Although the Church no longer ran the city, Rome still seemed to have a church on every block. Priests in their black cassocks, nuns in their habits, tonsure-headed Dominicans in their white robes, maroon-gowned Franciscans, Greek Catholic seminarians in their blue cassocks and red sashes, and a kaleidoscope of other monks and seminarians clogged the city’s roads. Carabinieri in their Napoleonic hats and red-striped trousers mixed with an assortment of soldiers and municipal police. Wet nurses, to whom the middle classes entrusted their infants, did their best to make their way through the crowded streets with their little wards.
While many Romans were impressed with all that was new—not least the electric tram, whose tracks crisscrossed the cobblestone streets, and the ever-growing number of automobiles on the impossibly narrow, winding, bumpy roads—signs abounded of a country that was still largely composed of semiliterate peasants. Horse-drawn wine carts descended from the countryside to deliver goods to the city’s many osterie. Signs outside the fancier of these eateries promised vini scelti and ottima cucina. Alongside them, more modest shops simply advertised pane e pasta. Small produce shops, a riot of colors thanks to their stocks of fruits and vegetables, lined the roads, the tiny premises serving as the shopkeeper’s living quarters as well. In early spring, small grapelike tomatoes arrived from the south. Greengrocers artfully arranged carrots, turnips, and broccoli around their doors. Romans also shopped at the small markets that sprang up each morning in the city’s little piazzas. There grocers constructed impressive pyramids of oranges, apples, and white figs. Pasta vendors piled up mounds of freshly made macaroni and spaghetti. Plucked chickens hung by their feet from stall awnings. Gleaming, tightly packed rows of fish attracted those who could afford it.
The larger outdoor markets, their stalls protected from sun and rain by broad umbrellas, attracted a wide range of customers. Princes’ fur-coated majordomos jostled alongside poor women in knitted peasant shawls. After haggling over price, women placed their modest purchases in large checkered handkerchiefs. Flower vendors balanced huge baskets brimming with daffodils, mimosa, carnations, and violets on their heads. Other hawkers sang the praises of their motley mix of clothes, folding knives, and onions, their wares swung over their shoulders or carried on trays hung from their necks.
Occasionally a distinctive, well-dressed figure could be seen sitting at a table in the middle of a small piazza. On benches arranged around him, his patrons—mainly old men and women—sat awaiting their turn. On his table lay an inkwell, some sheets of paper, and a blotting pad. He penned letters and filled out forms for the illiterate. Priests knew which streets had shops that sold clerical garb. Seminarians knew where to find secondhand bookstalls. Tourists consulted their guidebooks to locate the stalls that sold antiques and jewelry, not all of it fake. Old women stopped occasionally at a modest streetside shrine, saying a prayer to the fading image of the Madonna and Christ child that graced the stucco wall.
