The Vatican made it clear to the Catholic party’s leaders that their efforts to bring down the Fascist regime were not welcome. Yet they continued to work with other opposition groups to steer Italy back to a parliamentary democracy.14
Pius tried to buck up Mussolini’s sagging spirits. On Sunday morning, July 20, the pope told Tacchi Venturi to let the despondent leader know he still had his support. That afternoon the Jesuit sent Mussolini a note: “Excellence, This morning it pleased His Holiness to speak to me of Your Excellency in such terms that I am certain that they will succeed in being especially welcome and comforting.” He underlined these last words and, telling Mussolini that it would be best if he could communicate the pope’s thoughts in person, asked to meet with him soon. When two days later the embattled government head opened the note, he wrote across it in his colored pencil, “Thursday morning at 12.” So it was that in the midst of Mussolini’s darkest days, the pope’s emissary came to convey the pope’s support.15
But Pius XI did not confine himself to offering words of comfort. He again turned to Father Rosa for help. Meeting with the Jesuit editor in his library, the pope instructed him to prepare a new piece on the crisis. Two days later, at the end of July, Cardinal Gasparri himself arrived at the Civiltà cattolica headquarters in Rome to pick up Rosa’s draft. Over the next days, drafts went back and forth between the Vatican and the journal office, now bearing Pius XI’s black pencil markings. After getting the pope’s final approval, the unsigned article went to press.16
After praising Mussolini for all he had done for the Church, and implying that he had nothing to do with the Matteotti murder, the Civiltà cattolica article warned that violent action against the government could never be justified. Even the use of legitimate means to bring it down, as through new elections, should be avoided, for it would bring “serious misfortune.” Most important, the Popular Party could never be justified in entering into an alliance with the Socialists.17
The pope faced more embarrassment when Matteotti’s wife and mother repeatedly asked to meet with him. Suspecting that their request was aimed at further weakening Mussolini, the pope refused. But he did not want to appear coldhearted and instructed Gasparri to receive the two women and give them each a rosary he had blessed.18
If there was any doubt about the pope’s continuing support for Mussolini, it ended in early September when he addressed a group of university students. Italian Catholics, Pius told them, could never cooperate with Socialists.19
MUSSOLINI KNEW HOW CRUCIAL the pope’s support was in his fight for survival. In the midst of the crisis, he arranged for his children to take religious lessons. Edda, aged twelve, Vittorio, eight, and Bruno, six, all celebrated first communion and confirmation on the same day.20
At the time the pope heard this welcome news, he found himself confronted with another problem. Although Don Sturzo had resigned as head of the Popular Party, he was still writing articles critical of the regime. This was an irritant for Mussolini, and it meant that Sturzo remained a visible figure of the opposition. Pius XI ordered Sturzo to stop his attacks.21
In response, the Sicilian priest offered to leave the country, a suggestion that pleased the pope. Not only would it remove Sturzo from the Italian political scene, it would prevent what could be a huge embarrassment. As long as he was in Italy, the risk remained that some Fascist band would add him to the list of murder victims, making it all the more difficult for the pope to continue his support for the government. In late October Sturzo departed for what he hoped would be a short period abroad; it would turn into a twenty-two-year exile.22
Mussolini was meanwhile facing new headaches, as the Fascist bosses in the provinces increasingly questioned his resolve. At the end of 1924, an article titled “Fascism Against Mussolini” appeared, arguing that the leader’s only true support lay in the provincial Fascist squads and denouncing his decision to arrest Matteotti’s killers. Making matters worse, three days later an account of the murder prepared by Cesare Rossi was published in France—implicating Mussolini directly in the killing. The editor of Italy’s most prestigious paper, Milan’s Corriere della Sera, suggested that Mussolini might best resign. Rumors of a possible military coup d’état mixed with speculation that the king was about to appoint a new prime minister.23
If Mussolini was not deposed as a result of the Matteotti crisis, it was because the opposition—not least due to the pope’s constant efforts to undermine any possible alliance to put an end to Fascist rule—failed to offer a credible alternative. Lacking this alternative, neither the king nor the army was willing to act.24
Sensing this reality, Mussolini regained his self-confidence. The moment when it looked certain to him that Fascism would fall had passed. On January 3, 1925, not quite seven months since Fascist goons had murdered Matteotti, he rose to speak in parliament. It would be the most dramatic speech of his career.
