The borderline case of the RSI military chaplain raises the question of the role as stand-ins for the institutions that the clergy had played so extensively under German occupation and the RSI. This role, to which Federico Chabod has already drawn attention,73 reveals the clergy’s great capacity for filling, to a considerable degree, the void which neither the RSI nor ‘the government of the CLNs’ was capable of filling completely, thereby incorporating acts of human and religious assistance into their diplomatic caution and political ambitions. Their role as substitutes was immense and all too evident in the city of Rome, where it fed the myth of defensor urbis;74 but it spread extensively and in the most various forms throughout the whole of the occupied territory. In August 1944 the Northern edition of Il Popolo could write emphatically that ‘while [Italy’s] governing class has betrayed its duty’, the clergy ‘has remained all but intact against the misdeeds and acts of baseness into which many compatriots have fallen’.75 Still earlier, Il Popolo again, in its Roman edition, had indicated the parish priests as being the only active authority in the villages located in the zones of the front.76 In the Lower Po valley, the IOUs that substituted for coins were accepted only if they bore the parish priest’s stamp.77 The dean of Malo imposed a ceiling price on black-market prices.78 A parish priest was appealed to as mediator in disputes that broke out within the ranks of a Garibaldi formation.79 And many more examples could be cited, both in this minute sphere and in that of relations with the Fascist and German authorities in negotiations for the exchange of prisoners.
The main ambition behind this type of presence and activity was to transform the work of triangular mediation between the population, the Fascist and German authorities, and the partisans and CLNs into genuine political mediation at the highest level. Against this prospect the CLNAI took a stand on 19 January 1945 ‘in the most energetic way’ with a painstaking document that left its trace through then being published only in Avanti!, L’Unità and the Genoese paper L’Attivista.80 When the final surrender came, the ecclesiastical authorities’ tendencies to present themselves as intermediaries would emerge particularly clearly: from the parish priests of the province of Belluno to Cardinal Schuster, prelate of the Ambrosian Church. The latter, who had already offered his services as mediator between ‘the supreme Italian and German authorities’ and the ‘dissident government’ of the Ossola area, felt, according to Gianfranco Bianchi’s interpretation of him, that it was ‘an evangelical duty to avoid general insurrection’, and was fond of appearing as a protagonist and indeed almost primate of the northern Church, which irritated the supreme authorities of the Roman Church.81 If on the one hand the ecclesiastical hierarchies together cultivated to the end the ideal of an Italy reduced wholly to the state of an open city under their protection,82 the CLNs, for their part, could not, in the delicate phase of transition, abdicate in favour of the ecclesiastical authorities. The CLNs had given their personal word to the Allies that they would safeguard public order, and generally they succeeded in doing this so well as to induce a British officer in Turin to exclaim: ‘You pulled off a revolution and it’s all so calm, so orderly. I feel I’m in England.’83
The insurrection and the disturbance of public peace were, according to the ecclesiastical view, dangerously close to that disturbance of people’s minds that Church teaching has always numbered among its duties to avoid. An undisturbed ‘public peace’ (‘ordine pubblico’) does in effect offer fewer opportunities for people’s consciences to be ruffled, and makes it easier to govern them. The war fought on national soil had instead created a particularly treacherous terrain when it came to safeguarding traditional morality and customs, of which the Church felt itself to be the guarantor. The category of ‘public peace’ thus broadened until it came to include moral order. A research study of the diocese of Fano84 has shown how the parish priests were concerned about the novelties that the war had brought with it, above all in the sphere of sexual morality. From this point of view, it was principally the German and the Allied troops – made up of foreign, even coloured, and mainly non-Catholic people – who were bracketed together in the condemnation. This deprecation was of a different kind from that regarding the ‘calamity of the civil war … originating from high quarters, supported and stoked in every way possible by the two sides’, where if anything what was highlighted were the ‘increasingly ferocious, implacable and bloody’85 features of the conflict. All warfare was in any case classed as exceptional. And if it is true that in the religiosity of the Italians ‘the quotidian revealed the sacred’,86 the appearance of the exception might indeed reveal the sacred more clearly, but it could also put it in jeopardy.
