The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  IN NOVEMBER, AT MUSSOLINI’S DIRECTION, Fascists sacked the home of former prime minister Francesco Nitti, in the center of Rome. The police did nothing to intervene, and the marauders paraded triumphantly through the city streets. One morning the next month Giovanni Amendola, former cabinet minister and widely respected head of the Liberal opposition in parliament, was attacked near his home in downtown Rome. Four Fascists used clubs to smash his neck and face, then jumped into a waiting car and sped off. In reporting the attack, Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, argued that Amendola had only got what he deserved. Whether Mussolini himself had ordered the attack is not known, but it was part of the larger campaign of intimidation that he very much encouraged.26

  North of Italy, in Bavaria’s capital of Munich, the Fascist revolution was inspiring other Mussolini acolytes to violence. On November 8 the mustachioed thirty-four-year-old rabble-rouser Adolf Hitler, in an effort to imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome of the previous year, announced a revolution in a large local beer hall. The Nazi movement had already adopted the Italian Fascists’ straight-armed Roman salute. Hitler’s followers, shouting “Sieg Heil!” until they were hoarse, succeeded in occupying the local police headquarters but failed to take over the Bavarian War Ministry. Ten people were killed, and Hitler was arrested. He would spend a year in jail, but he put it to good use, writing his call to arms, Mein Kampf. At the time, Mussolini had no idea that his own fate would one day be tied to that of the imprisoned German wild man.

  In April 1924 Italy prepared for a new national election, the first since Mussolini came to power. Fascist violence exploded. While directing beatings and worse at his enemies, Mussolini continued to introduce measures to benefit the Church. A new list of official holidays included several Catholic holidays that the state had never before recognized. Mussolini also took his first steps against Protestant organizations, which he knew would please the pope: he denied Methodists permission to construct a big church in Rome and rejected the YMCA’s proposals to build centers in Italy. Catholic seminarians were exempted from the draft, and three weeks before the vote, he dramatically increased the government’s payments to Italy’s bishops and priests, much to their delight.27

  In early April La Civiltà cattolica, the Vatican’s unofficial voice, published its final issue before the election, explaining that the misbehavior of some anticlerical members of the Fascist Party should not obscure the fact that Mussolini was working tirelessly to improve relations between the government and the Church. The journal reminded readers of all the benefits that the Fascists had already produced for the Church compared with how little the Popular Party had accomplished.28

  Election Day came on April 6. In his home base of Ferrara, Italo Balbo, one of the Quadrumvirate from the March on Rome, gave his Blackshirts their instructions. At each polling place, they were to grab the first voter to emerge and beat him up, while shouting “Bastard, you voted for the Socialists.” True, the poor devil might well have voted for the Fascists, but if so, “too bad for him,” said Balbo.29

  In the wake of the beatings of opposition candidates, the torching of opposition newspapers, and the destruction of opposition ballots, the Fascist list—which included sympathetic non-Fascists—won two-thirds of the vote; the Fascists alone won 275 seats, giving them an absolute majority even without their allies. Of the opposition parties, the Popular Party held on to 39 seats, the Socialists 46, and the Communists 19. A smattering of other seats went to republicans, liberals, and various other small groups. Mussolini was triumphant. “This is the last time that there’ll be an election like this. The next time I will vote on behalf of everyone.”30

  The following day Fascist bands attacked Popular Party activists and local priests in places where the party had done well. In a small town outside Venice, armed Fascists arrived at night at the home of one such parish priest. Finding only the priest’s sister at home, they beat her and then for good measure beat up the assistant priest as well.

