost, and that shall make more splendid and glorious the day of triumph and of peace – triumph and peace which already they hasten and prepare to make more complete, imploring repentance and forgiveness for their persecutors with the eloquent voice of their own blood”. Ibid., 645–646. Ibid., 647.

128

chapter 3

affection shown by the ecclesiastical hierarchy and clergy towards the head of the government with the violence that had exploded in the country against persons and things, almost as if it were a form of ingratitude. The reference, however, was not to all forms of violence, but only to those committed against Catholics. Pius xi, indeed, seemed, by implication, to judge as basically acceptable violence committed against the ‘enemies of order’, in other words against anti-fascists. Once again he absolved Mussolini from any responsibility for the violence, maintaining his conviction that precise directives had come from the center of government to repress episodes of anti-Catholic intolerance which were hard to reconcile with the official demonstrations of support for religion. Nonetheless on the question that was closest to his heart, the education of youth and in particular Catholic Action, Pius xi overcame the reticence that had held him back at Christmas of the previous year and said: It seems that an obscure threat (a threat confirmed by a whole cloud of suspicions, interferences and difficulties) is hovering and suspended over the organizations and activities, especially those dedicated to the youth of ‘Catholic Action’, the apple of our eye. It seems too that the Christian formation of the young, which is the choicest part of the divine mandate euntes docete, is also in danger.88 And in this regard he did not hesitate to attack the view of the State in which the educational question was inserted, affirming how far removed it was from the Catholic conception: It seems that a conception of the State which cannot be the Catholic conception is once again being manifested and propounded, one that turns the State into the end, while the citizen, the individual, is reduced to a means, wholly monopolized and absorbed in it.89 The reference to the totalitarian project of Fascism, resumed by La Civiltà Cattolica early in 1927,90 was clear, while the points of contact between such a conception of the State and some ideas, just condemned, of Action Française were equally self-evident. But while the Holy Office, in its provision of 8 March 88 Ibid., 651. 89 Ibid. 90 “Principi di dottrina cattolica circa lo Stato e la convivenza civile”, La Civiltà Cattolica 78/1 (1927): 97–106.

The Holiest Of Nations

129

1927, cracked heavily down on the French nationalist movement by depriving its members of the sacraments, and by placing on the Index many books of its leading ideologue, Charles Maurras, and the movement’s newspaper itself, the Vatican condemnation of Fascist totalitarianism never assumed equally strong forms. Once again the Holy See demonstrated that it moved in a logic of Realpolitik, subordinating ethical and doctrinal questions to the realization of a modus vivendi with governments. This was the priority, and it was considered all the more urgent the wider were perceived to be the threats that such governments posed to the Church, her institutions, and her room for maneuver. The condemnation of Action Française itself, and the pressure thus exerted on French Catholics to accept the secular regime of the Third Republic, formed part, as already mentioned, of a process of reconciliation with the government in Paris. So it should not astonish us if the skirmishes with the Fascist regime in Rome were not translated into any explicit rupture: not only did the main objective remain, now as before, the solution of the Roman Question, but it seemed that such a solution could be deferred no longer, if the Church were to be safeguarded, and her scope to pursue her work in society preserved, in a situation of the growing disappearance of civil liberties. 3.4

Conciliation and Competition

In May 1926 Luigi Sturzo defined as unfounded and unverifiable the rumors then circulating abroad on the real willingness of Mussolini to resolve the Roman Question: A rumor, baseless, but skillfully disseminated, was to the effect that Mussolini’s Cabinet meant to settle the Roman Question. It is not unusual to be asked abroad for information on the points already agreed upon between the Vatican and Palazzo Chigi. The truth is that the rumor had no substance.91 Sturzo’s judgement was expressed in a book that immediately drew the attention of the press throughout the world, first published in Great Britain by Faber and Gayer in 1926 with the title Italy and Fascismo,92 and then successively published in German, French and Spanish editions in the following 91 92

L. Sturzo, Italy and Fascismo, London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926, 132. See previous note.

130

chapter 3

four years.93 Sturzo had written it in London during the first years of his exile. Writing from Oxford to congratulate the former secretary of the ppi for his book, Gaetano Salvemini, he too in exile since 1925, told him that with Italy and Fascismo any chance of his returning to Italy had been gambled away, at least so long as Victor Emanuel iii and ‘Benito I’ remained on the throne. And it was also for this that he congratulated the author.94 Salvemini’s prediction proved true: it was not until September 1946 that Sturzo would return to Italy, while his book, violently attacked by the regime, was not published in Italian until 1965.95 In the meantime, from his exile in London, Sturzo was engaged in prolific activity as an essayist and columnist to raise public awareness about the liberticidal nature of Fascism. At the same time he tried to maintain contacts with other anti-fascist groups in exile, in spite of the difficulties deriving from the lack of clout that the few former exponents of the Partito Popolare could hope to enjoy and the anticlericalism widespread in Italian exile circles abroad.96 Ever since his first months in exile Sturzo had also worked tirelessly to create a Committee for the assistance of Italian political refugees. For this purpose, an office was opened in Paris in 1927, with the aim of supporting and uniting anti-fascist refugees, with particular attention given to more humble persons and without any distinction of ideology or party affiliation.97 In spite of the fact that Sturzo’s book was among the best analyses of Fascism so far published and that it “applied to it the concept of totalitarianism, raising awareness of it in Europe, in order to define the new experiment of rule implemented in Italy”,98 the Sicilian priest was wrong in his predictions about the reconciliation between Church and regime: not about Mussolini, about whose political opportunism he is withering; but about the Holy See, which is absolved from any historical responsibility for the rise of Fascism.99 Yet, in 93 94

95 96 97 98 99

L. Sturzo, Italien und der Fascismus, Köln: Verlag G.M.B.H., 1926; Idem, L’ltalie et le Fascisme, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1927; Idem, Italia y el Fascismo, Madrid: Editorial Reus, 1930. The relevant passages from Salvemini’s letter are quoted in the introductory pages of the last Italian edition of Sturzo’s book: L. Sturzo, Italia e fascismo (1926), Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001, vii. L. Sturzo, Italia e fascismo (1926), Bologna: Zanichelli, 1965. On this period of Sturzo’s life see F. Malgeri, “L’esilio e le ultime battaglie politiche (1924– 1959)”, 299ff. Ibid., 305. Thus E. Gentile, Contro Cesare, 194. “In his relations with the Vatican and ecclesiastical affairs, he [Mussolini] pursued a policy of favor. He issued various decrees improving the stipends of the parish and episcopal clergy, exempting parish priests from military service and introducing other changes which were well received […] In spite of all this, the Holy See, seeing the hostile

The Holiest Of Nations

131

an appeal to Catholic university students on 21 December 1925, published by Unità cattolica on 27 January 1926 to rectify the misinformation spread by the daily Il Tevere, Sturzo had written: When cowardice triumphs and personal character is crushed, when interests are valued more than ideals, when the Risorgimento is nullified and religion reduced to the slave of a political regime, all the greater, then, is the need for Christian student youth to find the strength to react in faith, in culture, and in the depths of their own soul.100 Sturzo replied with a letter to the editor Ernesto Calligari, published in La Vita del Popolo in Como on 5 March, addressing the reservations expressed by the same Catholic paper that published his appeal, apropos of religion being reduced to a slave of the regime: That the Church, in her long history has suffered at times fetters of iron and at times those of gold, is hardly anything new. […] That the secular power, whatever it be, always tends to deceive or oppress the Church is the human condition she has experienced through the centuries […]. That’s why the virtues to react, both to seductions and to persecutions, and to overcome them, whether in the short or in the long term, as God wills, are perennially alive in the Church. But so that these virtues operate within the human course of terrestrial struggles, there are, and there shall always be, within the Church those who express the right degree of caution and those who openly combat with the sacrifice of themselves. […] I think that with my sacrifice I am fulfilling a duty to the Church (as also to my country) and that’s enough for me.101 Sturzo, in other words, assigned to himself the religious and political mission to combat the liberticidal regime, and left to others the art of mediation. In attitude of the government and the considerable number of aggressions – among which the most notable and painful was the Fascist murder of Don Minzoni, the Parish Priest of Argenta – invited the clergy to stand aloof from the electoral contest, while exercising their rights as citizens. This decision of the Holy See was exploited in favor of Fascism”. L. Sturzo, Italy and Fascismo, 132–133. 100 Now in L. Sturzo, Miscellanea londinese, vol. 1, (1925–1930), Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003 (1st edition 1965), 89–90. 101 Ibid., 109–110.

132

chapter 3

the meantime the bilateral negotiations between Italy and the Holy See were progressing. The two sides were represented respectively by State Councilor Domenico Barone and the Vatican lawyer Francesco Pacelli, while in the final phase they would be headed by Mussolini himself and by Secretary of State Gasparri. The historic signature of the Lateran Pacts came on 11 February 1929, after almost four turbulent years, punctuated by acts of violence committed by the more intransigent exponents of Fascism against Catholic organizations. These were years during which Pius xi continued to express reservations of principle on the totalitarian tendencies of the regime, though never desisting from the search for an advantageous compromise. The Lateran Pacts consisted of three documents: Treaty, Concordat and Convention. Elaborately penned on vellum with gold decorations, they were signed by Cardinal Gasparri, in his role as plenipotentiary of the Supreme Pontiff Pius xi, and by the head of the government Benito Mussolini, in his role as plenipotentiary of the King of Italy Victor Emanuel iii, at a signing ceremony held at 12:30 in the Sala dei Papi at the Palace of San Giovanni in Laterano. Contemporary newsreel coverage of the event show a hasty Mussolini, seemingly more embarrassed than proud to add his signature to these historic documents: he cannot but have been conscious that the anticlerical component within his own party was strong and that the Lateran Pacts flagrantly contradicted an important part of his own past. The press of the regime ingeniously papered over the contradictions by presenting the ‘Conciliation’ as a political masterpiece of the Duce, which brought to completion the historic cycle of the Risorgimento and enormously increased Italy’s prestige in international relations. That the moment was historic, that the ‘Conciliation’ was something that would be remembered through the years, was immediately grasped in the capital. The doors of the palazzi of the pro-papal aristocracy, which had remained closed as a sign of mourning for the end of the temporal power of the papacy since 20 September 1870, were reopened. Trophies composed of Italian tricolor flags and papal banners appeared on many shop-fronts, on balconies and in windows. In spite of the rain and the cold, thousands of well-wishers poured into the Piazza San Pietro, so much so that it was necessary to suspend the circulation of trams, and stop the access of cars and carriages, so as not to impede the crowds converging on the piazza.102 The signing of the Lateran Pacts was hailed by Catholic opinion as “an event of the highest value for the religious destinies of the nation, and as the solemn sanction, so long awaited, of the public and official role of Catholicism, understood as a system of beliefs and 102 “La cerimonia in Laterano”, La Stampa (12 February 1929).

The Holiest Of Nations

133

doctrines, authorities and institutions”.103 The accords seemed to many the premise for a Catholic restoration of the nation. Transcending the confines of ordinary legislation and investing that of the Constitution, the Pacts modified the very nature of the State, its ideals, its raison d’être. They had behind them a long gestation, to which a significant contribution had been made by the last Liberal governments, but of the Liberal input the accords preserved only the frame. With the Lateran Pacts Fascism achieved its aim of enlarging its basis of support within the Italian Catholic world and integrating a significant part of its lower and middle classes. This was no insignificant advantage, given that the unification of the various components (social, cultural, religious) represented the necessary premise for the totalitarian claims of the regime.104 At the same time, by guaranteeing to the Church and her organizations independent scope for action, the Pacts apparently weakened the hegemonic tendency of Fascism, and sanctioned the presence of another power that the regime had failed to re-absorb, in spite of their substantial coincidence of views on major issues of political and social life of the country.105 Yet, though the reconciliation with the Church seemed to reinforce the moderate and traditional character of Fascism itself, to the detriment of its more uncompromising tendencies, the totalitarian ambition of the regime was never in doubt and never weakened. This was to become clear in the weeks that immediately followed the signing of the Pacts, during which tensions deriving from the contest between two rival hegemonies, eager to re-assert their own ethical primacy, re-emerged. Mussolini had especially focused on the Treaty that abrogated the Legge delle Guarentigie (the law of the Kingdom of Italy of 13 May 1871 that had hitherto regulated relations between the Italian State and the Holy See) and recognized the Holy See’s sovereignty over a territory denominated Città del Vaticano or Vatican City State. On the Concordat, on the other hand, he had been willing to make ample concessions, accepting, de facto, a diminution of the sovereignty of the State and its influence in various fields, in deference to the Church: from matrimonial legislation to the teaching of Catholic religion in schools, from the recognition of a privileged position for the clergy to the violation of the principle of equality of all citizens before the law, authorized by article 5, which banned priests subjected to ecclesiastical censure from teaching in schools and from working in offices that would place them in contact with the public. “The religious problem with all its interferences – claimed the Catholic 103 See further F. Traniello, “L’Italia cattolica nell’era fascista”, in Storia dell’Italia religiosa, vol. 3, 275. 104 R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 151. 105 A. Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario, 293–298.

134

chapter 3

newspaper L’Avvenire d’Italia on 2 March 1929 – now permeates the structure and connexions of the Nation, which now as a Catholic State and seat of the Roman Pontificate is the guarantor of its sovereignty”.106 The nexus between sovereignty, pontifical seat and Catholicity of the State had perhaps been underlined with a deliberately provocative intent, but it was undeniable that the Concordat abolished a large part of the non-confessional character of the legislation inherited from the Liberal era and conferred on Italy the trappings of a Catholic State. Not by chance, commenting on the Pacts to the professors and students of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart two days after they had been signed, Pius xi recognized that the new Concordat was “among the best” hitherto signed by the Holy See: as the Pope declared, it had “restored God to Italy and Italy to God”, thanks also to what he called the helpfulness of “a man such as the one that Providence has enabled us to meet; a man who does not have the preoccupations of the Liberal school”.107 The character of Italy as confessional State, as it emerged from the Concordat, was captured with precision by a jurist of the caliber of Santi Romano, chairman of the Consiglio di Stato, who on the day following the signing of the Lateran Pacts pointed out: A fundamental point of the Lateran Pacts is the one that concerns Italy’s character as a confessional State. This is a character that our country, in truth, has always had, on the basis of article 1 of the Statute [Constitution], but that now assumes a new juridical form. Besides, the Fascist laws have several times had occasion to reaffirm the principle of confessionalism. Yet, whereas, hitherto, this principle had been adopted by the unilateral will of the Italian State, now its acceptance is the object of a precise commitment. And its applications will be important and numerous.108 In the plebiscitary elections on a single list of 24 March 1929, from which the Chamber of Deputies called to ratify the Pacts would emerge, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and Catholic Action, abandoning their traditional non-political character, made every effort to urge voters to go to the polls, even if they attempted, not without equivocation, to prevent the vote appearing an unconditional ­support for the Fascist regime.109 A week before the elections L’Osservatore 106 For the Catholic movement after the Lateran Pacts see further R. Moro, “Azione catto­ lica, clero e laicato di fronte al fascismo”, in Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia, (ed.) F. Malgeri, vol. 4, I cattolici dal fascismo alla Resistenza, Roma: Il Poligono, 1981, 197. 107 In Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 1, 14–19. 108 Quoted in R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 162. 109 See further S. Rogari, Santa Sede e fascismo, 251.

The Holiest Of Nations

135

R ­ omano had published a communiqué of the Central Committee of Catholic Action in which Italian Catholics were reminded of their “duty to contribute with their vote to the formation of the new legislative Assembly, which was called to ratify and implement the very important Lateran Conventions”.110 On 23 and 24 March Father Enrico Rosa had insisted on the religious and moral significance of the vote for the election of the Chamber: it did not represent, he said, an unconditional endorsement of Fascism, but a necessary contribution to the ratification and implementation of the Lateran Pacts.111 In spite of this assertion of a “non-political” vote, the Catholic support for the government in the elections would in fact be entirely to the advantage of the constituted order. The new political visibility of Catholics, even if in favor of the regime, worried Mussolini, who ran the risk of appearing to be imprisoned by it. Already on the eve of the elections, the head of the government had intervened with a letter to the Prefects to impress on Fascist dailies the need for greater sobriety in their attitude to Vatican City State and to recommend due vigilance on any amplifications in the Catholic press.112 As the weeks went by the regime’s determination to win its battle against the Holy See on the terrain of the application of the new laws grew. Leading intellectuals such as Gioacchino Volpe, Giovanni Gentile, and Francesco Scaduto intervened to circumscribe the possible impact of the Concordat and to explain that it had not placed in question fundamental principles acquired by the modern (i.e. Fascist) spirit.113 On 10 March 1929, speaking to the quinquennial Assembly of the regime in his first public intervention on the Lateran Pacts, Mussolini resumed the interpretation he had given to the relation between Catholicism and Fascism in his debut speech in Parliament and once again derived the ideal proximity between the two sides from the theme of romanitas. But now the idea of Rome towered over Christianity, whose strength in history was attributable to the imperial power of the Caesars: It is not by mere coincidence, or by human caprice, that this religion arose and irradiated from Rome. The Roman Empire is the historical presupposition first of Christianity and then of Catholicism. The language of the Church is still today the language of Caesar and of Virgil.

110 111 112 113

“Adunanza della Giunta Centrale”, L’Osservatore Romano (17 March 1929). S. Rogari, Santa Sede e fascismo, 251. R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 162. Ibid., 162ff.

136

chapter 3

And if the vote of Catholics – he said on the day before the elections – was aimed at placing mortgages on the future, Fascism would reject them “in the clearest possible way”: the regime would, he predicted, be “more totalitarian tomorrow than it was yesterday”.114 Mussolini’s hardest-hitting speech, however, was the one he pronounced on the afternoon of 13 May 1929, closing the debate in the Chamber on the Lateran Pacts.115 Though no opposition voice was now to be heard in Parliament, the head of the government accentuated his polemical tone and spelt out the line of the regime on the questions debated in previous weeks in a speech that lasted over three hours. In the drafting of the speech he drew on the services of one or more ghostwriters, including Mario Missiroli.116 The Fascist State – said Mussolini in essence – claimed for itself a totalitarian system of government and would never renounce its monopoly over education, in spite of the Pope’s unyieldingness: “In the State – he declared – the Church is not sovereign, nor is it free”.117 The Christian religion itself, born in Palestine, had become Catholic in Rome, because, if it had remained in Palestine, “it would have been just one of the many sects that flourished in that inflamed environment, such as those of the Essenes and the Therapeutae, and very probably would have died out leaving no trace”.118 At the end of his speech Mussolini reaffirmed the ethical self-sufficiency of the Fascist State and the useful, but not essential, character of Catholicism: The Fascist State claims to the full its own ethical character. It is Catholic, but Fascist; indeed it is pre-eminently, exclusively and essentially Fascist. Catholicism supplements it, and we openly declare so, but let no one think to change the cards on the table under a philosophical or metaphysical guise. (Applause). Let everyone be persuaded that he is faced not by an agnostic, or democratic-liberal State, a kind of mattress on which everyone sleeps in turn; but by a State that is conscious of its mission, and that represents a people on the move; a State that continuously transforms this people, even in its physical appearance. To this people the State must speak great words, agitate great ideas and great problems, and not just devote itself to ordinary administration.119 114 B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 24, 373–374. 115 Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxviii, Discussioni, 13 May 1929, 129–154. 116 R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 189. 117 Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, 13 May 1929, 130. 118 Ibid., 131. 119 Ibid., 154.

The Holiest Of Nations

137

Once he had permanently conquered his monopoly over political power, Mussolini showed in short that he had no intention of abdicating his control over consciences. That’s why he was determined to exert a blanket control over the activities, however petty or minute, of the Catholic world: Let no one believe that the least leaflet issued by the smallest parish is not sooner or later brought to the knowledge of Mussolini. We will not permit the resurrection of parties or organizations that we have always destroyed (Rousing applause). Let no one forget that when the Fascist Regime commits itself to battle, it fights it to the end and leaves a desert behind it. Nor let anyone think of denying the moral character of the Fascist State, because I would be ashamed to speak to this tribune, if I did not feel I represented the moral and spiritual force of the State.120 After the speech of the minister Alfredo Rocco, the Chamber approved by secret vote the implementation of the Treaty, the four appendices annexed to it, and the Concordat, with only two opposing votes. When the question passed to the Senate at the end of May, there was little opposition. The Liberal senator Benedetto Croce was alone in announcing his intention to vote against the bills, while three other senators belonging to the Liberal camp also voiced their concerns. Croce repudiated not the idea of ‘conciliation’ itself, but the way in which it had been implemented, and ‘the particular conventions’ by which it had been accompanied. The reference was, in particular, to the Concordat: not for the specific affirmations contained in it, but for its legal framework which authorized the exerting of pressure on consciences also by means of civil power. Amid ‘vociferous barracking’, ‘interruptions’ and ‘comments’, Croce claimed the validity of secular values, and denied that the Lateran Pacts were in continuity with the Italian tradition inaugurated by the Risorgimento (whose origins he traced back to the struggle for free thought personified by Pietro Giannone). In conclusion, reaffirming his own decision to vote against the bills under debate, and his own disapproval of what he regarded as the product of a cynical Realpolitik, Croce, recalling the trite saying that Paris was well worth a mass, declared that he felt himself among those “for whom the question of whether or not to listen to a Mass is worth infinitely more than Paris, because it is a matter of conscience”.121 120 Ibid., 153. 121 Senato del Regno, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxviii, Discussioni, 24 May 1929, 191–193. On the position of Croce about Fascism see D. Mack Smith, “Benedetto Croce: History and Politics”, Journal of Contemporary History 8 (1973): 41–61.

138

chapter 3

Though Croce’s speech during the parliamentary debate was the only reasoned opposition to the Lateran Pacts, it was understandably Mussolini’s three-hour harangue to the Chamber that drew the attention of Pius xi. The Pope gave his immediate response on the following day, 14 May, speaking to the young pupils at the Mondragone Jesuit College; he then declared that it was the right and the duty of the Church and of Christian parents to play a central role in the education of youth and condemned the State that claimed to ‘absorb’, ‘swallow up’ and ‘annihilate’ the individual and the family.122 After having attempted in vain to obtain a public declaration in which Mussolini would commit himself to an honest and faithful implementation of the Treaty and the Concordat, Pius xi was convinced of the need to make an official reply. The Pope’s eagerly awaited intervention, of whose imminence the head of the government learned from Francesco Pacelli, arrived in the pages of L’Osservatore Romano on 6 June 1929, in the form of a letter to Secretary of State Gasparri dated 30 May, feast of Corpus Domini.123 Pius xi responded point by point to everything Mussolini had said that was “erroneous”, beginning with his parliamentary speech of 13 May. He described as “heretical” and shot through with modernism those expressions of the head of the government that had derived the essence of Christianity and Catholicism from romanitas; reaffirmed that the “full and perfect educational mandate” was the responsibility not of the State, but of the Church; and asserted the indissoluble link between Treaty and Concordat, using the well-known formula simul stabunt or simul cadunt, to signify that any violation of the Concordat could inevitably re-open the Treaty itself to discussion. This was equivalent to attacking the maximum advantage that the Italian State had claimed to have obtained from the Lateran Pacts: the end of the Roman Question with the recognition of Rome as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy under the dynasty of the House of Savoy. The strong reaction of Pius xi obliged Mussolini to soften his language and, after a day of nervous negotiations between the two sides of the Tiber, to insert in the ceremony of 7 June for the ratification of the Lateran Pacts a declaration in which the contracting parties reaffirmed “their wish to observe faithfully, both in word and in spirit, not only the Treaty in its irrevocable and mutual recognition of sovereignty and in its definitive elimination of the Roman 122 The original text of Pius xi’s address (14 May 1929) was published in L’Osservatore Romano on 16 May 1929, now in Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 2, 1929–1933, Torino: Sei, 1960, 75–79. 123 The Pope’s letter was published in four columns, without headline, on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano, 6 June 1929.

The Holiest Of Nations

139

Question, but also the Concordat in its great goals aimed at regulating the status of religion and of the Church in Italy”.124 It was an armed, and only a temporary, truce. On 20 June the publishing house of the regime (Libreria del Littorio) published Mussolini’s speeches on the Lateran Pacts in a little book, Gli Accordi del Laterano, preceded by a foreword written by the head of the government himself, reaffirming the need and value of the Lateran Pacts.125 Three days later L’Osservatore Romano published a second letter from Pius xi to Gasparri to reaffirm the line already indicated in the document of Corpus Domini and in the speech to the pupils of the Jesuit boarding school at Mondragone; the texts of these latter were now reprinted and more widely disseminated.126 As a direct response to the Fascist publication, the printing-house of L’Osservatore Romano published a pamphlet that brought together the papal words on the Lateran accords.127 The most disturbing episode in the battle between regime and Holy See, however, took place at the height of summer, when, with an unprecedented provision, the Prefect of Rome ordered the seizure of all copies of issue number 1898 of the Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica due to the content of Father Enrico Rosa’s (unsigned) leader, Tra ratifiche e rettifiche, judged ‘anti-Italian and anti-Fascist’.128 The seizure was sensational: in previous years many Catholic publications had been seized by the Fascist authorities, but the Italian Jesuit periodical enjoyed unique prestige in the Church; it was considered close to the Pope, authoritative in registering Vatican thinking, and distributed throughout the world. In his editorial Father Rosa had drawn a comparison between Pius vii and Pius xi, between the Concordat signed with Napoleon in 1801 and that with Mussolini, a comparison between an emperor and a dictator. In essence he had launched a direct attack on the Bonapartist logic of the Fascist regime, replying point by point to all Mussolini’s interventions on the Lateran Pacts.129 The Pope must undoubtedly have had prior knowledge of the article, but clearly had not foreseen so hostile a reaction: Mussolini showed 124 In S. Rogari, Santa Sede e fascismo, 260. 125 B. Mussolini, Gli Accordi del Laterano: discorsi al Parlamento, Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1929. 126 The texts of the three papal interventions in question were prominently printed together, without headline, in the Vatican newspaper, occupying virtually the whole front page of L’Osservatore Romano of 23 June 1929. 127 Pius xi, Parole pontificie sugli accordi del Laterano, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia de L’Osservatore Romano, 1929. 128 On the episode see S. Rogari, Santa Sede e fascismo, 260–261, and R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 230–240. 129 [E. Rosa], “Tra ratifiche e rettifiche”, La Civiltà Cattolica 80/3 (1929): 97–105.

140

chapter 3

he did not fear a frontal clash, even if it might have international repercussions, as assuredly it would in this case, given the international reputation and diffusion of La Civiltà Cattolica. The episode led to Father’s Rosa’s temporary suspension from his role as editor of the review and temporary removal from Rome, at least to avert the forced exile threatened by the regime. Who knows how much the Jesuit, now in his sixties, felt consoled by taking with him the gold medal donated to him by the Pope and a card confirming Pius xi’s own “undiminished benevolence and no less undiminished confidence”.130 Following the ratification of the Lateran Pacts, the pressing of the regime did not prevent the ecclesiastical hierarchy from counter-attacking to condition the promulgation of the law on the religious cults admitted in Italy.131 The discussion of the bill was accompanied by a debate that was given wide coverage in the press with the intervention of representatives of Judaism in Italy and various Protestant denominations.132 In the light of the constitutional guarantees given in the Lateran Pacts, the real question at issue here was, in particular, the role of Catholicism as the exclusive factor of italianità, as the exclusive State Church.133 It seemed that the ecclesiastical authorities were concerned to an exaggerated degree by the presence of the evangelical confessions in Italy. Despite the smallness of evangelical communities and the difficulties they faced in their development, Catholic observers seemed convinced that there was a decisive growth in their activities at this time. The struggle against Protestant minorities was placed on a terrain, that of the national religion, on which the Church had no intention of making any concessions at all. This was all the more so in the aftermath of the Lateran Pacts, when the Church aimed at imprinting on the regime a philo-Catholic profile, and excluding once and for all its secular or anticlerical components, still far from quenched, as the crisis of 1931 would shortly demonstrate.134 On the other hand, on the level 130 R. Pertici, Chiesa e Stato in Italia, 239. 131 The accentuation of the role of active propulsion of religious intolerance on the part of Catholics after the Concordat has been emphasized by P. Scoppola, “Il fascismo e le minoranze evangeliche”, in Il fascismo e le autonomie locali, (ed.) S. Fontana, Bologna: il Mulino, 1973, 331–394. 132 The debate was reconstructed in some detail in M. Missiroli, Date a Cesare: la politica religiosa di Mussolini con documenti inediti, Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1929, 132ff. 133 See further R. Moro, “Cattolicesimo e italianità. Antiprotestantesimo e antisemitismo nell’Italia cattolica”, in La Chiesa e l’Italia. Per una storia dei loro rapporti negli ultimi due secoli, (ed.) A. Acerbi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2003, 307–339. 134 On the significance of this debate see R. Moro, “Pregiudizio religioso e ideologia: antiebraismo e antiprotestantesimo nel cattolicesimo italiano fra le due guerre”, Le carte 3 (1998): 53.

The Holiest Of Nations

141

of religious policy, Catholic anti-Protestantism assumed the “symbolic value of a wider commitment against a ‘secular and pluralist’ society”, because it was widely believed that the Reformation lay at the origin of European disintegration, rationalism, liberalism and socialism.135 The law, promulgated on 24 June 1929, ignored the principal objectives of the Church. Though it reaffirmed the privileged legal status of Catholicism as State religion, it declared the ‘admissibility’ in the Kingdom of Italy of cults other than the Roman Apostolic Church and recognized freedom of conscience and freedom of religious discussion. Though the law seemed a reaffirmation of the principles of the non-confessionalism of the Liberal State, in practice the activity of religious communities other than those of the Catholic Church was obstructed by administrative and police regulations with the pretext that their propaganda could have negative consequences for the social order.136 In the meantime the confessionalization of state schools went forward: the law of 5 June 1930 authorized the incorporation of the teaching of Catholic religion in all secondary schools. With exemplary promptness the Sacred Congregation of the Council published two months later its provisions to facilitate the teaching of religious education in the school year 1930–1931. It also made provision for the full incorporation of teachers of religion in the teaching staff with right to intervene in all meetings and to vote in ballots on the conduct and progress of pupils. Some of the clauses of the Congregation’s provisions enormously extended the role of the diocesan authorities, e.g. in the assignment of teaching posts, or in the approval of school textbooks. Yet the catechism – charged La Civiltà Cattolica – had been removed from the curriculum of Italian schools.137 In the aftermath of the signing of the Concordat, in short, the ecclesiastical project of ‘Catholic nation’, which aimed to realize a presence of the Church as protagonist and rival within an authoritarian and confessional regime, began to gain ground in Italy. For many authoritative Catholic circles, the Lateran Pacts, as Agostino Gemelli argued, meant “the return to the Catholic tradition and mission on the part of the Italian State, in the political and legal 135 Thus A. Giovagnoli, La cultura democristiana tra Chiesa cattolica e identità italiana. 1918– 1948, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 51. 136 See G. Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche: direttive e articolazioni del controllo e della repressione, Torino: Claudiana, 1990, 29–55. 137 The many articles published in La Civiltà Cattolica in 1930 on the question of religious education, generally attributable to Father Mario Barbera and often in polemic with the Fascist philosopher and Minister of Education, Giovanni Gentile, are reviewed in G. Verucci, Idealisti all’Indice, 100ff.

142

chapter 3

organization of the nation”.138 It was a question not of exhuming traditional models rendered obsolete by the transformation of the ‘Christian principle’ into the ‘Catholic nation’, which had now turned the Church into a protagonist of the new political order, but of transforming the Fascist State from within.139 There were those in the Church, in short, who thought that Fascism could be ‘Catholicized’ and that it was necessary to conduct a long war of permeation to reinforce her position, in order to consolidate those elements of the regime considered positive and marginalize the rest. The symbiosis was noticed also by Luigi Sturzo, commenting on the ‘Conciliation’ in The Review of Reviews on 15 October 1929: “the Pope tends to the Catholic State, of which the Concordat is the expression; […] Mussolini tends to the Fascist State, of which the Concordat is the tool”.140 But, in his view, a Catholic State could never rise in Fascist Italy, because it would mean the confrontation of two “irreducible” theories. In the more private dimension of correspondence, however, Sturzo’s judgement was more pessimistic: the responsibility of the Church for having backed, with the Concordat and with the clergy’s blatant support for the plebiscite of 24 March, a violent and liberticidal regime, did not escape him. He feared that Italian Catholicism would be transformed, in a definitive way, into a tool, an instrumentum regni, of the regime.141 From his exile in Paris Francesco Luigi Ferrari was even more critical. To Salvemini, with whom he had been in contact for years and whose democratic inspiration he shared, he wrote that he felt urged by the Lateran Pacts to reject the conservative policy of Pius xi and yet, in spite of that, he still felt himself to be Catholic; he refused to accept the identification of the institution founded by Christ with the societas christiana focused on power.142 More moderate was the judgement of Alcide De Gasperi, and yet he too had paid a steep personal price for his opposition to the dictatorship: he had suffered the humiliation of arrest in May 1927, four months’ imprisonment in Regina Coeli in Rome, and, after a breakdown in his health, a year in the Ciancarelli clinic under strict surveillance. He had ended up (in 1929) working as a cataloguer in the Vatican 138 Thus A. Gemelli in his introduction to the book Chiesa e Stato. Studi storici e giuridici per il decennale della Conciliazione tra la Santa Sede e l’Italia, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, Milano 1939, X. 139 See F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale, 33–34. 140 L. Sturzo, Miscellanea londinese, vol. 1, (1925–1930), 212. 141 For a close analysis of Sturzo’s position on the Lateran Pacts see F. Malgeri, “L’esilio e le ultime battaglie politiche (1924–1959)”, 314–320. 142 F.L. Ferrari, “Lettera a Salvemini”, in Antifascisti cattolici, Vicenza: La Locusta, 1968, 43–62.

The Holiest Of Nations

143

Library, again under close police surveillance.143 In a series of letters the politician from Trentino had dissociated himself from the former ppi members who were ‘furious’ about the Church’s compromise with the Fascist regime as sanctioned by the Lateran Pacts. He recognized the historical inevitability of the ‘Conciliation’, while at the same time dissenting from those who maintained that only a government like that of Mussolini could realize it.144 While never weakening in his fidelity to the principle of the incompatibility between Fascism and Catholicism, he took the view that the scope for action guaranteed to the Church by the Concordat could prove indispensable in enabling the Holy See to take forward an alternative project to that of the regime.145 Other doubts were raised, generally privately and in such a way that nothing transpired in public discourse, by personalities not directly engaged on the political level. Giovanni Battista Montini, national ecclesiastical assistant of fuci, wrote a letter to his family on 18 February 1929 (a few days after the signing of the Lateran Pacts) in which he perceived the danger that the euphoria aroused by this ‘great event’ might induce Catholics to abandon ‘militancy’ and ‘prudence’.146 Monsignor Domenico Tardini praised the providential character of the signing of the Pacts in the editorial Te deum laudamus of the March 1929 number of the Bollettino per gli Assistenti ecclesiastici and signed an article with a similar message for the Bollettino ufficiale dell’Azione Cattolica Italiana.147 But not long afterwards, by now under-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, he would express in his private diary all his own skepticism and his own perception of the risk that the accords signed with the Italian government could present to the world the image of a Holy See in hock to Mussolini.148 Extremely harsh was the judgement of don Primo Mazzolari, who in his ministry as a rural parish priest in the diocese of Cremona, was developing ever more critical reflections on Fascism and on the relations between religion and political power. To the enthusiasm that the signing of the Pacts had aroused in his friend don Guido Astori, don Primo 143 On this period in the life of the former ppi leader in Trentino see A. Melloni, “Alcide De Gasperi alla Biblioteca Vaticana (1929–1943)”, in Alcide De Gasperi: un percorso europeo, (eds.) E. Conze, G. Corni, P. Pombeni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2005, 141–168. 144 A. De Gasperi, Lettere sul Concordato, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1970, 60 and 72. 145 For a more detailed analysis of De Gasperi’s attitude to the Lateran Pacts see P. Craveri, De Gasperi, Bologna: il Mulino, 2006, 104–122. 146 G.B. Montini, Lettere a casa 1915–1943, (ed.) N. Vian, Milano: Rusconi, 1987, 168–169. 147 C.F. Casula, Domenico Tardini (1888–1961). L’azione della Santa Sede nella crisi fra le due guerre, Roma: Studium, 1988, 74–80. 148 Ibid., 294–295.

144

chapter 3

replied that they aroused in him “human dread” because “from absolutist and reactionary powers the Church had never reaped anything but humiliation, restriction of freedom and […] terrible co-responsibility towards tired and disheartened peoples”.149 3.5

Two Exclusive Faiths

The improvement of the regime’s image and the growth of support, which it hoped to reap from the ‘Conciliation’, were frustrated, however, in the short term, by its conflict with the Church. This reached its climax in 1931. On the contingent level, the difficulties encountered by the government as a consequence of the worldwide economic crisis in 1929 pushed Mussolini to compensate for this weakness with a show of strength, in a bid to obviate the spectacle of a power that felt that its impact on the population was slipping.150 More in general, in spite of the undoubted advantages that both sides had drawn from the Lateran Pacts, in actual practice, contradictions deriving from the conflict between two exclusive faiths soon came to the fore. This was all the more so because Fascism itself was gradually assuming the character of a new religion, with its own myths, rites, symbols and dogmas; a political and secular religion, obedient to the infallibility of its leader, and furnished with its own rituals, ceremonies and precepts, and already well codified by the end of the 1920s. The Fascist idea, wrote the provincial party secretary of Milan, Mario Giampaoli in 1929, expressing a conviction widely held at the time, “is like the Christian idea, a dogma that is perpetually evolving”.151 In the following year, the School of Fascist Mysticism was founded within the guf (Gioventù Universitaria Fascista) office in Milan. According to its founders, Niccolò Giani, Vito Mussolini and Fernando Mezzasoma, its aim was to act as a center for the theory and promotion of the spiritual and fideistic dimensions of Fascism.152 In 1932, in his treatise Dottrina del fascismo, Mussolini had insisted that Fascism was a “religious conception of life”, an “interior form and norm”, a “discipline 149 P. Mazzolari, Quasi una vita. Lettere a Guido Astori (1908–1958), Bologna: edb, 1979, 100. 150 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 1, Gli anni del consenso, 1929–1936, Torino: Einaudi, 1996 (1st edition 1974), 252. 151 M. Giampaoli, 1919, Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1928, 346. 152 See D. Marchesini, La scuola dei gerarchi. Mistica fascista: storia, problemi, istituzioni, ­Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976, and M.L. Betri, “Tra politica e cultura: la Scuola di mistica fasci­ sta”, in Il fascismo in Lombardia. Politica, economia, società, (eds.) M.L. Betri et al., Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1989, 377–398.

The Holiest Of Nations

145

of the whole person”,153 that found its organization in the totalitarian State, understood both as institution and collective faith.154 Mussolini and some of the Fascist organizations, especially those in the universities expressed by the guf, showed themselves to be increasingly hostile to the network of associations of Catholic Action, all the more so as the latter, profiting from the scope and the means that the Concordat had guaranteed, had intensified their work of propaganda and of infiltrating society.155 The updated data on religious associations, requested by the Minister of the Interior from the Prefects in 1930, quantified an imposing presence of the Church in Italy: Approximately one million persons are members of the various [Catholic] organizations, while Gioventù Cattolica alone comprises more than 100,000 members and an equivalent number of aspirants; the Catholic press, in a country of widespread illiteracy, has 100,000 readers and almost a million read parish publications.156 The regime’s machinery of repression already had the means to monitor the grassroots organization of Catholic parishes, speakers, clubs and associations, but in the course of 1930 a series of episodes reinforced the perception in Fascist circles of an irreducible hostility of Catholic organizations: reports of informers on an unusual degree of militancy among Catholic university students; the pronouncement of a group of Milanese Catholics attacking the Lateran Pacts; the discovery of the clandestine distribution of two ‘subversive’ pamphlets addressed to the parish priests of Italy (Ai parroci d’Italia), written by Francesco Luigi Ferrari and financed by Giustizia e Libertà (an antifascist resistance movement founded in Paris in 1929);157 the blind aversion of local leaders of Catholic Action and the clergy to the participation of Catholic 153 B. Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Milano: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1932), in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 34, 106–138, quotations 118 and 121. 154 See E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista, 117. 155 L. La Rovere, Storia dei Guf: organizzazione, politica e miti della gioventù universitaria fa­ scista, 1919–1943, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. 156 In S. Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime. 1929–1943, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 117. 157 The first pamphlet was focused on the condemnation of those sectors of the Italian clergy that had been integrated in Fascist society with positions of privilege, ever ready to bless the regime in exchange for an apparent omnipotence. In the second, parish priests were invited to express their strong condemnation of the regime, overcoming the passive submission to the wishes of their superiors (P.G. Zunino, La questione cattolica nella sini­ stra italiana (1919–1939), Bologna: il Mulino, 1975, 339–340). On these pamphlets, and in

146

chapter 3

youth in the onb; the discovery of an underground anti-fascist organization (Alleanza Nazionale), which proposed to recruit its own members also among Catholics; and more generally the fact that Fascism seemed to leave Catholic public opinion cold in several regions.158 Article 43 of the Concordat recognized the right of Catholic Action organizations to perform their own activities in the religious field outside any party control and under the immediate supervision of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But what was perceived to be heightened activism, both through forms of downright anti-fascism and through more subtle ways of bypassing political controls, strengthened the fear that opposition to the regime was increasing under the shadow of the Concordat, all the more dangerous as it could count on mass organization. Tensions were further exacerbated in the weeks following the second anniversary of the Lateran Pacts, which a law of the State had just included among Italy’s national holidays, thus compensating for the concomitant abolition of that on 20 September, judged in contradiction with the Lateran Treaty.159 A violent press campaign, initiated by the Fascist labor paper Il lavoro fascista, accused Catholic Action of conducting covert political opposition through the training of cadres who could in the future substitute those of Fascism.160 In some universities student members of fuci were attacked by the police and by Fascist action squads. A Gioventù Cattolica club in Bari was invaded by guf students, who declared they were carrying out precise orders from Carlo Scorza,161 pnf militant, former Blackshirt leader, and editor of the illustrated weekly Gioventù fascista, which for some years had been actively campaigning to reduce the influence of Catholic associations on university campuses.162 In various areas of the country Catholic clubs were attacked, ransacked, and their members beaten up or intimidated with the pretext that they were engaged in anti-fascist political activity.

158 159

160 161 162

particular on the role played by Carlo Rosselli, see N. Dell’Erba, Intellettuali laici nel ’900 italiano, Padova: Vincenzo Grasso Editore, 2011, 161–162. R. Moro, Azione cattolica, clero e laicato di fronte al fascismo, 234–239. On the negotiations that led to the abolition of the public holiday on 20 September and its substitution by that on 11 February see M. Margotti, “La soppressione della festa in discorso. Le trattative tra Italia e Santa Sede per l’abolizione della festività del 20 settembre”, Contemporanea 12 (2009): 87–104. “Manovre cattoliche”, Il lavoro fascista (26 May 1931). See further M.C. Giuntella, “I fatti del 1931”, in I cattolici tra fascismo e democrazia, (eds.) P. Scoppola and F. Traniello, Bologna: il Mulino, 1975, 185–233. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 1, 230. On the secretary of the guf see C. Rastrelli, Carlo Scorza. L’ultimo gerarca, Milano: Mursia, Milano 2010.

The Holiest Of Nations

147

Mussolini, no less than the secretary of the pnf Giovanni Giuriati, believed that such aggression and material destruction, which had been able in previous years to curb or destroy other forms of Catholic laity to the benefit of Fascist organizations, had achieved complete success also on this occasion. As had already happened with the ppi, the pnf thought it could demonstrate both to Pius xi and to the Holy See that there was no longer any need for a Catholic organization aimed at a militant presence or an active infiltration of society, all the more so as the Lateran Pacts had shown the good intentions of the government. On 8 April 1931 the Italian ambassador to the Holy See, Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon, presented Mussolini’s demands to the nuncio in Italy, Francesco Borgongini Duca.163 The most important of these concerned putting a muzzle on the Catholic press, which was asked to moderate its tone; the purging of former ppi exponents from the ranks of Catholic Action; and the banishment of the followers of don Sturzo from Rome, beginning with Alcide De Gasperi.164 Two weeks later, speaking at Milan, the secretary of the pnf Giuriati reaffirmed the right and duty of the Fascist State to establish totalitarian control over the education of youth.165 Pius xi’s reply, brought to Giuriati’s attention, took the form of a chirograph letter “in defense of Italian Catholic Action” addressed to the Archbishop of Milan, Ildefonso Schuster and published in L’Osservatore Romano: Fascism – accused the Pope – corrupted the young, exposed them to “inspirations of hatred and irreverence, made the practice of religious duties difficult and almost impossible due to the concurrent practice of exercises of quite different type, and permitted public competitions of female athletics, the impropriety and danger of which had been shown even by paganism”.166 As for the other central point of Giuriati’s speech, the ‘Fascist totalitarian state’, Pius xi affirmed that the claim of a political regime to establish a control even over “supernatural life [showed a] manifest absurdity in the order of ideas” and “would be a real monstrosity if it wanted to put it into practice”.167 163 Mussolini’s pressure on the Vatican in 1931 was registered by the first Italian ambassador to the Holy See in a diary: C.M. De Vecchi di Val Cismon, Tra Papa, Duce e Re (ed. S. Setta, Roma: Jouvence, 1998, 225ff.), on which see the observations of Sandro Setta, “Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon, Diario 1943”, Storia contemporanea 24 (1993): 1057–1113. 164 A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, Roma: Edizioni 5 lune, 1963, 136–146. 165 Ibid. 166 The document, dated 26 April 1931, in aas, vol. xxiii, 1931, 145–150. 167 Ibid.

148

chapter 3

As for De Gasperi, the Pope informed Mussolini by other means that he was not willing to repent for what he had done (i.e. to provide De Gasperi with a livelihood) and was willing to assume personal responsibility for his actions: De Gasperi: the Holy Father does not, nor will he repent for having given to an honest man and an honest father of a family a little of the bread that you have removed from him. The Holy Father will answer for his antifascist activity; so sure is he that he [De Gasperi] will never do anything in the least censurable in this regard. Besides all the guarantees were taken before making this act of charity, since charity too must be conducted with prudence.168 At this point, the gloves came off. On 29 May Mussolini ordered prefects throughout Italy to dissolve the youth clubs run by Catholic Action. On the following day the order was relayed to all police stations: the premises of such youth clubs were sealed; their documents seized, especially those that contained lists of members. On the same day Pius xi suspended the sending of the cardinal legate to the Antonian celebrations in Padua, the Eucharistic Congress in Rome and the traditional Corpus Domini processions. On 1st June he convened all the cardinals then in Rome to inform them of what had happened and of the steps already taken. As a sign of mourning, finally, he prohibited the holding of public religious processions throughout Italy. At the popular level it was especially this latter prohibition that aroused a widespread ferment against Fascism; for the prohibition of religious processions impacted on customs that were often centuries’ old and had particularly visible repercussions during the summer months, the period in which traditional religious festivals were mainly concentrated, eagerly awaited and prepared for throughout the year.169 The level of tension reached its climax with the promulgation of Pius xi’s encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno on Catholic Action in Italy on 29 June 1931.170 The document was a personal cri de coeur of the Pope. It was not made public until 5 July, once it had already been distributed abroad as a precautionary measure, because he had arranged for it to be sent directly to the nuncios of the 168 G. Coco, “L’anno terribile del cardinale Pacelli e il più segreto tra i concistori di Pio xi”, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 47 (2009): 208. 169 See S. Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 123–124. 170 English translation of the encyclical downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vati can.va).

The Holiest Of Nations

149

various countries. The tone of the encyclical was unusually harsh: Mussolini had been at the head of the government for roughly ten years and yet this was the first time that Pius xi reacted with so much passion to the violence of armed Fascist groups. He had avoided doing so at the start of his pontificate when the violence of the Blackshirts had targeted the offices of the psi and, albeit to a letter degree, those of the Catholics. He had avoided doing so even after the death of don Minzoni and on the occasion of later crackdowns that had led to political adversaries being deprived of their civil liberties. The traditional moderation and scruple with which in the past the Holy See, in its judgement of Fascism, had distinguished the good intentions of the government and its leader from the actions of Fascist thugs in the provinces, had now been eliminated from the encyclical. Now the condemnation, sanctioned by a solemn pontifical document, was focused not on individual injustices, though these are mentioned and punctiliously described, but against the conception of the Fascist State, which impelled the government to monopolize the education of the young, and its ‘religious’ claims, antagonistic to those of the Church, and branded in the encyclical as irreconcilable both with Catholic doctrine and with the natural rights of families. We have seen in action a species of religion which rebels against the directions of higher religious authorities and enjoins or encourages the nonobservance of these directions; an attitude towards religion which becomes persecution and which tries to destroy all that the Supreme Head of Religion is known to prize and cherish most. […] Such a sham religion cannot in any way be reconciled with Catholic doctrine and practice, but is something which must be considered contrary to both. The contradiction is most grave in itself and most destructive when it not only consists of external actions perpetrated and carried into effect, but when it also proclaims its principles and its maxims as the fundamentals of a social system. A conception of the State which makes the rising generations belong to it entirely, without any exception, from the tenderest years up to adult life, cannot be reconciled by a Catholic either with Catholic doctrine or with the natural rights of the family. It is not possible for a Catholic to accept the claim that the Church and the Pope must limit themselves to the external practices of religion (such as Mass and the Sacraments), and that all the rest of education belongs to the State.171 171 Non abbiamo bisogno, nos. 51–52.

150

chapter 3

If Pius xi intervened with a denunciation as uncompromising as this, it was not because the recent episodes were graver than those in the past, but because the stakes were immeasurably higher; what was at stake had become more crucial for the Church. To accept the demolition of the Catholic laity, to acquiesce in the disbanding of the youth associations of Catholic Action, would have meant the Church’s total renunciation to struggle, albeit in the Fascist State, for ideological supremacy over the new generations. Catholic Action, besides, had an international diffusion, in contrast to other lay associations; its suppression, consequently, could create a dangerous precedent. It was not that the Pope wished to trigger a final rupture with the Italian government. As he was eager to point out in a passage of the encyclical, “We have not said that we wished to condemn the [Fascist] party itself”.172 What was at issue, rather, was a fin de non-recevoir: Mussolini had to understand that the Church was not willing to lose ground. Pius xi’s solemn enunciation of his determination not to act contrary to Catholic doctrine and practice, however, only reinforced Fascist support for the head of the government and led to a relaunch of countermeasures against Catholics. As the Vatican’s Secretariat of State was confidentially informed, the Council of Ministers had discussed three crucial points on 9 July: (1) that no one can belong both to Catholic Action and to Fascism; (2) no one can be employed in the public administration if he has not attended State schools; (3) [Ambassador] De Vecchi has received an order to ignore the Vatican. It is also said that at the next meeting of the Direttorio the intention is to denounce the Treaty and the Concordat.173 Less than a week later, the alleged plot of an unholy alliance between the Vatican and freemasonry against the Fascist State was even denounced in the columns of Il Popolo d’Italia,174 but the political warfare showed its most violent and intimidating features on 17 July, when a bomb was found in St. Peter’s where, two days later, the Pope was due to preside over the rites for the beatification of Sister Catherine Labouré.175 How far the anti-Catholic polemic now invested in full Pius xi himself is shown by the circulation of a brochure 172 Ibid., no. 62. 173 The document is in M. Casella, Stato e Chiesa in Italia dalla Conciliazione alla riconciliazione (1929–1931), Galatina: Congedo, 2005, 416. 174 “Inaudita alleanza tra Vaticano e Massoneria”, Il Popolo d’Italia (15 July 1931). 175 G. Coco, “L’anno terribile del cardinale Pacelli e il più segreto tra i concistori di Pio xi”, 150–151.

The Holiest Of Nations

151

denouncing the “treason” and the plot secretly hatched by the pontiff against the Fascist State. The brochure, written by Emilio Settimelli and published in 1929 under the title Preti, adagio! [Priests, go easy!], went through six editions in 1931.176 In the same year the same Florentine writer signed with Ottone and Bruno Rosai, Remo Chiti and Alberto Maurizio a declaration with the title Sva­ ticanamento [De-vaticanization] urging the denunciation of the Concordat and “the ­capture and condemnation of the Italian renegade Achille Ratti and his accomplices”, with an explicit revival of Marinetti’s slogan and of the rabid anticlerical spirit of earlier 20th-century Fascism: Faced by the treason of Achille Ratti, Italian renegade, who dares – under the mask of Head of the Catholic Church but long manifestly active on the profane and political terrain – to attempt a coalition between all the anti-fascist forces throughout the world, thus making yet another appeal of the Papal State to foreigners, against the nation; faced by the imbecility of almost all the Italian press, we feel it is our noble and irresistible duty, as intellectuals who are Fascist in temperament and in Faith, to affirm: 1° that the time has come to cut with a sword the Gordian knot of a most gross misunderstanding. Catholic Fascists, i.e. observants, are a risible minority. The majority of Italians are not observant and hence do not belong to any church. […] 2° Priest is, and has been for an unconscionable period of time, considered in Italian a synonym of hypocrite, parasite, louse, anti-Italian. Shouting the word priest! to an adversary means insulting him in his innermost being, offending him in the most tremendous way. 3° The Risorgimento as a whole was an extremely bitter, bloody and desperate struggle against the priests who allied themselves with all the enemies of the nation: with the Emperor of Austria, the Empress Eugénie, and the Bourbons. […] So: in the name of all the blood that has been shed by the Italians for Italy, we dare – after the brief illusion of a possible reconciliation – to call the Duce to denounce the Concordat. […] On the part of the Italian State […] there still exists a great and Victorious King and there’s the prodigious novelty of the Duce creator of a powerfully Italian Regime, for which the capture and condemnation of the Italian renegade Achille Ratti and his accomplices would be an easy operation for a Legion of Roman Blackshirts and the logical 176 E. Settimelli, Preti, adagio!, Firenze: Giannini & Giovannelli, 1929.

152

chapter 3

result of a straightforward process of the Special Tribunal of the Fascist Revolution.177 On the part of the Holy See, the path of negotiation was resumed at the end of July. On 23 July Pius xi decided to call a meeting with all the cardinals resident in Rome: it was to be a meeting of the highest confidentiality.178 As shown by new documentation, only recently discovered, the Pope gave a long speech, ample in scope, in which he reviewed the various stages of the conflict that had erupted with the Mussolini government on Catholic Action, and posed a crucial question on the moral duty whether or not to proceed to a formal condemnation of Fascism, by declaring it incompatible, as ideology, with the principles of the Church, and prohibiting Catholics from participating in the associations and initiatives inspired by it: We therefore feel ourselves faced by the moral necessity – said Pius xi to the cardinals – in other words, by the precise duty to declare in our turn, that to profess, defend and in any way favor principles contrary to the doctrines and rights of the Church is incompatible with the conscience and profession of Catholics, and hence illicit; and therefore that the voluntary membership of associations and works that profess such principles and maintain them in their programmes is equally incompatible and illicit. The principles in question undoubtedly include those that, on the basis of a pagan conception of the State, or rather of the idolatry of the State, contest and conflict with, impede and curb, the Church’s right to educate youth in a Christian way and to prepare for herself valid aids for the hierarchical apostolate, in other words, Catholic Action.179 Pius xi knew very well that the majority of the Sacred College was contrary to a breach with Fascist Italy and he himself would have been glad to desist from taking the conflict with the Mussolini government any further. “We wish peace with everyone”, he had said during his speech.180 The answer to his question 177 The article was printed as a separate pamphlet by Edizioni Fiorentine in 1931, with the title Svaticanamento: dichiarazione agli italiani. 178 On the dynamics and tensions between the Cardinals of the Curia, Secretariat and the Pontiff during these weeks see G. Coco, “L’anno terribile del cardinale Pacelli e il più se­ greto tra i concistori di Pio xi”. 179 The text of the Pope’s speech to the Sacred College was rediscovered by Giovanni Coco in the archive of the Nunziatura in Italy, having been delivered by Pius xi to Monsignor Borgongini Duca a few days after the Consistory. Ibid., 145–152, quotation 152. 180 Ibid., 149.

The Holiest Of Nations

153

was, in short, predictable: better desist. But what has been called “the most secret of consistories”181 was also placed in another context: a battle of minds inside the Roman Curia. It closed the trial of strength that in the previous months had pitted the Pope and the Secretariat of State against some eminent members of the Sacred College. The disaffection that had spread among these latter, their dissatisfaction with the authoritarian style of Pius xi, had taken the form of blind opposition to the decisions taken by Eugenio Pacelli, the cardinal whom Ratti had strongly wished to succeed Gasparri as head of the Secretariat of State in February 1930.182 Subjected to extremely harsh pressures, so much so as to have more than once on the point of tendering his resignation, Pacelli had found himself playing the role of mediator between Pius xi and the more refractory members of the Sacred College, inclined in many cases to cozy up to the Mussolini government with what others considered excessive ease and independence. The bitter conflict opened with the regime over the role of Catholic Action increased their disaffection, which was often leaked to the Fascist press, and forced the new Secretary of State to carve out a difficult path for himself amid the crossfire of the old guard in the Roman Curia: first and foremost Cardinal Gasparri, more than ever unhappy about having had to abandon the key role he had played for so many years as head of the Secretariat of State.183 With the Consistory of 23 July Pius xi put an end to these disputes by forcing the cardinals to show their hand and assume a collegial position towards the Fascist government. In January 1935 Monsignor Tardini would recall that, as he had learned from Gasparri, of the twenty-two cardinals present, “the majority of them were contrary to a condemnation [of Fascism]. Cardinals Rossi and Serafini […] were in favor of this condemnation”.184 In sum, with this secret Consistory, the Sacred College ended by placing itself at the complete disposal of Pius xi and recognized Pacelli as the indisputable counselor of the Pontiff. Once this chapter had been closed, Pius xi could give his mind to a new round of negotiations. To this end he summoned the ever reliable Tacchi Venturi on 24 July. The negotiation, which the aged Jesuit years later would recognize as “the most significant” in his long 181 For this expression and the following discussion I am indebted to the study of G. Coco, quoted in the previous notes. 182 On this period of the diplomatic career of Eugenio Pacelli see Ph. Chenaux, Pio xii. Diplomatico e pastore, Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2004, 151ff. 183 On the shifting relations between Pius xi, Gasparri and Pacelli in this phase see G. Coco, “Eugenio Pacelli: cardinale e Segretario di Stato (1929–1930)”, in I ‘Fogli di Udienza’ del cardinale Eugenio Pacelli, Segretario di Stato, vol. 1, 1930, (eds.) S. Pagano, M. Chappin, G. Coco, Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2010, 52–77. 184 G. Coco, L’anno terribile del cardinale Pacelli e il più segreto tra i concistori di Pio xi, 259.

154

chapter 3

intermediation between St. Peter’s and the Palazzo Venezia,185 was concluded with the agreement of 2 September, which authorized the non-involvement of Catholic Action in tasks of a political or trade-union character; its direct dependence on the bishops; its renunciation of the role of conducting sports activities; and the ineligibility of former ppi members to assume executive roles in the organization.186 To avoid any impression of wishing to compete with Gioventù fascista, the Holy See watered down the national character of the organization in favor of a diocesan structure and permitted the adoption of the national flag. Mussolini for his part undertook to return to the bishops the premises, signs and registers of Catholic Action, seized by the police in previous months. The new structure of the association was accompanied by the reform of its statutes, which would be approved by the Holy See on 30 December of the same year.187 The diocesan character – which reinforced the local dimension of the organization – was specified in terms of a closer dependence of Catholic Action on the diocesan bishops. The new pact seemed, in the short term, to offer greater advantages to the regime for two reasons: the final elimination of what remained of the political legacy of the dissolved ppi and the subjection of the Catholic laity to the hierarchy. “The Vatican has surrendered to Fascism far more than Fascism has surrendered to the Holy See”, seems to have been the refrain in circles of the diplomatic corps accredited to Rome.188 The fact is, however, that what Father Tacchi Venturi called the “reconciliation of the Conciliation”,189 permitted the Church to pursue an apostolate of infiltration, an effort to exert her influence within the Fascist State. After the reopening of its youth clubs, Catholic Action emerged from the bitter clash that had threatened its continuing existence far from weakened in character or diminished in size: its possibilities of promoting organized activities, its capacities for proselytism had been strengthened. Even the ground it had lost due to the proscription of some youth activities was in part re-conquered through religious assistance in Fascist organizations. More pronounced, on the other hand, was the weakening of fuci, whose membership declined in 6 years from 4.67 to 3.92 percent of the total

185 arsi, Fondo Tacchi Venturi, vol. 76, Pietro Tacchi Venturi, “I miei ricordi (1861–1891–1931)”, dictated on 15 November 1951, in particular the part entitled “L’accordo del 2 settembre 1931 o la riconciliazione della conciliazione” (35 fols.). 186 A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 147–173. 187 L. Ferrari, Una storia dell’Azione cattolica, 117ff. 188 S. Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 132. 189 A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 172.

The Holiest Of Nations

155

university student population.190 What mattered most for Pius xi and for the majority of Catholics was not to find opportunities to act against the regime, but to work to transform the Fascist State into a State that would approximate as closely as possible to the ideal of the Catholic State. Sturzo was wrong in maintaining that the crisis of 1931 had led to the final dashing of the “illusion” that it was possible to Catholicize Fascism.191 The reconciliation was the premise for a closer alliance in the years to come. 190 R. Moro, La formazione della classe dirigente cattolica (1929–1937), Bologna: il Mulino, 1977, 30. 191 L. Sturzo, Chiesa e Stato. Studio sociologico-storico (1939), Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001, vol. ii, 180.

chapter 4

The Most Roman of Empires 4.1

A War Machine

Replying to a question posed by Emil Ludwig on the Lateran Pacts in 1932, Mussolini recalled that this result had been achieved without his ever having had a personal meeting with the Pope: It’s undoubtedly the first time that two men of government, independent of each other and alone responsible for their decisions, conducted negotiations together […] in the same city, without ever having met.1 The official meeting between the two did eventually take place, with great pomp and circumstance, on the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of the L­ ateran Pacts, as a solemn confirmation of the reconciliation between the regime and the Holy See. Mussolini was received in the Vatican by Pius xi on the ­morning of 11 February 1932. He arrived at eleven o’clock with a delegation composed of Minister of Justice Alfredo Rocco, Italian ambassador to the Holy See, ­Cesare Maria De Vecchi, and Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign A ­ ffairs Amedeo Fani. It was to all intents and purposes a meeting between two heads of state. The visit had long been prepared, ever since the settlement of the crisis over Catholic Action, as traced in our previous chapter. It was supposed to have been scheduled for mid-September 1931, but was then postponed not once but twice at Mussolini’s request, because it seemed necessary first to proceed to the replacement of the pnf exponents most exposed in the battle against Catholic Action and the Church: especially Giuriati and Scorza.2 That Mussolini was determined to remain, especially in his public image, in a position of strength, avoiding any impression that his visit was in any way a journey to Canossa, is shown not least by the formal dispensation, requested and obtained, from the obligation to kneel and kiss the hand of the Pope, as prescribed by Vatican ceremonial.3 Newspapers of the period are prodigal in their detailed descriptions of the processions, ceremonials, guards of honor, protagonists and extras of this event: Carabinieri and Fascist Militia, friars and seminarians, Swiss Guards and 1 E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, 173. 2 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 1, 274, note 3. 3 E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, 174. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_006

The Most Roman Of Empires

157

Palafrenieri, damask red and purple vestments; hats and waving handkerchiefs; ladies armed with folding chairs, applause and Fascist cries of exultation ­(alalà). All agree in emphasizing the historic character of the event. “There are no ‘precedents’ for the meeting between the Roman Pontiff and the Dux of ­Fascism: no historical reminiscences, no legendary evocations. The historic event is a fact unique in itself”, explained the regime’s labor paper, Il lavoro f­ ascista.4 But of the actual contents of the talks, conducted in the Pope’s ­private library, very little transpired. Mussolini wrote about the meeting in ­detail to King Victor Emanuel iii.5 The Pope’s opening remarks seemed “embarrassing” to the Duce. After these preliminaries Pius xi – at least according to this account – did not beat about the bush but immediately touched on the questions he had closest at heart. First he addressed the Protestants. Their propaganda, according to the Pope, was making “progress”, also thanks to the regime’s recent law on admissible religious confessions. Mussolini observed that the Protestants in question amounted to only 135,000 persons of whom 37,000 were foreigners. Pius xi’s reply to this observation helps to clarify what was uppermost in the Pope’s mind: i.e. the real significance of an objectively disproportionate apprehension: it was once again the claim for an integrally Catholic society. “Italy – the Pontiff is quoted as saying – is fundamentally Catholic and this is a condition of privilege also from the national point of view, but exactly for this reason vigilance is needed”.6 And vigilance could also involve inquisitorial methods, if it were true that Pius xi congratulated Mussolini for having instigated the trial and punishment of the director of Araldo della Verità in Florence, a small publishing house run by the Adventist Church, guilty of having used ‘utterly unworthy language’ against the Pope and the Duce. Pius xi then spoke about youth and expressed his satisfaction both for the measures taken to ensure respect for Sunday as day of rest, shifting to Saturday the activities of Fascist youth groups, and for the muzzle placed by the regime on a licentious press. As for Fascist doctrine, he touched on those principles closest to Catholic conceptions: “order, authority, discipline”. But he showed no inclination to give ground on ‘Fascist totalitarianism’: for if this aimed, apart from material interests, at conquering souls, what he called ‘Catholic totalitarianism’ would then enter into action.7 The last point raised by the Pope 4 “Un colloquio di un’ora nella biblioteca privata del pontefice”, Il lavoro fascista (12 February 1932). 5 The document has been published in A. Corsetti, Scritti, Foreword by F. Margiotta Broglio, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1999, 112–115. 6 Ibid., 112. 7 Ibid., 113.