Among the functions involved in the stand-in role for the institutions exercised by the clergy, the one that has left the clearest traces, in the vast social consensus won by the Catholic ruling class after the war, is that of assistance, which also falls into the no-man’s-land between institutions, religious devotion and political projects. Assistance was a field in which the Church moved with a time-honoured confidence that was destined in the post-war period to achieve new triumphs under the protection of Christian Democrat power. During Badoglio’s forty-five days the new possibilities being offered by the situation had already been glimpsed. On 12 August Monsignor Ferdinando Baldelli, leader of Opera Nazionale Assistenza Religiosa e Morale agli Operai (ONARMO), had urged Cardinal Maurilio Fossati, archbishop of Turin, to step up the activity of the chaplains in workplaces; otherwise, he wrote, ‘tomorrow we won’t be able to give the sense of the continuity of our work, above and beyond all party rivalries’.87 And again ONARMO, pursuing the logic of super partes, laid down this policy in a circular of 5 October 1943: ‘No collaboration with political parties of any tendency.’88
In the period of the civil war and the German occupation, the work of assistance covered a vast field. It ranged from the organisation of Catholic succour to fugitive anti-Fascists (OSCAR), which operated from Milan in the college of San Carlo from 12 September 1943,89 to assistance given to escaped Allied prisoners,90 to refuge in monasteries and convents, of which even prominent lay anti-Fascists like Pietro Nenni availed themselves. This resuscitated right of asylum was bitterly contested by the Fascists (as in the San Paolo episode in Rome). They even went so far as to have false orders by the Congregazione dei Riti published in the press, prohibiting priests from taking strangers into their houses.91 By contrast, Il Popolo lost no time in approvingly noting the judgment expressed by one of those who were assisted by the clergy: ‘For the next fifty years at least anti-clericalism will be impossible in Italy.’92
So unanimous and luminous an image of this work of assistance and recovery has been transmitted as to make us almost forget the shadows clouding it at times. A case in point is the great roundup conducted by the SS in the Rome ghetto on 16 October 1943, when, alongside the many fine pages written by the clergy, monasteries and convents were other, far from noble ones, like the demand that children be baptised as a condition for granting them asylum.93
In L’Osservatore Romano an article entitled ‘Christian Charity’ appeared, written by the priest Sergio Pignedoli (whom we have already encountered as the author of the letter ‘To you, student and soldier’, which vindicated the evangelical duty of offering charity to everyone: ‘In a Roman Catholic priest’s house anyone can go [even if he is opposed to his ideas] and find there a bed and a loaf of bread.’94
Clearly, this attitude is very different in kind from prudent diplomatic equidistance between the warring parties. Nevertheless, it was precisely the most deeply pondered and acutely felt positions that gave rise to the contradiction between a religious sense that made no distinction between friends and enemies and a religious sense that presented itself by contrast as the basis of a radical choice of sides. The beautiful simplicity with which a priest led out to be shot by the Fascists wrote that his fate was simply the consequence of his having done his job as a priest95 left the fundamental question unanswered. Just as th
e continuity between religiousness, patriotism and anti-Fascism, suggested by the author of the following words, was by no means obvious: ‘The clergy … far from standing by like inert spectators of the nation’s tragedy, have taken to the trenches of heroism with charity as its weapon.’96
Likewise, a parish priest of the diocese of Saluzzo, recounting that he hid partisans who risked being killed, made this comment: ‘This in the name of evangelical charity which is the cause of true patriotism.’97 Giuseppe Rovero himself, who quotes these words, nevertheless points out the full problem inherent in the fact that ‘the charitable and welfare activity of the priest takes on a patriotic significance, without losing any of its religious significance … We can simply say that these are exceptional circumstances.’98
