The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  The Socialists—whose numbers had been growing for decades—had hoped to ride the tide of popular anger to power. Workers occupied factories in Turin, Milan, and Genoa. Agricultural laborers struck, threatening the old rural landowner class. Only two years earlier, in 1917, a communist revolution had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia and destroyed the old tsarist order. Energized by their example, Italian protesters dreamed of a future when workers and peasants would rule.4

  But the Socialists had to face a violent threat of their own. Shortly after the war, Benito Mussolini, thirty-five years old and formerly one of the country’s most prominent Socialists, founded a new fascist movement. It drew heavily on disaffected war veterans. Fascist bands soon sprang up in cities throughout much of the country. Its first recruits came, like Mussolini, from the left and shared his hatred of the Church and the priests. But Mussolini quickly turned from vilifying priests and capitalist war profiteers to denouncing Socialists, guilty of opposing Italy’s entrance into the war. Recruits began streaming in from the extreme right.

  From their headquarters in the cities of northern and central Italy, black-shirted fascists crowded into cars and rampaged through the countryside, burning down union halls, Socialist meeting rooms, and the offices of left-wing newspapers. Mussolini had little direct control over these squadristi, who were led by local fascist bosses dubbed ras. Beginning in 1919 and with increasing frequency and size over the next three years, the bands attacked Socialist officials and activists, beating them and forcing castor oil down their throats. The squadristi took sadistic delight in using the oil, which produced not only nausea but humiliating, uncontrollable diarrhea. Panicked Socialist mayors and town councilors fled, leaving a large swath of Italy under the control of fascist thugs.5

  These “punitive expeditions” also took aim at members of Italy’s Catholic political party. The Popular Party was a new attempt by Italy’s Catholics to compete for political influence. That the Vatican looked kindly on the establishment of a Catholic party in Italy was a new development. In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II, king of the Savoyard state based in Turin in the northwest, had proclaimed a new Kingdom of Italy, having annexed much of the Italian peninsula. Among the territories he acquired by a combination of rebellion and conquest were most of the lands long ruled by the popes. Only Rome and its hinterland remained as part of the Papal States. Then in 1870 the Italian army seized Rome as well, declaring it the new nation’s capital. Pope Pius IX retreated to the Vatican, vowing not to leave its walls until the Papal States were restored.

  The pope excommunicated the king and forbade Catholics to vote in national elections or run as candidates for parliament; he was hoping to gain international support to return Rome to papal rule. But as the nineteenth century wore on, this prospect seemed ever more remote. A new threat meanwhile arose with the rapid growth of the socialist movement. Popes from the time of Pius IX, in the mid-nineteenth century, had regularly condemned socialism. In 1891, in his famous encyclical Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII had charged socialists with “working on the poor man’s envy of the rich.” He blasted their proposal to abolish private property. By the dawn of the new century, the Vatican had made clear that socialism was one of the Church’s most formidable enemies.

  With the expansion of the right to vote in Italy in the early twentieth century, the Vatican’s voting ban became untenable. Unless the Church did something, the socialists would likely come to power. In November 1918 Luigi Sturzo, a Sicilian priest, met with Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, to discuss his plans for a Catholic party, to be called the Italian Popular Party. It would offer a progressive platform intended to lure peasants and workers away from the socialists. It was formally launched early the following year with Benedict XV’s blessing. By 1922 it was among the country’s largest.6

  THE CONCLAVE THAT YEAR turned into a showdown between two factions. On one side were those cardinals dubbed the zelanti, the intransigents. They looked back nostalgically to the days of Pius X, eager to resume the Church’s crusade against the evils of modern times. On the other side, the moderates, dubbed the “politicians,” hoped to continue Benedict XV’s more middle-of-the-road and outward-looking policies. Pius X’s secretary of state, Rafael Merry del Val, led the zelanti. Pietro Gasparri, Benedict’s secretary of state, was the champion of the moderates. The conclave was shaping up as an epic battle over the direction the Catholic Church would take in the twentieth century, made all the more dramatic by the uncertainty of its outcome. It seemed doubtful that either faction could obtain the two-thirds vote required for election, and there was no obvious compromise candidate.7

