David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini"

Mussolini with children in a Fascist youth group, 1938

There being no school in Desio, at age ten Achille was sent to live with his uncle, a parish priest in the tiny town of Asso, near Lake Como. The frequent presence of neighboring priests, a gregarious lot, warmed his uncle’s household. Achille decided that he too wanted to be a priest and soon went off to a seminary. He returned each summer, not to his parents but to his uncle. The seminary enforced a ferocious discipline. Priests were to be obeyed without question, and rules were to be followed to the letter. None of this bothered the studious boy. 12 His classmates called him “the little old man,” for Achille would rather be left alone to his meditations than play with the other children. 13 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.9)

Steeped in a Church in which such views of Jews were deeply engrained, Ratti could not help being affected by the deep anti-Semitism he encountered in Poland. The various written reports he received from members of the Polish Catholic elite told him how preoccupied they were with the Jewish threat. Jews were accused of having sided with the German invaders in the recent war and of serving as rapacious moneylenders in towns and villages throughout the country. Ratti was especially struck by their charge that the spreading Bolshevik movement was the work of the Jews. 24 In October 1918 he attributed the latest unrest in Poland to “the extremist parties bent on disorder: the socialist-anarchists, the Bolsheviks … and the Jews.” 25 A wave of pogroms in Poland led to the murder of many Jews and the torching of their homes. Asked by Benedict XV—less sympathetic to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories than his predecessors—to verify whether the stories of these pogroms were true, Ratti responded that it was difficult to tell. But he insisted that the Jews were a dangerous element: although the people of Poland were good and loyal Catholics, he feared “that they may fall into the clutches of the evil influences that are laying a trap for them and threatening them.” Ratti left no doubt as to who these enemies were, adding: “One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and the most evil, is that of the Jews.” 26

In the fall of 1919 the Vatican officially recognized the new Polish state. Ratti’s mission was extended, and he was appointed papal nuncio. The following summer the Red Army, after a series of battles with Polish forces in the Baltic and in Ukraine, advanced into Poland and approached Warsaw itself. Men, women, and children armed themselves, ready to defend their city. While many foreigners fled, Ratti stood his ground. On August 15, as the armed inhabitants waited nervously, a Polish counteroffensive drove off the Bolshevik troops. For Ratti, the experience was traumatic. The conviction that the Western democracies failed to understand the Communist threat would stay with him the rest of his life. 27 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.13-4)

In Lausanne in 1904, Mussolini agreed to debate a local Protestant pastor on the existence of God. After trying to impress his audience with citations ranging from Galileo to Robespierre, he climbed onto a table, took out a pocket watch, and bellowed that if there really was a God, He should strike him dead in the next five minutes. Benito’s first publication, titled “God Does Not Exist,” came the same year. He kept up his attacks on the Church, branding priests “black microbes, as disastrous to humanity as tuberculosis microbes.” 3 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.20)

Along with the rest of the establishment, the Church was one of the fascists’ early targets. Mussolini called for seizing the property of religious congregations and ending state subsidies for the Church. In a November 1919 article in Il Popolo d’Italia, he invited the pope to leave Rome, and a month later he expressed his hatred for all forms of Christianity. 18

The fascists got their first chance to run candidates for parliament that same month, but it proved a great embarrassment. 19 In Milan they received under two percent of the vote and failed to elect anyone. Nationally, they elected only one deputy. 20 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.25)

Shortly after the new parliament convened, Mussolini rose to give his first speech. It would prove memorable. Hundreds of millions of Catholics throughout the world looked to Rome as their spiritual home, he said. This was a source of strength that Italy could not ignore. Fascism, he pledged, to the shock of many who knew him, would help bring about the restoration of Christian society. It would build a Catholic state befitting a Catholic nation. 25

Mussolini’s surprising embrace of the Church came without any previous consultation with Vatican authorities. The Catholic Popular Party stood in the way of his efforts to portray himself as the country’s best hope for stopping the Socialists. To get the pope to abandon it, he would have to convince him that he could help the Church more than the Popular Party could. In November the fascist movement formally became the Fascist political party and adopted a new program. Gone was all mention of expropriating Church property and separating church and state. 26

In trying to enlist Vatican support, Mussolini had his carrot—ending the liberal democratic regime and imposing an authoritarian Catholic state—and his stick. Indeed, he literally did have a stick, the dreaded manganello, the wooden truncheon proudly wielded by the Blackshirts. From the Fascists’ perspective, the Popular Party was part of a larger network of Catholic institutions in the countryside that stood in their way. At the local level, this obstruction included Catholic Action groups—groups of Catholic laymen and women engaged in religious activity under ecclesiastical supervision—and various Catholic cooperatives. The squadristi saw all as fair game for their bloody nighttime raids. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.27-8)

