The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  LIST OF PUBLICATIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS

  Publications

  L’AVVENIRE D’ITALIA Founded in the late nineteenth century in Bologna with Pope Leo XIII’s blessing, L’Avvenire d’Italia became the only truly national Catholic newspaper in Italy during Fascism.

  LA CIVILTÀ CATTOLICA Edited by a collective of Italian Jesuits, the journal was founded in 1850 on the request of Pope Pius IX shortly after he returned to power in Rome following the revolution of 1848–49. The journal’s director is appointed by the pope. Before each issue can be published—it comes out twice monthly—its proofs are reviewed and approved by the Vatican secretary of state office. In the Catholic world, the journal was read as the expression of the pope’s views on the issues of the day.

  L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO The daily newspaper of the Vatican, L’Osservatore romano was first published in 1861 as part of the effort to defend the pope’s remaining territories from the newly formed Kingdom of Italy. Although it was closely overseen by the pope, a fig leaf of deniability was afforded by the formal stance that L’Osservatore romano was not the official organ of the Vatican. Once Mussolini solidified his dictatorship in the mid-1920s, it remained the only newspaper in Italy not subject to Fascist censorship, although when it published articles that Mussolini objected to, copies placed on sale outside the Vatican’s walls were subject to seizure. L’Osservatore romano fulfilled its mission as the semiofficial newspaper of the Vatican by reporting on the pope’s more notable meetings and remarks each day and offering news on Church activities worldwide. La Civiltà cattolica, by contrast, combined much longer analyses of the political issues of the day with regular book reviews and a digest of the major Italian and international political events of interest to the Church.

  IL POPOLO D’ITALIA Benito Mussolini founded the daily newspaper in Milan shortly after being expelled from the Socialist Party in 1914. Il Popolo d’Italia became his vehicle for launching the Fascist movement five years later. When he became prime minister in 1922, he turned the editorship over to his brother Arnaldo. On Arnaldo’s death in 1931, Arnaldo’s son, Vito, became editor.

  Organizations

  CATHOLIC ACTION Created by Pius X in 1905 to provide a framework for organizing the Catholic laity, by the 1920s the organization had separate groups in Italy for men and women, boys and girls, and university students. With a national lay director appointed by the pope and an ecclesiastical overseer in the Vatican, Italian Catholic Action was organized at both the diocesan and the parish level. Mussolini remained suspicious of the organization, the only mass membership group in the country that he did not control. Pius XI, known as the “pope of Catholic Action,” thought the organization essential to his efforts to Christianize Italian society.

  FASCIST PARTY Launched in 1921, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) was the brainchild of Benito Mussolini. In the act of transforming what had been a looser political movement and collection of violent squads into a formal political party, Mussolini abandoned the anti-Church and antimonarchical roots of the earlier Fascist movement and turned decidedly rightward. In his early years in power, he would struggle to keep the local Fascist bosses in line. In 1928 the PNF became the only legal political party in Italy.

  HOLY OFFICE Also known as the Roman Inquisition, it had its origin in 1542 as the Congregation of the Holy Roman, Universal Inquisition, founded by Pope Paul III and aimed initially at combating the Protestant Reformation. Its name was changed in 1908 to the Holy Office (Sant’Uffizio). Headed by the pope, it consisted of a group of cardinals aided by an assortment of other prelates. Its secretary, a cardinal, met regularly with the pope to discuss the cases before it. The mission of the Holy Office was to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy and stamp out heresy.

  OPERA NAZIONALE BALILLA The ONB, or National Youth Organization, was founded in 1926 to socialize Italy’s youth into the new Fascist ideology. It was divided into two age groups, separated by gender. The younger boys (8–13 years old) were known as Balilla, the older boys (14–18) Avanguardisti. The comparable female groups were called the Little Italian Girls and the Italian Female Youths. The Fascist youth groups threatened to undermine the Catholic youth organizations; upon their founding, the government disbanded the Catholic Boy Scouts. However, a vast network of priests was established so that all local ONB groups would have their own Catholic chaplain to lead them in religious worship alongside their Fascist indoctrination and paramilitary training.

