The motion was not passed, and the CTLN limited itself to recalling a less drastic one, which had been passed the previous 24 May, when the Christian Democrats had polemicised against the ‘political infantilism’, ‘ideological prejudices’ and ‘romantic sentimentalities’ that appeared to them discernible in the intransigent positions.88 Things were to change in April 1945 with the general collapse, but the Communists’ insistence on insurrection, which they were prepared to start alone if need be, should nonetheless be attributed to the firm commitment to avoid not only another 25 July at the topmost level, but also a creeping series of widespread events of the same nature.89 Even if ‘insurrection’ was scarier than ‘liberation’,90 when the showdown came this sort of prudence was shelved in favour of a formula championed from the beginning of the movement,91 implicit in which was the anti-Fascist, and not just anti-German, character of the victory, and which could be imprinted in the collective memory as summing up the entire event. It is symptomatic that the ex-partisan workers questioned in a recent research inquiry tend to call the whole Resistance an ‘insurrection’.92
5. THE CATHOLICS AND THE CIVIL WAR
The civil war presented the Catholic Church and its various components with more arduous problems than those connected with the patriotic war. The latter could always be seen as falling within the traditional framework of conflicts between states, even between Catholic states, before which the Church, from long experience, knew how to conduct itself. Already the ideological character that the 1940–43 war had acquired – that of both a Fascist war and an anti-Bolshevik war – had created for the Catholic Church, as an institution and in relation to individual consciences, the particular problems that have been mentioned earlier. After 8 September the only problem that seemed to have been definitively solved was the identification of the victor. But even here, the mere question of what attitude it should take towards the strictly national aspect of the war became difficult for the Church – and not so much because of the change of sides, which in fact allowed the Church to feel easily in unison with the anti-German sentiments of a large part of the Italian population (as in fact occurred in the South), but because there came to the fore, as we shall presently see, the problem of obedience owed to the occupying foreign authorities as guardians of order.
It was the civil war, however, that created a particularly difficult situation. It revealed the line of ‘tranquil loyalism’ to the government followed during Badoglio’s forty-five days as being no longer viable.1 It complicated the process of what has been called ‘the succession’.2 It made dramatic what for most Italian Catholics had never constituted a serious problem of conscience, namely being both Catholic and Fascist. At a still higher level, it revealed the conflict between observing the fifth commandment and killing in time of war, now that it was necessary to kill other Italians. While in normal wars each of us, when he returns home, can be absolved for having done his duty, the civil war opened up a problematic field that it was not easy for the ecclesiastical authorities to occupy with clear and unambiguous directives.
In any case, several distinctions need to be made from the start – distinctions that are not limited to that between the higher and lower clergy, incontestable though that distinction is. This distinction has been emphasised by left-wing historiography, starting with Roberto Battaglia’s Storia della Resistenza (which is naturally wholly in favour of the lower clergy), but is already present in the contemporary sources3 and then in the memoirs,4 as well as in the way things actually were. On the other hand, it has been minimised or even denied in Catholic-inspired historiography and journalism. The fact is that an exceptional situation like the civil war, inserted in a great international ideological war, brought to light the multiplicity of planes on which the Church moved, all of them real enough but all resistant to any reductio ad unum – be it the appeal to a providential game between parties in which each would perform his office, or a bishop condemning partisan violence, or the tendency to highlight a rather too lucid and ‘objective’ ecclesiastical strategy capable of controlling and transporting to the glory of the institution the multiple threads of the often contradictory experiences lived by Catholics.5
The contradictions throng around one fundamental one: to remain super partes and at the same time to take sides. This is not simply a question of opposition between being religious and being political, for both elements were to be found at both poles of the dichotomy. The political (and military) choice of the Resistance, in a situation which called into question automatic institutional forms of legitimisation, was inevitably supported by profound, deep-rooted motivations for a Catholic who wanted to choose his allegiances as a Catholic, according to his religious convictions. On the other hand, Catholic piety was embodied in an institution, which as such operated politically.