THE POPE ’ S DECISION TO consider supporting Mussolini surprised many in the Church. None was more embarrassed than Father Enrico Rosa, editor of La Civiltà cattolica, who up to the time Mussolini came to power had used the journal’s pages to denounce Fascism as one of the Church’s worst enemies. Days before the March on Rome, Rosa had warned that the Fascist movement was “violent and anti-Christian, headed by sinister men … the failed effort of the old liberalism, of Masons, rural landowners, rich industrialists, journalists, tinhorn politicians and the like.” 16

La Civiltà cattolica had been founded in 1850, shortly after Pope Pius IX returned to Rome following the 1848 uprising that had driven him into exile. Twice a month the editor took the proofs of the upcoming issue to the Vatican secretary of state office for approval before publication. 17

The fifty-two-year-old Rosa had joined the Jesuit editorial collective seventeen years earlier and been appointed its head by Pope Benedict XV in 1915. Despite his experience, he had somehow missed the signs of the pope’s change of course. Reading Rosa’s latest anti-Fascist tirade, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, a man for whom Fascism would prove particularly congenial, was furious. He instructed Rosa to change his tune. 18 Even worse, Rosa learned that Pius XI too had had a change of heart. The pope had seen something in Mussolini he liked. Despite all their differences, the two men shared some important values. Neither had any sympathy for parliamentary democracy. Neither believed in freedom of speech or freedom of association. Both saw Communism as a grave threat. 19 Both thought Italy was mired in crisis and that the current political system was beyond salvation.

A conversation the pope had with Father Agostino Gemelli—recent founder of the Catholic University of Milan and a man close to the pontiff—offers a glimpse of Pius XI’s attitude toward Mussolini in the first weeks of the new government. “Praise, no,” the pope told him. But “openly organizing opposition is not a good idea, for we have many interests to protect.” Caution was needed. “Eyes open!” he advised. 20

The pope instructed Rosa to throw out the critical piece on Fascism that he had drafted for the upcoming issue of his journal and publish a friendlier editorial in its place. 21 “When a form of government is legitimately constituted,” Rosa now wrote, “even though it may initially have been defective or even questionable in various ways … it is one’s duty to support it, for public order or the common good requires it. Nor is it permitted to either individuals or to parties to plot to defeat it or supplant it or change it with unjust means.” 22

While La Civiltà cattolica would continue to denounce episodes of Fascist violence aimed at Catholic organizations, it would never again denounce Mussolini or Fascism. Quite the opposite: the journal would work on the Vatican’s behalf to legitimate Fascism in the eyes of all good Catholics, in Italy and beyond. 23

THE POPE’ S NEWFOUND HOPES for Mussolini got a further lift when the prime minister concluded his first address to parliament by asking for God’s help; no Italian government head since the founding of modern Italy had ever let the word God out of his mouth. Secretary of State Gasparri also saw grounds for hope. “Providence makes use of strange instruments to bring good fortune to Italy,” he told the Belgian ambassador: Mussolini was not only a “remarkable organizer” but a “great character.” Admittedly, the new prime minister knew nothing of religion, Gasparri added with a chuckle: Mussolini thought all Catholic holidays fell on Sundays. 24

Pius XI set out the goals for his papacy in his first encyclical, Ubi arcano, in December 1922. 25 He lamented attempts to take Jesus Christ out of the schools and out of the halls of government. He bewailed women’s lack of propriety in “the increasing immodesty of their dress and conversation and by their participation in shameful dances.” The notion that, in turning away from the Church, society was advancing, he warned, was mistaken: “In the face of our much praised progress, we behold with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.” He stressed the importance of obedience to proper authority and took up Pius X’s program of battling “modernism.” He belittled the new League of Nations, on which so many in Europe were pinning their hopes for peace: “No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity.” The pope’s plan was to bring about the Kingdom of Christ on earth. At heart, it was a medieval vision. 26 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.47-9)

Local Catholic Action groups, created by Pius X in 1905 to provide a framework for organizing the Catholic laity, were among the most frequent targets of these attacks. 46 No group was dearer to Pius XI, who earned a reputation as “the Pope of Catholic Action.” Men and women, boys and girls each had their own groups. The university students had a unit of their own, divided into separate chapters by university. Catholic Action activities were to be religious and educational but in fact went far beyond, for the pope thought of its members as ground troops for re-Christianizing Italian society, and this would require much more than simply prayer and lessons. To keep a close eye on the organization, he appointed Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo, the substitute secretary of state and one of Gasparri’s two undersecretaries, to be its chaplain. The Church hierarchy was to be in charge. “You have only to follow the advice and the instructions that come from above,” the pope once explained to a group of the Catholic Action lay leaders. 47

The pope was unhappy and indignant about the attacks on local parish priests and Catholic Action clubs. But Mussolini proved adept at using the violence to his benefit, convincing the pope that he was the only man in Italy who could keep the rowdies under control. The L’Osservatore romano articles reporting the episodes of bludgeoning and castor-oil-guzzling almost all ended with respectful pleas to Mussolini to see that those responsible be punished. Occasionally, when local sentiments ran particularly high, Mussolini had a few people arrested, but it was rare that the culprits were ever brought to trial, much less convicted.

