The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  In the fall of 1919 the Vatican officially recognized the new Polish state. Ratti’s mission was extended, and he was appointed papal nuncio. The following summer the Red Army, after a series of battles with Polish forces in the Baltic and in Ukraine, advanced into Poland and approached Warsaw itself. Men, women, and children armed themselves, ready to defend their city. While many foreigners fled, Ratti stood his ground. On August 15, as the armed inhabitants waited nervously, a Polish counteroffensive drove off the Bolshevik troops. For Ratti, the experience was traumatic. The conviction that the Western democracies failed to understand the Communist threat would stay with him the rest of his life.27

  In 1921 Benedict XV recalled Ratti to Italy, naming him archbishop of Milan. Having little pastoral experience, a librarian most of his life, Ratti was a surprising choice, but Benedict had been impressed by his competence, his devotion to the Church, and his selflessness.28 The fact that Ratti had lived most of his life in Milan undoubtedly played a role. With the appointment came the cardinal’s hat that was traditionally due to the head of Italy’s largest and wealthiest archdiocese.29

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CONCLAVE, when the zelanti realized that neither Merry del Val nor any other of their candidates would prevail, they too decided to meet secretly with Achille Ratti. They seem to have thought that, as someone not identified with either of the two factions, he could be a successful compromise candidate. They also thought they could more easily influence someone with so little experience in the Church hierarchy, especially if he were to attribute his election to their support. Cardinal De Lai, head of the Vatican congregation in charge of choosing bishops, approached Ratti with an offer, speaking on behalf of the dozen cardinals in his group.

  “We will vote for Your Eminence,” De Lai told him, “if Your Eminence will promise that you will not choose Cardinal Gasparri as your secretary of state.”

  Achille Ratti, archbishop of Milan, 1921

  (photograph credit 1.1)

  “I hope and pray,” responded Ratti, “that among so many highly deserving cardinals the Holy Spirit selects someone else.” But, he added, “if I am chosen, it is indeed Cardinal Gasparri whom I will take to be my secretary of state.”30 Whether Ratti had already promised as much to Gasparri is not clear, although it seems likely. Inexperienced in Vatican affairs, he may in any case have wanted to have the experienced diplomat alongside him. Or he may have been savvier than they thought and recognized the value of a secretary of state who would help shield him from the demands of the zelanti.

  “Your Eminence would be making a serious mistake,” Cardinal De Lai warned.

  “I am afraid that it would likely not be the only mistake I would make should I sit on Saint Peter’s throne, but it certainly would be the first.”

  By the twelfth ballot, the last on the third day of voting, twenty-seven cardinals gave their support to Milan’s archbishop.31 Early the next day the cardinals again assembled in the Sistine Chapel. At ten A.M. they began depositing their thirteenth ballot, which was again inconclusive. It was on their next vote that Achille Ratti passed the two-thirds mark.

  Fifty-two cardinals formed concentric circles around the stunned cardinal as he sat straight in his chair, head tilted down as if his shoulders bore a new weight. The cardinal deacon asked the obligatory question in a voice that even the most hard-of-hearing could make out: “Do you accept the election that selects you canonically to be the supreme pontiff?” Ratti did not respond immediately, and some of the cardinals grew nervous. After a full two minutes, he raised his head and replied in Latin. His voice trembled with emotion. “While deeply aware of my unworthiness,” he began. The cardinals knew that they had a new pope.32

  As all this was going on, a train from Naples pulled into Rome’s station on the other side of the Tiber. Out stepped the two American cardinals, William O’Connell of Boston and Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia. Having made the long ocean crossing aboard the Woodrow Wilson, then rushed from Naples to Rome, the men were unhappy to discover they had arrived too late. O’Connell had special reason to be displeased, as he owed his career in good part to the patronage of Cardinal Merry del Val. Had he been there to give him his support and that of Dougherty, perhaps things might have gone differently. Even more infuriating was the fact that the same thing had happened when Pius X had died seven and a half years earlier: no provision had been made to allow time for the Americans to get to Rome. Then too O’Connell had gotten to Rome only after the new pope had been elected.33