  POPULAR PARTY The Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) was founded in 1919 as a national Catholic political party by a Sicilian priest, Luigi Sturzo, with Pope Benedict XV’s approval. In the 1921 parliamentary elections, the PPI elected over 20 percent of the deputies. One of the main obstacles to the imposition of a Fascist dictatorship, the party was undermined when Pius XI made clear he was throwing his support to Mussolini. The party was disbanded in November 1926, although Mussolini would long suspect that elements of the PPI were secretly trying to reorganize in Catholic Action.

  SOCIALIST PARTY Founded in 1892, the Italian Socialist Party came to dominate the left in Italy, with special strength in the north and center of the country. Divided into a reformist branch and one championing revolution—Benito Mussolini was among the leaders of the latter—the party split in 1912 in a purge of reformists. The party reached its high point in the 1919 parliamentary elections, getting almost a third of the vote and winning control of many cities and towns. In 1921 a dissident faction walked out and formed the Communist Party. The following year the party suffered another split, as the reformist wing splintered off to form the United Socialist Party. In 1924 its leader, Giacomo Matteotti, would be murdered by Fascist thugs led by an Italian American. In 1926 Mussolini outlawed the Socialist Party and its various progeny.

  PROLOGUE

  ROME, 1939

  AILING, ELDERLY, AND HAVING BARELY SURVIVED CIRCULATORY FAILURE the previous year, Pope Pius XI begged God to grant him a few more days. He sat at his desk in his third-floor Vatican office in his white robe, a cane resting against the wall nearby. The rusted compass and barometer from his climbs to Italy’s highest Alpine peaks lay on one side, a reminder of days long past. An old tuning fork remained in a drawer. It had been years since he had last taken it out. Proud of his singing voice and eager that his sense of pitch not desert him, he had practiced when he could, but only when he was sure no one was listening. Now, knowing the end was near, he went through each drawer, making sure his papers were in order.

  For years the pope had enjoyed good health, and observers had marveled at his punishing schedule. He had insisted on knowing every detail of Vatican affairs and deciding everything of any significance. Now every day was a challenge, every step caused pain. At night, unable to sleep, he lay awake, his legs throbbing from varicose veins, his asthma making breathing a struggle, and worst of all, plagued by the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong.

  In the daytime, light streamed into his office through the three windows that overlooked St. Peter’s Square. But now it was night, and his small desk lamp cast a yellow glow over the sheets in front of him. The Lord, he thought, had kept him alive for a reason. He was God’s vicar on earth. He could not die before saying what had to be said.

  The pope had summoned all of Italy’s bishops to Rome to hear his final message. The gathering was to be held in a week and a half in St. Peter’s Basilica, on February 11, 1939. It would mark the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords, the historic agreement that Pius XI had struck with Italy’s dictator, Mussolini, ending decades of hostility between Italy and the Roman Catholic Church. With that agreement, the separation of church and state that had marked modern Italy from its founding sixty-eight years earlier came to an end. A new era began, the Church a willing partner of Mussolini’s Fascist government.

  Seventeen years earlier, in 1922, Achille Ratti, freshly appointed cardinal, had been the surprising choice to succeed Pope Benedict XV. He took the name Pius XI. Later that same year, amid widespread viole
nce, Benito Mussolini, the thirty-nine-year-old Fascist leader, became Italy’s prime minister. Since then the two men had come to depend on each other. The dictator relied on the pope to ensure Catholic support for his regime, providing much-needed moral legitimacy. The pope counted on Mussolini to help him restore the Church’s power in Italy. Now, with pen in hand, thinking back over these years, Pius felt a deep regret. He had allowed himself to be led astray. Mussolini seemed to think he was a god himself, and he had embraced Hitler, a man the pope despised for undermining the Church in Germany and championing a pagan religion of his own. The painful scene Rome had witnessed the previous spring haunted him: a sea of red and black Nazi flags had blanketed the city, as the German Führer passed through its historic streets in triumphal procession.