158

chapter 4

r­ egarded the international situation, which in the Pope’s view meant the world economic crisis on the one hand, and what he called the ‘sorrowful triangle’ on the other: in other words, the triangle formed by those countries (Mexico, Spain, Russia) dominated by antireligious policy, freemasonry and bolshevism: a policy generated fundamentally, according to the Pope, by the ‘anti-Christian aversion of Judaism’: “When I was in Warsaw, I saw that in all the Bolshevik regiments the civilian commissars, of either sex, were Jews”8 – even if he could say by personal experience that Italian Jews were an “exception”, as many friendships and meetings linked to the Lombard environment had demonstrated to him over the years.9 Later on that same day, 11 February, Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli returned the visit by going to the Palazzo Venezia, where he was greeted on his arrival with the military honors of the Blackshirts, and received by the head of the government and the same delegation that had gone to the Vatican in the morning. It was a very brief, purely formal meeting, but the day as a whole, which continued with a sumptuous reception at the Italian Embassy to the Holy See offered by De Vecchi, was calculated to demonstrate to Italy and the world the complete harmony between Vatican and Palazzo Venezia. This newfound harmony was further accentuated by the Italian press, by now wholly controlled by the regime. Those who expected some official words from the Pope, at least on the following day, were disappointed. The 10th anniversary of Pius xi’s enthronement as Pope occurred on 12 February 1932, and his message would be broadcast by Vatican Radio, which since the previous year had enabled the voice of the Pope to reach “all peoples and all creatures”, as he himself had said during his first broadcast message, transmitted twelve months before, after an announcement from Guglielmo Marconi.10 But not even on this occasion did Ratti mention the historic audience with the head of the government on the previous day. The Pope limited himself to thanking the divine mercy for the ten years of his pontificate; he made a rapid reference to the grave sufferings of peoples and the afflictions of their rulers; no doubt he had in mind the effects of the global economic crisis and the countries of the ‘sorrowful triangle’, though without naming them.11 The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, was equally reticent; it described the “historic event” of the meeting between the Pope and the Duce in extremely brief and prosaic

8 Ibid., 114. 9 Ibid. 10 The first radiomessagge of Pius xi, broadcast on 12 February 1931, in Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 2, 479–483. 11 Ibid., 647–648.

The Most Roman Of Empires

159

terms.12 Nor did Pius recur to the event on the following days, a sign that he preferred to avoid any accentuation of the reassuring image of ‘complete harmony’ with the head of the government. The mutual mistrust and rancor had been removed in public discourse, but had not been overcome, no matter how strong was the interest of both parties to safeguard the compromise they had achieved. At the level of public opinion, in any case, the message that the meeting was calculated to send had been received: “the harmonious relationship between Mussolini and the Pope – as Simona Colarizi has commented – was popular and people felt reassured by it; it even seemed natural in a Catholic society ordained to show respect and obedience for authority”.13 In a period in which a doctrine and a practice predicated on and dominated by the role of the Pontiff clearly prevailed in the Church, this image of unison helped to promote the spread of the conviction that the Fascist State was but a confirmation of the thesis of the Catholic nation: not only in the social strata in which Catholicism was more firmly rooted, such as in rural areas, but also in many intellectual circles, however much this conviction was expressed by different strategies and cultural attitudes. Many believed in the existence of a Catholic Italy. Many believed in the opportunity to catholicize Fascism; for instance those associated with the Florentine Catholic review Il Frontespizio, Piero Bargellini, G ­ uido Manacorda, Giovanni Papini, and with them, at least until 1934–1935, don ­Giuseppe De Luca, indefatigable in his multifarious activity as a man of learning, controversialist and spiritual guide.14 Rediscovering the profound historical fabric of religious Italy: that was the aim of the Catholic contributors to Il Frontespizio. It implied, especially for the erudite Lucanian priest, spurning organized social Catholicism, affected devotionalism, and doctrinal ignorance, in order to reach down to the deepest stratum of religious Italy, “the fountains of devotion” as he called it.15 But it also meant, more generally for the review, rediscovering and enhancing the essentially Catholic character of Italy’s medieval past, on the basis of her literary and poetic tradition, which, more than the nationalistic appeal to romanitas, ought to have represented the foundation of an identity, at once universal and national, antithetical to positivism and idealism, but not to Fascism. It was this tradition that, according to De Luca, had modelled Fascist Italy to the point of making it coincide with Catholic Italy.16 12 13 14 15 16

“Nostre informazioni”, L’Osservatore Romano (12 February 1932). See S. Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 124. L. Mangoni, In partibus infedelium. Don Giuseppe De Luca: il mondo cattolico e la cultura italiana del Novecento, Torino: Einaudi, 1989. G. De Luca, “Le fontane della pietà”, in Il Frontespizio, 8 August 1934, 3–5. L. Mangoni, L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo, Roma-Bari: ­Laterza, 1974.

160

chapter 4

The opportunities that the new political climate offered to Catholics to assume a leading role in education (in state schools and universities) and more in general in the formation of the new ruling class were firmly believed in by the tireless Father Agostino Gemelli who shared friendship and projects with De Luca. The rector of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart had seen in the Concordat the recognition of a central core of the pontifical teaching: the idea that the “salvation” of contemporary society could only be realized if it conformed to the ‘non-negotiable’ principles of Catholicism. That’s why it was essential to exploit to the full all the scope, all the opportunities – ­organizational and cultural – guaranteed by the provisions of the Concordat. Gemelli did so to the best of his (many) possibilities. Not only did he profit from the support that he could rely on from the Holy See and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as well as from the financial and moral support of Lombard Catholicism, but he also exploited to the full the particular situation of the University he had founded, which was in substantial accord with the regime, but yet enjoyed its own institutional autonomy.17 Its programme was at once national and universal: the Catholic University aimed to conquer a hegemonic role in the battle of italianità and to be the leading center for scientific training and research in the country.18 In Gemelli’s view, the Catholic ruling class that the University would form within a generation would not only be decisive in the new revival of the nation, but would secure for Italy “the possibility of once again becoming mistress of the world, because Italy’s civilizing battle coincides with her religious greatness and is realized in the teaching of Catholicism which it can and must give to other nations”.19 The project was ambitious, and, as far as its universal aspirations were concerned, destined to shatter on the fatal impediments of Mussolini’s foreign policy and the cataclysm of the war. Yet Gemelli did succeed in his objective of making the Catholic University in Milan play an incisive role in the formation of future leaders of the organized Catholic world and in fields of culture and education judged to be crucial. Within seven years, from 1929 to 1936, the number of matriculated students rose from less than one thousand to over three thousand, and the faculties were expanded to four: Jurisprudence, Humanities and Philosophy, Political 17 18

19

M. Bocci, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano. Chiesa, regime e democrazia, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003. L. Mangoni, “L’Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Una risposta della cultura cattolica alla laicizzazione dell’insegnamento superiore”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 9, La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, (eds.) G. Chittolini and G. Miccoli, ­Torino: Einaudi, 1986, 975–1014. A. Gemelli, “Il compito culturale dei cattolici”, Vita e Pensiero (November 1930): 644.

The Most Roman Of Empires

161

Science, and Teacher Training. This was naturally translated into a concomitant growth in the number of professors and in the expansion of the collegial structure. But the idea also gained ground of intervening in those disciplines held most significant (philosophy, economics, social psychology, biology) to promote high-level research in which the use of modern empirical science would be controlled by a theoretical framework unimpeachable at the level of orthodoxy and firmly rooted in Thomism. To this end, the Catholic University also promoted periodicals such as Vita e Pensiero, the Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali, and the Rivista del clero italiano;20 opened a school of experimental psychology, psychology of work, and pedagogical psychology; and founded the publishing house Vita e Pensiero: a powerful and complex apparatus that could boast of scholars who had emerged in the 1920s, such as Francesco Olgiati, and a later generation who were just beginning to gain a reputation, such as Giuseppe Zamboni and Amintore Fanfani, and that aimed to turn neo-scholasticism not only into the ‘brand’ philosophy of the Catholic world, but into the Italian and national philosophy of the Fascist regime altogether. The rector of the university said so himself in inaugurating the 1930/1931 academic year: scholasticism was not merely a philosophic doctrine conceived by Catholicism, but was the only philosophy able perfectly to match the conception of life and of the universe peculiar to Catholicism.21 Gemelli’s university therefore assumed the mission to restore to this philosophy the place that was due to it in Italian culture. But for this to happen, it was first necessary to eliminate the school of philosophy than then exerted most influence in the system of higher and university education in Italy: the idealism of Giovanni Gentile. This was perceived to be the main obstacle to the co-infiltration between Catholic culture and Fascism. It was a battle in which Gemelli himself played a leading role: a battle conducted with the weapons proper to philosophic discussion (conferences, books, periodicals), but in which recourse was also had to far less conventional weapons in the development of 20th-century thought: the Holy Office and the Index of prohibited books to which the Vatican was trying to give a new lease on life by publishing an Italian edition in 1929. Throughout the 19th century the Index librorum prohibitorum had fired its condemnations indiscriminately against novelists, poets, philosophers, sociologists, and authors of school textbooks, in its desperate bid to curb what it 20 21

P. Ranfagni, I clerico fascisti. Le riviste dell’Università Cattolica negli anni del regime, F­ irenze: Cooperativa editrice universitaria, 1975. A. Gemelli, La missione culturale dei cattolici nel momento presente, Milano: Società editrice Vita e Pensiero, 1931.

162

chapter 4

judged to be a hostile culture. Then its obsession became modernism, in all its disparate manifestations. Now the Church’s condemnation once again became projected against the world outside it, but the selection of objectives was now more carefully targeted: It was as if Fascism – as Luisa Mangoni has observed – had furnished the hierarchy with a peg on which to base not its judgement, but its evaluation of what was proper. Fascism was a reality which could at times be felt as hostile, but never as indifferent or alien.22 Gemelli could boast of enjoying high credit in the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, in spite of the events that had followed the death of Rafael Merry Del Val in February 1930. With the recently appointed Secretary of the Congregation, Cardinal Donato Sbarretti, the Rector of the Catholic University had not seen eye-to-eye on the line to be taken in the proceeding opened against Padre Pio di Pietralcina, who was still under the close scrutiny of the Holy Office in the early 1930s, and whom the Rector of the ‘Cattolica’ had persecuted with every means at his disposal, as Ernesto Buonaiuti wrote on 29 June 1931.23 To the ‘modernist’ professor, himself a victim of the Holy Office, excommunicated and suspended from his chair at the University of Rome, as we have seen, the dogged perseverance of the Church’s persecution against the Capuchin of San Giovanni Rotondo seemed excessive and incomprehensible. Looked at more closely, the status of Padre Pio, kept under close surveillance, was part of the more general design of the ecclesiology of Achille Ratti, ever more focused and alert, ever more entrenched in the defensive posture it had adopted against what were perceived to be the mystifying tendencies of the age, whether they came from an obscure friar in Apulia or from powerful systems of the sacralization of politics. What was at stake in the battle against the baleful ‘actualist’ philosophy of Giovanni Gentile was even more crucial: the influence and control by the Church of what, rightly or wrongly, was perceived to be the heart of teaching in Italian schools and universities.24 Once perceived as a powerful ally against the educational system inherited from the 19th century, Gentile, scientific ­director 22 23 24

L. Mangoni, “I Patti Lateranensi e la cultura cattolica”, in La Chiesa cattolica e il totalitarismo, (ed.) V. Ferrone, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004, 105. S. Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 272. See A. Tarquini, Il Gentile dei fascisti. Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008, 107ff.

The Most Roman Of Empires

163

of the Enciclopedia Italiana since 1925,25 was now perceived by the Church as an enemy; an enemy, indeed, even more dangerous than the positivistic school, in view of the crucial role he had played, and was playing, in the education of the young and of future Fascist cadres. On this level, if Gentile was the great antagonist due to the cultural and financial power he wielded, thanks also to the help of his wide network of pupils and supporters, hardly any less insidious must have seemed the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, widely disseminated in the historical, artistic and literary disciplines, and not only in Italy. The danger represented by idealism, of which Croce had been the founder and major exponent in Italy, cannot have escaped the Holy Office and its inquisitors, because his writings, especially those on history and historiography, continued to have a strong influence on the educated classes and on students. The idealistic culture, moreover, was not only different from and contrary to Catholicism, but claimed to absorb and supersede it, considering it a primitive (i.e. obsolete) manifestation of human thought.26 Such was the judgement of the Holy Office, which began its offensive against Croce in March 1932 by opening a proceeding against what was to become one of his most influential books, The History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, before passing to a condemnation of the opera omnia both of Croce and Gentile. Both were placed on the Index on 20 June 1934,27 four months after the publication of the decree condemning Alfred Rosenberg’s book, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhundert (1930), an exposition of the Nazi doctrine of Arian racial purity and anti-Semitism.28 In the international press the idea circulated that, through these censures, the Catholic Church wished to condemn Liberalism, Fascism and Nazism, placing them all on the same level. According to one of Mussolini’s informers, however, the condemnation of the work of “the well-known anti-fascist Croce” had been determined first, in order to be able to justify also the condemnation of the works of Gentile, spearheaded especially by Gemelli.29 25 26 27

28

29

See further G. Turi, Il mecenate, il filosofo e il gesuita. L’“Enciclopedia Italiana” specchio della nazione, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. G. Verucci, Idealisti all’Indice, 200. Benedetto Croce’s Storia d’Europa nel secolo del ventesimo secolo (1932), placed on the Index in 1934, was, in the same year, published in an English translation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934). On the process of the placing on the Index of Rosenberg’s book see H. Wolf, Pope and Devil. The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010, 248–252. Report of 2 July 1934 quoted in G. Turi, Giovanni Gentile. Una biografia, Firenze: Giunti, 1995, 466.

164

chapter 4

The Holy Office’s proscription was supposed to represent the basis for an even more ambitious objective: airbrushing the names of Croce, Gentile and their disciples out of historical, philosophical and pedagogical textbooks. But little progress was made along this road. The Fascist State, though it had supported the work of the Church in terms of social conformity to Catholic principles through the Gentile reform and the Concordat, was little disposed to countenance any ‘Catholization’ of higher and university education, the more so as the regime was having an uphill struggle in exerting full control over the universities in compliance with its own political and educational objectives.30 If for Gemelli the goal of a Catholic Italy was a project that still implied a hegemonic projection towards fascism, for others it already represented a reality. The former philo-fascist ppi exponents who had flowed into the Centro Nazionale maintained so, whether out of conviction or convenience. Repudiated by Pius xi in 1928, the Centro Nazionale was dissolved in 1930, after its function had been rendered superfluous by the signing of the Lateran Pacts.31 Among these so-called ‘clerico-fascists’ there were personalities of the Catholic world, such as Stefano Cavazzoni, representative of the Italian government on the board of directors of the Catholic University and chairman of the Istituto Centrale di Credito, the organ that since May 1930 had represented the main Catholic banks struck by the crash in 1929 and that had averted their collapse, also thanks to the allocation of state funds.32 4.2

Mother Rome

The myth of Catholic Italy naturally started out from Rome, from the Rome ‘sacred’ to the Church and Italy, with all the coté of traditions, narratives, heroes and saints that this implied. And it was this foundation of romanitas that, as we have seen, was chosen by Mussolini as the terrain on which he would woo the Church after years of militant anticlericalism.33 Rome would end up becoming the arena in which the Church and Fascism would clash in their 30

See in this regard M. Ostenc, La scuola italiana durante il fascismo, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 214ff. 31 D. Sorrentino, La conciliazione e il “fascismo cattolico”. I tempi e la figura di Egilberto M ­ artire, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1980, 66–70. 32 M. Pegrari, “De pecunia. Cattolici e finanza nello Stato unitario”, in Cristiani d’Italia, vol. 2, (ed.) A. Melloni, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011, 1053–1079. See also J.F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, especially Chap. 5. 33 See supra, Chapter 2, 63–66.

The Most Roman Of Empires

165

mutual bid to absorb each other in what it claimed as its own cultural and political primacy, but also in the attempt to unite together in a more or less illusory project of a renaissance of Roman civilization, of which the Church would represent the spirit and the regime the physical strength of political implementation.34 In Fascist circles there was no lack of those, such as Julius Evola, who tried to demonstrate, ever since 1928, that the imperial idea of Rome was an ‘immanent’ spiritual reality, irreconcilable with Christianity, and who went so far as to call the re-installation of the crucifix on the Capitol, the “place of the Eagle and the Fasces”, an unprecedented blemish.35 Evola’s thesis aroused dissent,36 but, at least according to Yvon De Begnac, it seems not to have been displeasing to Mussolini: Contrary to what is generally thought, he was not in the least irritated by the position taken by the learned Julius Evola a few months before the ‘Conciliation’ against any kind of peaceful accommodation between Italy and the Holy See. The attitude of Dr. Evola, besides, directly regarded not relations between Italy and the Holy See, but what was, in his view, the irreconcilability through the centuries between the Roman and Catholic traditions. Consequently, once Fascism had been identified with the survival of the Roman tradition, no other option would remain but to consider any universalist view of history as antagonistic to it.37 The head of the government himself, moreover, in his speech to the Chamber on the Lateran Pacts of 13 May 1929, forcibly reaffirmed – as we have seen – the primacy of the empire of the caesars over that of the popes, and had subordinated the historical success of Catholicism to the imperial dimension of Rome.38 That the cult of romanitas was not just a vacuous rhetorical trope of Mussolini, the grotesque proof of the reactionary antimodern nature of ­Fascism, had become clear by the early 1930’s, when the idea of forging a new Imperial Rome began materially to take shape. It entailed the attempt 34

A. Riccardi, Roma “città sacra”? Dalla Conciliazione all’operazione Sturzo, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1979, 6ff. 35 See J. Evola, Imperialismo pagano. Il fascismo dinanzi al pericolo euro-cristiano. Con una appendice polemica sulle reazioni di parte guelfa, Todi-Roma: Atanor, 1928, 113. On the view of romanitas propounded by Evola see F. Cassata, A destra del fascismo. Profilo politico di Julius Evola, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003, 36ff. 36 R. Moro, “Il mito dell’impero in Italia fra universalismo cristiano e totalitarismo”, 338–341. 37 Y. De Begnac, Taccuini mussoliniani, 647. 38 See supra, Chapter 3, 136–137.

166

chapter 4

to r­ esuscitate ancient Rome with a concerted campaign of excavations, urban clearance, the demolition of whole quarters, and the ambitious project to build the Mussolinian Rome. On 28 October 1932, during the celebrations for the first decade of the Fascist revolution, the Duce inaugurated the Via dell’Impero, a thoroughfare cutting through the Roman imperial forums, nine hundred meters long and thirty wide. He did so riding triumphantly in the uniform of the Fascist Militia, on a white horse. This spectacular project of urban renewal was realized by demolishing and revamping part of the city center of the capital. It consecrated the triumph of the Rome of Mussolini over the real Rome. It was but part of a wider project for the Fascist transformation of the urban space, a grandiose design, to realize which the best architects and artists of the period were called: Enrico Del Debbio, Mario De Renzi, Gaetano Minnucci, Mario Sironi and, most powerfully of all, Marcello Piacentini, perhaps the greatest artificer of Mussolinian Rome.39 The result was what has been called the “petrifaction of the Fascist myth of romanitas”: An ideological petrifaction which starts from the Foro Italico, formerly Foro Mussolini, runs along the banks of the Tiber, Via della Conciliazione, the Casa del Mutilato, Piazza Augusto Imperatore, traverses with the Via dei Fori Imperiali, formerly Via dell’Impero, the archaeological area between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, then branches out to the Città Universitaria and the Garbatella quarter, before leading into the glacial, metaphysical architecture of the new Rome of the eur, the most integral petrifaction of the Fascist myth of romanitas.40 In this interfusion between past, present and future, propelled by town-­ planning measures as ambitious as those presided over by the Renaissance popes, Mussolini was progressively assimilated to Augustus. For it was thought that his qualities as statesman, genius, victor, and founder of an empire could better be associated with Augustus than with his preferred model, Julius ­Caesar (given the ominous presages of his ill-fated end).41 Even the urban iconographic programme bore traces of the rivalry, the competitive ‘conciliation’, with the Church of Rome. This explains why, in the planning of empty spaces, aimed at isolating monuments in order to emphasize their significance and sacrality as part of the political ideology of the regime, an important role was accorded to the triumphal arch that the Christian emperor Constantine had erected next 39 40 41

G. Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascismo, Torino: Einaudi, 1989. Thus E. Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, vi–vii. See A. Giardina, “Ritorno al futuro: la romanità fascista”, in A. Giardina and A. Vauchez, Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000, 212–296.

The Most Roman Of Empires

167

to the Colosseum. Indeed, to accentuate the centrality of this arch, the fountain known as the Meta Sudans, dating to the Flavian period, and the base of the Colossus of Nero were demolished early in 1933: “The isolation of the Arch of Constantine, and the new link thus established with the Christian emperor, was intended […] as a symbolic gesture aimed at softening a real conflict between two different religions”.42 Among Catholics, on the other hand, there had been anti-fascists and hardliners who were more intransigent in rejecting a ‘reconciled’ vision of the two images of Rome, Catholic and Fascist. Giovanni Papini had declared, a few years after his conversion to Catholicism, and once the dictatorship had been established, his lack of trust in the “Rome of Peter”, due to the “cowardice”, “venality” and “mediocrity” demonstrated by the Church in her subservience to the “Rome of the new Caesars”, and her pagan and nationalist heresy.43 Papi­ ni’s companion, Domenico Giuliotti,44 too, was firm in rejecting the imperial romanitas of Mussolini and in proposing instead the theocratic medieval imperial model in which the political was subordinated to the religious power: If one day, God willing, – wrote Giuliotti in 1926 – the imperial Eagle were to spread its wings again, if for no other purpose than to have the honor of bearing the Cross, I would have no hesitation in telling you that it would be the Cross that would bear the Eagle; and make it fly, from Rome, all over the world. That’s why, while awaiting that miracle, I’m with Boniface viii and with Pius xi.45 Both Giuliotti and Papini, besides, in their Dizionario dell’omo salvatico (1923), had been scathing in their description of the caesars and dictators of antiquity, the Roman eagles, and the end of the Empire.46 The Catholic anti-fascist Francesco Luigi Ferrari had, for his part, insisted, in the years of his exile in B ­ elgium, on the pagan, anti-Catholic character of the Fascist myth of romanitas.47 Equally, even in the midst of the African imperialist infatuation, the Catholic 42 43 44 45 46 47

Thus A. Ricci, Attorno alla nuda pietra. Archeologia e città tra identità e progetto, Roma: Donzelli, 2006, 37. G. Papini to D. Giuliotti, 5 October 1925, in D. Giuliotti-G. Papini, Carteggio, vol. 1, 314–317. D. Giuliotti, Pensieri di un malpensante, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1936. D. Giuliotti, La croce e l’aquila (1926), in Idem, Polvere dall’esilio, (ed.) M. Baldini, Roma: Logos, 1980, 67–69. Dizionario dell’omo salvatico. Redatto da Domenico Giuliotti e Giovanni Papini, vol. 1, ­Firenze: Vallecchi, Firenze 1923, 205–206. See further R. Moro, “Il mito dell’impero in Italia fra universalismo cristiano e totalitarismo”, 342–343.

168

chapter 4

journalist Igino Giordani, at the time “under protection”, like De Gasperi, in the Vatican Library, had stigmatized many of the theses presented in Romolo Murri’s L’idea universale di Roma, a book which the Marchigian priest presented as a “history of universalist romanitas from the Republic of the Urbs to Italian Fascism”.48 Giordani himself, in his Rivolta Cattolica (1925), had castigated those Catholics who had prattled about “watered-down imperialism, holy wars and consecrated massacres, and brought the contrite endorsement of a spineless Christianity to the cunning resuscitators of a dissolute paganism”.49 In substance, however, from the signing of the Lateran Pacts onwards, a more conciliatory line had prevailed and was gradually being expressed in publications, research centers and institutes. The idea of romanitas as common denominator between Catholicism and Fascism was one of the themes most often rehearsed by the prolific Catholic journalist and former companion of Sturzo in the ranks of the ppi, Egilberto Martire. Already on the occasion of the parliamentary debate on the Lateran Pacts, Martire had praised the “holiness of Rome”; he had affirmed, amid a good deal of grumbling in the Chamber, that the Eternal City had rediscovered itself “in the symbol of the Littorio and the Cross”, and had finally returned to be, “as Dante had seen her, earth and heaven, City of man and paradise of God, ‘onde Cristo è romano’”.50 Dante’s well-known verse, “quella Roma onde Cristo è romano” (“that Rome whereby Christ is a Roman”) (Purgatorio, xxxii, 102), soon became the slogan to encapsulate and explain the providential mission assigned to the city of the caesars and the popes. As far as Martire is concerned, the myth of a joint Catholic and Fascist romanitas was especially formulated and popularized through the pages of the review that he directed between 1929 and 1938, La Rassegna Romana, succeeded by L’Illustrazione Romana from 1939 to 1942.51 At a higher level of divulgation, the Istituto di Studi Romani, founded by Carlo Galassi Paluzzi in 1925, officially proposed to act as a center for the coordination of historical studies on ancient Rome.52 The intention to e­ stablish 48

49 50 51 52

R. Murri, L’idea universale di Roma: dalle origini al fascismo, Milano: Bompiani, 1937, which Giordani reviewed in L’Italia (7 November 1937). On the attitude of the Milanese paper to the myth of Rome and fascism see V. Marchi, “L’Italia e la missione civilizzatrice di Roma”, Studi storici 36 (1995): 485–531. On the pro-fascist period of Romolo Murri see P.G. Zunino, “Romolo Murri e il fascismo”, Fonti e documenti 14 (1985): 631–667. I. Giordani, Rivolta cattolica, Torino: Gobetti, 1925, 1. Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxviii, Discussioni, 11 May 1929, 118–119. See D. Sorrentino, La Conciliazione e il “fascismo cattolico”. On the Istituto di Studi Romani see A. La Penna, “Il culto della romanità nel periodo fascista. La rivista ‘Roma’ e l’Istituto di studi romani”, Italia contemporanea 217 (1999): 605–630.

The Most Roman Of Empires

169

a continuum between the romanitas of the caesars, that of the popes, and the new romanitas of the Fascist regime was reflected in the Institute’s very emblem, formed by the union of the Roman eagle with the cross of Christ (the Fascist symbol of the littorio could not be added because a decree had limited its use to state agencies). The activities of the Institute, which the prospect of the imminent realization of a new Italian colonial empire had significantly widened, enlisted the participation of many prelates, beginning with Pietro Tacchi Venturi and culminating, at the height of the imperial dream, with Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli. The text of a lecture given by Pacelli with the title Il sacro destino di Roma in fact opened the volume Roma “onde Cristo è romano” in 1937; it was supposed to inaugurate a series of publications with the same name.53 But in Pacelli’s version, the destiny of the eternal city was embodied by Catholicism, not by Fascism. This was the sense of his praise of Constantine and the triumph of Christian over pagan Rome: Yes, from the depths of oppression, to which pagan Rome had immersed her, the Rome of Christ emerged more beautiful than ever, singing psalms and triumphing behind the banner of Constantine, beautiful with the purple of her martyrs, beautiful with the mitres of her Pontiffs, beautiful with the rays of the sun of an eternal victory even more resplendent than the secular triumphs of Caesar and Augustus.54 Of course, the recall of Constantine could allude to the assimilation of the Christian emperor to Mussolini, who had not failed to assume this pose in the past.55 Besides, as Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster would shortly say, in inaugurating the course of the ‘School of Fascist Mysticism’ in Milan, in the bimillennial year of Augustus, the Concordat signed by the “Dux of the new Italy” might

53

54 55

E. Pacelli, “Il sacro destino di Roma”, in Roma “onde Cristo è romano”, Roma: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1937, 3–7. Pacelli’s lecture was the first of a series of lectures broadcast by radio during 1936: alongside scholars of the Institute itself, many senior prelates of the Roman Curia were involved; they included Cardinals Vincenzo La Puma, Camillo Laurenti, Carlo Salotti, Giulio Serafini, the apostolic nuncio of Italy Monsignor Francesco Borgongini Duca and Tacchi Venturi. On the Istituto di Studi Romani’s series Roma “onde Cristo è romano” see the doctoral dissertation in contemporary history of A. Di Mauro, Regime fascista e mito di Roma: il ruolo dell’Istituto di Studi Romani (1925–1943), Università degli Studi di Catania, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, academic year 2009–2010, 155–169. E. Pacelli, “Il sacro destino di Roma”, 6. See L. Braccesi, “Costantino e i Patti lateranensi”, Studi storici 32 (1991): 161–167, and Idem, Roma bimillenaria: Pietro e Cesare, Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1999, 173ff.

170

chapter 4

have recalled “too closely the Constantinian edict of peace in 313”.56 However, Pacelli, while paying tribute to the Lateran Pacts and the reconciliation between Church and State in Italy, did not fail to underline the superiority of the mission of the papacy and its universalist vocation: And it is wonderful and consoling to think – wrote Pacelli – that the Vatican House of the common Father is the common home of all the children of the Church, who from the four winds all turn their devoted gaze and affection to the supreme white Pastor of Rome. If Rome is wherever a believer of Rome pitches his camp, there, on the Vatican hill, its sublime summit is raised close to the tomb of Peter and irradiates its light to the most remote corners of the earth. That enclave on the banks of the Tiber […] is the destination of believing pilgrims; it is the indestructible beacon of faith and moral truth, of which poor humanity has a need in the midst of the storms of error and passion to be able to arrive at the gateway of peace and salvation to which she has been destined by God.57 The myth of imperial Italy went well beyond the restricted inner circle of the Roman Curia and the world of intellectuals. Already in 1928 the journalist Giulio de’ Rossi Dell’Arno through the periodical Italia e Fede, whose title was said to have been proposed by Mussolini himself through his brother Arnaldo, had launched a rural campaign to involve priests in the so-called ‘Battle for Grain’, with the support of Tacchi Venturi and various exponents of the Roman Curia.58 Within two years, thanks to the new climate of trust and the funds allocated by the Ministry of Agriculture, the number of parish priests involved in the project rose from 464 to 1245. According to de’ Rossi dell’Arno, the priests had been convinced that it was in the countryside, “in the fields of the golden harvests”, that the “Catholic spirit” had met and been fused with the “Fascist spirit”. So at least he wrote in the pamphlet Cattolicesimo e fascismo which brought together the endorsements he had received from no less than 250 b­ ishops.59 The conquest of economic independence, he continued, achieved with the fundamental contribution of the Italian clergy, would r­ epresent the premise to 56 57 58

59

“Da Augusto a Costantino. Da un discorso milanese del Cardinale Schuster (25 febbraio 1937)”, Annuario cattolico italiano (1937): 35–38. E. Pacelli, Il sacro destino di Roma, 7. After the war de’ Rossi Dell’Arno would collect the most significant contributions of the bishops and priests linked to the initiatives of Italia e Fede in the volume Pio xi e Mussolini (Roma: Corso, 1954), in which the main stages of the movement are traced (in particular 28–32 for the initial phase). G. de’ Rossi Dell’Arno, Cattolicesimo e fascismo. Plebiscito di vescovi per il regime, Roma: Edizioni Italia e Fede, anno X [1931–1932].

The Most Roman Of Empires

171

enable the Italian nation to realize its civilizing mission. The ­antithetical pairs typical of ruralist ideology and Catholic apologetics (countryside/city, duty/ amusement, virtue/immorality) were further developed by the introduction of a nationalist paradigm, built round the glorification of sacrifice as founding value both of the peasant and of the soldier: A life lived amid the pleasures of the city, as an end in itself, transmits nothing that is not corrupt to the following age […]. And we who wish Italy to achieve civil Primacy among the nations, we say with the plain-speaking frankness, of which the Duce sets a magnificent example, that the way to achieve Italy’s greatness is not sown with pagan pleasures and urban amusements, but with sacrifices; sacrifices that are more serenely supported by those who by virtue of Faith are appeased in the joy of duty fulfilled, to which corresponds a smile that is never quenched and that is more serenely irradiated amid the peace of the fields. So our peasant farmers are the soldiers who are ever armed, ever entrenched, and steadfast in their delivery [of the harvest], for the greatness of Italy. O farmer, from the trenches sanctified by your blood, Italy can leap to the luminous glory of Vittorio Veneto. From the furrows sanctified by your sweat, Italy shall leap to the glory of civil Primacy.60 De’ Rossi Dell’Arno did not specify how this leap was to be achieved, i.e. whether he was alluding to actual territorial expansion, or whether he limited himself to using martial language in a purely metaphorical sense, in line with a tendency typical of post-war Catholicism, as explained in our previous chapter. That he was not antagonistic to Italy’s imperial pretensions is suggested by the fact that he did not hesitate to applaud the colonial attempts of the government of Francesco Crispi, bête noir of Catholics, for having known how to interpret Italy’s primacy in the world. And he was happy to impress, even on rural priests, his conviction that the synthesis, reconciled and harmonious, between Catholicism and Fascism was achieved in the imperial paradigm of the new Rome. He further explained that “the providential man by whom the forces of the nation are regenerated”61 would reignite her glory through “the power of Fascist Italy”.62 60 61 62

Ibid., 97–98. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 31–32.

172 4.3

chapter 4

Pure, Strong, Modern: A Catholic Virility

It is undeniable, in any case, that the involvement of parish priests in the mobilization of the regime succeeded in instilling the values of Fascism in those rural sectors traditionally hostile to great national projects, whether they were launched by local bigwigs, or by the state or federal authorities. In this sense the clergy and the Catholic organizations, in their encounter with Fascism, and by conferring on it a reassuring national perspective in the shadow of St. Peter’s, came to play a role of ‘political modernization’ in the rural world. On the other hand, this modernization, both in content and background, was that of an authoritarian totalitarian regime, which privileged the organizational and technological aspects more than the cultural and religious ones. In short, it was a ‘reactionary modernization’, largely conditioned by the very close relation that linked it to the conditions created by Fascism.63 Particularly emblematic, in this sense, was the effort made by Catholic Action to consolidate and enlarge its presence among the urban classes, as industrialization gradually changed the face both of Italian cities and of the rural world. The grassroots character of the organization, its blanket dissemination through the nation, and its huge membership were not adversely affected by the agreement of 1931. Indeed the number of members began to grow again and continued to do so throughout the Thirties. The Catholic youth movement ­Gioventù Cattolica alone, of which Luigi Gedda assumed the post of national president in 1934, grew from less than 250,000 members in 1930 to almost 400,000 in 1939, called as it was to stand in the frontline in the competition with Fascism to forge the new man.64 Modernization undoubtedly regarded the organization of society, ever more modulated in the forms of association assumed by mass urban society, and capable of competing with those of ­Fascism. The contents on the other hand remained closely bound up, in many respects, with the Church’s intransigent doctrinal nucleus of the condemnation of modernism; this too was a sign of how irreducible Catholicism was to the Fascist project to dominate the consciences of the young. Basically, however, the educational message of Catholic youth associations absorbed (a good deal more that their promoters cared to admit) those bourgeois models of respectability which had been built up in the course of the

63 64

R. Moro, “Il ‘modernismo buono’. La ‘modernizzazione’ cattolica tra fascismo e postfa­ scismo come problema storiografico”, 625–716. F. Traniello, “L’Italia cattolica nell’era fascista”, 290–292.

The Most Roman Of Empires

173

19th century in close correlation with modern nationalism,65 and which found their essential attributes in the virtues of discipline, sacrifice, courage and selfcontrol.66 Ever since the end of the Great War Catholic organizations, especially women’s organizations,67 had conducted a ‘battle for morality’ with a view to exerting a mass influence on the customs of Italian society. This struggle for the preservation of moral values inherited from the last century, and the educational models based on ‘purity’ that were proposed to the members of youth associations,68 represented the reply to a desire for order in a world that industrialization, urbanization and mass society had made ever more disorderly. In the mid-Thirties this type of Catholic culture was promoted as a contribution, or rather as a corrective, to the nationalist and bellicose political culture of Fascism. “Without purity we would not have had the heroism of our youth in the battles for the nation”, Luigi Gedda would write in 1939.69 Between 1934 and 1937 the heroic biographies of Catholic youth and Italian soldiers who had sacrificed their own life for the fatherland with discipline, selflessness and passion, convinced that they were doing God’s will, were at the center of a series of publications of the giac (Italian Catholic Youth). The “holocaust for the patria” had entered its very language through the traumatic experience of the Great War, its commemoration, and its assimilation to the Fascist symbolic world. But it was in the mid-Thirties, in tandem with the accentuation of what was called a ‘pedagogy of war’ in the mass organizations of the regime and in schools, that the memory of this martyrdom was revived.70 That the 65

66

67

68

69 70

See the fundamental study of G.L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig, 1985. On the ideological significance acquired by the cult of the body, in its various dimensions of gymnastics, sex education and physical hygiene, in united Italy, see G. Bonetta, Corpo e nazione. A. Ponzio, “Corpo e anima: sport e modello virile nella formazione dei giovani fascisti e dei giovani cattolici nell’Italia degli anni Trenta”, Mondo contemporaneo 1 (2005): 51–104. On the modulations of virility see G.L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, and B. Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. See V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1920–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, and L. Gazzetta, Cattoliche durante il fascismo. Ordine sociale e organizzazioni femminili nelle Venezie, Roma: Viella, 2011, 157–164. F. Piva, “Educare alla ‘purezza’: i dilemmi della Gioventù cattolica nel secondo dopoguerra”, in Chiesa, laicità e vita civile. Studi in onore di Guido Verucci, (eds.) L. Ceci and L. Demofonti, Roma: Carocci, 2005, 383–388. For the Gedda quotation, ibid., 388. See A. Ponzio, “Corpo e anima”, 68ff.

174

chapter 4

giac made so considerable a commitment to disseminating the model of the Catholic martyr in the Great War is revealing. From 1934 on Gioventù italica (magazine of the giac) dedicated many articles to the exemplary life of saintlike soldiers who had fallen in the First World War.71 And in the same year it launched its patriotic series named after the soldier-saint par excellence (San Giorgio) that continued down to 1937, publishing six titles in all.72 The link between the exemplary lives of Catholic martyrs in the Great War and the ItaloEthiopian war, evident in the chronology of the publications, is recalled in an explicit way. In his foreword to the biography of Giosuè Borsi, Luigi Gedda established indeed a continuum between the sacrifice of Catholics who had fallen in the Great War, the Lateran Pacts and the exploits of Fascist imperialism: Twenty years ago, Giosuè Borsi fell close to the Case Alte at Zagòra (Morocco), murmuring: “Mamma, your and my sacrifice shall not be in vain…”. We must bear witness to the fact that he was a prophet. His sacrifice and that of all those who died for a great and purer Italy was not in vain if, 14 years later, the Pontiff could say that “Italy was consigned to God, and God to Italy”, and if today our nation is making the prodigious advance that is bringing the white cross of Savoy, and the fasces and eagles of the new Italian generations to Africa.73 The San Giorgio series – concluded Gedda – would recall to the giac “those of our brothers who sowed the seeds of the new age with their heroism and their faith”.74 The exemplary lives of the “saintly heroes” of the Great War were used to transmit an educational message in which the consecration of blood for the fatherland is hailed as the final stage that seals a life based on the principles

71

See, for example, A. Sanvido, “Una tomba che è un’ara”, Gioventù italica 54 (June 1934): 167–168; G.d.M., “Il capitano santo”, ibid. (July 1934): 197; G. Mortari, “Carlo Ederle. ‘Spes messis in semine’”, ibid. 55 (May 1935): 139–140; F. Piantelli, “Cattolico e italiano: Loreto Starace”, ibid. (August 1935): 232–234; C. Mercurelli, “Giosuè Borsi. Poeta e soldato”, ibid. (November 1935): 318–320. 72 G. Ederle, Carlo Ederle. Maggiore d‘artiglieria, medaglia d’oro, Roma: Ave 1934; F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace. “Con la Croce e con la Spada”, with a foreword by R. Manzini, Roma: Ave 1935; N. Badano, Giosuè Borsi, with a foreword by L. Gedda, Ave: Roma 1935; T. Furlani, Il Capitano Negri, Roma: Ave 1936; Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica, Albo di gloria. Soci della Gioventù Italiana di a.c. per la conquista dell’Impero, Roma: Istituto editoriale San Michele 1936; Conte Lovera di Castiglione, Pierino Delpiano, Roma: Ave 1937. 73 L. Gedda, Foreword to N. Badano, Giosuè Borsi, 5–6. 74 Ibid.

The Most Roman Of Empires

175

considered paramount for a young Catholic.75 The paradigm of the heroic afflatus is defined through recurrent motifs in the various biographies, in a spirit of differentiation from the Fascist youth organizations and in competition with them. All the young men presented in the series were hard-working and devoted to study in their childhood and adolescence. Religious faith, of course, occupied a central place in their life. It was a faith in which devotion to the Virgin Mary and, in the case of Starace and Negri, a particular predilection for the Sacred Heart of Jesus are underlined. Another recurrent motif is purity of life, according to the principle ‘pure in order to be strong’, which reaches its high point, once again, in the life of Starace (“the man who does not look at women”76) and, especially in that of Captain Negri who is said to have expiated with knotted cords and scourges the night-long revels of his companions during Carnival.77 Yet at the same time the virile character of these young men, their “male and indomitable energy”,78 is extolled. This is a terrain on which the publications of the giac show that they wanted to vie with the ideal of Fascist virility.79 “Let those who think that Catholicism is a school of weakness or timidity, bashfulness or moping, read this book”, wrote Raimondo Manzini in his foreword to the biography of Starace. “They will hear reverberate in it the heroic wind of a superhuman masculinity: precisely this is the temperament of the human in the divine”.80 The Catholic heroes of the Great War are thus dedicated to gymnastics and strengthen themselves by strenuous sporting exercises. They love war. “War is splendid – Major Ederle is quoted as saying four days before his death on the Carso – because here we see man consciously confronting danger for the ideal and for duty”.81 “War is splendid”, even if uncomfortable, said Starace once he was on the front after so many peregrinations in Europe and America.82 “I yearn for war and wish it as sacrifice”, said Borsi.83 His words

75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

G. Vecchio, “Patriottismo e universalismo nelle associazioni laicali cattoliche”, in La Chiesa e l’Italia, 233–274. F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace, 95. T. Furlani, Il Capitano Negri, 77–78. R. Manzini, Apologia vivente, Foreword to F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace, 8. On the model of the virile male developed during the Fascist ventennio see L. Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man. Homesexuality in Fascist Italy, Madison: The University Wisconsin Press 2012. R. Manzini, Apologia vivente, prefazione a F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace, 8. G. Ederle, Carlo Ederle, 38. F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace, 158. N. Badano, Giosuè Borsi, 58.

176

chapter 4

were echoed by the infantryman Italo Bertagna: “What finer death can there be than this? That of the martyr of the faith who falls forgiving, but also that of the soldier who falls on the field of battle, his face resolutely turned to the enemy without retreating one step”.84 It is in this context that the bloody immolation in battle is inserted. More than with an explicatory role (giving a meaning to death), the glorification of sacrifice, and the ‘superhuman masculinity’ inseparable from it, is introduced with a pedagogical intention: to define what the role of Catholic youths should be in a society at war. ‘The bloody immolation’,85 ‘the heroic sacrifice’,86 show how a Catholic youth should be ready without hesitation to make his own tribute of blood to the fatherland because he knows from his faith that it is his duty to carry out the orders of his superiors. The mobilization of youth, the conditioning of their behavior, made use of traditional media such as the press and the theatre, but also placed a great deal of emphasis on more modern means of communication, such as radio and, especially, the cinema.87 In 1935 the number of cinematographic circuits affiliated with the Church rose to 1600, approximately a third of the total. Their development was accompanied, since 1928, by a magazine, the Rivista del cine­ matografo, with recommendations on the contents of films, advice on the fitting-out of cinemas and so on.88 The periodical began life as the monthly publication of the cuce (Consorzio utenti cinematografi educativi), founded in Milan two years previously to furnish advice on the management of cinemas and on the morality of films,89 especially in relation to the younger generations and women, considered, by their very nature, to be more easily ­influenced by films than men.90 Representatives of the cuce were received by Pius xi on 20 March 1933,91 because even in the eyes of the Pope the cinema seemed, 84 85 86 87 88

89 90

91

Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica, Albo di gloria, 11–12. F. Piantelli, Loreto Starace, 143. Ibid., 143. See S. Pivato, “L’organizzazione cattolica della cultura durante il fascismo”, Italia contemporanea 132 (1978): 3–25. M. Muscolino, “La Rivista del Cinematografo dalla nascita al 1968”, in Attraverso lo schermo. Cinema e cultura cattolica in Italia, (eds.) R. Eugeni and D.E. Viganò, vol. 2, Roma 2006, 181–196. D.E. Viganò, Un cinema ogni campanile. Chiesa e cinema nella diocesi di Milano, Milano 1997, 33–45. D. Forgacs, “Sex in the Cinema. Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930–1943”, in Re-viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema 1922–1943, (eds.) J. Reich and P. Garofalo, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 141–171. The Pope, who, with Marconi’s help, had founded the radio station in the Vatican in 1931, praised on that occasion the programme of what it hoped to broadcast, recalling that its

The Most Roman Of Empires

177

with ­radio, “one of the most powerful means of communication”.92 In this field Catholics – as Pius xi would emphasize in his encyclical Vigilanti cura (1936), dedicated to the motion picture industry and addressed in particular to the bishops of the usa – were called to a dual commitment: exerting pressure on the film industry to ensure that the motion pictures it produced were morally healthy, especially in terms of their treatment of sex and the stability of the family; and working for the realization of a specifically Catholic cinematographic ­production.93 In Italy these objectives were effectively pursued by the constant pressure brought to bear on government censorship, by the motion pictures produced by Catholic film production companies, and especially by the ever more extensive network of parish cinemas, which the regime had helped to create and which now vied with that of the secular Opera del Dopolavoro (Fascist leisure organisation).94 To this formidable apparatus was added the press promoted by the organizations of Catholic Action, religious orders, dioceses, and missionary associations. The obsession with a “good press” had generated a plethora of Catholic reviews, newsletters and magazines for every kind of readership, widely distributed through the traditional circuits and those linked to the Salesians, the Fathers of St. Anthony of Padua, and the ­Society of St. Paul, publishers since 1931 of the influential family magazine Famiglia Cristiana, with a growing print-run of upwards of 12,000 copies. The presence of Catholic papers and periodicals in Italy was to say the least impressive, considered in itself and even more so in relation to its development within a dictatorial State that had suppressed press freedom for the past decade.95 The mass media introduced into the Catholic world through Church-run circuits and parish organizations also tended to promote a homogenization

prime aim was to “combat evil”, but he also pointed out the need to work “in a positive sense” for the diffusion of the good through the medium of cinema. Text in Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 2, 879–880. 92 English translation of Pius xi’s encyclical Divini Illius Magistri on Christian Education, dated 31 December 1929, can be downloaded from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). 93 Pius xi’s encyclical letter Vigilanti cura on the Motion Picture, dated 29 June 1936, recognized the power of motion pictures to exercise “a profoundly moral influence upon those who see them”. English translation can be downloaded from the Vatican website. 94 On the role played by Catholic national organizations in promoting the film industry ever since its origins, see G. Convents, “I cattolici e il cinema”, in Storia del cinema mondiale, (ed.) G.P. Brunetta, vol. 5, Torino: Einaudi 2001, 485–517, and E. Mosconi, “La Chiesa cattolica e il cinema”, in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 5, (ed.) O. Caldiron, Padova: Edizioni Bianco e Nero, 2006, 77–84. 95 La stampa cattolica italiana, (ed.) A. Antoniazzi, Foreword by R. Manzini, Milano: Istituto di Propaganda Libraria, n.d. (but 1937 and updated to 31 December 1936), 204–206.

178

chapter 4

of religious models and their marked nationalization. This was clearly seen during the conquest of Ethiopia, when Catholic Italy seemed to coincide, in the popular sentiment, with Fascist Italy. It was then that the myth of imperial Rome made all its power of seduction felt among the upper and lower clergy, among the executive cadres of Catholic Action, among the bishops and parish priests of the ‘Battle for Grain’, among the intellectuals linked to Gemelli, and even among the circumspect fathers of La Civiltà Cattolica, as well of course as in the ‘clerico-fascist’ ranks of former members of the Centro Nazionale. Even men hitherto skeptical of, if not opposed to, the regime ended up by supporting, even glorifying the war as Italy’s re-found imperial mission and its coincidence with the expansion of Catholicism in the world. 4.4

A War for Empire-Building

Yet, the Pope himself was contrary to Fascist Italy’s war of conquest against the sovereign state of Ethiopia. In his confidential conversations with exponents of the Curia and the Vatican’s senior diplomats, Pius xi made his disapproval of Mussolini’s aggression against Ethiopia perfectly clear. He disapproved of it for various reasons. He, like many other observers, feared that the conflict would spread to Europe. He also knew that the aggression against a sovereign state that was a member of the League of Nations would inevitably push Mussolini to forge closer ties with Hitler. Further, ‘the Pope of the missions’ was deeply concerned by the inevitable consequences that the conflict between Italy and the other colonial powers would have on the organized development of the propagation of the faith.96 However, the strongest and most explicit condemnation of the war of conquest, pronounced by Pius xi at Castelgandolfo on 27 August 1935,97 triggered a very serious crisis with the government in Rome. The reaction of the Italian embassy to the Holy See, galvanized by the personal intervention of ­Mussolini, 96 97

For a wider analysis of Pius xi’s attitude to the war in Ethiopia see L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare. Chiesa, fascismo e guerra d’Etiopia, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010. S.RR.SS., AA.EE.SS., Italia, pos. 967, vol. iii, fols. 9r-11r, “Testo – ripreso stenograficamente – del discorso del S. Padre alle infermiere cattoliche il 27 agosto 1935” (on folio 3° of the typescript pencil corrections of which many later approved by the Holy Father himself). The official version of the speech, redacted and watered down, was published in L’Osservatore Romano on 29 August 1935. A synoptic edition of the two versions in L. Ceci, “La guerra di Etiopia fuori dall’Italia: le posizioni dei vescovi cattolici europei”, in L’Impero fascista. Italia ed Etiopia (1935–1941), (ed.) R. Bottoni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008, 117–143.

The Most Roman Of Empires

179

was aggressive; it was aimed at conditioning the Pope’s future public pronouncements on the war, with the threat of compromising the good relations between Church and State that had existed in Italy after the signing of the Lateran Pacts. The Pope bowed to the pressure; a decision that even his closest aides thought advisable.98 To gain an idea of how far Pius xi buckled under the diktat of silence on the Fascist war of conquest imposed on him by Mussolini we may recall one ­episode – one of many – that can be reconstructed through documents in ­Italian and Vatican archives. In December 1935, once the spread of the war to Europe had been averted, and the Italian Catholic world enthusiastically participated in the mobilization for the voluntary donation of gold to the nation, with blatant gestures of support given a lot of coverage by the media, Pius xi would have liked publicly to express his hopes for peace either in his consistorial allocution of 16 December or in his traditional Christmas speech. But such was the Pope’s prudence, or his pusillanimity, that he even felt he should ask Mussolini’s permission to do so. So, on 13 December, the Vatican Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli formally asked the Italian ambassador to the Holy See Bonifacio Pignatti that “the Holy Father would like to be able to announce some hope for peace in his Allocution and wanted […] to ask the head of the Government to allow him to do so”.99 In spite of the need for the language of diplomacy to move within the parameters of the politically correct, the reply of the Italian ambassador to the Secretary of State was decidedly intimidatory: any appeal made by the Pope for a truce “would be regarded as a hostile act by the Fascist government and by the Country”.100 Pacelli got the message. Without feeling any need to consult any further with the Holy Father, he reassured the ambassador: “Then nothing more will be said of the matter”.101 On the following day Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi met Mussolini. His task was primarily to act as spokesman of the Pope’s last effort of persuasion with regard to the Hoare-Laval plan, a joint British-French proposal for ending the Italo-Ethiopian war. But first of all – as he had been briefed by Pius xi on the morning of the same day – the Jesuit was commissioned to reassure the head of the government about the Pope’s planned speech on 16 December. “The Holy Father – declared Tacchi Venturi to Mussolini – , having been informed

98 L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 43–54. 99 S.RR.SS., AA.EE.SS., Stati Ecclesiastici, pos. 430b, fasc. 362, fol. 152r, 13 December 1935. 100 So Bonifacio Pignatti Morano di Custoza in his report to Mussolini of 14 December 1935, in I Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1935–1939, vol. 2, 836–837. 101 Ibid., 837.

180

chapter 4

of the conversation of the Ambassador with the Cardinal Secretary of State, would not even mention the Italo-Ethiopian war at the forthcoming Consistory, holding himself back about it tamquam non esset [as if it did not exist]”.102 The Pope kept his word: in his consistorial allocution of 16 December, he made no specific reference to the Italo-Ethiopian war, nor did he do so in his Christmas address. At the beginning of the same month, ninety days after the start of military operations in Ethiopia on 3 October 1935, without any formal declaration of war, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, under-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, posed the question to himself in his notes on the Italo-Ethiopian conflict: So should the Pope speak? Yes or no? I would draw a distinction. In public, for the time being, no. But in secret yes, immediately, and in the clearest possible way, to everyone. To speak and to act […] Also because it will be understood that, if the Holy See has not spoken in public, it was only so as not to impede with words its action of pacification. By speaking out, perhaps the Holy See would have spared itself from being criticized, but undoubtedly it would have paralyzed its work for good.103 Tardini forcefully posed the question of the Pope’s silence, because the blatant mobilization of the clergy, the bishops and many cardinals in the war e­ ffort presented the image of a total alignment of Catholicism – from the u ­ pper echelons of its hierarchy downwards – with the Mussolini government’s undeclared war of conquest in Ethiopia, which would cause some 300,000 fatalities among the Ethiopians.104 The wide and enthusiastic support offered by Catholics to the regime on the occasion of the Italo-Ethiopian war is a fact so manifest, as in few other circumstances of Italian political life. In numerous public pronouncements the bishops expressed their most fervent support for 102 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. ii, fols. 260r-262v, “P. Tacchi Venturi a Pio xi, Relazione dell’udienza avuta con S.E. Mussolini nel pomeriggio di sabato 14 dicembre 1935, alle ore 17,30, a Palazzo di Venezia”. 103 The document, with the title Previsioni e giudizi di Mons. Tardini sul conflitto tra l’Italia e l’Etiopia, in s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. i bis, ff. 1r-71. It has been published in toto in L. Ceci, “‘Il Fascismo manda l’Italia in rovina’. Le note inedite di monsignor Domenico Tardini (23 settembre-13 dicembre 1935)”, Rivista storica italiana 120 (2008): 342–344. 104 See, among many studies, R. Mallet, Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935: The Origins of Fascist Italy’s African War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, and N. Labanca, La guerra d’Etiopia 1935–1941, Bologna: Mulino, 2015.

The Most Roman Of Empires

181

the government’s war in Ethiopia.105 Senior prelates blessed the troops and the warships leaving for East Africa. The national ruling council of Catholic Action adopted a line of open support for the war. Decidedly political appreciations and endorsements of the government were expressed by various branches of the Catholic youth movement Gioventù cattolica. The group of priests associated with Italia e Fede, which played a key role in shaping the views of the provincial clergy, reaffirmed their own support for the imperial and autarchic goals of Mussolini. The missionary and devotional press, the Catholic cinema and theatre, all helped to spread among the popular masses the colonialist enthusiasm and the image of the war as a Catholic missionary crusade in a country which even La Civiltà Cattolica had called ‘heretical’.106 Amplified in turn by the Fascist press, the image of an Italian Catholic world aligned with the policy of the regime in Ethiopia was spread by newspapers throughout the world. It was reported to the main European governments by their diplomatic representatives accredited either to Italy or to the Holy See. It was noted in the reports of the League of Nations. It was pointed out by the anti-fascists. Even the upper echelons of the Vatican hierarchy were perfectly conscious of it, even, in some circumstances, embarrassed by it. The support, often blatant, inflated with rhetoric, and cravenly subservient to the propaganda of the government, was by far the predominant feature of this alignment, but a more detailed analysis shows that its development was by no means uniform. It went through several stages. A diversified attitude, characterized by caution, circumspection, silence and timid support, accompanied the phase of political and diplomatic negotiations. A massive response was given to the general mobilization of 2 October 1935. But it was the entry into force of the sanctions imposed on Italy by the League of Nations for her aggression on Ethiopia (18 November 1935) that generated the almost total Catholic backing for the African war. This support reached its maximum emphasis in the mobilization for voluntary donations of gold to finance the war (Oro alla Patria), culminating in the Giornata della Fede, the day devoted to the donation of wedding rings, inaugurated by Queen Elena herself (18 December 1935). It was blatantly expressed on the occasion of the proclamation of the Empire (9 May 1936), but then gradually faded as the “crusade” for the defense of Christianity in the Spanish civil war dominated the international scene and robbed Ethiopia of its former prominence. In any case, it was especially the anti-sanctions mobilization that made Catholic support for the war virtually total: it generated a mystical sea-change, 105 L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 67–108, to which reference can be made for what follows. 106 “Il cristianesimo degli abissini”, La Civiltà Cattolica 86/4 (1935): 478–487.

182

chapter 4

transforming the war for the conquest of Ethiopia into a war for the defense of Italy from the aggression of the perfidious League of Nations. To many it seemed to offer a great occasion to manifest the loyalty of Catholics both to the fatherland reconciled through the Lateran Pacts and to the great Fascist leader, the Duce himself, who was interpreted as the main promoter of this reconciliation. The triumph of imperial rhetoric, its tropes, its slogans, perhaps does not permit us properly to understand how far the clichés adopted by the episcopate were prompted by the ebullient language of the moment, or, vice versa, how deeply they were introjected. It should however be observed that the link existing between Italian Catholicism and Fascism was not merely tactical, the result of mutual exploitation, but deeper and more substantial: a shared respect for order, obedience, authority; a shared mistrust of common enemies such as freemasonry, liberalism, and communism. The involvement of the bishops, co-opted into the organizational machine of the regime, was expressed in an often indistinguishable symbiosis of religious and political language. The de­ stino fatale (the ‘fated destiny’), a cliché characteristic of the Fascist symbolic world, was given great resonance by the bishops in their narrative of Italian historical events. It became fused together with the providential interpretation of national history, and ended up being closely linked with the sacralization of the war in Ethiopia: it was God himself, with his Providence, who had assigned to Italy, through the centuries, a civilizing mission. That mission had now been assumed by the ‘Man of Providence’, thanks to whom Catholic civilization was being brought to darkest Africa. The Italy reconciled with the Church – said Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, Archbishop of Milan, in the Cathedral on 28 October 1935, in a homily that had reverberations around the world – had a “national and catholic mission”: over the fields of Ethiopia, therefore, the Italian national flag now bore in triumph “the Cross of Christ”; “the chains of the slaves” had been broken asunder; the roads had been levelled “for the Missionaries of the Gospel”.107 The emphasis on the confessional dimension of the war in Africa was especially underlined by Agostino Gemelli. He was as active as ever in promoting the war in Ethiopia as a crusade in defense of Catholic and national civilization, culminating in his consecration of the Italian armed forces to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June 1936. Between 1935 and the early months of 1936 Father Agostino, who in the pages of Vita e Pensiero had invoked the union sacrée in

107 Text of the homily in “Il dovere civile dei cattolici. Un’omelia del Card. Schuster”, Annuario Cattolico Italiano 15 (1936–1937): 79–81, quotation 81.

The Most Roman Of Empires

183

defense of Fascism against the “barbarians of every region”,108 found the funds to print and distribute half a million copies of a devotional booklet called Soldato, prega!, containing the act of consecration to the Sacred Heart for the triumph of Italian arms and Catholic civilization. The accentuation of the missionary features of the war produced a strong involvement of the popular press linked to the missions. Such popular mission periodicals as Le Missioni Illustrate, Le Missioni Domenicane, and Il Massaia extolled the prospect of the spread of Catholicism opened by the Italian conquest with a blind enthusiasm that precluded any prior evaluation of the moral legitimacy of the war of aggression. The emblem of the predestined meeting between Ethiopia and Italy was for many Cardinal Guglielmo Massaja, hailed by the propaganda as at once missionary and patriot. Yet the man who more than any other personified the pathos and rhetoric of the symbiosis between warrior and clerico-imperialist was the military chaplain, Reginaldo Giuliani, whom we have met before, and whose death in battle at Passo Urieu was presented by a prolific output of obituaries, pamphlets, articles, even theatrical pieces, as a heroic, almost supernatural synthesis of patriotic ardor and immolation for the Catholic faith. The moment of most widespread and theatrical euphoria of Italian Catholicism in its support for the war effort coincided, as we have suggested, with the mobilization of voluntary donations of gold for the war effort (Oro alla Patria). In that spectacular event of propaganda and mobilization against the ‘iniquitous sanctions’ decreed by the League of Nations,109 bishops and cardinals throughout Italy vied with each other in handing over to the nation at war and to the regime’s provincial party offices a wealth of gold in the form of episcopal treasures, rings, chains, precious liturgical objects, family heirlooms. And they invited the faithful, even the most humble, to follow suit. The Archbishop of Monreale went so far as to urge his priests to melt down the ex-votos donated by devotees to the sanctuaries for favors received, arousing for this desecration protests from as far afield as Venezuela. The bellicose and clerico-imperial enthusiasm of Italian Catholics, which aroused such a painful impression in don Sturzo, was widely perceived to be compatible with the line adopted, at least publicly, by the Holy See. For, after the diplomatic incident that had erupted in relations between the Vatican and the Mussolini government in late August 1935, following the words of ­condemnation pronounced by Pius xi on 27 August, the Pope made no further 108 A. Gemelli, “Tutti gli italiani uniti nella lotta per la pace”, Vita e pensiero (December 1935): 733–755. 109 P. Terhoeven, Liebespfand fürs Vaterland. Krieg, Geschlecht und faschistische Nation in der italienischen Gold- und Eheringsammlung 1935/36, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003.

