The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  Mussolini increasingly found his strength in the adulation of the crowds. A ceremony held in Rome three months after Arnaldo’s death was one of scores of such rituals that fed his ever-growing sense that he was a man of destiny who would lead Italy to new greatness. It was the thirteenth anniversary of the founding of the Fascist movement. An unending stream of Blackshirts, from children to old men, marched in formation toward Piazza Venezia. A squad of airplanes flew overhead, as scores of musical bands played the Fascist hymns. Fascist cries of “alalà!” pierced the air. By six P.M. the planes were gone, but tens of thousands of delirious Fascists still filled the immense piazza, waving their banners. Veterans of the Great War, veterans of the March on Rome, members of Fascist youth groups, workers, university students, people of all ages and occupations pressed toward the balcony from which Mussolini would speak. As the joyous crowd glimpsed the dictator at his window, his right arm raised in Roman salute, the bands struck up the Fascist anthem, “Giovinezza,” and thousands of voices sang together in holy communion.

  “Du-ce! Du-ce!” they chanted. In its glowing description, Il Popolo d’Italia, the Mussolinis’ newspaper, remarked that the demonstration was like “an immense religious rite of faith.” When the call of “attention” rang out, the thunderous noise died down, and an eerie, expectant silence fell over the piazza. Mussolini, wearing his Fascist militia uniform, his head uncovered, addressed the crowd. He ended, as he often did, with his trademark refrain, asking: “For whom is Italy?” “For us!” tens of thousands of voices responded together. After he left, two, three times the crowd got him to return to the balcony, his hand raised in Roman salute offering a kind of benediction. Finally, emotionally spent but glowing with energy and pride, the Fascists, old and young, made their way home. Italians throughout the country would endlessly repeat the rite in the coming months and years.43

  The Catholic clergy played a crucial role in lending the Duce cult a religious flavor, promoting a heady mix of Fascist and Catholic ritual. Priests were an integral part of the Fascist youth organizations; twenty-five hundred chaplains ministered to over four million members. Appointed to oversee the chaplains’ work was a bishop devoted entirely to Fascist youth. They helped ensure that Italians of the future would see their allegiance to the Catholic Church and their allegiance to Mussolini and Fascism as two sides of the same coin.44

  In October 1933, in one of many such instances, 152 priests serving as chaplains to the Fascist militia gathered at Palazzo Venezia. As their hero looked on, they sang a musical tribute they had prepared for him, titled “Acclamation to the Duce.”

  Hail to You indomitable Duce

  Savior of our land

  In peace and in war

  We are ready to follow Your signals

  Inspiration and force, guide and light

  To the new heroes of Italy, you are the Leader

  Duce to us, Duce to us!45

  Major Fascist rituals typically began with a morning mass, celebrated by a priest (in a small town) or by a bishop (in a city). A parade and rally followed, and a message from the Duce was read. Churches and cathedrals were important props in these rites, adding to their emotional power. For the 1933 anniversary of the March on Rome, the stark image of Mussolini’s face was projected at night halfway up Milan’s Duomo; the spectral visage towered over the crowd. “The Pope,” remarked European historian Piers Brendon, “gave the impression that the Catholic Church in Italy was the Fascist party at prayer; and he implied that the citizen, like the worshipper, might best do his duty on his knees.”46

  The few priests who dared say anything remotely critical of the Fascist regime were reported by local Fascists to the authorities. Many such complaints were dealt with at the local level, as bishops disciplined their wayward priests. But when a bishop balked, the matter was taken to Rome. Among the duties of Italy’s ambassador to the Holy See was getting the Vatican to act when such reports came in. In a typical case, in November 1932, the Vatican received a complaint about a parish priest in the diocese of Cremona. The local bishop was told to investigate. When he tried to minimize the offense, Monsignor Pizzardo informed him that his response was inadequate. The bishop was to have the priest use the next possible opportunity “to give a speech in the opposite sense from the one he gave on November 4 that did not give a good impression.”47