“I declare here, in front of the Assembly and all the Italian people,” said Mussolini, “that I and I alone assume full political, moral, and historical responsibility for everything that has happened.”
“We are all with you!” shouted the Fascist deputies.
“If Fascism has been a criminal organization, I am the head of this criminal association!”
“We are all with you!” The applause kept building.
“If all the violence was the result of a particular historical, political, and moral climate,” said Mussolini, “then I take responsibility for it, because I created this historical, political, and moral climate.
“Sirs! You have deluded yourselves! You believed that Fascism was finished … but you will see.… Italy, sirs, wants peace, wants tranquility, wants calm. We will give it this tranquility, this calm through love if possible, and with force, if it becomes necessary.”
With these words, the Fascist assault on the last vestiges of democracy in Italy began.
CHAPTER
SIX
THE DICTATORSHIP
THE SAME DAY MUSSOLINI SPOKE TO PARLIAMENT, FASCIST MILITIA units seized the headquarters of the remaining anti-Fascist parties and newspapers.1 Opposition leaders were rounded up and jailed.2 The beatings of opposition leaders resumed. The most prominent came in the summer with the Fascist assault on Giovanni Amendola, leader of the Liberals in parliament, who had already suffered a Fascist beating. He died of his injuries several months later.3
Recognizing the value of continued strong Vatican support, Mussolini looked for ways to nurture his alliance with the pope. Having had his children and wife baptized, then having arranged for his children’s first communion and confirmation, he was running out of rites to show his Catholic credentials. But he did have one left. In July he told Tacchi Venturi that he wanted to celebrate a religious wedding with Rachele, most likely in September.
The Jesuit was delighted, knowing the news would please Pius XI. But when half of September passed and he had heard nothing more, he wrote to ask what had happened. “It is not because I doubt your good will in the least,” Tacchi Venturi explained in his note to Mussolini, but if the wedding could be arranged within the next few weeks, he advised, “it will succeed in offering special consolation to the Holy Father and to not a few eminent personages who are sincerely devoted to Your Excellency.”
The delay may well have been caused by Rachele, whose antipathy to the Church ran deep. When Mussolini had insisted a few years earlier that Rachele be baptized, he practically had to drag her to the ceremony. Master everywhere but his own house, Mussolini decided he would have to catch his wife by surprise. On December 29, 1925, Rachele was in her kitchen in Milan cooking tagliatelle when her maid told her that her husband had arrived with his brother, Arnaldo, and a priest. They wanted her to join them in the drawing room. Her antennae raised by her husband’s uncharacteristic appearance with a man of the cloth, Rachele said she would come when she was finished. After waiting impatiently, Mussolini finally barged into the kitchen. “Off we go, Rachele. That’s enough n
ow. Don’t make me insist.” Rachele, not one to be easily pushed around, did her best to ignore him. Undaunted, he stepped behind her, undid her apron, and walked her to the sink to wash her hands. He then steered her to the drawing room, where the priest performed the wedding ceremony before she could escape.4
Things were once more going Mussolini’s way. As he resumed traveling through the country, enthusiastic crowds greeted him everywhere. Always ready with a punchy phrase or a potent military metaphor, Mussolini spoke with emotion of sacrifice and faith.5 He had an uncanny knack for increasing his volume at just the right time, with a voice that, as one observer put it, ranged from “the hiss of a python to the roar of the lion.”6
But he soon found himself dealing with a problem within his own ranks. Once again Roberto Farinacci, the most fascist of the Fascists, was causing trouble. The previous year, shortly after announcing the dictatorship, Mussolini had made a calculated gamble. In an effort to keep an eye on Farinacci, he had appointed him head of the Fascist Party.