  From the Sistine Chapel, Ratti was escorted to the nearby sacristy, where for the first time he put on the white papal robes. Three gowns had been readied, prepared for any eventuality, one small, one medium, and one large. The middle size fit him perfectly. He wore a white cassock, white silk stockings, and red silk slippers along with a red velvet cape, its border lined with ermine. On his head, over a white skullcap, he wore a red camauro, a papal cap with white ermine trim, pulled down to his ears. As he returned to the Sistine Chapel and walked to the throne placed in front of the altar, the cardinals got down on their knees. Each then approached him, in turn, kissing his foot and asking for his blessing. The man who had delighted in trekking through the mountains would now—if he followed the practice of his four predecessors—never leave the claustrophobic confines of the Vatican palaces.34

  The world had been looking on eagerly to see who would emerge from the conclave. Italians, whose 40 million people were 99 percent Catholic, showed the most interest, but the 260 million Roman Catholics outside Italy eagerly awaited word as well.35

  Crowds had been waiting in St. Peter’s Square since the conclave began, their eyes drawn to the chimney, where the smoke produced by the burning of the paper ballots following each round would tell them when a pope had been elected.36 Thirteen times over four days black smoke had belched from the chimney, but near noon on the fourth day, as the damp crowd stood under rainy skies, arms began pointing to the ribbon of white smoke wafting from the Apostolic Palace. Forty-five minutes later a cardinal emerged on the central balcony of St. Peter’s church, facing the square, and slowly raised his right arm. “Habemus papam … we have a pope.” Achille Ratti had chosen the name Pius XI, explaining that Pius IX had been the pope of his youth and Pius X had called him to Rome to head the Vatican Library.37 The man who until a few years earlier had presided over a small staff of librarians was now responsible for the world’s 300 million Catholics.

  The cheering throngs began pushing toward the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica. Ever since 1870, when Italian troops had seized Rome and the popes had proclaimed themselves “prisoners of the Vatican,” no pope would show his face outside, even from one of the windows facing St. Peter’s Square. Each of the three popes chosen since Pius IX’s death had blessed the faithful inside the basilica.

  Something surprising caught people’s eye. Members of the noble papal guard appeared on the balcony just above the central massive door of St. Peter’s, facing the square, and hung from its rail a red tapestry bearing the papal coat of arms. As the white-robed pontiff emerged onto the balcony to bless them, a hush spread through the vast piazza, and people fell to their knees. No one would forget the sight of Italian soldiers, stationed in the piazza to keep order, presenting their arms alongside the papal Swiss Guard. Together they saluted the new pope.38 It was a rare moment of peace in a city in the grip of growing panic. Violence and chaos were spreading through the country, and the government was paralyzed. Before the year was out, the new pope would find himself facing a decision of enormous importance.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  THE MARCH ON ROME

  PREDAPPIO, THE SMALL TOWN IN ROMAGNA WHERE BENITO MUSSOLINI was born, is no more than two hundred miles from Achille Ratti’s birthplace in Lombardy, yet their childhood experiences could hardly have been more different. It was not so much the Rattis’ greater wealth but the difference between a conservative, religious family and one immersed in the insurrectionary enthusiasms of R
omagna. The Rattis’ heroes were saints and popes; the Mussolinis’ were rabble-rousers and revolutionaries.

  Achille Ratti was already a twenty-six-year-old priest when Mussolini was born in 1883. Romagna was then the epicenter of Italy’s anarchist and socialist movements, and Benito’s father, Alessandro, a bigmouthed blacksmith, eagerly preached his revolutionary faith to any who would listen. He named his son after Benito Juárez, an impoverished Indian who became Mexico’s president, scourge of Europe’s colonial powers, and enemy of the Church. He named Benito’s younger brother, Arnaldo, after Arnaldo of Brescia, a priest who had led an uprising that drove the pope from Rome in 1146 and was later hanged. The boys’ long-suffering mother, Rosa, did not share her husband’s revolutionary ardor. A regular churchgoer, she taught in the local elementary school. Each night, as her children lay sleeping, she made the sign of the cross over their heads.1

  The family lived in a third-floor, two-room apartment. Benito and Arnaldo slept in the kitchen atop a big sack of corn husks on an iron bed their father had forged. Their parents shared the other room with their sister, Edvige. To enter the apartment, they had to walk through their mother’s schoolroom, which occupied the rest of the floor.

