The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  While Italians could be forgiven if they believed that the Fascist campaign against the Jews found favor in the Vatican, at least one influential Italian prelate sounded a dissonant note. His objection was surprising: Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan, had been one of Mussolini’s most vocal and enthusiastic supporters. Only the previous year the French ambassador to the Holy See had reported that Schuster, “known for his very Fascist sentiments,” had given a lecture to the School of Fascist Mysticism praising Mussolini for establishing a new Catholic Roman empire.23 In 1930 the archbishop had received a letter from three hundred Catholics in Milan berating him for his uncritical embrace of the Fascists, leading to a request from the government authorities to hand over the list of signatories.24 In September 1937 a police informant recounted that Schuster’s prospects for succeeding the sickly Pius XI were meeting strong resistance from cardinals outside Italy, who thought he was too closely linked to the Fascist regime.25

  But on Sunday, November 13, speaking in Milan’s Duomo, Schuster did what no one in the Vatican would do: he denounced Italy’s racial laws as a product of neopagan ideology, and argued that the Church could never accept them. “It is useless to want to establish a bilateral harmony between Religion and Fatherland. The Fascist State is creating its own ethic which has absolutely nothing in common with the religious idea.” He went on to accuse Mussolini of slavishly following Hitler, embracing a racist ideology of Nordic, pagan origin.

  With this one speech, Schuster fell from being darling of Milan’s Fascists to being enemy number one in the eyes of the party leadership. Only in 1951 would the text of his remarks finally appear in Milan’s diocesan journal, but the Catholic newspaper L’Italia reported it on November 15, generating excited discussion and amazement. As a secret police informer in Milan reported, people were especially chilled by the archbishop’s warning that the Nazis’ racist ideology would one day be turned against the Italians themselves. “On this point,” the informer wrote, “Cardinal Schuster expressed a fear that is extraordinarily widespread in northern Italy.”26

  The government did not respond to Pacelli’s letter protesting the marriage law. On November 22, three days after the law was officially published, Pacelli sent a brief new note to Pignatti expressing regret that the exceptions requested by the Vatican were not included.27 A week later Pignatti replied that while the government had tried to resolve the differences over the text of the new law and had been willing to make some exceptions, the Vatican would settle for nothing less than to have all marriages between two Catholics recognized, regardless of their race. The Fascist state could not accept this. Pignatti pointed out that the Vatican had recognized the “good ethical basis” of the state’s concerns and had advised “against marriages that raise the danger of producing defective children.”28

  If the Vatican protests of the racial laws were limited and muted, the chorus of denunciation coming from the United States was anything but. Given the Italians’ close ties to America, Mussolini worried they might be swayed. The Fascist press soon counterattacked. The reason the United States was being so critical, the newspapers explained, was that Jews there ran the government and controlled the press.

  A Roman newspaper charged that Jews had a “strangle-hold” on the country. It claimed that Jews occupied fifty-two of the seventy-five most important government positions in the United States and controlled 75 percent of American industry. The “same occult force which prevails in England, France, and Russia,” the paper reported, “is absolutely dominant in Washington. It is in Washington that anti-fascist activity and the plans of the democracies, which are a synonym for Jewry and Free Masonry, are coordinated.” Charging that President Roosevelt, “a Jew by race,” was the “Pope of World Jewry,” it asked when Italians would finally realize this awful truth.29

  The atmosphere in the Vatican was meanwhile becoming increasingly uncertain. As the international situation rapidly deteriorated, the pope was growing ever weaker. On November 25, Pius XI suffered a heart attack. Although once again he recovered, no one thought he could last long.30

  CARDINAL PACELLI REMAINED MUSSOLINI’S most powerful ally in the Vatican. Following Archbishop Schuster’s unexpected attack, Pignatti, worried that others might follow his lead, went to see the secretary of state to ask him to send written instructions to all of Italy’s bishops telling them not to criticize the anti-Semitic campaign.

