The pope, according to police informants, knew that Tacchi Venturi was trying to throw the authorities off the trail. But it did not diminish his belief or Mussolini’s in the Jesuit’s value, and he was soon once again meeting with the Duce on the pope’s behalf. Perhaps the suspicions generated by the incident led Tacchi Venturi to overcompensate a bit, eager as he was to win back the Duce’s trust. In a letter to Mussolini in May, he assured the Duce that he was both “a good Jesuit and a good fascist.”19
THE STREAM OF POLICE INFORMANT reports from the Vatican makes clear that the pope was dealing with a number of pederasty accusations at the time, aimed at some of the clerics nearest to him.20 Monsignor Caccia Dominioni had known the pope from his youth in Milan and now served as the pope’s master of ceremonies, constantly at his side. Several accounts from the top government informer in the Vatican detailed the monsignor’s alleged relations with both boys and young men.
The pope, the informer reported in 1926, had ordered a secret inquiry into the most recent allegations. A young man, interviewed by Vatican investigators, reported that Caccia had lured him to his Vatican rooms for sex. When the story became the subject of Vatican gossip, the pope ordered that no one speak of it. This was not the pope’s first experience with such allegations. Monsignor Ricardo Sanz de Samper, the majordomo and prefect of the papal household, had also been charged with having sexual relations with young boys. Behind the pope’s back, Vatican insiders joked that when Pius XI showed himself in public, he was “worthily surrounded, having at his sides two pederasts, Caccia and Samper.” And in fact, at public audiences Caccia and Samper did stand on either side of the pope.21
But the fate of the two accused men would be very different. Unlike the Milanese Caccia, the South American Samper had no preexisting ties to the pope. In the end he could not survive the scandal. Not only did Pius XI not give him the cardinal’s hat that he thought was owed him, he abruptly dismissed him in late 1928 with no public explanation. Thereupon Samper, hitherto one of the most visible presences in the Vatican, vanished from sight.22
For years to come, Caccia would face rumors about his penchant for bringing boys into his Vatican bedroom. A stream of secret reports, from several different police informants, chronicled the sordid details.23
Without Mussolini’s network of spies, such Vatican secrets would never have been known. Even today, when the Holy See makes available its historical files to scholars at the Vatican Secret Archives, Church officials remove those that deal with such sensitive “personnel” matters. But Mussolini’s spy network within the Vatican was robust. It included not only three or four well-placed clerics but also lay Vatican employees and Catholics with high-level Vatican sources, such as Emanuele Brunatto, an industrialist with close ties to Cardinal Gasparri. Brunatto was one of several informants who reported on Caccia’s exploits.24
Following the attempts on his life in 1926, Mussolini fired the national police chief and replaced him with forty-six-year-old Arturo Bocchini. A career civil servant, from the ranks of the country’s prefects, Bocchini was no Fascist zealot. Like many, he had simply switched his loyalty with the advent of the new government. But over the next years, no one would be more valuable to Mussolini, as Bocchini quietly but masterfully devised a vast network of surveillance designed to inform the police, and Mussolini, of any opposition to the regime.