Farinacci was not so easily tamed. Tension between the two men came to a climax in March 1926, when he insisted on playing a high-profile role at the trial of Matteotti’s murderers. It was now almost two years since the killing, and the last thing Mussolini wanted was to remind people of what had happened. In hopes of minimizing news coverage, he had moved the trial to Chieti, a remote town northeast of Rome. “During the court sessions,” Mussolini wrote in a handwritten memo a few days before the trial, “we must avoid any and all elements of drama, which might arouse public opinion, domestically and abroad. Therefore no noisy incidents or political excursions.”
To Mussolini’s dismay, Farinacci decided to join the defendants’ legal team and instructed Chieti’s Fascist Party head to organize a big rally for his arrival. Angered by his grandstanding, Mussolini sent him a sharply worded letter: “I see that not one of your promises has been kept, and the trial … has become political. I judge all this with extreme severity, and great uneasiness is spreading within the party.… I warn you that I will not tolerate any rallies or celebrations at the end of trial.”7
With the help of a Fascist prosecutor, a Fascist judge, and the national head of the Fascist Party as their defense attorney, two of the five defendants were acquitted. Dumini—Mussolini’s American-born henchman—and two of his comrades were found guilty of involuntary homicide and freed less than two months later. While satisfied with the verdict, Mussolini was furious with Farinacci and promptly dumped him as party head.8
Seeking to strengthen his public image, Mussolini increasingly cast himself as the new Caesar, the man who would return Italy to its ancient grandeur. In this effort he had an important partner in his lover, Margherita Sarfatti. Her 1926 quasi-official biography bore the revealing Latin title Dux.9 An Italian version of the term, Duce, meaning “leader,” was becoming ever more common in references to Mussolini in the press and on public occasions.10
Mussolini also began to be cast as a Christ-like figure, in a fusion of Fascist and Catholic images. In Italian schools in Tunisia, a French colony, students recited a prayer that in one form or another would increasingly be heard on the Italian peninsula as well:
“I believe in the high Duce—maker of the Black Shirts—And in Jesus Christ his only protector—Our Savior was conceived by a good teacher and an industrious blacksmith.… He came down to Rome.…”11
Mussolini basked in the adulation but remained vigilant. Giuseppe Bottai, longtime member of the Fascist Grand Council, spoke of two different Mussolinis. One was expansive and spontaneous, guided by his instincts; the other was “small, petty, with the little envies and jealousies of common men, quick to lie, to use deception and fraud, dispenser of promises that he had no intention of keeping, disloyal, treacherous, mean, lacking in affect, incapable of loyalty or love, quick to dump his most faithful followers.”12 In fact, Bottai was one of the few major figures in the regime whom Mussolini did not replace. Even in these early years, Mussolini could abide no competition, and any hint that one of his top ministers was getting too much favorable public attention was likely to lead to reassignment to Africa or the Balkans.
IF 1925 WAS THE YEAR of Mussolini’s triumph, it was also a proud time for the pope. In an effort to strengthen Catholics’ bonds with their Church, he had proclaimed 1925 a Holy Year, the twenty-third to be held since Pope Boniface VIII announced the first in 1300. These were years when Catholics were urged to make a pilgrimage to the holy places of Rome, and prelates from parish priests to bishops, from the Americas to central Europe, led visits to the Vatican and the basilicas of the Eternal City. Pius XI was so pleased with the result that he would later promote two special Holy Years: in 1929, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination, and in 1933–34, to mark the nineteen hundredth anniversary of Jesus’s resurrection.