184

chapter 4

public denunciations of Italy’s war of aggression in Ethiopia, not even in response to such war crimes as the systematic use of chemical weapons,110 or the attempt to wipe out the hierarchy of the Ethiopian Church with the massacre of two thousand inhabitants in the holy city of Debre Libanos.111 The silence was interpreted by the episcopate as tacit endorsement of the regime’s colonial policy. The Italian bishops had an attitude of undeviating assent to the line followed by the Holy See.112 Consequently, if on the one hand they were unable for reasons of cultural poverty to discuss or combat the clichés of Fascist propaganda, on the other it was inconceivable for them to adopt positions that they assumed were in conflict with those of the Pope. Not intervening publicly in a direction at variance with that of the higher clergy, the Pope, by his silence, implied, and left the episcopate, priests, laity and national and international public opinion to infer, that there was on the part of the Holy See a substantial approval of the African war and of the attitude of the Italian Catholic world. This seemed, in any case, to be confirmed by the editorials in L’Osservatore Romano, which throughout the war followed a line of justification of the imperial exploits of Fascist Italy, though at the same time it avoided reporting the more bellicose pronouncements of the episcopate and left to Guido Gonella the scope to express, from time to time, in the Acta diurna, some trifling detractions from the government’s press campaign.113 The philo-imperialist and philo-fascist declarations of Italian Catholics aroused reactions in many parts of the world. Scores of letters and telegrams of individual believers, Catholic associations and Catholic parties poured into the Vatican from the most diverse countries of the world to urge the Holy See to dissociate itself from the colonialist and bellicose declarations of Italian bishops.114 To all this were added the protests presented to the Vatican by the British government for the exuberant anti-British sentiments expressed in

110 A. Sbacchi, “Poison Gas and Atrocities in the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36”, in Italian Colonialism, (eds.) R. Ben-Ghiat and M. Fuller, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 47–56. 111 I. Campbell, The Massacre of Debre Libanos. Ethiopia 1937. The Story of one of Fascism’s most Shocking Atrocities, Introduction by A. Del Boca, Foreword by Asfa Wossen Asserate, Addis Abeba: Addis Ababa University Press, 2014. 112 G. Martina, “I cattolici di fronte al fascismo”, Rassegna di teologia 17 (1976): 175–194. 113 See S. Sambaldi, “Dalla preparazione dell’intervento alla conquista dell’impero. ‘L’Osservatore romano’ e la guerra d’Etiopia, settembre 1935 – maggio 1936”, Storia e pro­ blemi contemporanei 13 (2000): 201–229. 114 L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 144–160.

The Most Roman Of Empires

185

many interventions by the Italian episcopate, widely publicized in the international press.115 To the apostolic nuncio in Paris, Monsignor Luigi Maglione, were sent the protests of the emperor of Ethiopia Haile Sellassie for the speech pronounced by the Archbishop of Brindisi, in the course of which, according to press reports, the faithful had been exhorted to donate gold to the country “in order to bring civilization to lands where slavery and barbarism had hitherto reigned”.116 As the nuncio reported to Secretary of State Pacelli, in response to his attempt to dissociate the Holy See from the initiatives of Italian bishops, the representative of Haile Sellassie in Paris had declared that “in Ethiopia, where the Catholic discipline is known, such manifestations of the Italian Bishops, which generate aversion to Catholicism and hostility to the Missions, are attributed to the Holy See”.117 No less embarrassing for the Holy See was what was being maintained by the National Socialist press in Germany, according to which the many declarations made by the Italian clergy on the Italo-Ethiopian war – inconceivable, it was said, without the consent of the Vatican – were a clear demonstration that the Holy See had left the national clergy free to trumpet forth their full support for the Fascist war which for reasons of political wisdom it was not permitted for the Pope himself to express.118 Hence the question about the silence of the Pope posed in his notes by Monsignor Tardini, who did not mince his words in judging the Italian clergy and bishops “turbulent, intoxicated, warmongering and deranged”. Hence, too, the widely felt concerns about what reflections the episcopate’s philo-Italian and philo-imperial manifestations might have on the international image of the Holy See, accused “of being in cahoots with Fascism”.119 115 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. v, fols. 180r-181r, H. Montgomery to A. Ottaviani, 26 November 1935, and fols. unnumbered between 186v and 187r, 29 November 1935. 116 Ibid., fol. 189r, L. Maglione to E. Pacelli, 28 November 1935. 117 Ibid. 118 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. iii, fol. 91r, press review of 2 November 1935. The fact was also remarked by Waldemar Gurian, who in his dispatch of 6 December 1935 reported that elogia of the Italian bishops obedient to the State had suddenly proliferated in the Nazi press and emphasized that their conduct was praised in banner headlines, with the intention of pointing out the Italian bishops as models for their more recalcitrant counterparts in Germany to follow. See Deutsche Briefe. Ein Blatt der katholischen Emigration (1934–1938), Heintz Hurten ed., Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1969, vol. 1, 696. 119 See the predictions and judgements of Monsignor Tardini on the war between Italy and Ethiopia, in L. Ceci, “Il Fascismo manda l’Italia in rovina”, his notes of 1st December 1935 (342–344) and 3 December 1935 (344–345).

186

chapter 4

The decision adopted by senior prelates in the Vatican remained however that of publicly maintaining a line of silence over the war, tamquam non esset, and concentrating instead on the diplomatic channel and on confidential negotiations. At the international level the most important centers of action in this sense were represented by the nunciature in Paris, crucial for sounding out the attitudes of Laval, with the objective of forming a French mediation between Italy and Great Britain; by that in Berne, to intercept as speedily as possible the policies adopted, or the appeals made, by the League of Nations; and by the nunciatures in Latin-American countries, due to the important role they had played in Italian foreign policy since the second half of the Twenties. Monsignor Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster and Catholic Primate of England and Wales was, in turn, the key interlocutor as far as relations with Britain were concerned, important for the Holy See not only on the level of diplomatic relations from which it had been kept at arm’s length, but for the influence that the public opinion of that country, strongly opposed to the war, exerted at the international level. New archival findings have further brought to light a Vatican attempt to contact us President Roosevelt with a view to a joint mediation between Italy and Great Britain (see further below).120 Only three days after the beginning of military operations in Ethiopia the Vatican’s Secretariat of State rendered operative Mussolini’s desiderata that nuncios and apostolic delegates should be involved to defend the reasons that had led Italy to go to war in the government circles of various countries. This line of action had been urged by Mussolini in his talks with Tacchi Venturi since September. Talks between the Jesuit and the head of the government had continued regularly during the months of crisis and of war: 10 meetings in 19 weeks, i.e. on average one meeting every 10/12 days. The drill always remained the same: Tacchi Venturi would call on the Vatican; write down under the Pope’s dictation the essential message of what the Holy Father wanted to say to the head of the government; then refer the papal thinking to the head of the government, adding every so often some personal observation; annotate Mussolini’s reply and, depending on the time or the urgency of the message, would bring it to the Vatican either later the same day or during the immediately ensuing days. Pius xi entrusted to Tacchi Venturi various messages for Mussolini. Before the outbreak of the war the Pope had made, through the intermediary of Tacchi Venturi, a very strong if belated appeal to the head of the government urging him to renounce the invasion of Ethiopia, going so far as to affirm that the war would place “Italy in a state of mortal sin”:121 an invocation that took 120 L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 144–160. 121 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. i, fol. 165r, “Contatti con Mussolini per tramite del Tacchi-Venturi”, “Appunti dettati dal S. Padre al T. il 24 settembre 1935”.

The Most Roman Of Empires

187

to its extreme consequences the definition of war as unjust, of which it is not easy to find any trace in the papal magisterium of the 19th and 20th century. In other cases the Jesuit delivered French proposals for negotiations to Mussolini; they had reached the Secretariat of State through the apostolic nuncio in Paris Monsignor Luigi Maglione, who was in contact with Pierre Laval, or through the French ambassador to the Holy See François Charles-Roux. After having tackled specific questions in these talks with Tacchi Venturi, however, Mussolini did not fail to touch all the chords that he knew were calculated to arouse the greatest concerns on the other side of the Tiber. Thus, on one occasion he dilated on the gigantic plot hatched against Italy by the Third International and Liberals to bring down the regime and with it the Church.122 On another occasion he told his interlocutor to tell His Holiness that the real enemy of the government was freemasonry, which could not “forgive him for all the masonic lodges he [Mussolini] had destroyed in Italy and for his reconciliation with the Church”.123 On yet another occasion he threatened to throw himself into Hitler’s arms.124 To recur to the role of the nuncios, they were requested by the Secretariat of State to send to Rome detailed reports on the line adopted in the Italo-­ Ethiopian crisis by local governments and the attitude of public opinion to the Pope’s position. In Venezuela, shock and indignation were aroused by the initiative of the Archbishop of Monreale Eugenio Filippi to melt down the ex-­votos in the cathedral and donate the ingots of gold thus produced to the Italian government; the Venezuelan press insinuated that this had taken place with the “approbation of the Holy See”.125 To rectify the Vatican position the diligent nuncio Fernando Cento had printed in thousands of copies a pamphlet with the title Por los fueros de la Verdad. La Santa Sede y el conflicto italoetiope,126 and had them distributed free throughout the country.127 In some cases the action taken by the Holy See through its own delegates in the world was openly in connivance with the Italian government’s line. In December 1935 the government of Rome protested to the Vatican’s Secretariat 122 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. ii, fols. 260r-262v, Tacchi Venturi, “Relazione dell’udienza avuta con S.E. Mussolini nel pomeriggio di sabato 14 dicembre 1935 alle ore 17,30 a Palazzo Venezia”. 123 Ibid., fols. 343r-346r, Tacchi Venturi, “Relazione dell’Udienza avuta con sua eccellenza il Capo del Governo il 3 gennaio 1936”. 124 Ibid., fol. 80r-v, Tacchi Venturi, “Udienza col Capo del Governo, 24 ottobre 1935”. 125 “La campaña del arzobispo Filippi”, in El Heraldo, 21 November 1935. 126 Por los fueros de la Verdad. La Santa Sede y el conflicto italo-etiope, Caracas: Editorial Venezuela, 1935. 127 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 967, vol. v, fol. 34r, F. Cento to E. Pacelli, 12 December 1935.

188

chapter 4

of State because the apostolic delegate in Ottawa, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, had not received instructions to maintain contacts with the local Italian consul and “perform in loco the action desired of the Holy See”.128 On behalf of the Secretariat of State, Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo wrote to Cassulo on 26 December 1935 to urge an intervention in Canada favorable to the Italian ­position: the Italo-Ethiopian question should, he advised, be placed in a framework of epochal conflict, orchestrated by forces hostile to Fascism (communism, freemasonry), which, by combating Catholic Italy, wish to strike at the Church of Rome and the Holy See.129 In response to so strong an appeal from the Secretariat of State, Cassulo was left with no other option than carry out the Vatican directives. Alas, Canadian public opinion – he wrote to Pizzardo on 2 January 1936 – was contrary to the war and had approved the sanctions against Italy hoping that they would prevent the loss of human lives. The apostolic delegate affirmed however that he had “well understood the thought of the Holy See” and that he had done his best “to make it understood also to others”.130 To the Italian consul-general he had therefore replied “that the thought of the Holy See is well known, just as are well known the sentiments it feels towards the Nation which is and wishes to remain in good relations with the Church of which it is the Daughter”. Pizzardo later thanked him for “so much clear-sightedness”.131 If these were some of the lines of intervention requested of nuncios, the core of the Holy See’s diplomatic action remained the direct work of the Secretariat of State itself. For several weeks it was involved in a highly confidential attempt at mediation between France and Italy, which seemed indispensable after the crisis in Anglo-Italian relations had been precipitated. The negotiations continued through October and November, with a regular triangulation between the Vatican, Palazzo Venezia and the Quai d’Orsay, in which the heads of State communicated through Tacchi Venturi, Maglione and Charles-Roux. In the same period the Vatican’s diplomatic efforts were also addressed at the usa, a country in which Italy’s war against Ethiopia had aroused m ­ ounting hostility. The city of New York, and in particular the quarter of Harlem, had experienced moments of tension between Italo-Americans and the black

128 129 130 131

Ibid., fol. 128r, “Appunto riservatissimo”, undated, but December 1935. Ibid., fols. 129r-131r, G. Pizzardo to A. Cassulo, 26 December 1935. Ibid., fols. 132r-134r, A. Cassulo to G. Pizzardo, 2 January 1936. Ibid., fol. 135r, G. Pizzardo to A. Cassulo, 25 February 1936.

The Most Roman Of Empires

189

c­ ommunity, for which the defense of Ethiopia became the symbol of a nascent racial pride and an important stage in political maturation.132 On the suggestion of Bernardino Nogara, delegate to the Amministrazione Speciale dei Beni della Santa Sede (the main Vatican office responsible for the finances and properties of the Holy See), the Secretariat of State opened, between October and December 1935, confidential channels with President Roosevelt, with a view to a joint work of mediation between Italy and Great Britain.133 The contacts established between the Vatican and Washington did not lead to any tangible result in terms of the war in Ethiopia, also because they were speedily overtaken by events, but they were of some importance for future developments in the international action of the Holy See. Secretary of State Pacelli himself embarked on a journey to the usa in October 1936: an event in which American public opinion took great interest. He visited the main cities of the East Coast. He met President Roosevelt on 5 November. The meeting laid the foundations for a resumption in diplomatic relations between usa and Holy See, interrupted by the wish of the American Senate in 1867. ­Officialized at the end of 1939, the special relationship between the Vatican and the White House would contribute significantly, after Pearl Harbor and the closing of the American Embassy in Rome (December 1941), to the repositioning of the Holy See in international politics and the definition of the role that she would play after the fall of the Fascist regime.134 4.5

Against ‘Hybrid’ Unions

With the Italian military successes of February-March 1936 the war in Ethiopia had been practically won and nothing could stop Badoglio’s advance on

132 N. Venturini, Neri e italiani a Harlem. Gli anni Trenta e la guerra d’Etiopia, Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 1990, and J.E. Harris, African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941, ­Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1994. 133 L. Ceci, “The First Steps of ‘Parallel Diplomacy’: The Vatican and the us in the Italo-­ Ethiopian War (1935–1936)”, in Pius xi and America, (eds.) Ch.R. Gallagher, D.I. Kertzer, A. Melloni, Berlin: Lit, 2012, 87–105. 134 On the Holy See’s relations with the usa: R.D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, and L. Castagna, A Bridge across the Ocean. The United States and the Holy See between the Two World Wars, Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014.

190

chapter 4

­Addis Abeba. The Ethiopian capital was reached on 5 May 1936. Four days later Mussolini solemnly announced to the nation and the world “the reappearance of the Empire on the destined hills of Rome”.135 Although the outbreak of the Rhineland crisis, following the re-militarization ordered by Hitler, was shifting the axis of international politics, hitherto concentrated on Italy, towards Germany, the Holy See did not stop monitoring the Italo-Ethiopian situation. In March 1936 it tried to arrange the entry into Ethiopia of the Belgian Capuchin Father Théobald Gulleghen, as unofficial Vatican spokesman at the Ethiopian imperial court. The mission had long been prepared, but failed following the Italian military victories.136 The last diplomatic intervention of the Secretariat of State in the Italo-­ Ethiopian situation took place during the negotiations for the abdication of the emperor Haile Sellassie, who had been in exile with his family in the ­English town of Bath since May 1936. The attempted mediation took place between December 1936 and September 1937; the protagonists were Cardinal Pacelli, a French mediator sent by Haile Sellassie, Louis Blaise de Sibour, and the Archbishop of Westminster, but this initiative too had a negative result.137 The mediation of the Secretariat of State coincided for some weeks with the consultations in progress between the Italian government and the Holy See over the introduction of the first legislation in Italy that had ever touched on the question of race. To prevent the formation of half-castes in Ethiopia, and to protect the dignity of the country’s new rulers, the Lessona Decree, better known as the legge sul madamato (law on concubinage), was published by the Fascist government on 24 June 1937. The provision, issued on 19 April 1937, was intended to regulate, or rather to clamp down on, temporary relationships more uxorio between Italian citizens (especially soldiers) and native women in the colonized territories. It consisted in a single article that prescribed a period of imprisonment of between one and five years for an “Italian citizen who in the territory of the Kingdom or the Colonies has a relation of conjugal type with a subject of Italian East Africa or an assimilated woman”.138 The concept of race does not explicitly appear in the legislation, “but was its foundation since it represented the juridical asset that the law was aimed to protect”.139 135 136 137 138

B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 27, 268–269. See L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 157. Ibid., 192–197. Issued as Royal Decree Law no. 880, the provision was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 145, on 24 June 1937, and converted into law no. 2590 on 30 December 1937, without substantial amendments. 139 O. De Napoli, La prova della razza. Cultura giuridica e razzismo negli anni Trenta, Firenze: Le Monnier, 2009, 65.

The Most Roman Of Empires

191

Once the war of conquest had ended, during which predatory sexuality had been championed, in dulcified form, e.g. by the hit song Faccetta nera and by a flourishing traffic in postcards and photos of nude African women, the objective in short was to form an Empire populated by Italian emigrant families and to confine interracial sexuality to prostitution.140 For Mussolini it was essential to avoid the formation of a generation of ‘hybrids’ (meticci), whose very existence was seen as an affront to the prestige of the ‘master race’ and a serious danger for public order.141 Racial segregation was pursued by using a plurality of tools: awareness-raising campaigns, repression, town planning, educational policy, government decrees, regulations, circulars, laws of the State; and behind the whole gamut of provisions was the constant and personal impulse of the Duce, who monitored and intended to model even the most minute aspects of inter-racial relations.142 Biological racialism towards blacks was something, on the whole, alien to the mentality of missionaries, who were prone to reason according to the clichés of an inferiority that was codified in terms of faith and culture, but made provision for the possibility of conversion and hence full redemption. In the 19th century missionary promotional material had often painted Africa as an uncultivated and barbarous continent, but the missionary congregations had developed plans in which the twin objectives of bringing faith in Christ and bringing the benefits of civilization were seen as complementary and were also pursued by an apostolate conducted by natives and by the formation of an indigenous clergy. The mistrustful attitude to bourgeois, urban and industrial models of modern society had even led in some cases to extolling the simpler, more wholesome, less corrupted character of the African populations, due precisely to their isolation from the ordinary communications of modern civilization. On the level of the Church’s teaching, the absence of any racial attitudes to the black populations in papal pronouncements found more than a confirmation in the specific attention paid by Benedict xv and Pius xi to the formation of an autochthonous clergy in mission lands. More specifically the 140 For an acute analysis of the lyrics of Faccetta Nera see K. Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 56–58. 141 On the categoy of white ‘prestige’ in colonial society see D. Kennedy, Islands of White. Settler Society in Kenya and Southern Rodhesia, 1890–1939, Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, 153–154. 142 See G. Barrera, “Sessualità e segregazione nelle terre dell’Impero”, in L’Impero fascista, 393–414, and B. Sòrgoni, “Racist Discourses and Practices in the Italian Empire under Fascism”, in The Politics of Recognizing Difference, (eds.) R. Grillo and J.C. Pratt, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 41–58.

192

chapter 4

claimed ­prerogative for the civil authorities to ban, on eugenic grounds, those ­marriages from which there was a risk of ‘defective offspring’ was forcefully repudiated by Pius xi in his encyclical Casti Connubii of 31 December: “Public magistrates – he concluded – have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects”.143 In missionary practice half-castes were the object not of contempt, but of compassion. In Eritrea, where the reality of half-castes was most extensive, the Capuchin missionaries had founded, for example, various orphanages at Asmara, Cheren and Saganeiti, which provided a home for half-caste infants, often abandoned by both their parents as illegitimate children, with the aim not only of offering them protection, but also inserting them in colonial society as Italian citizens and providing them with a good education and ­vocational training. On the occasion of the Day of Missions celebrated in October 1935, the president of the Opera Pontificia di Propagazione della Fede, Monsignor Carlo Salotti, had recalled that in the eyes of God, “father of the whole of humanity”, there existed “no distinction between human beings however different they may be in color, race, character, custom or tradition”.144 So, in the colony many missionaries remained perplexed when the Lessona Decree came into force. Apart from contradicting a line that had been pursued by the Church for many years, the law on concubinage touched on a sphere that was of central importance for Catholic morality and for the Concordat: the family. It also seemed difficult to implement in a colony in which senior administrators – the very ones who would have been responsible for enforcing the law – cohabited with native women. Missionaries’ doubts about the Lessona Decree reached the Vatican’s ­Secretariat of State through Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, recently appointed secretary of the Congregation for the Eastern Church. His nomination had been ‘unwelcome’ to the Mussolini government, which had informed Pacelli of the fact through the Italian ambassador to the Holy See on 24 July 1937.145 It was Tisserant himself who had taken the initiative and who on 28 July 1937 had written to the Secretary of State, asking whether it was possible to take some steps with the Ministry of Italian Africa to permit nationals “who 143 Encyclical on Christian Marriage Casti Connubii, nos. 68–70. English translation downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). 144 Salotti’s speech was published in many reviews. See inter alia the journal of the Opera Pontificia di Propagazione della Fede Les Missions Catholiques 67 (1935): 514–516, and ­Palestra del Clero 16 (1935): 297–300. 145 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Stati Ecclesiastici, pos. 430b, fasc. 363, fol. 91v, Audience of 24 July 1936.

The Most Roman Of Empires

193

i­ntend to p ­ acify their conscience, to regularize their union and legitimize their offspring”.146 The Secretariat of State immediately instructed the nuncio Francesco Borgongini Duca to take the necessary steps with the Italian government, “so that, in some cases, it may be possible for nationals to put their own conscience at rest without incurring the rigors of penal sanctions”.147 Within a few days the nuncio succeeded in meeting the under-secretary at the Ministry of the Interior Guido Buffarini Guidi and the Minister for Italian Africa himself, Alessandro Lessona. He reported on his talks to Pacelli on 5 August. According to what the nuncio reported in writing to Pacelli, the Minister for Italian Africa had explained that the provision was aimed at curbing ‘illegitimate’ unions, concubinage between whites and blacks, but not marriage, an institution that was firmly protected – as Lessona knew very well – in the Concordat.148 At this point Borgongini Duca is reported to have told the minister that the government “had done very well” and, smiling, had added that, in the interest of morality, it would have been useful to “issue a Lessona Decree also to prohibit concubinage between whites, on pain of imprisonment”. But once the question of the Concordat had been cleared up, the minister presented to the nuncio the government’s request that “in future the Church would make her own contribution to dissuade unions between persons of different race, precisely to prevent the birth of mulattos, who are degenerates”.149 In the same report Borgongini Duca also described his own point of view to Pacelli: a “social ministry of the Church for the good of the two races and civil society” would, he suggested, be “very useful”. The fact that the decree touched on delicate aspects, relating both to race and to the Concordat, induced the Secretariat of State to consult with the Pontiff and to sift the matter in further detail before adopting a position on the matter. On the advice of Pius xi himself, an opinion was asked of Cardinal Domenico Jorio, Prefect of the Congregation of the Sacraments.150

146 asv, Arch. Nunz. Italia, b. 1, fasc. 4, E. Tisserant to E. Pacelli, 28 July 1937. The whole documentation relating to unions between Italians and native women also in s.rr.ss., aa. ee.ss., Italia, pos. 1030–1040, fasc. 720. 147 Ibid., fol. 19r, G. Pizzardo to F. Borgongini Duca, 31 July 1937. 148 Ibid., fols. 21r-23v, F. Borgongini Duca to E. Pacelli, 5 August 1937. In effect, in the report that had accompanied the draft legislation of January 1937, Lessona had explained that the lack of any prohibition of marriages had been due to the need to be consistent with the Lateran Pacts. 149 Ibid., 22v. 150 Ibid., fols. 24r-v, E. Pacelli to D. Jorio, 18 August 1937.

194

chapter 4

The document drawn up by Cardinal Jorio displays more political opportunism than moral principle. In its foreword it confirmed the main question of principle at stake by categorically denying that there could exist, from the Catholic point of view, differences in race such as to impede marriages. But in its conclusions it offered the Church’s full support to the government in its implementation of the Lessona Decree in the colony.151 In its lengthy preamble the document described various examples of how the Catholic Church in its legislation through the centuries had “never established impediments for marriages to be contracted between subjects of different race”, indeed had even promoted such marriages to foster the conversion of ‘barbarians’ and ‘pagans’. Jorio added another important point, which touched on the question of eugenics, a practice condemned by the Church. It was a question, he said, on which Catholic reflection had been focused a few years previously in Germany: “The maximum freedom granted by the Church in the celebration of matrimony […] encounters no impediments not only [in marriages] between the races, but even in those between individuals of the same race affected by chronic hereditary disorders, such as tuberculosis, syphilis, cancer or even plague, with pathological consequences in descendants perhaps even more grave that in marriages between individuals of different lineage”. Having clarified the question of principle, the document turned to the specific negotiation with the Italian government. It applauded first of all the moralizing effects, on the level of matrimonial ethics, of a law that condemned concubinage between Italians and natives and expressed indeed the hope that a similar provision would also condemn concubinage in all its forms. The document then turned to the more immediate question of how the Church could support the government’s policy in measures aimed at protecting and safeguarding the ‘health of the race’.152 In this regard it explicitly declared that “the Church could, and also should within due limits, widely support the necessary work of persuasion, by means of her Missionaries, to prevent such hybrid unions for the wise hygienic and social motivations invoked by the State”. And to further assuage “the perhaps excessive apprehensions of the Italian government that the Catholic Church has a different attitude on this matter”, Cardinal Jorio recalled that the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians were still Moslems or “Copts”. It followed that the Church ought, through her missionaries, to discourage hybrid unions by obstructing the granting of dispensations.153 151 Ibid., fols. 43r-44v, Sacra Congregatio de Sacramentis, 24 August 1937, signed by the Prefect Card. Domenico Jorio. 152 Ibid., 44r.: “sanità della razza”. 153 Ibid., 44v.

The Most Roman Of Empires

195

This document was written by Jorio on 24 August 1937. After papal approval, it was transmitted to the Italian nunciature on 31 August.154 As Borgongini Duca had occasion to report to Pacelli on 1st October 1937, the minister Lessona, on meeting the nuncio, showed himself “delighted by the wise provisions of the Holy See”, and expressed the hope that they would speedily be notified to missionaries.155 It was left to Tisserant to write to the apostolic delegate for Italian East Africa, Monsignor Giovanni Maria Castellani, then in Addis Abeba, so that he should advise all missionaries to cooperate with the Italian authorities in the application of the Lessona Decree, “to dissuade, as far as possible, matrimonial unions from which there was a danger of defective offspring”.156 Whether, and how far, Pius xi was informed of the details of these provisions is unknown. In the same year, 1937, the Jesuit John LaFarge published his book Interracial Justice, a Study of the Catholic Doctrine of Race Relations.157 It is known to have impressed the Pope, so much so as to invite the author (as we shall see) to the Vatican to entrust to him the task of drafting an encyclical on the unity of the human species, in the conviction of the close link between racism and nationalism. That encyclical would never see the light of day. Nor, for that matter, would the syllabus that condemned the errors of racism with reference to the writings of Hitler and Mussolini: on 2 June 1937, after three years of intensive work, the cardinals of the Holy Office decided to shelve it; the decision to postpone the syllabus sine die was expressly confirmed by Pius xi on 4 June.158 The most immediate background of the propositions condemned in the syllabus was represented of course by the pogroms in Germany, but the syllabus unambiguously denied in any case the existence of a biological hierarchy between the races, or the supremacy of any one race and the right of any State to preserve and support its ‘purity’. It is very probable that the hardening of ecclesiastical positions on National-Socialism and the aggravation of tensions between the Holy See and the Third Reich induced the Pope and his senior advisers to adopt a softer line in relations with the Italian government.159 The general conditions of the Church had become ever more difficult in ­Germany, where the promulgation of the famous encyclical Mit brennender Sorge against Nazism on 14 March 1937 had reignited the anti-Catholic ­offensive of the­ 154 asv, Arch. Nunz. Italia, b. 4, fasc. 1, fol. 89r, E. Pacelli to F. Borgongini Duca, 31 August 1937. 155 asv, Arch. Nunz. Italia, b. 4, fasc. 1, fols. 93r-94r, F. Borgongini Duca to E. Pacelli, 1 October 1937. 156 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 1030–1040, fasc. 720, fol. 50r-v, E. Tisserant to G.M. Castellani, 2 December 1937. 157 J. LaFarge Interracial Justice, a Study of the Catholic Doctrine of Race Relations, New York: America Press, 1937. 158 See H. Wolf, Pope and Devil, 258–264. 159 F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale, 38.

196

chapter 4

Nazis, despite the fact that, a few days previously, they had listened, with unrest­ rained rapture, to the same Pope’s condemnation of communism in Divini R ­ edemptoris.160 Having discarded the option of justifying, even in the name of anti-communism, the formation of a totalitarian bloc based on Nazi Germany, the Vatican now thought it advisable to emphasize the differences between the regime of Mussolini and that of Hitler, and to continue to assert the original and, in some sense, beneficial features of Fascism. This was a position that seemed to Pius xi and his closest aides opportune in response to the development of some situations in Europe: first and foremost the civil war in Spain. In those same months, the Holy See, though continuing to support the Spanish armed forces that had rebelled against the elected leftist government and to defend their reasons, showed growing concerns due to the rapprochement with Nazi Germany of Nationalist politicians and political forces aligned with Franco.161 4.6

A Crusade Just Like the Old Ones

At first the Holy See adopted a cautious line on the Spanish question, in spite of the fact that news of the violent anti-religious explosion that accompanied the spread of the civil war following the military uprising of 17–18 July 1936 arrived in the Vatican almost in real time. The first intervention of Pius xi in favor of the rebels who backed Francisco Franco came only some two months later, on 14 September 1936, on the occasion of the general audience granted at Castel Gandolfo to a group of Spanish refugees: some five hundred priests and religious, mainly Catalans, led by the Bishops of Cartagena, Vichy, Tortola and La Sue d’Urgell.162 His allocution had all the hallmarks of having the official papal seal of approval: not only because it had been painstakingly prepared with the Cardinal Secretary of State, translated into Spanish, printed and delivered to all those present, and broadcast throughout the world by Vatican Radio, but also because the Pope took a very clear position on the Spanish Civil War, and one which the Holy See, from that moment onwards, would no 160 Promulgated on 19 March 1937, the encyclical Divini Redemptoris was published before Mit brennender Sorge. 161 On the Vatican and the Spanish Civil War see A. Botti, “La guerra civile spagnola nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Le carte della Nunziatura apostolica di Madrid (prima parte)”, Spagna contemporanea 16 (2007): 131–158, and Idem. “La guerra civile spagnola nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Le carte della Nunziatura apostolica di Madrid (seconda parte)”, ibid. 17 (2008): 125–177. 162 Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 3, 1934–1939, Torino: sei, 1961, 554–562.

The Most Roman Of Empires

197

longer abandon. It represented the point of arrival of a process of elaboration gradually matured in the Vatican as the ever more dramatic news arrived of the atrocities committed against the Church: of the killing of priests, the burning down of churches, the corpses of nuns torn from their graves, convents transformed into socialist clubs, under the indifferent eyes of the government in Madrid.163 Such news arrived together with the reports sent by the Cardinal Primate of the Spanish Church, Isidro Gomá, and by the ecclesiastics who had escaped the anticlerical violence. It came already packaged in an interpretative frame which counterpointed the quiet and salutary revival of religious life in the country and the fervor of its combatants against the acts of barbarism committed by the Communists armed by Moscow with the approval of the government in Madrid. It was precisely the failure of the Republican authorities to dissociate themselves from the most brutal acts committed against men, women and properties of the Church that determined the Holy See’s sudden and decided shift in favor of the rebels.164 In the second half of August, Pius xi had considered the possibility of dedicating a pontifical letter to the Spanish question, the essential lines of which he had determined in his discussions with Pacelli.165 That project had been abandoned in the early days of September in favor of an allocution. But apart from the form, the more significant shift concerned the content: Pius xi chose the field. He denounced “the devastations, the massacres, the profanations, the outrages” which had involved persons and things; defined as martyrdom the fate suffered by the victims of this violence, accentuating their planned and “satanic” character with an evident allusion to the hand of international Communism; and imparted a special blessing for all those, in Spain, who had assumed “the difficult and dangerous task” of defending and restoring the “rights of God and of Religion”.166 He decided not to ask for a cessation of hostilities, as he had been minded to do at the end of August. That notwithstanding, the Vatican continued to maintain diplomatic relations with the elected government in Madrid and intervened to prevent the few prelates contrary to the collective letter of the Spanish bishops of July 1937, such as the Cardinal of Tarragona Vidal i Barraquer, from being obliged to sign 163 On the preparation of the allocution of 14 September 1936 see now the complex reconstruction by Alfonso Botti, based on an examination of new Vatican documentation: A. Botti, “Dal 18 luglio al 14 settembre 1936: come la S. Sede cambiò rotta sul conflitto spagnolo”, Spagna contemporanea 20 (2011): 111–148. 164 Ibid., 136–145. 165 Ibid., 132–136. 166 In Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3.

198

chapter 4

it.167 The Pope himself, though denouncing in the strongest language the brutal violence to which the men and women of the Church and ecclesiastical properties in Spain had been subjected, avoided lending credence to an interpretation of the conflict as a crusade to defend Christianity from the attacks of Bolshevism, as propounded, ever since the outbreak of the civil war, by the clergy and episcopate of Spain, first and foremost by Cardinal Gomá.168 The contribution made by the Archbishop of Toledo to the religious interpretation of the war was strong; he expressed it both in his public speeches and in the reports he sent to Rome. His, too, were the many circulars sent to the Spanish bishops, inviting them more than once to provide for the publication and distribution of the Pope’s encyclical letter Mit brennender Sorge; it had been sent to the bishops by the Secretariat of State with a covering letter of 10 March 1937 asking that the contents of the document be brought to the attention of the faithful as soon as possible. In the same months in which Vatican diplomacy had been busily trying to contain the infiltrations of Nazi ideology in the Iberian country through specific interventions with the Nationalist authorities, Gomá was trying to explain to Pacelli that the publication of Mit brennender Sorge risked appearing a denunciation of the Hitlerian component in the Falange, prejudicing its unity and strength. That was why the encyclical did not appear in ecclesiastical bulletins in Spain until 15 January 1938. The Pope’s other encyclical Divini Redemptoris, on the other hand, had been disseminated by the Church in Spain since April 1937.169 The significance of the radical and universal conflict attributed to the Spanish Civil War was not lost on the Italian Catholic world, almost totally aligned in support of Franco. It was a support that went well beyond the initially d­ ilatory backing of the Mussolini regime and that eagerly embraced the interpretation of the conflict as a crusade: a conflict of crucial importance for the destinies not only of Spain, but also of the Church, Western civilization and hence of humanity as a whole. The images of the profanation of churches and sacred objects in the Regions that had remained faithful to the Republic had, besides, been beamed round the world and had made an emotional impact on the symbolic level that outstripped any political rationale. So it is no surprise that a 167 H. Raguer, La pólvora y el incienso. La Iglesia y la Guerra civil española (1936–1939), Barcelona: Península, 2001, 151–174. 168 See, among many studies, M.L. Rodríguez Aisa, El cardenal Gomá y la guerra de España. Aspectos de la gestión pública del Primado 1936–1939, Madrid: Instituto Enrique Flórez, 1981. 169 A. Botti, “Santa Sede e influenza nazista nella Spagna della guerra civile”, in Pio xi: Keywords. International Conference Milan 2009, (eds.) A. Guasco and R. Perin, Berlin: Lit, 2010, 107–129.

The Most Roman Of Empires

199

central role was assigned to the antireligious persecution in the analysis of the war. As in the case of Ethiopia, an essentially Fascist war, with precise ideological characteristics, was experienced and presented to the Catholic world as a conflict of religious character.170 In La Civiltà Cattolica Father Enrico Rosa, who continued to form part of its pool of writers though he had abandoned its post as editor in 1931, wrote in September 1937 that the battle being fought in Spain against the enemies of religion was far deeper than a “crusade like the old ones”, since it was “a campaign against foreign subversives and common malefactors, men who, like the present invaders, were far worse than Moslems and Moors, since in them the perversity of the apostate and the mental agility of the modern man ‘are added to malevolence and brute strength’”.171 In other articles the Jesuit review had affirmed that the Spanish Republican revolution had “extrinsic” and not “intrinsic causes”, fomented as it was by the Communist International, a creation of “Russian sovietism”. And if this were to triumph in Spain, he wrote in apocalyptic tones, it would then spread to Portugal, France, North Africa and South America. Absent in these articles was any reference to the militant priests and Catholics in the Basque Nationalist Party and in the Catholic trade union, who had been killed by the Nationalist troops of Franco because they had fought side by side with the Popular Front.172 It was not that the Jesuit review had any intention of identifying its cause tout court with Franco; probably it was also to obviate this risk that the analysis of the Spanish civil war was conducted on a meta-historical and pre-political level, and sometimes in an elusive way. But the Iberian crisis had impressed on the struggle against Communism, central among the concerns of Roman Jesuits since the second half of the Twenties, the character of an irreducible antithesis between Rome and Moscow: the “Communist ‘devil’ was by now perceived as omnipresent” and, in comparison with the rebels, represented without the shadow of a doubt “the greater evil”.173 The theme of the international conspiracy against the Church was r­ esumed and amplified by the Catholic popular press, which inserted it in the metahistorical context of the genealogy of the errors opened by the Reformation. 170 See R. Moro, “L’opinione cattolica su pace e guerra durante il fascismo”, 276. 171 E. Rosa, “Il martirio della Spagna e la lettera collettiva dei suoi vescovi”, La Civiltà Cattolica, 88/3 (1937): 481–491, quotation 486. 172 On the position asumed by the Jesuit review on the civil war in Spain see L. Lestingi, “Questione del comunismo e difesa della ‘civiltà cristiana’ nei commenti della ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ sulla guerra di Spagna (1936–1939)”, in I cattolici italiani e la guerra di Spagna. Studi e ricerche, (ed.) G. Campanini, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1987, 99–125. 173 See G. Petracchi, “I gesuiti e il comunismo tra le due guerre”, in La Chiesa cattolica e il totalitarismo, 141 and 146.

200

chapter 4

In this sense there was no lack of polemicists ready to assert categorically the Protestant roots of the Frente.174 The battle against “the reds” in Spain (a composite front comprising a motley crew of anarchists, communists of various schools – both Trotskyist and Stalinist – moderate and radical socialists, liberal-­democrats, republicans, Catalan and Basque nationalists, freethinkers, ­freemasons, evangelicals, Christian-Democrats) was one in which the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart was, right from the start, in the front line, both in terms of the positions adopted by its rector, and in terms of the quantity of pro-Franco interventions hosted in the reviews variously linked with the university.175 The group of disciples that revolved round Gemelli, for years involved in the transposition of the Kingship of Christ to the social level, was certainly not insensible to the battle-cry ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, which galvanized the Spanish Catholics aligned with Franco. Nonetheless, before the outbreak of the conflict, the Milanese University had focused on the long term, by launching a programme of seminars and courses for young Spanish Catholics, with the aim of providing a stimulus of excellence for the formation of a Catholic ruling class in the Iberian Peninsula. Once the war broke out its approach changed. According to Vita e Pensiero what was being enacted in Spain was not a clash linked to social conflicts or political dialectic, but a war for the “defense of Christian civilization against Bolshevism”.176 The military coup d’état had, in Gemelli’s mind, posed a radical alternative: “either with God or against God”, “Christ or Barabbas”.177 The meta-political interpretation of the civil war had been further specified in another of Gemelli’s stable of periodicals, the Rivista internazionale di Scienze sociali, in which Teodoro Toni described what he saw as a gargantuan duel between revolution and counter-revolution, matter and spirit.178 An article by Miguel Sánchez-Izquierdo in the same review even went so far as to suggest its explicit approval of the Nazi State, even after the promulgation of Mit brennender Sorge.179

174 G.M. Petassi, “Le cose di Spagna e il protestantesimo”, L’Italia (28 May 1936): 3. 175 A. Albónico, “Dall’impegno originale all’allineamento: i cattolici milanesi e la ‘crociata’ in Spagna”, in I cattolici italiani e la guerra di Spagna, 61–97. 176 A. Gemelli, “Spagna e Italia nella difesa della civiltà cristiana contro il bolscevismo”, Vita e Pensiero (January 1938): 5–14. 177 “La guerra civile spagnola”, ibid. (September 1936): 426; A. Gemelli, “Cristo o Barabba?”, ibid. (March 1937): 179–185. 178 Thus T. Toni, “Il comunismo nella Spagna”, Rivista internazionale di Scienze sociali (November 1937): 15–31. 179 M. Sánchez-Izquierdo, “Orientamento sociale del nuovo Stato nazionale spagnolo”, ibid. (January 1937): 849.

The Most Roman Of Empires

201

Gemelli himself dedicated his keynote address of 8 December 1937 to the current war, affirming that it had supreme importance for the Catholic University, so much so as to make it imperative for the Catholic University to adopt a stance of “belligerence”. In his speech, later published with the title Spagna e Italia nella difesa della civiltà cristiana contro il bolscevismo,180 the battle against Communism was associated, in the historical mission of the two Latin countries, with the equally insidious battle against Protestantism. In this perspective, the war became for Gemelli an effective means to defend the Christianity that was now under threat,181 while Mussolini was eulogized as the new paladin of the rosary. The rector was not interested in investigating whether there had been, as some alleged, responsibilities of Spanish Catholicism for the conflict: it was vital to concentrate on the present and give full support to the Italian military intervention. On those responsibilities the intellectual organizations of Catholic Action had timidly put the emphasis, prior to the war; they had suggested the shortcomings of Spanish ecclesiastical integrism and the negative role it had had in obstructing the development of social Catholicism, which could have entered into dialogue with the world of work and helped reduce the threat of a radical conflict.182 A similar judgement had been expressed by the Florentine Catholic review Il Frontespizio.183 But after the military coup d’état even these more progressive mouthpieces of Catholic opinion ended up by aligning themselves with the philo-fascists of the Italian Catholic world as a whole, while at the same time trying to give their own position a centrist connotation which rejected the identification between anti-­communism and Fascism.184 The spectacle of the blessing of military standards, of the chaplains of the Militia, of the sermons that parish priests and prelates dedicated to the Italian soldiers sent to the Spanish front, gave credence, once again, to the idea of a total coincidence between the positions of Catholics and those of the Fascist regime. Nor was there any shortage of Catholic youngsters who applied to the government in Burgos to enroll as volunteers, with motivations that radicalized the apocalyptic language used by the confessional press. On 19 October 1936, for example, the 23-year-old Luigi 180 A. Gemelli, “Spagna e Italia nella difesa della civiltà cristiana contro il bolscevismo”, cit. 181 R. Moro, L’opinione cattolica su pace e guerra durante il fascismo, 277. 182 See C. Casula, “La Santa Sede frente a la República española y a la guerra civil”, in La Iglesia católica y la guerra civil en España (cincuenta años después), Madrid: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, Instituto Fe y Secularidad, 1990, 67–100. 183 L. Mangoni, “Aspetti della cultura cattolica sotto il fascismo: la rivista ‘Il Frontespizio’”, in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo, 409. 184 R. Moro, La formazione della classe dirigente cattolica (1929–1937), 521.

202

chapter 4

Ernoli, member of the San Giorgio a­ ssociation of Catholic Action at Colico (in Lombardy), wrote to the representative of Franco accredited to the Holy See, the marchese Antonio Magaz y Pers: Excellency, from the daily news I hear from the newspapers on the satanic anarcho-communist furor that pours out the most unspeakable atrocities, surpassing by far the most savage cannibals, against Venerable Priests, whose only blame is that of having spared no pains to do good to these human hyenas, and against a multitude of the old, the young, and women guilty of no more than having a Sacred Image or a Blessed Rosary, I cannot resist the wave of indignation that assails every breast that encloses a soul and offer myself to Your Excellency, so that you may enable me to depart as soon as possible for Spain, to ensure that this struggle of the City of God against that of the World may make an active contribution including that of total immolation to the Sacred Cause of Christ, Civilization and Spain.185 Of course, those who glorified the war in such apocalyptic terms were no monolithic block; there were also those who expressed nuances and reservations about the Catholic position. There were those who, like Alcide De ­Gasperi and Guido Gonella, might have been willing to support franchismo as the lesser evil, but who tried to avoid a justification tout court of the insurrection. Both of them writing from their point of observation in Vatican City, the former secretary of the Partito Popolare and the former activist in the Italian Catholic Federation of University (fuci) made an effort not to embrace uncritically the religious interpretations of the conflict but rather to analyze it in political terms. In the Quindicine internazionali signed by Spectator (De Gasperi) reference was naturally made to the persecutions suffered by the Catholics and the risk of ‘sovietization’ in Spain, with the consequent loss of religious and civil liberties.186 But the insurrection of Franco seemed to him not the bearer of a new legality, but a potential right-wing dictatorship which might at most represent an evil less grave than a system radically hostile to the Church, but which did not lose, in De Gasperi’s eyes, the hallmarks of a

185 Quoted in A. Albónico, “Los católicos italianos y la guerra de España”, Hispania 38 (1978): 387. 186 The whole series of these articles published under the pseudonym Spectator in L’Illustrazione Vaticana has been republished in A. De Gasperi, Scritti di politica internazionale, 1933–1938, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981.

The Most Roman Of Empires

203

civil and political regression.187 In a similar way Gonella’s Acta diurna seemed very far from the philo-Francoist enthusiasm of so much Catholic apologetics, while the term crusade itself seemed banned from his articles.188 In contrast to the total silence of the Italian Catholic press on the bombardment of Guernica, the massacres committed by the Nationalists at Badajoz, and the execution by firing squad of the Catalan Christian-Democrat leader Manuel Cerrasco i Formiguera, the admittedly brief references of De Gasperi and Gonella to the excesses of the Falangists at Badajoz189 and the steps taken by the Holy See to achieve a cessation of bombardments of Spanish towns,190 shine out all the more strongly. An explicit refusal to see the civil war as a struggle between Christianity and Communism came, with different emphases, from personalities like Gerardo Bruni and Primo Mazzolari. Apart from firmly rejecting the ideology of the crusade, Bruni, former ppi member and future founder of the small Partito Cristiano-Sociale, emphasized the need to identify the specific character of Catholic anti-communism, and to distinguish it both from that of the Fascist regime and that of the Franco uprising.191 Even clearer was the position of the parish priest of Bozzolo, who spoke of the war in Spain as a “horrendous ­fratricide”, behind which moved “waves of grim, unspeakable and inhumane interests, concealed at times by flags, by ideologies that deceive many and accelerate the alignment of peoples in two blocs in order to precipitate them with blind passion into the maelstrom of war”.192 And after having warned of the risk of perilous mixtures between the evangelizing mission of the Church and the defense of “transient and impure” interests, Mazzolari invited Catholics to overcome a token anti-communism and pay attention to what had given rise to it: “the suffering of injustice and the aspiration to a life that promises a new lease of life both for the body and for the soul”.193 However, to find a more comprehensive, a more lucid analysis and reflection on the Spanish situation, we need to look at the pages written by don .

187 On the position adopted by De Gasperi on the Spanish question, see A.M. Giraldi, “Gli scritti di De Gasperi sulla guerra civile spagnola”, Clio 10 (1974): 465–500. 188 G. Gonella, Verso la seconda guerra mondiale. Cronache politiche. Acta Diurna, 1933–1940, (ed.) F. Malgeri, Bari: Laterza, 1979. 189 A. De Gasperi, Scritti di politica internazionale, note of 1st September 1936, 443. 190 G. Gonella, Verso la seconda guerra mondiale, note of 10 June 1938, 302. 191 See G. Campanini, Introduction of the volume I cattolici italiani e la guerra di Spagna, 21–22. 192 Thus don Primo Mazzolari in his manuscript text Cosa fare (September 1936), quotation ibid., 23. 193 Ibid.

204

chapter 4

Luigi Sturzo. An exile in London for over a decade, the Sicilian priest knew Spain well. He had maintained a network of contacts with exponents of Catalan democratic Catholicism since the Twenties. He wrote inter alia for the ­Catalan-language paper El Matí in Barcelona.194 In contrast to the Italian observers of Spanish events, deafened by propaganda and virtually deprived of direct sources of information, Sturzo could speak more authoritatively as someone directly informed of what was going on. Between 1936 and 1938, indeed, the war in Spain became for him almost an obsession.195 It was very clear to him – and he wrote so on several occasions – that the conflict had social, economic and political, but not religious causes. The Spaniard who burned down churches – he wrote to a Catalan Catholic in February 1937 – expressed in his way a protest as a “Catholic”, just as a blaspheming carter vents his wrath against God when his carthorse proves recalcitrant.196 But the Church, according to Sturzo, ought to abandon her partisanship, stand back from the conflict and assume a position super partes. In response to the left-wing massacres “of priests and friars, falangists and francoists”, he pointed out in an article published in the Christian-democrat paper l’Aube on 27 April 1937, There have been right-wing massacres of alleged communist and anarchist manual workers […]. And I don’t know whether the massacres committed by the defenders of the faith who hoist religious banners don’t arouse greater horror than those perpetrated by a plebs incited and puffed full of hate, who know not what they do and therefore deserve the prayer of Jesus for his crucifiers.197 All this made even more manifest to him what he had observed about Italy over the last fifteen years, namely, the absence of a democratic political culture among Catholics. It was also clear to him that the war and its results reflected not just the limitations of Catholic conscience, but the crisis of European democracy. The aerial bombardment of cities and in particular the destruction of Guernica propelled Sturzo towards positions even more resolute in the 194 See the long introduction of A. Botti of the volume he edited of the correspondence of Sturzo with his Spanish friends: Luigi Sturzo e gli amici spagnoli. Carteggi (1924–1951), Rubbettino Soveria Mannelli, 2012, i–cxlvi. 195 G. Campanini, “Una battaglia per la libertà della Chiesa. Luigi Sturzo e la guerra di Spa­ gna”, in I cattolici italiani e la guerra di Spagna, 167–219, quotation 169. 196 L. Sturzo to R. Sugraynes de Franch, 18 February 1937, in L. Sturzo, Scritti inediti, 1924–1940, (ed.) F. Rizzi, Roma: Cinque lune, 1975, vol. 2, 449. 197 Now in L. Sturzo, Miscellanea londinese, vol. 4, 1937–1940, Rubettino, Soveria Mannelli 2008 (1st edition 1974), 37.

The Most Roman Of Empires

205

c­ ondemnation of war and its sacralization. In this he was close to such French and Spanish intellectuals as Emmanuel Mounier, Georges Bernanos, Jacques Maritain, and Alfred Mendizábal, who were variously active in committees for civil and religious peace in Spain, and who had been stigmatized by Father Rosa in Civiltà Cattolica as having “colluded” with the “new barbarians” of the government in Madrid, condemned out of hand as “enemies of religion, indeed enemies of any kind of human order or civilization”.198 But in the Italian context the voice of don Sturzo was completely isolated, or rather silenced. For, in Italy, first with the imperialist war in Ethiopia and then with the civil war in Spain, a new climate, a new religious and ideological conviction, had been created, in which the traditional obligation of discipline and obedience to the nation at war had gained renewed strength. The result was a new sacralization of war. Produced both by the rapid process of the subordination of politics to ideology,199 and the new culture of war developed to give an acceptable sense to the radicalization of the conflict, its consequences would continue down to 1940.

198 E. Rosa “Grandezza cristiana della Spagna nella sua tragedia religiosa e sociale”, La Civiltà Cattolica 89/3 (1938): 481–491. 199 K.D. Bracher, The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

chapter 5

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown 5.1

‘Hit the Pope and You Die’

On 9 January 1938 over sixty archbishops and bishops of Italian dioceses, together with some two thousand parish priests and other clergy, gathered in Rome to be received by Mussolini.1 They were the ecclesiastics who had received prizes in the almost decade-long activity of the national grain competition, held by the periodical Italia e Fede, under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests and the standing committee for grain.2 Gathered in the Aula Magna of the Collegio Romano, they approved an order of the day expressing gratitude and devotion to the Duce, ‘founder of the Empire’. They then processed to the Victor Emanuel II Monument to pay homage to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, to the altar of those who had fallen for the Revolution, and to the memorial of Arnaldo Mussolini on the Campidoglio. At the end of these rites, held in an atmosphere of devotion and prayer, the ecclesiastics entered the Palazzo Venezia (Mussolini’s headquarters) from its main entrance on the Via del Plebiscito, where they were received by a guard of honor, and escorted to the audience hall in the Sala Regia. It was just short of midday: Mussolini – we read in La Stampa – had left them the time, “with delicate thoughtfulness”, to recite a prayer before his arrival.3 When the head of the government finally made his entrance, they greeted him with a standing ovation and, with arms raised in the Roman salute, hailed him with the acclamation: “Duce! Duce! Duce!”. A speech given by the Archbishop of Udine, Monsignor Giuseppe Nogara, followed. He reminded everyone of the importance and success of the Battle for Grain, the great contribution made by priests in the autarchic movement,4 the many merits of Mussolini for having finally re-established imperial Italy and for having placed the Catholic religion at the center of civil life: 1 “L’udienza ai sessanta Vescovi e ai duemila Parroci”, La Stampa (10 January 1938). 2 On the Battle for Grain see supra, Chapter 4, 170–171. A contemporary report of the imposing gathering of Italian bishops and priests can also be found in G. de’ Rossi dell’Arno, Pio xi e Mussolini, Roma: Corso, 1954, 138–145, and in S. Maggi, “Nazione Cattolica”, L’Italia (11 January 1938). 3 L’udienza ai sessanta Vescovi e ai duemila Parroci, cit. 4 The autarchic movement in agriculture was aimed at food self-sufficiency. Introduced in 1934, autarchy, or the pursuit of self-sufficiency, was one of the seven pillars of the Fascist political economy.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_007

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

207

You, Your Excellency, have understood that Religion is of capital importance in the life of a people: that the Church of Christ possesses a divine virtue, whose beneficent effects are felt in every branch of human activity. Therefore, now that outdated and pernicious prejudices have been overcome, you have, ever since the start of your government, given due importance to spiritual values with perspicacity of view and firmness of intent; you have forged amicable relations with the Holy See and with the Papacy; you have shown consideration and respect for Religion and the Church. In this way you have secured the admiration of all men of good will. You have won the devotion of Catholics. You have ensured their collaboration.5 Nogara then recalled the “many proofs” offered by this collaboration in the sixteen years of the Fascist Era: from “victory in the battle for grain” to the autarchic movement and the conquest of the Empire. Referring in conclusion to the war in Spain, he prayed that the Lord might grant to Mussolini a victory in all his battles “for the prosperity, greatness and glory of Christian Italy, and of this Rome which is the center of Christianity and capital of Imperial Italy”. Even more energetic was the following blessing invoked by don Menossi on behalf of the “priests of Italy”: Your Excellency, the priests of Italy invoke, and shall continue to invoke, the Lord’s blessing and a personal aureole of Roman wisdom and virtue on your person, on your work as the restorer of Italy and Founder of the Empire, and on the Fascist Government. Duce! The ministers of Christ and fathers of the rural population devoutly pay tribute to you. They bless you. They swear fidelity to you. With spiritual enthusiasm, with the voice and heart of the people, we cry: Hail to the Duce!6 The ecclesiastics gathered in the Sala Regia could not contain their jubilation. They shouted out the Fascist slogan “A noi!”.7 Their applause culminated in the acclamation “Duce! Duce!” when Mussolini began to speak. The head of the government thanked his audience and emphasized that what was taking place was “an extremely important meeting and one that was unprecedented 5 “I sacerdoti a Palazzo Venezia”, La Stampa (10 January 1938). 6 Ibid. 7 “A noi!”: abbreviation of the rhetorical question: “Whose is the victory? Whose is the glory? Ours!”.

208

chapter 5

in the history of Italy”. The Lateran Pacts – he continued – had borne fruit. This had been shown by the clergy’s collaboration in the struggle “against the Abyssinian hordes and also against the so-called, highly civilized hordes of the sanction-backers”. It had been shown by the exemplary patriotism offered by the bishops in the donation of gold “to the seats of the Fascist Party”. It continued to be shown by the clergy’s contribution to the development of the agricultural sector. In his conclusions Mussolini adopted an ingratiating tone by appealing to what the clergy had closest at heart. He incited them to join in the battle against urbanization, and in that for the “numerical reinforcement of the Italian population”, because – he said – “only families with many children can produce the big battalions without which victories cannot be achieved”. Despite the fact that the totalitarian experiment and the sacralization of politics had by now achieved their apotheosis, Mussolini ended his speech with the flattering image of Italy as “Catholic Nation”, bulwark of Christian civilization. And he asked the priests to confirm their will to continue to ensure their collaboration with Fascism. The response was a deafening “Sì! ”.8 The meeting with the clergy at Palazzo Venezia had been for the head of the government the second stage in a day full of events, all of them celebrating Italy’s great conquests in the agricultural sector. In the morning, at 9:45, he had presided over the prize-giving ceremony for the national grain competition held in the Teatro Argentina. The event had already entered into the annual calendar of the regime, but at the beginning of the present year (1938) important changes had been made to its protocol, dictated by the new scenarios of foreign policy. So the regime’s new German allies participated in the ceremony for the first time: Reich Minister of Agriculture Richard Walther Darré, German ambassador Ulrich Von Hassel, Under-Secretary for Agriculture Herbert Backe, and Director-General of Agriculture Alex Walter. The presence of representatives of the Third Reich was solemnly recalled by Mussolini in his speech and symbolically underlined by the gesture with which the ceremony was closed: after the Band of the Carabinieri had played the Marcia Reale and Giovinezza, and while it was playing the Inno della Rivoluzione, he advanced to the front of the stage and ordered that the German national anthem, together with the Nazi anthem, be played. He stood at attention as he listened to them, amid the applause of the public.9 The tribute to the regime’s new ally can hardly have been welcomed by the Pope. In diplomatic circles it was said that Pius xi was beside himself when

8 “I sacerdoti a Palazzo Venezia”, cit. 9 “La cerimonia all’Argentina”, La Stampa (10 January 1938).

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

209

he spoke of Germany and her new rapprochement with Italy.10 The Pontiff no longer made any bones about it: to the Third Reich he had devoted more than one passage in his Christmas allocution of 24 December 1937: Let us call things by their name. There is in fact religious persecution in Germany. For a long time it has been said, and people have been led to believe, that there is no persecution. We know, on the contrary, that there is, and grave persecution too; indeed, seldom has there been a persecution so grave, so painful and so sorrowful in its deepest effects. It is a persecution in which there has been no lack of the predomination of force, or the pressure of threats, or the deceptions of force and duplicity.11 Serious cracks in the imperial rapport between Mussolini and Pius xi had begun to appear in the course of 1937, as gradually the alliance between Italy and Germany became ever more sharply defined at the military and ideological level. Even if more time was needed for the growing tensions between them to become openly manifest in the public arena, various sources of friction had emerged even in the weeks immediately preceding the great rally on 9 January. Despite the warm words he had addressed to the ecclesiastics gathered in Palazzo Venezia, in private Mussolini had shown himself to be, in his conversations with his closest aides, ever more intolerant of the Pope and the clergy; they were guilty, in his view, of fomenting the unpopularity of the Rome-Berlin Axis among the Italian Catholic masses. At the end of 1937 Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister since 1936, noted in his diary that in his talks with Secretary of State Pacelli he had complained of what he called “the philo-communist attitude of Cardinal Verdier”, the archbishop of Paris who, in the course of that year had shown signs of ever more explicit receptiveness to the French Popular Front government.12 Ciano was very well aware that Hitler’s anti-Catholic policy, which had been further accentuated after the publication of the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, had created more than one problem for the Vatican, but now, he complained, the Holy See had gone “too far”, to the point of jeopardizing relations with the government in Rome.13 10 11 12 13

See further E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 145–146. Discorsi di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 3, 677–682, quotation 679. See E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 59ff. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, Foreword by R. De Felice, Milano: Rizzoli, 2010 (1st ed. 1980), entry for 24 December 1937, 72–73 (English translation: Diary, 1937–1943, Foreword by R. De Felice, original introduction by S. Welles, New York: Enigma Books, 2002).

210

chapter 5

Even Tacchi Venturi, generally prone to point out even the minutest signals of rapprochement, expressed his concern in the spring of 1937 about the ever closer relations between Mussolini and Hitler, whom he considered a “devious” and “unscrupulous” person.14 It was not so much Germany’s racial policy or her anti-Semitic legislation that concerned the Holy See in this first phase. Indeed the Holy See had expressed no protest – as we have seen – about the first racist provisions connected with the Italian colonial presence in East Africa.15 What principally concerned the Vatican was the risk that Fascism would accelerate its headlong course down the road to totalitarianism, state worship, neo-paganism and war. That there was a consensus in the Vatican that a European war was by now inevitable can be inferred, not least, from the transfer of funds implemented by Vatican finance during these months. In November 1937 Bernardino Nogara, delegate of the Amministrazione Speciale dei Beni della Santa Sede, headed by the Secretary of State himself, had gone to the usa to discuss and define the opportunities for Vatican investments with American banks and especially with the House of Morgan.16 In the same year the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office had also been active on financial markets in the usa, specifically to invest in AT&T shares, through the intermediary of the apostolic delegate, Monsignor Amleto Cicognani.17 Concurrently the Holy See was accelerating its diplomatic ties with the usa. Especially after the reconfirmation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as us President (landslide re-election in 1936), such a rapprochement could not but confirm, in the eyes of public opinion and of governments, the Vatican’s overture to a world power antagonistic to the Axis. The thaw between the two main “moral forces” of the planet could hardly have been welcome to the government in Rome.18 A further motive for irritation was the fact that Pius xi, while he was busily reinforcing his contacts with Washington, refused to back the pressures of the German government to disavow the speech of the Cardinal of Chicago Georges Mundelein, guilty in the eyes of Nazis of having insulted Hitler and his regime. In his famous “paperhanger” speech, given before an audience of over five hundred prelates from his archdiocese on 18 May 1937, the Cardinal had wondered how it was possible

14 See E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 145. 15 See supra, Chapter 4, 178–189. 16 On Nogara’s mission to the usa see G. Belardelli, “Un viaggio di Bernardino Nogara negli Stati Uniti (novembre 1937)”, Storia contemporanea 23 (1992): 321–338. 17 J.F. Pollard, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy, Chaps. 5 and 6. 18 L. Castagna, A Bridge Across the Ocean, xv.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

211

that a nation of sixty million people, intelligent people, will submit in fear to an alien, an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one I am told, and a few associates like Goebbels and Göring, who dictate every move of the people’s lives.19 Relations between the Vatican and the Fascist government had also been complicated by the personal antipathies of Mussolini, ever more hostile to Christianity and the Church. He now resuscitated the accusation he had made as a young man, that the Church had emasculated the Italians by her doctrine of renunciation.20 His anticlericalism, indeed, was revived in all the violence of former times. “Mussolini – wrote Ciano in his diary on 24 December 1937 – says he is ready to dust down the cudgels to tan the backside of priests. He adds that this is something easy for us to do because the Italian people aren’t religious. They are only superstitious”.21 That’s why – he is reported to have added on 22 August 1938 – it would be enough “to scratch the skin” of Italians to unleash their latent anticlericalism.22 The head of the government, however, even at this juncture, did not underestimate the Church. In the ranks of the Fascist Party, moreover, a growing irritation had emerged in response to the powerful organizational expansion and quantitative growth of Catholic Action, and especially its youth associations: Catholic Action was increasingly perceived as an embryonic political party, incompatible with the totalitarian offensive begun by Mussolini during this period. Yet, in contrast to what had happened in 1931, the regime’s hostility to ­Catholic organizations was not now propagated by any concerted large-scale anticlerical campaign. Rather it was expressed in minor harassments, local measures of control, the detention of individuals considered hostile to the regime, and isolated episodes of violence. These actions culminated in May 1938 with a ferocious public attack launched by Roberto Farinacci, who in three successive articles published in the Regime fascista accused Catholic organizations of having an attitude in conflict with the Fascist Party and raised the question of the incompatibility between membership of the pnf and Catholic Action.23 Pius xi initially seemed determined to take the defense of Catholic Action 19

20 21 22 23

On the episode of Cardinal Mundelein’s speech, given in Quigley Seminary Chapel on 18 May 1937, see R. Trisco, “The Holy See and Cardinal Mundelein’s Insult to Hitler (1937)”, in Pius xi and America, 155–191. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, Lo Stato totalitario (1936–1940), Torino: Einaudi, 2008 (1st edition 1981), 142–145. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 24 December 1937, 72–73. Ibid., entry for 22 August 1938, 167–168. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, 148–149.