The parish priest of Cadola, monsignor Viezzer, who was arrested twice, wrote in his diary: ‘A priest could not help seeing the human and patriotic side of what was happening.’ And the report by the parish priest of Valle di Seren del Grappa to the bishop of Belluno says, almost defensively, regarding the partisan couriers who had used the canon’s house as an address: ‘And I couldn’t avoid it.’99 At a higher level, Monsignor Giovanni Cazzani, bishop of Cremona, had answered don Calcagno more confidently and realistically: ‘The Italian clergy cannot be against the majority of the Italian people, who are against Fascism.’100
It was not only the Italian clergy and Catholics who faced the problem of the relationship between religion and patriotism. ‘Patriotism is a Christian virtue’, wrote a Belgian priest before being shot.101 But if the letters written by Italians sentenced to death are compared with those of another Catholic country, such as Belgium, the Italian ones reveal a religious sense which, while being in line with patriotism, is experienced principally, at the final hour, as faith in individual salvation, as the hope of finding one’s loved ones in heaven, as forgiveness often accorded to one’s slayer. In the Belgians, by contrast, there appear the themes of an ideologised Catholic culture conforming to the tradition of that country. One is dying for the Church, to restore Belgium to Christ, for the advent of Christian society, even for Christ the King – which was the motto of Rexism (Belgian Fascism), whose head, Léon Degrelle, had become an active collaborationist.102
Difficult indeed, then, were the problems inherent in the passage from Christian solidarity to the bloody struggle against people who spoke the same language, belonged to the same national community, and by and large professed the same religion. On 23 September 1943 a meeting was held in Como for ‘cases of conscience’; and a priest, don Onorio Cairoli, drew up a declaration that reads like a court sentence (with a justification and verdict):
With all the attenuating circumstances of a political muddle around which informative facts are scarce, and with the psychological justifications put forward from opposite points of view in support of conflicting convictions, admitting the considerations which discounted the good faith of others, there is but one, objectively certain solution: to oppose the Germans, an unjust foreign occupier, and their collaborators, within the limits dictated by the commandments.103
A Veneto priest, ‘questioned by the Germans as to whether he had offered lodging to the British, replied that he hadn’t, justifying his mental reservation by distinguishing between board and bed for a few nights and real accommodation’.104
In Rome, in the church of San Marcello al Corso, the prior, Clemente Francesconi, celebrated a mass offered for the soul of Ettore Muti. An indignant letter then appeared in L’Unità, attributed to ‘a young member of Catholic Action’, which granted that a priest could not refuse to celebrate that service, but added that he should have taken care to keep it within the sphere of a purely private event. Instead the mass had acquired a political significance of which Catholics would be the first ‘to demand tomorrow that prior CF justify himself for his cowardly formalistic, anti-Christian and Pharisaic conformism’.105
The question of funeral rites, in which the right of priests to celebrate them was never contested by anyone, is the thorniest question relating to the issue of convergence or divergence between religious and political spheres. The patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Adeodato Giovanni Piazza, agreed to solemn obsequies being celebrated in San Marco for the thirty soldiers of the GNR killed in the explosion caused by the GAPs at Ca’ Giustiniani – and then celebrated, in San Moisè, the funeral of thirteen anti-Fascists shot in reprisal.106 In some cases the parish priests risked their lives to bury partisans who had been killed.107
L’Unità reported with satisfaction the news that Cardinal Schuster had, in Milan Cathedral, openly prohibited confessors from giving absolution to informers working for the Germans.108 Voce Operaia, organ of the Catholic Communists, devoted an enthusiastic commentary to the episode, with an opening in the spirit of Manzoni and Gioberti and a finale in that of Togliatti: ‘Ancient and immortal Catholic faith, linked to all the fortunes of our people, today you reaffirm yourself as the indestructible binding force of popular unity!’109 But when, little more than a couple of months later, Schuster made some anti-Communist declarations and participated in the funeral of Aldo Resega – the federale (provincial party secretary) of Milan killed by the GAPs – the same Voce Operaia attacked him bitterly, accusing him of not having attended the funerals of the eight hostages shot in reprisal, and adding with rage and anguish: ‘We won’t lose our faith because of this. Which doesn’t, clearly, absolve those who are doing everything in their power to make us lose it.’110