  Two months after Hitler’s visit, Mussolini shocked the world by proclaiming that Italians were a pure, superior race. Although Jews had lived in Rome since before the time of Jesus, they were now officially deemed a noxious foreign people. The pope was horrified. Why, he asked in a public audience, was Italy’s leader so eager to imitate the Führer? The question enraged Mussolini, for nothing upset him more than being called Hitler’s stooge. The men of the pope’s inner circle rushed to repair the damage. More comfortable with authoritarian regimes than with democracies, and fearful of losing the many privileges that Mussolini had granted the Church, they thought the pope was getting reckless in his old age. He had already alienated the Nazi leaders; now, they worried, he was putting the Vatican’s ties to Mussolini’s Fascist regime at risk.

  At his headquarters on the other side of Rome’s Tiber River, Mussolini raged against the pope. If Italians still went to mass, it was only because he had told them to. If it weren’t for him, anticlerics would be running wild through Italy’s streets, sacking churches and forcing castor oil down the throats of cowering priests. If every classroom and courtroom had a crucifix on its wall, if priests taught religion in all of Italy’s public schools, it was because Mussolini had ordered it. If generous state funds were being used to support the Church, it was because he had willed it, all in an effort to craft a mutually beneficial understanding between his Fascist government and the Vatican.

  Pius stayed up late on the night of January 31, as he had the previous night, drafting his remarks for the gathering of bishops. The once-hearty, barrel-chested “mountaineer” pope was emaciated, his formerly full face deeply wrinkled and shrunken. But it was clear to all who saw him how determined he was to give that speech. He did not want to die before warning the bishops that Fascist spies were everywhere, including the halls of the Church. It would be his last chance to denounce Mussolini’s embrace of Nazi racism.

  In the week remaining before the speech, however, the pope’s remaining reserve of strength began to fail him. Unable to stand, he took to bed. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who as secretary of state was second-in-command at the Vatican, begged him to postpone the gathering. The pope would not hear of it and ordered the Vatican daily newspaper to report that he was in good health. On February 8, worried that he might not be strong enough to give the speech in three days’ time, he ordered the Vatican printing office to make a copy of it for each bishop. The following night his condition worsened, and in the early morning hours of February 10, his breathing became more labored. Attendants, careful not to disturb the white skullcap on his head, fastened an oxygen mask over his mouth. At four A.M. they roused Cardinal Pacelli. The cardinal rushed to the pope’s bedside, then fell to his knees to pray. His eyes reddened with tears.

  Lying on his simple iron bed, rapidly fading, Pius XI soon took his last feeble breath. God had not granted his final request. The bishops would see him next not in St. Peter’s Basilica but in the nearby Sistine Chapel where, on the afternoon of February 10, his ruined body was placed on a raised platform. To those who had known him in his prime, he was barely recognizable. It was as if someone else lay there, under Michelangelo’s frescoed ceiling, wearing the pope’s white silk cassock and red-ermine-lined cap.

  Across the Tiber, Mussolini greeted news of the pope’s death with a grunt of relief, eager that the papal wake not interfere with his next coupling with Clara Petacci, his green-eyed young mistress. But one last concern remained. Over the years, he had put in place an extensive network of spies in the Vatican and read their reports eagerly. In recent days, they had warned him that the pope planned to give an inflammatory anniversary speech denouncing Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign and his ever-tightening ties to the German Führer. If the text got out now, he worried, it might yet do damage, a prophetic papal plea from the grave.

  There was one man, thought the dictator, in a position to help. He contacted Cardinal Pacelli, who in his role as chamberlain was now in charge of everything Pius had left behind, including the handwritten pages piled on his desk and the stacks of freshly printed booklets ready for distribution to the bishops. Mussolini wanted all copies of the speech destroyed.

  He had reason to think that Pacelli would oblige him. Hailing from a prominent Roman family closely linked to popes for generations, Pacelli had for the last months lived in fear that the pope would antagonize Mussolini. Too much, he thought, was at stake. Yes, he owed a great deal to the pope who had made him secretary of state and had promoted him in so many ways. But he felt he had an even greater responsibility to protect the Church. He ordered the pope’s desk cleared, the printed copies of his speech seized.