The hardest distinction to mediate was thus that between religion as an institution – administrated, though not exclusively, by the leaders of the hierarchy – and religion as a question of conscience. Both levels contained the duality of being super partes and of taking sides. At the first level, this duality generated diplomatic prudence, broken at times by compromise with, or opposition to, the Nazi-Fascist authorities. At the second level, emphasis was laid on the religious piety shared by friends and enemies, victors and vanquished, and active engagement alongside one’s friends against the enemy, out of a religious inspiration to rebel against oppression and injustice. ‘Thou source of free life, give us the force to rebel’ is written next to an image of Christ.6 ‘Pastoral activity’, to which Catholic historiography has often appealed, though failing to devote as much attention to the sheep as to the shepherds, does not appear to be sufficient as a mediating category. In fact, pastoral activity took the form of diplomatic caution, provoking the reactions of those who ‘had by now made a clear choice of sides’.7 Nor is the distinction exhaustive between a plane on which the Church performs a ‘Benedictine’ function of preserving society from chaos, and a plane where it orientates the masses over which it exercises its influence in a pro-Resistance direction.8
The function of the shepherd who must never abandon his sheep could lead the Church – and this was no novelty, either – to paying the price of submission to, or collaboration with, established power, whatever that power might be. From an ethico-political point of view, it is legitimate to speak in such cases of opportunism, but from a pastoral–institutional point of view one has to recognise the coherence of those priests who considered it more important to tend the souls of others than to tend their dignity as citizens or, if one prefers, to think too deeply about the reasons for a choice made by so many people as men and citizens. This attitude seems to me to be exemplified by a chaplain of the Pusteria Alpine division who, on being captured by the Germans in Grenoble, refused to follow the deported officers because they had refused to collaborate and were defined by him as ‘rebels’: ‘I didn’t want to go to Poland, my ministry didn’t permit me to starve to death among barbed wire, thus cutting short work that was so useful for the soldiers.’ When, subsequently captured by the Allies, he was taken to England, this priest ‘immediately became an enthusiastic collaborator of the victors’.9 An opposite example is don Olindo Pezzin. Chaplain of the 13th sector of the Frontier Guard, stationed at Malles Venosta, where the South Tyrolese handed fugitive soldiers over to the Germans but wanted to hide the priest even though he was dressed as an Italian officer, don Pezzin gave himself up to the occupiers as a prisoner in order to remain close to the men who had been entrusted to him.10
In reality the Church, in the multiplicity of forms it took on RSI territory, found itself facing the same problems of the relationship between political and legal morality with which all the Italian inhabitants of those regions had to reckon. It seems to me at least as useful to try to understand certain features of the complex and not always coherent behaviour of this sizable portion of the Italian Catholic world as to conduct research into ‘the Catholics of the Resistance’.
In October 1943, Monsignor Evasio Colli, bishop of Parma and director general of Catholic Action, published in L’Avvenire d’Italia – in reply to a libellous statement that had appeared, as a ballon d’essai, in the Fascist newspapers – a declaration that ‘this association has never made mention of the state, nor of Fascism, nor of the Republic in any written document. Catholic Action must not engage, has not engaged, does not engage and will never engage in politics. If it were to do so it would betray its mission.’11
The Secretariat of State’s general directives would maintain ‘an attitude of superior impartiality before the armed conflict’, avoid ‘manifestations that might appear either as purely political proclamations or as statements of preference towards one of the belligerent forces’.12 But when asked for advice by the vicar cardinal of Rome, Marchetti-Selvaggiani, as to how he should behave in response to Fascist pressure to collaborate in dissuading the young from draft-dodging, the assistant secretary of state, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini [the future Pope Paul VI], replied with words whose meaning slid from diplomatic prudence to what was to all effects acquiescence. Montini said that one should ‘confine oneself to recommending calm and obedience to the public authorities. To give other advice would mean entering what is still an open question.’13
On 15 October 1943 Monsignor Ambrogio Marchioni, secretary of the nunciature in Italy, had a meeting with General Rodolfo Graziani. To the marshal’s request that he take the part of, or at least express sympathy for, the cause of the Social Republic, the monsignor replied by insisting again on the neutrality of the Church and ‘still more of the Vatican’, which did not permit any ‘political intervention in favour of one of the belligerents or in favour of one part of the citizens against another of the same nation’. The duty of priests, rather, was to ‘instil calm, tranquility, order, so as to ensure that ill-advised actions do not produce serious reprisals against so many innocent people or the entire population’.14
The authoritative prelate incidentally let slip a few words – the Church ‘does not and cannot remain neutral between good and evil’ – which, while sounding, on the one hand, like a necessary if vague appeal to the highest principles, on the other hand did not help orientate individual believers in a situation that compelled them, if necessary, to risk ‘calm’, ‘tranquility’ and ‘order’ in choosing between positions which also needed to be defined in relation to the problem of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
The polyvalence of the appeals issued, above all by the bishops, with their various tones and emphases, stemmed very largely from the fact that they gave no precise indication as to who were to be the recipients of the condemnations and warnings. It was a repeat performance of ‘deprecating the deeds’ without ‘denouncing the culprits’, which had characterised the attitude of ecclesiastical teaching regarding Fascism and the war.15 The intransigent Fascists were the first to resent this ambiguity; the anti-Fascists were offended by it; most people were bewildered or, conversely, felt authorised to set their consciences at rest, without any undue traumas, delegating the government once again to the hierarchy. The root problem – namely that of the legitimacy of the political command exercised by the actually existing authorities – was evaded.16 Thus it might happen that declarations by manifestly pro-Fascist papers such as L’Italia Cattolica turned out to be very similar to stances taken by the highest ecclesiastical authorities. In that Venetian magazine the following words are quoted from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘Let every soul be subject to authority. Whoever resists authority, resists God’s design and merits eternal damnation. Therefore, according to your duty pay the tributes, enlist and fight. In these things too the authorities are instruments which God uses.’17