  The Italian ambassador found Pacelli supportive but not eager to expose himself. “The Cardinal,” Pignatti wrote, “observed that it would be easy to give the advice that I was suggesting orally, but that, having to put it in writing it would become more difficult.” The ambassador knew Pacelli could be pressured and kept pushing. “In the end,” Pignatti told Ciano, “the secretary of state told me that something had already been done as far as the diocese of Rome went. In addition, he made a written note of my request, promising to study the best way to take care of Italy’s other dioceses.”31

  Mussolini was worried by signs that the racial laws might be eroding Italians’ enthusiasm for the regime. Police reports from cities with significant numbers of Jews told of widespread unhappiness. A police informant from Milan observed that while some people were being won over by the anti-Semitic propaganda, “a strong majority still find many of its measures exaggerated and condemn the head of the government and the Grand Council for having reached these decisions only after Germany imposed it as one of the necessary conditions for the Rome-Berlin axis.” People were also upset that the Fascists who were charged with implementing the policy were giving the jobs vacated by Jews to their own clients. They were also buying up Jewish properties at a small fraction of their value.32

  Italy’s Jews were desperate, having lost their jobs and property, their children thrown out of school. Formerly friendly Catholic neighbors now nervously crossed the street to avoid having to greet them. Rumors spread about Nazi plans to set up concentration camps. Jewish suicides multiplied. Angelo Formiggini, a well-known editor and poet, wrote to his colleagues that while he was a good Italian, he could not face the unending persecution. In a letter to his non-Jewish wife, he explained that only his death could free her from abuse. After mailing the letters, he climbed the 190 stairs to the top of the medieval tower that loomed over Modena’s central piazza and leaped out. A pool of blood dampened the cobblestones around his broken body.

  “He died just like a Jew,” quipped party head Achille Starace on hearing the news. “He threw himself from a tower to save the cost of a bullet.”33

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A CONVENIENT DEATH

  AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS OF NURTURING HIS PARTNERSHIP WITH THE Vatican, Mussolini was allowing his megalomania, his infatuation with the Third Reich, and his sense of invincibility to get in the way of his political judgment. The pope felt poorly used. Increasingly frail, he knew his own death could not be far off.

  The assault on the concordat in Italy and the persecution of the Church in Germany had produced unhappiness among the cardinals. “Our attitude on the racial question and especially toward the Jews,” Pignatti told Ciano in mid-December, “has had strong repercussions on the Sacred College, a majority of whom must now be considered not well disposed toward Fascism.” The cardinals worried that Mussolini might imitate Hitler and launch a campaign against the Church’s influence in Italy.

  The Italian dictator remained defiant and, as Pius saw it, wholly lacking in the respect due the pontiff. Disillusioned and despondent, the pope worried he had not been true to the sacred trust placed in him. He had let his patriotic sentiments as an Italian color his judgment. He vowed to do all he could in the little time he had left to make amends.

  Hearing of the pope’s new resolve, Pignatti became alarmed. “The pontiff threatened to do something before dying that would be remembered in Italy for a long time,” he told Ciano, underlining his words. Pius XI, he warned, might use the upcoming celebrations marking the tenth anniversary o
f the Lateran Accords to pronounce a wholesale “condemnation of Fascism.”1

  Told of this latest warning, Mussolini erupted. Pius could not die soon enough. Didn’t the pope realize all he had done for him? Italians had long resented the Church’s power. He, Mussolini, was the one who had kept the Church’s critics in check. If the pope wanted to play this game, he would play as well, for he knew how to “stimulate the people’s anti-clerical sensibilities.” The Church had long been in decline, stopped only because of his own efforts to shore it up. If Italians still attended mass, it was only because they knew that their Duce wanted them to go. After a stream of such fulminations, the dictator eventually calmed down and, no doubt encouraged by Ciano, grudgingly acknowledged that this was no time to have the pope call on Catholics to abandon him. He needed to find a way to prevent a break.2

  A French bishop visiting Rome in mid-December found the sickly pope restless, sad, discouraged, and still complaining about Mussolini’s failure to reply to his personal letter on the marriage law. “You are young,” Pius told the French prelate. “You will live to see more horrible things than the Church has seen for centuries.”3

  On the day before Christmas, the cardinals gathered around the pope at the Vatican to receive his annual blessing. Pacelli, Tardini, and the others of Pius’s entourage were nervous. Normally, he sent a copy of his text in advance to the secretary of state office, but not this time.