Mules and donkeys carried bricks and barrels, scarlet tassels hanging from their harnesses and scarlet cloths on their backs. Laundry hung from clotheslines that stretched across the narrow streets. Cobblers pounded their shoes, and stonecutters chipped their stones in tiny, dark shops. Women shouted down from their windows to bargain with peddlers on the street below. They put their payment in a basket and lowered it down by rope. The vendor replaced the coins with goods for the return trip. When the scorching sunlight gave way to clouds and rain, Rome burst out in umbrellas, from the tattered green ones of the scavengers to the shiny black ones that liveried servants held over the heads of the city’s elite. Other than the automobiles, which had no need of them, practically every vehicle sprouted an umbrella as well. “There are few more grotesque silhouettes in Rome,” wrote one observer earlier in the century, “than her cabmen, with their weary, ewe-necked horses and their ramshackle open victorias, shrinking under umbrellas which look like old mushrooms.”14
The pope got to see none of this, for he refused to venture beyond the Vatican walls. For decades, every pope had suffered the ignominy of living on a tiny plot of land surrounded by the very state that had seized the Church’s territories and drastically reduced its political power. The neighborhood outside, squeezed into the land between the Vatican palaces and the Tiber, retained something of the scent, sound, and feel of the old regime, a shabby, overpopulated jumble of small streets and alleys. Only when visitors made their way west through the narrow streets, filled with vendors of sacred memorabilia, did the magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica and Bernini’s colonnade suddenly appear.15
THE POPE’S DECISION TO consider supporting Mussolini surprised many in the Church. None was more embarrassed than Father Enrico Rosa, editor of La Civiltà cattolica, who up to the time Mussolini came to power had used the journal’s pages to denounce Fascism as one of the Church’s worst enemies. Days before the March on Rome, Rosa had warned that the Fascist movement was “violent and anti-Christian, headed by sinister men … the failed effort of the old liberalism, of Masons, rural landowners, rich industrialists, journalists, tinhorn politicians and the like.”16
La Civiltà cattolica had been founded in 1850, shortly after Pope Pius IX returned to Rome following the 1848 uprising that had driven him into exile. Twice a month the editor took the proofs of the upcoming issue to the Vatican secretary of state office for approval before publication.17
The fifty-two-year-old Rosa had joined the Jesuit editorial collective seventeen years earlier and been appointed its head by Pope Benedict XV in 1915. Despite his experience, he had somehow missed the signs of the pope’s change of course. Reading Rosa’s latest anti-Fascist tirade, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, a man for whom Fascism would prove particularly congenial, was furious. He instructed Rosa to change his tune.18 Even worse, Rosa learned that Pius XI too had had a change of heart. The pope had seen something in Mussolini he liked. Despite all their differences, the two men shared some important values. Neither had any sympathy for parliamentary democracy. Neither believed in freedom of speech or freedom of association. Both saw Communism as a grave threat.19 Both thought Italy was mired in crisis and that the current political system was beyond salvation.
A conversation the pope had with Father Agostino Gemelli—recent founder of the Catholic University of Milan and a man close to the pontiff—offers a glimpse of Pius XI’s attitude toward Mussolini in the first weeks of the new government. “Praise, no,” the pope told him. But “openly organizing opposition is not a good idea, for we have many interests to protect.” Caution was needed. “Eyes open!” he advised.20
The pope instructed Rosa to throw out the critical piece on Fascism that he had drafted for the upcoming issue of his journal and publish a friendlier editorial in its place.21 “When a form of government is legitimately constituted,” Rosa now wrote, “even though it may initially have been defective or even questionable in various ways … it is one’s duty to support it, for public order or the common good requires it. Nor is it permitted to either individuals or to parties to plot to defeat it or supplant it or change it with unjust means.”22
While La Civiltà cattolica would continue to denounce episodes of Fascist violence aimed at Catholic organizations, it would never again denounce Mussolini or Fascism. Quite the opposite: the journal would work on the Vatican’s behalf to legitimate Fascism in the eyes of all good Catholics, in Italy and beyond.23
––
THE POPE’S NEWFOUND HOPES for Mussolini got a further lift when the prime minister concluded his first address to parliament by asking for God’s help; no Italian government head since the founding of modern Italy had ever let the word God out of his mouth. Secretary of State Gasparri also saw grounds for hope. “Providence makes use of strange instruments to bring good fortune to Italy,” he told the Belgian ambassador: Mussolini was not only a “remarkable organizer” but a “great character.” Admittedly, the new prime minister knew nothing of religion, Gasparri added with a chuckle: Mussolini thought
all Catholic holidays fell on Sundays.24
