The Pope and Mussolini
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23. Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, p. 296; Monelli 1953, p. 109; De Felice 1966, p. 716.
24. Here I build on De Felice’s (1966, p. 717; 1968, pp. 50–51) interpretation.
CHAPTER 6: THE DICTATORSHIP
1. Exact numbers for membership in the Fascist militia, known as the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Voluntary Militia for National Security, or MVSN), are not available, given the difference between those who were effectively organized in the militia and those enrolled on paper, but it would seem that there were well over one hundred thousand effective members and perhaps two or three times that number.
2. Milza 2000, pp. 386–87.
3. Fornari 1971, pp. 101–11.
4. Tacchi Venturi’s draft letter to Mussolini, dated September 18, 1925, is found in an uninventoried series of documents in the CC archives and published in Sale 2007, pp. 364–65. I did not find the original or any copy of this letter in Mussolini’s own archives at the Central State Archives, so there is no proof I am aware of that it was sent. Franzinelli (1998, p. 45) reports the wedding date. Milza (2000, p. 401) reports on Rachele Mussolini’s lack of enthusiasm at being belatedly baptized. The account of the wedding is from R. Mussolini 1974, pp. 123–24.
5. Typical was his June 21, 1925, speech to the national congress of the PNF: “Those who have the responsibility for leading a revolution are like the generals responsible for conducting a war”; Discorsi di Benito Mussolini, “Discorso del 21 giugno 1925,” http://www.dittatori.it/discorso21giugno1925.htm.
6. Quoted in Baima Bollone 2007, p. 28.
7. That the powerful Duce did not intimidate Farinacci is clear from the ras’s reply the next day. “This morning your messenger brought me one of your usual ‘epistolary tantrums,’ ” wrote Farinacci. “I have fulfilled the engagements made at Rome, and you amaze me by saying I did not keep my promises.… The trial has become political? But this was known long ago; otherwise I would not be at Chieti.”
8. Fornari 1971, pp. 119–25, 135. The U.S. State Department files in the National Archives contain an intriguing series of documents from 1934 that offer a curious epilogue to the trial of Matteotti’s murderers. Amerigo Dumini, the ringleader of the murder, had sent a sealed package to a San Antonio lawyer, telling him that his life was in danger from certain enemies, naming Arturo Bocchini, national head of the Italian police, as principal among them. Dumini said that the ability to let it be known that the documents in the packet would be opened in case of his death could save him from assassination. The lawyer, not knowing who Dumini was, asked his friend, a Texas U.S. senator, to find out. In response to the senator’s request, the U.S. consul in Florence sent back a report to the State Department, informing it of Dumini’s role in the Matteotti murder. The State Department regarded the consul’s letter as too sensitive to send on to the Texas lawyer. Instead, it briefed the senator on the report and had him discreetly let the lawyer know what he was dealing with. NARA, M1423, reel 1, Arnold Cozey, San Antonio, to Joseph Haven, U.S. Consul in Florence, March 1, 1934; et seq.
9. Urso (2003, pp. 160–65) discusses Sarfatti’s role in introducing the theme of romanità and in crafting the cult of the Duce. The book had been first published outside Italy the previous year with a different title.
10. Duce is pronounced DOO-chay.
11. Quoted in Falasca-Zamponi 1997, pp. 64–65.
12. Quoted in Baima Bollone 2007, p. 78.
13. O. Russell, Annual Report 1925, April 21, 1926, C 5004/5004/22, in Hachey 1972, pp. 74, 77–78, sections 3, 14–18; Chaline 1996, p. 162; Agostino 1991, pp. 44–45; Morgan 1939, p. 205.
14. ACS, MI, DAGRA, b. 129, Vice Questore, Borgo, al Signor Questore, 21 gennaio 1925; Venini 2004, pp. 24–25.
15. “You are not fully Christian,” the pope pronounced on April 21, the birthday of Rome, “unless you are Catholic, and you are not fully Catholic unless you are Roman.” See Baxa 2006, p. 116.
16. In the middle of the Holy Year, Cardinal Merry del Val, fearful that Pius XI was being infected by the thousands of pilgrims who got the privilege of kissing his hand, reportedly proposed, and the pope agreed, that he wear gloves in the future. A. C. Jacobson, M.D., “To Guard the Hands that Pious Pilgrims Kiss,” WP, November 15, 1925, p. SM8.
17. The Pontifical Gendarmes consisted of a hundred men, with five officers, who with the Swiss Guards policed the Vatican.