  Three weeks later a large crowd waited impatiently in St. Peter’s Square as the cardinals met in conclave. At the appearance of the telltale ribbon of white smoke wafting from the Apostolic Palace, a cheer went up. “Habemus papam,” announced the cardinal deacon from the balcony perched above the main entrance of St. Peter’s. Soon a tall, thin, bespectacled figure, newly clothed in white papal robe and bejeweled tiara, strode out to give his blessing. Eugenio Pacelli would take the name Pius XII, honoring the man at whose bedside he had recently wept.

  PART ONE

  THE POPE AND THE DICTATOR

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  A NEW POPE

  OUTSIDE THE VATICAN GATE, A SMALL CROWD GATHERED, APPLAUDING the black sedans as they slowly made their way inside the medieval wall. In recognition or appreciation, or simply from habit, each arriving cardinal waved a hand in ecclesiastical benediction from his backseat. Standing on either side of the gate was a harlequin-clad Swiss Guard, his white-gloved hand raised to his gleaming helmet in salute. A little later, once the last cardinal had found his room in the Apostolic Palace, six officials scurried through the long, cold halls, each swinging a bell. A voice shouted “Extra omnes!” as the last of the outsiders exited. Clutching a massive antique key chain, a Chigi prince, the conclave’s ceremonial marshal, locked the heavy door from the outside. Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the chamberlain, locked it from within. The windows were sealed. It was Thursday, February 2, 1922. The doors would not open again until there was a new pope.

  ONLY TWO WEEKS EARLIER a persistent cough had begun to bother Pope Benedict XV. Although he was a small, frail man who since childhood had walked with a limp—the Vatican gossips called him the “little one”—he was not old and had enjoyed good health during his seven years on St. Peter’s throne. But what began as bronchitis quickly turned into pneumonia, and the sixty-eight-year-old Benedict took last rites. The next afternoon, lying on his simple iron bed, he lost consciousness. The following morning, January 22, he was dead.1

  Giacomo Della Chiesa had been an unusual choice when the genial but repressive Pius X died in 1914, just as the Great War began. When the fifty-two cardinals assembled in late August that year to elect a successor, Della Chiesa had been a cardinal for only three months. Born to an aristocratic but far-from-wealthy family, respected for his intelligence and good judgment, he did not look the part of a pontiff. Although dignified in bearing, and courtly in manners, he was undersized, with a sallow complexion, an impenetrable mat of black hair, and prominent teeth. Everything about him seemed sli
ghtly crooked, from his nose, mouth, and eyes to his shoulders.2

  As a young priest, Della Chiesa worked in the Vatican Secretariat of State, which deals with the Holy See’s relations with governments around the world. There he made his way through the ranks until 1913, when he was sent to Bologna to become its archbishop.

  Some believed that Della Chiesa’s departure from the Vatican was the work of Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, Pope Pius X’s secretary of state and his main partner in the crusade to stamp out any sign of “modernism” in the clergy. Pius X worried that modern ideas were replacing the Church’s centuries-old teachings. Particularly noxious, in the pope’s view, were beliefs in individual rights and religious freedom, along with the heretical notions that church and state should be separated, and that faith should come to terms with the lessons of science. Believing Della Chiesa to be too moderate, Merry del Val wanted him far from the seat of Church power.3

  On the tenth ballot, Della Chiesa reached—just barely—the two-thirds vote required. One of Merry del Val’s fellow hard-liners, Cardinal Gaetano De Lai, humiliated the new pope by demanding that his ballot be examined to ensure that he had not voted for himself.

  Pius X had died at a frightening time for Italians, but his successor’s death, in 1922, came amid even greater unrest. Many feared that revolution could erupt at any moment, although they differed on whether it was more likely to be sparked by the socialists or the fascists. The Great War, which the elite had hoped would help unify the hopelessly divided Italians and rally the population around the government, had done neither. Over half a million Italians had died, and even more had returned wounded. A demobilized army came home to find few jobs. The country’s political leaders seemed incapable of finding a way out of the crisis.