  If Cardinal Gasparri was sometimes called the pecoraio, the shepherd, it was not in the pastoral sense. Sixty-nine years old at the time of the conclave, he came from a peasant family in a small sheep-raising village in the Apennine Mountains of central Italy. The nickname—which he delighted in himself—came with the Italian connotations of being a country hick, a parvenu amid the sophisticates of the Vatican hierarchy. When he was a child, his family followed its herd into the mountains each spring, returning each fall to the valley, where they sent Pietro to the local parish priest for school lessons. A bright child, he entered Church seminaries for his later education, but unlike many in the high Vatican diplomatic service, he did not attend Rome’s prestigious Pontifical Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, which traditionally drew on sons of the aristocracy.

  Gasparri grew into a short, rotund adult, a priest who seemed to move without his feet ever leaving the ground. His dress “showed an unusual indifference to neatness.” But he was popular with the diplomatic corps, making up in bonhomie what he lacked in polish. Gesticulating broadly, eyes sparkling, and laughing often, he was constantly pushing his red skullcap back into place. Gasparri saw himself—and was seen by others—as having a mountain peasant’s shrewdness, intuition, tenacity, and capacity for hard work. “His black, intelligent eyes,” one observer noted, “betrayed his finesse.”8

  On the evening of February 2, the conclave began in the Sistine Chapel; each of the fifty-three cardinals was provided with a seat at his own small table. Among those absent were the two cardinals from the United States, still on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic. The thirty-one Italians constituted a majority, and only with strong Italian support could anyone be elected. At the altar at the front of the chapel stood a large crucifix and six burning candles. Every time a vote was called, the cardinals approached the altar one at a time, in order of seniority. At the foot of the altar, each got down on his knees, spent a moment in prayer, and recited a Latin vow pledging to choose the man whom he believed God would want elected. He deposited his folded paper ballot and then bowed before the cross before returning to his seat.

  Two votes were held each morning and two in the afternoon. Three cardinals, chosen by lot, counted the ballots. Over the next days, the solemn rite was repeated fourteen times, marred only once when, as he rose from his chair, a Dominican cardinal bumped into his table, draining an ink bottle over his white cassock.9

  Twelve cardinals received votes. On the second day, Merry del Val reached what would be his high of seventeen. Gasparri received twenty-four votes by the sixth ballot but remained stuck at that number for the seventh and eighth as well. Outside the Vatican, a large crowd of Romans—both the curious and the devout—waited anxiously. “Only one thing is certain,” the French paper Le Figaro reported, “no one knows anything.”10 Cardinal Gasparri spent the night after the eighth ballot lying awake in bed, aware that he would never become pope. The following morning, before the third day of voting began, he went to see the conclave’s most junior member, Achille Ratti. He told the surprised Ratti, who had been made a cardinal only a few months earlier, that he would urge his supporters to switch their votes to him.

  RATTI WAS BORN IN 1857 in the small town of Desio, in the deeply Catholic Brianza region just north of Milan, where his father managed a silk factory. His mother, a devout Catholic,
was the kind of organized and intimidating woman who seemed born to run something much bigger than a household. In later years Ratti often spoke of her with deep affection and respect, but he never talked about his father. At the time of his birth, Desio and Milan were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ratti’s earliest memory was of his father telling him at age two that French and Savoyard forces were battling the Austrian army nearby.11 Within weeks the patchwork of duchies and kingdoms that had long composed the Italian peninsula dissolved, and a new unified Italian nation took shape.