There is clear assonance here not only with the bishop of Mantua, who urged respect for the authorities and for the German troops, only to find his admonition immediately re-launched by an RSI poster,18 but also with many of the vague appeals to respect for unnamed authorities. Even in one of the most well-known episcopal documents, the Lettera degli arcivescovi e vescovi della regione piemontese al clero e al popolo nella Pasqua 1944 (‘Letter of the archbishops and bishops of the region of Piedmont to the clergy and the people at Easter 1944’), the effort seems to be to reconcile ‘obvious considerations of prudence with constant concern about not letting oneself be dragged into performing actions that were in any sense compromising and binding’, maintaining for that end ‘on the principal point … an able and eloquent silence’ – where, however, ‘ability’ was such as to be to the detriment of eloquence, if the latter was taken to mean the vehicle of an emphatic strength of conviction.19 And ability revealed itself as ambiguity when the bishops condemned the ‘bloody guerrilla warfare of armed bands’ (the Fascists in no way regarded themselves as bands involved in guerrilla warfare) and ‘any form of reprisal and violence from whichever side it may come and whatever justification it may flaunt’. On the fundamental point of the RSI’s legitimacy, the Piedmontese bishops took cover behind St Thomas: ‘The use of power will be God’s if it is exercised according to the precepts and norms of divine justice; instead it will not be God’s if he who holds it uses it to commit injustice’, and behind Leo XIII: ‘In all things in which the law of nature or the will of God is violated, commanding is as iniquitous as obeying.’20
Of an altogether different feather was the moral tension that had inspired the letter of the Dutch bishops of 25 July 1941, which was immediately circulated in France as well.21 In contrast to so many instances of caution, greater clarity must be recognised in the pragmatic argumentation of Monsignor Giuseppe Angrisani, bishop of Casale Monferrato:
We find ourselves before an established government, which has in its hands the force to make its laws observed and will not allow itself to be ignored or ridden roughshod over. Even if one does not wish to invoke higher principles, it is well to say that prudence at least suggests that we avoid the greater evil by adapting to the lesser. This rule of common sense, even though it may seem prompted by mere personal advantage, will be of value in illuminating us about the practical way to resolve many intricate situations.22
When all was over Monsignor Angrisani wrote: ‘The bishop, like all the other bishops of this wretched northern Italy, torn between brothers and bloodied by fratricidal massacres, had not the slightest intention of taking one or the other side.’
This bishop is, moreover, an example of how in the very person of a prelate simple practical prudence and genuine religious ardour could coexist. In fact, on 14 November 1944 Monsignor Angrisani asked to be shot in the place of 150 hostages from Ozzano.23
Another exemplary case of the question of obedience or disobedience to the existing authorities is that of don Aldo Moretti, awarded the medaglia d’oro in North Africa, when still convinced that it was not an ‘unjust war’, and one of the organisers of the Friuli Osoppo partisan formations. The semi-formal annexation to Germany of the province of Udine led to the existence of a particularly close intertwining of the patriotic and anti-Fascist aspects of the struggle. Don Moretti recognised the illegitimacy of the government installed by the Nazis (it was illegitimate enough in Germany, its standing in Italy can only be imagined), but at the same time recognised the occupier’s ‘right to govern within the bounds of what regards public order’. He then sought to save himself from contradiction by clingin
g to the argument that annexation to the Reich of the territories of the Pre-Alps and the Adriatic coast was not altogether perfect: if it were so, ‘in theory, it might make it difficult in all honesty entirely to legitimise the armed resistance and to equate it with that provided for by Holy Scripture’. The declaration of war on Germany by the ‘Italian state that had constitutional continuity’ had then, don Moretti goes on to say, remedied the situation.24 Don Moretti did nonetheless get the local branch of the Christian Democrats to reject the orders prepared by the CLNAI against Fascist traitors and collaborationists.25 These contradictions reoccurred in don Moretti’s direct superior, the bishop of Udine, but weighted the opposite way, in the name of public order on the one hand, and on the other – and this is the thorniest point – of respect for human life. Monsignor Giuseppe Nogara, whom Bianchi defines as an ‘uomo possibilista’, published, in the Rivista diocesana udinese, one of his declarations of 12 December 1943, in which he recommended obedience to the legitimate ordinances of authority – because in matters relating to the maintenance of order even a de facto government has to be obeyed. The following January the bishop, who had previously even offered himself to the Germans so long as ‘you leave my children in peace’, invoked ‘respect for life’, without naming anyone in particular who had violated it; and then in March and April, with the other bishops of the Adriatic coast, he condemned the occupier’s abuses of power, but also the acts of violence and excesses of those opposing him.26 On 30 November 1944 the same prelate addressed a letter to his parish priests enjoining them to exhort the partisans to present themselves and to hand their weapons over to the Germans, on the guarantee that they would not be deported. A Garibaldi source has no hesitation in defining this policy as treason, since in a phase of the most violent roundups, such as that taking place, it induced surrender. The Germans, for their part, had made sure that they distributed safe-conduct passes to those parish priests who presented themselves. Even the commanders of the Osoppo brigade repudiated the bishop’s letter, alleging – ‘hypocritically’, comments the Garibaldi document – that it had been extorted from him. The Christian Democrats managed to get the bishop to withdraw the controversial document.27
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