212

chapter 5

to its extreme consequences. On 5 January 1938 he sent Mussolini, through Father Tacchi Venturi, a peremptory letter in which he recalled how central was the role, and how inalienable the presence, of Catholic Action in the Church’s apostolate; recalled how deep its roots were in all nations, and the full support given to it by the whole of the episcopate; and stressed that neither the papacy nor the Church as a whole would ever relinquish it.24 The letter also expressed the papacy’s willingness to examine any observations that the Duce and his ministers might care to make on specific activities of Catholic Action. But the tone, in conclusion, was intransigent: Pius xi went so far as to raise the specter of open conflict and made it plain that he was ready, if necessary, to use the weapon of excommunication: In that case – warned Pius xi at the end of his letter – the tranquil state in relations between the Vatican and the Regime would cease to exist: a state that has lasted for almost seven years, with no little utility and glory to Fascism and with infinite torment to anti-fascists throughout the world, who wish for nothing more than that the Vatican should excommunicate both, and are doing their utmost to achieve this result.25 A few months later what had been a confidential threat became public. On 28 July 1938, speaking to the seminarians of the Pontifical Urbanian College ‘de Propaganda Fide’ (over two hundred young men belonging to thirty-seven different nations), Pius xi warned: Whoever attacks Catholic Action attacks the Church, because he attacks Catholic life. The identification is therefore plain: whoever attacks Catholic Action attacks the Pope […] I urge you not to attack Catholic Action; I exhort you, I beg you for your own well-being, because whoever attacks Catholic Action, attacks the Pope; hit the Pope and you die.26 The hardening of Pius xi’s stance was caused by various factors. It is plausible to assume, as Renzo De Felice has maintained, that the Pope abandoned his habitual caution to prevent, or to curb, a ‘process of the growing Fascist transformation of Catholics’, and especially of the young, after support for the

24 25 26

For an analysis of the various redactions of the letter see G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, Quaderni di storia 76 (2012): 83–154, in particular 94–96. Ibid., 95. Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 777–784.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

213

regime had peaked in the Catholic world in the years of the conquest of Ethiopia.27 In the light of the imperial euphoria thus engendered, Italian bishops had extolled, as we have seen,28 the full coincidence between the objectives of the Church and those of Fascism. But below the blatantly disseminated rhetoric, some cracks in the rhetorical structure had already begun to appear, even at the time of the greatest Catholic support for the regime. They are apparent, in particular, in what was widely perceived to be a slow and steady alienation of Italians from religion, from religious practice, and from the conduct inspired by it. These sources of disquiet were quickened not so much by Fascism as a political system, but rather by a persuasion of inexorable secularization, favored also by the process of modernization implemented, not without contradictions and delays, by the regime that had boasted of restoring Italy to God. For example, in their five-year reports to mark their visits ad limina, Italian bishops, even in the months of exceptional imperial fervor, had expressed their concerns about the progressive abandonment of the life and practice of the faith that was taking place in Italian dioceses. Of course, these reports had been compiled according to a precise question-and-answer format prepared by the Consistorial Congregation (forerunner of the Congregation for ­Bishops), and the bishops, in their responses, tended in any case to second what the Congregation expected to hear. The predominant mood expressed by the bishops, however, was far from optimistic. The Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Nasalli Rocca, though pointing out with satisfaction the absence of socialist associations and the decline of masonic lodges in his archdiocese, had reported at the end of 1936 a growing negligence in religious practice, an excessive freedom, uti ubique, in behavior and morals, and a failure to observe the Church’s precepts on the celebration of feast-days.29 The diocese of Albano, as Cardinal Genaro Granito di Belmonte reported, still preserved in part the salutary features of peasant culture, but in the larger towns the practice of contraception had spread, nor was there any lack of extra-­conjugal relations, though the greatest danger was perceived to be the obscoena spectacula being projected in cinemas.30 That the city was the environment most conducive to the propagation of vice was also perceived by the Archbishop of Palermo Bonifacio Bartolucci: he saw a merely exterior phenomenon in the proliferation of 27 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, 140: “processo di effettiva fascistizzazione”. 28 See supra, Chapter 4, 180–189. 29 asv, Congr. Concist. Relat. Dioec., b. 129, card. G.B. Nasalli Rocca to Congr. Concist., Bologna, 30 December 1936. 30 Ibid., b. 23, Relatio de statu Ecclesiae Albanensis ad normam praescriptionis S. Congregationis Consistorialis, 4 May 1936.

214

chapter 5

religious ceremonies: the piety of the people of Palermo was more apparent in exterior show than in inner conviction or in the life of the spirit.31 Of much the same tendency, albeit with indications more specifically linked to different geographical and socio-religious situations, were the ­analyses sent to Rome respectively by the Bishops of Terni,32 Trento,33 Como,34 or by the Bishop of Isernia, Monsignor Pietro Tesauri,35 who was one of the most fervent and loquacious supporters of the Italian campaign in Ethiopia.36 On the other hand, this was a crucial year (1938) for the institutional structure of the regime. On the legislative level, the corporative structure of the Fascist State was completed with the approval of new Statutes for the pnf, the suppression of the Chamber of Deputies (with the end of the 29th legislature), and the creation of a new Camera dei fasci e delle corporazioni.37 The presence of a modern mass organization such as Catholic Action, the appeal it continued to exert on the young, and its continuing quantitative growth, clashed not a little with this new institutional structure. The regime felt increasingly cramped by the agreement of 1931. 5.2

A Solitary Reconsideration

More recent research has confirmed and elucidated how closely the changed attitude of Pius xi towards the Fascist regime was bound up with the German question. The Pope may have been induced to soften the tone of his public discourse by the bullying tactics of the head of the government, but he was now prepared to speak out. The threat, “hit the Pope and you die”, made by Pius xi to Mussolini on 28 July 1938, in the context of a passage on Catholic Action, was 31

Ibid., b. 600, Relatio de statu Ecclesiae panormitanae ab anno 1929–1936, 1 February 1936: “magis externa quam interna videtur, et magis in externis pompis quam in vero spiritu”. 32 Ibid., b. 409, Interamnen et Narnien, Relatio super statu dioecesium ad S.C. Consistorialem in visitationem SS. Liminum, anno 1936, Terni, 10 September 1936. 33 Ibid., b. 874, Relatio de statu Ecclesiae Tridentinae (1931–1936), 23 June 1936. 34 Ibid., b. 248, Report of Mgr. Alessandro Macchi to S. Congregationis Consistorialis, 14 June 1936. 35 Ibid., b. 12, Report of Mgr. Pietro Tesauri to S. Congregationis Consistorialis, 8 December 1936. 36 See L. Picardi, Cattolici e fascismo nel Molise (1922–1943), Roma: Studium 1995, 107–115. 37 On the corporative structure of the Fascist State and the way it functioned in practice see now A. Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010. A more problematical analysis of this institutional structure in S. Cassese, Lo Stato fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010, 89ff.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

215

part of a speech which also had another important focus. It was pronounced exactly two weeks after the publication (in the regime’s Giornale d’Italia) of the Manifesto of Racist Scientists, a manifesto that was signed by scholars at some of Italy’s most prestigious universities and that vindicated the Aryan origin and purity of the ‘Italian race’. A few days earlier, on 15 July, speaking to a group of nuns of Our Lady of the Cenacle, Ratti had called the Manifesto “a form of true apostasy”, and “contrary to the faith of Christ”. His condemnation of it was based on the argument he had already adopted in his encyclical Ubi arcano Dei consilio of the incompatibility between Catholic doctrine and ‘exaggerated nationalism’, and on the universal appeal of Catholicism.38 The Pope confessed to the nuns that “he had never thought about these things with such precision, with such absolutism, one might say with such intransigence” as he did now: and just for this reason, it was his intention to “share them with his children”.39 During that summer of 1938, Mussolini had been infuriated on various fronts by the conduct of the Pope; the violence of his reactions was recorded in Ciano’s Diaries.40 What particularly enraged him were the Pope’s ever more frequent interventions against racism, against hypernationalism, and against the Third Reich. In the aftermath of the Anschluss Pius xi had distanced himself from the Cardinal of Vienna Theodor Innitzer, who had signed with other Austrian bishops a fulsome declaration endorsing the Anschluss and expressing warm appreciation of Hitler and his policy. He had ordered the Cardinal to backtrack and sign a clarification; when news of this was leaked to the press it caused a furor.41 On the other hand, little outrage had been aroused by a document published on 13 April 1938 by the Vatican Congregation for Seminaries and Universities which contained eight theses asserting that racism was contrary to Catholic doctrine.42 It was long maintained that the propositions contained in this document, close in many respects to those in the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, were the result of consultations within the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, which was responsible for supervising Catholic higher education in general and for controlling the theological studies taught in the Church’s seminaries and universities in particular. Hubert Wolf has more 38 39 40 41 42

Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 766–772. Ibid., 770. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entries for 8 August 1938 (163), 22 August 1938 (167), and 4 September (173). See G. Miccoli, I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio xii. Vaticano, Seconda guerra mondiale e Shoah, Milano: Rizzoli, 2000, 139. Latin text in adss, vol. 11, 530–531. Italian translation in “Circolare della Congregazione dei Seminari e Università”, in La Civiltà Cattolica 89/3 (1938): 83–84.

216

chapter 5

recently shown, however, on the basis of new Vatican documentation, that these theses were based on a critical assessment developed by the Holy Office on Mein Kampf from 1934 on.43 The consultors of the Holy Office had discussed at great length the propositions that were to be condemned on the question of racism, a context of which the examination of Hitler’s book formed part. In their meeting of 26 April 1937 they had identified ten propositions on race that were contrary to Catholic doctrine.44 But on 2 June 1937 the Cardinals of Propaganda Fide had, as already mentioned, deferred sine die the publication of this syllabus, urged to do so by the evolving situation in Spain.45 The perception of an incumbent Communist peril and Soviet threat persuaded the Vatican not to force its hand in its relations with Germany to avoid weakening the forces of the Axis and precluding a settlement between the Catholic Church and the Third Reich. On the other hand, an anti-Jewish prejudice was still widespread among the consultors of the Holy Office, albeit within the parameters of traditional religious anti-Judaism. Less than ten years earlier the Holy Office had issued a decree, dated 25 March 1928, which had abolished the international 43 44

45

H. Wolf, Pope and Devil, 252–264. “(1) All of the intellectual and moral characteristics of human beings flow as from a powerful source from the ‘blood’ in which the capacities of the race are contained. (2) The human races differ one from another in their inherited and unchanging nature to such an extent that the lowest race of humans is further removed from the highest human race than from the highest species of animal. (3) The power of race and the purity of the ‘blood’ must be preserved and promoted in every manner imaginable, and all means that are useful and effective to this end are reasonable and permissible as such. (4) The primary goal of education is to further develop the capacities of race by ennobling the body so that it becomes strong and well formed, and to inflame the spirit with burning love for one’s own race as the highest good. (5) The Christian religion must be completely subordinated to the law of race. Consequently, the doctrine of original sin, of redemption by the cross of Christ, and of the practice of humility and mortification must be rejected or changed in so far as they alienate the human being from his heroic spirit. (6) The Christian religion must be completely eliminated from public life; all Catholic journals, schools, and associations must therefore be cleared out of the way. (7) The doctrine, constitution, leadership and cult of the Catholic Church are not such that different peoples, nations, and races would be able, within it, to achieve complete perfection, in accordance with their own natural capacity for life. (8) The concepts of God and of religion are defined by nation and race. Religious belief is nothing other than trust in the future fate of one’s own people; the immortality of man exists exclusively in the perpetuation of one’s own people and one’s own race. (9) The original source and highest rule of the universal legal order is the instinct of race. (10) The ‘battle for selection’ and the ‘right of the stronger’ grant to the victor, in the event of success, the right to rule”. Ibid., 260–261. Ibid., 277–279. See supra, Chapter 4, 196–205.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

217

association Amici Israel (Friends of Israel); its members included 19 cardinals, 287 bishops, and some 3000 priests worldwide; and its aims included that of reacting against the spread of anti-Semitism among Catholics.46 However, an explicit condemnation of modern racist anti-Semitism had been incorporated in the same decree: the only such condemnation to appear in the official documents of the Roman Catholic Church until the Second World War, however much watered down in scope by the persistent justification of religiously motivated anti-Semitism.47 In any event, with the publication of the eight propositions by the Congregation for Seminaries and Universities, a part of the Holy Office’s wider ­syllabus was in fact made public. Admittedly, the fact that the document was issued not by the Holy Office, but by a minor congregation, reduced its scope and weakened its authoritativeness. It also lacked references to the author (or authors) of the affirmations it condemned. Nonetheless the eight propositions were immediately dubbed the “Syllabus against Racism” (corollary of the Syllabus errorum against modernism of 1864).48 Moreover, the accusations made in the document, given the current foreign policy of the Italian government, seemed aimed not just at Germany, but also at the racist ideology that was then taking hold in Fascist Italy, though the document placed no specific obligation on Catholic educators to refute this ideology on scientific or other grounds (biological, historical, moral, apologetic, legal or moral). It is also worth pointing out that the document was issued just at a time when Mussolini was going through a phase of disillusion with his German ally, even going so far as to suggest to Pius xi, through their usual go-between Tacchi Venturi, that he excommunicate Hitler.49 Yet, when the Führer made his state visit to Italy in May 1938, Pius xi seemed willing enough to receive him in the Vatican. It was the lack of any formal request by the German government for any such audience that induced the Pontiff to leave Rome for Castel Gandolfo for the duration. He also ordered the closing of the Vatican Museums to avoid any contact with the German delegation and prohibited bishops and clergy from taking part in receptions in ­Hitler’s honor. In Florence the Archbishop, Cardinal Dalla Costa, ordered that the doors of the archbishop’s palace be kept closed and its windows ­shuttered 46 47 48 49

L. Deffayet, “Pie xi et la condamnation des ‘Amis d’Israël’”, in Pie xi et la France, (éd.) J. Prévotat, Rome: École française de Rome, 2010, 87–102. See G. Miccoli, “Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938”, in La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa, Roma: Camera dei Deputati, 1989, 174–175. See H. Wolf, Pope and Devil, 260–270. Ibid., 270.

218

chapter 5

on the day when the Führer passed through. Yet the distress aroused in the Church by Hitler’s visit was expressed no more bitterly than by the Pope himself: in the audience granted to 436 married couples on 4 May, Pius xi ­pronounced the famous phrase, reported in L’Osservatore Romano on the following day, on the “very sad things” that were happening not only “far away” (i.e. in Germany), but also “close at hand” (i.e. in Italy). It was a speech in which he contrasted the swastika, which then adorned the public buildings in the capital, with the Cross of Christ, the feast of which had been celebrated on the previous day: Among the sad things there is also this: that it is not found too out of place, on the day of the Holy Cross, to raise the sign of another cross that is not the cross of Christ.50 In the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s visit the Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica clearly spelt out the limitations that could not but condition any reconciliation between “racist Germanism and Catholic Romanism” and impact on the alliance between Italy and Germany: So long as this gulf is not closed, with a return to more lenient counsels on the part of Nazi rulers, so long as our brothers in the Faith are crushed under the steamroller of the anti-Christian policy of the Third Reich, and the most sacred symbols of the faith itself, the holiest and most cherished truths of religion, and the most august institutions and persons of the Church, are publicly and cynically outraged, with the complacent connivance of the responsible authorities, there can perhaps be some common ground in political aims, some convergence of political interests, but never shall there be any ideological community of ideas. And this on the grounds of the indestructible reality of the Catholic religion, which is at the same time the official religion of the Italian people.51 The whole strategy hitherto followed by the Holy See in her relations with Italy and with Germany seemed to have crumbled, as the British chargé d’affaires Francis Osborne did not fail to point out.52 It was in these same weeks that Pius xi took a dramatic decision: that of writing an encyclical on the unity of the human race, aimed in particular at the condemnation of Nazism and 50 51 52

Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 734–735. “Germanesimo razzista e romanesimo cattolico”, La Civiltà Cattolica, 89/2 (1938): 292. See in this regard O. Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 16ff.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

219

anti-Semitism. Five years had gone by since Edith Stein, favorite pupil of Husserl and convert from Judaism to Catholicism, had written to the Pope imploring him to break his silence on the wave of violence that had been unleashed against the Jews in Germany by a government that called itself Christian: “For weeks not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and, I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name”.53 Whether Stein’s heartfelt appeal influenced the decision pondered and taken by Pius xi in the course of 1938 is unknown; no documentary trace of any such influence can be found in the archives.54 In the meantime many other authoritative voices had been joined to that of the Catholic philosopher to denounce to the Pope the gravity of the persecution unleashed against the Jews in Germany and to ask for his public intervention: in the judgement of the French embassy to the Vatican, by the end of January 1938, the scale reached by anti-Semitic policies in European States was widely known to the Holy See.55 In June 1938 the Catholic journalist Father John LaFarge was in Italy. He was the us editor of the Jesuit review America and founder of the Catholic Interracial Council, a movement committed to combating racism and promoting peaceful co-existence between whites and blacks, issues to which he had dedicated his most important book Interracial Justice in the previous year. While he was in Rome, LaFarge attended a pontifical general audience at Castel Gandolfo and was introduced to Pius xi, who had admired his book.56 A few days later he received a message from the Vatican: the Pope wished to meet him and fixed an appointment for 22 June. It was during that meeting that Pius xi assigned to the Jesuit the task of preparing the text of an encyclical on the unity of the human race addressed to the universal Church. We know from LaFarge himself that the Pope had confided to him that “he was continually 53

54 55 56

The existence of a short letter addressed by Edith Stein to Pope Pius xi in April 1933, shortly after the advent of Hitler to power in Germany, had long been known, but its content was only released following the opening, on 15 February 2003, of the Vatican Archives relating to relations between the Holy See and Germany in the period comprised between the two world wars. The text of the letter was published in an appendix in the volume Edith Stein e il nazismo, (eds.) A. Ales Bello and Ph. Chenaux, Roma: Città Nuova, 2005, 101–106, in which the letter is cited both in its original version in German and in an Italian translation. On Edith Stein’s letter to Pius xi, including a facsimile of the original letter in German, see H. Wolf, Pope and Devil, 182–190. See Ph. Chenaux, “La Santa Sede e la questione dell’antisemitismo sotto Pio xi”, in Edith Stein e il nazismo, 5–37. E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 174–175. J. LaFarge, The Manner is Ordinary (1954), New York: Doubleday, 1957, 235.

220

chapter 5

revolving the matter in his mind, and was increasingly convinced that racialism and nationalism were fundamentally the same”.57 The theme of the encyclical, the method to be followed and the principles to be adopted were expounded to the Jesuit by the Pope himself. LaFarge, however, did not feel himself equal to so delicate a task, at least not on his own. He expressed his apprehensions to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus Wladimir Ledóchowski, who enlisted on his behalf two other Jesuit experts on the social doctrine of the Church as coadjutors: Gustav Gundlach, professor of social ethics at the Pontifical Gregorian University since 1934 and author of a highly critical comment, broadcast by Vatican Radio on 1st April 1938, on the declaration of the Austrian episcopate in support of the Anschluss, and Gustave Desbuquois, director in Paris of Action Populaire, a team of Jesuits working in Parisian banlieux since 1903. The three Jesuits were soon after joined by a fourth, Heinrich Bacht, who was given the task of preparing the Latin translation. All four worked in Paris throughout the summer; they were bound by an oath of absolute secrecy lest any news of the planned encyclical should be leaked and reach the Nazi information services. At the end of September LaFarge returned to Rome with the complete draft of the encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, which he personally delivered to Ledóchowski.58 But at this point the whole project ran into the sand. “The Pope is mad”, the Jesuit Superior General is reported to have commented right from the start on the idea of an encyclical of this type.59 Once he had the text in his hand, Ledóchowski delivered it not to Pius xi himself, but to his fellow-Jesuit Father Enrico Rosa, old and by now gravely ill: he would die only a few weeks later, on 26 November. The choice of Rosa was hardly neutral: proponent of a hardline form of anti-Judaism, the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica had published a series of articles on Jews over the last two decades so hostile as to be easily exploited by Fascist propaganda. So it is difficult to imagine how he could have reached a favorable opinion on a reform of the Church’s traditional attitude towards 57 Ibid. 58 All these circumstances have been reconstructed by G. Passelecq and B. Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius xi, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997, 24–66 (First published in France: L’encyclique cachée de Pie xi. Une occasion manquée de l’Église face à l’antisémitisme, Paris: La Découverte, 1995). 59 The comment, reported in a source preserved in the Archive of La Civiltà Cattolica, is quoted by G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, Introduction by E. Fattorini, Milano: Jaca Book, 2009, 37. Strangely the same author excludes any deliberately dilatory role in holding up the encyclical on Ledóchowski’s part (ibid., 45–52), attributing the delays instead to merely procedural problems, but his argument on this score does not convince even the author of the introductory essay (27–29).

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

221

anti-Semitism. Ledóchowski, if he did not throw a spanner in the works, at least took his time. In all probability he trusted in a further deterioration in the Pope’s health, which had been steadily growing worse since November. Besides, it was well known that in the view of the Superior General of the Jesuits the real threat to Catholicism and civilization was posed not by Nazism, but by Soviet Russia and by Communism; this was the reason why he must have judged it paramount not to exacerbate the opposition between the Holy See and the Axis powers. At the end of December, when rumors began to be spread in Vatican circles and among journalists that the Pope would shortly publish an encyclical against racism, the Italian ambassador to the Holy See Pignatti took steps to obtain information on the question from the Secretariat of State, but Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, Deputy Secretary of State, formally denied the rumor. The ambassador got a similar reply from Pacelli himself in early January 1939.60 The draft of the encyclical, which had arrived in Rome on 26 September 1938, did not reach the hands of Pius xi until 21 January 1939, i.e. after a four-month delay and only after a peremptory request made by the Pope himself to Ledóchowski. Three weeks later the Pope was dead. According to Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, the text of the encyclical Humani Generis ­Unitas was on the Pontiff’s desk on the night he died between 9 and 10 February 1939, but it then rapidly disappeared.61 With war imminent, the new Pope, Pius xii, considered it inadvisable at this point to attempt any showdown with Nazism and Fascism. So the draft encyclical was shelved, in the attempt to reach a diplomatic détente with the Third Reich. In commenting on the possibility that the encyclical might be suppressed, Gundlach wrote to LaFarge on 15 March 1939: “The Church will not able to exist honorably and successfully unless it clearly supports the challenge of the gospel and of natural law, everywhere and with regard to everything”.62 Precisely this was the originality of the encyclical wished for by Pius xi: in it the condemnation was not limited to neo-pagan racism, as it had been in Mit brennender Sorge, but also involved, and without limitation, anti-Semitism.63 Indeed, the reigning racism was denounced as a mere pretext to be able to persecute the Jews. Germany, Italy and the other countries that had taken measures, or issued legislation, against the Jews were not named in any explicit way, but they were recognizable with great clarity: 60 61 62 63

V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 2010, 140. G. Passelecq and B. Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius xi, 151. Ibid., 80. G. Miccoli, I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio xii, 318ff.

222

chapter 5

As a result of such persecution, millions of persons are deprived of the most elementary rights and privileges of citizens in the very land of their birth. Denied legal protection against violence and robbery, exposed to every form of insult and public degradation, innocent persons are treated as criminals though they have scrupulously obeyed the law of their native land. Even those who in time of war fought bravely for their country are treated as traitors, and the children of those who laid down their lives in their country’s behalf are branded as outlaws by the very fact of their parentage. The values of patriotism, so loudly invoked for the benefit of one class of citizens, are ridiculed when invoked for others who come under the racial ban. In the case of the Jews, this flagrant denial of human rights sends many thousands of helpless persons out over the face of the earth without any resources. Wandering from frontier to frontier, they are a burden to humanity and to themselves.64 To be sure, the document did not disavow the line that the Church had followed in her attitude to the Jews in the course of her history. In the attempt to place “the so-called Jewish question”65 exclusively within the confines of the religious perspective, it admitted the need for the Church to continue to be vigilant in trying to stem the “spiritual dangers” and the “spiritual contagion” to which contact with Jews could expose the souls of her children.66 But even though the Church did not repudiate her own tradition, the explicit and repeated condemnation of anti-Semitism and of any persecutory measures against Jews, contained in the draft encyclical, would have impacted strongly in the somber final months of 1938.67 5.3

The Speech that Enraged Mussolini

In the speech he addressed to the students of the Urbanian College on 28 July, the Pope had returned with particular force to the question of racism and the ideological rapprochement between Italy and Germany. He had asserted 64 65 66 67

The text of Humani Generis Unitas in G. Passelecq and B. Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius xi, 176–275. Quotation 246–247. Ibid., 247. Ibid., 252. With regard to the different judgements of the encyclical’s possible impact, see F.J. Coppa, “The Hidden Encyclical of Pius xi against Racism and Anti-Semitism Uncovered – Once Again!”, The Catholic Historical Review 84 (1998): 63–72.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

223

that “mankind, the whole of mankind, is one single, universal and great human race”. He wondered “why, unfortunately, Italy has any need to imitate Germany”.68 This was the passage that had particularly infuriated Mussolini: “Let none of you be in any doubt – he declared in a speech in Forlì on the morning of 30 July – that, also on the question of race, we shall push straight ahead. To say that Fascism has imitated someone or something is simply absurd”.69 And it was due in particular to this passage in the Pope’s speech on the one and indivisible human race, which had reverberations throughout the world,70 and not the Pope’s remarks on Catholic Action, that Ciano summoned the Holy See’s nuncio in Italy, Borgongini Duca, on 30 July: Following the Pope’s speech, violently anti-racist, I summoned the Nuncio and warned him: if the Pope were to continue along this path, a collision would be inevitable, because the Duce considers the racial question as fundamental, following the conquest of the Empire. […] I spoke very plainly to Borgoncini [sic]: I explained to him the premises and aims of our racism. He seemed to me very convinced. And I will add that he also revealed himself personally as very anti-Semitic. He is due to confer with the Holy Father tomorrow.71 A report of his meeting, presented by Borgongini Duca to the Secretary of State on 2 August, confirmed Ciano’s impressions, namely that the nuncio shared, effectively, the government’s positions on race. Borgongini Duca in fact reported to Pacelli that he had reassured his interlocutor and had repeated the Church’s commitment to support the racial provisions of the Italian government in East Africa. He emphasized, almost with the same words as then, that the missionaries in the colony had made an effort “not only to prevent concubinage between whites and blacks, but also to dissuade marriage between them, due to the problem of hybrids (meticci), who combine, as is well-known, the defects of the two races”.72 In his talks with the Foreign Minister the nuncio had also downplayed the language used by Pius xi, saying that it should be interpreted as no more than a pious prayer, devoid of any political connections with the present. And he had also given reassurances to the minister, endorsing the peculiarity of Italian racism and its difference from 68 69 70 71 72

Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 781. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 29, 144–147, in particular 126. V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 152. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 30 July 1938, 162. In E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 178–179.

224

chapter 5

the German variety: “Italy is Catholic – Ciano is reported to have said during his talks with the nuncio – and if someone here were to dare to say that Jesus Christ was a bastard, he would be punished as a blasphemer”.73 During these same days Pizzardo and Montini met the ambassador Pignatti to seek to dispel some of the tension created by the papal speech of 28 July, but received instead, according to the report that the diplomat made of his meeting and sent to Foreign Minister Ciano on 5 August, a further bitter philippic against Pius xi, guilty of having “offended” Fascist Italy with an “unjust and unjustifiable intervention”: The Cardinal [Pizzardo] wished to persuade me […] that the Pope had no intention to strike a blow at us. I made Cardinal Pizzardo understand, that I deeply appreciated the sentiment that inspired his step, but that, with all the respect I had for his person, I felt bound to declare to him that I could neither take his considerations into account, nor report them to Your Excellency. This morning Monsignor Montini, deputy of the Secretariat of State, came to see me, without any prior announcement. He told me he was concerned about the extremely tense situation that was being created, and asked me whether, in my view, there was anything that could be done to restore relations between Italy and the Holy See to a normal footing. I replied that the blame for the tension he deplored was not ours, but was exclusively that of the Holy See, or to be more precise that of the Holy Father, who in his unjust and unjustifiable speech had offended Fascist Italy. I then asked Monsignor Montini on whose behalf he was speaking. He replied that Cardinal Pacelli did not know of his decision to come to see me, which must be considered personal. During our conversation the monsignor said, evidently on purpose, that he had come to me directly from Castegandolfo. For my part I declared to him how astonished I was to ascertain that no one dared to speak to the Pope.74 Montini, in short, implied, and made his interlocutor understand, that he had taken the initiative at the prompting of the Pontiff himself. Yet the tendency of Pius xi to adopt positions far more outspoken than those that the other curial authorities dared to express, and the efforts of Vatican diplomats to tone

73 Ibid. 74 B. Pignatti to G. Ciano, 5 August 1938, in Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1935–1939, vol. 9, 507–508.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

225

down his language and offer their Fascist interlocutors signs of the lack of consensus that reigned in the Vatican on the Pope’s pronouncements, can also be inferred from the conversation between Pignatti and Cardinal Pacelli on 6 August. The Secretary of State had decided to intervene in person to allay the tensions that had arisen in relations with the Italian government after the words pronounced by the Pope on 28 July.75 In conciliatory terms, and as a sop to the government, Pacelli told Pignatti that a “good impression” had been made in Vatican circles by a government communiqué, Informazione diplomatica no. 18, issued on the previous day (5 August): a declaration that set in motion the regime’s policy of discrimination against Jews, starting out from its hardly reassuring premise (“Discriminating does not mean persecuting”76), which was doubtless intended to take into account the distinctions drawn in the Catholic world.77 In response to Pignatti’s observation that the essence of the declaration had been communicated directly to the Pope on 26 July and that, in spite of that, the Pontiff “had launched an attack against everything and everyone” two days later, Pacelli almost apologized for not having learnt of the communiqué in time. Nonetheless in the end the Secretary of State had to agree with Pignatti that, even if he had been informed of it, “the speech would have been made just the same”, since the Pope did not consult him prior to speaking and didn’t notify him in advance of the questions he intended to tackle in his public pronouncements.78 While Vatican diplomacy was busily working to mend the fences with the government and heal the rift with Mussolini, the secretary of the pnf Achille Starace sent a circular to the federal secretaries of the party with the instruction that it should remain secret: on no account was it to fall into the hands of Catholics. But the Pope had his sources of information inside the bureaucracy of the regime and the content of the circular, issued on 2 August 1938, was intercepted by the Vatican within a few day, so that Montini was able to write to Tardini (then on holiday) about it on 7 August. The circular was of particular significance. The order was given to ban Fascist members of Catholic Action and “card-carrying members of Jewish race” from holding any office in Fascist institutions: 75 76

77 78

B. Pignatti to G. Ciano, 6 August 1938, ibid., 512–513. The text of Informazione diplomatica no. 18 in R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Torino: Einaudi 1993, 558–559. (English translation: The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, New York: Enigma Books, 2001). G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 188–189. B. Pignatti to G. Ciano, 6 August 1938, in Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1935–1939, vol. 9, 512–513.

226

chapter 5

Fascist members of Catholic Action Fascist members of Catholic Action cannot hold offices in the Party (including its subordinate Organizations), and in the Organizations of the Regime. Members of the pnf are also prohibited from holding offices of any kind in Catholic Action. Card-carrying members of Jewish race I also wish to inform Secretaries of the pnf that card-carrying members of Jewish race must be replaced in the offices entrusted to them in the Party and in the Organizations of the Regime.79 Catholic Action in short was lumped together with Jews in being declared ineligible to hold executive positions in Fascist institutions. It may be assumed that the aim of the purge, in both cases, was to eliminate from the new corporative and Fascist State those cadres that were considered untrustworthy or insufficiently Fascist. Nor can it be excluded that Mussolini and Starace were really persuaded of the need, after the papal speech of 28 July, to expel and debar members of Catholic Action from holding any responsible position in Fascist institutions. As far as Catholics are concerned, however, it is more plausible to assume that the measure was a heavy-handed way of putting pressure on Pius xi to induce him to soften the tone of his public pronouncements. It is no accident that a confidential negotiation between the Church and the State, conducted through several channels, was opened during these same days. On meeting Tacchi Venturi on 9 August, Ciano agreed with him “on the need to act to prevent a conflict between the Holy See and Fascism”, especially since no “reason for a quarrel” existed.80 On 12 August L’Osservatore Romano made a further conciliatory gesture by denying that the Pope had spoken of the racist measures of the Italian government as copies of the German ones.81 A compromise was reached at the Palazzo Venezia on the evening of 16 August, during a meeting between Mussolini and Tacchi Venturi. In less than half an hour, the Duce dictated to the Jesuit father the text of an agreement which would represent the basis for a settlement between the Holy See and the Italian government.82 It referred to “(1) the problem of racism and Judaism; (2) the general question of Catholic Action; and (3) the particular situation of 79 80 81 82

The source in G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 101. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 9 August 1938, 163. “Una citazione berlinese”, L’Osservatore Romano (12 August 1938). The negotiation has been reconstructed in detail in G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 105ff.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

227

the province of Bergamo”, where the secretary of the pnf had clashed with the bishop.83 In the light of new archival documentation, Giorgio Fabre has recently demonstrated that the agreement, already known in some of its aspects,84 was prepared by at least two discussions between Mussolini and Tacchi Venturi and by two documents inspired by Pius xi.85 During these negotiations the Pope, as head of Vatican diplomacy, agreed to hold his tongue on racism and the Jews, receiving as a quid pro quo safeguards for the future of Catholic Action. The complicated triangulations that led to the deal involved a progressive watering down of the Vatican appeals to the “Government of the Nation” to use humanity in its anti-Jewish measures, which were positively defined, right from the start, in any case, as “appropriate provisions in defense of legitimate interests”.86 The end-result was a virtual capitulation: the agreement reached was a text dictated by Mussolini to Tacchi Venturi and accepted by the Holy See within 24 hours. So ‘Mussolinian’ was its language that the conscientious Jesuit made a mistake in his transcription: he wrote down the word allogeni (‘those having a different ethnic background’) as allogesci.87 As far as Catholic Action was concerned, the agreement of 16 August confirmed the terms prescribed in the agreement of 1931, which had been severely tested by the renewed threat of the government to make activism in Catholic lay associations incompatible with membership of the pnf.88 This was the price that the Pope was obliged to pay to stop his attacks on the anti-Semitic 83

84

85 86

87 88

On this clash in Bergamo see A. Pesenti, “I contrasti tra il fascismo e la Chiesa nella diocesi di Bergamo negli anni 1937–1938”, in Chiesa, Azione Cattolica e fascismo nell’Italia settentrio­nale durante il pontificato di Pio xi (1922–1939), (ed.) P. Pecorari, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1979, 535–563. A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 186ff.; G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, 203–204; V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 160–162. The Jesuit historian Angelo Martini published only some parts of the agreement, in particular the part relating to the Jews, transcribing only the headings and not the text of the two following points. Sale and De Cesaris published the text of the agreement in toto, retrieving it from the declassified documents of the Vatican Archives. G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 85ff. See also R. Perin, “Pio xi e la mancata lettera sugli ebrei a Mussolini”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 10 (2013): 181–206. So defined in the minute prepared by the Secretariat of State, read out by Pacelli to Pius xi on 5 August 1938, and delivered by Pacelli to Tacchi Venturi on the following day, so that he could read it out to Mussolini. G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 106–108. Ibid., 88ff. This point was implemented through a meeting between the secretary of the pnf, Achille Starace, and the president of the aci (Italian Catholic Action), Lamberto Vignoli. They  jointly issued a communiqué in this sense on 20 August, as disseminated in the

228

chapter 5

policy of the regime. On the question of racism and Judaism, the document that set the seal on the agreement did not lack ironical notes (“Jews, in short, can be confident that they will not be subjected to any worse treatment than that inflicted on them for centuries by the Popes”). But it was aimed above all at silencing Catholics, from the Pope downwards: (1) Problem of racism and Judaism. It is the Government’s intention that this problem be calmly defined at the scientific and political level, without the aggravation of groups of those with different ethnic backgrounds, but only with the due application of honorable criteria that the State considers it has a right to establish and follow. As for the Jews, the badges of their race, the caps, of whatever color, shall not be revived, nor shall the ghettoes, still less will their properties be confiscated. Jews, in short, can be confident that they will not be subjected to any worse treatment than that inflicted on them for centuries by the Popes, who have accommodated them in the Eternal City and in the lands of their temporal rule. Having said that, it is the strong desire of the Head of the Government that the Catholic press, preachers, lecturers and so on, abstain from treating this subject in public. The Holy See, and the Supreme Pontiff himself, shall not lack opportunity to come to terms directly in their private dealings with Mussolini and to propose to him those observations they think appropriate for the better solution of this delicate problem.89 Tacchi Venturi got the message: to his transcript he added the marginal note: “Stop preaching against racism”.90 The new boldness of Pius xi, his determination to adopt a stance against anti-Semitic persecutions, even at the cost of breaking off relations, seemed to have been nipped in the bud. It was, for the Pope, an anguished decision. In a note taken by Pacelli at the papal audience of 6 August and transmitted to Tacchi Venturi during the negotiation, the Secretary of State had recorded the deep concerns felt by the Pope: “Don’t forget that it was the Jews who gave Christ and Christianity to the world”.91 The recall of the Jewish origin of Christ, however, did not seem to clash, according to this

89

90 91

diocesan press. See S. Rogari, “Azione cattolica e fascismo, 2, La crisi del 1938 e il distacco dal regime”, Nuova Antologia 113 (1978): 348ff. Published, as we have said, only in part by A. Martini and in toto by Sale and De Cesarisi (see note 84), the document is reproduced, critically analyzed and collated with the documentation in the Tacchi Venturi archive, by G. Fabre, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, 87–88. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 108.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

229

note, with the demeanor adopted for centuries by the popes to curb the children of Israel (“The Holy See has never let itself be dragged down this odious path, though keeping things in their place”).92 The Jewish origins of Christ may have been recalled, but traces of a basic ambiguity remained: the principle of salutary segregation, following the example of the Church and the Popes, had not been repudiated.93 A few days later Pius xi intervened once again to condemn totalitarianism and hypernationalism,94 but he avoided any explicit reference to the question of anti-Semitism. Undoubtedly the Pope felt muzzled and deeply lamented it. He tried to break out of the cage in which he had been placed by the agreement, as shown by a personal conversation with a delegation of Belgian Catholic Radio on 6 September 1938. The audience took place on the day following the first provisions of the Fascist government introducing racial discriminations in Italian schools. Though it was a private and restricted audience, Pius xi asked those present to make known to the world the Pope’s thoughts on the Jews. The scene was described, at the invitation of Ratti himself, by Monsignor Louis Picard, president and creator of Belgian Catholic Radio. The Pope – he wrote in La libre Belgique some days later – was commenting on some verses of the Roman Canon on the sacrifice of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek and had affirmed the incompatibility between anti-Semitism (“an obnoxious movement, with which we Christians should have nothing to do”) and “the sublime realities” expressed in the biblical text. It was at this point that Pius xi “could no longer contain his own emotion”: And, with tears in his eyes, he cited the passages of St. Paul that threw light on our spiritual descent from Abraham […] Through Christ and the Church, we are spiritual descendants of Abraham. No. It is impossible for Christians to participate in anti-Semitism. We recognize everyone’s right to defend himself, and to procure for himself 92 Ibid. 93 Documents in the Tacchi Venturi archive show that this approach to the children of Israel was developed in a letter dictated, or wished, by the Pope but materially drafted by the Jesuit and read out by him to the head of the government on 8 August 1938. Ibid., 109–111. 94 See, in particular, the speech given by Pius xi at Castel Gandolfo to the seminarians of the Urbanian College “de Propaganda Fide” on 21 August 1938: “But beware of ‘exaggerated nationalism’ as a real curse. It seems to us that unfortunately all events bear us out when we say ‘real curse’, because it brings with it the curse of divisions, of conflicts, and the danger of war. For the missions the real curse is that of sterility, because it is not thus that the fertility of grace is poured into souls and makes the Apostolate flourish”. In Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 784–786.

230

chapter 5

the means to protect himself from everything that threatens his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are Semites.95 That the exhortations pronounced by Pius xi on this score were not fully taken on board in many parts of the Italian Catholic world can be explained in various ways. First, there were the persistent uncertainties and differences in view within the Roman Curia itself, where anti-Semitic judgements continued to circulate, as shown by the new Vatican documentation, however much they were articulated in cultural or historical, and not in biological or racist terms.96 Second, the Pope’s appeals were censored by the regime and limited in their dissemination: only in minimum part did they circulate in Italy: the regime obstructed their publication in print, and in the Vatican itself many strove to attenuate or water down the Pope’s clash with the Fascist government. After his speech to students at the Urbanian College on 28 July 1938, which had so enraged Mussolini, the Minister for Education Dino Alfieri sent two telegrams to the prefects of the Kingdom on 4 and 5 August with the order to remind the editors of Catholic dailies and periodicals of the imperative to desist from the publication of the papal speech and to curb any comment on the racial problem. Even the editor-in-chief of the publications of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, an institution not exactly unpopular with the regime, was summoned by the prefect of Milan and obliged to sign a declaration in which he pledged not to print “the speech of the Holy Father on racism of 28 July”.97 Only two Catholic organs managed to slip through the net of official censorship: L’Osservatore Romano, which had published the speech on the following day, and La Civiltà Cattolica, thanks to a standoff between the Minister of Culture and the editor of the Jesuit review.98 And it was against the latter than the press of the regime directed its heavy artillery, pouring sarcasm on the anti-Semitic positions adopted by the review at the turn of the century and concluding that there’s “much to learn from the Fathers of the Society of Jesus. […] Neither in its provisions nor in their implementation can Fascism compete with the rigor of Civiltà Cattolica”.99 95

96 97 98 99

The anonymous article with the title Les déclarations du Pape aux dirigeants et aux délégués de Radio Catholique Belge, was published in the paper La libre Belgique on 14 September 1938, and reproduced in La Documentation catholique (5 December 1938): 1459–1460. See H. Wolf, Pope and Devil, 81–125, and 179–222. Thus the Vatican note of 30 August 1938 on a letter of Father Agostino Gemelli, reproduced in G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, 206. Ibid., 77. “Un tremendo atto di accusa”, Il Regime fascista (30 August 1938).

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

231

The failure to disseminate the papal speech was also the result of continuing negotiations between Holy See and government. The communications of the prefectures and, in some cases, the seizure of copies of Catholic papers that had already published the speech of 28 July led various diocesan bishops to seek clarifications from the Secretariat of State. To all of them Pacelli replied evasively that the question would have been more appropriately tackled in the “competent” seat.100 That the ban imposed on the diocesan press represented a violation of article 2 of the Concordat was pointed out by several and relayed by Pacelli to the ambassador Pignatti. The Minister of the Interior Buffarini Guidi replied to this observation on 23 August. He explained that manifestations of a predominantly political character were excluded from the provisions of the Concordat. He further pointed out that diocesan publications were necessarily subordinated to requirements of domestic and international order and subjected to the ordinary provisions that regulated the press.101 The dispute did not go much further: the agreement of 16 August held. The government thus left in place the prohibitions imposed on the Catholic press, while in the Vatican it was decided to downplay the controversy with Palazzo Venezia.102 More widely considered, if in the eyes of the ailing 82-year-old pontiff the Church was faced by the problem of a comprehensive reform of the line to be followed both in relations with the Italian State and on the Jewish question, it was becoming increasingly clear that his intentions encountered little support in Vatican circles. His precarious health, undermined by a chronic heart condition and diabetes, cast doubt on his action of government and raised the prospect of an imminent succession, which the precarious international situation made particularly delicate. The outburst that the nuncio Borgongini Duca could not contain in a conversation with Ciano on 26 August drew, less ingenuously perhaps than appeared to his interlocutor, the image of an authoritarian and irascible, but sick and isolated Pope: I needled him – wrote Ciano in his diary – and he gave vent to his feelings about the Pope. He said that he had a bad character. He was authoritarian and almost insolent. In the Vatican, he said, everyone was terrified of him. He himself, when he had to enter the Pontiff’s room, trembled. Pius xi treated everyone with haughtiness: even the most distinguished 100 The question has been reconstructed on the basis of new Vatican documentation by R. Perin, “La Chiesa veneta e le minoranze religiose (1818–1939)”, in Chiesa cattolica e minoranze in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, 201–206. 101 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, 149–150. 102 R. Perin, La Chiesa veneta e le minoranze religiose, 206.

232

chapter 5

cardinals. Cardinal Pacelli, for example, when he goes to report to him, must, like a junior secretary, take written notes of all his instructions under his dictation.103 The nuncio himself, on 8 August, is reported to have told Ciano that the Pope had grasped the real terms of the problem of race and was beginning “to disarm”.104 Other opinions from senior figures in the Vatican, collected by Farinacci for Mussolini, spoke of a badly informed Pope who was in conflict with those in the Curia who were “more in tune” with the Fascist government, and who gravitated round the Cardinal Vincenzo La Puma, prefect of the Congregation for Religious.105 Contacted by the ambassador Pignatti, the Superior General of the Jesuits Wladimir Ledóchowski declared, undiplomatically, that the Pope had failed to understand the racial question and that there were times when he did not think rationally and refused to listen to the voice of reason.106 In the meantime La Civiltà Cattolica did not fail to offer a sweetened interpretation of the more hardline declarations of Pius xi. It is no wonder, therefore, if Catholic circles ended up by expressing judgements widely different from those of the Pope himself. In some cases they exhumed the traditional justifications of the Catholic anti-Semitic polemic. In others they showed themselves permeable to the racist anti-Semitism propagated by the regime.107 5.4

Inexpiable Sin?

In general terms the Italian Catholic world had adopted a prudent attitude to the propaganda campaign that had preceded the issuing of Italy’s racial laws. A general indifference, a silence more eloquent than words, had accompanied, for instance, the publication in April 1937 of Paolo Orano’s influential pamphlet Gli ebrei in Italia, which opened the floodgates to the government’s antiJewish campaign. It adopted a pseudo-scientific pose in summing up all the usual anti-Semitic clichés (the financial plot, the responsibility for diffusing 103 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 26 August 1938, 169. 104 Ibid., entry for 8 August 1938, 163. 105 R. Farinacci to B. Mussolini, Rome, 3 August 1938, in R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 560, in which Farinacci describes La Puma as “Segretario Generale delle Congregazioni”. 106 asdmae, Gabinetto e Segreteria Generale 1923–1943, b. 1186, Report of Pignatti to Ciano, 5 August 1938. 107 G. Miccoli Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 210.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

233

subversive foreign ideas) and launched a frontal attack on Italian Jews. It confronted them with a stark choice: either they choose Zionism or Italian citizenship.108 In spite of the tremendous stir caused by its publication and in spite of the fact that the author insisted in an explicit way on the continuity between Fascist anti-Semitism, the immemorial practice of the Church in her attitude to Jews, and the Catholic roots of the Italian nation, Orano’s pamphlet was virtually ignored by the Catholic press.109 This omission was accompanied, at least to the end of 1937, by a constant polemic against Nazi ideology, its racism and the anti-Christian practice that was its consequence. Catholics may not have been eager to recognize Jews as the “forefathers of their faith”,110 but the omission in this case – as Giovanni Miccoli has observed – was not “obvious”: on the one hand it underlined that the reasons for the protests of the Church and of Catholics against the regime did not have their roots in the question of anti-Semitism; on the other, it implied a disassociation from a form of propaganda that showed itself as hostile to Christianity as it was to Judaism, both in its theoretical foundations and in its political practice.111 Other anti-Semitic pamphlets were published by the clerico-fascist Gino Sottochiesa under the title Sotto la maschera di Israele in late 1937,112 and by the otherwise unidentified “Catholicus” under the title Io cattolico e Israele in February 1938.113 Both were written by authors who claimed to be Catholics, but who were not accredited as such in ecclesiastical circles. While this kind of pro-government propaganda remained outside the circuits of the organized Catholic world, there was no lack of anti-Semitic interventions by Catholics who were publicly recognized as such: not only the ‘usual suspects’, such as the editor of Italia e Fede Giulio de’ Rossi Dell’Arno, but also culturally more accomplished exponents such as Pasquale Pennisi, Professor of International Law at the University of Parma and member of the executive of fuci in the early Thirties, or the educationalist Roberto Mazzetti, or the ancient historian Carlo Cecchelli, wrote anti-Semitic tracts in 1938 that conformed in line to the 108 109 110 111 112

P. Orano, Gli ebrei in Italia, Roma: Pinciana, 1937. G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 191. R. Moro, La Chiesa e lo sterminio degli ebrei, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002, 84. G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 182–183. G. Sottochiesa, Sotto la maschera di Israele, Milano: La Prora, 1937. On Sottochiesa, collaborator of Telesio Interlandi and contributor to the periodicals Il Tevere, Quadrivio, and La Difesa della razza, which represented the most intransigent current of fascist racism in its biological sense, see F. Rasera, “Gino Sottochiesa, scrittore roveretano, cattolico fa­ scista antisemita”, Materiali di Lavoro 1–4 (1988): 191–211. 113 Catholicus [A. Martin], Io cattolico e Israele. In margine al libro di Paolo Orano, Roma: Pinciana, 1938.

234

chapter 5

most squalid anti-Jewish diatribes produced by the literature of the regime.114 These judgements however did not reflect, nor did they become the norm of the Church and of the Catholic world. Catholic positions on the Jewish question cannot be reduced to a uniform position. The most widespread attitude was one of essential detachment. It was expressed in the preference not to engage personally in battles against the Jews, but equally in the unwillingness to enter the field in their defense. With some distinctions and differences in emphasis, the anti-Semitic ideology formulated by intransigent Catholic thought in the late 19th century continued to operate in many circles of Italian Catholicism: an ideology that had lumped Jews together with Protestants, freemasons, liberals, socialists and other traditional enemies of the Church. But now the age-old accusation against the blindness of a deicide people was superimposed by an interpretational model that dreamt of a return to a pre-revolutionary “Christian society” and that, in its simplistic identification of the targets to be combated, had directed its darts against “modern society”.115 Nor in this conceptual system was there any lack of analyses aimed at identifying the common source of the enemies of the Church in the Jewish project to establish its own domination over the world by eliminating the Christian influence over society. This was only a few decades after the Russian revolution had added a new accusation to the charge-sheet of international Jewry: Bolshevik communism, thus enriching the alleged Jewish conspiracy with the nexus between Judaism and Bolshevism. In October 1922 La Civiltà Cattolica, the journal that best kept alive the spirit of the late-nineteenth-century anti-Semitic campaign,116 had published a statistical study, purporting to show that in Russia 447 civil servants out of 545 and 17 commissars of the people out of 21 were Jews: it was clear – concluded the review with an inferential bravura that yielded nothing to the propaganda of the most blatant anti-Semitism – that Soviet Russia was a “Communist Jewish 114 On these ‘Catholic’ anti-Semitic exponents see R. Moro, “Propagandisti cattolici del razzismo antisemita in Italia (1937–1941)”, in Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique ( fin xix–xx siècle), (eds.) C. Brice and G. Miccoli, Rome: École française de Rome, 2003, 275–345. 115 The question of Catholic anti-Semitism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century is exhaustively analyzed by G. Miccoli, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo fra Otto e Novecento”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 11, Gli ebrei in Italia, vol. 2, Dall’emancipazione a oggi, (ed.) C. Vivanti, Torino: Einaudi, 1997, 1369–1574. 116 R. Taradel and B. Raggi, La segregazione amichevole. “La Civiltà Cattolica” e la questione ebraica 1850–1945, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2000, 16ff. The central role of the Jesuit review in the late-nineteenth-century anti-Semitic campaign is also widely discussed in R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 37ff.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

235

republic”, based on a doctrine that only “the perversion of a Semitic imagination” could have conceived.117 Concurrently the Balfour Declaration and the international accords of 1920–1921 on the Jewish presence in Palestine had been generating a mounting aversion to Zionism, which was perceived as a threat for the immemorial Catholic interest in the Holy Places and was represented in terms of a Jewish invasion conducted with an “exuberant” hatred of humanity and of Christianity.118 Apart from arousing fears of a possible “bolshevization” of Palestine,119 the prospect of an end to the diaspora and the reconstruction of a Jewish State seemed, in any case, to contradict the divine curse that had followed the “deicide”, judged an inexpiable crime that precluded any return of the Jews to the land of their forefathers.120 During the Twenties the Catholic press was invaded by the image of the Bolshevik Jew, the fomenter of every revolution and ferocious in his antiChristian hatred precisely because he was a Jew.121 In this way anti-Judaism was absorbed into the anti-modern polemic excogitated by an intellectual converted to Catholicism like Giovanni Papini, who stuffed his Storia di Cristo (1921) with many anti-Jewish passages and who dedicated to anti-Semitism an entry in the Dizionario dell’Omo Salvatico, written with his friend Domenico Giuliotti in 1923.122 But it was also expressed, and in a particularly brutal manner, by Gemelli, who, already rector of the Catholic University in Milan, commented as follows on the suicide of the socialist Felice Momigliano in the pages of the review Vita e Pensiero in August 1924: A Jew, a secondary school teacher, a great philosopher, a great socialist, Felice Momigliano has died by taking his own life. The newspapers without any backbone wrote that he was Rector of the Mazzinian University. Some others recalled that he was a latter-day positivist. But if together with Positivism, Socialism, Free Thought, and Momigliano, all the Jews, 117 “La rivoluzione mondiale e gli ebrei”, La Civiltà Cattolica 73/4 (1922): 111–121. 118 See E. Caviglia, “Il sionismo e la Palestina negli articoli dell’ ‘Osservatore Romano’ e della ‘Civiltà Cattolica’ (1919–1923)”, Clio (January–March 1981): 79–90. See also the observations of R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 55ff. 119 E. Caviglia, “Il sionismo e la Palestina negli articoli dell’ ‘Osservatore Romano’ e della ‘Civiltà Cattolica’”, 83. 120 R. Moro, “Le premesse all’atteggiamento cattolico di fronte alla legislazione razziale fascista. Cattolici ed ebrei nell’Italia degli anni venti (1919–1932)”, Storia contemporanea 19 (1988): 1013–1119. 121 G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 267. 122 R. Moro, “Le premesse all’atteggiamento cattolico di fronte alla legislazione razziale fascista”, 1086ff.

236

chapter 5

who continue the work of the Jews who crucified Our Lord, were also to die, is it not true that the world would be a better place? It would be a liberation, even more complete if, before dying, they were to repent and ask for the water of Baptism.123 The editorial was unsigned. Gemelli only conceded that he had penned it four months later, admitting that it had been an “error” and one he was sorry about. The atonement, however, was no less significant than the apologia that went with it. The “ferocity” of his comment on the death of Momigliano – explained the rector of the Cattolica – had been a “reaction to the monstrosities we see every day: it’s Jews who have propagated and regaled us with socialism, communism, freemasonry, the domination of the banks and a thousand other devilries of this kind”. That’s why – he wrote in conclusion – he prayed every day for their conversion, “as every good Christian ought to do”.124 The circulation of violently anti-Semitic propositions, corroborated from time to time by such gross fabrications as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (published in Italy in 1921 on the initiative of two exponents of Catholic integrism, Monsignor Umberto Benigni and the former priest Giovanni Preziosi),125 reached such grotesque levels in tone as to induce even La Civiltà Cattolica to disavow them in 1928, in an article in which Father Rosa anathematized the “extremist anti-Semites” who fed on legends and enjoyed spreading them in ways detrimental “to their own cause”.126 In the same article, however, Rosa vindicated the legitimacy of a line that based the struggle against Jews on their “frequent and undeniable” alliance with freemasons, liberals and Bolsheviks: a line that refused to be defined as racist, in as much as it found the raison d’être of its struggle not in blood, but in the Talmud, and that considered itself moderate because it excluded hatred of Jews as such, but not the adoption of systems of civil containment and discrimination against them.127 Even in commenting on the decree issued by the Holy Office on 15 March 1928 to condemn the association of the Amici Israel, the Jesuit review, through the usual pen of Father Rosa, had believed it had adopted a balanced stance, condemning 123 See Vita e Pensiero (August 1924): 1069. On the episode see A. Cavaglion, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924). Una biografia, Bologna: il Mulino, 1988, 203–204. 124 A. Gemelli, “In tema di ebrei… e di errori”, Vita e Pensiero (December 1924): 723. 125 M.T. Pichetto, Alle radici dell’odio. Preziosi e Benigni antisemiti, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1983, 103–128. 126 “Il pericolo giudaico e gli ‘Amici di Israele’”, La Civiltà Cattolica 79/2 (1928): 335–344, quotation 341, on which see D. Menozzi, ‘Giudaica perfidia’. Uno stereotipo antisemita fra liturgia e storia, Bologna: il Mulino, 2014, 103–114. 127 Ibid., 114.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

237

anti-Semitism “in its anti-Christian form and spirit” and rejecting, “with equal diligence”, the other “no less dangerous and even more seductive extreme”: philo-Semitism.128 From this the plausibility of a form of anti-Semitism willing to be guided by the Church could, without straining the truth, be concluded. The anti-Jewish measures taken by Nazi Germany had accentuated in the Italian Church criticisms and disavowals of the racist State of neopagan origin, but the dismissal of German racism, often accompanied by a re-affirmation of the diversity of Italian Fascism, had not been accompanied by any remeditation on, or any revised awareness of, the nature of anti-Semitism in its links with racism.129 The position of Jacques Maritain had left its mark on some Catholics. Already in his rupture with Bernanos in 1929 the issue of antiSemitism had played a major role. But it was in 1937 that the Catholic philosopher decided to break his silence on the Jewish question by writing a long essay, L’impossible antisémitisme, which was published in the same year in the miscellaneous volume Les Juifs.130 In this essay, which had a profound influence on Giuseppe Dossetti,131 Maritain called anti-Semitism “a pathological phenomenon”: it was a symptom of an “alteration of the Christian consciousness”, of its inability “to shoulder its own responsibilities in history, and to remain existentially faithful to the high demands of Christian truth”.132 This view was shared by Luigi Sturzo who became one of the main propagators of Maritain’s teaching on Israel, however much he himself had been formed within an intransigent tradition from which anti-Jewish prejudices were not excluded.133 From his exile in London he had openly condemned and battled against the racism and anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. He called the measures taken against Jews “contrary to civilization and to Christianity”.134 Faced by the spectacle of the anti-Semitic contagion that had infected Italy and spread to other areas

128 “Il pericolo giudaico e gli ‘Amici di Israele’”, 338–339. 129 G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 180–181, and 189–190. 130 On Maritain’s intellectual journey that led him to reject Nazi anti-Semitism see the exhaustive research of D. Lorenzini, Dai diritti della persona ai diritti dell’uomo. Jacques Maritain, l’antisemitismo cattolico e la democrazia, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2012. 131 G. Dossetti, “Introduzione” to L. Gherardi, Le querce di Monte Sole: vita e morte delle comunità martiri fra Setta e Reno, 1898–1944, Bologna: il Mulino, 1994, xxxviii. 132 J. Maritain, L’impossible antisémitisme, in Les Juifs, Paris: Plon, Paris 1937, 44–71. 133 A brief reconstruction of Sturzo’s positions on German and Italian anti-Semitism in E. Guccione, “Razzismo e antisemitismo nelle analisi di Luigi Sturzo”, Storia e Politica 2 (2010): 30–38. 134 L. Sturzo, Politica e morale (1938), in Idem, Politica e morale (1938) – Coscienza e politica (1953), Bologna: Zanichelli, 1972, 139.

238

chapter 5

of Europe, he appealed to the conscience and sense of duty of Christians and called for their “resistance” against “the new idol”: the deified German race.135 More ambiguous remained the position of Alcide De Gasperi. Following the publication of the Manifesto of Racist Scientists and Pius xi’s speech to seminarians at the Urbanian College in the summer of 1938, De Gasperi showed he shared the hopes of those curial circles engaged in the task of decoupling Fascist from German anti-Semitism. Writing in the magazine Illustrazione Vaticana he expressed the hope that Italian racism would take the form of “concrete provisions in defense and promotion of the nation”.136 Such a prospect naturally excluded physical assaults, ghettoes and pogroms, but could still contemplate for Jews such measures as a numerus clausus and restrictions on their roles in society. This was the basic distinction that was gaining ground in most of the diocesan press and clerical reviews in 1938: on the one hand was the aggressive racist anti-Semitism of the Nazis, to be rejected in principle and in part in method; on the other was a ‘defensive’ anti-Semitism as a bulwark against the perceived Jewish invasion in politics, finance, journalism and the cinema.137 This was a conceptual framework conforming to the anti-Jewish tradition of Catholic intransigence (never officially repudiated). Yet its revival in a public context distinguished by a constant accentuation of the anti-Semitic campaign implied, more or less consciously, a willingness to accept discriminatory measures against Jews. The effort was essentially the need to distinguish Italian from German anti-Semitism and to strive in various ways to associate the former with the Catholic tradition. Commenting on the Manifesto of Racist Scientists in the Catholic paper Avvenire di Roma on 17 July 1938, the Jesuit Angelo Brucculeri, for example, underlined the diversity of the Italian version of antiSemitism from other racist theories.138 La Civiltà Cattolica, which more than once had got bogged down in the difficulty of reconciling the condemnation of biological anti-Semitism of Nazi origin with the admissibility of specific measures against Jews,139 spoke of a “considerable divergence” between the propositions of Italian Fascist scholars and the theses of German racism: a proof, according to the authoritative Jesuit review, that Italian Fascism could not “be 135 Ibid., 126. 136 On De Gasperi’s comment (published on 16 August 1938) on the Manifesto of Racist Scientists, see G. Formigoni, “L’Europa vista dal Vaticano: De Gasperi commentatore della politica internazionale”, in Alcide De Gasperi: un percorso europeo, 169–193, in particular 187–188. 137 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 200ff. 138 R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 293. 139 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 194ff.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

239

confused with Nazism or German racism which is intrinsically and explicitly materialistic and anti-Christian”.140 Even L’Osservatore Romano, in reporting the publication of the Manifesto in a brief article on its second page, implied that it offered a definition of race in spiritual and not in biological terms.141 In these same months, anti-Jewish references, generally absent in previous years, began to crop up ever more frequently in the interventions of Italian bishops. At Venice Cardinal Adeodato Piazza prepared for Lent of 1938 a pastoral letter, apocalyptic in tone, which blamed the “Jewish people […], dispersed and fragmented amid a hundred peoples”, for the most reprehensible crimes ranging from the “distant and inexpiable” deicide to the “massacred Spain”, described with all the purple rhetoric of images of blood: This Jewish people, transformed from the people who were chosen by the Lord to the people who killed God, and who were broken into pieces, dispersed and fragmented amid a hundred peoples, always preserves its unmistakable character almost as a stigma of reproof; this people implicated in the most sinister sects, from freemasonry to bolshevism, in the bloodiest upheavals and in the most ferocious wars, perhaps attempting to wipe out in human blood the great stain of the Blood betrayed; this people, who, in every age and on every soil, provokes bloody reactions, and in the land itself of its forefathers imbued with the blood of Christ, often repays with its own blood that distant and inexpiable crime; this people, which, in spite of everything, seems to have the terrible gift of immortality, must indeed remain with a mark upon it and be a wanderer on the face of the earth like Cain, precisely to bear witness, albeit in its inextinguishable hate, to the divine Blood that was shed and shall never be expiated.142 The Patriarch of Venice was one of the most fervent supports of the racial policy of the Fascist regime among Italian bishops. Less fervently but with the same polemical content, other bishops inserted anti-Jewish remarks in their speeches and homilies which drew on the long-standing Catholic tradition 140 “Proposizioni sul razzismo fascista”, La Civiltà Cattolica 89/3 (1938): 275–278, quotation 278. 141 “Il fascismo e i problemi della razza”, L’Osservatore Romano (16 July 1938). 142 A. Piazza, “Il Sangue prezioso di Cristo. 1938”, Bollettino diocesano del patriarcato di Venezia 23 (1938): 25–67. For an analysis of the diocesan press, see: E. Mazzini, Ostilità convergenti. Stampa diocesana, razzismo e antisemitismo nell’Italia fascista (1937–1939), Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2013.