Pius XI set out the goals for his papacy in his first encyclical, Ubi arcano, in December 1922.25 He lamented attempts to take Jesus Christ out of the schools and out of the halls of government. He bewailed women’s lack of propriety in “the increasing immodesty of their dress and conversation and by their participation in shameful dances.” The notion that, in turning away from the Church, society was advancing, he warned, was mistaken: “In the face of our much praised progress, we behold with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.” He stressed the importance of obedience to proper authority and took up Pius X’s program of battling “modernism.” He belittled the new League of Nations, on which so many in Europe were pinning their hopes for peace: “No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity.” The pope’s plan was to bring about the Kingdom of Christ on earth. At heart, it was a medieval vision.26
Mussolini was meanwhile sketching out his own authoritarian plan. “I affirm that the revolution has its rights,” he said in his opening speech to parliament. “I am here to defend the blackshirts’ revolution and to empower it to the maximum degree.… With three hundred thousand armed young men throughout the country, ready for anything and almost mystically ready to carry out my orders, I could have punished all those who have defamed and tried to sully the name of Fascism.”27
In late December, Mussolini convened the first meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism, which was responsible for addressing the most important issues of government policy and party organization. The following month the council approved the transformation of the sundry Fascist militias into the Voluntary Militia for National Security. These units had previously been the creatures of the local Fascist bosses; now Mussolini was eager to wrest control from them. Unlike the regular military, which swore allegiance to the king, members of the militia swore allegiance to Mussolini.28
He moved quickly to make good on his promises to the Vatican, eager to show that he could do what the Popular Party had been incapable of doing. He would restore the privileges that the Church enjoyed before Italian unification. He ordered crucifixes to be placed on the wall of every classroom in the country, then in all courtrooms and hospital rooms. He made it a crime to insult a priest or to speak disparagingly of the Catholic religion. He restored Catholic chaplains to military units; he offered priests and bishops more generous state allowances; and to the special delight of the Vatican, he required that the Catholic religion be taught in the elementary schools. He showered the Church with money, including three million lire to restore churches damaged during the war and subsidies for Church-run Italian schools abroad. In cities and towns throughout the country, in the course of Mussolini’s many triumphal visits, bishops and local parish priests were encouraged to approach him to ask for funds for church repair. To further burnish his Catholic credentials, later in 1923 he had his wife Rachele and their three children—Edda and two sons, Vittorio and Bruno—baptized. Rachele, more principled in her anticlerical faith than her husband, went only reluctantly. Raised in the heart of red rural Romagna, she had learned early to despise priests and the wealth and power of the Church.29
Because many Italians and foreign observers were uncertain what to make of Italy’s new leader and his violent Fascist movement, Vatican approval played a major role in legitimizing the new regime. In widely quoted remarks, Cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli, dean of the College of Cardinals, praised Mussolini as the man “already acclaimed by all Italy as the rebuilder of the fate of the nation according to its religious and civil traditions.”30
Mussolini was eager to cement his growing bond with the Vatican by meeting with its secretary of state, Cardinal Gasparri. Like him, Gasparri came from a humble background. “I was born May 5, 1852 in Capovallazza, one of the hamlets that form the Town of Ussita,” Gasparri recalled in his typed memoir, “in the middle of the Sibillini mountains, about 750 meters above sea level. Clean air, enchanting view, healthy, hard-working, honest people, with large families, and the Gasparri families were most prolific of all.” His parents had had ten children, of whom he, the last, was naturally the favorite. While his nine siblings were “especially robust and lively,” he reflected, “I was frail, rather sickly, so that some predicted, and perhaps augured, that my life would be short, much to Mamma’s displeasure.” While his father spent many nights sleeping with the sheep in the pastures, little Pietro provided the family entertainment. As they huddled by the warmth of the fireplace, he read them stories of the saints. They all cried together as he recounted the terrible trials faced by the Church’s martyrs. “Mother had the gift of tears, transmitted to all the children, especially to me.”31
Gasparri’s rendezvous with Mussolini had to be arranged with great care, for the Vatican secretary of state could not be seen meeting with the government’s head—the Holy See still did not recognize Italy’s legitimacy. The secret meeting was arranged by Gasparri’s old friend Carlo Santucci. Part of an aristocratic family close to the popes, he had been one of the first members of the Popular Party to break off to support the Fascists. His home had a valuable feature: it was in a corner building that had entrances on two different streets.