18. Bosworth 2011, p. 180.
19. Father Martina (1978, pp. 226–27), one of the Church’s foremost historians, characterizes the pope’s vision, as expressed in Quas primas, as anachronistic. See also Bouthillon 1996; Verucci 1988, pp. 35–37; Chiron 2006, pp. 233–34.
20. Quas primas, English translation at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas_en.html. The quote is from paragraph 33. (There are 34 paragraphs in all.)
21. “Lutherans to Fight Papal Feast Edict,” NYT, March 21, 1926, p. 12.
22. Seldes (1934, p. 128) reports this as fact, although it admittedly has the ring of the apocryphal.
23. Beatrice Baskerville, “How the Pope Spends His 24 Hours,” BG, November 1, 1925, p. C5.
24. This episode is reported by the “noted Vatican informer,” who added that the pope was an “insensitive egoist.” ACS, MCPG, b. 155, 20 marzo 1926. In an otherwise admiring profile in the Boston Globe, the author similarly reported that “Prelates who were attached to Benedict XV think Pius XI somewhat cold.” Baskerville, “How the Pope Spends,” p. C5.
25. These reports, written by Mussolini’s informants, can now be found in the Central State Archives in Rome. The informants were not above peddling unconfirmed gossip or trying to besmirch the reputation of those they disliked. But as a result of the Fascist spy network that they constituted, we have a picture of the power struggles, backbiting, personality conflicts, and scandals in the Vatican that is richer than for any other period in history. Among the new police agencies that were added, the most feared was the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism (OVRA), a kind of elite political spy force. Fiorentino 1999; Canali 2004a. For more on the repressive measures introduced in 1925–26, see among many other sources Milza 2000, pp. 394–96; Gentile 2002, p. 153–54; CC 1926 IV, pp. 459–65, 560.
26. ACS, MCPG, b. 155, n.d. [1926]. The “noted Vatican informer” filled his reports with accounts of prelates’ complaints about the pope’s imperious personality and his rude treatment of them. Typical is one from October 28, 1927: “A Monsignor who often has occasion to talk with the Pope told me that, as time goes on, the Pope becomes increasingly frightful and authoritarian, and therefore one is afraid to speak with him.” ACS, MCPG, b. 156.
27. Ambassador Eugène Beyens, 10 février 1925, quoted in Ruysschaert 1996, pp. 252–53; Beyens 1934, pp. 286–87.
28. Cesare Pasini, “Il bibliotecario con la pistola,” OR, 19–20 novembre 2007, p. 5.
29. De Felice 1968, pp. 200–1; Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, pp. 326–27. Gibson apparently intended to kill the pope after she had shot Mussolini.
30. Baima Bollone 2007, p. 53.
31. “Mussolini si è salvato per un vero miracolo!” Il Regime fascista, 9 aprile 1926, p. 1.
32. Within hours of the attack, Tacchi Venturi was at Palazzo Chigi, carrying the pope’s personal expression of gratitude. ARSI, TV, b. 7, fasc. 431, Tacchi Venturi a Monsignor Pizzardo, 11 settembre 1926; De Felice 1968, p. 202.
33. De Felice 1968, pp. 204–8.
34. The message was delivered through Tacchi Venturi. DDI, series 1, vol. 4, n. 473, Grandi, Roma, a Mussolini, a Forlì, 1 novembre 1926.
35. Censorship had begun before this, but was less repressive. A July 15, 1923, law gave police the authority to fire newspaper editors and sequester copies of their newspapers if they published anything deemed injurious to Italy’s reputation or offensive to the king, pope, or Catholic Church. See Talbot 2007, p. 27
.
36. La Civiltà cattolica expressed its approval, while without comment, the Vatican daily reported the minister of justice’s speech to parliament, including his words affirming the support of the Catholic Church for the measure. CC 1926 IV, pp. 459–62; Rogari 1977, p. 174.
CHAPTER 7: ASSASSINS, PEDERASTS, AND SPIES
1. One of the more notable of these requests came in July 1928. Alcide De Gasperi—who had replaced Don Sturzo as head of the PPI and would become Italy’s prime minister following the Second World War—was arrested in 1927 for attempting to leave the country without permission and was jailed. Released in an amnesty the following year, he was told not to leave Rome. Eager to join his wife and children in their family home in northeastern Italy, he prepared an appeal to Mussolini. As De Gasperi was a well-known anti-Fascist, his friends convinced him that Mussolini would reject his plea unless he could get Tacchi Venturi to deliver it personally. Reluctantly, De Gasperi asked for the Jesuit’s assistance, but the pope’s emissary refused to help him. As De Gasperi explained in a handwritten note scribbled in the margin of his typed appeal to the Duce: “Not accepted by Father Tacchi because it contains no thanks for the amnesty and lacks any words of homage!” See De Gasperi 2004, p. 94.
2. ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 1320, informatore n. 204, Roma, 28 ottobre 1928.
3. Maryks 2012, p. 308.
4. Alongside the threat of what he termed “internal disintegration.”
5. ARSI, TV, b. 7, fasc. 430a, no date.
6. The booklet was Filippo Maria Tinti, Sionismo e Cattolicismo (Bari, 1926). ASMAE, Gab., b. 32, Tacchi Venturi a Marchese Giacomo Balucci, capo di gabinetto, 6 settembre 1926. Balucci replied that Mussolini appreciated receiving it. ASMAE, Gab., b. 32. Tacchi Venturi saw a link between the danger posed by the Jews and their various co-conspirators and the difficulty that the Church was having in enforcing its norms of morality. In a memo to Gasparri on December 1, he recommended ways of dealing with what he called the threat posed by the “antireligious” campaign in Italy. Every Catholic, he told Gasparri, rejoiced in seeing the Fascist government work ever harder in the interests of the Catholic Church, as it tied church and state together ever more firmly. But Mussolini’s efforts were encountering resistance in the provinces, where officials often ignored his orders. Standing in the way of the renaissance of religious sentiment, the Jesuit advised, were “the Jews, the Protestants, the Masons and the Bolsheviks, all constantly and powerfully allied against religion, against the Church, and against the National Government itself.” Here again Tacchi Venturi identified the conspiracy as aimed not at the Vatican alone but at Mussolini and the Fascist government as well. Aware of Mussolini’s sensitivity about Britain’s power, he added that the Jews and their allies, in so mercilessly seeking to weaken the Catholic Church, were working on behalf of “Anglo-Saxon hegemony.” This, he warned, “is putting in place a vast plan of conquest of Italy that is today religious, but tomorrow political.” ARSI, TV, b. 8, fasc. 446, Tacchi Venturi a Gasparri, 1 dicembre 1926, lettera con allegati.
7. The informant said he couldn’t vouch firsthand for the accuracy of the verse, or even if the whole story was made up, but it was making the rounds. In fact, other versions of the story cropped up elsewhere, each with a slightly different wording of the verse. ACS, MI, DAGRA, b. 1320, 1927.
8. “Stabs Jesuit Agent in Vatican Issue,” NYT, February 29, 1928.
9. “Anti-Mussolini Plot Seen in Rome Stabbing,” WP, March 1, 1928, p. 3.
10. “Father Tacchi Venturi,” one police informant’s report read, “is convinced that the aggression against him was related to the listing of his name some months ago right after that of the Duce in a list of people to eliminate. It is said that the list was compiled in France among circles composed of Freemasons and Italian exiles. They blame him, as a member of the Jesuit order, for having suggested to the Duce that he take repressive measures against the masonry and for this they had presumably ordered his death.” ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 1320, informatore, Roma, n.d.
11. The police chief also found it curious that after the police had expressed disbelief at finding the Jesuit’s name second on the list of targets, Tacchi Venturi’s secret report offered an explanation: Salvemini told the informant that “the Jesuit Order is completely fascist and they are the great pillar on which fascism rests.”
12. “The document,” wrote the police chief, “was clearly a fantastic and crude tissue of facts and news that reveals paradoxically an ignorance of the most basic political circumstances.” ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 59, pp. 15–16. Salvemini would later make his way to the United States, where in 1934 he would be given a chair at Harvard.
13. Two years earlier, when Violet Gibson had tried to assassinate Mussolini, the man had attempted to convince the police that the Irish woman was part of a plot that he knew all about. He had been in jail in Florence at the time, serving time for fraud, and the police undoubtedly suspected him of inventing the story to win his release. But no lead could be ignored in a case like this. Interviewed by police, he claimed that the assassination attempt was plotted by a previously unknown Irish women’s secret political society, in league with Italian anti-Fascist exiles in France. The police were not impressed. He got into trouble again trying to sell a secret weapon to the French military. It would, he claimed, stop the engines of enemy airplanes in midflight. It didn’t.
14. ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 1320, Roma, 20 marzo 1928.
15. Ibid., Roma, dal direttore, Capo Divisione Polizia Politica, 30 marzo 1928, p. 29.
16. The police chief also observed that, in trying to prevent the police from identifying his attacker, Tacchi Venturi had given a description of him very different from that provided by the doorman. The Jesuit had attributed the discrepancy to the fact that the doorman was becoming old and demented. But in the police chief’s view, the man was “not that poor muddle-headed scatterbrain that Father Tacchi would have us believe.” ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 1320, informatore, n.d.
17. “Naturally,” the police chief wrote in his final report, he had refused “to credit other absurd, not to say outrageous voices given the respectability of the Man, namely, of immoral relations between the victim and the aggressor.” ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 59, p. 13.
18. Whether Tacchi Venturi had actually had an affair or a sexual liaison, or had sexually abused a boy or a young man, remains in the realm of speculation. The evidence, while tantalizing, is far from conclusive. Several years later a report from a regular police informant related that Tacchi Venturi “has great affection for a young man who is not his relative. It may be his young secretary … I had it confirmed that this is his only true love.” ACS, MI, DAGR, b. 1320, informatore n. 590 (=Eduardo Drago), Roma, maggio 1936. For the identification of police informants by their coded number, I rely on Canali 2004a.
19. ACS, CR, b. 68, 4 maggio 1928.
20. In the usage at the time, pederast referred to a man having sexual relations either with boys or with young men.
21. Both men thought they were due a cardinal’s hat, and according to Mussolini’s “noted Vatican informer,” both were using their position at the pope’s side to poison him against Cardinal Gasparri, whom they blamed for turning the pope against them. If the pope was gradually excluding his old secretary of state from the most important decisions he was making, it was in part due to the influence that Samper and Caccia enjoyed. ACS, MCPG, b. 155, noto informatore vaticano, 1926. The note was most likely written in late June, as it references Samper’s disappointment at not being in the most recent list of newly appointed cardinals, and the consistory took place on June 21, 1926.
22. ACS, MCPG, b. 157, noto informatore vaticano, 23 luglio 1928. Indeed, Samper was not even Italian but Colombian. The informant had previously referred to the secret papal inquiry in his reports of 22 and 30 giugno. Samper’s mysterious suspension is mentioned in The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, Biographical Dictionary (1902–2012), online at http://www2.fiu.edu/~mirandas/bios-s.htm. In
his memoir of his years as unofficial French emissary to the Vatican, in 1914–18, Charles Loiseau (1960, p. 102) recalls Samper, then Benedict XV’s majordomo, fondly as “a young, wealthy prelate of handsome presence who then enjoyed the intimate favor of Benedict XV.” He learned only much later that Samper “had fallen into disgrace and that they had driven him from the Vatican for rather delicate reasons.… Whatever they might have been,” Loiseau added, “I retain a good memory of him.” The French ambassador, Fontenay, also discussed the mysterious dismissal in a report to Paris on December 17, 1928, cited in Chiron 2006, p. 152n57.
23. The “noted Vatican informer” also reported that Caccia employed the pope’s negotiator, Francesco Pacelli, to defend him. ACS, MCPG, b. 157, noto informatore vaticano, 30 giugno 1928.
24. Canali 2004a, p. 288.
25. De Felice (1968, p. 464) makes this point, noting that in this way Bocchini contrasted with his Nazi counterparts, Heydrich and Himmler, who were sadistic. Both of them, however, thought highly of Bocchini and sought his technical advice. According to the American journalist Thomas Morgan, who knew him, Bocchini was unhappy about Mussolini’s increasing embrace of the Nazis, and when he died in November 1940, still chief of police and in excellent health until then, suspicions of foul play fell on the Germans. Morgan 1941, p. 236.
26. De Felice 1968, p. 465.
27. Canali 2004a, pp. 283–84.
28. Ibid., p. 766n840. Much of the information Pucci sent in got reported through Pupeschi, who appears as informant no. 35 in the secret reports. In 1929 Pupeschi would report that when a cardinal pleaded with the pope to send Pucci away from the Vatican, the pope replied that he was too valuable in handling the press but would not be given any confidential missions—“and we,” the pope added, “will know how to keep an eye on him.” ACS, MI, FP “Cerretti,” informatore n. 35 (=Bice Pupeschi), Roma, 25 ottobre 1929.