240

chapter 5

and showed how weak were the antibodies that Catholic culture was able to produce in its reaction to anti-Semitism.143 In a religious system strongly anchored in the theological tradition and its teachings it was, besides, highly improbable that any change in attitude could be prompted by a re-interpretation of the normative process that had led to the formation of a negative and conflictual view of Judaism, still less by the pressure of external events. The revival of these attitudes, their updating, their reinforcement, in the light of contemporary events, showed, on the other hand, a willingness to tune into the predominant outlook disseminated by the regime that had restored Italy to God: a regime whose extraordinary benevolence to the Catholic Church had been glorified for years by the bishops and diocesan press, reaching an imperialcatholic apogee following the conquest of Ethiopia. As recalled by Monsignor Nogara in his speech in the Palazzo Venezia on 9 January 1938, it was the widespread conviction among clergy and episcopate that Mussolini and his government had given ‘many proofs’ of its collaboration with the Church.144 So it was not so obvious for Catholics to adopt, on particular questions, critical positions on the man who, just a year previously, had been hailed by the Archbishop of Milan Ildefonso Schuster as a new Constantine, “the providential man of genius who had saved the State, founded the Empire and given Italians the most perfect national unity thanks to religious peace”.145 5.5

Adverse, But Not Too Much

Put in motion by the decrees promulgated on 5 and 7 September 1938, the machinery of the regime’s racial laws now advanced at a rapid pace. While the ministries were busily gathering information necessary for the preparation of further provisions, and government propaganda continued to hammer home the message of the deleterious effects of the “Jewish presence” in national life, Mussolini and his government were removing the last institutional hurdles to the realization of a system of State anti-Semitism: more precisely, the king and the Holy See. The nulla ostat of Victor Emanuel came, without problem, on 12 September.146 Things were a bit more complicated with the Holy See, but only on account of the resistance of Pius xi. On 9 September, three days after 143 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 203. 144 See supra, 206–208. 145 “Da Augusto a Costantino. Da un discorso milanese del Cardinale Schuster (25 febbraio 1937)”, Annuario cattolico italiano (1937): 35–38. 146 R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 291–293.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

241

his cri de coeur to the delegation of Belgian Catholic Radio culminating in the affirmation “spiritually we are all Semites”, the Pope asked Tacchi Venturi to transmit the following message to Mussolini: “The Holy Father, on the basis of unfortunately reliable news and information, is greatly concerned lest this aspect or appearance of anti-Semitism which is given to the provisions taken in Italy against Jews should provoke reprisals perhaps not insensible to Italy on the part of Jews throughout the world”.147 The papal remonstrance was not based on any strong or plausible motivation. But it sufficed to make Mussolini once again adopt intimidatory language. He did so at Trieste, in the harangue he addressed to the crowd gathered in Piazza dell’Unità. After insisting that the Fascist government had not taken the road of racial policy as a sop to Germany, he railed against the “improvised and unexpected friends” who were defending “the Semites […] from too many pulpits”.148 To the Bishop of Trieste, Monsignor Antonio Santin, Mussolini denied that these affirmations referred to Pius xi, and it was on the initiative of the bishop himself that this denial reached the Vatican.149 But it was a disavowal that did not cancel the interpretation that the press had given to the passage, namely, that the head of the government had included the Pope among the “improvised and unexpected friends” of the Jews. On the practical level, however, the episode was irrelevant. For, two weeks later, the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo, meeting at the Palazzo Venezia on the night between 5 and 6 October, approved a declaration on race that endorsed the regime’s antiSemitic policy and accelerated its implementation.150 Giuseppe Bottai, who penned a detailed account of this meeting in his diary, noted that Mussolini, in the polemical impetus of his speech, attacked the Church and declared his conviction that “this Pope [was] pernicious for the destiny of the Catholic Church”.151 Nonetheless, apart from his ever more accentuated antipathy to Pius xi, Mussolini, at the political level, could now feel secure that the Holy See had been brought to heel and would make no fundamental objections to his racial plans. The Italian government was now fully persuaded that the Pope was isolated in the Sacred College. In a report dated 7 October, the counselor 147 148 149 150

G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, 90. B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 29, 146. V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 188. R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei in Italia sotto il fascismo, 302ff. See also M. Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, Torino: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1994, 39–45. 151 G. Bottai, Diario. 1935–1944, (ed.) G.B. Guerri, Milano: Rizzoli, 2001 (1st edition 1982), entry for 6 October 1938, 136–137.

242

chapter 5

in the Italian Embassy to the Holy See, Carlo Fecia di Cossato, wrote to Ciano that in Vatican circles appreciation was shown for several aspects of the deliberations of the Gran Consiglio on matters of race and that “the only point” on which objections had been raised concerned mixed marriages between Catholics and Jews, on which the possible difficulties posed to the Church had been highlighted in a detailed way.152 On 10 October Ciano communicated the content of the report to the office of the head of the government.153 Three days later the Foreign Minister briefed Mussolini anew about what he had learned from the Italian Embassy to the Holy See, confirming “that the main if not the only concerns of the Holy See referred to the case of converted Jews”.154 The information yielded by newly released Vatican documentation adds new details to the behind-the-scenes work in the Roman Curia, but doesn’t seriously alter the picture offered by Fecia di Cossato. The ecclesiastical committee, established in October with the task of preparing an official memorandum to be submitted to the government before the policy declaration of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo would be converted into legislation, did not tackle the emergency measures against Italian Jews, but focused exclusively on the problem of mixed marriages. The text for identifying the issues on which to insist in conversations with the government authorities was drafted by the committee (of which Jorio, Borgongini Duca, Ottaviani, Tardini and Bracci formed part) on 23 October and approved by the Pope on the following day. It regarded only the problem of marriages between Catholics and Jews and focused on three specific questions: 1. 2. 3.

Mixed marriages (in terms of religion and race) authorized by the Church are extremely rare and in future the Holy Father has ordered that they be submitted to his examination. The Government for its part shall grant the registration of these marriages that are so exceptional, subject, if it deems necessary, to royal dispensation (art. 68). In any case it should be borne in mind that it would be gravely offensive for religious sentiment and for natural law [addendum of Pius xi]

152 C. Fecia di Cossato to G. Ciano, 7 October 1938, in Documenti diplomatici italiani, 1935– 1939, vol. 10, 234–235. 153 Report of G. Ciano to the Presidenza del Consiglio, Gabinetto, 10 October 1938, in R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 561–562. 154 Report of G. Ciano to the Presidenza del Consiglio, Gabinetto, 13 October 1938, ibid., 563.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

243

to establish sanctions against those who for reasons of conscience carry out the religious act of marriage.155 Once the draft of the government decree had arrived in the Vatican on 2 November, the committee, prompted by the need to reach an agreement with the government, confined itself to the question of mixed marriages. In this regard it proposed an amendment of art. 7, more firmly rooting it in canon law and its source in the Concordat. On the other hand, the committee did not approve the proposal made by Monsignor Tardini to insert a phrase that would express the Holy See’s disapproval of ‘the racist principle’ that had inspired the law.156 The attitude of Pius xi was different. This is also confirmed by new archival sources. The notes of Monsignor Tardini show that the Pope had asked that two documents be drafted: one on mixed marriages and the other “regarding the question of the Jews”, so that it be clear that “the Holy See had warned the Government in advance of the painful consequences of its new laws”.157 The question was posed by the Pope directly in his conversations with Tardini and Tacchi Venturi during an audience on 24 October. The Jesuit had reminded the Pontiff of the government’s intransigence on the racial question and referred, in particular, to the ban imposed on the press by the Minister of Culture prohibiting any reproduction of the attacks of L’Osservatore Romano against racism, including German racism. It was at this point – according to Monsignor Tardini’s account – that the Pope burst out to Tacchi Venturi: But this is outrageous! And I am ashamed… ashamed to be Italian. And tell that, father, to Mussolini himself! I am ashamed not as Pope but as an Italian! The Italian people have become a flock of stupid sheep. I will speak out, without fear. I am forced to by the Concordat, but even more so by my conscience. I have no fear! I would prefer to beg in the streets. I will not even ask Mussolini to defend the Vatican. And even if the piazza fills with people, I will not be afraid! […] I am truly discouraged, both as Pope and as an Italian!158 155 A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 197. 156 V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 227–228. 157 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, pos. 1063, fasc. 755: “Appunti di mons. Domenico Tardini sui rapporti tra Santa Sede e autorità governative sulla formazione della legge sulla difesa della razza”, December 1940–January 1941. 158 Quotation from E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 184.

244

chapter 5

In the negotiations with the Italian government, however, the clash remained confined exclusively to the question of marriages. The Holy See succeeded in obtaining the suppression of the article that equated with “concubinage” the religious matrimony contracted in violation of the bans imposed by the law on mixed marriages, but obtained no concessions at all on the recognition of the civil effects of marriages contracted or contractible with Jews converted to Catholicism.159 The subsequent steps taken by Pius xi by writing directly to Mussolini (4 November) and to the King (5 November) to protest about the vulnus inflicted on the Concordat also had no result. Equally fruitless were Tacchi Venturi’s talks with the head of government and the protest note sent by Pacelli to the Italian ambassador to the Holy See: the Cardinal affirmed, on the one hand, the religious nature of marriage, even if it involved Catholics and non-baptized persons, and, on the other, recalled the tendency of the Church to discourage the “quite different” case of marriages between individuals “of different race” to prevent “the danger of defective offspring”. Once again, as had happened in the previous year with the measures of racial discrimination legislated for Italian East Africa, the Holy See inserted into its response a series of concessions, admissions, and exemptions aimed to safeguard relations with the government. Such an attitude enormously weakened the influence that the Holy See could hope to exert in the negotiations and implied a tendency to endorse forms of partial discrimination. For centuries – wrote Pacelli to Pignatti on 13 November – the Church has established two canonical impediments: the one that prohibits marriage between Catholics and non-baptized persons; and the other that prohibits marriages between Catholics and baptized but non-Catholic persons. […] Quite different on the other hand is the case of two Catholics of different race. It’s true that the Church […] wishes to discourage her children from contracting marriages that may present the danger of defective offspring, and in this sense is willing to support, within the limits of divine law, the efforts of the civil authority tending to the achievement of so laudable a goal. But if, notwithstanding, two Catholics of different race intend to contract marriage […] the Church cannot, on the mere grounds of diversity of race, deny her assistance.160 Pius xi wanted the text of the note to be published in L’Osservatore Romano. It was in fact summarized, in the form of an article in the number of 14–15 159 A. Martini, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 204–216. 160 asv, Arch. Nunz. Italia, b. 9, f. 5, Letter of E. Pacelli to B. Pignatti, 13 November 1938.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

245

November. But here the focus was significantly widened and the universal claims of Catholicism were reaffirmed: Everyone knows that the Church of Jesus Christ is catholic, that is, universal […]. All people, no matter to what race they belong, are called to be children of God, living members of the living Christ, citizens of that Kingdom of the Divine Redeemer on earth that is his Church. Twenty centuries of history are there to demonstrate this great and wonderful universality. For the races have never constituted a source of discrimination among catholic faithful […] The Church is addressed to men and women of all races: she has instructed them, if they are ignorant; she has educated them, if they are savage; she has perfected them, if they are already civil. And with her slow and sometimes dangerous and difficult work the Church has always tried to demolish the barriers that spiritually separate humanity and to create and develop the bonds of brotherhood and charity in everyone.161 We know from the notes of Monsignor Tardini that the Pope would have wished the note to be published in toto.162 But its final part was cut from the article published in the Vatican daily; this was the part in which mention was made of Victor Emanuel’s reply to the letter addressed to him by the Pope and the failure to receive any reply from Mussolini. Irritated by the tone of the article, which he thought too conciliatory, Pius xi wished that L’Osservatore Romano should return to the question with a communiqué, in spite of all the opposite pressure from his entourage (Pacelli, Tardini, Tacchi Venturi).163 An addendum, however, was published in the daily of the Holy See on 16 ­November and later reprinted by the diocesan press. It published the reassurance contained in the King’s reply that “maximum account would be taken of the [Pope’s] August autograph with a view to reaching a conciliatory solution” between the positions of the government and those of the Holy See.164 The sovereign’s encouragement, now made public, represented a further incentive to abandon the over-harsh tones of the Vatican’s protest and resume attempts to 161 “A proposito di un nuovo Decreto legge”, L’Osservatore Romano (14–15 November 1938). 162 Thus Tardini in his note of 15 November 1938, in “Appunti di mons. Domenico Tardini sui rapporti tra Santa Sede e autorità governative sulla formazione della legge sulla difesa della razza”, in G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, 286–288. 163 Ibid. 164 “Ancora a proposito di un nuovo Decreto Legge”, L’Osservatore Romano (16 November 1938).

246

chapter 5

find a de facto accommodation, even after the promulgation of the decree law on 17 November.165 On Mussolini, however, the short paragraph in L’Osservatore Romano had no pleasant effect. According to what Claretta Petacci wrote in her diary on 16 November, describing some moments spent at the seaside with her lover, the Duce indeed had a hysterical reaction: It’s just towards Italy that [the Vatican] performs all these wretched things. Against me, to irritate me. In the Osservatore Romano there’s a short paragraph that said: ‘His Holiness is moved and wishes to thank his beloved son the Sovereign for his telegram…’ This was only to underline the fact that I had not written. But the pope doesn’t know that it was I who told the king to make this acknowledgement. […] They play disgusting tricks on me. Instead of thanking me, helping me, or being grateful that I’m still on my feet. They are bad people [brutta gente].166 The pressures of the Holy See, under the impetus of Pius xi, in defense of the Concordat continued to the end of the year, but the government ignored them and made no revision to the decree law.167 In the absence of any overall denunciation in principle by the Holy See of the emergency legislation on Italian Jews, but also as an effect of the provisions to gag the Catholic press and impose silence on the government’s anti-Semitic policy, what prevailed in the Italian Church reflected, in essence, the basic approach of the article published in L’Osservatore Romano on 14–15 November, widely reproduced in diocesan magazines and in other Catholic papers. Some, while accentuating the Church’s sense of grievance for the violation of the Concordat, noted the coincidence between the substance of the government provisions and the ecclesiastical practice aimed at prohibiting marriages with non-Catholics. Others stressed their appreciation for the other provisions on marriage and expressed the hope for a conciliatory solution.168 If Catholic dissent from the anti-Jewish legislation was already weak, the huge demonstrations in support of the regime that followed Mussolini’s return 165 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 215. 166 C. Petacci, Mussolini segreto. Diari 1932–1938, (ed.) M. Suttora, Milano: Rizzoli, 2009, entry for 16 November 1938, 459–460. An analysis of the passages in Claretta Petacci’s diary on racial issues in G. Fabre, “Mussolini, Claretta e la questione della razza. 1937–1938”, Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa. Storia e politica 24 (2009): 347–367. 167 V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 231–234. 168 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 219–220.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

247

from the Peace Conference in Munich, and that continued for several weeks, had the effect of weakening it still further. Hierarchy, clergy and faithful all helped, by active participation, to disseminate the image of Mussolini as a major protagonist of the accords signed in Munich and as a bulwark of European peace.169 Admittedly the champion of Italy as a warrior nation could not have taken much pleasure in the spontaneous joy expressed by Italians for the danger of war that had been averted. Yet Mussolini’s triumph was great: comparable only to the day of the conquest of Addis Abeba. In the aftermath of these accords Father Gemelli glorified Mussolini’s pax romana, affirming that the Duce with his “political wisdom” had been able, in one of the darkest hours in our history, to assign to the fledgling “Italian empire” the task of achieving “the victory of peace” and the “salvation of European civilization”.170 Catholic Action also hailed Mussolini as a man of Providence and celebrated his achievement in securing peace: “the genial and positive Roman wisdom embodied in the powerful personality of Benito Mussolini was once again, in the hand of Providence, the valid instrument of prodigious reconciliation”.171 It was highly improbable, in a climate such as this, that at the level of public opinion, the position of the Catholic Church on Jews could seem hostile to the government; all the more so as Fascist propaganda continued to hammer home the message that the Church throughout her history had persecuted the Jews and that the government was doing nothing new and indeed was doing no more than following the Catholic tradition. The most active propagandists in this sense were Giovanni Preziosi and, especially, Roberto Farinacci, who was dedicated as no other to demonstrating to Catholics that anti-Semitism was one of their religious duties.172 The aim of such propaganda was to prevent, also with an explicit recourse to threats, Italian Catholics from adopting hostile positions to the Fascist regime, especially after Pius xi’s speech to the seminarians of the Urbanian College, though even this had not been prompted by any real willingness of the Italian Church to enter the field in defense of the Jews.173 A good deal stronger, on the other hand, was the Church’s denunciation of German racism and the anti-religious persecution in Germany. The intervention that created the biggest impact in this sense, also due to the high profile of

169 Ibid. For the reaction of Pius xi to the Munich Peace Conference see A. Martini, “Pio xi, la pace e gli accordi di Monaco”, La Civiltà Cattolica 126/3 (1975): 457–472. 170 A. Gemelli, “Per gli uomini di buona volontà”, Vita e Pensiero (October 1938): 453–454. 171 “Il messaggio della pace”, Azione sociale (October 1938): 178. 172 R. De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 321–324. 173 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 220–221.

248

chapter 5

its author, was the homily pronounced by Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster in Milan Cathedral on 13 November, three days after the Kristallnacht, the coordinated pogrom launched against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria on the night of 9/10 November 1938. The Archbishop of Milan, who in previous years had spared no effort to support the Fascist regime, condemned “the Nordic racial myth”, and called it “a heresy that depresses us”.174 He also asserted the incompatibility of Nazi racism with Catholic doctrine, which drew no distinction between the races, and with the Italian Catholic tradition (“the genius of the Italic stock”), and insisted on the multiracial dimension of the Roman Empire. He concluded his homily by reiterating his own trust in Mussolini, who had saved Italy from the ‘red peril’. Yet the sermon as a whole revealed that this trust, for so long cherished by Schuster, and sustained by the hope that Fascism could be catholicized within an ideology of romanitas, was beginning to crumble.175 Two months later his mistrust was complete. “Against an apostolic credo and a Catholic Church of divine origin, – said Schuster in a speech reserved for the Lombard clergy on 17 January 1939 – we have […] a Fascist credo and a totalitarian State which […] claims divine attributes. At the religious level the Concordat has been liquidated”.176 Admittedly, in the archbishop’s words, the destiny of the Jews was not confronted per se, but inserted in a wider rationale: the powerful threat posed by the ‘pagan peril’ represented by the totalitarian state. Notwithstanding, that destiny was, in Schuster’s view, a significant symptom, so much so as to induce one of the most fervent and vocal eulogists of the new Italy finally to acknowledge the anti-Catholic nature of the Fascist regime.177 The denunciation of the Germanic myth of race did not prevent some bishops from proposing support for forms of moderate racism, more or less in the same terms in which they had chosen to interpret the Manifesto of Racist Scientists. In the homily he pronounced from the pulpit of San Marco on 6 January 1939, on the feast of Epiphany, the Patriarch of Venice Adeodato Piazza, having established the incompatibility of Catholic doctrine with the neo-pagan glorification of race, justified nonetheless “the concern of the best 174 P. Beltrame Quattrocchi, Al di sopra dei gagliardetti. L’arcivescovo Schuster, un asceta benedettino nella Milano dell’era fascista, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1985, 246–249. 175 See further A. Riccardi, “Vescovi, parroci, Azione Cattolica”, in Sulla crisi del regime fa­ scista 1938–1943. La società italiana dal “consenso” alla Resistenza, (ed.) A. Ventura, Venezia: Marsilio, 1996, 523–538, in particular 528. 176 P. Beltrame Quattrocchi, Al di sopra dei gagliardetti, 263. 177 For a reconstruction of Schuster’s intellectual and spiritual parabola in the second half of the Thirties see E. Nobili, La parabola di un’illusione. Il cardinale Schuster dalla guerra d’Etiopia alle leggi razziali, Milano: ned, 2005.

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

249

peoples to preserve the hereditary purity of their lineage”.178 It was left to the Bishop of Cremona, Monsignor Giovanni Cazzani, to be the only Italian b­ ishop to dedicate a pastoral letter to Italy’s anti-Jewish laws. Published in February 1939, it resumed and developed the content of the homily pronounced by Cazzani on 6 January, on which L’Osservatore Romano had set its official seal of approval by granting wide coverage to it in its pages.179 “The Church – declared Monsignor Cazzani – has not condemned, nor does she condemn, any political defense of the integrity and prosperity of race, and any legal precaution against an excessive and damaging Jewish influence on the life of a Nation”.180 But for any such “defense” to be compatible with Catholic doctrine, it was essential that it be exercised with “reasonable criteria and discriminating conditions”. The language used by Cazzani was vague, labile and ambiguous; instead of establishing firm contours to what was or was not licit, it showed approbation of the government’s emergency legislation. The tone of the homily and the predictable way it was exploited by the Fascist press led don Primo Mazzolari to write to his bishop from Bozzolo, which formed part of the ­diocese of Cremona, to point out to him the too harsh references to the Jews and their misdemeanors that he thought were contained in the homily, the manipulations made of such language by the press for a “diabolic” purpose, and the need to mitigate the accusations against “the messianic people” and follow the example of the Pope who had affirmed that he felt himself spiritually to be a Semite.181 Yet, in this battle, it was Farinacci who claimed the victory. In a letter to Mussolini dated 7 January he boasted of having succeeded in persuading the ­Bishop of Cremona to toe the regime’s anti-Semitic line and of having “instigated” Gemelli to make a speech “with a similar approach”.182 For the 178 “La Nobiltà del cristiano. Omelia detta dall’E.mo Sig. Card. Patriarca nella solennità dell’Epifania in Basilica S. Marco”, Bollettino diocesano del patriarcato di Venezia 24 (1939): 13–26. 179 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 227. 180 Thus in Monsignor Cazzani’s homily of 6 January 1939, quoted ibid., 226. 181 The letter of don Primo Mazzolari to Monsignor Cazzani, dated 14 January 1939, is published in Obbedientissimo in Cristo… Lettere di don Primo Mazzolari al suo vescovo 1917– 1959, (ed.) L. Bedeschi, Milano: Mondadori, 1974, 127–128. Another parish priest of the diocese of Cremona wrote instead to Monsignor Tardini at the Secretariat of State on 28 January 1939, expressing his own sadness and that of other priests for the homily of his bishop on the Jews. See G. Sale, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, 99–100, note 24. 182 For Farinacci’s letter to Mussolini, dated 7 January 1939, see D. Bardelli, “La chiesa e i cattolici nella stampa di Roberto Farinacci”, Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea 6 (2000): 534.

250

chapter 5

Franciscan rector the opportunity to do so was presented on 9 January at the University of Bologna, where he had been invited to commemorate the medieval surgeon William of Saliceto. Though the theme of the meeting did not offer any specific cue to touch on the question of anti-Semitism, Gemelli, at the end of his speech, spoke of the “tragic situation of the Jews”, rooting it in traditional anti-Judaism and justifying it as the execution of the “terrible sentence” of deicide: Tragic without doubt, and painful [is] the situation of those who cannot form part of this magnificent country, both on account of their blood and of their religion; a tragic situation in which we see once again, as so often through the centuries, the carrying out of that terrible sentence that the deicide people invoked on itself, and on account of which it is fated to wander through the world, unable to find the peace of a fatherland, while the consequences of its horrible crime persecute it everywhere and in every age.183 It cannot be excluded that Gemelli expressed himself in these terms to offset the position adopted by the Cardinal of Bologna Giovanni Battista Nasalli Rocca, who in previous days had condemned the “esoteric and ill-advised ideologies, inspired by an exaggerated and extreme nationalism”, by which “unbridgeable gulfs” are created between peoples and States.184 In any case Farinacci, on the day following Gemelli’s anti-Semitic outburst, was all too willing, in the pages of Il Regime Fascista, to vindicate the support offered by the rector of the Catholic University to the government’s anti-Semitic legislation: Father Gemelli – recalled the ras of Cremona – was a man “of undeniable 183 M. Bocci, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano. Chiesa, regime e democrazia, 502–505, quotation 505. 184 G. Miccoli, Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938, 224. Also worth pointing out here is the homily pronounced in Istanbul, in these same days (6 January 1939), by Monsignor Giuseppe Roncalli (future Pope John xxiii), at the time apostolic delegate of the Holy See in Turkey. The text of the homily has not been preserved, but the Journal d’Orient reported the news that the ecclesiastic, in a language accessible to everyone, had affirmed that the Church did not recognize the separation of mankind into different races (A. Melloni, Fra Istanbul, Atene e la guerra: la missione di A.G. Roncalli, 1935–1944, Genova: Marietti, 1992, 183). The homily met with a frosty reception in Rome, but the Italian ambassador in Istanbul, in a briefing to the Foreign Minister, downplayed the significance of this passage and its impact on the local community (A.G. Roncalli, La mia vita in Oriente. Agende del delegato apostolico, vol. 4/1, critical edition, edited and annotated by V. Martano, Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 2006, 619–620, note 17).

Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown

251

Catholic and Fascist faith” and was “destined to have a wide repercussion on the souls of Italian Catholics”.185 The admission, even partial, of racist criteria could not, however, wipe out the salvific value attributed to conversion and baptism. The question soon assumed a practical, as well as canonical, connotation, in view of the significant increase of requests for baptism by Jews after the promulgation of the racial laws.186 On this level the Catholic hierarchy and the clerical press preferred to avoid any mandatory pronouncements and to refer to the Tridentine prescriptions and the norms of Canon Law, delegating to the bishops the duty of evaluating, as prescribed by canon 744, the cases of the baptism of adults, but leaving a wide margin of discretion to parish priests. There was no lack of awareness of the self-serving character of such conversions, made in a situation of threat or personal danger. Without prejudice to the doctrinal level, which recognized in the sacrament a value ex opere operato, the clergy accepted to baptize several thousand Jews. However, it’s not easy to determine at the quantitative level how far the individual decisions of parish priests were prompted by the wish to mitigate the discrimination enforced by the new legislation, or how far they were conditioned by long-standing convictions and mentalities that had recognized the need, in some circumstances, to use coercive means for the conversion of heretics and infidels.

185 M. Bocci, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano, 506. 186 It is a phenomenon whose extent is difficult to quantify. But a rough idea of its scale and character can be gauged from the collection of letters sent to Father Tacchi Venturi by Italian Jews in 1938: R.A. Maryks, “Pouring Jewish Water into Fascist Wine”. Untold stories of (Catholic) Jews from the Archive of Mussolini’s Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2012, 45–258.

chapter 6

Punishment and Purification 6.1

Time Out

On 10 February 1939 the news story that dominated the front pages of the Italian press was the epilogue of the Spanish civil war. The victory of the nationalists and legionaries, the triumph of the “New Europe”, based on the Fascist Idea, seemed a fait accompli: once Barcelona had fallen, a ceasefire came into effect along the whole Catalan front; the red forces barricaded on the island of Minorca withdrew; Franco’s troops raised their red and gold flag at Puigcerdá on the Pyrenees, only 800 m from the French frontier.1 On the home front the regime’s official gazette (foglio di disposizioni no. 1170) decreed that it was improper to refer to Mussolini with the title of “Head” and that the term “Duce” was now obligatory. “For the Italians Mussolini is not the Head. He does not only preside over the Government of a Nation; he commands, animates and guides the Fascist People with his genius and with his Will”.2 The same dailies also reported the worsening of the Pope’s health on the previous day. Two heart attacks in the space of three hours, compounded by renal complications, were placing huge strains on the constitution of the ageing pope. The reports coming out of the Vatican referred to his prostate, kidneys, heartbeat, temperature, injections, the constant to and fro of physicians, members of the Pope’s family and of the Curia.3 The body of Pius xi was exposed as never before to the scrutiny of the media, though not at the visual level, and not so much as his successor Pius xii would be during his death agony. From the coverage of the Pope’s illness in the press it could also be inferred that he was battling so strenuously to hold onto life, because he had no intention of renouncing participation in the celebrations to mark the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pacts; that he was preparing “an important speech” to be pronounced to the cardinals and episcopate on that occasion; and that he had been working uninterruptedly on its text over the last few days. During the night his conditions worsened; the Pontiff died at five o’clock in the morning on 10 February. At his bedside – reported the papers on the following day – were Pacelli, Tardini, Montini, his nephew Franco Ratti, his affectionate secretary Carlo Confalonieri, Cardinal Camillo Caccia-Dominioni, 1 “I nazionali ai Pirenei – Minorca occupata”, La Stampa (10 February 1939). 2 Duce non capo, ibid. 3 Il papa aggravato, ibid. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_008

Punishment And Purification

253

governor of Vatican City State, two physicians, two nurses, and a few others.4 But it is also true that “the pope dies alone”.5 During the last days of his life he had written by hand the speech he intended to dedicate to the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pacts, to which he attributed enormous importance in the Church’s relations with Fascism – just as he had done in the speech he had pronounced to the Sacred College at Christmas,6 when he had spoken of his sadness on account of the harassment suffered by Catholic Action in many Italian cities, lamented the injury inflicted on the Concordat by the unilateral intervention of the State on marriages, recalled the scandal of the “apotheosis” prepared in Rome for a “cross that was the enemy of the Cross of Christ” (i.e. the swastika) and, with a clear reference to the totalitarian offensive of the regime, defined as “inhumane whatever is anti-Christian”: “whether it concern the common dignity of the human race, or the dignity, freedom and integrity of the individual to whom society is destined”.7 That many fears circulated in Italo-Vatican diplomatic circles about what Pius xi planned to say at the ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pacts transpires from the Diaries of Galeazzo Ciano, who already on 1st February 1939 had written: I was visited by Pignatti, and by the Nuncio. The atmosphere for the celebration of the tenth anniversary is becoming murky; the Duce has no intention of answering the Pope’s letter, nor of granting the changes in the law concerning mixed marriages. I have charged Pignatti to find out at the Vatican, because we must be sure to avoid sharp statements by the Pope when he speaks to the bishops if we are to accept invitations to St. Peter.8 The Italian ambassador to the Holy See spoke with Pacelli about the matter on 8 February: he explained that, if there were any chance of the Pontiff making a speech with allusions unfavorable to the Italian government, and if such a speech were then to be made public, neither Mussolini nor the King would take part in the ceremony in St. Peter’s.9 The situation, however, just at this moment, escaped from Pacelli’s ability to control it. Pius xi died. A week later, once the Secretary of State had assumed the interim office of Camerlengo 4 For an “insider’s view” of the Pope’s suite of rooms in the Vatican Palace in the last days of his life see the account of his private secretary C. Confalonieri, Pio xi visto da vicino, 231–242. 5 E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 220. 6 Thus Tardini in a note dated 8 February 1939, quoted ibid., 206. 7 Discorsi di Pio xi, vol. 3, 869–872. 8 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 1st February 1939, 246. 9 E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 210.

254

chapter 6

of the Holy Roman Church, with the task of presiding over the sede vacante, things took a different turn. On 15 February Pacelli ordered that all the material relating to Pius xi’s last speech, including the proofs and the metal type in which the text had already been set at the printing works, be destroyed.10 That speech, like the encyclical on the unity of the human race, would never be published. On 6 February 1959, thirty years after the Conciliation, John xxiii would cite some passages from it in his letter to the Italian bishops,11 but Pacelli himself thought it better never to make any reference to it. A study of the manuscript, only rediscovered in recent times in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano,12 shows that the most explicit passage on Fascism is the one that describes the regime as a center that spies on and distorts the words of the Pope, of the bishops and of the Catholic press. There is nothing explosive in it: no ultimatum to the government, no condemnation of the Concordat. But just for this reason Pacelli’s decision to suppress it seems even more significant than his wish totally to change the Vatican’s approach in its relations with the regime, avoid any possible grounds for friction, and send clear signals of détente. Mussolini may have pretended indifference to the death of Pius xi and the outcome of the Conclave.13 Yet he was far from indifferent about the Pope’s last hand-written document and was anxious to get precise information on its circulation. This is shown once again by the Diaries of Galeazzo Ciano, who in his entry for 12 February notes: In some American circles it is rumored that the Camerlengo has a document written by the Pope. The Duce wishes Pignatti to find out, and, if it true, to try to get a copy of the document.14 10 11

12 13

14

Ibid., 211ff. This was mentioned already by Angelo Martini in his Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, 249. The “Lettera di S.S. Giovanni xxiii all’episcopato d’Italia (6 febbraio 1959)”, in La Civiltà Cattolica 110/1 (1959): 337–343. Complete text of the speech in E. Fattorini, Pio xi, Hitler e Mussolini, 240–244. “The Pope is dead – noted Ciano in his diaries on 10 February –. The news leaves the Duce completely indifferent. During my personal report to him he mentioned the death only in order to inform me that this evening he will postpone the meeting of the Grand Council out of respect to the memory of the Pope, and also because the public is too much concerned about the mourning to be preoccupied with scholastic reform”. On the following day, during a telephone conversation, Mussolini is reported to have declared his indifference to the outcome of the Conclave: “I called him in order to report what Pignatti had said: the Holy See was expecting a gesture of respect from him at the bier of the Pope, and he answered that it was too late: that he ‘is not interested at all in the conclave. If the Pope is an Italian, all right; if he is a foreigner, all right just the same’”. G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, respectively entry for 10 February 1939, 250, and entry for 11 February 1939, 251–252. Ibid., entry for 12 February 1939, 251–252.

Punishment And Purification

255

The possibilities of a fresh approach in the Vatican were quickly grasped by government circles. As the French ambassador to the Holy See Charles-Roux pointed out, the unanimity of the Fascist press in praising the merits of the late Pope was too surprising as not to have been induced, at least in part, by an “official order”.15 The regime’s posthumous attention was propagandistic; it was aimed to create, posthumously, an image of Pius xi shaped to its own desires. But it was also prompted by the wish to demonstrate that relations between Italy and the Vatican were characterized by mutual collaboration and perfectly enshrined in the Lateran Pacts.16 The rapid election of Pacelli to the throne of Peter on 2 March 1939 accelerated this process. Mussolini, who was at Terminillo on the day when white smoke rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, was happy about the result of the Conclave: so much so that he now considered superfluous the services of the now “devalued” Tacchi Venturi.17 What especially reassured the government were the improvements, of which the first signals began to be seen shortly after Pacelli became Pope, in the ­relations between the Holy See and the Third Reich, considered a necessary premise for any détente with Fascist Italy. Writing from London for the Belgian paper La Terre Wallonne on 8 March 1939, don Luigi Sturzo posed the question: “Will Pius xii tone down the position taken by his predecessor on nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism?”18 On the theoretical level he had no doubt: “There cannot be any conciliation between a pagan and a Christian conception of life”.19 But on the practical level the founder of the Partito Popolare was not so sure; he expected “some pause”.20 6.2

At Mussolini’s Side to Prevent the War

The mounting threat of war accentuated the efforts of the new Pope Pius xii to re-establish a climate of entente with the Italian government. At the level of diplomatic relations the contacts with Rome seemed also the privileged way to prevent the conflict or at least reduce the areas involved in it, in view of 15

See further I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1988, 27. 16 Ibid., 28–29. 17 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 3 March 1939, 259; the adjective used to describe the now dispensable Tacchi Venturi was “smonetizzato”. 18 Reprinted in L. Sturzo, Scritti storico-politici (1926–1949), (ed.) L. Brunelli, Roma: Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1984, 191–193, quotation 191. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 192.

256

chapter 6

­Italo-German relations.21 In response to the crisis that was leading Europe to a new war, Pius xii tried to adopt a line similar to that taken by Benedict xv during the First World War. In other words, he aimed to place the Holy See in a position of equidistance between the contending sides and thus to promote a work of mediation. The appeals for peace made by Pius xii from April onwards were pressing.22 Following the signing of the non-aggression pact between Russia and Nazi Germany, the Pope exhorted the governments, in an address broadcast by Vatican Radio on 24 August 1939, to settle their differences not by force of arms but by that of reason and negotiation: “Nothing is lost with peace. Everything may be lost with war”.23 On 31 August he tried once again, in extremis, to stop the escalation of the crisis by sending a message to the ambassadors of Germany, Poland, Britain, France, and Italy inviting their governments to find a solution to the question of Danzig and urging them to promote an international conference aimed at a settlement of the conflict between Germany and Poland and a revision of the Versailles Treaty.24 Pius xii had also worked to promote a possible settlement between Germany and Poland in previous weeks, through Father Tacchi Venturi, to persuade Mussolini to rein back Hitler. He had also actively intervened with the Polish government, through the apostolic nuncio, suggesting, that it step back from the brink, and avert disaster, by accepting in substance the German demands: a sacrifice judged indispensable not only for the preservation of peace, but for the very survival of Poland as a nation state. It could be that Pius xii also hoped to reach a modus vivendi with the Third Reich as regards the ever more difficult situation of Catholics in Germany: he was especially impelled by his conviction that it was his pastoral duty to intervene in this direction. The traditional effort of the Holy See to maintain at all costs an impartial position was also expressed by the consolidation of her relations with the American administration. Though Vatican diplomacy did not back Roosevelt’s appeal for peace to Hitler and Mussolini, because the invitation to abstain for ten years from any kind of aggression against the thirty States specifically ­listed in the appeal seemed too partial, aimed only at the Axis powers, the steps taken by Pacelli in previous years to promote a resumption of diplomatic 21 22 23

24

C. Kent, “A Tale of Two Popes: Pius xi, Pius xii and the Rome-Berlin Axis”, Journal of C ­ ontemporary History 23 (1988): 589–608. See G. Miccoli, I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio xii, 16ff. “Nothing is lost with peace. Everything may be lost with war. May men try once again to understand each other. May they resume negotiations. Negotiating with good will and with respect for reciprocal rights, they will acknowledge that an honourable success is never precluded from sincere and active negotiations”. Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 1, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 305–307. G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 17–19.

Punishment And Purification

257

relations with Washington did lead to some concrete results. On 19 March 1939 the American ambassador in London Joseph Kennedy, father of future President John Fitzgerald, took part, with all his numerous family, in the enthronement of Pius xii. He did so not in a private capacity, but in his role as special representative of the usa: he was in fact the first diplomat in history to officially represent the usa in a ceremony of this kind.25 Two months later Pius xii appointed Monsignor Francis Spellman (who had forged a lifelong friendship with Pacelli when the latter was serving as apostolic nuncio in Germany) as Archbishop of New York and by the end of the year succeeded in negotiating with the American administration the designation of a personal representative of the us President accredited to the Holy See, an agreement officialized by Roosevelt on 23 December 1939. The man appointed to the post was Myron Charles Taylor. Episcopalian in faith, his role would prove invaluable after Pearl Harbor and the closing of the American Embassy in Rome.26 The invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939 confronted the Vatican with a conflict of a new kind: it was no longer a war of nations in the traditional sense, based on a reaffirmation of national prestige and power. At stake were no ­longer principles of nationality, prerogative or border disputes, but the elimination and subjection of the adversary with all the mass destructive means possible: Poland was to be not just defeated, but destroyed. The Holy See seemed to have difficulty in recognizing this fact and could not easily be weaned from a more limited and traditional view of the war taking place. Thus, when the ambassadors of France and Great Britain asked the Pope for a condemnation of the German aggression, his reply was no. The rejection was influenced by the criterion of impartiality adopted ever since the start of Pacelli’s pontificate, but there is no doubt that it was also prompted by the wish not to irritate the Italian government with which the Holy See now enjoyed sound relations. And it was on these relations it believed it could count, also with a view to re-establishing peace.27 With the outbreak of war the interventions of Pius xii and his appeals for peace were concentrated also on the reaffirmation of the ethical criteria ­necessary for peaceful co-existence both in civil society and in international relations. In his encyclical “on the unity of human society” Summi pontificatus of 20 October 1939, the Pope disavowed the idea of the totalitarian State. 25 26

27

L. Castagna, A Bridge Across the Ocean, 160. On the importance of the Vatican City State-New York-Washington axis, based on the great political influence of Monsignor Spellman, see J.F. Pollard, “Il Vaticano e la politica estera italiana”, in La politica estera italiana, (eds.) R.J.B. Bosworth and S. Romano, Bologna: il Mulino, 1991, 197–230, in particular 223ff. O. Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Chap. 4.

258

chapter 6

He called it “an error pernicious to the well-being of the nations and to the prosperity of that great society which gathers together and embraces within its confines all races. It is the error contained in those ideas which do not hesitate to divorce civil authority from every kind of dependence upon the Supreme Being”. Pius xii then continued: To consider the State as something ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated and directed, cannot fail to harm the true and lasting prosperity of nations. This can happen either when unrestrained dominion comes to be conferred on the State as having a mandate from the nation, people, or even a social order, or when the State arrogates such dominion to itself as absolute master, despotically, without any mandate whatsoever.28 As for the origins of the present conflict, Pius xii re-proposed the intransigent theses familiar in the teachings of his predecessors. He thus identified the root cause of war in the progressive alienation of peoples from the unity of doctrine, faith, customs and morals of which the Catholic Church was the pledge and the throne of Peter the guardian: Perhaps – God grant it – one may hope that this hour of maximum need may bring a change of outlook and sentiment to those many who, till now, have walked with blind faith along the path of popular modern errors unconscious of the treacherous and insecure ground on which they trod. Perhaps the many who have not grasped the importance of the educational and pastoral mission of the Church will now understand better her warnings, which they ignored in the false security of the past. No more striking apologia for Christianity could be found than the troubles of the present. From the immense vortex of errors and anti-Christian movements there has come forth a crop of such poignant disasters as to constitute a condemnation, whose effectiveness surpasses any merely theoretical refutation.29 The interpretation that identified the raison d’être for war in the apostasy of modern society, as propounded in this first solemn encyclical of the new Pope, would recur in his subsequent doctrinal pronouncements and was explicitly 28 Pius xii, Summi pontificatus, nos. 52 and 60. English translation of the encyclical downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). 29 Pius xii, Summi pontificatus, no. 25.

Punishment And Purification

259

explained in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica.30 To this evaluation was added the presentation of the present conflict as divine punishment, necessary expiation of the rejection of Christian principles in social life.31 The meta-historical view of the war, the determination to stand aloof from it, the refusal to enter into the interests at stake or the contents of a possible settlement, led to an indirect judgement of the conflict in which an essential balance between the rights and wrongs of the two contending sides was implicitly recognized.32 It was not until 2 June 1943 that Pius xii publicly recognized “the tragic fate of the Polish people […] surrounded by powerful Nations”, in a speech to the Sacred College. Even then, however, the Pope scrupulously refrained from apportioning blame or pointing his finger at those responsible for the war. Instead he referred vaguely “to the vicissitudes and turmoil of a cyclonic drama of war”.33 Yet news of Nazi atrocities in Poland, the blanket aerial bombardment of inhabited centers, the arrests and deportations, the massacres, had long been disseminated in the neutral and allied press. Some data on this score had also been furnished to the Vatican directly on 21 January 1940 by the Polish government in exile at Angers, to which the Holy See had accredited a temporary chargé d’affaires. Ten days later the German governor of the part of Poland that had not been annexed to the Reich announced that a million Jews had been concentrated in the General Government.34 Yet the question of whether it was appropriate, or wise, or counter-­ productive, publicly to denounce the atrocities and the methods of German occupation had quickly been posed to the Pope and his closest aides. What decision the Vatican took, however anguished, was clear. In the Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, the description of the crimes committed by the Germans in their advance was filtered by a circumspect and formal prose.35 Quite different in tone were the judgements expressed on the Russian invasion of Poland and the subsequent Soviet attack on Finland: the Holy See now threw caution to the wind, abandoned all impartiality, to denounce the new threat of Communism and Soviet imperialism. It was of this war, and not that unleashed by Nazism, that L’Osservatore Romano grasped the new, ideological and total character, openly propounded since 2 December 1939: 30 D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 149ff. 31 Ibid. 32 G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 21. 33 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 5, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 73–80. 34 G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 40. 35 Ibid., 55–56.

260

chapter 6

One would fall into a grave and dangerous error if one were to consider the current war against Finland as one of the many wars provoked by border disputes, or by threats to security. The Soviet press has given a messianic character to all the Russian offensives in recent months […]. The war between peoples is thus placed in the context of the class struggle, and the advance of Soviet imperialism has been transmuted into the expansion of the Communist system.36 The description and comments on the Russian occupation of Finland are given a place of decided emphasis in the Vatican daily, contrasting with the sober and incomplete descriptions of the areas occupied by the Germans. Of course, the Holy See’s concerns about any expansion of Soviet Russia are no mystery. The denunciation of and the threat represented by the thought and work of the “enemies of God” had been indicated by Pius xii as one of the central tasks of his own apostolate. It was a theme to which he recurred on many occasions.37 Only a few weeks after the solemn inauguration of his pontificate, he had, on 16 April 1939, hailed the victory of the nationalists under General Franco over the Republican government in Spain in a radiomessage, in which he had expressed his own unreserved recognition of the “most noble Christian sentiments securely testified by the Head of State and his many collaborators, with the legal protection granted to the supreme religious and social interests, in conformity with the teachings of the Apostolic See”.38 The “supreme challenge” orchestrated by the “enemies of Jesus Christ” had failed – added the Pontiff – and “the designs of Providence” had once again been manifested over the “nation, chosen by God as principal tool of the evangelization of the New World and as inexpugnable bastion of the Catholic faith”.39 With the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland and the pressure on the other bordering States, the sense of danger assumed even more catastrophic contours, such as to make the Holy See consider as an urgent priority the need to confront the imminent danger by trying to eliminate the contrasts in the West and downplay the magnitude of the Nazi threat. The forty million German Catholics, on the other hand, and more widely the age-old cultural traditions of Germany, seemed to the Pope both a guarantee and a hope for reform and moderation: a hope based not just on wishful thinking, but on the direct and 36 37 38

“Acta diurna”, L’Osservatore Romano (2 December 1939). See further G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 30ff. Radiomessage of His Holiness Pius xii to the Catholics of Spain, 16 April 1939: Italian text downloadable from the Vatican website (www.vatican.va). 39 Ibid.

Punishment And Purification

261

intimate knowledge of German society that Pacelli had acquired during his years as apostolic nuncio in Munich. Not even news stories on the atrocities committed by the Nazis were enough to wipe out the Pope’s admiration of that compact and disciplined society, respectful of authority and well organized: qualities that seemed to recall the teachings and recommendations of Catholic pastoral theology. This too was the filter through which the violent reality of the war was passed, stripped, even if only temporarily, of its unacceptable character.40 6.3

Ongoing ‘Non-belligerence’

In the months following the outbreak of war, Pius xii strove to ensure that Italy would remain outside the conflict. He did so with the hope that the “nonbelligerence” declared by Mussolini would represent a favorable condition for playing a role of mediation between the belligerents. The political will to exploit the opportunities offered to Rome to safeguard the efforts to secure peace on the international scene had induced the Pope and his senior aides to lower their guard on the Catholic Action front by accepting, between ­September 1939 and April 1940, the Italian government’s request to eliminate the use of the association’s insignia, i.e. its visible identity, in ceremonies of a political character.41 From the regime’s point of view, the move was a demonstration that forces other from those headed by the Fascist Party could not exist in the country, but it is clear that the elimination of the insignia of Catholic Action did not bring with it the end of the influence that the association was able to exert on large sectors of the Italian population. In his effort to try to keep Italy outside the war, Pius xii sought the support of the usa which, as we have seen, had officialized the appointment of Myron Taylor with the rank of extraordinary ambassador to the Holy See on 23 December 1939.42 In his address to the Sacred College on 24 December 1939 Pius xii, after the proposal for a Christmas truce between the belligerents 40 41

42

G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 43–44. M. Casella, “Il conflitto tra Stato e Chiesa del 1939–1940 sui distintivi d’Azione cattolica nella documentazione dell’Archivio storico diplomatico del Ministro degli Affari esteri”, in Democrazia e coscienza religiosa nella storia del Novecento. Studi in onore di Francesco Malgeri, (eds.) A.D’Angelo, P. Trionfini, R.P. Violi, Roma: Ave, 2010, 55–81. On the mission of Myron Taylor in the Vatican see G.Q. Flynn, “Franklin Roosevelt and the Vatican: The Myron Taylor Appointment”, The Catholic Historical Review 58 (1972): 171–194, and E. Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti 1939–1952 (dalle carte di Myron C. Taylor), Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1978, 9–29.

262

chapter 6

made by the Holy See had fallen on deaf ears in previous days, spelt out a fivepoint plan for a “just and honorable” peace: right to life and independence of all nations (“large and small, powerful and weak”); mutually agreed and progressive disarmament; international institutions aimed at underwriting the treaties between States, devoid of the shortcomings of those of the past; attention to the demands of nations and ethnic minorities and willingness to reach agreement on treaty reform; and recognition of the “sacred and inalienable forms of divine law” as the foundation of human laws and statutes.43 At the end of his address Pius xii read out the telegram received that morning from the apostolic delegation in Washington, containing the news of the appointment of Myron Taylor, and he concluded: It’s a Christmas announcement that we could not be more pleased to receive, since it represents, on the part of the distinguished Head of so great and powerful a Nation, a valid and promising contribution to our pleas, both for the achievement of a just and honorable peace, and for a more effective and wide-ranging work aimed at alleviating the sufferings of the victims of war. Therefore we wish to express here our felicitations and gratitude for this noble and generous act of President Roosevelt.44 Five days later, on 28 December 1939, Pius xii went to the Palazzo Quirinale to repay the visit to the Vatican by the sovereigns of Italy on 21 December. From London to Paris, from Berlin to Madrid, from Buenos Aires to Cairo, the event had a global reverberation: not only because Pius xii was the first Pope to return to the Quirinal since 1870, but also because a strong political significance was attributed to the visit, which took place just a few days after the official announcement of the equally historic rapprochement between the Holy See and the White House. In his brief address the Pope declared, as if it were a selfevident truth, that the Vatican and the Quirinal were “united” by the common bond of peace: The Vatican and the Quirinal, which the Tiber divides, are reunited by the bond of peace with the memory of our Fathers and Ancestors. The currents of the Tiber have swept away and buried in the whirlpools of 43 44

Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 1, 435–445. Ibid. Roosevelt’s letter to Pius xii dated 23 December 1939, in which he told the Pontiff that “it would give me great satisfaction to send to You my personal representative in order that our parallel endeavors for peace and the alleviation of suffering may be assisted”, can be found in Wartime Correspondence between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius xii, (ed.) M.C. Taylor, New York: Macmillan, 1947, 17–19.

Punishment And Purification

263

the Tyrrhenian the murky waves of the past, and made its banks flourish anew with olive branches. Today, in this magnificent hall, for the first time after decades, the hand of a Roman Pontiff is raised in blessing as a sign of peace, while Italy watches and exults; the Catholic world watches and exults, and the two Princes of the Apostles, who sit motionless at the entrance to this Palace, seem also to exult.45 The Italian press gave a lot of coverage and emphasis to the event, but downplayed its significance, considering it but the culmination of the process of collaboration with the regime that had begun with the Lateran Pacts. Yet it recognized its value in terms of a shared aspiration for peace, common – it was claimed – both to Italy and the Holy See. The real objective of the exchange of visits – to bring into the open and forge together those forces in Italy that were opposed to the war – was camouflaged by the usual rhetorical clichés, of a kind by now familiar in Fascist propaganda, on the themes of romanitas, fated destiny, and the bulwark against Bolshevism.46 When, in the second half of April 1940, rumors of an imminent Italian intervention in the war were becoming ever more insistent, contacts were stepped up between Pius xii and Roosevelt to try to persuade Mussolini to maintain his non-belligerence.47 The “parallel action” for peace – as it was called by Taylor on 19 April during a meeting with Cardinal Maglione48 – was expressed in the decision to proceed to the simultaneous sending of a message to Mussolini both by the Pope and by the American President. The first to act was Pius xii on 24 April. Faced by the “fears of wider conflict”, the Pontiff thought it “opportune” to address himself directly to the head of the government: We know, in fact, – he wrote – having attentively followed and recommended them to God, the noble efforts with which you wished first to prevent, and then to circumscribe the war; and though sad that success did not entirely smile upon your endeavors, we were delighted that you too were recognized for the noble merit of having contained the scourge within defined frontiers. Yet the fact is that the fire of war has burst out and is now ever more active in its tragic development, justifying our fears, since the dangers of war seem to be drawing ever closer and becoming ever more menacing for those peoples still immune from them. While not doubting your persevering work on the line that you prescribed to 45 46 47 48

Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 1, 455–456. I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 121ff. E. Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti, 114–115. Ibid., Taylor to Roosevelt, 19 April 1940, 114.

264

chapter 6

yourself, we supplicate the Lord to assist you at this time of such gravity for the peoples and such great responsibility for the person who holds the reins of government. And in accordance with the universal paternity that is peculiar to our office, we express from the depths of our heart the ardent wish, that Europe be spared more extensive destruction and more numerous bereavements, thanks to your initiatives, your firmness of purpose and your spirit as an Italian; and, in particular, that our and your beloved country be spared so grave a calamity.49 Though feeling some doubts about the usefulness of an American initiative, President Roosevelt sent Mussolini a message dated 29 April and delivered to the head of government on 1st May. But the result of both these initiatives was decidedly negative. According to Ciano, the papal document met with a “skeptical, cold, and sarcastic” reception from the head of the government.50 From the reply he sent to Pius xii on 30 April it is quite clear that the government’s decision to “enter the field” at Germany’s side had already been taken and that Mussolini was not willing to accept moral lessons from the Pope on matters of war.51 Two weeks later, the telegrams sent by the Pope to the sovereigns of Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg after the German aggression, in which the involvement of neutral countries in the war was deplored, though without using the term “invasion”, aroused the protests of the Italian government, which complained of the matter to the Secretariat of State through the new ambassador to the Holy See Dino Alfieri. Simultaneously, militant Fascists took to the streets and boycotted with arson attacks, seizures and physical assaults the distribution of L’Osservatore Romano, which had published the telegrams.52 As the days passed the situation gradually returned to normality, but Italy’s entry into the war on 10 June 1940 marked the end of the Vatican’s design, long cultivated by Pius xii, to stop or at least circumscribe the conflict through ItaloVatican diplomatic channels. 6.4 Oscillations On 4 September 1940, almost three months after Italy’s entry into the war, Pius xii gave a long speech to the diocesan directors of Catholic Action. 49 Pius xii to Mussolini, 24 April 1940, in adss, vol. 1, document no. 284, 425–426. 50 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 28 April 1940, 422. 51 Mussolini to Pius xii, 30 April 1940, in adss, vol. 1, document no. 290, 432–433. 52 I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 147–150.

Punishment And Purification

265

The ­occasion on which it was made determined its particular importance.53 For, together with the boards of directors of the various branches of the association, the most authoritative members of the Sacred College, a hundred of so bishops and numerous representatives from all over Italy had gathered in Rome to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Catholic youth movement Gioventù cattolica. It was clear, therefore, that the Pope would address his remarks to the Italian Church as a whole. His speech was naturally focused on Catholic Action, the new statutes of which had been promulgated in June 1940. Pius xii underlined the essential aspect of the organization, and its full subordination to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Pope then touched on the problem of relations with the political power, and reaffirmed the traditional principle of the Church’s submission to the prescriptions of the civil authority. With a clear reference to the war then engulfing Europe, he then recalled the duty of Catholics to love their country, even if it meant making the supreme sacrifice if required by “the legitimate good of the country”: The members of Catholic Action, which is not, nor does it wish to be, a party association, but an elite body of religious example and fervor, shall not fail to demonstrate they are not only the most fervent Christians, but also perfect citizens, not alien to the noble tasks of national and social life, lovers of their country and ready to lay down their life for it, whenever the legitimate good of the country should require this supreme sacrifice.54 The contrary, but basically resigned, attitude shown by the Holy See to Italy’s involvement in the war55 was received by Italian Catholicism as a directive of extreme prudence, in which distinctions and nuances were not lacking.56 To furnish Catholic public opinion with more precise guidelines on how to react to the conflict, the first essential lines had been formulated by one of the leading experts of La Civiltà Cattolica on questions of social doctrine, the Jesuit Angelo Brucculeri,57 in his vade mecum on the morality of war, published 53 54 55 56

57

D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 155–156. Discorsi e radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 2, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 216–230, quotation 223–224. R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, 819. For Catholic reactions to the Fascist war, see R. Moro, “I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista”, in La cultura della pace dalla Resistenza al Patto Atlantico, (eds.) M. Pacetti, M. Papini, M. Saracinelli, Bologna: Il lavoro editoriale, 1988, 84. See G. Pignatelli, “Brucculeri, Angelo”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 34, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1988, 532–535.

266

chapter 6

in July 1940; it went through several reprints during the war.58 A large part of the booklet was dedicated to a refutation of the antithetical theories on war: those that considered it always necessary, and those that rejected any legitimacy in war. The Jesuit however mainly dedicated his attention to challenging the former, repudiating, with implications apparently hostile to the Axis, the legitimacy of war on the basis of its biological, social and demographic premises. For the Catholic, however, war – said Brucculeri – could be reconciled with ethical norms: not only as legitimate defense against an aggression, but also as redress for an injustice suffered. Though the booklet was written prior to the Italian intervention, Mussolini’s war could perhaps fall into this latter category. So, to this extent, a war of aggression could be justified as legitimate. But the position taken by Brucculeri was too weak to inflame the ideal warmongering Italy on which the Duce had invested so much. The classic principle of obedience to the decisions of the political authority, recalled at the end of the pamphlet, was also too weak to inspire the total mobilization called for by Mussolini for the war now underway. Some weeks later Brucculeri made some adjustments to his analysis in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica. He presented as a hoped-for outcome of the war the realization in Europe of the “new order” called for by Mussolini, and summed up by the Jesuit in a romanitas imbued with the values of the Catholic tradition.59 In the spring of 1940, when an Italian intervention in the war was already being forecast, two journalists, Raimondo Manzini of L’Avvenire d’Italia in Bologna and don Mario Busti of Italia in Milan, had asked Father Gemelli for guidance on ideas to put to their readers on the doctrinal and moral problems that the war would pose to the Christian conscience.60 In agreement with the ­Vatican, some meetings had been held at the Catholic University in Milan in which professors and assistants variously attached to the university had taken part. A leading role among them was played by don Carlo Colombo, author of the study on war and peace in Christian thought, published in the journals Scuola cattolica and the Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica soon after Italy’s entry into the war.61 The authoritative theologian devoted his attention to some objections raised, a few years previously, about the traditional Catholic doctrine of the just war. He referred in particular to the Freiburg Declaration, a document 58 59 60 61

A. Brucculeri, Moralità della guerra, Roma: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1940. A. Brucculeri, “Verso l’ordine nuovo”, La Civiltà Cattolica, 91/3 (1940): 401–413. Largo Gemelli, 1. Studenti, docenti e amici raccontano l’Università Cattolica, (ed.) E. Preziosi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2002, 207–208. C. Colombo, “Guerra e pace nel pensiero cristiano”, La Scuola cattolica 68 (1940): 320–340, and Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica (July 1940): 257–273.

Punishment And Purification

267

signed in October 1931 by some prestigious French and German theologians; it was published in the Dominican review Les documents de la Vie intellectuelle in February 1932 and in Italy in the Scuola cattolica.62 The Declaration had since then helped to promote a debate on the morality of war. It had proposed a new perspective with two main focuses: the encouragement of a more decisive commitment of Catholics to the League of Nations; and the repudiation of the right to the “just war” in view of the destructive power reached by modern armaments. Colombo now pointed out that one of the presuppositions on which this document was based had since been overturned by events: the existence of an effective international organization. But it was especially the inclusion of the legitimate “aspiration of the peoples” to “expansion” among the just causes of war that furnished a clear support to the Italian positions, due to its approximation to themes of Fascist propaganda. A little book with a substantially different approach had appeared in 1940: Perché ci sono le guerre: sono esse evitabili? [Why are there wars: are they avoidable?], written by a Dominican friar from Turin, Filippo Robotti,63 who had already expressed himself in favor of Fascist imperialism at the time of the war in Ethiopia.64 On the basis of the same doctrinal platform (equidistance of the Church between bellicosity and pacifism) Robotti justified the new war of the Axis in the light of Catholic doctrine.65 The new European order based on the Italo-German hegemony would, he argued, render justice to a “sad past” dominated by the “sinister interests” of the plutocratic nations: “the poor nations – wrote Robotti – if they cannot obtain justice with peaceful means, have the right to try to obtain it with more energetic means such as arms: for it is intolerable that there should be nations that are bursting with indigestion and others dying of hunger”. With an intellectual legerdemain to say the least grotesque, Robotti controverted those evaluations that had rejected recourse to war due to the destructive potential of modern armaments and that had prompted a series of appeals and reflections, also in pontifical documents, on the legitimacy of modern warfare in light of the new relation between ends 62

63 64 65

The signatories were the French Albert Valensin, Joseph Delos, Bruno de Solages, and the Germans Joseph Mayer, Constantin Noppel, Franz Keller, and Franziskus M. Stratmann. On the Freiburg Declaration and its reverberations in Europe see D. Menozzi, “Chiesa cattolica, pace e guerra tra gli anni Venti e gli anni Trenta”, in Culture e libertà. Studi di storia in onore di Roberto Vivarelli, (eds.) D. Menozzi, M. Moretti and R. Pertici, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2006, 335–370. F. Robotti, Perché ci sono le guerre: sono esse evitabili? Torino: Lice, 1940. See L. Ceci, Il papa non deve parlare, 128. R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 108–109.

268

chapter 6

and means:66 Thus the lethal effects of modern aviation were presented by Robotti as a providential “gift” to the poor nations, given the impossibility for them to procure the powerful naval fleets of the rich nations. In a similar way, albeit with different arguments, the Catholic doctrine of the just war was manipulated and perverted to support its coincidence with the aims of the Axis by such openly philo-fascist thinkers as Gino Sottochiesa and don Tullio Calcagno, typical exponent of the clergy in the Battle for Grain.67 The nexus between Catholicism and war was in particular glorified by Giovanni Papini in his booklet Italia mia (1939), a veritable paean to the messianic role of Fascist Italy: it’s no accident that the regime made so strenuous an effort to disseminate it in thousands of copies, especially among the young. Already in his review Frontespizio, the Florentine intellectual had, following the German attack on Poland, declared his total support for the war, castigating (under the motto “less theory, more fire”) as useless layabouts those Catholics who pretended to justify it through doctrinal disquisitions.68 Yet in the spring of 1941 Papini himself furnished a Christian justification for the war in the chapter Questa guerra, inserted in a new edition of Italia mia, a chapter in which he hailed the “new order” which was destined to triumph in Europe with the Italian and German victories and which would spell the dissolution of the modernity that had overturned the societas christiana.69 The debate on the just war was one that the youth of fuci and the Catholic Graduates’ Movement were reluctant to enter. Chastened by the departure of many of their members for the front, they preferred instead to develop the ethical and religious aspects of the Christian experience of war, the meaning of suffering, the difficulties of those who remained at home, and the hardships of the country in wartime. At the level of reflection, the two intellectual ­movements of Catholic Action, under the leadership of Aldo Moro and Giulio Andreotti for the male and of Bruna Carazzolo and Bianca Penco for the female component, were the only component of organized Catholicism to offer a particular forum for voices critical of the war such as La Pira and ­Mazzolari: these were the first attempts to think of a possible post-war scenario and ­provide a 66 67 68 69

D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 36ff. R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 109–110. G. Papini, “Quattro sguardi sulla Guerra”, Il Frontespizio (September 1939), in Idem, Politica e civiltà, Milano: A. Mondadori, 1963, 1168–1181, quotation 1181. On this book of Giovanni Papini see R. Vivarelli, Storia e storiografia. Approssimazioni per lo studio dell’età contemporanea, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004, 203–216, and A. Scarantino, “Il ‘ritorno alle armi’ di Giovanni Papini tra cattolicesimo e fascismo: l’amicizia intellettuale con Giuseppe De Luca negli anni Trenta”, Mondo contemporaneo 4 (2008): 67–128, in particular 119–128.

Punishment And Purification

269

cultural alternative, albeit a minority one, for the expression of the disaffection felt by part of the Catholic world in their attitude to the regime. It was in these circles, and especially among the youth of fuci, that some began to look to don Primo Mazzolari as a source of inspiration. His book Tempo di credere ended up under the axe of Fascist censorship in 1941; it was accused of not being in conformity with the spirit of martial Italy.70 The parish priest of Bozzolo, a few years previously, had also suffered another kind of censorship, that of the Holy Office, which had judged “erroneous” his book La più bella avventura (1934) and had ordered its withdrawal from the book trade, without ever explaining the reasons for this to the author.71 Obediently, don Primo had then submitted to the Holy Roman Church, but he reacted ­differently to the attempted suppression of his book by the regime. Tempo di credere, which implicitly deprecated the war and emphasized instead the importance of charity and hospitality, continued to circulate in clandestine form and M ­ azzolari never stopped writing pages in which the rejection of war, from a Christian point of view, was increasingly clear. To respond to the questions put to him by a junior air-force officer, Giancarlo Dupuis, who had sent him a letter full of doubts about the position of the Catholic Church on the war in which Italy was now involved,72 Mazzolari wrote his Risposta ad un aviatore [Reply to an Aviator], dated 10 August 1941, a typescript of which he had circulated among his friends.73 The Lombard parish priest based his arguments on the traditional distinction between just war and unjust war, but suggested that the duty to obey the constituted authorities could not be unlimited; he thus considered legitimate “the right to rebel” in the case of a State that had betrayed its own essential purpose, namely the common good: I can accept obedience [to authority] – wrote the priest – so long as it is participation not in evil but in suffering, not ignoring at the same time ­every means to enlighten public opinion on the common error or the mistaken acquiescence. And I have the right to rebel against and disobey 70 71

72 73

P. Mazzolari, Tempo di credere (Brescia: Gatti, 1941), (ed.) M. Maraviglia, B ­ ologna: edb, 2010. On the attempted suppression of don Mazzolari’s book see La più bella avventura e le sue “disavventure” 50 anni dopo, (eds.) F. Molinari and the Fondazione don Primo Mazzolari in Bozzolo, supplement of the Notiziario Mazzolariano 3 (1984). G. Vecchio, Lombardia 1940–1945. Vescovi, preti e società alla prova della guerra, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005, 170–174. Now in P. Mazzolari, Scritti sulla pace e sulla guerra, (eds.) G. Formigoni and M. De Giu­ seppe, Bologna: edb, 2009, 234–264.