  Angered by scores of such attacks on clergy and Catholic organizations, someone in the Vatican secretary of state office prepared a circular, to be sent to all of Italy’s bishops, telling them not to participate in the planned Fascist victory celebrations and especially forbidding them from performing special masses of thanksgiving for the Fascists. But although the circular was printed, it never left the Vatican. Written on the margin of the draft document (now found in the archives) is the note: “This should no longer be sent. By order of Monsignor Secretary.” Gasparri—undoubtedly after discussing the matter with the pope—had decided it best not to do anything that might offend Mussolini.31

  PIUS XI HAD BY NOW settled into a routine. His underlings lived in nervous fear of his reproach. He was curt with those who displeased him and was not intimidated by even the most exalted heads of state. When the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, visited him at the Vatican, he made the mistake of asking the pope to nominate more South American cardinals; there was only one for the whole continent. Angered by what he saw as an inappropriate attempt to influence him, Pius decided to cancel his planned elevation of his majordomo, Monsignor Ricardo Sanz de Samper, who was from Colombia. He did not want to appear to be bowing to the king.32

  But an occasional visitor could bring back flashes of his earlier enthusiasms. Pius invited the French intellectual Jean Carrère for a private audience and asked his views of various French and Italian literary figures. While he responded, the pope—as Carrère described it—looked upon him with a grave expression of “courteous superiority.” But then Carrère mentioned Manzoni and called The Betrothed one of the world’s masterpieces. As he uttered these words, “it seemed to me,” recalled the Frenchman, “that my august interlocutor became transformed. From courteous benevolence that he had shown up to that point, he became all smiles and affable.” Manzoni, the pope told him, was not only a great novelist but a great poet, and to Carrère’s delight, the white-robed pontiff began reciting verses of a Manzoni poem from memory in a soft, musical cadence.33

  Where Benedict XV had seemed overwhelmed by the weight of his office, Pius XI projected the vigor of a mountain climber. “He seemed born to command,” said Confalonieri, the priest whom he had brought with him from Milan to serve as his private secretary. He radiated authority, the French ambassador later observed.34 The pope was also a stickler for following proper procedure. One afternoon while strolling through the Vatican gardens, he saw an envelope, marked with large capital letters For His Holiness, lying on his path. With him that day was the archbishop of Bologna. Without thinking, the archbishop bent down and picked it up. He turned to hand it to the pope.

  “Put it back where you found it,” snapped Pius XI. “It is not the proper way to send mail.”

  The archbishop placed the envelope back on the path, and they continued on their walk.35

  Although the pope had spent many years in libraries, he had, thought Monsignor Confalonieri, the personality not of a librarian but of a small businessman. The young priest attributed this to the pope’s roots, for the industrial region of his birth was known for just such men. Pius XI thought in concrete terms and was uncomfortable with improvisation. He insisted on reasoning everything through and carefully studied all the reports that came to him. Once he did make a decision, he stuck to it. Criticism only made him dig in. The pope, complained the former secretary of state Cardinal Merry del Val, was “stubborn as a mule.”36

  For all their obvious differences, the pope and Mussolini were alike in many ways. Both could have no real friends, for friendship implied equality. Both insisted on being obeyed, and those around them quaked at the thought of saying anything that would displease them. They made an odd couple, but the pope had quickly come to recognize the benefits of casting his lot with the former priest-eater. As a result, within a year of the March on Rome, the Fascist revolution had become a clerico-Fascist revolution. A new partnership had begun. But it would soon face an unexpected threat, for something was about to happen
that would very nearly bring Mussolini down.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  RISING FROM THE TOMB

  ON MAY 30, 1924, THE THIRD DAY OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT, GIACOMO Matteotti strode to the podium in the Chamber of Deputies amid jeers and threats from the Fascist benches. Ejected from the Socialist Party two years earlier in a purge of moderates, he had founded a reformist Unitary Socialist Party. Today he had a message to deliver: the recent election, marked by violence, should be annulled. As he detailed cases of voter intimidation from around the country, Fascist deputies kept interrupting him. “Lies!” they shouted. “Go back to Russia!” One member yelled: “Enough already! What are we doing here? Do we have to tolerate these insults?” An enraged phalanx of Fascist deputies moved menacingly toward the front of the hall. “You shouldn’t be in parliament!” one screamed, “You should be under house arrest!”1 When, having been interrupted dozens of times, he finally finished, Fascist catcalls drowned out the opposition’s applause. “Now you’d better prepare to write my obituary,” Matteotti remarked to one of his colleagues as he made his way out of the building.