  Seated in his throne, the pope held his handwritten notes in his trembling hands. He began warmly enough. February 11 would mark the tenth anniversary of the concordat, he reminded the cardinals. Thanks should be offered to “the most noble sovereign and his incomparable minister, to whom credit is due if such an important and beneficial work was crowned by a good result and gratifying success.”

  But after praising Mussolini, he repeated the words that had so enraged the Duce a few months earlier: he lamented “the recent apotheosis in Rome prepared for a cross that is the enemy of the Cross of Christ.” He went on to link the swastika’s appearance in the Eternal City to the wound recently inflicted on the concordat and the persecution of members of Catholic Action.4

  Upset, Cardinal Pacelli tried to persuade the pope to delete the offending phrase about the swastika from the published version of his talk. It was irrelevant to the pope’s main point, he argued, since he had been focusing on Italy and not Germany. But Pius knew exactly what he was saying. He needed to warn Italians against the Nazis. Pacelli’s pleas, recalled Tardini, were all in vain: “The pope held firm.” L’Osservatore romano published his full text the next day.5

  Mussolini was again angry, viewing the pope’s remarks as yet another attack on the Rome-Berlin axis.6 The upcoming anniversary of the Lateran Accords was taking on all the appearance of a dramatic showdown. The pope believed Mussolini had a choice: he could use the day to show the world he still stood by the agreements; or by snubbing the pope, he could declare war on the Vatican. The nuncio, eager to ease tensions, proposed that the Duce visit Pius XI on the anniversary, but the dictator dismissed the suggestion. He had gone once to pay tribute to the pope. He would not go again.7

  The men of the Duce’s inner circle worried that he was losing touch with reality. At times Mussolini clearly recognized the importance of Vatican support and even criticized Hitler for antagonizing the Church. But he was getting ever more reckless. At year’s end, at his coastal retreat in Romagna, he brooded over the fateful decisions to be made in the next months. The French ambassador to Italy captured the scene: “The dictator’s friends, his intimates are … the first to confirm that he is surrounding himself with an ever more impenetrable secrecy, that he is no longer the person he once was, that he is much changed, that he no longer receives anyone and that no one, today, except perhaps Ciano, would know what he is preparing to do and toward what end he is moving.”8

  ––

  THE DUCE’S AFFAIR WITH Clara Petacci was increasingly the subject of snide remarks, but he was unwilling to give her up. Two months earlier one of his former maids had come to ask for help. He gave her some money, but before leaving, she timorously asked if he realized what people all over Rome were saying. He reluctantly urged her to speak up. “They say,” she told him, “that you have a young lover who is the daughter of a big shot in the Vatican.”

  “The usual gossip, fantasie,” replied the Duce, who was not pleased. He had had many lovers over the past years and had not been overly concerned about word of them hurting his reputation. In fact, he rather thought they helped his image. But to be linked to the Vatican in this way was distasteful to him.9

  Back in his office on New Year’s Day, Mussolini phoned Clara at 9:15 A.M., then three times more before, at 2:15 P.M., calling to say he was ready to have her join him. When she arrived, he was sitting in an armchair in the dark, with only a little light on by his side. He fell asleep. When he awoke, he asked her to sit on his lap, and then they made love. He ate a tangerine as he dressed, then returned to his office, coming back at 7:30 P.M. Sitting with a stack of papers, he muttered various deprecations as he read: “These French pigs! Listen to this.… What idiots!” He paced, working himself into a foul mood, and told Clara he hated her, as he often did before showering her with protestations of his love. “I never loved anyone,” he said. “I have had many women, but it’s been a revolving door.” He was now much less wild, he told her, and kept up relations with only the two women she knew about—Romilda Ruspi and Alice Pallottelli—and only because they had given birth to his children. He had once loved Margherita Sarfatti, he admitted, but only for a couple of years, and he had constantly betrayed her as well. They turned on the phonograph and listened to Beethoven’s Fifth, cuddling up with Clara’s fur coat stretched over them. “He holds me with my head on his chest and caresses me every so often,” Clara wrote in her diary, “but he is always a little distracted.”10