By early 1923 Mussolini had good reason to think that his strategy was paying off. A deal with the pope was taking shape. While he would not abandon the violence that had proven so effective in intimidating his opponents, he did not want to unduly anger the pope. He would continue to restore privileges that the Church had not enjoyed for many decades. In exchange, he needed the pope to eliminate the remaining Catholic opposition to his rule.

IN THE SPRING OF 1923, THE POPULAR PARTY FOUND ITSELF IN AN untenable position. It depended above all on Church support, but the pope had decided to end it. In April, at the pope’s direction, the Vatican daily told its readers that, given Mussolini’s efforts on behalf of the Church, there was no longer any need for a Catholic party. Later in the month La Civiltà cattolica took up the pope’s new line, singing the praises of the Fascist government. “The shouts of Mussolini’s squads, ‘down with Bolshevism!’ ”—the journal enthused—“are attracting supporters and sympathy from one end of Italy to the other.… In its thought, sentiment, action, all of fascism consists simply of a protest and revolt against socialism.” It praised Mussolini for his efforts to restore order, hierarchy, and discipline. “Fascism,” the journal proclaimed, “seeks to place spiritual values once again in the place of honor they once occupied, especially as required by the battle against liberalism, to restore the most conspicuous of these, religious upbringing and the nation’s Catholic inspiration.” 1 Heartened by these signs that the pope thought the Popular Party dispensable, Mussolini issued an ultimatum: unless the party gave him its unqualified support, he would dismiss its two government ministers and cast it out of his coalition. When party founder Don Luigi Sturzo and his colleagues refused, the ministers were forced out. 2

The pope now found it intolerable that Don Sturzo should continue to serve as Popular Party head. Rome’s Catholic newspaper, Corriere d’Italia, carried a plea by a domestic prelate of the pope urging the priest to resign. Readers assumed that the request came from the pope himself. 3

Behind the scenes, Pius was indeed demanding that Sturzo resign, but the priest was slow to comply. Impatient with the foot dragging, the pope sent Tacchi Venturi, his special envoy to Mussolini, to see him. 4 Sturzo complained that in forcing him to step down, the pope was undermining the one party “that is truly inspired by Christian principles of civil life and … today serves to limit … the arbitrary rule of the dictatorship.” This plea made no impression on Pius XI. 5

Reluctantly, Don Sturzo agreed to obey the papal command. The pope sent Tacchi Venturi to work out the timing of the public announcement with Mussolini and to get him to play down the news in the press. In no case, said the pope, should the government “boast about a victory.” 6 Over the next twenty-four hours, the Jesuit worked closely with Mussolini to orchestrate Sturzo’s removal. 7

Pius had hoped that mollifying Mussolini in this way would help end the ongoing violence against Popular Party activists and priests, but his action had the opposite effect. Once it became clear that the pope was pulling Church support from the Catholic party, members found themselves increasingly isolated and subject to the depredations of local squadristi. In late August a Fascist newspaper proclaimed that the regime’s greatest enemy was no longer socialism but the Popular Party. Fascist squads were soon on the prowl.

Giovanni Minzoni was the young parish priest of a small town outside Ferrara, about thirty miles northeast of Bologna. He was known for his courage as a military chaplain at the front during the war, and his popularity with local youth and devotion to the Popular Party were getting in the way of local Fascist Party recruitment. One night, as he walked down a dark alley on his way to the parish recreation room, the priest realized he was being followed. Before he could turn around, two men jumped him, smashed his head with clubs, and fled. With blood pouring from his wounds, the priest struggled to his knees, then fell again. Somehow he lifted himself up and staggered toward his church, but he did not quite make it, collapsing, unconscious, nearby. Horrified parishioners found him sprawled there, his skull crushed, but still alive, and carried him in. By midnight he was dead.