  A few months later the pope acted on complaints that Giovanni Montini, the chaplain of the Catholic Action university organization, was anti-Fascist: he dismissed him from his position. Upset, Montini, whose father had been a Popular Party deputy in parliament, directed his anger not at the pontiff but at Pizzardo, who had conveyed the pope’s decision. Pizzardo, he complained, had fired him without “a word of comfort, of esteem, of praise.” A few years later the pope, by then less enamored of Mussolini, would rehabilitate Montini. The detour would do nothing to damage Montini’s career, for three decades later he would ascend St. Peter’s throne, taking the name Pope Paul VI.48

  In 1932 Mussolini announced that the handshake—a “bourgeois” custom—was to be replaced by the more virile Roman salute. He not only required university professors to take a Fascist oath of allegiance but insisted they wear black shirts on graduation days. By the end of 1934, all elementary school teachers had to wear a black shirt and party uniform whenever they were in school.49

  Earlier that year another plebiscite was held. Turin’s diocesan weekly expressed the same sentiment that Catholics throughout the country were hearing from their priests and bishops: “Catholics of Turin! To the urns to give your consensus to the government of Benito Mussolini.… Anti-Fascism is finished.”50 It was the last election that Mussolini would bother holding. Ten million Italians voted yes, only fifteen thousand no.51

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  THE PROTESTANT ENEMY AND THE JEWS

  ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 11, 1932, THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY of the Lateran Accords, a caravan of four black limousines made its way to the Vatican, with festively dressed carabinieri on horseback riding among them. Saluted at their entry into Vatican City by Swiss Guards, the cars entered the San Damaso Courtyard. There they were met by Papal Gendarmes, who carried a papal flag aloft, and a contingent of the Palatine Guard of Honor, in their neck ruffs, with small curved swords in gleaming halberds strapped to their sides. Mussolini emerged, dressed in his swallowtailed diplomatic uniform. Lavish gold designs covered his sleeves, and a wide gold stripe ran down the sides of his trousers. He carried his plumed hat in one hand, a ceremonial sword strapped to his waist.1

  The press had been speculating about the visit for months. The previous September, three days after Mussolini and Tacchi Venturi signed their agreement ending the battle over Catholic Action, a front-page New York Times headline announced “Mussolini Will Visit the Pope This Week.”2 Thereafter a steady stream of newspaper stories and diplomats’ dispatches reported that the Duce’s long-awaited papal visit was soon to take place, but each predicted date passed without any meeting.3 Finally Mussolini fixed the visit for February.4

  In preparation, Pius XI awarded the dictator a special papal honor. On a January morning, Borgongini arrived at Palazzo Venezia for the presentation. A beaming Duce, formally dressed in morning coat, proudly welcomed him. The nuncio presented him with a papal brief. Mussolini studied the scroll carefully. “I am one of the few Italians who can read and understand Latin!” he boasted implausibly. The nuncio then gave the dictator the pope’s gift, the Collar of the Golden Militia, a beautiful golden collar with a gold cross. The former anticlerical rabble-rouser was now a knight of the papal court.5

  On the day of the historic meeting with the pope, Mussolini arrived with the papal cross hanging over his chest. He was a dozen minutes early, and embarrassingly, Monsignor Pizzardo, charged with greeting him, was nowhere to be seen. The papal guards had no idea what to do other than to remain at attention and salute. Alongside the door, given the honor of being among the first to see the Duce’s arrival, stood
the pope’s elderly sister. She was certainly not going to say anything. At last Pizzardo scurried down the stairs, running late because the pope had kept him in his library giving last-minute instructions. Accompanied by various gendarmes, Swiss Guards, and papal chamberlains, they climbed the stairs.

  Mussolini made his way up the broad winding staircase toward the Clementine Hall. The top two-thirds of the towering walls of the ornate hall and all of its ceiling were covered in Renaissance frescoes. On one wall, a frieze depicted the cardinal virtues, while a frieze on the facing wall depicted the theological virtues. Alberti’s fresco The Apotheosis of St. Clement adorned the ceiling. Colorful mosaics covered the lower portion of the walls and the whole floor of the large rectangular room. The twenty people who had been invited to witness the Duce’s historic arrival there seemed lost amid its grandeur.