Bocchini met with Mussolini every morning, showing him the secret informant reports that he thought would be of most interest. Intelligent, efficient, and dedicated to his task, he was not personally sadistic, just thorough.25 By the end of 1927, he had centralized all police surveillance under his control and had produced active files on more than one hundred thousand people. His job was not only to keep an eye on particular individuals but to keep a finger on the pulse of the population. His reports allowed the Duce—otherwise surrounded by sycophants—to get some sense of the public mood.26
Bocchini put his spy network together by recruiting people to serve as the center of their own subnetworks of informants, and these subnetwork chiefs were constantly on the lookout for recruits. Heading one of the most important of these nodes was Bocchini’s own tall, attractive, mistress, Bice Pupeschi, a married but separated woman fourteen years younger than he. Bocchini installed her in a Rome apartment that served not only as their love nest but as the rendezvous for some of her top informants.27
Few of them were more valuable to the police chief than Monsignor Enrico Pucci, recruited in October 1927.28 Pucci had first served in the Vatican under Pius X; he then became priest of Santa Maria in Trastevere, a church not far from the Vatican. In 1919 he returned to the Vatican as domestic prelate of the pope and editor of Rome’s Catholic newspaper, Il Corriere d’Italia. It was Pucci’s 1923 article there that had made public the pope’s wish that Don Sturzo resign as Popular Party head. Pucci put out a regular newsletter covering Vatican news. Nurturing a vast range of personal contacts, by the mid-1920s he was widely viewed as the Vatican’s chief press officer. Pucci regularly met with Cardinal Gasparri, although not with the pope, and he was a common sight in Rome’s cafés and restaurants, sharing a drink or dining with cardinals and bishops.29
It was thanks to this network of informants that Mussolini came to know of Caccia’s travails. A 1928 inquiry focused on two boys who had been spotted coming out of the monsignor’s rooms. When caught and questioned, they detailed their illicit relations with him, down to a description of his bedroom. Mussolini first learned of this from an informant identified in the police files simply as the “noted Vatican informer.” The identity of this informer, who clearly was deep in the Vatican, remains obscure. Between 1925 and 1934 he filed scores of confidential reports. Many were sent on to Mussolini’s private secretary, and the Duce read them avidly.30
In reporting the latest news of Caccia’s exploits in 1928, the “noted Vatican informer,” added that the police chief of Borgo, the Roman police district responsible for the Vatican, was collaborating with Vatican officials to keep the allegations from getting out.31 This would not be the last time Rome’s police would help the Vatican conceal embarrassing accounts of Monsignor Caccia’s relations with young boys.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
THE PACT
THE “ROMAN QUESTION” HAD BEDEVILED THE COUNTRY’S LEADERS ever since the Kingdom of Italy, formed on the ashes of the Papal States in 1861, gobbled up Rome nine years later. For a millennium, popes had ruled a large swath of the Italian peninsula, stretching at the time of Italian unification from Rome northward through Umbria and into Ferrara and Bologna. In 1860, as the Papal States were crumbling, Pius IX had excommunicated Italy’s king and announced that no Catholic could recognize his government.
For the next three decades, Pius IX and his successor, Leo XIII, had cast about for ways to retake the Eternal City. But by the end of the century, even the pope’s most fervent supporters realized that the effort was futile. The continuing conflict created international complications for the new Italian state, for leaders of Catholic countries were loath to visit its capital. The pope would not see them if they met with Italian government leaders, yet to visit Rome and fail to pay homage to the pope risked incurring unpleasant consequences back home.
At the turn of the century, things finally began to change. Alarmed by the rapidly growing socialist movement, Pius X lifted the ban on Catholics voting and running for national office. But the Holy See still refused to recognize the Italian government, and the Vatican’s legal status remained murky.1
In the summer of 1924, in the midst of the crisis sparked by Matteotti’s murder, Mussolini set up a special commission to review the laws affecting the Church. Its aim was to reduce the sources of friction between church and state. Because the Holy See still formally did not recognize Italy, the pope could not be seen collaborating with its government. But behind the scenes, working through Tacchi Venturi, he placed three prelates on the commission.2
The group met thirty-five tim
es in 1925. In February 1926, as it prepared to announce new draft laws, the pope wrote a long handwritten letter offering his opinion of its work. Addressed to his secretary of state, the letter was published in the Vatican newspaper.