As was his custom, Mussolini blamed the attack on unknown “assassins” who would be mercilessly tracked down and brought to justice. But although the assailants were found, they were never punished. 8 Ferrara’s archbishop chose not to attend Minzoni’s funeral, sending a Fascist priest in his place. The Vatican newspaper published a brief note on the murder, commenting that the news had saddened Mussolini. 9 Pius said nothing about it, accepting Mussolini’s claim that the violence was the work of “idiots” and “undisciplined comrades.” 10

In mid-August, in the midst of the latest wave of violence, the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See, Eugène Beyens, met with the pope, who, he discovered, was more concerned about the danger of Communism than with any threat from Fascist violence. “Nothing is more fatal to civilization,” Pius told him, “than communism. In the course of a few days, it destroys the work of several centuries.” Only if France, Belgium, and Germany formed an alliance—despite their recent past as bitter enemies—could the Communist advance be stopped. “Mussolini is no Napoleon, nor even perhaps a Cavour,” the pope remarked, “but he alone understood what was required to free his country from the anarchy that a powerless parliamentary system and three years of war had reduced it to.” He added, “You see how he has gotten the nation to follow him. May he revive Italy! It is such men predestined for greatness who can bring about peace who are lacking today. May God soon give us some such beacons, so that they guide and enlighten humanity!” 11 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.55-9)

In dealing with the pope, Mussolini continued his well-calibrated mix of pressure and reward. As Fascist bands continued to attack local Popular Party leaders and headquarters, Mussolini cast himself as the only person able to control these overzealous Fascists. At the same time, he showered the Church with cash and privileges. He pushed through a new law allowing police to fire any editor whose newspaper belittled either the pope or the Catholic Church. He bowed to the Vatican’s request that only books approved by the Church be used to teach religion in the schools. He agreed to close down gambling halls. He provided state recognition to the Catholic University of Milan, announced his opposition to divorce, and moved to save the Bank of Rome, closely tied to the Vatican, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. Crucifixes were back in the country’s classrooms, and Church holidays were added to the civil calendar. He came up with generous funds to rebuild churches that had been damaged during the war. The list went on and on. 24

As the pope was well aware, the support Mussolini was getting from the Church in return was priceless. In September 1923, the Vatican spelled this out in a “Program of Collaboration of the Catholics with the Mussolini Government.” Mussolini had come to realize, the document reported, that he would be better off if he were not so dependent on the Fascists who had brought him to power. They were an undisciplined lot whom he could not fully control. He needed “a new mass” of support, and this could best be provided by Catholics, for they were accustomed to top-down rule. True, some in the Church hierarchy had initially been skeptical about him, but they now had to confess they had been wrong: “They have had to admit that no Italian Government, and perhaps no government in the world, would have in a single year alone been able to do so much in favor of the Catholic Religion.”

Nor was this the only reason for the Vatican to support Mussolini: “Catholics could only think with terror of what might happen in Italy if the Honorable Mussolini’s government were to fall perhaps to an insurrection by subversive forces and so they have every interest in supporting it.” In short, the Vatican briefing concluded, “In every respect the constitution by Catholics of a mass of support for the Honorable Mussolini’s government seems to be the most dependable and reassuring combination imaginable in Italy.” 25

IN NOVEMBER, AT MUSSOLINI’ S DIRECTION, Fascists sacked the home of former prime minister Francesco Nitti, in the center of Rome. The police did nothing to intervene, and the marauders paraded triumphantly through the city streets. One morning the next month Giovanni Amendola, former cabinet minister and widely respected head of the Liberal opposition in parliament, was attacked near his home in downtown Rome. Four Fascists used clubs to smash his neck and face, then jumped into a waiting car and sped off. In reporting the attack, Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, argued that Amendola had only got what he deserved. Whether Mussolini himself had ordered the attack is not known, but it was part of the larger campaign of intimidation that he very much encouraged. 26

North of Italy, in Bavaria’s capital of Munich, the Fascist revolution was inspiring other Mussolini acolytes to violence. On November 8 the mustachioed thirty-four-year-old rabble-rouser Adolf Hitler, in an effort to imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome of the previous year, announced a revolution in a large local beer hall. The Nazi movement had already adopted the Italian Fascists’ straight-armed Roman salute. Hitler’s followers, shouting “Sieg Heil!” until they were hoarse, succeeded in occupying the local police headquarters but failed to take over the Bavarian War Ministry. Ten people were killed, and Hitler was arrested. He would spend a year in jail, but he put it to good use, writing his call to arms, Mein Kampf. At the time, Mussolini had no idea that his own fate would one day be tied to that of the imprisoned German wild man.