  Mussolini greeted by Monsignor Pizzardo on his arrival at the Vatican to meet with the pope, February 11, 1932

  (photograph credit 14.1)

  But when Monsignor Caccia Dominioni, master of ceremonies and in charge of accompanying Mussolini to the pope’s library, entered the hall to greet the Duce, he was taken aback. There amid the formally dressed men stood a woman, a foreign journalist. This was impossible. No woman was allowed to be present for such an occasion. And Mussolini was already halfway up the stairs.

  “Signorina,” Caccia pleaded, “I beg you to leave immediately.”

  The blond woman’s face reddened with embarrassment, but she stood her ground. “I have a perfect right to be here, Monsignor,” she replied.

  “Rights here are decided by me,” he responded. “You have no right to be here. I am acting under the orders of the Holy Father.”

  The woman waved her invitation in reproach. Caccia, hearing Mussolini’s party ascend the stairs, grew frantic. “Signorina, I do not want to adopt anything but kind words.” He glanced at a couple of the imposing gendarmes standing nearby. “But if you do not leave immediately you will force me to act.”

  Angry and humiliated, the woman relented, and a prelate guided her to a back exit. Just then Mussolini entered, and Caccia greeted him effusively. The Swiss Guards presented their arms, their swords aloft.

  Caccia led Mussolini through a series of grand halls, each with a contingent of papal troops, Noble Guards, and high Church officials. They reached the Small Throne Room, and from there the Duce entered the pope’s library, where Pius awaited him.6 As had been previously arranged at the Duce’s insistence, Mussolini neither bowed nor kissed the pope’s ring, obeisances that were customarily expected of a Catholic head of government. The pope would allow no photograph to be taken, but an artist for a popular newsweekly captured the scene for the public. It showed the pope, wearing his white robe, white papal cap, and red shoes, sitting in one of his richly upholstered red armchairs in front of his desk facing Mussolini, who sat wearing his embroidered diplomatic jacket and yellow-striped pants, the pope’s cross around his neck.7

  Mussolini and the pope, in the pope’s library, February 11, 1932

  (photograph credit 14.2)

  The historic meeting generated worldwide press coverage. “Pope and Duce Clasp Hands in Friendship Pact,” read the Chicago Daily Tribune headline. The front-page New York Times headline declared “Pope and Mussolini Show Warm Feeling in Vatican Meeting.”8 But the best description we have of their encounter—the only time the two men would ever meet—comes from Mussolini himself, who wrote an account by hand to send to the king.

  The pope invited him to sit, asking how his daughter, Edda, was doing in Shanghai, where her husband was serving as Italian consul.

  After a minimum of such pleasantries, Pius brought up the subject he thought most pressing. Protestant proselytizing, he told a surprised Mussolini—who was not expecting this to be at the top of the agenda for the meeting—“is making progress in almost all of Italy’s dioceses, as shown in a study that I had the bishops do. The Protestants are becoming ever bolder, and they speak of ‘missions’ they want to organize in Italy.” They were taking advantage of the concordat’s unfortunate language, which referred to non-Catholic religions as “admitted” cults. The pope had opposed that phrase, preferring that they be described as “tolerated.”

  Mussolini pointed out that only 135,000 Protestants lived in Italy, 37,000 of them foreigners—a mere speck amid 42 million Catholics.

  The pope acknowledged that the Protestants were few but argued that the threat was nonetheless great. He handed the Duce a lengthy report on the question. Over the next years he would bombard the dictator with requests to keep the Protestants in check.

  The conversation then turned to the recent conflict over Catholic Action, and here we must treat Mussolini’s account of the pope’s words with caution. After expressing his pleasure that the dispute had been settled amicably, the pope added—according to the Duce—“I do not see, in the complex of Fascist doctrines—which tend to affirm the principles of order, authority, and discipline—anything that is contrary to Catholic teachings.”

  The pope added that he could understand the principle of “totalitarian fascism,” but this could refer only to the material realm. There were also spiritual needs, he said, and for these what was needed was “Catholic totalitarianism.”

  “I agreed with the Holy Father’s opinion,” commented Mussolini. “State and Church operate on two different ‘planes’ and therefore—once their reciprocal spheres are delimited—they can collaborate together.”