  There being no school in Desio, at age ten Achille was sent to live with his uncle, a parish priest in the tiny town of Asso, near Lake Como. The frequent presence of neighboring priests, a gregarious lot, warmed his uncle’s household. Achille decided that he too wanted to be a priest and soon went off to a seminary. He returned each summer, not to his parents but to his uncle. The seminary enforced a ferocious discipline. Priests were to be obeyed without question, and rules were to be followed to the letter. None of this bothered the studious boy.12 His classmates called him “the little old man,” for Achille would rather be left alone to his meditations than play with the other children.13

  In 1875 Ratti entered Milan’s seminary to prepare for the priesthood. He read voraciously, not only the Italian classics such as Dante, but also English and American literature. He expressed such concern for the challenges faced by Mark Twain’s Jim, Huckleberry Finn’s enslaved sidekick, that his classmates dubbed him l’africano. Although the nickname would not stick, Achille pronounced himself pleased with it, telling his classmates he would one day serve as a missionary in Africa. Ratti’s favorite author was the great Milanese writer Alessandro Manzoni. One day many years later, when he was pope, his master of ceremonies entered his study and, as was the custom, got on his knees to await instructions. The pope was pacing the room, absorbed in reading aloud a passage from Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed. Twenty minutes passed before he stopped and took note of the kneeling cleric. The pope apologized for the delay but added with a smile: “These are pages that are worth listening to on one’s knees, Monsignor!”14

  After four years in Milan, Ratti moved to Rome to continue his studies at the recently opened Lombard College. Rome had been ruled by popes for over a millennium, but nine years earlier it had been conquered and was now the capital of the newly unified Italian nation.

  Five foot eight, barrel-chested, with thinning blond hair, Ratti was already wearing the round spectacles that would become his trademark, giving him the appearance of a young scholar. Ordained at Rome’s massive St. John in Lateran Basilica in December 1879, he stayed in the Eternal City for another three years, studying at the Gregorian University, where the Jesuit faculty lectured in Latin.

  By 1882 Ratti was back in Milan, soon to be appointed professor of sacred eloquence and theology at the city’s Grand Seminary. Despite his title, he was not terribly eloquent. He was so intent on being perfectly clear that he spoke at a painfully slow pace, struggling to find the right words, then constantly correcting himself when he thought what he had said wasn’t quite right.15 Never gregarious, Ratti was in some ways more comfortable around books than people. After six years as professor, he became an assistant at Milan’s Ambrosiana Library, whose unparalleled collections of old manuscripts include such treasures as Leonardo da Vinci’s Codice atlantico. He knew not only Latin but also Greek, French, and German.

  But Ratti was not simply a bookworm. As a young man in Milan, he developed a passion for mountain climbing and joined the local chapter of the Italian Alpine Club. Each winter, along with his climbing companion, a fellow priest, he would study all the material he could find on approaches to the mountains they would scale the next summer. Success, he was convinced, was all a matter of careful planning. From 1885 to 1911 he went on a hundred Alpine climbs, each over eight thousand feet.16 The shock of the cold air, the power of the Alpine cliffs, and the landscape stretching below all showed him the glory of God’s creation.17

  WHEN THE PREFECT of the Ambrosiana Library died in 1907, the fifty-year-old Ratti took his place. Four years later the head of the Vatican Library decided it was time to find a successor. As director of a library that was second in reputation only to the Vatican’s own, Achille Ratti was hardly a surprising choice. Milan’s newspaper announced news of the appointment accompanied by a photograph. It showed a balding prelate, but Ratti’s most memorable physical trait remained his little round glasses. Along with his serious—some would say melancholy—demeanor, they gave him the look of a dour Church intellectual. But he took a paternal interest in the library staff. To help them feed their families during the Great War, he got permission from Benedict XV to turn the Vatican Library courtyard into a vegetable garden for their use. When one of them got sick, he would personally deliver a gift of sweets or a bottle of good wine.18

  Had Ratti remained as Vatican librarian, as he assumed he would, he would never have been in a position to become pope in 1922. But in March 1918 he received a surprising request: Benedict XV wanted him to go immediately to Warsaw as his personal emissary. It is still not clear how the pope came to choose him for the delicate assignment. He had no experience in diplomacy and no special knowledge of Poland, although strangely, when his nomination was discussed by the cardinals of the Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, they mistakenly thought he spoke Polish.19 At sixty-one, Ratti was nervous about his new assignment, but he obediently set off in May. He had been led to believe he would be away only a few months, charged with preparing a report for the pope on the Polish situation.