  Alessandro and Rosa had a stormy marriage. Not only did Alessandro have lovers, but he often returned drunk at night from local pubs and picked fights with his wife. Somehow she won one argument, and they sent Benito, age ten, to board at a nearby school run by Salesian monks. He did not last long. During a squabble with a classmate, he pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed the boy in the hand. The Salesians expelled him. Benito continued his roughhouse ways, but, a bright boy, he somehow made it through secondary school. He began work as a substitute schoolteacher in 1901, losing one of his first jobs when his affair with a married woman came to light.

  Unable to find a new post, Benito headed for Switzerland in search of work. There he joined the local world of socialists and anarchists, drawn by their excited talk of revolution. Swiss police soon produced a report on him, leaving us a description of him as a young man: five and a half feet tall, stocky, with brown hair and beard, he had a long, pale face, dark eyes, an aquiline nose, and a large mouth.2

  In Lausanne in 1904, Mussolini agreed to debate a local Protestant pastor on the existence of God. After trying to impress his audience with citations ranging from Galileo to Robespierre, he climbed onto a table, took out a pocket watch, and bellowed that if there really was a God, He should strike him dead in the next five minutes. Benito’s first publication, titled “God Does Not Exist,” came the same year. He kept up his attacks on the Church, branding priests “black microbes, as disastrous to humanity as tuberculosis microbes.”3

  Mussolini’s passion was for polemics and politics, and he would soon devote himself full time to both. By 1910 he was back in Forlì, near his family home in Romagna, editor of the local socialist weekly and secretary of the town’s Socialist Party. That same year he tried his hand at fiction, publishing a steamy novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress.4

  In these first years of his political career, Mussolini cut a striking figure, part left-wing wild man and part Don Juan. Sporting a mustache that he would keep for the next decade, he always seemed to know how to become the center of attention. A transgressive roughhouser, more than a little bit of a provocateur, he was someone you would rather have on your side than against you. One of his most memorable traits was already on display: his steely stare. At once both intimidating and mesmerizing, Mussolini’s gaze transfixed his listeners. His eyes seemed to bulge out. In 1910 a local union organizer described the experience: “He looked me over with one of those raisings of the eyebrows that reveals all the white of the eye, as if he wanted to take in some distant fleeting sight, giving his eyes and his face the pensive look of an apostle.”5

  In 1912, while still in his twenties, Mussolini was named to one of the Socialist Party’s most influential posts, editor of the national party newspaper, Avanti!, based in Milan. He moved from the modest provincial outpost of Forlì to Italy’s bustling financial and cultural capital.

  As editor of Avanti!, Mussolini took aim at the Socialist Party’s reform faction. Only revolutionary action, not parliamentary politics, he insisted, would bring about a new order. In 1913, when police south of Rome killed seven farmworkers during a protest, he called for revenge: “Death to those who massacre the people! Long live the Revolution!” he told a rally in Milan. In his newspaper he wrote, “Ours is a war cry. Those who massacre know that they can be, in their turn, massacred.”6

  When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Socialists denounced it as the work of warmongering imperialists and capitalists happy to use the proletariat as their cannon fodder. The workers of the world were to unite, not to butcher one another in the name of God or country. But to his comrades’ surprise, two months after the war began, Mussolini published an article questioning the wisdom of Italian neutrality. Pacifism was not in his character, and he chafed at the thought of Italy standing by and simply watching as the rest of Europe waged war. Whether he thought he could persuade his fellow Socialists to follow his lead is unclear. If he did, he soon found out how mistaken he was: within a month he was not only forced out of Avanti! but expelled from the party.