In April 1924 Italy prepared for a new national election, the first since Mussolini came to power. Fascist violence exploded. While directing beatings and worse at his enemies, Mussolini continued to introduce measures to benefit the Church. A new list of official holidays included several Catholic holidays that the state had never before recognized. Mussolini also took his first steps against Protestant organizations, which he knew would please the pope: he denied Methodists permission to construct a big church in Rome and rejected the YMCA’s proposals to build centers in Italy. Catholic seminarians were exempted from the draft, and three weeks before the vote, he dramatically increased the government’s payments to Italy’s bishops and priests, much to their delight. 27

In early April La Civiltà cattolica, the Vatican’s unofficial voice, published its final issue before the election, explaining that the misbehavior of some anticlerical members of the Fascist Party should not obscure the fact that Mussolini was working tirelessly to improve relations between the government and the Church. The journal reminded readers of all the benefits that the Fascists had already produced for the Church compared with how little the Popular Party had accomplished. 28

Election Day came on April 6. In his home base of Ferrara, Italo Balbo, one of the Quadrumvirate from the March on Rome, gave his Blackshirts their instructions. At each polling place, they were to grab the first voter to emerge and beat him up, while shouting “Bastard, you voted for the Socialists.” True, the poor devil might well have voted for the Fascists, but if so, “too bad for him,” said Balbo. 29

In the wake of the beatings of opposition candidates, the torching of opposition newspapers, and the destruction of opposition ballots, the Fascist list—which included sympathetic non-Fascists—won two-thirds of the vote; the Fascists alone won 275 seats, giving them an absolute majority even without their allies. Of the opposition parties, the Popular Party held on to 39 seats, the Socialists 46, and the Communists 19. A smattering of other seats went to republicans, liberals, and various other small groups. Mussolini was triumphant. “This is the last time that there’ll be an election like this. The next time I will vote on behalf of everyone.” 30

The following day Fascist bands attacked Popular Party activists and local priests in places where the party had done well. In a small town outside Venice, armed Fascists arrived at night at the home of one such parish priest. Finding only the priest’s sister at home, they beat her and then for good measure beat up the assistant priest as well. Angered by scores of such attacks on clergy and Catholic organizations, someone in the Vatican secretary of state office prepared a circular, to be sent to all of Italy’s bishops, telling them not to participate in the planned Fascist victory celebrations and especially forbidding them from performing special masses of thanksgiving for the Fascists. But although the circular was printed, it never left the Vatican. Written on the margin of the draft document (now found in the archives) is the note: “This should no longer be sent. By order of Monsignor Secretary.” Gasparri—undoubtedly after discussing the matter with the pope—had decided it best not to do anything that might offend Mussolini. 31 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.63-6)

PIUS XI HAD BY NOW settled into a routine. His underlings lived in nervous fear of his reproach. He was curt with those who displeased him and was not intimidated by even the most exalted heads of state. When the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, visited him at the Vatican, he made the mistake of asking the pope to nominate more South American cardinals; there was only one for the whole continent. Angered by what he saw as an inappropriate attempt to influence him, Pius decided to cancel his planned elevation of his majordomo, Monsignor Ricardo Sanz de Samper, who was from Colombia. He did not want to appear to be bowing to the king. 32

But an occasional visitor could bring back flashes of his earlier enthusiasms. Pius invited the French intellectual Jean Carrère for a private audience and asked his views of various French and Italian literary figures. While he responded, the pope—as Carrère described it—looked upon him with a grave expression of “courteous superiority.” But then Carrère mentioned Manzoni and called The Betrothed one of the world’s masterpieces. As he uttered these words, “it seemed to me,” recalled the Frenchman, “that my august interlocutor became transformed. From courteous benevolence that he had shown up to that point, he became all smiles and affable.” Manzoni, the pope told him, was not only a great novelist but a great poet, and to Carrère’s delight, the white-robed pontiff began reciting verses of a Manzoni poem from memory in a soft, musical cadence. 33

Where Benedict XV had seemed overwhelmed by the weight of his office, Pius XI projected the vigor of a mountain climber. “He seemed born to command,” said Confalonieri, the priest whom he had brought with him from Milan to serve as his private secretary. He radiated authority, the French ambassador later observed. 34 The pope was also a stickler for following proper procedure. One afternoon while strolling through the Vatican gardens, he saw an envelope, marked with large capital letters For His Holiness, lying on his path. With him that day was the archbishop of Bologna. Without thinking, the archbishop bent down and picked it up. He turned to hand it to the pope.

“Put it back where you found it,” snapped Pius XI. “It is not the proper way to send mail.”

The archbishop placed the envelope back on the path, and they continued on their walk. 35 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.67)

ON MAY 30, 1924, THE THIRD DAY OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT, GIACOMO Matteotti strode to the podium in the Chamber of Deputies amid jeers and threats from the Fascist benches. Ejected from the Socialist Party two years earlier in a purge of moderates, he had founded a reformist Unitary Socialist Party. Today he had a message to deliver: the recent election, marked by violence, should be annulled. As he detailed cases of voter intimidation from around the country, Fascist deputies kept interrupting him. “Lies!” they shouted. “Go back to Russia!” One member yelled: “Enough already! What are we doing here? Do we have to tolerate these insults?” An enraged phalanx of Fascist deputies moved menacingly toward the front of the hall. “You shouldn’t be in parliament!” one screamed, “You should be under house arrest!” 1 When, having been interrupted dozens of times, he finally finished, Fascist catcalls drowned out the opposition’s applause. “Now you’d better prepare to write my obituary,” Matteotti remarked to one of his colleagues as he made his way out of the building.