  Finally the pope expressed his distress at what was going on in Russia where, he said, the Bolsheviks were intent on destroying Christianity. “Beneath this,” said Pius, “there is also the anti-Christian loathing of Judaism.” When he was nuncio in Poland, he recalled, “I saw that in all the Bolshevik regiments the civilian commissars were Jews.” The pope thought Italy’s Jews an exception. He fondly told the Duce of a Jew in Milan who had made a major gift to the church, and of the help that Milan’s rabbi had given him in deciphering “certain nuances of the Hebrew language.”

  At the end of the meeting, the pontiff presented the Duce with three more papal medals.9 Mussolini then made his way to the secretary of state’s office, where he spent twenty minutes with Cardinal Pacelli. Then he was escorted down into St. Peter’s to kneel before the Altar of the Madonna. When newspaper photographers tried to take a photo of him in prayer, he abruptly got up and shooed them away. “No. No. When one is praying,” he said, “one should not be photographed.”10 No one would photograph the dictator on his knees.

  Mussolini arrived home in an ebullient mood. Eager to hear details of the visit, his children gathered around him. Rachele was less impressed, interrupting his glowing account by asking acidly: “Did you also kiss his feet?” On this note, his narration came to an abrupt end.11

  The next month, in an orgy of honorifics, Mussolini and the king reciprocated the honors. They bestowed on Cardinal Pacelli the Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation—Italy’s highest decoration, making him a “cousin” of the king—and awarded the Grand Cross of Saints Maurice and Lazarus to Pacelli’s two undersecretaries of state, Monsignors Pizzardo and Ottaviani. But what most caught the attention of the clergy was the honor given to someone who had no official Vatican position at all: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, too, received a Grand Cross.12

  Mussolini at the Vatican following his meeting with the pope, February 11, 1932; from front left: Monsignor Caccia Dominioni, Cesare De Vecchi, Mussolini

  (photograph credit 14.3)

  The pope now settled into a period of collaboration with the Italian dictator. To the bishop of Nice, who happened to be in Rome, the pope explained that it was thanks to Mussolini that the Catholic Church once again occupied a powerful position in Italy. When the bishop reminded him of the recent bruising battle over Catholic Action, the pope blamed it on the anticlerics who surrounded Mussolini. “I can still see him,” said the pope, “sitting in the same seat where you are sitting, telling me, ‘I recognize that we
made some mistakes, but I had to battle against my entire staff.’ ”13

  ––

  THAT SAME YEAR THE pope celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, triggering an outpouring of admiration in the world’s press. In a lengthy article, The New York Times Magazine gushed about the “surprising discovery” that behind the “quiet scholarliness of the Prefect of the Vatican Library were the traits of a born ruler of men.” (The Times portrait unknowingly echoed a comment Cesare De Vecchi had made after a meeting with the pope three years earlier: “Every other will gives way before that of the Holy Father,” he said, adding that he could easily imagine Pius XI at the head of a government or an army. “Every possible intrigue crumbles on contact with this block of granite.”)14 Pius still had the vigorous step of a younger man, the Times article affirmed, and spent virtually all his waking hours at work.15

  The pope certainly kept a crushing schedule. During the 1933–34 Holy Year, two million pilgrims would come to Rome, and he met with many of them, making innumerable speeches and celebrating countless masses. Marking the nineteen hundredth anniversary of the crucifixion, the Holy Year ran from Easter to Easter.16

  Pius XI was no orator. At public audiences, he made up his remarks as he went along, delivering them in a slow staccato, pausing as he considered each new thought. He often spoke of “the House of the Father” or “the Common Father of the faithful.” Other times he took advantage of a saint’s day or seized on some characteristic—national or occupational—of the visiting group to develop his theme. He had a well-deserved reputation for long-windedness, and given the length of his speeches, the size of the crowds he drew, and the often-stifling heat, it was not unusual for someone in the audience to faint before he finished. During Lent in 1934 he lectured a group of preachers on the virtue of keeping sermons brief—speaking for forty-five minutes to make his point.17