The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  GIVEN HIS VIEW of the dignity of the papal office, Pius XI refused to talk on the telephone or be photographed with guests. He kept a heavy schedule of public audiences but was not always eager to honor requests for private meetings. Once, when his secretary of state told him of an important personage requesting an audience, he expressed his reluctance. “But there is one excuse you cannot offer him,” added the pope in one of his more lighthearted moments. “You cannot say I am not at home.”22

  Rome’s clergy found Pius XI, compared to his recent predecessors Pius X and Benedict XV, cold and curt.23 During one of the pope’s daily walks, an elderly Vatican gardener nearby crumpled to the ground, felled by a heart attack. As other gardeners, along with a guard who had been accompanying the pope, rushed to help him, someone told Pius what had happened. He continued on his way. The incident became fodder for the gossip that swirled around the Vatican.24

  Precious insights into the infighting around the pope come from the voluminous secret police informant reports sent from the Vatican. Since coming to power, Mussolini had set up a vast network of informants. Although their observations have to be read with care, given the various axes that the informants had to grind, they provide unmatched insight into what was going on in the Vatican in these years.25

  Pius XI’s bursts of anger were becoming more frequent. One monsignor confided to an informant that when he had to see the pope, he trembled, “so great were the mortifications he had to suffer,” forced to remain on his knees. The pope treated Gasparri badly as well, this informant wrote, but fortunately the cardinal “has a thick skin, and pretends that he doesn’t notice anything.”26

  The Belgian ambassador captured the view of the pope that was then common among the Vatican’s foreign diplomats. Pius XI was a learned man and certainly less obsessed with questions of dogma and religious discipline than Pius X, who had his infamous spy service. But he was just as stubborn as his namesake and lacked any hint of diplomatic skills: “He marches straight to the end. He is a character committed to the most noble and generous ideals, but not open to those who counsel patience.” Pius XI’s most salient personality trait, noted the ambassador, was his insistence that he be obeyed.27

  A recently discovered letter, reported in the Vatican’s own newspaper, offers surprising, not to say flabbergasting, testimony of just how tough Pius XI was. In 1919, while he was in Warsaw as Benedict XV’s envoy, Achille Ratti had written to his assistant at the Vatican Library, asking that someone bring him papers he had left in his desk, “along with the little revolver and ammunition” that he had left there. Amid the chaos and threats of revolution in Milan, Ratti had acquired a gun and kept it in his desk at the Ambrosiana Library. When he moved to the Vatican Library, he brought the revolver with him. Finding himself in Warsaw, under threat of a Red Army invasion, he did not want to remain unarmed.28

  HAVING OFFERED A WELCOME to an international surgeons’ convention, Mussolini emerged into Rome’s sunshine. Seeing their Duce appear unexpectedly, an excited group of Fascists outside raised their arms in the Fascist salute. Without thinking, Mussolini raised his arm in response. As he tilted his head back, a shot rang out. Violet Gibson, a mentally unstable middle-aged Irish woman, had fired her pistol at his head. Thanks to his salute, rather than piercing his temple, the bullet only grazed his nose, producing copious blood.

  Mussolini insisted on going ahead with his scheduled address to a Fascist Party gathering later in the day, April 7, 1926, appearing with a large white bandage stretched over the bridge of his nose. His concluding remarks there—with their oblique reference to the assassination attempt—became legendary: “If I advance, follow me; if I turn back, kill me; if I die, avenge me.”29 The next day he flew to Italy’s African colonies. As he left, he is said to have joked that he was going with his nose already pierced.30

  Around the country, the clergy led their flocks in prayers of thanksgiving, assuring the faithful that God was watching out for their leader. Just a few days before the attempted assassination, Pius X’s elderly sister had presented the Duce with her brother’s papal skullcap as a gift. Many believed that the former pope—who would one day be pronounced a saint—had produced yet another miracle.31