Mussolini, who was present for that session, was enraged. He turned to his press secretary, Cesare Rossi. “That man,” he muttered, “shouldn’t be allowed to remain in circulation.”

On June 10 Matteotti was scheduled to speak again in parliament, this time to denounce Mussolini’s government for corruption. After lunch, as he walked from his home near Piazza del Popolo toward the Chamber of Deputies, two men grabbed him and tried to drag him into a waiting sedan. Although he was neither big nor especially muscular, the thirty-nine-year-old Matteotti was both courageous and quick. He threw one of his attackers to the ground and was about to break away from the second when a third man set upon him, punching him in the face with brass knuckles. The men dragged the semiconscious deputy into the car. As he struggled, smashing the glass partition that divided the driver from the backseat, his abductors beat him savagely.

The car raced through Rome’s streets, the driver pressing the horn in one constant blast to cover Matteotti’s cries for help. The screams soon stopped. Matteotti was dead. Whether they had been ordered to kill him remains a matter of debate, but now that they had his cadaver in their laps, the men searched for a place to dump it. About fifteen miles from Rome, they made a shallow burial in woods not far from the road. 2

When Matteotti did not return home for dinner, his wife learned he had never made it to parliament. The alarm went out. By the next evening, witness reports began to come in describing the scene of the Socialist’s bloody abduction and the frenetic flight of the speeding car.

That a prominent member of parliament could criticize the Fascists one day and be violently abducted practically the next was shocking to all but the most hardened fascisti. Amid the furor, Mussolini tried to distance himself from the murder. By June 14 he had fired both the police head and the undersecretary for internal affairs. Suspicion fell on Cesare Rossi, who in addition to serving as Mussolini’s press secretary headed a secret Fascist goon squad. Rossi went into hiding. Soon others high in the Fascist regime were caught in the investigation’s web.

Evidence from the car that had been used in the abduction allowed the police to identify the men who had murdered the Socialist deputy. Their leader, Amerigo Dumini, had boasted to his comrades that he had already killed a dozen men on the orders from the highest ranks of the regime. Dumini was an American, born in 1894 in St. Louis, his father an Italian immigrant, his mother English. He had moved to Italy as a teenager, joined the Italian army during the war, and later became one of Mussolini’s trusted henchmen, working under Rossi.

Five months earlier Mussolini had met with Rossi and several Fascist bigwigs to create a small, secret squad capable of carrying out violent missions. Dumini was entrusted with putting the group together. In June he received orders, most likely from Rossi, to go after Matteotti. 3 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.69-71)

The Senate—a body whose members were chosen by the king, not elected—reopened two weeks after the murder. Mussolini got up to speak. He said he was as eager to get to the bottom of what had happened as anyone, pointing to the arrest of the presumed murderers and his dismissal of top government officials as evidence of his sincerity. 9 While most judged his remarks woefully inadequate, one man rushed to compliment him. In a flowery, handwritten letter, Father Tacchi Venturi, the pope’s secret emissary, told Mussolini how impressed he was with the speech. He gushed with praise for all of Mussolini’s good work and called on God to ensure his future success. 10

As word got out that their leader was in a state of shock, worried Fascist bosses from the provinces visited Rome to rouse him from his stupor. To their horror, they found him dazed. Leandro Arpinati, the Fascist boss of Bologna, was horrified to find Mussolini appearing feverish, his eyes red, as if he had been weeping. He looked, remarked Arpinati, like a businessman about to declare bankruptcy. 11

For the pope, the Matteotti murder was a disaster. In Mussolini the Vatican finally had found an Italian leader with whom it could work. Now, with the opposition forces uniting to boycott parliament and call for the return of constitutional rights, Mussolini’s hold on power was in danger. The pope decided to do all he could to save him, taking aim at the Popular Party’s decision to join the coalition calling for a new government. While the party did not formally depend on the Church hierarchy, it could hardly continue to claim to be Italy’s Catholic party if the pope were to openly renounce it. 12

In late June, with Italians disoriented and Mussolini’s fate in doubt, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore romano, published an editorial on the crisis, reminding Catholics of the Church’s teaching to obey civil authorities and warning them against any “leap in the dark.” La Civiltà cattolica, the Vatican-overseen Jesuit journal, followed up with an article written by its editor, Father Rosa, reminding readers of the Church’s admonition to obey government authority. Any attempt to undermine the current government, he argued, risked anarchy. He took special aim at the Popular Party’s supporters, warning that good Catholics could not cooperate with Socialists. 13