270

chapter 6

authority, not as authority in itself, but for whatever is unjust in what it orders. When the constituted authority no longer responds to its purpose, which is the common good, but acts against it, I have the right to rebel against it, as against someone who usurps a right. What don Primo preached was not a call to revolt. But he did open the way to a morality of possible civil disobedience. A year later, in his book Dietro la croce, he supported the irreconcilability of the Christian conception with the pursuit of war and challenged the deepest punctum dolens of the traditional approach of Catholic thought to this question: the tendency to camouflage with the “myth of obedience” the conformism that the Church cravenly ended up assuming towards the decisions of the political power.74 If these were the main contributions in Italy to the debate on whether the war of the Axis could be identified, or reconciled, with the Catholic doctrine of the “just war”, the consensus of ecclesiastics on the legitimacy of the Fascist war was developed in no linear manner, but in a diversified and diachronic way, depending on the consecutive events of the war: thus the principle of legitimacy of the Italian war, from a Christian point of view, did not mean the same thing in the spring of 1940 as it did after the start of the Russian campaign in 1942.75 On the wave of the profound shock caused by the fall of France, Catholics, like most Italians, were convinced that the war was almost at its end and that Mussolini had sensed in advance – sign of Providence – the birth of a new civilization, coinciding with the new Europe of the Axis. Even a prelate of the calibre of Angelo Roncalli believed in this providential foresight. On 21 June 1940 the future Pope wrote to his family from Istanbul: Take Italy’s part in the war. There is Providence in this and we need to thank Mussolini who has been its instrument. He kept Italy out of the conflict: he preserved thereby the life of so many young men and of so many families: and after Italy entered the war, here we are, after only ten days, at the armistice.76 74

P. Mazzolari, Dietro la croce e il segno dei chiodi (1st edition: Pisa: Editrice salesiana, 1942), (ed.) S. Xeres, Bologna: edb, 2012. 75 R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 78ff. 76 Giovanni xxiii, Lettere familiari. 152 inediti dal 1911 al 1952, (ed.) G. Farnedi, Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1993, 11. On Roncalli’s attitude to Fascism see S. Trinchese, “‘Servire, obbedire e tacere’. L’immagine dell’Italia fascista nell’opinione di Angelo Roncalli”, Storia contemporanea 20 (1989): 211–258.

Punishment And Purification

271

In contrast to what had happened in 1914–1915, however, there was no widespread resistance to Italy’s intervention in the war, however much the appeals of the Pope for peace and the sermons of many priests against the propaganda of hate were deprecated by prefects and other officials of the regime due to their potentially pacifist impact on the masses.77 After the speech of Pius xii on 4 September 1940 and at least up to the spring of 1941, what predominated in the public debate were the invitations to discipline and the mass demonstrations in support of the Italian war, but without the triumphalist tones of 1935: “the alliance with Hitler, the racial legislation, the Russian-German nonaggression pact, the German aggression on Poland, then on the neutral countries and on France, were all factors that concurred to make the attitudes of the Church to the Italian intervention far colder than had been the case during the war in Ethiopia or that in Spain”.78 At the official level the persistent mistrust in Germany was mitigated by a trustful acceptance of Mussolini’s decision to go to war and by the revival of the ideal convictions of Italy’s “historic mission” and “rights”. Such convictions were promoted by great public events like the rallies of Gioventù Cattolica in November 1940, the consecration of soldiers to the Sacred Heart by Father Gemelli’s charity, the introduction in the Eucharistic Congresses of a special Day celebrating the fatherland and the armed forces, and the appeal made by the ecclesiastical leadership of Catholic Action on 2 February 1941.79 Following the indications of the Holy See, the bishops and the leadership of Catholic Action limited themselves to reminding the faithful of the need to obey authority and understand the spirit of the time. While showing themselves open to a sense of spiritual solidarity with the whole country, they were cautious, at the same time, about straying from the religious sphere and offering a political interpretation of the war. In contrast to what had been the case four or five years previously, at the time of the conquest of Ethiopia and the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, the themes dear to the propaganda of the regime were now absent from Catholic judgements on the causes of the conflict. The view of the war as ‘divine punishment’ now returned with renewed emphasis.80 Of course 77 78 79 80

See F. Malgeri, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra (1940–1945), Rome: Studium, 1980, 25ff., though here the importance of periodization is not sufficiently underlined. F. Traniello, Città dell’uomo. Cattolici, partito e Stato nella storia d’Italia, Bologna: il Mulino, 1998, 234. R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 78ff. G. Vecchio, “Guerra e Resistenza”, in Cristiani d’Italia, vol. 1, 733–745. A particularly interesting case is that of the bishop of Bressanone, reconstructed by A. Sarri, “Il vescovo di Bressanone Johannes Geisler e la seconda guerra mondiale. Omelie e lettere pastorali (1939–1945)”, Geschichte und Region 19 (2010): 136–162.

272

chapter 6

a judgement of this type permitted the responsibilities of governments and politicians to be skated over. But to insist on the theme of ‘punishment’ was a quite different matter than the collective faith in martial Italy that Fascism had claimed to forge and the needs for total mobilization that the world war was now demanding – all the more so in the prospect, propagated by Fascist propaganda, of a revolutionary war destined to lead, with the victory of the Axis, to the realization of the Fascist imperial community, the creation of a New Europe and a New Order.81 Even in this phase, there was no lack of positions of more fervent support for the war; no shortage of those who wished to place themselves at the side not only of the country, but also of the regime and who supported the political justifications of the conflict: ranging from the traditional ‘clerico-fascism’ of the magazine Illustrazione Romana which identified the war effort with a crusade against the anti-Catholic nation par excellence, Great Britain, to the appeal signed by 29 bishops linked to the Battle for Grain in which the hope was expressed of seeing the Italian flag flying over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.82 On the level of religious practice, these were the months in which prayers were recited for the Italian victory. Gemelli was in the vanguard also on this front. In November 1940 he published the Invocazioni ai santi protettori d’Italia perché presto suoni l’ora della vittoria [Invocations to Italy’s Protector Saints to Speed the Hour of Victory], which overturned the request for intercession addressed in May by Pius xii to Italy’s patron saints to bring peace to the country.83 St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ambrose, St. Benedict and other saints were instead recruited, and the historical data marshalled on their behalf blatantly distorted, by Father Agostino to implore the success of Italian arms. The basic text from which Gemelli’s Invocations took their cue, the L­ itanie della Patria, had been composed during the Great War to fuel the Catholic-nationalistic spirit of the troops, but was now remodulated to give a devotional underpinning to Fascist warmongering: St. Francis of Assisi, primary patron of Italy, restorer of Christian life, you who re-trod and passed beyond the roads marked by the Roman legions with your order, bringing Christian civilization to the barbarians, and giving the dignity of man to savage wolves; 81 See P. Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 264ff.. 82 R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 85ff. 83 The Pope’s address on the Patron Saints of Italy Catherine of Siena and Francis of Assisi, on 5 May 1940, in Discorsi e radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 2, 95–10.

Punishment And Purification

273

St. Catherine of Siena, primary patroness of Italy, you who supported with prayer, with intelligence, and with courage the Church of Rome, meriting her redemption from foreign servitude; St. Ambrose, patron of Milan, you who expelled the barbarians from our country; St. Sergius, Roman soldier, you who in the hour of martyrdom miraculously donated your halberd, sign and promise of victory; St. Eusebius, you who fought and suffered to demonstrate that the integrity of the faith is pledge of life and greatness for our country; […] St. Benedict, you who saved Italic civilization from the barbarians […] St. John Gualbert, you who brought the spirit of St. Benedict to the apostolate and felt the nobility and dignity of our lineage; […] St. Pius v, you who invoked the cross to vanquish Islam; […] St. Helena, mother of the great Constantine, you who were his auxiliary in helping to ensure that the true Church of Christ would triumph by way of the luminous roads of the Roman Empire.84 Throughout the war, there was also a prolific circulation of prayers, mainly printed on the back of little colored images of the Virgin Mary and invoking the restoration of peace, albeit within the traditional view of war as divine punishment for the apostasy of society from the teachings of the Church. The most widely circulated of these prayers, from 1940 on, was the Prayer for Peace composed by Benedict xv in 1915, and reprinted throughout Italy on the initiative of bishops, parish priests, and Catholic associations in pamphlets, leaflets, images of the saints, and parish magazines: Dismayed by the horrors of a war that is engulfing peoples and nations, we seek refuge, O Jesus, as supreme succor, in your beloved Heart. From You, God of mercy, we implore with groans the cessation of the appalling scourge; from You, peaceful King, we await with our vows the yearned-for Peace. From your Divine Heart may You irradiate charity in the world, so that, once every discord is removed, only love shall reign in man. May your Heart be moved, therefore, also in this critical time for us, beset by such fatal expressions of hatred and such terrible massacres. May you have pity on so many mothers anguished for the fate of their sons, pity for so many families deprived of their fathers, pity for wretched Europe overcome by so much disaster! May you inspire rulers and 84

D. Menozzi, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento, 165–167.

274

chapter 6

­ eoples with counsels of meekness, settle the conflicts that are tearing p Nations apart, and lead men once again to give each other the kiss of Peace, You who by shedding your blood made them brothers. And as one day you replied compassionately to the supplication of the apostle Peter, ‘Save us, O Lord, for we are lost’, by stilling the storm at sea, so today, to our trusting prayers, may you placate us and restore tranquility and peace to the ravaged world. May you too, O Blessed Virgin, as in other times of terrible ordeals, help, protect, and save us. Amen.85 The circulation of this prayer, also in letters addressed to soldiers on the front, was a favorite target for the military censors in many provinces.86 Like other prayers imploring peace, it was seized, censored and denounced by the Fascist police, in the persuasion that it disseminated forms of devotion detrimental to the public spirit and subversive of the will of soldiers to resist.87 Yet, despite the exertions of the Fascist authorities, the subservience of religion to the needs of an aggressive war struggled to gain hold, not so much because of any conscious repulsion felt for the war of Mussolini and Hitler – something that emerged strongly only in a few minority enclaves – , but especially because of some ‘historic’ features of Italian Catholicism, which rendered it largely impermeable to a bellicose spirit, especially at the popular level.88 More misgivings about the war, albeit without any repudiation of Fascism, were expressed in the spring of 1941, as the bad news filtering back from Albania and from the African front gradually brought home the failure of ­Mussolini’s ‘parallel war’ as well as his subordination to Hitler. Meanwhile, the government and the prefects continued, through the machinery of censorship, to crack down on the many parish magazines considered too pietistic, even too defeatist, with their constant invitations to the faithful to pray for peace. A ­pastoral letter of the bishop of Cremona, Giovanni Cazzani, was even seized during Lent in 1941, because it recurred to the view of war as divine punishment with what was regarded as excessive force.89 Early in the same year the Italian ambassador to the Holy See, Bernardo Attolico, protested to Cardinal 85 F. Malgeri, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra, 77–78. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 68–84. 88 On Catholic Resistance and the anti-bellicose tendency of the Catholic populace see the long and fruitful introduction of G. De Rosa, “La Resistenza attraverso la molteplicità del ‘vissuto religioso’”, in Cattolici, Chiesa e Resistenza, (ed.) G. De Rosa, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997, 13–60. 89 G. Vecchio, Lombardia 1940–1945. Vescovi, preti e società alla prova della guerra, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005, 144–149.

Punishment And Purification

275

Schuster about the “pacifist character” of the Catholic press which “did not conform to the aims of the Government or the needs of the moment”.90 A more significant shift in the public mood took place with the attack on the ussr, unleashed by Hitler on 22 June 1941 and followed soon after (in July) by Italy’s participation, first with the Italian Expeditionary Force in Russia (csir) and then by the Armata Italiana in Russia (armir). The rapid German successes in the initial stages of the campaign, and the ideological war fought to save humanity from Communism and atheism, once again mobilized part of the clergy, who if they had to make a choice, however repugnant, between the two “pagans” Hitler and Stalin, would doubtless have chosen the Führer, with the prospect of liberating whole Christian populations from the yoke of the red dictator. 6.5

The Early Signs of a Changing Policy

The declaration of war on the Soviet Union raised great hopes also among military chaplains, whose deployment among the combatants had proceeded slowly at the time of Italy’s entry into the war. Several asked to be sent to the Eastern Front, in the conviction of taking part in the mission that would lead to the conversion of Russia, according to the prophecies of Fatima.91 To many Fascists it seemed that the Church in Italy was now convinced of the need to return to the side of the regime.92 The Italian ambassador to the Holy See was of the same view.93 But the conviction did not last long: the refusal of the Vatican hierarchy to embrace an “anti-Bolshevik crusade” led by National-­ Socialism94 and continuing coldness to the war, whose cost of violence and death was aggravated and multiplied on the Russian front,95 soon quenched the initial enthusiasm of the clergy for the war of the Axis against Stalin, or perhaps transmuted it into the hope – shared in the Vatican – that the c­ onflict would so exhaust both Soviets and Nazis as to make them disappear from Catholic Europe.96

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Ibid., 150. See M. Franzinelli, Il riarmo dello spirito: i cappellani militari nella seconda guerra mondiale, Treviso: Pagus, 1991, 105ff. S. Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime, 360–361. I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 199. Ibid., 194–199. F. Malgeri, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra, 31. See G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 213–228.

276

chapter 6

The progress of military operations on the Eastern Front clearly did not give much comfort to such hopes. At the same time the balance of power on a planetary scale that the global conflict was slowly altering led Vatican diplomacy to a shift towards the choice of the usa as preferential political interlocutor, due to the growing conviction that only the usa, even if temporarily allied with the ussr, could form a bulwark against Communism.97 This had already become clear in September 1941 with the arrival in the Vatican of Roosevelt’s personal representative. From his many meetings in Rome (five personal audiences with the Pope, long conversations with the Secretary of State, with Monsignors Tardini and Montini) Myron Taylor admittedly came away with little tangible result. Pius xii did not accept the American proposal to sign up to the Atlantic Charter (the Allied enunciation of war aims issued on 14 August 1941): as Cardinal Maglione wrote to the nuncio in Berne, Monsignor Filippo Bernardini, both Pius xii and the Secretary of State were firm in underlining to the American representative the need not to confuse “the action of the Holy Father with that of the President of the usa”. The two roles were not interchangeable: they ought to move along “parallel lines” if the voice of the Pope were not to be accused of “partiality and partisanship”.98 In substance Pius xii and his aides used every occasion to bring home to Taylor the gravity of the danger represented by Soviet Communism, judging the American policy on this point too weak. The Holy See, however, did agree to offer us bishops, through the apostolic delegate in Washington, a looser interpretation of the passage in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris that condemned any relationship with Communists, to enable Catholics to support in full the decision of the Roosevelt administration to go to war at Russia’s side.99 With the usa’s intervention in the war, the contours of a shift began to be more clearly defined also in the Italian Church. Catholic organizations – on this the police sources are unanimous – seemed to be firm in their support for the guidance that Pius xii was giving on questions of peace, morality and the social order. What we are dealing with here is not a movement with any precise political design against Fascism, but an implicit de-legitimation of the regime from within. And as such it was greatly feared by the authorities.100 Mussolini denounced it in his speech to the national board of directors of the pnf on 3 January 1942: 97 98

F. Traniello, Città dell’uomo, 232. L. Maglione to F. Bernardini, 8 November 1941, adss, vol. 5, document no. 34, 291–293, quotations 292. 99 G. Miccoli, I silenzi e i dilemmi di Pio xii, 217ff. 100 F. Traniello, Città dell’uomo, 237–238.

Punishment And Purification

277

There are […] some harmful and deleterious sections [of the population] on which we need to focus our attention. Currents of the Catholic world are hindering the Axis. No voice of the higher clergy has yet been raised in favor of this people that is combating the Anglicans of England and of America, the Bolsheviks and atheists of Russia. There are those, moreover, who preach pacifism: making war without hating the enemy.101 Mussolini’s principle of ‘hatred of the enemy’ as criterion to judge the loyalty of Catholic participation in the war did not go uncontested. A great controversy about it blew up between February and April 1942. It was fuelled, on the one side, by the Fascist periodical Critica fascista and, on the other, by the ­Jesuit review La Civiltà Cattolica which expressed its position clearly, in a few lines relegated to the page of contemporary news items, in its first issue (January) for 1942: The morality of the Gospel is not something relative, but holds good for all times and all cases. Nor does the precept of love for our enemies, if understood in the right way, enervate the arm of the Christian soldier in the fulfilment of his supreme duty, or corrode his temper of steel, if he is called to repress the insolence of the enemy and re-establish the order of justice that the enemy has violated: it means only that the Christian, who also sees in his enemy a brother, while he will show himself inexorable in the pursuit of the wrong, will not unleash his ferocity on the vanquished; and just as he will be able to show himself human in the fury of war and moderate in the inebriation of victory, so he will make future reconciliation more secure and peace more stable.102 In the spring of the same year a journalist on the staff of L’Osservatore Romano, Guido Gonella, who had been arrested on Mussolini’s orders in September 1939 due to some criticisms he had made of German racism in the paper,103 decided to gather together into a book some of his more recent articles in the Vatican newspaper, in which Pius xii’s commitment to peace clearly emerges.104 The foreword to the book had been entrusted by Gonella to the Deputy Secretary 101 102 103 104

B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 30, 154. “Cronaca contemporanea”, La Civiltà Cattolica 93/1 (1942): 76. V. De Cesaris, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, 70–77. The book was published at the end of the year: G. Gonella, Presupposti di un ordine internazionale. Note ai messaggi di S.S. Pio xii, Città del Vaticano: Edizioni Civitas Gentium, 1942.

278

chapter 6

of State Monsignor Montini, who was playing an ever more important role of liaison between those Catholics such as Moro, Andreotti and La Pira, linked to fuci and the Graduates’ Movement, encouraging their strategy of cultural and political preparation:105it is no accident that since February 1941 Montini was being kept under close surveillance by the political police, who suspected his activity, real or presumed, against a victory of the Axis.106 In the end Montini’s foreword to Gonella’s book could not be published due to a veto imposed by his superiors, linked probably to fears of a worsening of relations with the Fascist government. Gonella however inserted a part of it, in anonymous form, in which the centrality of the theme of peace in the recent teaching of Pius xii was underlined.107 The clearest signs of Catholic dissociation from the regime were expressed in the summer of 1942 and reinforced in the next few months following the Italo-German defeats at El Alamein and the disaster on the Don. Military setbacks, Italy’s subordination to Hitler’s plans, the experience on the national territory of the first terrifying effects of air bombardment, the growing sense of insecurity, material depravation and hunger, all concurred to weaken the roots of religious sentiment within the war machine of the regime. The calamitous disintegration of the myth of the New Order rapidly eroded the Fascist ‘new faith’, creating the conditions for Catholic religion to play a surrogate role. It did so with the strength of a reassuring millennial tradition and the coherence of its symbolic universe. Religion thus began to operate as a last bastion of sense, a factor that compensated for everything that was disintegrating in the Fascist experience.108 Though the Italian bishops did not go so far as to indicate a political alternative and continued to recall the duty of obedience to authority and of service and fidelity to the nation,109 signals that expressed divergence from the regime, however, were becoming more common, opening the way to a distinction between the idea of fidelity to the country and the principle of fidelity to the Fascist rulers. In June 1942 Mussolini threatened to order the arrest of the historic editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano, the conte Giuseppe Dalla Torre, because – he told Ciano – he could no longer tolerate the “subtle 105 F. De Giorgi, Mons. Montini. Chiesa cattolica e scontri di civiltà nella prima metà del Novecento, Bologna: il Mulino, 2012, 227ff. 106 F. Malgeri, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra, 49–50. 107 L. Pazzaglia, Introduzione, in G. Montini and G.B. Montini, Affetti familiari, spiritualità e politica. Carteggio 1900–1942, (ed.) L. Pazzaglia, Brescia-Roma: Istituto Paolo VI-Studium, 2009, 1–187, in particular 171. 108 G. De Rosa, La Resistenza attraverso la molteplicità del “vissuto religioso”, 44–45. 109 A. Riccardi, “I vescovi italiani e la seconda guerra mondiale”, Anuario de historia de la Iglesia 4 (1995): 147–165.

Punishment And Purification

279

vein of poison” against the regime that was spread through the columns of the paper.110 The risks posed by the opening of a crisis with the Holy See made the head of the government desist from giving any such order, but it was clear that the gulf between the two sides of the Tiber was beginning to grow. A more explicit return to a political agenda was registered in the organizations of Catholic Action from the summer of 1942 on: not only in the ­Graduates’ Movement and in fuci, in which a debate was opened on the legitimacy, in a Christian perspective, of a revolt against tyranny, but in the discussions in Gioventù Cattolica on the new Christian order to be realized after the war.111 The screening in cinemas of Romolo Marcellini’s biopic Pastor Angelicus at the end of 1942 showed that an effort was being made to forge a myth of Pius xii as defender of peace, in opposition to the warmongering image of the Duce. A number of illustrious names had contributed to the making of this documentary film, the first production of Catholic Action’s own film company, the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico: the Catholic activist Luigi Gedda developed the idea of the film, while the Catholic playwright Diego Fabbri and the young Ennio Flaiano were hired to write the screenplay. The Pope famously played himself.112 In his public pronouncements Pius xii came to express a position which could not but be interpreted as political, as in his radiomessage for Christmas 1942.113 Through Vatican Radio the Pope indicated the mainstays on which, in the Catholic view, collective life ought to be founded: both between peoples and within each people. Pacelli did not distort the Church’s traditional teaching on natural rights and the attribution of their interpretation to the ecclesiastical institution, the only depository and safeguard of the eternal laws written by God in nature.114 But when he came to describe and uphold these 110 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 12 June 1942, 630. 111 R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 82. 112 The importance of the film in the construction of an image of Pius xii destined to flow into hagiography is described by R. Rusconi, Santo Padre, 491–492. See also J.F. Pollard, The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 353, and F. Ruozzi, “Pius xii as Actor and Subject. On the Representation of the Pope in Cinema during the 1940s and 1950s”, in Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power, (eds.) D. Biltereyst and D. Treveri Gennari, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015, 256–280. 113 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 4, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia ­Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 327–346. 114 D. Menozzi, Chiesa e diritti umani. Legge naturale e modernità dalla Rivoluzione francese ai nostri giorni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2012, 138–139. On the development of Catholic thought on human rights see S. Moyn, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

280

chapter 6

rights, which he defined for the first time as “inalienable rights of man”, it was abundantly clear how wide was the gulf between such ideas and contemporary Fascist and Nazi ideology, based on their elimination: Whoever wishes the star of peace to shine forth and stop over society, should help to restore to the human person the dignity granted to him by God right from the start; oppose the excessive grouping together of human beings, almost like masses without a soul; their economic, social, political, intellectual and moral inconsistency; their lack of solid principles and strong convictions; their superabundance of excitement at the instinctive and emotional level, and their volubility; promote, with all permissible means, and in all fields of life, social forms in which a full personal responsibility is facilitated and guaranteed, both as far as the terrestrial and eternal orders are concerned; and support respect for and the practical application of the following fundamental rights of the person: the right to maintain and develop physical, intellectual and moral life, and particularly the right to religious formation and education; the right to worship God, both in private and in public, including the exercise of religious charity; the right, in general, to marriage and the achievement of its purpose, the right to conjugal and domestic society; the right to work as indispensable means for the maintenance of family life; the right to the free choice of condition or state in life, and thus also the state of priest or religious; and the right to use material goods, conscious of their social responsibilities and limitations.115 Such a prospect, destined to be translated into practice and propagated by bishops and priests, undoubtedly exerted an influence on public opinion in a country whose political regime was beginning visibly to totter and especially among those Catholics who were starting to think of what was to come ‘after’.116 For, as the military setbacks of the Axis multiplied, it was becoming increasingly clear that the totalitarian states of the Fascist and Nazi varieties were now heading towards inevitable defeat and that the future world order would be governed by democracies. This was a certainty that was consolidated in the Vatican with the return to Rome, in September 1942, of the representative 115 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 4, 327–346. 116 See M. Bocci, Oltre lo Stato liberale. Ipotesi su politica e società nel dibattito cattolico tra fascismo e democrazia, Roma: Bulzoni, 1999, 251–268, and A. Parola, “Pensare la ricostruzio­ ne: gli incontri di casa Padovani”, in Giuseppe Dossetti: la fede e la storia. Studi nel decennale della morte, (ed.) A. Melloni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, 261–280.

Punishment And Purification

281

of the us President to the Holy See, Myron Taylor. To the Pope and to the representatives of the Secretariat of State he explained without uncertainties that the usa was sure it would emerge victorious from the war and that she and her allies had decided not to accept any compromise peace: nothing but total victory would be acceptable. Taylor was very explicit also about another point: the usa was determined to play a role of primary importance both in the conducting of the war and in the redefinition of the many questions that the victorious powers would have to tackle once the war had ended. On behalf of Roosevelt he therefore invited the Holy See not to lend itself to any maneuvers of the Axis aimed at reaching a compromise peace.117 It was Tardini who concisely summed up the American objectives as far as post-war Europe was concerned, as he had deduced them from a conversation with Taylor on 22 September, after the latter had emerged from his second audience with Pius xii: I came away […] with the following impressions: 1. That the usa feels strong, sure of victory, and does not fear a long war. 2. That the usa is preparing to reorganize Europe as it thinks best. And since no American, or almost none, understands the European situation, this pipedream of theirs could cause Europe enormous trouble. 3. That the usa, once it has reorganized Europe in its own way, wishes to keep it under surveillance and keep it on a leash, so that, it says, a new war will not be repeated.118 Taylor also asked the Holy See to condemn the “many atrocities” committed by the Nazis against civilians and especially against Jews in the occupied territories. The governments in exile of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, as well as the governments of Great Britain and Brazil had made similar requests in previous days; they had furnished authenticated and detailed reports on atrocities committed as part of methodical Nazi plans to liquidate whole populations and exterminate the Jews. Of course, as was pointed out to Taylor, the Pope had already denounced atrocities committed against civilians on various occasions in his speeches. Moreover, ever since the outbreak of the war the Holy See had launched a major campaign to help the victims of war, including prisoners of war, and had extended it to 117 See I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 226–229. 118 Notes of Mgr. Tardini, 22 September 1942, in adss, vol. 5, document no. 480, 704–706, quotation 706.

282

chapter 6

the Jews.119 But it was further explained to Roosevelt’s representative that the Holy See had chosen not to denounce Hitler and Germany by name: not only because it would have had, as a consequence, the need also to denounce the Soviet Union, but also because such an intervention would have caused, in the Pope’s opinion, even more ruthless persecutions against civilians and reprisals on Catholics.120 All this flowed into the Pope’s Christmas radiomessage of 1942. Pius xii did not name names in condemning war crimes, as the usa and the governments of the Allies would have wished. But his diagnosis of the situation did mark an explicit change of direction. Though he re-stated, in his message, the Holy See’s conception of war as divine punishment and did not pass particular judgements on the specific responsibilities of those involved in the conflict, Pius xii entrusted to the “best and most elect members of Christianity” the historic task of restoring humankind to the straight and narrow.121 As Giuseppe Battelli argued, “The whole document was an explicit invitation to Catholics to ­prepare to intervene directly and in a concrete way […] in the social reconstruction of the post-war period”.122 The famous wake-up call of Pius xii, “not lamentation, but action is the precept of the present hour; not lamentation over that which is or that which was, but reconstruction of that which shall arise and must arise for the good of society”, was more than a call to close ranks. It was the perception of new conditions that made possible a redefinition of the role of Catholics in the new world created by the war; under the guidance, it goes without saying, of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Mussolini did not seem, at least for the time being, to have grasped the magnitude of the transformation urged by the Pope. He limited himself to making a sarcastic comment in his conversations with Ciano: The Vicar of God – i.e. the representative on earth of the regulator of the universe – ought never to speak: he ought to remain with his head in

119 A wide-ranging collection of documentation on this activity of the Holy See can be found in Inter Arma Caritas. L’Ufficio Informazioni Vaticano per i prigionieri di guerra istituito da Pio xii (1939–1947), (eds.) F. Di Giovanni and G. Roselli,Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2004. 120 Notes of Mgr. Tardini, 22 September 1942, cit. 121 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 4, 327–346. 122 Thus G. Battelli, Società, Stato e Chiesa in Italia dal tardo Settecento a oggi, Roma: Carocci, 2013, 109.

Punishment And Purification

283

the clouds. This is a speech replete with platitudes that could easily have been made also by the Parish Priest of Predappio.123 A few weeks later, however, the Duce had clearly reached a different view. On 22 January 1943 the Palazzo Chigi (office of the government) urged Raffaele Guariglia, who had replaced Attolico as Italian ambassador to the Holy See in February 1942, to put pressure on the Secretary of State to scale down the “intensive campaign” that the Catholic, Vatican and diocesan press was conducting, “after the Christmas speech of the Supreme Pontiff”, on social issues and, for the first time after many years, also on political questions.124 Within 24 hours Guariglia had met the Secretary of State and had received from him appropriate reassurances. Nonetheless the progress of the war and the general situation of the country made relations between center and periphery increasingly difficult to control. Mussolini was forced to hold his hand in response to some important Catholic initiatives that threatened to weaken or cut the ground from under the organizational and propagandistic machinery of the regime. Emblematic was the line assumed by the government with regard to the Opera per l’Assistenza Religiosa e Morale degli Operai (onarmo), a charity founded in 1926 to promote social activities among industrial workers, which the Holy See placed under its direct control in 1940, having grasped the importance of reinforcing its own position among workers. Through Ciano, now in his new role as Italian ambassador in the Vatican, the board of directors of onarmo obtained in March 1943 Mussolini’s approval of its activities, e­ specially in the factories of Northern Italy. The aggravation of the economic sacrifices imposed by the conflict, the consequent worsening of social conflict, and the unknown factor of what role Communists might play in the post-war period, all pushed in this direction. But, as Monsignor Baldelli of onarmo and Father Messineo of La Civiltà Cattolica told Ciano, some leading Italian industrialists were also pushing in the same direction; they were urging a social intervention of the clergy among workers to stem “extremist tendencies”.125 It has been pointed out that during the First World War bishops, clergy and militant laity moved on different levels traversed by “occasional ­intersections”; 123 G. Ciano, Diario. 1937–1943, entry for 24 December 1943, 679–680. Predappio, of course, was Mussolini’s birthplace. 124 The document, dated 22 January 1943, was based on a note by Mussolini of 18 January 1943. See I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 241. 125 Ibid., 242–244. Important observations on the role of onarmo in A. Giovagnoli, Le premesse della ricostruzione. Tradizione e modernità nella classe dirigente cattolica del dopoguerra, Milano: Nuovo Istituto editoriale italiano, 1982, 237–238.

284

chapter 6

the same goes for the Second World War.126 Nor must we lose sight of the many nuances, linked also to social diversities, which distinguished, say, the attitude to the war of the peasant world from that of the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie in the cities.127 Yet we cannot ignore the fact that the general situation of the country and the progress of the war tended to accentuate, from the end of 1942, the importance of the Pope as a figurehead to whom everyone could look. The Pope was regarded not just as head of the universal Church, but also as the “Italian leader who can best operate to save Rome from bombardments and for the good of the country”.128 Pius xii’s radiomessage at Christmas 1942 became in Italy an important rallying call for the launch or acceleration of operations that would lead a part of the Catholic laity to play a leading role in the restoration of institutions that had been suppressed in the mid-Twenties following the rise of Fascism. On 25 July 1943, the very same day as the fall of Mussolini, a first version of the programme of the new Catholic party (Democrazia Cristiana) was published in Milan. It had been prepared, in the summer and autumn of 1942, by discussions that had brought together representatives of the former Partito Popolare, including De Gasperi, exponents of the Guelph movement of Piero Malvestiti and young Catholic intellectuals such as Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. Other meetings between former ppi members and other Catholic exponents, such as Paolo Bonomi, Pietro Campilli, and Pasquale Saraceno, would give rise in January 1944 to the document Idee ricostruttive della Democrazia cristiana, published by De G ­ asperi in the Catholic daily Il Popolo. Born on the basis of a close link with the Church, thanks to the direct support of the Holy See, and especially of Monsignor ­Montini, the new party would move along a trajectory that would lead to a moderate approach to democracy.129

126 Thus G. Rumi, Movimento cattolico e dimensione internazionale, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in Italia 1860–1980, (eds.) F. Traniello and G. Campanini, 1/2, I fatti e le idee, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1984, 146–157, quotation 152. 127 R. Moro, I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista, 93. 128 A. Riccardi, I vescovi italiani e la seconda guerra mondiale, 158. 129 See A. Giovagnoli, La cultura democristiana, 125ff., G. Formigoni, “Alcide De Gasperi 1943– 1948. Il politico vincente alla guida della transizione”, in A. De Gasperi, Scritti e discorsi ­politici. Edizione critica, vol. 3, (eds.) V. Capperucci and S. Lorenzini, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008, 11–34, and V. Capperucci, Il partito dei cattolici. Dall’Italia degasperiana alle correnti democristiane, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2010, 23–55.

chapter 7

Atonement 7.1

Divine Providence Doesn’t Go to Salò

The Holy See’s hopes were not fulfilled by the events that prepared and provoked the fall of Mussolini, still less by the political and military decisions of the Allies for Italy. The Vatican’s Secretariat of State had envisaged a scenario in which a change of government, and the return of constitutional normality, would not be traumatic and be sealed by the conclusion of a separate peace treaty with Italy. Pius xii had played, in vain, all the cards in his hand to mitigate the policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ concerted by Roosevelt and Churchill.1 The enormous commitment made by the Vatican to prevent Rome being targeted by allied bombardment was also in vain, as demonstrated by the devastating air attack against the capital on 19 July 1943, when over five hundred American bombers, escorted by British warplanes of the Middle East Command, launched the heaviest raid so far conducted by the Allies in the Mediterranean, hitting in particular the San Lorenzo working-class district.2 Seven months previously the Florentine jurist Piero Calamandrei had recorded in his diary, with regard to some rumors circulating in Rome, that Pius xii was preparing to move to the Lateran to avert any bombardment of the city center of Rome. “They call him the anti-aircraft pope”, commented the anti-fascist intellectual.3 Pius xii, alas, was not powerful enough to preserve the Eternal City from attack. Nonetheless a good deal of emotion was aroused by his decision to visit the rubble left by the bombardment at San Lorenzo as soon as the sirens had ceased; he was accompanied only by Monsignor Montini, without any escort and without the papal entourage that usually accompanied him. The open arms of the Pope to bless the crowds who had rushed to the scene of devastation, his kneeling in silence, his words of consolation to the stricken population calling for peace, created, also visually, in the collective consciousness, the image of the Pope as genuine defender of the humble against the barbarities 1 O. Chadwick, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, 236ff. 2 U. Gentiloni Silveri and M. Carli, Bombardare Roma. Gli alleati e la “città aperta” (1940–1944), Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, 31–37. 3 P. Calamandrei, Diario 1939–1945, (ed.) G. Agosti, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1982, vol. 2, entry for 13 December 1942, 94.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_009

286

chapter 7

of war. His relation with the city was consecrated. The contrast with the image of the king Victor Emanuel iii, who was forced to return to the Quirinal in his limousine because of the angry protests of the crowd, could not have been more striking. But, as Montini observed, what dominated the comments at the popular level was the absence of the Duce, who had led Italy to war and now did not even have the courage to let himself be seen in the streets of the ­capital.4 Three days later, the Anglo-American bombardments and the policy of “unconditional surrender” were openly stigmatized by L’Osservatore Romano through the publication of a letter of Pius xii to the Cardinal Vicar of the diocese of Rome Francesco Marchetti Selvaggiani.5 The accentuation of the gulf that separated the Holy See from the political and military strategy of the Anglo-Americans for Italy led to excluding Pius xii from the events that in the space of a few weeks led the country to change its government and its position on the war. In spite of that, the coup of 25 July 1943, when Mussolini was removed from the government and the ­Badoglio government installed in his place, was greeted with satisfaction by the Vatican hierarchy.6 The new Italian representative to the papal court, Francesco Babuscio Rizzo, who had replaced Ciano, was convinced of this: “the upper hierarchy of the clergy – he wrote on 10 August to the Foreign Minister of the Badoglio government, Raffaele Guariglia, who had in recent days returned to Italy from the Italian embassy at Ankara – is openly supporting the work of the Royal Government”.7 Catholics – continued the chargé d’affaires – had made frequent appeals for the restoration of order and discipline, for moderation, and condemnations of radical temptations. At the same time, the fear in the Vatican, that popular unrest would spread and that the Communist Party would be able to find too much room for maneuver within it, was strong. The fluidity of future political scenarios, fluctuating between full acceptance of the democratic system and more reactionary solutions, also generated uncertainties in the Church, fearing lest the advances it had made, the concessions it had wrested, in Italian society over the last twenty years be placed at risk. But Guariglia’s analysis, as would be confirmed by later historiography,8 hit the 4 A. Riccardi, L’inverno più lungo. 1943–44: Pio xii, gli ebrei e i nazisti a Roma, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2008, 8–9. 5 “Una lettera del Sommo Pontefice al Cardinale Vicario in Roma”, L’Osservatore Romano (22 July 1943). The letter, dated 20 July 1943, reprinted in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua San­ tità Pio xii, vol. 5, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 401–404. 6 See I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 257–259. 7 F. Babuscio Rizzo to R. Guariglia, 10 August 1943, quoted ibid., 277. 8 See R. Moro, “I cattolici italiani e il 25 luglio”, Storia contemporanea 24 (1993): 967–1017, and J.D. Durand, L’Église catholique dans la crise de l’Italie (1943–1948), Rome: École française de Rome, 1991, 9–49, which provides a wide-ranging repertoire of sources.

Atonement

287

mark: following the 25 July the main attitude among the episcopate and Catholic associations fluctuated between appeals to the duty of national concord round the Badoglio government (as hitherto round the Mussolini regime) and the denunciation of revolutionary acts. On 14 August the new government, through Foreign Minister Guariglia, officially announced the declaration of Roma città aperta. It was a unilateral resolution, which would not spare the capital from other bombardments. But for Pius xii, who had made it a priority question and had activated his own diplomatic network at the world level to press for it, it was not only a precise signal that the government was working hand-in-hand with him, but also a personal success.9 The declaration came on the day following another air raid on the city, which had caused serious damage and scores of victims in heavily builtup working-class suburbs (Appio Claudio, Casal Bertone, Pigneto), leading the Pope once again to leave the Vatican by car to visit the bombed-out areas. Once again he was accompanied by Monsignor Montini. Once again he expressed his close rapport with the people wandering dazed amidst the rubble. The illusion – brief-lived – was still cultivated in the Vatican of achieving an armistice, also at the international level, that would enable Italy to extricate itself from the war without dramatic upheavals. All hope of that was lost following the announcement on 8 September 1943 of the armistice with the Anglo-American allied forces. The country was plunged into the most difficult of scenarios. Amid the disintegration of institutions and of social bonds, the accumulation of ruins, the proliferation of violence, the Church formed, in the eyes of the population – or a large part of it – , the one point of reference to which to look with trust in the hope of obtaining some succor or consolation.10 It was a trust that, in response to the downfall of the myth of Mussolini and the fatal tarnishing of the image of Italy’s royal family, was charged with a quite particular emotional attachment to Pius xii: the Pastor angelicus, as he began to be called after Marcellini’s film, the Defensor civitatis, as he was hailed due to his commitment to the defense of Rome.11 Initially moved by a concern to provide for Italy’s material and moral needs, the Holy See came to fill the nation’s political and institutional vacuum, and attempted to claim for herself the role 9 10

11

I. Garzia, Pio xii e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 280ff. This was emphasized, many years ago, by F. Chabod, L’Italia contemporanea (1918–1948), 124–125. The protective role attributed to the Church by the Italians during the war, ever less defended by the Royal Army, was underlined by G. De Luna, “L’identità coatta. Gli italiani in guerra (1940–1945)”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 18, Guerra e pace, (ed.) W. Barberis, Torino: Einaudi, 2002, 773ff. For the attribution to Pius xii of the title Defensor civitatis see D. Tardini, Pio xii, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960, 38ff.

288

chapter 7

of main interlocutor of the Allies for everything that concerned the present and future of the country. The complexity of the Italian campaign, its character of war of attrition, forced papal diplomacy to tackle institutional questions and political interlocutors that became day after day ever more difficult to decipher. The rapid liberation of the South of the country, the prolongation of the German occupation in Central and Northern Italy, the installation of the puppet regime rsi (Italian Social Republic) under Mussolini at Salò, confronted the Vatican with new and unforeseen problems, whose management was complicated by the difficulties of direct contacts between Rome and the dioceses. The Vatican did not grant any public recognition to the new Mussolini government at Salò, even if the Secretariat of State maintained informal relations with such authoritative representatives of the rsi as Rodolfo Graziani.12 The rationale for non-recognition, theoretically unexceptionable, was set forth by Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione in a memorandum of 27 September 1943, in which the findings of a survey conducted by Franco’s ambassador in the Vatican on the matter were noted: though the final decision was up to the Holy Father, it was not usual to furnish recognition de jure to “governments formed during the war, and due to the war, if there is already a legal government in place”.13 Though such recognition had never been officially requested by Mussolini, the Vatican’s cold-shouldering must have been an embarrassment for the new regime at Salò. The close relations that had been forged with the Fascist government and its representatives over the last twenty years undoubtedly complicated any drastic change of policy for the ecclesiastical authorities. Mussolini’s merit for the L­ ateran Pacts, after all, remained. But now the match with Fascism was over, with the full consciousness that Fascism had ended its match with Italian society. That did not prevent the ecclesiastical authorities from asking the rsi in Salò to respect the Concordat, even if they did not want to recognize that ­regime’s legitimacy.14 Any such request could have been confined to the government in Rome, which had not of course renounced its own potential jurisdiction over the whole national territory. But preference was shown for an option that seemed to offer greater guarantees: an anti-Concordat measure against the man who had signed the Lateran Pacts in 1929 could have unleashed reprisals by the rsi on a terrain that was particularly close to the heart of the Holy See. Of course, in theory, the Church could have vindicated her claims, at 12 13 14

E. Forcella, La Resistenza in convento, Torino: Einaudi, 1999, 67 and 132ff. Notes of Cardinal Maglione, 27 September 1943, in adss, vol. 7, document no. 415, 651–652. On the question of the Concordat and the rsi see A. Cicchitti-Suriani, “La Repubblica sociale italiana ed il Concordato del 1929”, Nuova Antologia 86 (1951): 118–127.

Atonement

289

the end of the war, for any Fascist violations of the Concordat. Experience had shown, however, that, as far as guarantees and prerogatives are concerned, it was better not to give ground, even in relation to an illegitimate authority. For if those prerogatives were to be eroded, it would be arduous to regain them. The absence of official relations between the rsi and the Vatican forced the bishops and clergy of Northern Italy to establish direct contacts with the authorities at Salò. There was no lack of priests, especially among the village and small-town clergy, who chose actively to support Republican Fascism, but they represented a tiny, if vociferous, minority.15 Of the some 2500 military chaplains in service on the eve of 8 September 1943, only 483 chose to be incorporated in units obedient to the rsi.16 Among the ranks of the military chaplains, besides, the religious justification of the war had not survived the experience of defeat; the image of the ‘God of armies’, associated with the initial phase of the campaign, had gradually lost ground, replaced by that of the suffering Christ, in whom the troops could find a more convincing reflection of their daily condition.17 A group of priests who had thrown in their lot with the rsi was organized in Venice, around Gianni Vettori’s paper L’Italia Cattolica.18 The main animator of priests of Salò however was don Tullio Calcagno, who propagated the idea of a Fascist and anti-Semitic neo-Catholicism in the pages of the weekly Crociata italica.19 He gradually recruited other clerics to the cause, especially former military chaplains disgruntled by the “betrayal” of the King and the armistice of 8 September: don Ettore Civati from Como, much-decorated chaplain in the Great War and centurion of the Militia, suspended a divinis in 1942, and then hired by the rsi as press officer of the Minister of Popular Culture Fernando Mezzasoma; Father Eusebio Zappaterreni, the Franciscan who had survived the campaign in Russia and who rose to become head chaplain of the black brigades; the legionary friar Galdino; the Republican national guard 15 16

17 18 19

See S. Tramontin, “Il clero e la Rsi”, in La Repubblica Sociale Italiana 1943–45, (ed.) P.P. Poggio, Annali della Fondazione Micheletti 2 (1986): 335–350. The government of the rsi obtained from the Vatican authorization to institute a section of the military Ordinariate, later established at Verona, to coordinate the activities of chaplains. M. Franzinelli, Il riarmo dello spirito, 177–192. On the number of chaplains of the rsi see ibid., 217 and 328. A similar estimate is made by Silvio Tramontin in his paper “Il clero e la Rsi”, 344ff. See M. Franzinelli, Il riarmo dello spirito, 145ff. See C. Scagliola, “L’Italia Cattolica. Un foglio al servizio della rsi”, in La Repubblica Sociale Italiana 1943–45, 157–162. A. Dordoni, “Crociata Italica”. Fascismo e religione nella Repubblica di Salò (gennaio 1944– aprile 1945), Milano: SugarCo, 1976.

290

chapter 7

chaplain Alberico Manetti; don Antonio Bruzzesi of the black brigades; the friar Ginepro da Pompeiana who had toured German concentration camps in which Italians were interned to convince them to sign up to the rsi; don Angelo Scarpellini and don Carlo Barozzi, former columnists (the latter under the pen-name don Remo Cantelli) of the Regime fascista.20 An extreme, though not unique, case was that of the Carmelite Antonio Intreccialagli, who in the military role of squad leader of a regiment of storm troops (the reconstituted 1st Legione d’Assalto “M” Tagliamento) participated in roundups and savage reprisals, ending up on the list of war criminals, but in a condition of complete isolation from his order and from his confrères in Central and Northern Italy.21 Thanks to the support of Farinacci, Calcagno founded the weekly review Crociata Italica at Cremona in January 1944, dedicating it to the service of Il Duce di Gargnano,22 and succeeded in printing it until 23 April 1945. He was then 45 years old and had behind him a past as militant patriot and schismatic priest. He was suspended a divinis after 8 September, when he was a canon in Terni cathedral, for having published without ecclesiastical approval a book that was a veritable panegyric of Fascism and war.23 Following the armistice he continued to disseminate his ideas in a series of articles and letters to the press. To mobilize the undecided to support the forces of the rsi, Calcagno conducted a campaign, as aggressive as it was discredited, in the pages of the Crociata italica (initial print-run, 100,000 copies), insisting on the doctrinal and ethical convergences between Fascism and Catholicism. Symbol: the cross in a circle, with the motto “Jesus Christ King of Italy vanquishes and reigns”. Receiving Calcagno’s recruits (crociati) at Gargnano on 17 March 1944, ­Mussolini told him he was a “regular reader” of the review and supported the importance that Catholicism had had in Republican Fascism: Some say that we republican fascists are Catholics out of political expediency, namely, to attract to us the sympathies of Catholics at this time. It’s not true: we are Catholics by conviction, because I believe that Catholicism has an adequate and sufficient doctrine to solve all the problems of individual and social, national and international life. Moreover, 20 21 22 23

S. Tramontin, Il clero e la Rsi, 341ff. On Intreccialagli’s career see A. Rossi, “Missionario e combattente in camicia nera. Storia ‘sbagliata’ di padre Antonio di Gesù”, Cultura&Identità 7 (2012): 66–71. Il Duce di Gargnano: i.e. Mussolini’s new moniker after he had taken up residence at the Villa Feltrinelli at Gargnano on Lake Garda in October 1943. T. Calcagno, La scure alla radice della Royal Oak, ossia la Guerra di Giustizia, Spoleto: ­Panetto & Petrelli, 1942. The book would be republished by Mondadori in Milan in 1945, with the title Guerra di Giustizia.

Atonement

291

in the conflict between spirit and matter it supports and wishes the superiority and victory of the spirit.24 Mussolini’s words sound opportunistic: more frustration than conviction could be sensed in them. Six months later, on 26 September 1944, Mussolini would declare to one of his friar hagiographers, Father Eusebio Zappaterreni, that “when priests see the Blackshirts, they ring the church bells to warn the red shirts” and it would be no surprise, he said, to see “the red flag of the Kremlin fluttering from bell-towers”.25 Yet in the Manifesto di Verona, approved by the Republican Fascist Party on 14 November 1943, it had been reaffirmed that “the religion of the Republic is the Roman Apostolic Catholic”.26 Despite that, on the whole the Fascist authorities did not have any doubts about the hostility of Catholics, and especially of the clergy, however resigned they were to the impossibility of opening another highly risky front. The Crociata Italica rapidly became the organ of a rigidly organized movement that took the name of the paper itself. Its statutes were written in a deliberately anachronistic language, populated by princes, knights and henchmen, but the substance of the association’s religious and political credo was rooted in a total profession of faith in Christ the Lord and in the rsi.27 Many of the arguments touched on by the review drew on the wide repertoire developed by the Church two decades previously to express her own support for the Fascist regime: the “providential” merits of Mussolini in having opened the way, with the Concordat, to the ‘thesis’ of the Catholic State; the progress made in the struggle against communism, freemasonry and liberalism; the affirmation, on the social level, of principles dear to the Catholic tradition such as order, hierarchy and obedience; the conquest of the Empire; the victorious war in Spain; the success at Munich.28 Moreover, the support offered by the Catholic world to the regime, the consonance of criteria and values vigorously hailed throughout the ventennio, were based on the drastic repudiation of ‘modern liberties’ and the principles by which they were inspired, which the Fascist regime had put into effect. On this anti-modern agenda the ecclesiastical hierarchy had retracted not an inch, nor had it initiated even a partial public discussion on

24 25 26

In A. Dordoni, “Crociata Italica”, 168–169. See A. Fappani and F. Molinari, Chiesa e Repubblica di Salò, Torino: Marietti, 1991, 42–43. The document has been published in an appendix by R. De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, vol. 2, La guerra civile (1943–1945), Torino: Einaudi, 1997, 610–613. 27 Lo Statuto della Crociata Italica, in A. Dordoni, “Crociata Italica”, 155–156. 28 Ibid., 22ff.

292

chapter 7

the responsibilities of the Church and Catholics for the rise of Fascism.29 The crucial questions that Alcide De Gasperi posed in September 1943 in a letter sent to the young manager of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (iri), Sergio Paronetto (“What ought we to have done, how and why have we erred, what and how big is our share in the blame?”30) and his extremely harsh criticisms of the compromises made by Catholic Action during the ventennio did not go beyond the private sphere.31 Crociata Italica went so far as to envisage the creation of a national Church that would detach itself from Roman centralism and assume a more markedly patriotic character, but such a notion found no support in the episcopate. Indeed, no sooner had the publication of the review been announced than it was condemned by the bishop of Cremona Giovanni Cazzani on 8 January 1944 with a warning posted in the Catholic press, beginning with Italia in Milan, whose editor-in-chief, don Mario Busti, had been tried and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment after the armistice on 8 September.32 This was followed by the denunciation of Cardinal Schuster, who in a homily pronounced in the Cathedral of Milan on 16 August 1944, called the Crociata Italica “an historical error and an anti-Italian heresy” and prohibited priests, religious and Catholic associations from having anything to do with it.33 Similar disavowals were made by the Archbishop of Turin Maurilio Fossati, the Bishops’ Conference of the Triveneto ecclesiastical region, the top brass of the military Ordinariate, and many priests in Northern Italy.34 In the Secretariat of State, however, a less frontal approach would have been preferred: Schuster’s homily was stigmatized for its “strongly political character”; it threatened to open “damaging polemics” that the Holy See would have been glad to have been spared.35 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

On the Church’s failure to face up to her responsibilities for the rise of Fascism see G. Miccoli, “Cattolici e comunisti nel secondo dopoguerra: memoria storica, ideologia e lotta politica”, Studi storici 38 (1997): 951–991. De Gasperi scrive. Corrispondenza con capi di Stato, cardinali, uomini politici, giornalisti, vol. 1, (ed.) M.R. De Gasperi, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1974, 342. Thus in a letter to Stefano Jacini, undated but dated by the editor of De Gasperi’s correspondence presumably to 1944, ibid. A. Dordoni, “Crociata Italica”, 170–171. Schuster’s homily was published in the Rivista diocesana milanese (July–August 1944): 150–155. A. Dordoni, “Crociata Italica”, 171ff. “1. His Eminence Cardinal Schuster gave a homily with the title ‘An historical error and an anti-Italian heresy’ in the Cathedral of Milan on 16 August [1944] […] The homily, strongly political in character, has given rise to a lively debate in the Milanese press […]. 2 The aim of the cardinal was to defend the activity and conduct of the Holy See in the present

Atonement

293

A more abstract intervention would have been better, one limited to “insisting on the provisions of the Concordat” and “affirming that the clergy ought not to get involved in party politics, neither in Italy nor abroad”.36 The birth of the rsi, and the fact that a large part of the population perceived it as a pawn at the service of the German occupation, presented a character of Fascism that seemed profoundly different from its previous guise: a regime from which also the Church and the majority of Catholics were dissociated.37 On the political level, however, the public response of the episcopate in Central and Northern Italy was dominated by prudence: no disownment of the civil authority, no analysis of responsibilities, but explicit denunciation of persecutions, massacres, and terror. In a country that had become a theatre of guerrilla warfare, under “three governments and two occupations”,38 the main action of the bishops, clergy and many religious was concentrated on the provision of grassroots assistance and support to the suffering populations. The direct role played by parish priests in the extensive mountainous areas of Central and Northern Italy was especially important; they assumed the role of guide, defense and support of the communities under their care, while in the cities the parishes were at the center of a huge network of activities that relieved the needs of the poorest and most abandoned strata of the population.39 The priority given to charitable activities in her own mission permitted the Church to avoid too harsh disputes with Mussolini’s government and to acquire a social consensus that went well beyond the Catholic faithful themselves. This charitable mission was destined to play an extremely important role at the end of the war.40 This was also the approach favored in the Vatican. In the instructions sent by Cardinal Maglione to the episcopate of Northern Italy after the liberation of

36 37 38

39 40

­conflict. To tell the truth I would not dare to affirm that this homily was one of the happiest pronounced by His Eminence Cardinal Schuster. It seems to me that it was a somewhat hasty discourse and that perhaps the Holy See could have been better defended without providing amunition for damaging polemics”. Notes de la Secrétairerie d’État, 21 October 1944, in adss, vol. 11, document no. 397, 580–582, quotation 580. Ibid., 581. A. Fappani and F. Molinari, Chiesa e Repubblica di Salò, cit. C. Pavone, “Tre governi e due occupazioni”, in L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale e nella Resistenza, (eds.) F. Ferratini Tosi, G. Grassi and M. Legnani, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1988, 423–452. J.D. Durand, L’Église catholique dans la crise de l’Italie, 9ff. G. Miccoli, “La Chiesa di Pio xii nella società italiana del dopoguerra”, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, 1, La costruzione della democrazia. Dalla caduta del fascismo agli anni cinquanta, (ed.) F. Barbagallo, Torino: Einaudi, 1994, 535–613.

294

chapter 7

Rome, when the ever-shifting front of the war raised fears of direct communications between the Holy See and most of the bishops of Central and Northern Italy being severed, bishops were urged to pursue a “common line of conduct”, maintain the activity of the clergy “outside any kind of party politics” and play a “role of persuasion so that resentments and hatreds be assuaged”.41 Moreover, continued the Secretary of State, “the great material and spiritual miseries that afflict the Italian people today offer to pastors of souls a vast field of apostolate to bring back spirits to the practice of religion and to love of our fellowmen in Christ”.42 More than defining in formal terms their own attitude to the Fascism of Salò, the bishops in short were called to foster a national reconciliation necessarily based on the religious rebirth of the nation. It is no accident that most of them seemed far more interested in the damage that the war was causing to immemorial customs and ways of life than in issues of patriotism and party politics.43 This was pointed out – almost with astonishment – in the report on pastoral letters written by the bishops for Lent 1944, which the General Directorate for Cults sent to the Ministry of the Interior on 29 May of that year. It was based on the examination of 52 pastoral letters and presented, according to its compiler, a fairly complete picture of the tendencies and attitudes of the Italian episcopate: Though it might be legitimate to expect a considerable reference to the ­current situation of Italy and an active contribution of ideas which would help to direct the majority of the faithful towards ideals of patriotic faith and rebirth of the country – the report observes – , we must point out, on the contrary, that the common denominator seems to be a complete abstraction from the present situation, combined with an unimaginative, monotonous and uniform treatment of subjects of a rigorously religious nature, with ample treatments of an evangelical, dogmatic and moral character.44

41

L. Maglione to I. Schuster, 4 June 1944, in adss, vol. 11, document no. 210, 359–361, quotations 186. 42 Ibid. 43 This is an aspect explored in B. Bocchini Camaiani, “Vescovi e parroci durante la Resistenza: alcuni casi emblematici”, in Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Piemonte, L’insurrezione in Piemonte, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1987, 260–284. 44 The report is published in an appendix to F. Malgeri, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra, 167–175, quotation 167.

Atonement

295

The religious identity, as Dossetti observed, lent itself to constituting the foundation of the political unity of Catholics.45 Between 1943 and 1945 it came into collision with the values embodied by the rsi and reflected the latent hostility felt by the great mass of Italians towards the Germans and Republican Fascists. On the other hand, only a minority of Catholics were involved in active support for the partisan war. It is not our present purpose to examine the nature, or the scale, of Catholic participation in the Resistance. Here it will suffice to mention the fact that, in the variety of territorial, personal and organizational situations, its main connotation was not ‘anti-fascist’: it was not inspired, that is, by a democratic choice of opposition to the liberticidal system developed by Fascism.46 National and patriotic motivations prevailed over those of political alignment. In any case the formulation of a political position, or an explicit anti-fascist stance, was hampered by the support hitherto given by the Church to the regime, mistrust in popular uprisings, and fears for the organized presence of Communists in the Resistance movement, regarded by the Church with growing disquiet, also in the light of the European situation as a whole.47 Generally the bishops avoided any official appointment of chaplains to partisan troops,48 but when in October 1944 Cardinal Schuster, in preparation for a meeting with the clergy of the Metropolitan Archidiocese of Milan, asked for instructions from the Vatican on whether religious assistance should be given to partisan units, also to ensure that Communism should not gain the upper hand among them,49 the reply he received from Rome was positive.50 There were many cases, indeed, in which ecclesiastical structures furnished a network of asylum and protection, so much so as to place at risk the very lives

45 46

47

48 49 50

G. Dossetti, “Fisionomia del ii Congresso della d.c.”, Cronache sociali (30 November 1947): 198. On Catholic perspectives on the war of liberation, see A. Parisella, “Cattolici, guerra civile, guerra di liberazione. Orientamenti e problemi storiografici”, in Guerra, guerra di libe­ razione, guerra civile, (eds.) M. Legnani and F. Vendramini, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1990, 433–459. See V.E. Giuntella, I cattolici nella Resistenza, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in Italia. 1860–1980, 1/2, 112–128; Cattolici, Chiesa e Resistenza, and C. Pavone Una guer­ ra ­civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991, 169–189. M. Franzinelli, Il riarmo dello spirito, 275ff. Schuster’s request was forwarded to the Secretariat of State by the nuncio in Berne: F. Bernardini to D. Tardini, 24 October 1944, in adss, vol. 11, document no. 400, 585. D. Tardini to F. Bernardini, 24 November 1944, in adss, vol 11, document no. 440, 627.

296

chapter 7

of priests and religious. This is sadly confirmed by the tribute of blood paid by the clergy between 1943 and 1945: of the approximately 10,000 Italians who fell victim to Nazi-Fascist reprisals in the final phase of the war some 200 priests gave their lives; they represented, out of a total of 50,000 Italian ecclesiastics, one of the professional categories that paid the highest price.51 7.2 ‘A Poor Christian’ In the concluding phase of the conflict the bishops residing in the area of ­German occupation and of the government of the rsi strove to limit the scale of the armed insurrection, or even to avert it. This was especially the case in the cities deputed to be its nerve centers: Milan, Turin, Genoa. The prominent role played by Schuster in Milan, at the time of the Liberation, is well known. He was actively involved in the negotiations between Allies, German high command, National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy and Fascist authorities. The Cardinal’s intervention was prompted by the need (as he saw it) to prevent the destruction of industrial plant, and also to avert civilian clashes and social disorders in which extremist positions of Communist inspiration could gain the upper hand. The plea that concluded the draft accord penned by the Cardinal of Milan on 13 December 1944 says it all: If the Anglo-Americans don’t want Bolshevik Communism in the Po valley, they must prevent an abortive insurrection, and therefore support the project devised by the Milanese Ecclesiastical Authorities.52 The negotiation promoted by Schuster did not lead to any compromise solution: the determination of communists, socialists and activists to deny to ­Mussolini and his Fascist Party bosses any room for maneuver coincided with the Anglo-American rejection of any exemptions from the principle of unconditional surrender. The Benedictine Cardinal’s last-ditch attempt also failed. It took place in the audience room of the Archbishop’s Palace on 25 April 1945, at three in the afternoon. The participants: Mussolini, General Raffaele Cadorna, commander of the Corpo Volontari per la Libertà (cvl), and Achille Marazza, Christian Democrat representative in the National Liberation Committee for Northern Italy and in this role chosen to conduct the negotiation.53 Mussolini, 51 52 53

These are the figures reported in J.D. Durand, L’Église catholique dans la crise de l’Italie, 147–148. I. Schuster, Gli ultimi tempi di un regime, Milano: La Via, 1946, 109–113, quotation 113. Ibid., 162–170.

Atonement

297

however, abandoned the talks and left Milan in a hurry as soon as he found out that the Germans had negotiated a separate deal confirming the capitulation and declaring their intention to deliver the instrument of their surrender to Schuster himself. The legend of Mussolini converted in extremis to Catholicism circulated for a long time once the war had ended. It was packaged and publicized by the illustrated magazines, on the basis of non-existent spiritual testaments and sensational revelations of former chaplains of the black brigades.54 To the survivors of the ventennio the idea might have seemed plausible, that Mussolini in the final phase of his life was swept away by events because he had become indifferent to them: the idea of a Duce following in the footsteps of his gerarchi rather than at their head, resigned rather than possessed, irenic rather than bellicose, in short a poor Christian rather than a Fascist diehard.55 The myth of the “Man of Providence” cast its protective shadow over them all. Even Schuster seemed to believe that Mussolini, before his death on the 28 April, had shown every intention of returning to God, at least according to the posthumous account that he wrote of that last conversation with the Duce on 25 April. “Resigned”, “moved”, “almost numbed”, forced, in the interminable hours spent in conversing with the Cardinal on questions of religion (ranging from the Ambrosian clergy to St. Benedict and the Patriarchate of M ­ oscow), while awaiting the arrival of Cadorna and Marazza, Mussolini seemed to Schuster, if not yet devout, to have “a religious outlook”, and seemed ready to return to Catholicism, even go to Mass, just as his mother Rosa had wished. Just like Napoleon: Then, continuing our conversation on matters of religion, he confided to me that, when he was a prisoner on the Maddalena, a good priest of Pansanica had offered his services to begin his re-education in the practice of the Catholic life. He had already reached an advanced point, indeed it had even been decided that on the following morning he would attend Holy Mass, when on that very day he was forcibly removed from 54

55

See, among the more recent trouvailles, E. Innocenti, Disputa sulla conversione di Benito Mussolini, privately circulated edition of the “Sacra Fraternitas Aurigarum in Urbe” (1998); a preview of Innocenti’s findings was published in the Catholic daily Avvenire», 14 January 1994. See also M. Cancogni, Gli ultimi giorni di Mussolini, Foreword by F. Perfetti, Firenze: Le Lettere, 2008. Though the question of the presumed conversion of the Duce di Gar­ gnano recurs every so often in the press, it is a story that especially absorbed the illustrated magazines in the months following the Liberation and in the Fifties. See S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce. Un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria, Torino: Einaudi, 2011 (1st edition 1998), 167–169. Ivi, 167.