  Mussolini would need more miracles that year, for as he solidified his dictatorship, disheartened anti-Fascists saw their only hope in his death. In September a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist hurled a homemade bomb at Mussolini’s car. Again, the Duce seemed to be leading a charmed life—bouncing off the right side door, the bomb exploded, wounding several people but leaving its intended victim unharmed.32

  The most dramatic assassination attempt came on October 31, when Mussolini was in Bologna to inaugurate a new sports stadium. As he drove through the city’s crowd-lined streets, a shot was fired. It did not miss its target by much, tearing through the ceremonial sash that the Duce wore across his chest. Several men from the crowd jumped on a sixteen-year-old boy, the presumed shooter, and killed him on the spot. Throughout Italy, outraged Fascists burned down what was left of the opposition press and beat those suspected of anti-Fascist sympathies.33

  Relieved that Mussolini had escaped harm, the pope let him know of his “immense joy” in learning that he was “safe and sound thanks to Jesus Christ’s special protection.”34 The climate was now ripe for the Duce to secure his dictatorship. On November 5 a new law provided for internal exile for critics of the regime. Many would be sent from their urban homes to remote island and mountain villages, to be kept under police surveillance. Four days after the new law was announced, the remaining opposition deputies were ejected from parliament. Only members of the Fascist Party would be allowed to continue in office. By the end of 1926, Fascist unions alone were permitted, and strikes were banned. Mayors were no longer elected but appointed by the central government. Press censorship was tightened; a special tribunal was created to root out the remaining opposition, and capital punishment was reinstated.35 It had not been known in Rome since the pope had last ruled the city, more than a half century before. 36

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  ASSASSINS, PEDERASTS, AND SPIES

  FEW MEN HAD MORE INFLUENCE IN ROME THAN FATHER TACCHI Venturi, the pope’s emissary to Mussolini. A common sight in the halls of government, he hurried from one ministerial office to another, power broker extraordinaire. Over the years, he would make hundreds of visits to government ministers and their staff, seeking help not only on behalf of the pope but for many others who knew that the best path to winning favors from the Fascist regime was to gain his ear.1

  The Jesuit was discreet, but his bond with Mussolini did not go unobserved. Romans dubbed him “Mussolini’s confessor,” the “éminence grise” who was said to meet with him every day.2 A German newspaper called him Mussolini’s Rasputin.3

  While Pius XI saw Tacchi Venturi’s role as relaying his requests and concerns to Mussolini, the Jesuit had a broader view of his own mission. Like others around the Vatican, he thought the pope was insufficiently exercised about the danger that Italy’s Jews posed. He took it upon himself to alert Mussolini to this supposed threat, as he would repeatedly do over the years.

  In a document he drafted in the summer of 1926, Tacchi Venturi identified “the worldwide Jewish-Masonic plutocracy” as the greatest enemy the Church faced.4 He called for strong government measures, including a special “secret police” to monitor Italy’s Jewish bankers. The government should also abolish the stock exchange, which he dubbed “the most potent means of the occult empire.” And because the world’s press was almost entirely in the hands of the Jews and the Masons, governments needed to limit freedom of the press in all matters dealing with business and finance. They had to recognize the fact that the Jewish-Masonic plutocracy lay at the root of all the world’s economic and political problems.5

  Although the pope shared in the general Vatican view that the large numbers of Jews in central and eastern Europe posed a threat to Christian society, he had always ex
cepted Italy’s tiny Jewish community. But his Jesuit envoy made no such distinction. In September 1926 Tacchi Venturi gave the Duce a recently published fifteen-page pamphlet, Zionism and Catholicism, which had been dedicated to the Jesuit himself. The pamphlet, after recalling that God condemned the Jews to wander the earth and cursed them for rejecting Jesus, turned to the more immediate dangers the Jews posed. “No one can doubt,” its author warned, “the Jewish sect’s formidable, diabolical, fatal activity throughout the world.” The Jews sought revolution, Bolshevism, “to destroy current society and dominate the world by themselves, as their Talmud prescribes.”6 Mussolini took the booklet, although whether he ever read it we do not know.