  The carnage of the Great War had barely ended when Ratti arrived in Warsaw. The Poles were preparing for the rebirth of their independent nation, most of which had been under Russian rule for a century, the rest under German or Austrian control. Ratti’s task was delicate, for the borders of the new Polish state were not yet set, and tensions were great.

  As he traveled around the country, one of the sentiments the Vatican librarian most often heard from the clergy was their hatred of the Jews, seen as enemies of Catholic Poland. While Italy’s Jewish population was tiny, just one in a thousand, in Poland a tenth of the population was Jewish. A decade earlier Ratti had taken Hebrew lessons from the chief rabbi of Milan, and the city’s largely assimilated Jewish population had not caused him any concern.20 But while his own relations with Milan’s small Jewish community had been cordial, he was aware that the Vatican had a much darker view of the Jews.

  The history of Church demonization of the Jews is an old one, going back to shortly after Christianity’s origins as a Jewish sect. In 1555 Pope Paul IV issued a papal bull, Cum nimis absurdum, ordering all Jews in the lands under his control to live in ghettoes. The Jews’ contacts with Christians were to be severely limited, and they would be confined to the most menial occupations. The Jews, the pope argued, had been condemned by God to “eternal slavery,” for their sin of murdering Jesus and refusing his teachings. Only in 1870, with the Italian conquest of Rome, were Jews fully liberated from the city’s ghetto.21

  In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, La Civiltà cattolica, the twice-a-month Jesuit journal closely overseen by the Vatican, had attacked the Jews mercilessly. The journal was read not by the Catholic masses, for it was pitched well above their heads; rather it offered Catholic opinion leaders, newspaper editors, and upper-echelon clergy a window into the Vatican’s perspective on the issues of the day. A man in Achille Ratti’s position at the Ambrosiana Library would have read each issue as it appeared.

  “The Jews,” one of scores of such denunciations in the journal warned, “eternal insolent children, obstinate, dirty, thieves, liars, ignoramuses, pests and the scourge of those near and far … managed to lay their hands on … all public wealth … and virtually alone they took control not only of all the money … but of the law itself in those countries where they have been allowed to hold public offices.” The Church had long taught, the Vatican-supervised journ
al insisted, that Jews should be kept separate from Christians, or they would reduce Christians to their slaves: “Oh how wrong and deluded are those who think that Judaism is just a religion … and not in fact a race, a people, and a nation!” As a noxious foreign body, the journal charged, Jews could never be loyal to the country in which they lived, as they schemed to exploit the generosity of those who foolishly accorded them equal rights.22 It was a campaign that the journal would take up again within months of Ratti’s election as pope, in a series of articles blaming the Jews for the Russian revolution and sounding the alarm against a vast Jewish conspiracy aimed at ruling the world.23

  Steeped in a Church in which such views of Jews were deeply engrained, Ratti could not help being affected by the deep anti-Semitism he encountered in Poland. The various written reports he received from members of the Polish Catholic elite told him how preoccupied they were with the Jewish threat. Jews were accused of having sided with the German invaders in the recent war and of serving as rapacious moneylenders in towns and villages throughout the country. Ratti was especially struck by their charge that the spreading Bolshevik movement was the work of the Jews.24 In October 1918 he attributed the latest unrest in Poland to “the extremist parties bent on disorder: the socialist-anarchists, the Bolsheviks … and the Jews.”25 A wave of pogroms in Poland led to the murder of many Jews and the torching of their homes. Asked by Benedict XV—less sympathetic to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories than his predecessors—to verify whether the stories of these pogroms were true, Ratti responded that it was difficult to tell. But he insisted that the Jews were a dangerous element: although the people of Poland were good and loyal Catholics, he feared “that they may fall into the clutches of the evil influences that are laying a trap for them and threatening them.” Ratti left no doubt as to who these enemies were, adding: “One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews.”26