The Church, the pope wrote, could not approve any agreement on the Church’s rights that was produced simply by a vote of parliament. Only direct negotiations between the government and the Holy See could bring about a new understanding.3
Mussolini was excited. The pope’s letter, he told his minister of justice and religion, was “of capital importance.” Having disposed of “the prejudices of liberalism,” the Duce explained, the Fascist regime “has repudiated both the principle of the state’s religious agnosticism, and the principle of separation of church and state.” His government had worked hard “to restore the character of being a Catholic State and a Catholic Nation.” It was time for negotiations to begin. As Mussolini was so quick to grasp, Pius XI was offering him the possibility of a historic agreement that would solidify support for his regime in a way that was otherwise unimaginable.4
Some diplomats doubted that the pope would ever end the Vatican’s formal state of enmity with Italy. By portraying itself as implacably opposed to the Italian government, the Vatican avoided awkward questions about why it was entirely in Italian hands. Should the pope—an Italian surrounded almost entirely by other Italians—make peace with the Italian state, observed America’s ambassador to Italy, he risked being seen as the king’s chaplain. What was supposed to be a universal institution would appear as essentially Italian. “The Church is convinced,” the ambassador advised Washington, “that its influence would be diminished rather than increased by a formal reconciliation with the Quirinal [the royal palace], and I should be surprised if this were to come about for years, if not indeed for centuries.”5
Undaunted by the skeptics, Mussolini did all he could to identify the Italian state with the Catholic Church.6 Declaring Saint Francis of Assisi “the most saintly of Italians, the most Italian of the saints,” he declared October 4 a national holiday in the saint’s honor. He provided Cardinal Merry del Val, the pope’s representative to the inaugural rites in Assisi, with a special train, offering military honors along the way; this would have been inconceivable before the March on Rome. The cardinal returned the favor: Mussolini, he told the crowd at Assisi, was “visibly protected by God.”7 The dictator also decided that the country should be self-sufficient not only in agriculture but in miracles as well. Unhappy that so many Italians were attracted to the French pilgrimage site of Lourdes, he built up worship of the Madonna of Loreto, to no little effect.8
When, in August 1926, the pope launched the negotiations, he chose a layman, Francesco Pacelli, to serve as his personal representative. If he avoided relying on his secretary of state—or even on a clergyman—for this purpose, it was in good part because the Vatican still did not formally recognize the Italian state. Born in 1872—four years before his better-known brother, Eugenio, the future pope Pius XII—Francesco Pacelli came from a Roman family that had served the popes for generations. When Rome fell to Italian troops in 1870, the city’s elite had divided into two factions. Those who embraced the new state were dubbed the white aristocracy, those loyal to the pope the black. The Pacelli family belonged to this aristocrazia nera.9 Following in his father’s footsteps, Francesco became a prominent Vatican lawyer.
Mussolini appointed Domenico Barone, a government lawyer, to represent him in the talks. Although both the pope and Mussolini were eager to keep them secret, there was no lack of gossip. Word reached as far as Chicago, where a news account told of the Duce’s purported eagerness to create “a city of the Pope.” Sensitive to the rumors, Romans began scrutinizing real estate sales, as a story was making the rounds that the pope was quietly buying up property, with the goal of creating a papal state that would stretch from St. Peter’s to the sea.10
The course of negotiations was anything but smooth. What most frequently proved a stumbling block was the pope’s fiercely protective attitude toward Catholic Action. Mussolini could never be comfortable with a group that he did not control. As a mass-membership organization over which he had no authority, Catholic Action constantly aroused his suspicion. He was certain that remnants of the Popular Party were finding a home there. But Pius viewed the organization as his main vehicle for spreading Catholic gospel to the Italian masses.