The Vatican made it clear to the Catholic party’s leaders that their efforts to bring down the Fascist regime were not welcome. Yet they continued to work with other opposition groups to steer Italy back to a parliamentary democracy. 14

Pius tried to buck up Mussolini’s sagging spirits. On Sunday morning, July 20, the pope told Tacchi Venturi to let the despondent leader know he still had his support. That afternoon the Jesuit sent Mussolini a note: “Excellence, This morning it pleased His Holiness to speak to me of Your Excellency in such terms that I am certain that they will succeed in being especially welcome and comforting.” He underlined these last words and, telling Mussolini that it would be best if he could communicate the pope’s thoughts in person, asked to meet with him soon. When two days later the embattled government head opened the note, he wrote across it in his colored pencil, “Thursday morning at 12.” So it was that in the midst of Mussolini’s darkest days, the pope’s emissary came to convey the pope’s support.

But Pius XI did not confine himself to offering words of comfort. He again turned to Father Rosa for help. Meeting with the Jesuit editor in his library, the pope instructed him to prepare a new piece on the crisis. Two days later, at the end of July, Cardinal Gasparri himself arrived at the Civiltà cattolica headquarters in Rome to pick up Rosa’s draft. Over the next days, drafts went back and forth between the Vatican and the journal office, now bearing Pius XI’s black pencil markings. After getting the pope’s final approval, the unsigned article went to press. 16

After praising Mussolini for all he had done for the Church, and implying that he had nothing to do with the Matteotti murder, the Civiltà cattolica article warned that violent action against the government could never be justified. Even the use of legitimate means to bring it down, as through new elections, should be avoided, for it would bring “serious misfortune.” Most important, the Popular Party could never be justified in entering into an alliance with the Socialists. 17

The pope faced more embarrassment when Matteotti’s wife and mother repeatedly asked to meet with him. Suspecting that their request was aimed at further weakening Mussolini, the pope refused. But he did not want to appear coldhearted and instructed Gasparri to receive the two women and give them each a rosary he had blessed. 18 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.73-5)

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 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.85)

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

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.

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. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.94-7)

The secretary of state’s replacement became a topic of intense speculation. 9 Gasparri hoped the pope would appoint his disciple, Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti, and had reason to believe that the pope might follow this advice. In 1925, shortly after Cerretti returned from his post as nuncio to Paris and was named a cardinal, the pope had hinted that he might want him to succeed Gasparri one day. One of the Vatican’s leading diplomats, Cerretti had served in Mexico, the United States, and Australia and had represented Pope Benedict XV at the postwar peace negotiations in Paris. But in the fall of 1929, Cerretti told a journalist he did not want the post. “With Pius XI,” he explained, “the secretary of state has little to do. He’s more of a decorative figure than someone with any power or independence. He can’t assume any direct, serious responsibilities, nor give his personal stamp to the Church government. You could say, in other words, that he is simply an executor of orders from above.” 10

Cerretti’s comments are a bit suspect, for while many saw him as the obvious choice, he had reason to fear that the pope would pass him over. Cerretti’s sympathies for the democratic countries, and for the Popular Party in Italy, were well known, and as the pope was aware, he opposed the deal Pius had struck with Mussolini. 11 In December the pope chose instead his nuncio to Germany, Eugenio Pacelli, to be the new secretary of state. Cerretti was indignant. He was certain that Francesco Pacelli, a mere layman, had used his frequent meetings with Pius XI to build up his brother in the pope’s eyes.

“That Pius XI will prefer Pacelli over me, to everything I have done for him, to my tenacious loyalty, to my diplomatic experience of over thirty years … it makes me furious to think of it, I can’t accept it,” Cerretti fumed. “Pacelli and his brother, servants and slaves of Fascism, accomplices bought by Mussolini, bring discredit on the Holy See. They humiliate the papacy, weaken its power, and lower its moral and educational authority in the eyes of all the Catholic powers.” 12

Mussolini’s ambassador to Germany, Luigi Aldrovandi, viewed the appointment much more sympathetically. Eugenio Pacelli was a person of stature, he said, combining deep intelligence with the ability to stay calm. He projected both dignity and a deep religious faith. Perhaps most important, thought the ambassador, he would be a friend of the Fascist government. “Monsignor Pacelli,” he reported, “had expressed his admiration for His Excellency Mussolini even before the Lateran Accords.” 13 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.148-9)

n contrast to Gasparri, who rarely spoke publicly, Pacelli was a skilled orator and would represent Pius XI at several high-profile international Church gatherings. His memory was prodigious. “When I have written or typed a sermon or a talk,” he once said, “I see the text roll by in front of my eyes as I speak the words, as if I were reading it.” 24 He insisted that he be informed of everything and was meticulous in reviewing even the smallest details, down to the address on each envelope to be mailed. Every night his undersecretaries prepared a file of papers and letters for his signature, sometimes as many as a hundred. The next morning he would return them in one of two folders. One contained the documents he had signed, and the other those in which he had detected an error. They would all have to be retyped. His assistants took to calling the latter folder “the infirmary” and prayed each morning that it would have few patients. 25 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.152)