  Mussolini, who was present for that session, was enraged. He turned to his press secretary, Cesare Rossi. “That man,” he muttered, “shouldn’t be allowed to remain in circulation.”

  Giacomo Matteotti

  (photograph credit 5.1)

  On June 10 Matteotti was scheduled to speak again in parliament, this time to denounce Mussolini’s government for corruption. After lunch, as he walked from his home near Piazza del Popolo toward the Chamber of Deputies, two men grabbed him and tried to drag him into a waiting sedan. Although he was neither big nor especially muscular, the thirty-nine-year-old Matteotti was both courageous and quick. He threw one of his attackers to the ground and was about to break away from the second when a third man set upon him, punching him in the face with brass knuckles. The men dragged the semiconscious deputy into the car. As he struggled, smashing the glass partition that divided the driver from the backseat, his abductors beat him savagely.

  The car raced through Rome’s streets, the driver pressing the horn in one constant blast to cover Matteotti’s cries for help. The screams soon stopped. Matteotti was dead. Whether they had been ordered to kill him remains a matter of debate, but now that they had his cadaver in their laps, the men searched for a place to dump it. About fifteen miles from Rome, they made a shallow burial in woods not far from the road.2

  When Matteotti did not return home for dinner, his wife learned he had never made it to parliament. The alarm went out. By the next evening, witness reports began to come in describing the scene of the Socialist’s bloody abduction and the frenetic flight of the speeding car.

  That a prominent member of parliament could criticize the Fascists one day and be violently abducted practically the next was shocking to all but the most hardened fascisti. Amid the furor, Mussolini tried to distance himself from the murder. By June 14 he had fired both the police head and the undersecretary for internal affairs. Suspicion fell on Cesare Rossi, who in addition to serving as Mussolini’s press secretary headed a secret Fascist goon squad. Rossi went into hiding. Soon others high in the Fascist regime were caught in the investigation’s web.

  Evidence from the car that had been used in the abduction allowed the police to identify the men who had murdered the Socialist deputy. Their leader, Amerigo Dumini, had boasted to his comrades that he had already killed a dozen men on the orders from the highest ranks of the regime. Dumini was an American, born in 1894 in St. Louis, his father an Italian immigrant, his mother English. He had moved to Italy as a teenager, joined the Italian army during the war, and later became one of Mussolini’s trusted henchmen, working under Rossi.

  Five months earlier Mussolini had met with Rossi and several Fascist bigwigs to create a small, secret squad capable of carrying out violent missions. Dumini was entrusted with putting the group together. In June he received orders, most likely from Rossi, to go after Matteotti.3

  The country was in an uproar. The occasional beating and castor oil guzzling meted out to socialist rabble-rousers was one thing, but the murder of the leader of one of the main opposition parties in parliament, to all appearances ordered by the highest levels of the Fascist regime, was another. That it was done in the middle of Rome in the middle of the day only added to the outrage. In the previous year and a half, Mussolini had risen from the head of a violent movement best known for its thugs, to the increasingly respected head of government. Many of his supporters had thought—or at least hoped—that he had put his brutal past behind him, but the Matteotti murder suggested otherwise. Over the next days and weeks, the whole network of support that Mussolini had so carefully put together—the old nationalists and Liberals, the large industrialists and the small shop owners—began to unravel.4

  By the end of June, with Matteotti’s body still not found, opposition deputies met and vowed that they would not participate in another session of the Chamber until Mussolini dissolved the Fascist militia and the other secret organizations that he had created to terrorize the opposition.