On Christmas Eve 1924 the pope appeared in St. Peter’s Square and symbolically removed the seal from the Holy Door, to be left open for the duration of the year. Over the course of the following twelve months, he gave 380 speeches, as more than a million pilgrims streamed in from all over the Catholic world. Often he spoke without notes; other times he jotted down themes; but he rarely wrote out what he was going to say. His speech remained distinctively slow and deliberate, with pauses as he looked downward and to the left. After considering what to say, he lifted his head upward and slightly to the right and resumed speaking, often by repeating his last word, as if to confirm that it had been the right choice after all.13
Pius XI, 1925
(photograph credit 6.1)
The demanding schedule took its toll. A few weeks into the Holy Year, Rome’s police chief received a confidential report. Although the pope was in reasonably good health, it said, he found papal life stifling. A man who reveled in the outdoors and relished physical activity was now confined to the tiny precincts of the Vatican and burdened with constant meetings, audiences, and ceremonies. Most of all the pope missed the fresh mountain air and even in winter insisted on leaving his bedroom window open. The pope’s aide, Father Venini, thought the pope looked tired. Perhaps he was not getting a good night’s sleep, for he kept telling Venini to do something about the mice that scurried across his bedroom floor at night.14
The pilgrimage to Rome, Pius believed, was one of the most sacred acts a Catholic could perform.15 Hundreds each day waited on their knees in the grand halls of the Apostolic Palace, hoping to kiss the pope’s ring as he walked by and, if they were especially lucky, receive a commemorative medal from his hands.16 It was hard not to be awed by the spectacle of the white-robed pope surrounded by scarlet-gowned cardinals, assorted chamberlains, and gendarmes with cape and sword, dressed in high stiff ruffs and knee breeches.17 The enormous rooms, with beautifully painted ceilings and walls covered with Renaissance art, combined with the quaintly dressed papal attendants, gave visitors the impression that they had traveled centuries back in time.
In a typical audience, Pius received hundreds of pilgrims, both clergy and lay. The men wore formal dress, although those who lacked such attire got by with a plain dark suit. Women wore black dresses, with sleeves. A black mantilla or black lace scarf covered their heads. The pope entered the hall surrounded by an escort of Noble Guards and chamberlains, along with the master chamberlain, Monsignor Caccia Dominioni. Pius made his way to a raised throne, where he sat facing the crowd. The pilgrims’ leader spoke first, offering words of devotion and praise. The pontiff replied in his slow, deliberate, precise way, typically by referring to the beauty of the country the pilgrims came from and the piety of its Catholic population. He then directed praise at the senior cleric leading the group. As he offered his concluding benediction, the pilgrims got down on their knees.
Something of the emotional impact of the Holy Year comes across in an account recorded by the popular English writer Edward Lucas, a Quaker who was in St. Peter’s for the closing ceremonies on Christmas Eve 1925. There was nothing like Vatican ritual, he wrote, anywh
ere in the world. Most impressive of all was the papal procession. The pope’s Noble escorts, acting as ushers, scurried about, in their medieval outfits, with dazzling sword-hilts. Lucas felt transported back to the Middle Ages not only by the costumes but by the faces of the princes, prelates, priests, and monks. These, he observed, seemed not to change.
“Some of the clerics are in purple, some in black, some in cowls; one or two are bearded; some austerely robed in white.… Many are incredibly old; almost none look happy, care-free; many are lined and marked with anxiety. And then the cardinals … and then, carried high above all the rest, by servitors in red, and accompanied by two bearers of lofty feather fans, the Holy Father himself seated in his chair, with a great yellow mitre on his venerable head, and softly waving his hand from right to left in blessing.”18
Pius XI brought the Holy Year to a close by issuing an encyclical, Quas primas. Humanity could be saved, he said, only if all embraced the one true religion, Roman Catholicism. Like popes before him, he denounced the French Revolution as the origin of much evil, spreading harmful notions of the “rights of man.”19 He concluded by warning that “rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.” Those who failed to heed these words faced a terrible end, for Christ “will most severely avenge these insults.”20
The pope used the encyclical to announce a new Church holiday, Christ the King, designed to combat what he saw as the great plague of modern times: the spread of secularism. While Catholics greeted the encyclical, and the new holiday it announced, with enthusiasm, the same could not be said of Protestants. In the United States, the National Lutheran Council blasted the encyclical as “sectarian in the worst sense” and “hostile to very large groups of Christians.” It called on Protestants everywhere to boycott the pope’s new holy day.21
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