  Over the next years, in what his erstwhile comrades considered an inexplicable and traitorous transformation, the Socialist leader became the Socialists’ worst enemy. He kept the revolutionary’s disdain for parliamentary democracy and fascination with the possibilities of violent action. But he jettisoned much of the rest of Marxist ideology. The chaos surrounding the end of the Great War, he realized, had created a void, and he meant to fill it. He had always been committed, above all, to himself and to a belief in his own ability to rise to the top. Now he began to see a new path that could allow him to realize those dreams.

  Four years earlier, in 1910, Mussolini had had a child, Edda, with his hometown lover, Rachele Guidi, who would later become his wife. They lived at the time in a two-room, literally flea-ridden apartment in Forlì. Such, however, was Benito’s love life that for decades rumors spread that Edda’s mother was not Rachele. Edda would later write with some irritation of the widespread gossip that her mother was really Angelica Balabanoff, a Russian Jewish socialist (and later secretary of the Third Communist International) who had settled in Italy and become one of Mussolini’s more significant lovers and political mentors. “Knowing my mother,” wrote Edda in her memoirs, “I know very well that she wouldn’t have kept me for five minutes if I had been Balabanoff’s daughter.”7

  Born to a poor peasant family, Rachele first met Benito when she was seven and he was substituting for his mother in the local elementary school. Rachele was not much of a student, and in any case her father died when she was only eight and she was sent to work as a maid in Forlì. Although she would later grow rather matronly, as a youth she was attractive, blond, short, slender, and blue-eyed.

  Rachele thought Edda was Benito’s first child. But a few months before Edda’s birth, a coffeehouse waitress gave birth to a boy she named Benito. This little Benito died at a young age, but there would be other illegitimate children, including at least one other Benito.8 One might be forgiven for wondering how Mussolini had any time for his journalistic and political career as he juggled several love affairs. His women could hardly have been more different. In 1913 he had a baby with another Russian Jew whom he had met a few years earlier, although he never recognized the child.9 That same year he became enchanted by the unlikely Leda Rafanelli, thirty-two years old and one of the better-known anarchist authors in Milan, distinctive for having embraced Islam some years earlier after spending a few months in Egypt. Benito began sneaking from his office to pay visits to Rafanelli’s incense-filled apartment, where guests sat on the floor. Their tryst lasted until the fall of 1914. Many decades later, as an old woman, Rafanelli published forty letters that the young Mussolini had written to her in those torrid months.10

  In November
1915 a second Benito was born, this to another of Mussolini’s lovers, Ida Dalser, a woman who worshipped him. Perhaps in an attempt to ward off Dalser’s increasingly insistent claims that she was his true wife, Mussolini married Rachele. The hurried civil ceremony took place a month after Benito’s birth, despite the fact that Mussolini was a patient in a typhoid ward at the time. When he failed to answer her letters, Dalser got a court order to have his furniture seized. In a spiteful rage, she gathered up his modest collection of tables and chairs in her hotel room and set it all ablaze.11

  Back in November 1914, fresh from his ejection as editor of Avanti!, Mussolini announced he was starting his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The Italian People).12 Begun with support from Italian industrialists who would benefit from Italy’s entrance into the war, it would remain his paper for the next three decades.13

  Around the same time he started his newspaper, he organized the Fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria, revolutionary cells or, as he would describe them, “a free association of subversives,” who supported Italy’s entrance into the war and called for an end to the monarchy.14 They held their first meeting in January 1915, four months before Italy entered the war on the side of Britain and France. Soon Mussolini was drafted and sent to the front in the mountains of northeastern Italy. On February 23, 1917, his military service was cut short when a mortar he was trying to fire exploded in its tube, killing five of his own soldiers and puncturing his body with shrapnel. Despite surgery, or perhaps because of it, infection set in and a fever raged. But he survived and returned to Milan, where his most important lover and political confidante awaited him.