  The next day the Duce summoned both Ciano and Pignatti to discuss the latest developments. He was still mulling over the phrase “incomparable minister” that the pope had used in referring to him in his Christmas address. He was sure the pope was being sarcastic, taking him for a fool. “We do not want a conflict,” Mussolini told the two men, “but we will not shy away from one, and in that case we shall arouse all the dormant anticlerical rancor.” Fearful of where Mussolini’s temper might lead, Pignatti tried to defend the pontiff, and Ciano too thought it madness to risk alienating the Church. But Mussolini wanted to apply pressure and prepared a sharp note of warning for his ambassador to deliver to the Vatican secretary of state.11

  Pignatti presented the Duce’s note to Pacelli the next day. The cardinal insisted that the phrase that had so upset Mussolini—“incomparable minister”—had been sincere. The pope had intended to express his appreciation for all that Mussolini had done for Italy and the Church. Pignatti replied that relations with the Holy See were at a dangerous juncture. If the Church were not careful, he warned, it would find itself in trouble.12

  What made the past months so painful to the pope was his realization that his dreams of turning Italy into a confessional state—one where the machinery of the authoritarian regime would be at the service of the Church—had been so naïve. True, he had been able to do what no modern pope before him had done: get the government to impose the Church’s will on the Italian population. Catholic clergy now played active roles in many state institutions—from schools to government-sponsored youth groups—where before they had been absent. But the battle over the marriage law had made it clear that for any matter that Mussolini deemed crucial to his regime, it was he who would decide, not the pope.

  The London Daily Mail published a story by its Rome correspondent claiming that Pius XI was planning a secret gathering of the cardinals to draft a ringing denunciation of racism. Rumors spread that the pope was preparing a secret encyclical with the same aim. Cardinal Pacelli denied the reports but told the Italian ambassador that the pope had warned that he “would have more to say and that at
his age he had no fear.” In conveying these remarks to Ciano, Pignatti nervously recalled the pope’s comment that “before dying, he might do something that Italy would remember for a long time.”13

  THE POPE’S CRITICAL REMARKS about racism had left Italy’s Church leaders some room to voice criticisms of their own. Cardinal Schuster of Milan had been the most clamorous case. The possibility that other high prelates might follow his example had Mussolini and his acolytes worried.14

  Roberto Farinacci led the attack on Schuster, asking in Il Regime fascista how someone who had been a “super-Fascist” could so suddenly go to the other extreme. It could certainly have nothing to do with the Catholic religion, Farinacci argued, for in battling the Jews, Fascism was fighting “the enemies of Christianity, who offend and insult Christ.”15 Farinacci turned to the influential head of the Catholic University of Milan for help. Father Gemelli, the rector, was scheduled to give a major public lecture in Bologna.

  Two days before it was to take place, Farinacci sent Mussolini a letter, telling the Duce how he had recently gotten Giovanni Cazzani, the bishop of Cremona, to give a sermon supporting the anti-Semitic campaign. Then he added, “I hope to have persuaded Father Gemelli to give one of the same kind in Bologna.”

  A week later L’Osservatore romano, the Vatican daily, would publish the Cremona bishop’s sermon, which had all the appearance of offering a Vatican endorsement of the anti-Semitic laws. All of Italy’s bishops were in agreement on the treatment of the Jews, the paper’s editor explained in his preface, and their views were in perfect harmony with the pope’s.