  The fact that Tacchi Venturi got to have a private meeting with the Duce practically every month could not fail to arouse envy, even hatred. One Saturday in 1927 he entered Rome’s Church of Jesus, where he was in the habit of taking confession each week. The massive sixteenth-century baroque building, Rome’s most important Jesuit church, stood in the city center. As he walked through the dimly illuminated church and stepped into his confessional that day, he was startled to see a large sign. He read its block letters:

  Venturi, Venturi, Venturi—

  if they bump off your Benito—

  your empire too will be finito

  So pray to God that they’re in no hurry.7

  Such anonymous warnings were nothing new to the Jesuit priest, who was not one to be easily intimidated. But as it turned out, it was not Mussolini but Tacchi Venturi who would be the next target of the assassin’s blade.

  THE NEWS SPREAD QUICKLY. Sixty-seven-year-old Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, confidant of both the pope and the Duce, had narrowly escaped death. As he would later tell the story, he had been working at his desk in the building adjacent to the Church of Jesus when he heard that a young man wanted to see him. He told the doorman to let him in. As the young man entered, he pulled a knife from his coat and, without saying a word, plunged it into the Jesuit’s neck. Only the priest’s reflexes saved him, as he instinctively recoiled; the wound narrowly missed his jugular. The assailant ran from the building. Stunned, the bloodied Jesuit staggered to the hallway, where his colleagues rushed to his aid, the knife still lodged in his neck.

  The next day, February 29, 1928, The New York Times carried the news: “The Jesuit scholar, Father Tacchi Venturi, intermediary in the negotiations between the Pope and Premier Mussolini for a solution of the ‘Roman question,’ has been injured by a mysterious attempt on his life by a youth who, for no apparent reason, penetrated into his apartment and stabbed him in the neck with a paper-knife.” The paper added, “there is extreme reluctance in Vatican spheres to discuss the case.”8

  Who tried to murder Tacchi Venturi, and for what reason? Milan’s Corriere della Sera speculated that the conspirators wanted to strike at the Fascist wing of the Jesuit order, of which Tacchi Venturi, the order’s former secretary general, was reportedly the leader. Others were sure that behind the violence were Jesuit dissidents, unhappy with Tacchi Venturi’s role in cementing the Vatican-Fascist alliance.

  Over the next weeks, Tacchi Venturi did everything he could to convince the police that he had been the target of an international assassination attempt. When they expressed skepticism, he produced his own evidence, quickly picked up by the press. A March 1 Washington Post story, headlined “Anti-Mussolini Plot Seen in Rome Stabbing,” reported the existence of a “black list” of planned assassination victims on which the Jesuit’s name figured prominently.9

  Tacchi Venturi told the police he had recently received a confidential report from a highly informed and trustworthy source. It revealed that the prominent anti-Fascist Gaetano Salvemini, in exile in Paris, had prepared a list of the leaders of the Fascist regime to be targeted for murder. Second on the list, right after Mussolini himself, Tacchi Venturi had found his own name. The identity of the man he accused could not fail to capture police attention, as Salvemini was one of Mussolini’s most influential critics abroad. An esteemed scholar, professor of history at the University of Florence, Salvemini had entered parliament as a Socialist deputy after the war. Author of numerous works denouncing the dictatorship and briefly imprisoned in 1925, he had fled the country.10

  The police were suspicious of Tacchi Venturi’s claim that an internationally acclaimed intellectual like Gaetano Salvemini was organizing a series of assassinations. It was hard to believe. It seemed similarly far-fetched that such a conspiracy, if it existed, would identify Tacchi Venturi as the most important target after Mussolini.

  Unnerved that the police seemed not to be taking his story seriously, and desperately wanting to stop their investigation from turning to his personal life, Tacchi Venturi tried to get Mussolini to intervene. On March 19 he went to see the Duce, eager to convince him that he had been the target of a dangerous anti-Fascist conspiracy. He handed Mussolini the typed pages recounting the tale that his informant had told.