A priest refused to bless the flags of a Garibaldi formation, provoking ‘a murmur of disapproval’. The commissar then addressed the following sermon to the cleric:
Your behaviour makes you unworthy to serve the God you claim to believe in. Do not forget that He drove out of the temple the false priests, who had him crucified for this. Remember that He too died to redeem the oppressed, as we today are fighting to redeem our country. Certainly God, who can see it, disapproves of your action.111
Monsignor Giacomo Bortignon, bishop of Feltre and Belluno, climbed the scaffold to administer holy oil and kissed four hanged partisans. The bishop of Padua, monsignor Carlo Agostini, at the station of Chiesanuova, opened the railway trucks full of soldiers being deported to Germany. But both prelates participated in the episcopal conference in the Veneto of 20 April 1944, which pronounced itself in favour of the separation between politics – the sphere into which the war was conducted – and the Church, which was ‘outside and above’ it, and whose resolution, though regarded as one of the clearest and most enlightened documents of the northern Italian episcopate, reminded its ‘subjects’ about the duty of ‘disciplined obedience’ and those governing about the imperative of ‘justice’ and the ‘common good’. Monsignor Agostini then, justifying himself before the questore for having circulated the document in his diocese, took the opportunity to declare his ‘sentiments of patriotism and sympathy towards the Germans, having also given public proof of it’.112
It is no easy thing to find an organic framework for positions inspired by such contradictory impulses and the proclamation of one’s duty to disobey the laws of the Social Republic made by so prominent a Christian Democrat politician as Paolo Emilio Taviani.113 The exhortation by Teresio Olivelli, who died at Mauthausen, to become ‘rebels for love’ is interpreted by his biographer as a choice made precisely by virtue of his Christian spirituality.114 The same need to come down clearly on one side or the other was felt by Alfredo Di Dio, the Catholic partisan leader of the Val d’Ossola, who, replying to his mother, who was exhorting him to hide, said that he regarded those who were neither partisans nor Fascists as ‘mediocre’.115
Still more significant is the itinerary of Giuseppe Dossetti. In the summer of 1942, at the inter-regional conference of the Catholic graduates of Emilia-Romagna, Dossetti had maintained that Christian morality considers rebellion against tyranny legitimate. Immediately after 8 September he was recommending that one keep clear of the fratricidal struggle and direct one’s energies at of
fering fraternal assistance to the persecuted and suffering. Dossetti was then to become president of the provincial CLN.116 Gorrieri clearly saw where Catholic engagement in the Resistance would lead politically. The Catholics, he wrote, had grown convinced that their organised presence in the armed struggle would constitute a qualification for participating in the construction of the new democratic state soon after the Liberation.117
The contradictions of the Catholics were mirrored almost identically in the contradictions and uncertainties of the ‘lay’ resistenti they found before them. When the laici found themselves again alongside the Catholics, they showed incredulity, positive surprise, suspicion, at times almost contempt, together with manifestations of a unitary spirit, at times instrumental, at times sincere. Sincere certainly was the wish to avoid the rebirth of anti-clericalism, though this attitude does not simply bespeak a civil ideal of tolerance, but also inadequate attention to the great problems of theory and morality, sacrificed to the political need for agreement between Catholics and the representative role assumed for them by the Christian Democrat party. If on the one hand this party constituted the visible proof of the Catholics’ commitment, on the other hand it might instead have aroused suspicion exactly by virtue of its being a bridge between religion and politics, over which it was hard to tell what might cross in future. ‘We started hearing talk of Christian Democrat units’, writes a pungent Veneto Action Party–inspired author in his memoirs: ‘Late in the day but sure enough, they too arrived. The participation of priests and of some church folk in the first phases of the Resistance had been admirable; but now one might almost have thought that this organisational intervention, coming rather late in the day, was an opportunist, competitive move.’118
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