  Conservative newspapers turned against him. Il Giornale d’Italia, which had until then offered support, demanded that full light be shed on those responsible for the murder. The middle classes that had largely embraced Mussolini began to turn from him as well: they had wanted a conservative, nationalist government, not a bloody tyrant. People began ripping up their Fascist Party membership cards, while opposition members of parliament found themselves applauded by passersby as they walked down the streets of Rome. In some areas, Fascist militiamen, who had so recently paraded haughtily through the streets, were now afraid to appear in public in their uniforms.5 The regime teetered. Little stood in the way of its fall.

  A stream of successes had boosted Mussolini’s ego. But now, unnerved, he became unapproachable. So black was his humor that even his closest aides were too frightened to meet with him. “Inside Palazzo Chigi”—where Mussolini then had his office—“one breathed the air of the tomb,” said Quinto Navarra, his assistant.6

  The quiet was all the more remarkable because the blustery tyrant’s shouts had regularly penetrated his door, as he lectured and hectored his underlings. Now not a sound made its way out. One day at the height of the crisis, Navarra found the prime minister in his office: “To say that Mussolini, when I surprised him opening the door a bit that morning, was just upset, would be far short of the mark.” The disconsolate man sat shaking his head from side to side, knocking it against the gilded wood frame of his tall chair first on one side and then the other, with his eyes wide open, snorting and grumbling.7

  A wiretap—for he had apparently ordered the police to tap his lover’s phone—caught Mussolini’s plaintive phone conversation with Margherita Sarfatti:

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “How do you expect me to be?”

  “Anything new?”

  “Nothing … by now, I’m not surprised at anything.… The thing that upsets me the most is that I don’t know what my so-called friends are thinking—they who’ve betrayed me.”

  Margherita cautioned him not to let his temper color his judgment.

  “It’s not a question of temper,” Mussolini replied. “Unfortunately fate has dealt its card in favor of my enemies, and if I lose the game, which is almost certain, there’s not even the possibility of saving face!”8

  Mussolini’s attempts to distance himself from the murder foundered on the identity of those deemed responsible, for they included some of those closest to him. The end of the regime seemed near.

  The Senate—a body whose members were chosen by the king, not elected—reopened two weeks after the murder. Mussolini got up to speak. He said he was as eager to get to the bottom of what had happened as anyone, pointing to the arrest of the presumed murderers and his dismissal of top government officials as evidence of his sincerity.9 While most judged his remarks woefully inadequate, one man rushed to compliment him. In
a flowery, handwritten letter, Father Tacchi Venturi, the pope’s secret emissary, told Mussolini how impressed he was with the speech. He gushed with praise for all of Mussolini’s good work and called on God to ensure his future success.10

  As word got out that their leader was in a state of shock, worried Fascist bosses from the provinces visited Rome to rouse him from his stupor. To their horror, they found him dazed. Leandro Arpinati, the Fascist boss of Bologna, was horrified to find Mussolini appearing feverish, his eyes red, as if he had been weeping. He looked, remarked Arpinati, like a businessman about to declare bankruptcy.11

  For the pope, the Matteotti murder was a disaster. In Mussolini the Vatican finally had found an Italian leader with whom it could work. Now, with the opposition forces uniting to boycott parliament and call for the return of constitutional rights, Mussolini’s hold on power was in danger. The pope decided to do all he could to save him, taking aim at the Popular Party’s decision to join the coalition calling for a new government. While the party did not formally depend on the Church hierarchy, it could hardly continue to claim to be Italy’s Catholic party if the pope were to openly renounce it.12

  In late June, with Italians disoriented and Mussolini’s fate in doubt, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore romano, published an editorial on the crisis, reminding Catholics of the Church’s teaching to obey civil authorities and warning them against any “leap in the dark.” La Civiltà cattolica, the Vatican-overseen Jesuit journal, followed up with an article written by its editor, Father Rosa, reminding readers of the Church’s admonition to obey government authority. Any attempt to undermine the current government, he argued, risked anarchy. He took special aim at the Popular Party’s supporters, warning that good Catholics could not cooperate with Socialists.13