298

chapter 7

the island. […] So it must be concluded that Mussolini had by now been imbued with a religious sense, just as he had been induced to do by the education he had received from his mother Rosa during his first years of life. I then reminded him that Napoleon, when he found himself exiled in St. Helena, drew his comfort from the faith of his Forefathers.56 The fact of Mussolini’s conversion, in any case, assuming the Cardinal really believed in it, did not change in any way the cards on the table, at least in human terms. Of course – said Schuster consolingly to Mussolini offering him a biscuit and a little glass of sweet liqueur – he, whatever happened, would be able to count on the Holy See, which “had not forgotten” the Lateran Concordat and “would try to be of service to him in the best possible way”. But now he could not escape the tragic destiny that awaited him: that Calvary – added the Cardinal with Benedictine wisdom – would be “the expiation of his sins before a just and merciful God”.57 Three days later, on the day after the miserable epilogue at the village of Dongo, Pietro Nenni signed a categorical editorial in Avanti! in which he demanded the immediate execution of Mussolini before a firing squad, to preclude the Allies from staging a show trial.58 To be sure, the Socialist leader, who thirty years earlier had profaned churches and tabernacles with “companion” Benito during the agitation of the so-called Settimana Rossa, gave the matter a different sense than that of so erudite an ecclesiastic and pastor of souls as Schuster. The word used in the headline of Nenni’s editorial, nevertheless, was the same as that pronounced by the Cardinal in the Archbishop’s Palace on 25 April: Expiation. The image of Mussolini muffled up in a Luftwaffe greatcoat being picked up at Dongo while he was trying to leave Italy, with the money from the Banca d’Italia and with his mistress Claretta Petacci, seemed to confirm, especially in the eyes of the anti-fascists, the triad of accusations brought by the Italians against him after the collapse of his myth under the devastating blows of war: cowardice, dishonesty, infidelity.59 Remitting those sins would have meant pardoning the crimes of the regime.60 Angelica Balabanoff, the Russian socialist who forty years earlier had loved the young Benito, castigated those 56 Thus I. Schuster, Gli ultimi tempi di un regime, 163–164. 57 Ibid. 58 L’Avanti, 28 April 1945, then republished in P. Nenni, Vento del Nord. Giugno 1944-giugno 1945, Torino: Einaudi, 1978, 355–356. 59 S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, 251ff. 60 Ibid., 262.

Atonement

299

crimes in her unsparing book Il traditore Mussolini (1945). It was the former lover of Mussolini, the teacher who had taught him the fundamentals of Marxism, we recall, who had reported the challenge that Mussolini had launched against God in the Maison du Peuple at Lausanne on 26 March 1904; the one in which, watch in hand, he had granted ten minutes to the Almighty to strike him down and thus demonstrate that He really existed.61 One might conclude that, in the end, God had accepted the challenge and that the time had come for the Duce to expiate his guilt and that of the regime. But that would mean avoiding the problem of the profound tendencies and collective aspirations of which Fascism had been the expression. It would have meant ignoring the responsibilities of those who had supported its rise, including the men of the Church. 7.3

Nothing to Apologize about

In December 1943 the Holy See’s Deputy Secretary of State Domenico Tardini had prepared a long memorandum for Roosevelt’s personal representative in the Vatican, Myron Taylor. Title: Italy: situation and remedies. It was the Holy See’s intention that the document, which dedicated a long paragraph to Fascism, would help explain to the Allies “the truth” about the “real conditions” of the country.62 The person designated to write it was an able and experienced career-diplomat, now recognized as one of the key figures in the international relations of the Holy See during this period.63 Tardini’s brief in writing it was also to take into due account the ideas and views of his interlocutor: a consideration that makes even more significant some of his judgements on Fascism, minimizing to say the least. The origin of the “Fascist phenomenon”– an issue on which a debate had long been opened in anti-fascist circles – was plausibly explained in the memorandum by tracing it back to the “psychological conditions” in the years immediately after the end of the First World War, dominated by disillusions and resentments. Tardini then turned his attention to the difficult “economic

61 See supra, Chapter 1, 23–24. 62 The document “L’Italia: situazioni e rimedi” has been published in E. Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti, 279–297. 63 See A. Riccardi, Tardini Domenico, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in ­Italia, 1860–1980, (eds.) F. Traniello and G. Campanini, 3/2, Le figure rappresentative, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1982, 832–834.

300

chapter 7

conditions” after the war; these, he said, had been exacerbated by the galloping inflation attributable to strong wage claims [sic].64 But it is especially the analysis of “socio-political conditions” that reveals what were the predominant concerns in the Vatican, also following the regime’s tragic epilogue and the situation of a country that had become a theatre of war. If Fascism had assumed power – summed up Tardini – it was due to the inability of the “­ so-called moderate parties” to find a solution, in view of their “narrow partisan interests” and “personal jealousies”. No mention is made of the Partito Popolare. Yet the responsibilities of the Holy See’s upper hierarchy for the elimination of that Catholic Democratic Party had – as we have seen – been heavy. As for the ­climate of violence that preceded Mussolini’s rise to power, the blame for that was firmly laid at the door of the Socialist Party, guilty, – said Tardini – of having instigated workers to “frequent and often unjustified strikes”, and of having threatened private property and public security.65 Of “Fascism in power” many “positive aspects” were listed in the memorandum: public order and social tranquility, land reclamations, expansion of the road network and public transport system, efficient functioning of public services, and due attention paid to family policies, not to mention, ça va sans dire, the overcoming of the conflict between Pope and Italian State. Some claims (“the trains began to run on time”66) may now arouse some pleasant irony, finding in it a reflection of the propaganda of the regime and the nostalgic clichés of a later period. But basically Tardini limited himself to describing the process of modernization that had transformed Italy under the Fascist regime. The criteria adopted by the Vatican’s senior representatives and the deep convictions that underlay their interpretations more clearly emerge, on the other hand, – tellingly so – in those passages in the memorandum that relate to the “negative aspects of Fascism”.67 Among these the document recalled, apart from a series of blunders in foreign policy, the having denied the freedom of the individual, of the trade unions and of political action: “no one – said the memorandum – was allowed publicly to criticize, or to make accusations against, Fascism and its leaders; the trade unions were reduced to being organs regimented by the State”. The fact that “only one party was tolerated, and that was the Fascist Party”, was dismissed in the memorandum as no more than a “stupidity”.68 64 65 66 67 68

“L’Italia: situazioni e rimedi” in E. Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti, 282–283. Ibid., 283–284. Ibid., 285. Ibid., 285–287. Ibid., 286.

Atonement

301

Equally emblematic is the passage on the regime’s racial legislation of November 1938, touched on only to prove Mussolini’s “inability” to draw lasting advantage, in terms of international prestige, from the Lateran Pacts. It was dismissed as a legislative measure relating to “marriages between Arians and Jews”, and in this sense a source of conflict with Pius xi. Given the fact that such marriages amounted to less than a hundred out of a total of 300,000, it was “evident” – concluded Tardini – that it wasn’t worth the trouble for the head of the government to create “a bone of contention with the supreme spiritual power […] on so limited a question”.69 This was tantamount to saying that those laws, in themselves, were not judged inadmissible by Catholics and perhaps in some parts – such was the implication – might even have been considered meritorious. The fact that in a document drawn up by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State for an American interlocutor – ultimately for President Roosevelt – the regime’s anti-Semitic legislation of 1938 was reduced to a mere prohibition of mixed marriages, with the consequent vulnus to the Concordat, shows once again that the basic criterion adopted by the ecclesiastical authorities to pass judgement on Fascism and its regime, even following its downfall, was determined not by the cataclysm that had engulfed Europe, but by the claims of the Church. The disaster of 8 September and even more so the events of the following two years showed with growing clarity that the political system that was being launched in Italy and that would prevail at the world level at the end of the war could not but be democratic. The consciousness of an imminent return to democracy is already attested in Tardini’s memorandum, however much he adduced significant restrictions in its application: Without doubt a return to democracy is essential. […] It may be said that today, after the tragic fascist experiment, all Italians deplore and deprecate the dictatorship and have become favorable to democracy. It is clear, however, that the democratic forms should be adapted to the capacities, characteristics and degree of evolution of the various populations. It would be an error to apply to Italy the same methods and criteria that have produced such good results in England and the usa. Everyone recalls how, when universal suffrage was in force in Italy, a large number of workers, peasants, and so on, voted not according to their own convictions, but were influenced by those who could pay most or were more skillful in deceiving ingenuous and ignorant voters. This fact ought not to 69

Ibid., 287.

302

chapter 7

be forgotten when the time comes to give the Italian people a new and practical political order.70 In his radiomessage of 24 December 1944, “the sixth Christmas of the war”, Pius xii similarly recognized that the peoples, under the sinister glare of the tragedy of war, had “as if awoken from a long slumber” and been animated by a “democratic tendency”. They had reached the persuasion that, if the opportunity to examine and correct the activities of the public authorities had not been trampled on, the world would not have been dragged into the disastrous vortex of a world war.71 ln the course of his radiomessage the Pope tackled, for the first time, on the basis of the Church’s magisterium, the political dimension of the rights of the person, beginning with the right of citizens to “express their own opinion on the duties and sacrifices imposed on them”. In this case too, however, some important reservations are made.72 The fundamental criterion to judge “a real and sound democracy” remained the subordination of its norms to the moral order established by God and interpreted by the Church.73 The Pope invited “an elite of men of solid Christian conviction” to assume a guiding role in order to “circulate in the veins of the people and of the State, inflamed by a thousand fevers, the spiritual antidote of clear views”. So, also in the democratic regime, the Pope attributed to the teaching of the Church a role of higher orientation and control, which aspired to a progressive confessionalization of the State.74 Rooted in a long tradition of thought, this guiding role of the Church implied that only Catholics had the aptitude, or the moral principle, to govern society. Only they could rescue it from the abyss into which it had been led by a fatal chain of errors and anti-Catholic movements, culminating in the atrocities of a world war. Pius xii – as we have seen – had declared so in the encyclical that had opened his pontificate in October 1939, when the war was only in its initial stages: the tragedy that was investing the European peoples was caused, he said, by the “immense vortex of errors and 70 71 72 73

74

Ibid., 282. Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 6, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 235–251. See D. Menozzi, Chiesa e diritti umani, 140–142. “If the future will belong to democracy, an essential part of its task will have to touch on the religion of Christ and the Church, herald of the word of the Redeemer and continuator of his mission of salvation. It is she who teaches and defends the truths, and communicates the supernatural powers of grace, in order to put into effect the order established by God for beings and ends, ultimate foundation and guiding principle of any democracy”. Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 6, cit. See G. Miccoli, Cattolici e comunisti nel secondo dopoguerra, 960.

Atonement

303

anti-Christian movements” and represented a divine punishment, the necessary expiation, for States and for society, for having refused to recognize the role of supreme direction that belonged to the teaching of the Church.75 The meta-historical view of the war had long enabled Pacelli not to enter into any adjudication of the responsibilities for the conflict and to imply that there was a substantial balance between the pros and cons of both sides. Once it had become abundantly clear that the twin totalitarian systems of Nazism and Fascism were inexorably heading towards total defeat and that the future world order would be determined by the victory of democracies, this view was revived, in a new guise, and now lent itself to a further interpretation: the Church did not feel herself in any way responsible for the direction that had been taken by human affairs. Indeed she now attributed to herself a central role in the opposition to forms of totalitarianism. She vindicated her God-­given mission to proclaim to the world the highest and most necessary message there could possibly be: the dignity of man and the vocation of being children of God: By her very existence – the Pope now affirmed – the Church stands up before the world, a shining beacon that constantly recalls this divine order. Her history clearly reflects her providential mission. The struggles that she has been forced to undergo by the abuse of power and has had to sustain to defend the freedom she has received from God were, at the same time, struggles for the true freedom of man.76 The battles conducted in previous years to assert the authority and scope of the Church were now presented by the Pope as struggles to defend the ­freedoms of everyone. In this way the Vatican began the process of the “manipulation of history”77 through which the ecclesiastical hierarchy was not only self-­ absolved from the full support she had offered to Fascism, but continued to present herself as the sole authority able directly to take the reins of Italian society into her hands again. Accredited by the enormous task of charitable assistance that priests and bishops had performed in support of the Italian population, especially in the last two years of the war, the Church had, as it were, been exonerated, and even purified. But the re-gained Catholic innocence did not pass through the ablution of public debate – simply because there was none. Any such debate was stifled at birth by the unchallengeable principles of the Church’s 75 See supra, Chapter 6, 257–259. 76 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio xii, vol. 6, cit. 77 D. Menozzi, Chiesa e diritti umani, 143.

304

chapter 7

­self-­proclaimed infallibility and indefectibility which prevented any critical reflection on the past of the Catholic institution; at most, it permitted an admission of the errors of individuals. So, for the ecclesiastical hierarchy there was no need to justify the Church’s accord with the Fascist regime, or to offer any comprehensive interpretation of the ventennio. This line was fully taken on board by Catholic political leaders at the end of the war. With a variety of accents, they appealed to the tradition of democratic Catholicism, whether they were former members of the ppi defenestrated during the ventennio or young party cadres who had emerged from the ranks of Christian Democracy after involvement in the Resistance. Though the problem of the embrace between Church and Fascism had been repeatedly raised by former ppi exponents in exile during the previous two decades, any debate on the question was scrupulously avoided in the new Catholic party. This was due, in the main, to the psychological difficulty its leaders had of adopting a publicly critical attitude to Vatican policy, past and present. For a critical reflection might have involved the demand for a revision, or worse the abolition, of the privileges that the regime had granted to the ecclesiastical institution through the Concordat. Any such critical revision was further blocked by the specter of a frontal clash with Communism, which locked the Catholic world in a compact block, making any objections to and dissent from the official line ever less justifiable.78 The silence that fell over the Church’s collusion with the regime was also an expression of the more general tendency to wash the slate clean and remove the problem of Fascism from Italian society.79 That does not mean that the issue, in itself, was absent from the political debate. Discussion on the longstanding ills that had favored the advent of the dictatorship in Liberal Italy, the debate on the shortcomings of the pre-fascist democratic system, the repeated appeals to the need to extirpate Fascism from its very roots, had occupied a significant space in public debate in the last years of the war and in the immediate post-war period. But the problem of the success of the Fascist regime, the popular appeal it had enjoyed, was exorcized. Fascism was presented, at most, as the result of the deceptions which the Italians had been too ingenuous to see through. The problem of the wide support that the regime had enjoyed was avoided; the collective attitudes and responsibilities that had permitted its rise were obliterated. Collective amnesia was the price the Church, and Italian society as a whole, paid for what was felt to be the overriding need: national 78 79

G. Miccoli, Cattolici e comunisti nel secondo dopoguerra, 961. L. Mangoni, “La civiltà della crisi. Gli intellettuali tra fascismo e antifascismo”, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, vol. 1, 617–718.

Atonement

305

concord. This was considered indispensable by the new mass parties in postwar Italy. It was a need that impelled the political forces of the anti-fascist coalition, not least (as is well-known) the Communists, to avoid entering into any dispute with Catholics over the events of the past: it was imperative that the new State should not be born in conflict with the Church.

Bibliography Albanese, Giulia, La marcia su Roma, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2006. Ales Bello, Angela and Chenaux, Philippe (eds.), Edith Stein e il nazismo, Roma: Città Nuova, 2005. Álvarez Bolado, Alfonso Para ganar la guerra, para ganar la paz, Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 1995. Aquarone, Alberto, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (1965), Torino: Einaudi, 1995. Arnold, Claus and Vian, Giovanni, La condanna del modernismo. Documenti, interpre­ tazioni, conseguenze, Roma: Viella, 2010. Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane and Becker, Annette, 14–18, retrouver la Guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. Banti, Alberto Mario, Sublime madre nostra. La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al fascismo, Roma-Bari: Laterza 2011. Bardelli, Daniele, “La chiesa e i cattolici nella stampa di Roberto Farinacci”, Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea 6 (2000): 505–546. Barrera, Giulia, “Sessualità e segregazione nelle terre dell’Impero”, in L’Impero fa­scista. Italia ed Etiopia (1935–1941), (ed.) Riccardo Bottoni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008, 393–414. Bassanesi, Roberto, “Il contraddittorio di Mussolini sulla divinità”, Protagora 33 (June 1964): 51–66. Battelli, Giuseppe, Società, Stato e Chiesa in Italia dal tardo Settecento a oggi, Roma: Carocci, 2013. Becker, Annette, La guerre et la foi: de la mort á la mémoire, 1914–1930, Paris: Armand Colin, 1994. Bedeschi, Lorenzo, Buonaiuti, il Concordato e la Chiesa. Con un’appendice di lettere ine­ dite, Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1970. Bedeschi, Lorenzo, Don Minzoni il prete ucciso dai fascisti, Milan: Bompiani, 1973. Bedeschi, Lorenzo ed., Obbedientissimo in Cristo… Lettere di don Primo Mazzolari al suo vescovo 1917–1959, Milano: Mondadori, 1974. Bedeschi, Lorenzo, Il giovane De Gasperi e l’incontro con Murri, Milano: Bompiani, 1974. Belardelli, Giovanni, “Un viaggio di Bernardino Nogara negli Stati Uniti (novembre 1937)”, Storia contemporanea 23 (1992): 321–338. Beltrame Quattrocchi, Paolino, L’arcivescovo Schuster, un asceta benedettino nella Milano dell’era fascista, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1985. Benadusi, Lorenzo, The Enemy of the New Man. Homesexuality in Fascist Italy, Madison: The University Wisconsin Press 2012. Berezin, Mabel, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture in the Interwar Italy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

308

bibliograpghy

Bertoldi, Silvio, Mussolini tale e quale, Milano: Longanesi, 1975. Betri, Maria Luisa, “Tra politica e cultura: la Scuola di mistica fascista”, in Il fascismo in Lombardia. Politica, economia, società, (eds.) Maria Luisa Betri et al., Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1989, 377–398. Betti, Carmen, L’Opera Nazionale Balilla e l’educazione fascista, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1984. Biagioli, Ilaria et al., (eds.), Romolo Murri e i murrismi in Italia e in Europa cent’anni dopo, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2004. Binchy, Daniel A., Church and State in Fascist Italy, London: Oxford University Press, 1970 (1st edition 1941). Bocchini Camaiani, Bruna Vescovi e parroci durante la Resistenza: alcuni casi emble­ matici, in Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Piemonte, L’insurrezione in Piemonte, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1987, 260–284. Bocci, Maria, Oltre lo Stato liberale. Ipotesi su politica e società nel dibattito cattolico tra fascismo e democrazia, Roma: Bulzoni, 1999. Bocci, Maria, Agostino Gemelli rettore e francescano. Chiesa, regime e democrazia, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003. Bonetta, Gaetano, Corpo e nazione. L’educazione ginnastica, igienica e sessuale nell’Italia liberale, Milano: FrancoAngeli 1990. Borella, Girolama, Borgato, Daniela and Marcato, Roberto (eds.), Chiedo notizie di vita o di morte. Lettere a un cappellano militare della Grande Guerra, with an introduction by Mario Isnenghi and an anthology of letters, Rovereto: Museo storico italiano della guerra, 2004. Bosworth, Richard J.B., Musssolini, new edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2010 (1st edition 2002). Bottai, Giuseppe, Diario 1935–1944, (ed.) Giordano Bruno Guerri, Milano: Rizzoli, 2001 (1st edition 1982). Botti, Alfonso, Romolo Murri e l’anticlericalismo negli anni de “La Voce”, Introduction by L. Bedeschi, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1996. Botti, Alfonso, “La guerra civile spagnola nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Le carte della Nunziatura apostolica di Madrid (prima parte)”, Spagna contemporanea 16 (2007): 131–158. Botti, Alfonso, “La guerra civile spagnola nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Le carte della Nunziatura apostolica di Madrid (seconda parte)”, Spagna contemporanea 17 (2008): 125–177. Botti, Alfonso, “Santa Sede e influenza nazista nella Spagna della guerra civile”, in Pio XI: Keywords. International Conference Milan 2009, (eds.) Alberto Guasco and Raffaella Perin, Berlin: Lit, 2010, 107–129. Botti, Alfonso, “Dal 18 luglio al 14 settembre 1936: come la S. Sede cambiò rotta sul conflitto spagnolo”, Spagna contemporanea 20 (2011): 111–148.

Bibliography

309

Bouthillon, Fabrice, La naissance de la Mardité. Une théologie politique à l’âge totali­ taire: Pie XI (1922–1939), Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2001. Boutry, Philippe, “Hagiographie, histoire et Révolution Française. Pie XI et la béatification des martyrs de septembre 1792 (17 octobre 1926)”, in Achille Ratti Pape Pie XI, Rome: École française de Rome, 1996, 305–355. Braccesi, Lorenzo, “Costantino e i Patti lateranensi”, Studi storici 32 (1991): 161–167. Braccesi, Lorenzo, Roma bimillenaria: Pietro e Cesare, Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1999. Bracher, Karl D., The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Brice, Catherine and Miccoli, Giovanni (eds.), Les racines chrétiennes de l’antisémitisme politique ( fin XIX-XX siècle), Rome: École française de Rome, 2003. Butler, Matthew, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion Michoacán 1927–1929, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Caliò, Tommaso “Corpi santi e santuari nella Roma della Restaurazione”, in Monaci, ebrei, santi. Studi per Sofia Boesch Gajano, (ed.) Volpato, Antonio, Roma: Viella, 2008, 129–137. Caliò, Tommaso and Rusconi, Roberto (eds.), San Francesco d’Italia. Santità e identità nazionale, Roma: Viella, 2011. Campanini, Giorgio (ed.), I cattolici italiani e la guerra di Spagna. Studi e ricerche, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1987. Campbell, Ian, The Massacre of Debre Libanos. Ethiopia 1937. The Story of one of Fascism’s most Shocking Atrocities, Introduction by Angelo Del Boca, Foreword by Asfa Wossen Asserate, Addis Abeba: Addis Ababa University Press, 2014. Canali, Mauro, Il delitto Matteotti. Affarismo e politica nel primo governo Mussolini, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997. Cannistraro, Philip V. and Sullivan, Brian R., Margherita Sarfatti. L’altra donna del duce, Milano: Mondadori, 1993. Capperucci, Vera, Il partito dei cattolici. Dall’Italia degasperiana alle correnti democris­ tiane, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2010. Casella, Mario, Stato e Chiesa in Italia dalla Conciliazione alla riconciliazione (1929–1931), Galatina: Congedo, 2005. Casella, Mario, “Il conflitto tra Stato e Chiesa del 1939–1940 sui distintivi d’Azione cattolica nella documentazione dell’Archivio storico diplomatico del Ministro degli Affari esteri”, in Democrazia e coscienza religiosa nella storia del Novecento. Studi in onore di Francesco Malgeri, (eds.) Augusto D’Angelo, Paolo Trionfini and Roberto P. Violi, Roma: Ave, 2010, 55–81. Cassata, Francesco, A destra del fascismo. Profilo politico di Julius Evola, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Cassese, Sabino, Lo Stato fascista, Bologna: il Mulino, 2010.

310

bibliograpghy

Castagna, Luca, A Bridge across the Ocean. The United States and the Holy See between the Two World Wars, Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Castelli, Giulio, La Chiesa e il fascismo, Roma: L’Arnia, 1951. Casula, Carlo Felice, Domenico Tardini (1888–1961). L’azione della Santa Sede nella crisi fra le due guerre, Roma: Studium, 1988. Casula, Carlo Felice, “La Santa Sede frente a la República española y a la guerra civil”, in La Iglesia católica y la guerra civil en España (cincuenta años después), Madrid: Fundación Friedrich Ebert, Instituto Fe y Secularidad, 1990, 67–100. Cattaneo, Giulio, “Giovanni Papini, prima della conversione e dopo”, in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo. Aspetti e figure della cultura e della politica dei cattolici nel ‘900, (ed.) Giuseppe Rossini, Bologna: il Mulino, 1972, 235–247. Cavaglion, Alberto, Felice Momigliano (1866–1924). Una biografia, Bologna: il Mulino, 1988. Cavagnini, Giovanni, “Le prime prove di un mito fascista. Padre Reginaldo Giuliani nella Grande Guerra”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 976–992. Cavagnini, Giovanni, “Nazione e provvidenza. Padre Reginaldo Giuliani tra Fiume ed Etiopia (1919–36)”, Passato e Presente 28 (2010): 43–67. Ceci, Lucia, “‘Il Fascismo manda l’Italia in rovina’. Le note inedite di monsignor Domenico Tardini (23 settembre-13 dicembre 1935)”, Rivista storica italiana 120 (2008): 313–367. Ceci, Lucia, “La guerra di Etiopia fuori dall’Italia: le posizioni dei vescovi cattolici europei”, in L’Impero fascista. Italia ed Etiopia (1935–1941), (ed.) Riccardo Bottoni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008, 117–143. Ceci, Lucia, “Letture politiche di una vicenda missionaria: Guglielmo Massaja nella propaganda colonialista”, in Guglielmo Massaja 1809–2009: all’Africa attraverso l’Africa, (ed.) Pierluigi Magistri, Roma: Società Geografica Italiana, 2009, 91–105. Ceci, Lucia, Il papa non deve parlare. Chiesa, fascismo e guerra d’Etiopia, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010. Ceci, Lucia, “Il sacrificio per la patria nel discorso cattolico sulla guerra di Etiopia”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 11 (2011): 91–110. Ceci, Lucia, “The First Steps of ‘Parallel Diplomacy’: The Vatican and the US in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–1936)”, in Pius XI and America, (eds.) Charles R. Gallagher, David I. Kertzer and Alberto Melloni, Berlin: Lit, 2012, 87–105. Ceci, Lucia, “Il dibattito sull’insegnamento della religione tra le due guerre”, in La re­ ligione istruita nella scuola e nella cultura dell’Italia contemporanea, (eds.) Luciano Caimi and Giovanni Vian, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013, 117–141. Ceci, Lucia, “La Chiesa e il fascismo”, Studi storici 55 (2014): 123–137. Cerrato, Rocco, “Genocchi, Giovanni”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 53, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1999. Chabod, Federico, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1990 (1st edition 1951).

Bibliography

311

Chabod, Federico, L’Italia contemporanea (1918–1948), Torino: Einaudi, 2002 (1st edition 1961). Chadwick, Owen, Britain and the Vatican during the Second World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Chaline, Nadine-Josette, “La Spiritualité de Achille Ratti”, in Achille Ratti Pape Pie XI, Rome: École française de Rome 1996. Chenaux, Philippe, Pio XII. Diplomatico e pastore, Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 2004. Ciano, Galeazzo, Diario. 1937–1943, Foreword by Renzo De Felice, Milano: Rizzoli, 2010 (1st edition 1980). English translation: Diary, 1937–1943, Foreword by Renzo De Felice, original introduction by S. Welles, New York: Enigma Books, 2002. Cicchitti-Suriani, Arnaldo, “La Repubblica sociale italiana ed il Concordato del 1929”, Nuova Antologia 86 (1951): 118–127. Ciliberto, Michele, “Tra ‘societas christiana’ e cesarismo: Giovanni Papini”, in Giovanni Papini, (ed.) Gentili, Sandro, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1983. Ciucci, Giorgio, Gli architetti e il fascismo, Torino: Einaudi, 1989. Coco, Giovanni, “L’anno terribile del cardinale Pacelli e il più segreto tra i concistori di Pio XI”, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 47 (2009): 143–276. Coco, Giovanni, “Eugenio Pacelli: cardinale e Segretario di Stato (1929–1930)”, in I ‘Fogli di Udienza’ del cardinale Eugenio Pacelli, Segretario di Stato, vol. 1, 1930, (eds.) Sergio Pagano, Marcel Chappin and Giovanni Coco, Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2010, 52–77. Colarizi, Simona, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il regime. 1929–1943, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Confalonieri, Carlo, Pio XI visto da vicino, new edition with the addition of two appendices edited by G. Frasso, Torino: Edizioni Paoline, 1993 (1st edition 1957). Convents, Guido, “I cattolici e il cinema”, in Storia del cinema mondiale, (ed.) Gian Piero Brunetta, vol. 5, Torino: Einaudi 2001, 485–517. Coppa, Frank J., “The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI against Racism and Anti-Semitism Uncovered – Once Again!”, The Catholic Historical Review 84 (1998): 63–72. Corner, Paul, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Corsetti, Angelo, Scritti, Foreword by Francesco Margiotta Broglio, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1999. Craveri, Piero, De Gasperi, Bologna: il Mulino, 2006. D’Alfonso, Rocco, “Il nazionalismo italiano e le premesse ideologico-politiche del Concordato”, in Stato, Chiesa e relazioni internazionali, (ed.) Marco Mugnaini, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2003, 60–103. D’Agostino, Peter R., Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Dal Toso, Paola, Nascita e diffusione dell’Asci: 1916–1928, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2006.

312

bibliograpghy

Dalla Casa, Brunella, Attentato al duce. Le molte storie del caso Zamboni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2000. Dalla Torre, Giuseppe, I cattolici e la vita pubblica italiana, Roma: Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1962. Dau Novelli, Cecilia, Società, chiesa e associazionismo femminile, Roma: Ave, 1988. De Begnac, Yvon, Palazzo Venezia. Storia di un regime, Roma: Editrice La Rocca, 1950. De Begnac, Yvon, Taccuini Mussoliniani, (ed.) Francesco Perfetti, Bologna: il Mulino, 1990. De Cesaris, Valerio, Vaticano, fascismo e questione razziale, Milano: Guerini e Associati, 2010. De Felice, Renzo, Mussolini il fascista, vol. 1, La conquista del potere (1921–1925), Torino: Einaudi, 1981 (1st edition 1966). De Felice, Renzo, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920, Torino: Einaudi 1995 (1st edition 1965). De Felice, Renzo, Mussolini il duce, vol. 1, Gli anni del consenso, 1929–1936, Torino: Einaudi, 1996 (1st edition 1974). De Felice, Renzo, Mussolini l’alleato, vol. 2, La guerra civile (1943–1945), Torino: Einaudi, 1997. De Felice, Renzo, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Torino: Einaudi 1993. English translation: The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, New York: Enigma Books, 2001. De Felice, Renzo, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2, Lo Stato totalitario (1936–1940), Torino: Einaudi, 2008 (1st edition 1981). De Gasperi, Alcide, I cattolici trentini sotto l’Austria: antologia degli scritti dal 1902 al 1915 con i discorsi al Parlamento austriaco, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964. De Gasperi, Alcide, Lettere sul Concordato, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1970. De Gasperi, Maria Romana (ed.), De Gasperi scrive. Corrispondenza con capi di Stato, cardinali, uomini politici, giornalisti, I, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1974. De Giorgi, Fulvio, “Il culto al Sacro Cuore di Gesù: forme spirituali, forme simboliche, forme politiche nei processi di modernizzazione”, in Santi, culti, simboli nell’età del­ la secolarizzazione, (ed.) Emma Fattorini, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1997, 195–211. De Giorgi, Fulvio, “Linguaggi militari e mobilitazione cattolica nell’Italia fascista”, Con­ temporanea 5 (2002): 253–286. De Giorgi, Fulvio, Mons. Montini. Chiesa cattolica e scontri di civiltà nella prima metà del Novecento, Bologna: il Mulino, 2012. De Grazia, Victoria, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1920–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. De Grazia, Victoria and Luzzatto, Sergio (eds.), Dizionario del fascismo, Torino: Einaudi, 2005. De Napoli, Olindo, La prova della razza. Cultura giuridica e razzismo negli anni Trenta, Firenze: Le Monnier, 2009.

Bibliography

313

De Rosa, Gabriele, I conservatori nazionali: biografia di Carlo Santucci, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962. De Rosa, Gabriele, Il Partito popolare italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1966. De Rosa, Gabriele (ed.), Cattolici, Chiesa e Resistenza, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997. De Rosa, Gabriele, “La Resistenza attraverso la molteplicità del ‘vissuto religioso’”, in Cattolici, Chiesa e Resistenza, (ed.) Gabriele De Rosa, Bologna: il Mulino, 1997, 13–60. De Rosa, Gabriele, Gregory, Tullio and Vauchez, André, Storia dell’Italia religiosa, vol. III, L’età contemporanea, (ed.) Gabriele De Rosa, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995. De Vecchi di Val Cismon, Cesare Maria, Tra Papa, Duce e Re, (ed.) Sandro Setta, Roma: Jouvence, 1998. De’ Rossi Dell’Arno, Giulio, Pio XI e Mussolini, Roma: Corso, 1954. Decleva, Enrico, “Anticlericalismo e lotta politica nell’Italia giolittiana, 1: L’‘esempio della Francia’ e i partiti popolari (1901–1904)”, Nuova rivista storica 52 (1968): 291–354. Decleva, Enrico, “Anticlericalismo e lotta politica nell’Italia giolittiana, 2: L’estrema sinistra e la formazione dei blocchi popolari (1905–1909)”, Nuova rivista storica 53 (1969): 541–617. Deffayet, Laurence, “Pie XI et la condamnation des ‘Amis d’Israël’”, in Pie XI et la France, J. Prévotat (éd.), Rome: École française de Rome, 2010, 87–102. Dell’Erba, Nunzio, Intellettuali laici nel ’900 italiano, Padova: Vincenzo Grasso Editore, 2011. Derré, Jean-René, Gadille, Jacques De Montclos, Xavier, Plongeron, Bernard (éds), Civilisation chrétienne. Approche historique d’une idéologie XVIIIe-XXe siècle, Paris: Beauchesne, 1975. Di Giovanni, Francesca and Roselli, Giuseppina (eds.), Inter Arma Caritas. L’Ufficio In­ formazioni Vaticano per i prigionieri di guerra istituito da Pio XII (1939–1947), Città del Vaticano: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2004. Di Mauro, Alessandro, Regime fascista e mito di Roma: il ruolo dell’Istituto di Studi Ro­ mani (1925–1943), Università degli Studi di Catania, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche, academic year 2009–2010, 155–169. Di Nolfo, Ennio, Vaticano e Stati Uniti 1939–1952 (dalle carte di Myron C. Taylor), Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1978. Diner, Dan, Raccontare il Novecento. Una storia politica, Milano: Garzanti, 2007 (First published in German: Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung, München: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1999). Dominici, Silvia, La lotta senz’odio. Il socialismo evangelico del «Seme» (1901–1915), Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1995. Dordoni, Annarosa, “Crociata Italica”. Fascismo e religione nella Repubblica di Salò (gen­ naio 1944-aprile 1945), Milano: SugarCo, 1976.

314

bibliograpghy

Duggan, Christopher, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, London: The Bodley Head, Random House, 2012. Durand, Jean Dominique, L’Église catholique dans la crise de l’Italie (1943–1948), Rome: École française de Rome, 1991, 9–49. Emiliani, Vittorio, I tre Mussolini. Luigi, Alessandro, Benito, Torino: Baldini e Castoldi, 1997. Fabre, Giorgio, “Mussolini, Claretta e la questione della razza. 1937–1938”, Annali della Fondazione Ugo La Malfa. Storia e politica, XXIV, 2009, 347–367. Fabre, Giorgio, “Un ‘accordo felicemente conchiuso’”, Quaderni di storia 76 (2012): 83–154. Fappani, Antonio and Molinari, Franco, Chiesa e Repubblica di Salò, Torino: Marietti, 1991, 42–43. Fattorini, Emma, Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini. La solitudine di un papa, Torino: Einaudi, 2007. English translation: Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican. Pope Pius XI and the speech that was never made, Cambridge: Malden – Polity, 2011. Fattorini, Emma, Italia devota. Religiosità e culti tra Otto e Novecento, Roma: Carocci, 2012. Ferrari Liliana, Una storia dell’Azione cattolica. Gli ordinamenti statutari da Pio XI a Pio XII, Genova: Marietti, 1989. Fiocchi, Ambrogio M., P. Enrico Rosa S.I., scrittore della “Civiltà Cattolica” (1870–1938), Roma: La Civiltà Cattolica, 1957. Flynn George Q., “Franklin Roosevelt and the Vatican: The Myron Taylor Appointment”, The Catholic Historical Review 58 (1972): 171–194. Forcella, Enzo, La Resistenza in convento, Torino: Einaudi, 1999. Forgacs, David, “Sex in the Cinema. Regulation and Transgression in Italian Films, 1930–1943, in Re-viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema 1922–1943”, (eds.) Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 141–171. Formigoni, Guido, I cattolici deputati (1904–1918). Tradizione e riforma, Roma: Studium, 1988. Formigoni, Guido L’Italia dei cattolici. Fede e nazione dal Risorgimento alla Repubblica, Bologna: il Mulino, 1998. Formigoni, Guido, “L’Europa vista dal Vaticano: De Gasperi commentatore della politica internazionale”, in Alcide De Gasperi: un percorso europeo, (eds.) Eckart Conze, Gustavo Corni, Paolo Pombeni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2005, 169–193. Formigoni, Guido, “Alcide De Gasperi 1943–1948. Il politico vincente alla guida della transizione”, in Alcide De Gasperi, Scritti e discorsi politici. Edizione critica, vol. 3, (eds.) Vera Capperucci and Sara Lorenzini, il Mulino, Bologna 2008, 11–34. Fornari Harry D., “Roberto Farinacci”, in Uomini e volti del fascismo, (ed.) Ferdinando Cordova, Roma: Bulzoni, 1980, 213–241.

Bibliography

315

Forno, Mauro, Cardinal Massaja and the Catholic Mission in Ethiopia. Features of an Experience between Religion and Politics, Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2013. Franzinelli, Mimmo, Il riarmo dello spirito: i cappellani militari nella seconda guerra mondiale, Treviso: Pagus, 1991. Gagliardi, Alessio, Il corporativismo fascista, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010. Galfrè, Monica, Una riforma alla prova. La scuola media di Gentile e il fascismo, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2000. Ganapini, Luigi, Il nazionalismo cattolico. I cattolici e la politica estera in Italia dal 1871 al 1914, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Garzia, Italo, Pio XII e l’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1988. Gaudio, Angelo, Scuola, chiesa e fascismo. La scuola cattolica in Italia durante il fas­ cismo, 1922–1943, Brescia: La Scuola, 1995. Gazzetta, Liviana, Cattoliche durante il fascismo. Ordine sociale e organizzazioni femminili nelle Venezie, Roma: Viella, 2011. Gentile, Emilio, “Il futurismo e la politica”, in Futurismo, cultura e politica, (ed.) Renzo De Felice, Torino: Fondazione Agnelli, 1988, 105–159. Gentile, Emilio, Storia del Partito fascista 1919–1922. Movimento e milizia, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989. Gentile, Emilio, “La nazione del fascismo. Alle origini della crisi dello Stato nazionale in Italia”, in Storia contemporanea 24 (1993): 833–887. Gentile, Emilio, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1993. English translation: The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Gentile, Emilio, Fascismo di pietra, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2007. Gentile, Emilio, L’apocalisse della modernità. La Grande Guerra per l’uomo nuovo, Milano: Mondadori, 2008. Gentile, Emilio, La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2006. English translation: La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the 20th Cen­ tury, Madison-London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Gentile, Emilio, Contro Cesare. Cristianesimo e totalitarismo nell’epoca dei fascismi, Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010. Gentiloni Silveri, Umberto and Carli, Maddalena, Bombardare Roma. Gli alleati e la “città aperta” (1940–1944), Bologna: il Mulino, 2007. Gherardi, Luciano, Le querce di Monte Sole: vita e morte delle comunità martiri fra Setta e Reno, 1898–1944, Bologna: il Mulino, 1994. Giardina, Andrea, “Ritorno al futuro: la romanità fascista”, in Andrea Giardina and André Vauchez, Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2000, 212–296.

316

bibliograpghy

Gibelli, Antonio, La Grande Guerra degli italiani. 1915–1918, Milano: Rizzoli, 1998. Gibelli, Antonio, Il popolo bambino. Infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò, Torino: Einaudi, 2005. Giovagnoli, Agostino, Le premesse della ricostruzione. Tradizione e modernità nella classe dirigente cattolica del dopoguerra, Milano: Nuovo Istituto editoriale italiano, 1982. Giovagnoli, Agostino, La cultura democristiana tra Chiesa cattolica e identità italiana. 1918–1948, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Giovanni XXIII, Lettere familiari. 152 inediti dal 1911 al 1952, (ed.) Giustino Farnedi, Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1993. Giuntella, Maria Cristina, “I fatti del 1931”, in I cattolici tra fascismo e democrazia, (eds.) Pietro Scoppola and Francesco Traniello, Bologna: il Mulino, 1975, 185–233. Giuntella, Vittorio Emanuele, I cattolici nella Resistenza, in Dizionario storico del movi­ mento cattolico in Italia. 1860–1980, (eds.) Francesco Traniello and Giorgio Campanini, 1/2, I fatti e le idee, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1981, 112–128. Giusti, Gabriella, La diplomazia vaticana e la guerra di Libia, in Pio X e il suo tempo, (ed.) Gianni La Bella, Bologna: il Mulino, 2003, 741–752. Grasso, Giovanni, I cattolici e l’Aventino, Roma: Studium, Roma 1994. Gregor, Anthony J., Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley- Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1979. Guasco, Maurilio, Il caso Murri dalla sospensione alla scomunica, Urbino: Argalia, 1978. Guasco, Alberto, “‘La città assunse l’aspetto della guerra civile’. La Santa Sede all’osservatorio di Fiume (1919–1925)”, Cristianesimo nella storia 31 (2010): 79–100. Guasco, Alberto, “‘La parte dei cattolici nelle presenti lotte’. La Santa Sede, il delitto Matteotti e l’alleanza popolari-socialisti”, Cristianesimo nella storia 33 (2012): 845–874. Guccione, Eugenio, “Razzismo e antisemitismo nelle analisi di Luigi Sturzo”, Storia e Politica 2 (2010): 30–38. Guerri, Giordano Bruno, Eretico e profeta. Ernesto Buonaiuti, un prete contro la Chiesa, Milano: Mondadori, 2001. Harris, Joseph E., African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936–1941, Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1994. Houlihan, Patrick J., Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Ger­ many and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Isnenghi, Mario, Giovanni Papini, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Isnenghi, Mario and Rochat, Giorgio, La Grande Guerra 1914–1918, Bologna: il Mulino, 2008. Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni, Torino: Einaudi, 1948. Kennedy, Dane, Islands of White. Settler Society in Kenya and Southern Rodhesia, 1890– 1939, Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.

Bibliography

317

Kent, Peter C., “A Tale of Two Popes: Pius XI, Pius XII and the Rome-Berlin Axis”, Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 589–608. Kertzer, David I., The Pope and Mussolini. The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, New York: Random House, 2014. Kilani, Mondher, Guerre et sacrifice. La violence extrême, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006. La Mattina, Amedeo, Mai sono stata tranquilla. La vita di Angelica Balabanoff, la donna che ruppe con Mussolini e Lenin, Torino: Einaudi, 2011. La Penna, Antonio, “Il culto della romanità nel periodo fascista. La rivista ‘Roma e l’Istituto di studi romani’”, Italia contemporanea 217 (1999): 605–630. La Rovere, Luca, Storia dei Guf: organizzazione, politica e miti della gioventù universita­ ria fascista, 1919–1943, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. Labanca, Nicola, La guerra d’Etiopia 1935–1941, Bologna: Mulino, 2015. LaFarge, John, The Manner is Ordinary (1954), New York: Doubleday, 1957. Ledeen, Michael A., D’Annunzio a Fiume, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Lesti, Sante, “Autorità, dovere, sacrificio. Il discorso di guerra di mons. Angelo Bartolomasi”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 8 (2011): 45–62. Lesti, Sante, Riti di guerra. Religione e politica nell’Europa della Grande Guerra, Bologna: il Mulino, 2015. Lorenzini, Daniele, Dai diritti della persona ai diritti dell’uomo. Jacques Maritain, l’antisemitismo cattolico e la democrazia, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2012. Loughlin, Michael B., “Gustave Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Another Example of French Fascism?” Journal of Contemporary History 36 (2001): 5–39. Ludwig, Emil, Colloqui con Mussolini (1932), Milano: Mondadori, 1965. Luzzatto, Sergio, “Un chierico grande vestito da soldato. La guerra di padre Agostino Gemelli”, in Gli Italiani in guerra. Conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai no­stri giorni, (ed.) Mario Isnenghi, vol. 3/1, La Grande Guerra. Dall’intervento alla “vittoria mutilate”, (eds.) Mario Isnenghi and Daniele Ceschin, Torino: Utet, 2008, 452–462. Luzzatto, Sergio, Padre Pio. Miracoli e politica nell’Italia del Novecento, Torino: Einaudi, 2007. English translation: Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010. Luzzatto, Sergio, Il corpo del duce. Un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria, Torino: Einaudi, 2011 (1st edition 1998). Lyttleton, Adrian, The Seizure of Power. Fascism in Italy 1919–1929, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Mack Smith, Denis, “Benedetto Croce: History and Politics”, Journal of Contemporary History 8 (1973): 41–61. Malgeri, Francesco, La guerra libica (1911–1912), Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1970.

318

bibliograpghy

Malgeri, Francesco, “L’esilio e le ultime battaglie politiche (1924–1959)”, in Francesco Piva and Francesco Malgeri, Vita di Luigi Sturzo, Roma: Edizioni Cinque lune, 1972, 273–433. Malgeri, Francesco, La Chiesa italiana e la guerra (1940–1945), Rome: Studium, 1980. Malgeri, Francesco, “Il Partito popolare italiano”, in Storia del movimento cattolico in Italia, (ed.) Francesco Malgeri, vol. 3, Roma: Il Poligono, 1980, 1–201. Mallet, Robert, Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935: The Origins of Fascist Italy’s African War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Malpensa, Marcello, “Il sacrificio in guerra nelle lettere pastorali dell’episcopato”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 905–924. Mangoni, Luisa, “Aspetti della cultura cattolica sotto il fascismo: la rivista ‘Il Frontespizio’”, in Modernismo, fascismo, comunismo. Aspetti e figure della cultura e della politica dei cattolici nel ‘900, (ed.) Giuseppe Rossini, Bologna: il Mulino, 1972, 363–417. Mangoni, Luisa, L’interventismo della cultura. Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo, RomaBari: Laterza, 1974. Mangoni, Luisa, “L’Università cattolica del Sacro Cuore. Una risposta della cultura cattolica alla laicizzazione dell’insegnamento superiore”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 9, La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, (eds.) Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli, Torino: Einaudi, 1986, 975–1014. Mangoni, Luisa, In partibus infedelium. Don Giuseppe De Luca: il mondo cattolico e la cultura italiana del Novecento, Torino: Einaudi, 1989. Mangoni, Luisa, “La civiltà della crisi. Gli intellettuali tra fascismo e antifascismo”, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, vol. 1, La costruzione della democrazia. Dalla caduta del fascismo agli anni cinquanta, (ed.) F. Barbagallo, Torino: Einaudi, 1994, 617–718. Mangoni, Luisa, “I Patti Lateranensi e la cultura cattolica”, in La Chiesa cattolica e il totalitarismo, (ed.) Vincenzo Ferrone, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004, 93–196. Marchesini, Daniele, La scuola dei gerarchi. Mistica fascista: storia, problemi, istituzioni, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976. Marchi, Valerio, “L’Italia e la missione civilizzatrice di Roma”, Studi storici 36 (1995): 485–531. Marco Muscolino, “La Rivista del Cinematografo dalla nascita al 1968”, in Attraverso lo schermo. Cinema e cultura cattolica in Italia, (eds.) Ruggero Eugeni and Dario E. Viganò, vol. 2, Roma 2006, 181–196. Margiotta Broglio, Francesco, Italia e Santa Sede. Dalla grande guerra alla Conciliazio­ ne. Aspetti politici e giuridici, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Margiotta Broglio, “Pio XI”, in Enciclopedia dei papi, vol. 3, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 2000, 617–632.

Bibliography

319

Margotti, Marta, “La soppressione della festa in discorso. Le trattative tra Italia e Santa Sede per l’abolizione della festività del 20 settembre”, Contemporanea 12 (2009): 87–104. Martina, Giacomo, “I cattolici di fronte al fascismo”, Rassegna di teologia 17 (1976): 175–194. Martina, Giacomo, “La Civiltà cattolica e il problema coloniale italiano”, in Fonti e pro­ blemi della politica coloniale italiana, Roma: Ministero per i Beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1996, vol. 2, 905–913. Martina, Giacomo, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia (1814–1983), Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003. Martini Angelo, Studi sulla Questione romana e sulla Conciliazione, Roma: Edizioni 5 lune, 1963. Martini, Angelo, “Pio XI, la pace e gli accordi di Monaco”, La Civiltà Cattolica 126/3 (1975): 457–472. Maryks, Robert A.,“Pouring Jewish Water into Fascist Wine”. Untold stories of (Catholic) Jews from the Archive of Mussolini’s Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2012, 45–258. Maurer, Catherine, “Vingt ans d’histoire religieuse de la Grande Guerre”, in Schweizeri­ sche Zeitschrift für Religion und Kulturgeschichte/Revue suisse d’histoire religieuse et culturelle, 108 (2014): 19–29. Mazzini, Elena, Ostilità convergenti. Stampa diocesana, razzismo e antisemitismo nell’Italia fascista (1937–1939), Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2013. Melloni, Alberto, Fra Istanbul, Atene e la guerra: la missione di A.G. Roncalli, 1935–1944, Genova: Marietti, 1992. Melloni, Alberto, “Alcide De Gasperi alla Biblioteca Vaticana (1929–1943)”, in Alcide De Gasperi: un percorso europeo, (eds.) Eckart Conze, Gustavo Corni and Paolo Pombeni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2005, 141–168. Menozzi, Daniele, “Regalità sociale di Cristo e secolarizzazione. Alle origini della Quas primas”, Cristianesimo nella storia 16 (1995): 79–113. Menozzi, Daniele, Sacro cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società, Rome: Viella, 2001. Menozzi, Daniele, Chiesa cattolica, pace e guerra tra gli anni Venti e gli anni Trenta, in Culture e libertà. Studi di storia in onore di Roberto Vivarelli, (eds.) Daniele Menozzi, Mauro Moretti and Roberto Pertici, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2006, 335–370. Menozzi, Daniele, Chiesa, pace e guerra nel Novecento. Verso una delegittimazione reli­ giosa dei conflitti, Bologna: Mulino, Bologna 2008. Menozzi, Daniele, Chiesa e diritti umani. Legge naturale e modernità dalla Rivoluzione francese ai nostri giorni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2012.

320

bibliograpghy

Menozzi Daniele, ‘Giudaica perfidia’. Uno stereotipo antisemita fra liturgia e storia, Bologna: il Mulino, 2014. Merry del Val, Rafael, Pio X (Impressioni e Ricordi), Padova: Il Messaggero di S. Antonio, 1952. Meyer, Jean A., La Cristiada, 3 vols., México: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973. Meyer, Jean A. (ed.), Las Naciones frente al conflicto religioso en México, México: Tusquets, 2010. Miccoli, Giovanni, “La Chiesa e il fascismo”, in Fascismo e società italiana, (ed.) Guido Quazza, Torino: Einaudi, 1973, 202–203. Miccoli, Giovanni, “Santa Sede e Chiesa italiana di fronte alle leggi antiebraiche del 1938”, in La legislazione antiebraica in Italia e in Europa, Roma: Camera dei Deputati, 1989, 163–274. Miccoli, Giovanni, “La Chiesa di Pio XII nella società italiana del dopoguerra”, in Storia dell’Italia repubblicana, vol. 1, La costruzione della democrazia. Dalla caduta del fascismo agli anni cinquanta, (ed.) Francesco Barbagallo, Torino: Einaudi, 1994, 535–613. Miccoli, Giovanni, “Cattolici e comunisti nel secondo dopoguerra: memoria storica, ideologia e lotta politica”, Studi storici 38 (1997): 951–991. Miccoli, Giovanni, “Santa Sede, questione ebraica e antisemitismo fra Otto e Novecento”, in Storia d’Italia, Annali 11, Gli ebrei in Italia, vol. 2, Dall’emancipazione a oggi, (ed.) Corrado Vivanti, Torino: Einaudi, 1997, 1369–1574. Miccoli, Giovanni, I dilemmi e i silenzi di Pio XII. Vaticano, Seconda guerra mondiale e Shoah, Milano: Rizzoli, 2000. Miccoli, Giovanni, “La guerra nella storia e nella teologia cristiana. Un problema a molteplici facce”, in Pace e guerre nella Bibbia e nel Corano, (eds.) Piero Stefani and Giovanni Menestrina, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002, 91–110. Migliore, Sandra, Mistica povertà: riscritture francescane tra Otto e Novecento, Roma: Istituto storico dei cappuccini, 2001. Molinelli Raffaele, “Nazionalisti cattolici e liberali”, in Rassegna storica del Risorgimen­ to 52 (1965): 355–378. Moro, Renato, La formazione della classe dirigente cattolica (1929–1937), Bologna: il Mulino, 1979. Moro, Renato, “Azione cattolica, clero e laicato di fronte al fascismo”, in Storia del movi­ mento cattolico in Italia, (ed.) Francesco Malgeri, vol. 4, I cattolici dal fascismo alla Resistenza, Roma: Il Poligono, 1981, 87–377. Moro, Renato, “Il ‘modernismo buono’. La ‘modernizzazione’ cattolica tra fascismo e postfascismo come problema storiografico”, Storia contemporanea 19 (1988): 625–716. Moro, Renato, “Le premesse all’atteggiamento cattolico di fronte alla legislazione razziale fascista. Cattolici ed ebrei nell’Italia degli anni venti (1919–1932)”, Storia contemporanea 19 (1988): 1013–1119.

Bibliography

321

Moro, Renato, “I cattolici italiani di fronte alla guerra fascista”, in La cultura della pace dalla Resistenza al Patto Atlantico, (eds.) Massimo Pacetti, Massimo Papini and Marisa Saracinelli, Bologna: Il lavoro editoriale, 1988, 75–126. Moro, Renato, “I cattolici italiani e il 25 luglio”, Storia contemporanea 24 (1993): 967–1017. Moro, Renato, “Pregiudizio religioso e ideologia: antiebraismo e antiprotestantesimo nel cattolicesimo italiano fra le due guerre”, Le carte 3 (1998): 17–66. Moro, Renato, “Nazionalismo e cattolicesimo”, in Federzoni e la storia della destra italiana nella prima metà del Novecento, (eds.) Benedetto Coccia and Umberto Gentiloni Silveri, Bologna: il Mulino, 2001, 49–112. Moro, Renato, La Chiesa e lo sterminio degli ebrei, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. Moro, Renato, “Cattolicesimo e italianità. Antiprotestantesimo e antisemitismo nell’Italia cattolica”, in La Chiesa e l’Italia. Per una storia dei loro rapporti negli ultimi due secoli, (ed.) Antonio Acerbi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2003, 307–339. Moro Renato, “Nazione, cattolicesimo e regime fascista”, Rivista di storia del cristian­ esimo 1 (2004): 129–147. Moro, Renato, “Il mito dell’impero in Italia fra universalismo cristiano e totalitarismo”, in Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo. Chiesa e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia), (eds.) Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004, 311–371. Moro, Renato, “L’opinione cattolica su pace e guerra durante il fascismo”, in Chie­ sa e guerra. Dalla “benedizione delle armi” alla “Pacem in terries”, (eds.) Mimmo Franzinelli and Riccardo Bottoni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2005, 221–319. Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto, La fede e la guerra. Cappellani militari e preti soldati 1915–1919, Studium, Roma 1980. Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto, Le nazioni non muoiono. Russia rivoluzionaria, Polonia indipendente e Santa Sede, Bologna: il Mulino, 1992. Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto, “Benedetto XV e il nazionalismo”, Cristianesimo nella storia 12 (1996): 541–555. Mosconi, Elena, “La Chiesa cattolica e il cinema”, in Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 5, 1934/1939, (ed.) Orio Caldiron, Padova: Edizioni Bianco e Nero, 2006, 77–84. Mosse, George L., Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig, 1985. Mosse, George L., Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New YorkOxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Mosse, George L., The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, New YorkOxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Moyn, Samuel, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Nesti, Arnaldo, “Gesù socialista”. Una tradizione popolare italiana (1880–1920), Torino: Claudiana, 1974.

322

bibliograpghy

Nobili, Elena, La parabola di un’illusione. Il cardinale Schuster dalla guerra d’Etiopia alle leggi razziali, Milano: NED, 2005. Ostenc, Michel, La scuola italiana durante il fascismo, Roma-Bari: Laterza. P. Calamandrei, Diario 1939–1945, (ed.) Giorgio Agosti, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Pacelli, Francesco, Diario della Conciliazione, (ed.) Michele Maccarone, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1959. Paiano, Maria, “Contro ‘l’invadente eresia protestante’: l’Opera della Preservazione della Fede in Roma (1899–1930) ”, in Chiesa cattolica e minoranze in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, (ed.) Raffaella Perin, Roma: Viella, 2011, 97–103. Parisella, Antonio, “Cattolici, guerra civile, guerra di liberazione. Orientamenti e problemi storiografici”, in Guerra, guerra di liberazione, guerra civile, (eds.) Massimo Le­ gnani and Ferruccio Vendramini, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1990, 433–459. Parola, Alessandro, “Pensare la ricostruzione: gli incontri di casa Padovani”, in Giuseppe Dossetti: la fede e la storia. Studi nel decennale della morte, (ed.) Alberto Melloni, Bologna: il Mulino, 2007, 261–280. Passelecq, George and Suchecky, Bernard, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997 (First published in France: L’encyclique cachée de Pie XI. Une occasion manquée de l’Église face à l’antisémitisme, Paris: La Découverte, 1995). Passerini, Luisa, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Pavone, Claudio, “Tre governi e due occupazioni”, in L’Italia nella seconda guerra mon­ diale e nella Resistenza, (eds.) Francesca Ferratini Tosi, Gaetano Grassi and Massimo Legnani, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1988. Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991. Pazzaglia, Luciano, “Stato laico e insegnamento religioso in alcuni dibattiti del primo Novecento (1902–1904)”, Pedagogia e vita 42 (1980–1981): 379–416. Pazzaglia, Luciano, “Cultura religiosa e libertà d’insegnamento nella riflessione di Tommaso Gallarati Scotti”, in Rinnovamento religioso e impegno civile in Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, (eds.) Fulvio De Giorgi and Nicola Raponi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1994, 91–136. Pazzaglia, Luciano, “Introduzione”, in Giorgio Montini and Giovanni Battista Montini, Affetti familiari, spiritualità e politica. Carteggio 1900–1942, (ed.) Luciano Pazzaglia, Brescia-Roma: Istituto Paolo VI-Studium, 2009, 1–187. Pegrari, Maurizio, “De pecunia. Cattolici e finanza nello Stato unitario”, in Cristiani d’Italia, vol. 2, (ed.) Alberto Melloni, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011, 1053–1079. Perin, Raffaella, “La Chiesa veneta e le minoranze religiose (1818–1939)”, in Chiesa cat­ tolica e minoranze in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento, (ed.) Raffaella Perin, Roma: Viella, 2011, 133–223.

Bibliography

323

Perin, Raffaella, “Pio XI e la mancata lettera sugli ebrei a Mussolini”, in Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 10 (2013): 181–206. Pertici, Roberto, Chiesa e Stato in Italia. Dalla Grande Guerra al nuovo Concordato (1914– 1984), Bologna: il Mulino, 2009. Pesenti, Antonio, “I contrasti tra il fascismo e la Chiesa nella diocesi di Bergamo negli anni 1937–1938”, in Chiesa, Azione Cattolica e fascismo nell’Italia settentrionale du­ rante il pontificato di Pio XI (1922–1939), (ed.) Paolo Pecorari, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1979, 535–563. Petacci, Clara, Mussolini segreto. Diari 1932–1938, (ed.) Mauro Suttora, Milano: Rizzoli, 2009. Petracchi, Giorgio, “I gesuiti e il comunismo tra le due guerre”, in La Chiesa cattolica e il totalitarismo, (ed.) Vincenzo Ferrone, Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2004, 123–152. Pettinaroli, Laura, La politique russe du Saint-Siège (1905–1939), Rome: École Française de Rome, 2015. Picardi, Luigi, Cattolici e fascismo nel Molise (1922–1943), Roma: Studium 1995. Pichetto, Maria Teresa, Alle radici dell’odio. Preziosi e Benigni antisemiti, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1983. Pinkus, Karen, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Pisa, Beatrice, Crescere per la patria. I Giovani Esploratori e le Giovani Esploratrici di Carlo Colombo (1912–1927), Milano: Unicopli, 2000. Piva, Francesco, “Dalle lotte contadine al Partito Popolare (1871–1924)”, in Francesco Piva and Francesco Malgeri, Vita di Luigi Sturzo, Roma: Edizioni Cinque lune, 1972, 15–270. Piva, Francesco, “Educare alla ‘purezza’: i dilemmi della Gioventù cattolica nel secondo dopoguerra”, in Chiesa, laicità e vita civile. Studi in onore di Guido Verucci, (eds.) Lucia Ceci and Laura Demofonti, Roma: Carocci, 2005, 383–398. Piva, Francesco, Uccidere senza odio. Pedagogia di guerra nella storia della Gioventù cat­ tolica italiana (1868–1943), Milano: FrancoAngeli 2015. Pivato, Stefano, “L’organizzazione cattolica della cultura durante il fascismo”, Italia con­ temporanea 132 (1978): 3–25. Pivato, Stefano, “L’anticlericalismo ‘religioso’ nel socialismo italiano fra Otto e Novecento”, Italia contemporanea 154 (1984): 29–50. Pollard, John F., The Vatican and Italian Fascism. A Study in Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pollard, John F., “Il Vaticano e la politica estera italiana”, in La politica estera italiana, (eds.) Richard J.B. Bosworth and Sergio Romano, Bologna: il Mulino, 1991, 197–230. Pollard, John F., Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican, 1850– 1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pollard, John F., The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

324

bibliograpghy

Pombeni, Paolo Il primo De Gasperi. La formazione di un leader politico, Bologna: il Mulino, 2007. Ponzio, Alessio, “Corpo e anima: sport e modello virile nella formazione dei giovani fascisti e dei giovani cattolici nell’Italia degli anni Trenta”, Mondo contemporaneo 1 (2005): 51–104. Poulat, Émile, “Socialisme et anticléricalisme. Une enquête socialiste internationale (1902–1903)”, Archives des sciences sociales des religions 10 (1960): 109–131. Prampolini e il socialismo riformista, Roma: Mondo operaio, 1979. Prévotat, Jacques, Les catholiques et l’Action française. Histoire d’une condamnation. 1899–1939, Paris: Fayard, 2001. Preziosi, Ernesto (ed.), Largo Gemelli, 1. Studenti, docenti e amici raccontano l’Università Cattolica, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2002. Raguer, Hilari, La pólvora y el incienso. La Iglesia y la Guerra civil española (1936–1939), Barcelona: Península, 2001. Ranfagni, Paolo, I clerico fascisti. Le riviste dell’Università Cattolica negli anni del regime, Firenze: Cooperativa editrice universitaria, 1975. Raponi, Nicola, Tommaso Gallarati Scotti tra politica e cultura, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1971. Rasera, Fabrizio, “Gino Sottochiesa, scrittore roveretano, cattolico fascista antisemita”, in Materiali di Lavoro 1–4 (1988): 191–211. Rastrelli, Carlo, Carlo Scorza. L’ultimo gerarca, Milano: Mursia, Milano 2010. Repaci, Antonino, La marcia su Roma, new revised and enlarged edition, Milano: Rizzoli, 1972 (1st edition 1963). Riccardi, Andrea, Roma “città sacra”? Dalla Conciliazione all’operazione Sturzo, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1979. Riccardi, Andrea, “Tardini Domenico”, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in Italia, 1860–1980, (eds.) Francesco Traniello and Giorgio Campanini, 3/2, Le figure rappresentative, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1982, 832–834. Riccardi, Andrea, “I vescovi italiani e la seconda guerra mondiale”, Anuario de historia de la Iglesia 4 (1995): 147–165. Riccardi, Andrea, “Vescovi, parroci, Azione Cattolica”, in Sulla crisi del regime fascista 1938–1943. La società italiana dal “consenso” alla Resistenza, (ed.) Angelo Ventura, Venezia: Marsilio, 1996, 523–538. Riccardi, Andrea, L’inverno più lungo. 1943–44: Pio XII, gli ebrei e i nazisti a Roma, RomaBari: Laterza, 2008. Ricci, Andreina, Attorno alla nuda pietra. Archeologia e città tra identità e progetto, Roma: Donzelli, 2006. Ridolfi, Maurizio, Il Psi e la nascita del partito di massa, 1892–1922, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1992. Ridolfi, Maurizio, Le feste nazionali, Bologna: il Mulino, 2004.