  As Rome’s police chief noted in his later report, even at first glance the mysterious informant’s story was hard to believe. The source claimed he had arranged a meeting in Paris with Salvemini by telling the exiled professor he wanted to help him. The fifty-four-year-old scholar not only agreed to meet—although he had no idea who the man was—but immediately confided to him all the details of his secret assassination plot.11 It was hard to imagine, the police chief observed, how someone as intelligent and politically sophisticated as Tacchi Venturi could have believed any of it, let alone think he could get others to believe it. For the police chief, the only issue was whether someone else had prepared it for him or he had concocted it himself.12

  The police repeatedly urged the Jesuit to reveal who the report’s author was, but Tacchi Venturi refused. Eventually the police did discover the author’s identity: he was a notorious schemer who had previously run afoul of the law for trying to peddle preposterous stories.13

  Tacchi Venturi, thought the police chief, was trying to throw off the investigation. On March 20 a police informant offered support for his suspicion. “We have confirmation from the Vatican,” wrote the informant, “that it was Tacchi Venturi who did not want his attackers (whom he knows well, as he knows the reasons for the attack) to be identified.”14

  Ten days later the director of the political police, in a confidential memo, reported that the latest information on the case would explain Tacchi Venturi’s strange behavior. It would also explain the silence of the Jesuits at the Church of Jesus, for they were not cooperating: the young man who had attacked the priest had done so because the two had had “illicit relations.”15 This was the secret that Tacchi Venturi wanted so desperately to conceal.

  In June the police chief sent in his final report, bringing the investigation to an end. Tacchi Venturi’s account of what had happened did not add up. If he really had been assailed by an assassin, why had he not shouted out for help but instead allowed his assailant to escape? Why had none of the Jesuits notified the police of the attack? The authorities had learned of it from the hospital, where the injured priest had gone to get stitched up.

  The young man who had assaulted Tacchi Venturi had been sitting in the waiting room long enough to be seen by others. A little later, according to a priest in the room next to the attack, angry shouts had come from Tacchi Venturi’s room. But according to Tacchi Venturi, the unknown visitor had barely entered when he attacked without saying a word.

  And then there were questions about the assassin’s weapon. It was a heavy letter opener of distinctive design, with a black wooden handle and a sharp metal blade. Examining the unusual weapon, the police were surprised to discover that it was identical to the letter openers used by Tacchi Venturi himself, although according to the Jesuit the man had brought it with him. It was odd, the police thought, that the weapon of choice of a team of international political assassins would be a letter opener, no matter how heavy or sharp.

  The nature of the wound raised further questions. According to Tacchi
Venturi, the would-be assassin had clutched the knife like a dagger and tried to plunge it into his neck. Although it missed his jugular, it had ended up lodged in his neck and produced a great deal of blood. But the medical reports recorded no deep stab wound, but rather a relatively superficial, if long, cut. Such a wound could not have resulted from a stabbing motion, much less one that resulted in a knife being lodged in the neck. An examination of the Jesuit’s clothes similarly showed that while they were bloodied, there was not much blood. And while Tacchi Venturi reported that his fellow Jesuits had found the knife stuck in his neck, none of them had confirmed this account.

  What really happened on that February day? The police chief was certain that the attack had had nothing to do with an anti-Fascist plot. The priest had been wounded as a result of an altercation with someone he knew well; the assailant, in a moment of fury, had picked up a letter opener on Tacchi Venturi’s desk and thrown it at him. The motive had been personal, not political, and for this reason the Jesuit was doing everything he could to prevent the police from finding the assailant.16

  There was an avenue of investigation that the police chief would not pursue in this case. In his final report, he acknowledged that he had not looked into the possibility that the priest had had illicit relations with the young man.17 The police were not eager to delve into the personal life of the Jesuit who was so close to both Mussolini and the pope, much less look into his possible relations with boys or young men. Once they could rule out a political assassination plot, they were content to bring the investigation to an end. The attacker was never found.18