On January 19 Mussolini arrived in a car with his chief of staff, who would wait outside the building while the prime minister went in. Mussolini entered through one door, where he was greeted by Santucci’s father; the cardinal entered through the other, where Santucci’s mother welcomed him.
Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Vatican secretary of state, 1914–30
(photograph credit 3.3)
The key issue on Cardinal Gasparri’s mind that day was not whether the Vatican would be willing to help end Italy’s democracy, for the Vatican had no particular fondness for democratic government. Rather, the question was whether Mussolini could be trusted to honor his promise to restore the Church’s influence in Italy and how likely it was that, with Church support, he could succeed.32
For Mussolini, the former mangiaprete, or priest-eater, as he had been known in his earlier years, the stakes were high. If he could be the man to restore harmony between church and state, if he could win the pope’s blessing for his government and bring the conflict between them to an end, he would succeed where his predecessors had all failed. He would be a hero throughout the Catholic world.
For an hour and a half, the two men met alone. When Gasparri left, he paused to tell Santucci how pleased he was with the meeting, calling Mussolini “a man of the first order.” Mussolini rushed out the other door without saying a word. In the car, his chief of staff was eager to hear what had happened. “We must be extremely careful,” Mussolini told him, “for these most eminent men are very shrewd. Before entering very far into even preliminary discussions, they want to be sure our government is stable.”33
The two men did make one decision that day: they agreed on a confidential go-between, a person whom both the pope and Mussolini would trust to convey their messages on the most sensitive matters.
It is not entirely clear how the sixty-one-year old Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi came to be the choice.34 He was born in 1861 to a prosperous family in central Italy; his father, a lawyer, proudly kept the rifle he had used in 1849 in helping defeat Garibaldi’s forces and retake Rome for the pope. Pietro went at an early age to study for the priesthood in Rome, then newly annexed to the Italian kingdom. In 1896 he began writing the official history of the Jesuit order and spent much of the next two decades in research that took him to libraries, archives, and monasteries across Europe. He published the first volume in 1910. During the Great War, Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the Jesuit superior general, a Pole from the Austrian Empire, was forced out of Italy as an enemy alien. Tacchi Venturi, who had been appointed secretary general of the order in 1914, was left in charge of the Jesuits’ activi
ties in Rome.35
“Lean and severe,” as one of Tacchi Venturi’s colleagues described his appearance, he looked the part of the austere Jesuit. His baldness produced the effect of an oval face; his pointed ears set off against the fringe of gray hair on the back of his head. Clad in black clerical gown and white collar, he exuded seriousness and intensity.36
Achille Ratti first met the Jesuit scholar in 1899, when one of Tacchi Venturi’s research trips brought him to the Ambrosiana Library.37 Mussolini had apparently first heard of him from his brother, Arnaldo, who became friendly with the Jesuit during the months he spent in Rome during the war.38 Then shortly before his secret meeting with Gasparri, Mussolini had met Tacchi Venturi. Within weeks of coming to power, Mussolini realized that one of the easier things he could do to ingratiate himself with the pope was to give the Chigi library to the Vatican. The government had purchased Palazzo Chigi—then as today the Italian prime minister’s headquarters—in 1918. With the building came its private library, begun by the seventeenth-century pope Alexander VII, which included three thousand old manuscripts and thirty thousand books. Achille Ratti, then Vatican librarian, had heard that the government was purchasing the building and tried unsuccessfully to acquire the library. In response to Mussolini’s offer to donate it, the Vatican sent Tacchi Venturi to evaluate the collection. Hearing one day that the Jesuit was in the building and perhaps recalling that his brother had spoken well of him, Mussolini sent word that he should come to his office to meet him. As it turned out, that encounter in late 1922 would be the first of many, many meetings between the Jesuit and Mussolini over the next two decades.39
The Pope and Mussolini Page 7