Bibliography

325

Roccucci, Adriano, Roma capitale del nazionalismo (1908–1923), Roma: Archivio Guido Izzi, 2001. Rochat, Giorgio, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche: direttive e articolazioni del con­ trollo e della repressione, Torino: Claudiana, 1990. Rodríguez Aisa, María Luisa, El cardenal Gomá y la guerra de España. Aspectos de la gestión pública del Primado 1936–1939, Madrid: Instituto Enrique Flórez, 1981. Rogari, Sandro, Santa Sede e fascismo. Dall’Aventino ai Patti lateranensi, with unpublished documents, Bologna: Arnaldo Forni Editore, 1977. Roncalli, Angelo Giuseppe, La mia vita in Oriente. Agende del delegato apostolico, vol. 4/1, critical edition, edited and annotated by Valeria Martano, Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 2006. Rosada, Anna, Serrati nell’emigrazione 1899–1911, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972, p. 76. Rossi, Ernesto, Il manganello e l’aspersorio. L’uomo della Provvidenza e Pio XI, Firenze: Parenti, 1958. Rossi, Giorgio, “Maria Goretti”, in Il grande libro dei santi, directed by Claudio Leonardi et al., Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo, 1998, vol. 2, 1320–1323. Rossi, Andrea, “Missionario e combattente in camicia nera. Storia ‘sbagliata’ di padre Antonio di Gesù”, in Cultura&Identità 7 (2012): 66–71. Rumi, Giorgio, “Movimento cattolico e dimensione internazionale”, in Dizionario stori­ co del movimento cattolico in Italia 1860–1980, (eds.) Francesco Traniello and Giorgio Campanini, 1/2, I fatti e le idee, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1984, 146–157. Ruozzi, Federico, “Pius XII as Actor and Subject. On the Representation of the Pope in Cinema during the 1940s and 1950s”, in Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power, (eds.) Daniel Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015, 256–280. Rusconi, Roberto, Santo Padre. La santità del papa da san Pietro a Giovanni Paolo II, Roma: Viella, 2010. Salaris, Claudia, Alla festa della rivoluzione. Artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a Fiume, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. Sale, Giovanni, Popolari e destra cattolica al tempo di Benedetto XV, Milano: Jaca Book, 2006. Sale, Giovanni, Fascismo e Vaticano prima della Conciliazione, Milano: Jaca Book, 2007. Sale, Giovanni, Le leggi razziali in Italia e il Vaticano, Introduction by Emma Fattorini, Milano: Jaca Book, 2009. Salvatorelli, Luigi, Pio XI e la sua eredità pontificale, Torino: Einaudi, 1939. Salvatori, Paola S., “Liturgie immaginate: Giacomo Boni e la romanità fascista”, Studi Storici 53 (2012): 421–438. Salvemini, Gaetano, Opere, II, Scritti di storia moderna e contemporanea, vol. 3, Stato e Chiesa in Italia, (ed.) Elio Conti, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1969.

326

bibliograpghy

Sambaldi, Sabrina, “Dalla preparazione dell’intervento alla conquista dell’impero. ‘L’Osservatore romano’ e la guerra d’Etiopia, settembre 1935 – maggio 1936”, Storia e problemi contemporanei 13 (2000): 201–229. Santoro, Lorenzo, Roberto Farinacci e il Partito Nazionale Fascista 1923–1926, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2008. Saresella Daniela, Romolo Murri e il movimento socialista (1891–1907), Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1994. Sarfatti, Michele, Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, Torino: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1994. Sarri, Andrea, “Il vescovo di Bressanone Johannes Geisler e la seconda guerra mondiale. Omelie e lettere pastorali (1939–1945)”, Geschichte und Region 19 (2010): 136–162. Sbacchi, Alberto, “Poison Gas and Atrocities in the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–36”, in Italian Colonialism, (eds.) Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 47–56. Scagliola, Claudia, “L’Italia Cattolica. Un foglio al servizio della RSI”, in La Repubblica Sociale Italiana 1943–45, (ed.) Pier Paolo Poggio, Annali della Fondazione Micheletti 2 (1986): 157–162. Scarantino, Anna, “Il ‘ritorno alle armi’ di Giovanni Papini tra cattolicesimo e fascismo: l’amicizia intellettuale con Giuseppe De Luca negli anni Trenta”, Mondo contempo­ raneo 4 (2008): 67–128. Scoppola, Pietro, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, Bologna: il Mulino, 1966. Scoppola, Pietro, Crisi modernista e rinnovamento religioso, Bologna: il Mulino, 1969. Scoppola, Pietro, “Il fascismo e le minoranze evangeliche”, in Il fascismo e le autonomie locali, (ed.) Fontana, Sandro, Bologna: il Mulino, 1973, 331–394. Scoppola, Pietro, La Chiesa e il fascismo. Documenti e interpretazioni, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1976. Scorza Barcellona, Francesco (ed.), Santi del Novecento: storia, agiografia e canonizza­ zioni, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998. Setta, Sandro, “Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon, Diario 1943”, Storia contempora­ nea 24 (1993): 1057–1113. Silone, Ignazio, La scuola dei dittatori (1938), Milano: Mondadori, 1977. Sòrgoni, Barbara, “Racist Discourses and Practices in the Italian Empire under Fascism”, in The Politics of Recognizing Difference, (eds.) Ralph Grillo and Jeff C. Pratt, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Sorrentino, Domenico, La conciliazione e il “fascismo cattolico”. I tempi e la figura di Egilberto Martire, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1980. Spackman, Barbara, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996.

Bibliography

327

Spadolini, Giovanni, Giolitti e i cattolici (1901–1914), Milano: Mondadori, 1974 (1st edition 1960). Spadolini, Giovanni, Il cardinale Gasparri e la Questione Romana, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1972. Stellavato, Ornella, “La nascita dell’Opera nazionale balilla”, Mondo contemporaneo 5 (2009): 5–47. Stiaccini, Carlo, “Con questo segno vinco. La religiosità popolare nelle testimonianze dei soldati della Grande Guerra”, Humanitas 63 (2008): 943–958. Sturani, Enrico, “Il fascismo in cartolina”, in Modernità totalitaria. Il fascismo italiano, (ed.) Emilio Gentile, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2008. Taradel, Ruggero and Raggi, Barbara, La segregazione amichevole. “La Civiltà Cattolica” e la questione ebraica 1850–1945, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Tardini, Domenico, Pio XII, Città del Vaticano: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1960. Tarquini, Alessandra, Il Gentile dei fascisti. Gentiliani e antigentiliani nel regime fascista, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008. Terhoeven, Petra, Liebespfand fürs Vaterland. Krieg, Geschlecht und faschistische Nation in der italienischen Gold- und Eheringsammlung 1935/36, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. Togliatti, Palmiro, L’opera di De Gasperi. I rapporti tra Stato e Chiesa, Milano: Parenti, 1958. Tokareva, Evgenija S., “Le relazioni tra URSS e il Vaticano: dalle trattative alla rottura (1922–1929)”, in Santa Sede e Russia da Leone XIII a Pio XI, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002, 199–261. Tramontin, Silvio, “Mussolini, la questione romana e i rapporti con i popolari in un documento inedito”, Humanitas 20 (1970): 409–475. Tramontin, Silvio, “Tacchi Venturi, Pietro”, in Dizionario storico del movimento cattolico in Italia 1860–1980, (eds.) Francesco Traniello and Giorgio Campanini, vol. 2, I pro­ tagonisti, Marietti, Casale Monferrato 1982, 631–633. Tramontin, Silvio, “Il clero e la Rsi”, in La Repubblica Sociale Italiana 1943–45, (ed.) Pier Paolo Poggio, Annali della Fondazione Micheletti 2 (1986): 335–350. Traniello, Francesco, “L’Italia cattolica nell’era fascista”, in Storia dell’Italia religiosa, (eds.) Gabriele De Rosa, Tullio Gregory, André Vauchez, vol. 3, L’età contemporanea, (ed.) Gabriele De Rosa, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995, 257–299. Traniello, Francesco, Città dell’uomo. Cattolici, partito e Stato nella storia d’Italia, Bologna: il Mulino, 1998. Traniello, Francesco, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale. Dal Risorgimento al secondo dopoguerra, Bologna: il Mulino, 2006. Trinchese, Stefano, “‘Servire, obbedire e tacere’. L’immagine dell’Italia fascista nell’opinione di Angelo Roncalli”, Storia contemporanea 20 (1989): 211–258.

328

bibliograpghy

Trisco, Robert, “The Holy See and Cardinal Mundelein’s Insult to Hitler (1937)”, in Pius XI and America, (eds.) Charles R. Gallagher, David I. Kertzer, Alberto Melloni, Berlin: Lit, 155–191. Turi, Gabriele, “Aspetti dell’ideologia del Psi (1890–1910)”, Studi storici 21 (1980): 61–94. Turi, Gabriele, Giovanni Gentile. Una biografia, Firenze: Giunti, 1995. Turi, Gabriele, Il mecenate, il filosofo e il gesuita. L’“Enciclopedia Italiana” specchio della nazione, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002. Urso, Simona, Margherita Sarfatti. Dal mito del ‘dux’ al mito americano, Venezia: Marsilio, 2003. Vecchio, Giorgio, Alla ricerca del partito. Cultura politica ed esperienze dei cattolici ita­ liani del primo Novecento, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1987. Vecchio, Giorgio, “Achille Ratti, il movimento cattolico, lo Stato liberale”, in Achille Ratti Pape Pie XI, Rome: École française de Rome, 1996, 69–88. Vecchio, Giorgio, “Patriottismo e universalismo nelle associazioni laicali cattoliche”, in La Chiesa e l’Italia. Per una storia dei loro rapporti negli ultimi due secoli, (ed.) Antonio Acerbi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2003, 233–274. Vecchio, Giorgio, Lombardia 1940–1945. Vescovi, preti e società alla prova della guerra, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005. Vecchio, Giorgio, “Guerra e Resistenza”, in Cristiani d’Italia, vol. 1, (ed.) Alberto Melloni, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011, 733–745. Venturini, Nadia, Neri e italiani a Harlem. Gli anni Trenta e la guerra d’Etiopia, Roma: Edizioni Lavoro, 1990. Verucci, Guido, La Chiesa nella società contemporanea. Dal primo dopoguerra al Con­ cilio Vaticano II, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1989. Verucci, Guido, L’Italia laica prima e dopo l’unità 1848–1876, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996. Verucci, Guido, “I simboli della cultura laica e delle istituzioni civili”, in Santi, culti e simboli nell’età della secolarizzazione (1815–1915), (ed.) Emma Fattorini, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1997, 235–245. Verucci, Guido, Cattolicesimo e laicismo nell’età contemporanea, Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2001. Verucci, Guido, Idealisti all’Indice. Croce, Gentile e la condanna del Sant’Uffizio, RomaBari: Laterza, 2006. Verucci, Guido, L’eresia del Novecento: la Chiesa e la repressione del modernismo in Italia, Torino: Einaudi, 2010. Vian, Giovanni Maria “Gli anni santi di Pio XI”, in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 4, (ed.) Francesco Margiotta Broglio, Firenze: Giunti, 2000, 116–133. Vian, Giovanni, Il modernismo. La Chiesa cattolica in conflitto con la modernità, Roma: Carocci, 2012.

Bibliography

329

Viganò, Dario E., Un cinema ogni campanile. Chiesa e cinema nella diocesi di Milano, Milano 1997, 33–45. Vivarelli, Roberto, Storia e storiografia. Approssimazioni per lo studio dell’età contempo­ ranea, Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004. Webster, Richard A., “Il primo incontro tra Mussolini e De Gasperi (marzo 1909)”, Il mulino (January 1958): 51–55. Webster, Richard A., The Cross and the Fasces, Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960. Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory. Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural His­ tory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Winter, Jay and Prost, Antoine, The Great War in History. Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wolf, Hubert, Pope and Devil. The Vatican’s Archives and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. Zambarbieri, Annibale, “Per la storia della devozione al Sacro Cuore in Italia tra ’800 e ’900”, in Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia 41 (1987): 361–432. Zambarbieri, Annibale, Il cattolicesimo tra crisi e rinnovamento: Ernesto Buonaiuti ed Enrico Rosa nella prima fase della polemica modernista, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1979. Zapponi, Niccolò, “Le organizzazioni giovanili del fascismo 1926–1943”, in Storia con­ temporanea 13 (1982): 569–633. Vázquez Zoraida, Josefina, Juárez el Repúblicano, México: El Colegio de México, 2005. Zoraida Vázquez, Josefina (ed.), Juárez: historia y mito, México: El Colegio de México, 2010. Zunino, Pier Giorgio, La questione cattolica nella sinistra italiana (1919–1939), Bologna: il Mulino, 1975. Zunino, Pier Giorgio, “Romolo Murri e il fascismo”, in Fonti e documenti 14 (1985): 631–667. Zunino, Pier Giorgio, Interpretazione e memoria del fascismo. Gli anni del regime, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991.

Index of Names Note: Page number followed by ‘n’ refers to footnotes. Acerbi, Antonio 140n133 Acerbo, Giacomo 85, 90, 91 Agosti, Giorgio 285n3 Albanese, Giulia 66n30 Albónico, Aldo 200n175, 202n185 Ales Bello, Angela 219n53 Alfieri, Dino 230, 264 Alighieri, Dante 110, 168 Ambrose of Milan, Saint 272, 273 Andreotti, Giulio 268, 278 Angelini, Pietro 108n20 Anthony of Padua, Saint 108 Antoniazzi, Antonio 177n95 Aquarone, Alberto 102n169, 133n105 Ardali, Paolo 108, 109n24, 111, 112, 112n36 Ascalesi, Alessio 112 Asfa Wossen Asserate 184n111 Astori, Guido 143 Attolico, Bernardo 274, 283 Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane 9, 46n132 Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Emperor 166, 169 Babuscio Rizzo, Francesco 286, 286n7 Bacht, Heinrich 220 Backe, Herbert 208 Badano, Nino 174n72, 174n73, 175n83 Baden-Powell, Robert Stephenson Smyth 121n69 Badoglio, Pietro 189, 286, 287 Balabanoff, Angelica 19, 22, 23, 23n44, 24n47, 29, 298 Baldelli, Ferdinando 283 Baldini, Massimo 167n45 Banti, Alberto Mario 110n31 Barbagallo, Francesco 293n40 Barbera, Mario 141n137 Barberis, Walter 287n10 Bardelli, Daniele 249n182 Barelli, Armida 49 Bargellini, Piero 159 Barone, Domenico 116, 132 Barozzi, Carlo 290

Barra, don 36 Barrera, Giulia 191n142 Barrès, Maurice 63 Bartolini, Francesco 11 Bartolomasi, Angelo 56, 57, 57n173 Bassanesi, Roberto 23n45, 24n49 Battelli, Giuseppe 282, 282n122 Battisti, Cesare 30, 31, 37, 38, 38n101 Becker, Annette 9n13, 46n132 Bedeschi, Lorenzo 39n107, 93n129, 116n52, 249n181 Belardelli, Giovanni 210n16 Bellocchio, Marco 24n47 Belloni, Angelo 99 Beltrame Quattrocchi, Paolino 248n174, 248n176 Beltramelli, Antonio 13, 13n5 Benadusi, Lorenzo 175n79 Benedict of Norcia, Saint 108, 272, 273, 297 Benedict xv (Giacomo Della Chiesa), Pope 44, 45, 46, 49, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 84, 87, 191, 256 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 184n110 Benigni, Umberto 236 Berezin, Mabel 80n85 Bergamaschi, Aldo 49n146 Bernanos, Georges 205, 237 Bernardini, Filippo 276, 276n98, 295n49, 295n50 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 105 Berro, Benedetto 56 Bertagna, Italo 176 Bertetto, Domenico 6n8, 98n151, 104n2, 138n122, 158n10, 196n162, 209n11 Bertoldi, Silvio 16, 16n16 Bertram, Adolf 78 Betri, Maria Luisa 144n152 Betti, Carmen 120n68 Beyens, Napoléon E. 81, 81n86 Biagioli, Ilaria 32n78 Biltereyst, Daniel 279n112 Binchy, Daniel A. 79n80 Bini, Aldo 55

Index of names Bissolati, Leonida 28 Bloy, Léon 62 Bo, Carlo 77n70 Bocchini Camaiani, Bruna 294n43 Bocci, Maria 160n17, 250n183, 251n185, 280n116 Bonetta, Gaetano 121n70, 173n65 Boni, Giacomo 79, 79n76 Boniface viii (Benedetto Caetani), Pope 167 Bonomelli, Geremia 21, 41, 41n113 Bonomi, Ivanoe 67, 68 Bonomi, Paolo 284 Borella, Girolama 47n135 Borgongini Duca, Francesco 147, 152n179, 169n53, 193, 193n147, 193n148, 195n154, 195n155, 223, 231, 242 Borsi, Giosuè, 174, 175 Boselli, Paolo 86 Bosworth, Richard J.B. 61n11, 257n26 Bottai, Giuseppe 241, 241n151 Botti, Alfonso 10, 33n81, 196n161, 197n163, 198n169, 204n194 Bottoni, Riccardo 101n162, 178n97 Bouthillon, Fabrice 10, 76n68, 106n9 Boutry, Philippe 107n14 Braccesi, Lorenzo 169n55 Bracci, Francesco 242 Bracher, Karl D. 205n199 Brice, Catherine 234n114 Broll, Rosa 36, 37 Brucculeri, Angelo 102, 102n166, 124, 125, 125n79, 125n80, 238, 265, 265n57, 266, 266n58, 266n59 Brunelli, Lucio 255n18 Brunetta, Gian Piero 177n94 Bruni, Emanuela 115n51 Bruni, Gerardo 203 Bruno, Giordano 31, 32, 32n76, 39, 104 Bruzzesi, Antonio 290 Budkiwicz, Kostanty Romuald 126 Buffarini Guidi, Guido 193, 231 Buonaiuti, Ernesto 116, 116n52, 162 Busti, Mario 266, 292 Butler, Matthew 126n84 Caccia Dominioni, Camillo 252 Cadorna, Raffaele 296, 297 Caesar, Gaius Julius 12, 42, 98, 135, 166, 169 Calamandrei, Piero 285, 285n3

331 Calcagno, Tullio 268, 289, 290, 290n23 Caldiron, Orio 177n94 Caliò, Tommaso 11, 51n152, 108n17, 108n21, 108n23, 109n28 Calles, Plutarco Elías 126 Calligari, Ernesto 131 Cambronne, Pierre 35 Campanini, Giorgio 86n108, 199n172, 203n191, 204n195, 284n126, 299n63 Campbell, Ian 184n111 Campilli, Piero 284 Campos Goenaga, María Isabel 17n18 Canali, Mauro 94n138 Cancogni, Manlio 297n54 Cannistraro, Philip V. 12n1, 14n10 Cantelli, Remo, pseud. of Barozzi, Carlo, see 290 Cantù, Cesare 107 Capperucci, Vera 284n129 Caracciolo, Nicola 115n51 Carapelle, Aristide 94, 94n137 Carazzolo, Bruna 268 Carducci, Giosuè 16–18, 18n22, 31n74, 42n115, 43 Carletti, Giovanni 11 Carli, Maddalena 285n2 Carlo Borromeo, Saint 105 Caronia, Giuseppe 88n113, 91n124 Carpegna, Mario di 120 Casalini, Armando 101 Casella, Mario 150n173, 261n41 Cassata, Francesco 165n35 Cassese, Sabino 214n37 Cassulo, Andrea 188, 188n129, 188n130, 188n131 Castagna, Luca 189n134, 210n18, 257n25 Castellani, Giovanni Maria 195, 195n156 Castellano, Aloisio 35 Castelli, Giulio 79n75 Castelnau, Édouard de 50 Casula, Carlo Felice 10, 143n147, 201n182 Catherine Labouré, Saint 150 Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa), Saint 108, 272, 272n83, 273 Catholicus, pseud. of Martin, Antonio, see 233, 233n113 Cattaneo, Giulio 63n17 Cavaglion, Alberto 236n123 Cavagnini, Giovanni 53n162, 54n165

332 Cavazzoni, Stefano 83, 91, 164 Caviglia, Elena 235n118, 235n119 Cazzani, Giovanni 249, 249n180, 249n181, 274, 292 Cecchelli, Carlo 233 Ceci, Lucia 4n5, 83n95, 109n26, 173n68, 178n96, 178n97, 179n98, 180n103, 181n105, 184n114, 185n119, 186n120, 189n133, 190n136, 267n64 Cento, Fernando 187, 187n127 Cerrasco i Formiguera, Manuel 203 Cerrato, Rocco 84n99 Cerretti, Bonaventura 117 Ceschin, Daniele 49n142 Chabod, Federico 50, 51n150, 65n24, 287n10 Chadwic, Owen 218n52, 257n27, 285n1 Chaline, Nadine-Josette 106n7 Chappin, Marcel 153n183 Charcot, Jean-Martin 107 Charles-Roux, François 187, 188, 255 Chauvard, Jean-François 10 Chelodi, don 36, 36n94 Chenaux, Philippe 153n182, 219n53, 219n54 Chiaberge, Riccardo 11 Chiti, Remo 151 Chittolini, Giorgio 160n18 Churchill, Winston L.S. 285 Ciano, Galeazzo 209, 209n13, 211, 211n21, 215, 215n40, 223, 223n71, 224, 224n74, 225n75, 225n78, 226, 226n80, 231, 232, 232n103, 232n106, 242, 242n152, 242n153, 242n154, 253, 253n8, 254, 254n13, 255n17, 264, 264n50, 278, 279n110, 282, 283, 283n121, 286 Ciano Mussolini, Edda 115, 115 n51 Cicchitti-Suriani, Arnaldo 288n14 Cicognani, Amleto 210 Ciliberto, Michele 62n16 Ciucci, Giorgio 166n39 Civati, Ettore 289 Clovis I, King of the Franks 107 Coccia, Benedetto 52n158 Coco, Giovanni 148n168, 150n175, 152n178, 152n179, 153n181, 153n183, 153n184 Colarizi, Simona 145n156, 148n169, 154n188, 159, 159n13, 275n92 Colombo, Carlo 266, 266n61, 267 Colombo, Carlo Giovanni 120–121, 121n69

Index of names Colombo, Cristopher 110 Confalonieri, Carlo 105, 105n5, 106n6, 252, 253n4 Constantine the Great, Emperor 38, 108, 166, 167, 169, 240, 273 Contarini, Salvatore 86, 87 Conti, Elio 3n3 Convents, Guido 177n94 Conze, Eckart 143n143 Coppa, Frank J. 222n67 Cornaggia, Ottavio 89 Corner, Paul 272n81 Corni, Gustavo 143n143 Corradini, Enrico 63 Corsetti, Angelo 157n5 Costa, Andrea 17 Craveri, Piero 143n145 Crispi, Francesco 171 Croce, Benedetto 137, 137n121, 138, 163, 163n27, 164 Dal Toso, Paola 121n69 D’Alfonso, Rocco 63n19 Dalla Casa, Brunella 112n38 Dalla Costa, Elia 217 Dalla Torre, Giuseppe 3n4, 278–279 Dallabrida, Costantino 30 Dandolo, Tullio 107 D’Angelo, Augusto 261n41 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 52, 53n159, 54–58, 107, 107n15, 109 Darré, Richard Walther 208 Dau Novelli, Cecilia 48n137 De Begnac, Yvon 19n27, 38, 38n100, 59n1, 165, 165n37 De Cesaris, Valerio 221n60, 223n70, 227n84, 228n89, 241n149, 243n156, 246n167, 277n103 De Falco, Giuseppe 50 De Felice, Renzo 16n17, 17n20, 19, 19n28, 25n52, 30n73, 36n90, 40n108, 44n122, 45n124, 59n2, 60n3, 61n5, 66n29, 115n50, 144n150, 146n162, 156n2, 209n13, 211n20, 211n23, 212, 213n27, 224n76, 231n101, 232n105, 234n116, 235n118, 238n138, 240n146, 241n150, 242n153, 247n172, 265n55, 291n26 De Gasperi, Alcide 30, 31, 33, 39, 39n106, 90, 94, 95, 98, 142, 143n143, 143n144,

Index of names 143n145, 147, 148, 168, 202, 202n186, 203, 203n187, 203n189, 238, 238n136, 284n129, 292 De Gasperi, Maria Romana 292n30 De Giorgi, Fulvio 28n66, 75n65, 107n12, 278n105 De Giuseppe, Massimo 17n18, 269n73 De Grazia, Victoria 108n20, 173n67 De Lai, Gaetano 73 De Luca, Giuseppe 159, 159n14, 159n15, 160, 268n69 De Luna, Giovanni 287n10 De Napoli, Olindo 190n139 De Renzi, Mario 166 De Rosa, Gabriele 51n151, 67n31, 68n36, 71n47, 76n66, 88n115, 90n121, 92n126, 94n136, 95n140, 274n88, 278n108 De Solages, Bruno 267n62 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, Count of Val Cismon 147, 147n163, 150, 156, 158 Decleva, Enrico 27n63 Deffayet, Laurence 217n46 Del Boca, Angelo 184n111 Delcroix, Carlo 111 Del Debbio, Enrico 166 Dell’Erba, Nunzio 145–146n157 Delos, Joseph 267n62 Demofonti, Laura 173n68 Desbuquois, Gustave 220 Di Giovanni, Francesca 282n119 Di Mauro, Alessandro 169n53 Di Nolfo, Ennio 261n42, 263n47, 299n62, 300n64 Dinale, Ottavio 45n123 Diner, Dan 6n10 Dominici, Silvia 20n33 Donati, Giuseppe 95, 102 Dordoni, Annarosa 289n19, 291n24, 291n27, 292n32, 292n34 Dossetti, Giuseppe 237, 237n131, 280n116, 284, 295, 295n45 Duggan, Christopher 113n41 Dupuis, Giancarlo 269 Durand, Jean Dominique 286n8, 293n39, 296n51 Ederle, Carlo 174n71, 174n72, 175, 175n81 Ederle, Guglielmo 174n72, 175n81 Emiliani, Vittorio 17n19

333 Enotrio Romano, pseud. of Carducci, Giosuè, see 42, 42n115 Ercoli, pseud. of Togliatti, Palmiro, see 3 Ernoli, Luigi 201–202 Eugeni, Ruggero 176n88 Eugénie de Montijo, Empress of the French 151 Eusebius, Saint 273 Evola, Julius 165, 165n35 Fabbri, Diego 279 Fabre, Giorgio 212n24, 226n79, 227, 227n85, 227n86, 228n89, 246n166 Facta, Luigi 67, 69, 70, 80 Fanfani, Amintore 161 Fani, Amedeo 156 Fappani, Antonio 291n25, 293n37 Farinacci, Roberto 118, 118n62, 211, 232, 232n105, 247, 249, 249n182, 250, 290 Farnedi, Giustino 270n76 Fattorini, Emma 10, 75n65, 105n5, 109n27, 209n10, 209n12, 210n14, 219n55, 220n59, 223n72, 243n158, 253n5, 253n9, 254n12 Fecia di Cossato, Carlo 242, 242n152 Fedele, Pietro 116, 117 Federzoni, Luigi 63, 115 Ferrara, Alessandro 11 Ferrari, Andrea 45, 73, 78 Ferrari, Francesco Luigi 89, 89n117, 92, 102n168, 103, 142, 142n142, 145, 154n187, 167 Ferrari, Liliana 89n117, 102n168, 154n187 Ferratini Tosi, Francesca 293n38 Ferrer, Francisco 40 Ferrone, Vincenzo 162n22 Filippi, Ernesto Eugenio 187, 187n125 Filippo Neri, Saint 105 Fiocchi, Ambrogio M. 51n153 Fiocco, Gianluca 11 Flaiano, Ennio 279 Flynn, George Q. 261n42 Fontana, Sandro 140n131 Forcella, Enzo 288n12 Forgacs, David 176n90 Formigoni, Guido 28n64, 48n140, 238n136, 269n73, 284n129 Forno, Mauro 109n26 Fortini, Arnaldo 110, 110n30, 111n34 Fossati, Maurilio 292

334 Francis of Assisi, Saint 107–109, 112, 272n83 Francis Xavier, Saint 105, 106 Franco Bahamonde, Francisco 74, 125, 196, 198–200, 202, 203, 253, 260, 288 Franzinelli, Mimmo 101n162, 112n39, 275n91, 289n16, 289n17, 295n48 Frasso, Giuseppe 105n5 Fuller, Mia 184n110 Furlani, Teseo 174n72, 175n77 Gagliardi, Alessio 11, 214n37 Galassi Paluzzi, Carlo 168 Galfrè, Monica 82n91 Gallagher, Charles R. 189n133 Gallagher, Paul Richard 11 Galletti, Arturo 33 Ganapini, Luigi 41n111 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 21 Garofalo, Piero 176n90 Garzia, Italo 255n15, 263n46, 264n52, 275n93, 281n117, 283n124, 286n6, 287n9 Gasparri, Pietro 4, 5n6, 45, 73, 73n57, 74, 79, 81, 83–85, 85n, 88, 92, 99, 117, 123, 132, 138, 139, 153, 153n183 Gaudio, Angelo 82n92 Gazzetta, Liviana 173n67 Gedda, Luigi 172, 173, 173n169, 174, 174n72, 174n73, 279 Gemelli, Agostino 40, 40n109, 48, 48n141, 48n142, 49, 49n143, 49n144, 75, 76, 83, 101, 114, 114n47, 116, 141, 142n138, 160, 160n17, 160n19, 161, 161n21, 162–164, 178, 182, 183n108, 200, 200n176, 200n177, 201, 201n180, 230n97, 235, 236, 236n124, 247, 247n170, 249, 250, 250n183, 251n185, 266, 271, 272 Genocchi, Giovanni 84, 84n99, 85 Gentile, Emilio 9n14, 48n139, 59n2, 61n8, 61n10, 62n15, 65n25, 80n85, 113n43, 130n98, 145n54, 166n40 Gentile, Giovanni 29, 82, 83n95, 108, 120, 135, 141n137, 161–164 Gentili, Sandro 62n16 Gentiloni Silveri, Umberto 52n158, 285n2 Gherardi, Luciano 237n131 Gialluca, Anna 11 Giampaoli, Mario 144, 144n151 Giani, Niccolò 144 Giannini, Amedeo 81, 81n90, 86, 87 Giardina, Andrea 166n41

Index of names Gibelli, Antonio 14n11, 113n41, 113n42 Gibson, Violet 112 Ginepro da Pompeiana (Antonio Conio) 290 Gioberti, Vincenzo 8, 8n11, 123, 123n176 Giolitti, Giovanni 27, 32, 41 Giordani, Igino 168, 168n48, 168n49 Giovagnoli, Agostino 141n135, 283n125, 284n129 Giraldi, Anna Maria 203n187 Giudice, Maria 23n44 Giuliani, Reginaldo 53–58, 101, 183 Giuliotti, Domenico 77, 77n70, 167, 167n43, 167n44, 167n45, 167n46, 235 Giuntella, Maria Cristina 146n161 Giuntella, Vittorio Emanuele 295n47 Giuriati, Giovanni 67, 147, 156 Giusti, Gabriella 41n114 Gobetti, Piero 99 Goebbels, Joseph P. 211 Gomá y Tomás, Isidro 197, 198 Gonella, Guido 184, 202, 203, 203n188, 203n190, 277, 277n104, 278 Göring, Hermann W. 211 Gramsci, Antonio 63, 63n17 Granito di Belmonte, Gennaro 213 Grassi, Gaetano 293n38 Grasso, Giovanni 95n139, 97n147 Graziani, Rodolfo 288 Gregor, Anthony J. 30n73 Gregory, Tullio 67n31 Grillo, Ralph 191n142 Gronchi, Giovanni 83–84 Grosoli, Giovanni 41, 71, 90, 91 Guariglia, Raffaele 283, 286, 286n7, 287 Guasco, Alberto 53n161, 97n148, 99n153, 198n169 Guasco, Maurilio 33n83 Guccione, Eugenio 237n133 Guerri, Giordano Bruno 116n52, 241n151 Guidi, Rachele 115 Gulleghen, Théobald 190 Gundlach, Gustav 220, 221 Gurian, Waldemar 185n118 Haile Sellassie (Tafari Mokonnen), Negus 185, 190 Harris, Joseph E. 189n132 Haver, Luigi 116

Index of names Helena, Saint 273, 298 Hervé, Gustave 42n116 Hinsley, Arthur 186 Hitler, Adolf 74, 178, 187, 190, 195, 196, 209, 210, 211n19, 215–218, 219n53, 256, 271, 274, 275, 278, 282 Hoare, Samuel 179 Hurten, Heintz 185n118 Huss, Jan 43 Husserl, Edmund G.A. 219 Ickx, Johan 11 Ignatius Loyola, Saint 105 Innitzer, Theodor 215 Innocenti, Ennio 297n54 Interlandi, Telesio 233n112 Intreccialagli, Antonio 290, 290n21 Isnenghi, Mario 47n135, 48n138, 49n142, 62n13 Jacini, Stefano 292n31 Jean-Jacques, pseud. of Dinale, Ottavio, see 45n123 Jemolo, Arturo Carlo 3n4, 74, 74n58 Joan of Arc, Saint 107 John Bosco, Saint 108 John Gualbert, Saint 273 John Paul ii (Karol Wojtyla), Pope 2 John xxiii (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), Pope 250n184, 254, 270, 270n76 Jorio, Domenico 193, 193n150, 194, 194n151, 195, 242 Keller, Franz 267n62 Kennedy, Dane 191n141 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 257 Kennedy, Joseph 257 Kent, Peter C. 256n21 Kertzer, David I. 10, 122n72, 189n133 Kilani, Mondher 110n31 La Bella, Gianni 114n41 La Brière, Yves de 125, 125n81 La Fontaine, Pietro 67, 68n35 La Mattina, Amedeo 19n24, 19n26 La Penna, Antonio 168n52 La Pira, Giorgio 268, 278, 284 La Puma, Vincenzo 169n53, 232, 232n105 La Rovere, Luca 145n155

335 Labanca, Nicola 180n104 Labriola, Antonio 20 Labriola, Arturo 23 LaFarge, John 195, 195n157, 219–221 Laurenti, Camillo 169n53 Laval, Pierre 179, 186, 187 Ledeen, Michael A. 53 Ledóchowski, Wlodozmierz 72, 86, 220, 220n59, 221, 232 Legnani, Massimo 293n38, 295n46 Lels, Ester 11 Lemius, Joseph 114 Leonardi, Claudio 109n25 Leonardo da Vinci 110 Lessona, Alessandro 190, 192–195 Lesti, Sante 49n145, 57n173 Lestingi, Leo 199n172 Lorenzini, Daniele 237n130 Lorenzini, Sara 284n129 Loughlin, Michael B. 42n116 Lovera, Carlo, Count of Castiglione 174n72 Lucrezio Monticelli, Chiara 11 Ludwig, Emil 14, 14n14, 37, 37n97, 156, 156n1, 156n3 Luther, Martin 35, 39 Luzzatto, Sergio 48n142, 108n20, 113n44, 114n48, 162n23, 297n54, 298n59 Lyttleton, Adrian 72n51 Maccarone, Michele 116n54 Macchi, Alessandro 214n34 Mack Smith, Denis 137n121 Madruzzo, Carlo Emanuele 38 Maffi, Pietro 92 Magaz y Pers, Antonio 202 Maggi, Sante 206n2 Magistri, Pierluigi 109n26 Maglione, Luigi 185, 185n116, 187, 188, 163, 276, 276n98, 288, 288n12, 293, 294n41 Maistre, Joseph de 111 Malgeri, Francesco 41n111, 67n31, 68n36, 68n37, 68n38, 89n118, 99n154, 130n96, 134n106, 142n141, 203n188, 261n41, 271n77, 274n85, 275n95, 278n106, 294n44 Mallet, Robert 180n104 Malot, A.H. 25 Malpensa, Marcello 47n136 Maltoni, Rosa 13, 297, 298

336 Malvestiti, Piero 284 Manacorda, Guido 159 Manetti, Alberico 290 Mangoni, Luisa 159n14, 159n16, 160n18, 162, 162n22, 201n183, 304n78 Mantovani, Francesco 97 Manzini, Raimondo 174n72, 175, 175n78, 175n80, 177n95, 266 Maraviglia, Mariangela 269n70 Marazza, Achille 296, 297 Marcellini, Romolo 279, 287 Marchesini, Daniele 144n152 Marchetti Selvaggiani, Francesco 286 Marchi, Valerio 168n48 Marconi, Guglielmo 158, 176n91 Margaret Mary Alacoque, Saint 50 Margiotta Broglio, Francesco 74n59, 78n73, 83n96, 85n104, 86n109, 104n1, 119n64, 125n82, 157n5 Margotti, Marta 146n159 Maria Goretti, Saint 109, 109n25 Marie Bernadette Soubirous, Saint 105 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 59–62, 151 Maritain, Jacques 205, 237, 237n130, 237n132 Martano, Valeria 250n184 Martin, Antonio 233n113 Martina, Giacomo 41n112, 52n156, 184n112 Martini, Angelo 147n164, 154n186, 154n189, 227n84, 228n89, 243n155, 244n159, 247n169, 254n11 Martire, Egilberto 88, 91, 101, 168 Marx, Karl 41–43 Maryks, Robert A. 251n186 Masetti Zannini, Antonio 93n132, 101 Massaja, Guglielmo 109, 109n26, 183 Mattei Gentili, Paolo 91, 116 Matteotti, Giacomo 94–97, 101–103 Maurer, Catherine 9n13 Maurizio, Alberto 151 Maurras, Charles 52, 63, 106, 129 Mayer, Joseph 267n62 Mazzetti, Roberto 233 Mazzini, Elena 239n142 Mazzolari, Primo 49, 49n146, 143, 144n149, 203, 203n192, 249, 249n181, 268, 269, 269n70, 269n71, 269n73, 270n74 Melis, Guido 81n90 Melloni, Alberto 10, 143n143, 164n32, 189n133, 250n184, 280n116

Index of names Mendizábal, Alfred 205 Menestrina, Giovanni 111n32 Menossi, Giuseppe 207 Menotti Serrati, Giacinto 19, 21–24, 26, 29 Menozzi, Daniele 6n9, 9n15, 10, 46n130, 47n133, 51n152, 52n157, 74n61, 74n62, 75n65, 93n133, 99n155, 101n163, 111n33, 124n77, 236n126, 259n30, 265n53, 267n62, 268n66, 273n84, 279n114, 302n72, 303n76 Mercurelli, Catullo 174n71 Merlin, Umberto 84 Merry del Val y Zulueta, Rafael 46, 46n128, 73, 114, 117, 162 Messineo, Antonio 283 Meyer, Jean A. 126n84 Mezzasoma, Fernando 144, 289 Miccoli, Giovanni 93n130, 111n32, 160n18, 215n41, 217n47, 221n63, 225n77, 232n107, 233, 233n109, 233n111, 234n114, 234n115, 235n121, 237n129, 238n139, 240n143, 246n165, 246n168, 247n173, 249n179, 250n184, 256n22, 256n24, 259n32, 259n34, 260n37, 261n40, 275n96, 276n99, 292n29, 293n40, 302n74, 304n77 Miglioli, Guido 70 Migliore, Sandra 107n15 Milani, Fulvio 83–85 Minnucci, Gaetano 166 Minozzi, Giovanni 84, 85 Minzoni, Giovanni 93, 93n129, 130–131n99, 149 Misciattelli, Piero 93, 94n134, 107, 108n16 Missiroli, Mario 136, 140n132 Molinari, Franco 269n71, 291n25, 293n37 Molinelli, Raffaele 63n18 Momigliano, Felice 235, 236 Mommsen, Theodor C.M. 64, 65 Montgomery, Hugh 185n115 Montini, Giorgio 278n107 Montini, Giovanni Battista 106, 143, 143n146, 221, 224, 225, 252, 276, 278, 278n107, 284–287 Moretti, Mauro 267n62 Moro, Aldo 268, 278 Moro, Renato 5n7, 6n9, 9n17, 10, 52n158, 63n20, 101n162, 134n106, 140n133,

337

Index of names 144n134, 146n158, 155n190, 165n36, 167n47, 172n63, 199n170, 201n181, 201n184, 233n110, 234n114, 235n120, 235n122, 265n56, 267n65, 268n67, 270n75, 271n79, 272n82, 279n111, 284n127, 286n8 Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto 47n134, 49n147, 53n160, 56n172, 78n74, 84n101 Morris, Laura 11 Mortari, Giuliano 174n71 Mosconi, Elena 177n94 Mosse, George L. 9n16, 80n83, 173n65, 173n76 Mounier, Emmanuel 205 Mugnaini, Marco 63n19 Mundelein, Georges 210, 211n19 Murri, Romolo 32–35, 39, 168 Muscolino, Marco 176n88 Mussolini, Alessandro 12, 13, 17 Mussolini, Arnaldo 118, 118n60, 170, 206 Mussolini, Benito 3–6, 8, 9, 12–27, 29–31, 33–45, 49, 50, 50n148, 50n149, 59–70, 72n49, 74, 78, 79, 79n76, 80–83, 85–88, 90–93, 95n139, 96, 102–104, 107, 108, 109 111, 112, 113, 113n40, 115–119, 123, 127–130, 132, 133, 135–139, 142–145, 147–150, 152–154, 156–157, 159–160, 163–167, 169, 170, 178–181, 183, 186, 186n121, 187, 187n122, 190, 190n135, 191, 192, 195, 96, 198, 201, 206–215, 217, 222, 223, 223n69, 225–228, 230 232, 232n105, 240–249, 252–256, 261, 263, 264, 264n49, 264n51, 266, 270, 271, 274, 276, 277, 277n101, 278, 282, 283–288, 290, 290n22, 291, 293, 296–301 Mussolini, Bruno 31, 115 Mussolini, Vito 144 Mussolini, Vittorio 115 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French 139, 297, 298 Nasalli Rocca, Angelo Maria 101 Nasalli Rocca, Emilio 101 Nasalli Rocca, Giovanni Battista 213, 213n29, 250 Nava, Cesare 88 Negri, Guido 175 Nenni, Pietro 298, 298n58 Nesti, Arnaldo 20n33

Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 29, 61 Nobili, Elena 248n177 Nogara, Bernardino 189, 210, 210n16 Nogara, Giuseppe 206, 207, 240 Noppel, Constantin 267n62 Novelli, Giuseppe 11 Olgiati, Francesco 161 Olivetti, Angelo Oliviero 22, 23 Orano, Paolo 23, 232, 233n108 Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele 45, 81, 86, 117 Osborne d’Arcy, Francis G. 218 Ostenc, Michel 164n30 Ottaviani, Afredo 185n115, 242 Oviglio, Aldo 84 Paalvast, Stephanie 11 Pacelli, Ernesto 41 Pacelli, Eugenio, see Pius xii Pacelli, Francesco 116, 116n154, 132, 138 Pacetti, Massimo 265n56 Pagano, Sergio 11, 153n183 Paiano, Maria 94n135 Palmira 13 Papini, Giovanni 62, 62n13, 62n14, 63, 77n70, 159, 167, 167n43, 235, 268, 268n68 Papini, Massimo 265n56 Parisella, Antonio 295n46 Parola, Alessandro 280n116 Paronetto, Sergio 292 Passelecq, George 220n58, 221n61, 222n64 Passerini, Luisa 12n4 Pavone, Claudio 293n38, 295n47 Pazzaglia, Luciano 28n65, 28n66, 278n107 Pecorari, Paolo 227n83 Pegrari, Maurizio 10, 164n32 Penco, Bianca 268 Pennisi, Pasquale 233 Perfetti, Francesco 19n27, 297n54 Perin, Raffaella 94n135, 198n169, 227n85, 231n100, 231n102 Pertici, Roberto 45n126, 65n27, 81n89, 91n125, 103n170, 108n19, 116n55, 133n104, 134n108, 135n112, 136n116, 139n128, 140n130, 267n62 Pesenti, Antonio 227n83 Petacci, Clara, known as Claretta 246, 246n166, 298

338 Petassi, Giuseppe M. 200n174 Peter, Apostle, Saint 38, 42, 73, 106, 167, 170, 274 Petracchi, Giorgio 199n173 Pettinaroli, Laura 10, 126n83 Piacentini, Marcello 166 Piantelli, Francesco 174n71, 174n72, 175n76 Piazza, Adeodato 239, 239n142, 248 Piazzalunga, Luigi 21 Picard, Louis 229 Picardi, Luigi 214n36 Pichetto, Maria Teresa 236n125 Pignatelli, Giuseppe 265n57 Pignatti Morano di Custoza, Bonifacio 179, 179n100, 221, 224, 224n74, 225, 225n75, 225n78, 231, 232, 232n106, 244, 244n160, 253, 254, 254n13 Pilsudski, Józef 78 Pinkus, Karen 191n140 Pio da Pietrelcina, Saint (Francesco Forgione) 113, 113n44, 114, 162 Pisa, Beatrice 121n69 Pistelli, Ermenegildo 93 Pius ii (Enea Silvio Piccolomini), Pope 87 Pius V (Antonio Michele Ghislieri), Pope, Saint 273 Pius vii (Barnaba Chiaramonti), Pope 139 Pius ix (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti), Pope 18, 52 Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto), Pope 27, 33, 46, 46n129, 73, 76 Pius xi (Achille Ratti), Pope 1, 4, 6–8, 52, 53, 65, 70, 72–79, 86, 87, 95, 98, 101, 102, 104–106, 115, 117, 119, 119n66, 122–128, 132, 134, 138, 138n122, 138n123, 139, 139n127, 140, 142, 147–153, 155–158, 162, 164, 167, 176–179, 183, 186, 191–193, 195–197, 208–212, 214, 215, 217–224, 226–232, 238, 240–247, 252–255, 301 Pius xii (Eugenio Pacelli), Pope 2, 4, 7, 153, 153n182, 152n183, 158, 169, 169n53, 169n54, 170, 170n57, 179, 185, 185n116, 187n127, 189, 190, 192, 193, 193n146, 193n148, 193n150, 195, 195n154, 195n155, 197, 198, 209, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227n86, 228, 231, 232, 244, 244n50, 245, 252, 255–265, 271, 272, 276–279, 281, 282, 284–287, 302, 303

Index of names Piva, Francesco 10, 68n38, 99n154, 173n68 Pivato, Stefano 19n29, 176n87 Pizzardo, Giuseppe 83, 84, 188, 188n129, 188n130, 188n131, 193n147, 224 Poggio, Pier Paolo 289n15 Pollard, John F. 10, 74n60, 88n114, 164n32, 210n17, 257n26, 279n112 Pombeni, Paolo 30n72, 143n143 Pons, Silvio 11 Ponzio, Alessio 173n66, 173n70 Poulat, Émile 25n54 Prampolini, Camillo 20, 25 Pratt, Jeff C. 191n142 Prévotat, Jacques 106n10, 217n46 Preziosi, Ernesto 266n60 Preziosi, Giovanni 236, 247 Prost, Antoine 9n12 Pucci, Enrico 90, 90n122 Quazza, Guido 93n130 Raggi, Barbara 234n116 Raguer, Hilari 198n167 Rajna, Pio 88n112 Ranfagni, Paolo 161n20 Raponi, Nicola 28n66, 73n56 Rasera, Fabrizio 233n112 Rastrelli, Carlo 146n162 Ratti, Franco 252 Rava, Luigi 28 Reich, Jacqueline 176n90 Repaci, Antonino 72n50 Riccardi, Andrea 165n34, 248n175, 278n109, 284n128, 286n4, 299n63 Ricci, Andreina 167n42 Ridolfi, Maurizio 20n32, 80n84 Rita of Cascia, Saint 108 Riva, Silvio 58n174 Rizzi, Franco 204n196 Robotti, Filippo 267, 267n63, 268 Rocco, Alfredo 63, 116, 117, 137, 156 Roccucci, Adriano 65n24 Rochat, Giorgio 48n138, 141n136 Rodríguez Aisa, María Luisa 198n168 Rogari, Sandro 123n74, 134n109, 135n111, 139n124, 139n128, 228n88 Romano, Santi 134 Romano, Sergio 257n26

Index of names Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 186, 189, 210, 256, 257, 262–264, 276, 281, 282, 285, 299, 301 Rosa, Enrico 51, 51n153, 51n154, 52n155, 57, 72, 72n52, 79, 95, 96n144, 97, 97n146, 101, 102, 102n165, 116, 135, 139, 139n129, 199, 199n171, 205, 205n198, 220, 236 Rosada, Anna 21n37, 22n40, 25n51 Rosai, Bruno 151 Rosai, Ottone 151 Roselli, Giuseppina 282n119 Rosenberg, Alfred 163, 163n28 Rosselli, Carlo 146n157 Rossi, Andrea 290n21 Rossi dell’Arno, Giulio de’ 88, 170, 171, 206n2, 233 Rossi, Ernesto 3n3, 112n39 Rossi, Giorgio 109n25 Rossi, Giovanni 47 Rossi, Mario Giuseppe 89n117 Rossi, Raffaele Carlo 114 Rossini, Giuseppe 63n17 Roveda, Ferdinando 118 Ruffo della Scaletta, Rufo 99 Rumi, Giorgio 284n126 Ruozzi, Federico 279n112 Rusconi, Roberto 51n152, 105n4, 279n112 Salaris, Claudia 53n159 Salazar, António de Oliveira 125 Sale, Giovanni 71n48, 72n53, 79n79, 83n98, 84n102, 86n109, 95n142, 96n145, 118n63, 220n59, 227n84, 230n97, 241n147, 245n162, 249n181 Salotti, Carlo 106, 106n11, 107, 169n53, 192, 192n144 Salvatorelli, Luigi 74n59 Salvatori, Paola S. 79n76 Salvemini, Gaetano 3n3, 20, 130, 130n93, 142 Sambaldi, Sabrina 184n113 Sánchez-Izquierdo, Miguel 200, 200n179 Santin, Antonio 241 Santoro, Lorenzo 118n62 Santucci, Carlo 71, 85, 86, 86n106, 91, 116 Sanvido, Gino 174n71 Saraceno, Pasquale 284 Saracinelli, Marisa 265n56 Saresella, Daniela 32n77, 33n82

339 Sarfatti Grassini, Margherita 12–14, 19, 19n25, 25, 25n55, 37, 37n98, 37n98, 38, 38n101, 108, 108n18 Sarfatti, Michele 241n150 Sarri, Andrea 271n80 Savage Carmona, Mónica 17n18 Sbacchi, Alberto 184n110 Sbarretti Tazza, Donato Raffaele 162 Scaduto, Francesco 135 Scagliola, Claudia 289n18 Scaraffia, Lucetta 104n3 Scarantino, Anna 268n69 Scarpellini, Angelo 290 Schuster, Ildefonso 108, 147, 169, 182, 240, 248, 248n177, 275, 292, 292n33, 292n35, 294n41, 295–298 Scoppola, Pietro 20n34, 21n36, 33n79, 61, 61n7, 91n123, 102n167, 117n57, 140n131, 146n161 Scorza Barcellona, Francesco 108n22 Scorza, Carlo 146, 156 Semeria, Giovanni 84 Serafini, Giulio 153, 169n53 Sergius, Martyr, Saint 273 Setta, Sandro 147n163 Settimelli, Emilio 151, 151n176 Sibour, Luois Blaise de 190 Sigismund, Emperor 43 Silone, Ignazio 38, 38n102 Sironi, Mario 166 Soderini, Edoardo 29 Sòrgoni, Barbara 191n142 Sorrentino, Domenico 164n31, 168n51 Sottochiesa, Gino 233, 233n112, 268 Spackman, Barbara 173n66 Spadolini, Giovanni 73n57 Spazzino, pseud. of Mussolini, Benito, see 35n89 Spectator, pseud. of De Gasperi, Alcide, see 202, 202n186 Spellman, Francis 257, 257n26 Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovič (Iosif Vissarionovič Džugašvili) 74, 275 Starace, Achille 225, 226, 227n88 Starace, Loreto 175 Stefani, Piero 111n32 Stein, Edith 219, 219n53 Stellavato, Ornella 122n71

340 Stratmann, Franziskus M. 267n62 Sturani, Enrico 113n43 Sturzo, Luigi 51, 67–72, 76, 83, 88–91, 98–101, 103, 129–131, 142, 142n140, 142n141, 147, 155, 155n191, 168, 183, 204, 205n194, 204n196, 204n197, 205, 237, 237n133, 237n134, 255, 255n18 Suchecky, Bernard 220n58, 221n61, 222n64 Sugraynes i de Franch, Ramon 204n196 Sullivan, Brian R. 12n1, 14n10 Susmel, Duilio 12n3, 37n99, 38n103 Susmel, Edoardo 12n3, 37n99, 38n103 Suttora, Mauro 246n166 Tacchi Venturi, Pietro 86–88, 91, 119, 122, 122n72, 153, 154, 154n185, 169, 169n53, 170, 179, 180n102, 186–188, 210, 212, 217, 226–228, 229n93, 241, 243–245, 255, 256 Taglialatela, Alfredo 23, 24 Tangorra, Vincenzo 83 Taparelli d’Azeglio, Luigi 124 Taradel, Ruggero 234n116 Tardini, Domenico 1, 2, 121, 122, 122n71, 143, 153, 180, 185, 185n118, 225, 242, 243, 243n157, 245, 245n162, 249n181, 252, 253n6, 276, 281, 281n118, 282n120, 287n11, 295n49, 295n50, 299–301 Tarquini, Alessandra 162n24 Taylor, Myron Charles 257, 261–263, 276, 281, 299 Teresa of Jesus, or of Ávila, Saint 105 Terhoeven, Petra 183n109 Tesauri, Pietro 214, 214n35 Theissling, Ludwig 55 Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint 105, 105n5, 106 Thomas Aquinas, Saint 124 Tisserant, Eugène 192, 193n146, 195, 195n156, 221 Togliatti, Palmiro 2, 3n2 Tokareva, Evgenija S. 10. Tommaseo, Niccolò 107–108 Toni, Teodoro 200, 200n178 Torchiani, Francesco 110n29, 118n60 Tramontin, Silvio 68n35, 86n108, 289n15, 289n16, 290n20 Traniello, Francesco 8n11, 86n108, 123n76, 133n103, 142n139, 146n161, 172n64,

Index of names 195n159, 271n78, 276n97, 276n100, 284n126, 299n63 Tranquillini, Carlo 36 Treveri Gennari, Daniela 279n112 Treves, Claudio 29 Trinchese, Stefano 270n76 Trionfini, Paolo 261n41 Trisco, Robert 211n19 Trotsky, Lev (Lev Davidovič Bronštein) 63 Turi, Gabriele 20n32, 83n93, 163n25, 163n29 Valensin, Albert 267n62 Vallecchi, Attilio 62, 63 Valti, L. 79n77 Vandervelde, Émile 25, 26 Vassallo, Ernesto 84 Vauchez, André 67n31, 166n41 Vaussard, Maurice 100, 100n159 Vecchio, Giorgio 10, 32n78, 33n79, 73n54, 76n69, 175n75, 269n72, 271n80, 274n89 Vendramini, Ferruccio 295n46 Ventura, Angelo 248n175 Venturini, Nadia 189n132 Verdiano, pseud. of Mussolini, Benito, see 34, 35n87 Verdier, Jean 209 Vero eretico, pseud. of Mussolini, Benito, see 26, 27, 27n60, 27n61, 29n68 Verucci, Guido 18n22, 22n39, 33n80, 77n72, 83n94, 84n100, 107n13, 115n49, 116n53, 141n137, 163n26 Vettori, Gianni 289 Vian, Giovanni 83n95 Vian, Giovanni Maria 104n1 Vian, Nello 77n70, 143n146 Vianney, Jean-Marie Baptiste, known as curé d’Ars, Saint 105 Vidal i Barraquer, Francisco de Asís 197 Viganò, Dario E. 176n88, 176n89 Vignoli, Lamberto 227n88 Violi, Roberto P. 261n41 Virgil, Publius Maro 135 Vicrtor Emanuel ii, King of Italy 80, 81, 206 Victor Emanuel iii, King of Italy 80, 110, 130, 132, 157, 240, 245, 286 Vivanti, Corrado 234n115 Vivarelli, Roberto 268n69

341

Index of names Volpato, Antonio 109n28 Volpe, Gioacchino 135 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, known as 107 Von Hassel, Ulrich 208 Walter, Alex 208 Webster, Richard A. 3n3, 34n84 William of Salicet 250 Winter, Jay 9n12, 80n83 Wolf, Hubert 10, 163n28, 195n158, 215, 216n43, 217n48, 219n53, 230n96

Xeres, Saverio 270n74 Zambarbieri, Annibale 51n153, 75n65 Zamboni, Anteo 112 Zamboni, Giuseppe 161 Zappaterreni, Eusebio 289, 291 Zapponi, Niccolò 120n67 Zeppegno, Giovanni 55 Zoraida Vázquez, Josefina 17n18 Zunino, Pier Giorgio 19n30, 93n131, 145n157, 168n48

Index of Subjects Ad beatissimi, encyclical (1914) 45 Amici Israel (Friends of Israel) 217, 236, 236n126, 237n128 Anarchism 16, 17, 19, 24, 36, 200, 202, 204 Anglican Church 277 Anschluss: Pius xi and 215, 220 Anti-Judaism 216, 220, 235, 250 Anti-Semitism: Catholic Church and 7, 163, 217, 219, 221, 222, 229, 230, 232–238, 240, 241, 247, 250, 255, 301 Austria 30, 37, 42, 44, 49, 54, 86, 125, 151, 211, 215, 248 Blackshirts 3, 67, 68, 72, 79, 80, 92, 146, 149, 151, 158, 291 Bolshevism 7, 158, 198, 200, 234, 239, 263 Casti Connubii, encyclical (1930) 192 Catholic Scouts 92, 93, 120–123 Centro Nazionale Italiano 94 Civiltà Cattolica, journal 41n112, 51n153, 51n154, 52, 71n44, 71n45, 72n52, 80n82, 96n143, 102n166, 125n79, 128n90, 139n129, 141, 181n106, 199n171, 215n42, 218n51, 230, 234n116, 235n117, 236n126, 239n140, 247n169, 254n11, 266n58, 266n59, 277n102 Communism 6, 7, 25, 93, 182, 188, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 221, 234, 236, 259, 275, 276, 291, 295, 296, 304 Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs 117, 180 Congregation for the Eastern Church 192 Congregation for Seminaries and Universities 215, 217 Curia, Roman 7, 73, 80, 81, 124, 152n178, 153, 169n53, 170, 178, 230, 232, 238, 242, 252 Democrazia Cristiana 284 Divini Redemptoris, encyclical (1937) 196, 196n160, 198, 276

Ethiopia 2, 4, 7, 9, 58, 109, 174, 178, 178n96, 180–190, 180n104, 184n111, 185n119, 189n132, 194, 199, 205, 213, 240, 267, 271 Freemasonry 6, 52, 82, 88, 93, 150, 158, 182, 187, 188, 236, 239, 291 Friends of Israel. See Amici Israel fuci (Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana), Italian Catholic Federation of University 98, 143, 146, 154, 202, 233, 268, 269, 278, 279 Futurism 59, 59n2, 60, 63 Germany 2, 7, 8, 47n134, 49, 74, 95, 124, 125, 185, 185n118, 190, 194–196, 209, 210, 216–219, 219n53, 221–223, 237, 241, 247, 248, 256, 257, 260, 264, 271, 282 giac (Gioventù Cattolica Italiana), Italian Catholic Youth 92, 121, 145, 173–175 Giustizia e Libertà 145 Great Britain 124, 129, 186, 189, 257, 272, 281 guf (Gioventù Universitaria Fascista), Fascist University Youth 144–146, 146n162 Holy Office 32, 35, 73, 84, 113, 116, 117, 128, 161–164, 195, 210, 216, 217, 236, 269 Humani Generis Unitas 220, 221, 222n64 Istituto di Studi Romani 168, 168n52, 169n53 Italian Catholic Action 5, 6, 77, 102, 122, 123, 128, 134, 135, 143, 145–154, 156, 172, 177, 178, 181, 201, 202, 211, 212, 214, 223, 225–227, 227n78, 247, 253, 261, 264, 265, 268, 271, 279, 292 Jubilee 42, 104, 104n2, 105, 107, 119 Lateran Pacts 2, 5, 8, 44, 132–147, 142n141, 143n145, 156, 164, 165, 168, 170, 174, 179, 182, 193n148, 208, 252, 253, 255, 263, 289, 301 League of Nations 77, 124, 124n77, 125, 178, 181–183, 186, 267, 271 Liberalism 6, 72, 89, 93, 117, 141, 163, 182, 291 Libya 40, 41

343

Index of subjects Manifesto of Racist Scientists 215, 238, 238n136, 248 Mexico 8, 17, 17n18, 74, 119, 126, 126n84, 158 Military chaplains 47, 53–58, 121, 183, 275, 289, 289n16 Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Voluntary Militia for National Security), Fascist Militia 58, 66, 99, 93, 97, 157, 166, 201, 289, Mit brennender Sorge, encyclical (1937) 195, 198, 200, 209, 215, 221 Modernism 33, 39, 51, 51n153, 73, 77, 84, 116n52, 138, 162, 172, 217 Nazism 2, 163, 195, 218, 221, 239, 259, 303 Non abbiamo bisogno, encyclical (1931) 148, 148n170 onb (Opera Nazionale Balilla), Fascist schoolchildren’s organization 120–123, 146 onarmo (Opera Nazionale per l’Assistenza Religiosa e Morale degli Operai), Catholic organization for industrial workers 283, 283n25 Pascendi dominici gregis, encyclical (1907) 33 pci (Partito Comunista Italiano), Italian Communist Party 67 Pieni l'animo, encyclical (1906) 33 pnf (Partito Nazionale Fascista), National Fascist Party 66, 66n29, 118, 118n62, 146, 147, 156, 211, 214, 225–227, 227n88, 276 Poland 78, 95, 125, 256, 257, 259, 260, 268, 271, 281 ppi (Partito Popolare Italiano) Italian Popular Party 50, 66–69, 71, 72, 88–92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 103, 116, 118, 122, 130, 143, 143n143, 147, 154, 164, 168, 203, 284, 304 Protestantism 6, 94, 141, 201 psi (Partito Socialista Italiano) Italian Socialist Party 19, 20, 20n32, 27, 30, 33, 94, 95, 97, 149

Quas primas, encyclical (1925) 74, 74n62, 75n63 Race and racism 7, 49, 52, 54, 190–195, 215, 216, 216n44, 218, 219, 223, 225, 226, 228, 232, 238, 239, 241, 242, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250n184, 253, 254 Romanitas 65, 69, 109, 118, 135, 138, 159, 164–169, 165n35, 248, 263, 266 Roman Question 32, 41, 42, 44, 45, 45n126, 69, 83, 86, 93, 109, 117–119, 129, 138 rsi (Repubblica Sociale Italiana), Italian Social Republic 288–291, 288n14, 289n16, 290, 291, 293, 295, 296 Russia/Soviet Union 8, 126n83, 158, 199, 221, 234, 256, 259, 260, 270, 275, 276, 277, 279, 282 Sacred Heart, cult of 47–50, 75, 75n65, 76, 92, 175, 182, 183, 200, 271 Scuola di Mistica fascista 144 Syllabus against the errors of racism 195, 216, 217 Society of Jesus 51, 72, 86, 220, 230 Spain 8, 9, 74, 125, 158, 196–199, 199n172, 200, 202–205, 207, 216, 239, 260, 260n38, 271, 291 Studiorum ducem, encyclical (1923) 124, 124n77 Summi pontificatus, encyclical (1939) 257, 258, 258n28 Suprema Sacred Congregation. See Holy Office Totalitarianism 6, 6n9, 129, 130, 157, 210, 229, 303 Ubi arcano Dei consilio, encyclical (1922) 52, 52n157, 76n67, 77, 101, 124, 215 United States 188, 189, 189n134, 210, 219n16, 221 University of the Sacred Heart 48, 78, 134, 160, 200, 230 Unknown Soldier 78, 80, 81, 206 Vigilanti cura, encyclical (1936) 177, 177n93