Reports of Fascist violence against Catholic Action groups had often provoked the pope’s anger. In June 1925, in one such case, squadristi sacked the Catholic Action headquarters in Padua; the pope had dispatched Tacchi Venturi to do something about it. The resulting police investigation detailed the tight links in that city between Catholic Action and the Popular Party.11 In this case and others, the pope’s Jesuit emissary did all he could to calm him. Catholic Action leaders had been repeatedly warned to keep their activities separate from the Popular Party, he reminded the pontiff. The Catholic Action groups were bringing the trouble on themselves. How, he asked, could the Vatican permit a Church organization to criticize the Fascist government that was “so well disposed to the Catholic religion”?12
Early in 1926, upset by the latest reports of violence against a Catholic Action headquarters, this time in the northern city of Brescia, the pope again told Tacchi Venturi to lodge a complaint. After meeting with government officials, the Jesuit again tried to get the pope and Gasparri to see things from Mussolini’s perspective. Many of the most active members of Catholic Action in Brescia, Tacchi Venturi reported, were also well-known Popular Party activists: “From this comes the confusion and almost identification of the one with the other.” He continued, “The government does not lack clear proof that the [Brescia] Catholic Action, along with its semi-official paper, Il Cittadino, is often nothing but the disguise used by the anti-government political party.”13
While local Fascists often took aim at adult Catholic Action groups, Mussolini was more exercised by the role played by the youth groups. As he solidified his dictatorship, he recognized how important it would be to mold children into loyal Fascists. A few months before the negotiations with the Vatican began, he announced the founding of his own national youth organization, the Opera Nazionale Balilla. It had four sections. The Balilla was for boys eight to fourteen, and the Avanguardisti for those fourteen to eighteen; they had their female counterparts in the Piccole italiane (Little Italian Girls) and the Giovani italiane (Female Italian Youth). Members wore quasi-military uniforms.14
For Mussolini, the Church’s national network of youth groups—ranging from the Catholic Boy Scouts through various Catholic Action organizations for older youths—offered unwanted competition. Gaining control of the youth was important enough to him to risk angering the pope. He began by outlawing the Boy Scout groups. Angered by the news, the pope sent Tacchi Venturi to warn him to back off.
In early 1927, upset not only by the dissolution of the Catholic Boy Scouts but by signs that the ban would soon extend to the Catholic Action youth groups, the pope ordered the talks suspended. He demanded that Catholic Action be specifically excluded from regulations that would allow only those non-Fascist youth groups whose activities were “predominantly religious.” Much of what drew youngsters to the Catholic groups was their recreational activities. Pius worried that if the groups offered only prayer and religious instruction, membership would dwindle. He sent Tacchi Venturi to give Mussolini an ultimatum: unless he relented, he could forget about reaching a deal on the Roman question. Realizing that he was in danger of overplaying his hand, in late February 1927 Mussolini sent word to his prefects to leave the Catholic Action youth groups alone. Pleased, the pope had Francesco Pacelli resume the talks.15
Over the next months, as the negotiations continued, the pope met with Pacelli several times a week. Fresh reports of Fascist violence against local Catholic groups would come in from time to time, and the pope would again threaten to break off the talks. But by now he had invested too much in the negoti
ations, and too much in his support for Mussolini and the Fascist regime, to risk having them fail. He blamed the violence on anticlerics surrounding Mussolini who were trying to thwart the dictator’s will. Other points of conflict arose as well. In April 1928 the pope complained about the recent creation of the Fascist girls’ organizations. He was especially pained by their practice of marching with muskets on their shoulders. But again, the fault was not Mussolini’s. “There are many things that are going on that Mussolini does not know about,” said the pope.16
The pontiff had earlier told the cardinals of the Curia that negotiations with the government were under way. But fearing that opposition might form, he decided against convening them until an agreement was reached. He worried in particular about Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti, an influential voice on international affairs known to be hostile to the Fascist regime. In order to remove Cerretti from Rome during the crucial months of the negotiations in 1928, he sent him to Sydney, Australia, as his legate to the International Eucharistic Congress. The cardinal would return only after the agreement was completed.17
In October 1928, just as an agreement seemed near, the pope got unwelcome news: the king was having second thoughts and might not sign it. Victor Emmanuel III—named after the man who had robbed the pope of his territories—was, the pope knew, no friend of the papacy. Two years earlier Pius XI had further antagonized the king when his mother, known for her Catholic devotion and good works, had died. The king had wanted the pope to preside over her funeral or at least offer a public tribute, but the pope would do neither. Count Dalla Torre, editor of the Vatican daily, had prepared a flattering obituary of the queen mother, but it was never published—the pope had forbidden it.18
Pius now worried that the years of difficult negotiations might all be for naught. Desperate to find a way to win the king’s approval, he focused on what he knew most bothered the monarch: the possible expansion of the lands under the pope’s control. He decided to abandon his earlier demand that the vast gardens of the Villa Doria Pamphili, on the Janiculum Hill above the Vatican, be added to Vatican territory.19
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