Gasparri, for his part, was not making Pacelli’s transition easy. “You have come to take my place!” he growled shortly after Pacelli arrived in Rome. “You should not have accepted! They have exploited me, and now they send me away! You will see what kind of man the pope is!” A distraught Pacelli did his best to calm him down, but the encounter left its mark. 37

“They have chased me out like a dog,” the former secretary of state kept repeating, complaining to a fellow cardinal that in their final meeting the pope had not offered him a word of appreciation. 38 Talking to another friend, he indignantly asked how the pope could treat him so poorly. “I am the one who made the librarian a pope and a sovereign, and he chased me out worse than a mangy dog! He will pay me for it! Believe me, he will pay me for it!” 39

Gasparri aimed much of his fire at Monsignor Pizzardo, his old undersecretary, charging him with building up his friend Eugenio Pacelli in the pope’s eyes at Gasparri’s expense. The passed-over Cardinal Cerretti likewise blamed Pizzardo, dismissing Pacelli as weak-kneed and indecisive, a “slave in the hands of Pizzardo, who moves him like a puppet.” 40 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.155)

Mussolini was unsympathetic, explaining that international athletic groups, not the government, organized such events. In an attempt to show that he personally had little use for girls’ athletic competitions (or perhaps because he always enjoyed seeing the prim nuncio squirm), the dictator added: “Women are good for two things: to have children and to be beaten.” Egged on by Borgongini’s discomfort, he warmed to his subject. “Women are like fur coats,” he explained, “every once in a while you need to knock the dust off them.” 8

Similar pleas from local Catholic Action groups to local government officials often met an unsympathetic response as well. In such cases, frustrated bishops turned to the Vatican for help.

A letter the pope received in August 1932 was unusual only in being accompanied by a number of blurry snapshots. The bishop wrote to denounce the flaunting of women’s flesh on the island of Capri. Many women could be seen there “with their backs practically entirely uncovered, often with their breasts poorly covered, and sometimes wearing a bathing top made of transparent fabric.” Most of the good people of the island, he added, were nauseated by the spectacle, which he blamed on outsiders. He urged the Vatican to get the police to act. The four photographs he enclosed, all taken from behind, showed the naked backs of women wearing stylish evening gowns. 9

Eugenio Pacelli responded on behalf of the pope. The campaign for female modesty, he assured the bishop, was one of the centerpieces of the Catholic Action program. The organization “does not let any appropriate occasion go by when it can influence the authorities to exercise greater vigilance and a severe application of the law.” 10

It is worth pausing a moment to consider the date of Pacelli’s letter—September 16, 1932. Barely one year earlier Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini had initialed the agreement ending the Catholic Action dispute. 11 Throughout the country, local Catholic Action groups were now collaborating with the Fascist police. 12

The pope continued to complain about the exhibition of female bodies on Italy’s beaches. Church attempts to push Mussolini into action sometimes went too far, as happened in March 1934. That month the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, lambasted the Fascist youth groups for sponsoring beach outings for their members. Mussolini was so incensed by the complaint that he wrote Pacelli a letter.

“The well known—perhaps too well known—Monsignor Elia Dalla Costa addressed the attached pastoral letter to his flock,” said the Duce. “He graciously describes us as pagan and savage. Let those above him know that we are neither pagan nor savage and we don’t want to become either, notwithstanding the pastoral letter of Dalla Costa.”

De Vecchi, the Italian ambassador, hand-delivered the Duce’s letter to Pacelli. Such attacks, he told Pacelli, were counterproductive. It took a lot of nerve, De Vecchi added—broaching a taboo topic—for the archbishop to accuse the Fascists of being savages when at the same time the Vatican expected the government to keep silent about widespread cases of priestly immorality. One of these days, the ambassador warned, the pope would go too far. He would not be happy with the result. 13

The pope also pressed the authorities to ban books that the Church deemed offensive, like a European best seller offering advice on sex. Ideal Marriage , written by a Dutch gynecologist, described the biology of reproduction, advocated the pleasures of sexuality, and offered information helpful to controlling fertility. In 1930 the Vatican placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Sometime later, apparently prompted by the imminent appearance of an Italian edition, the pope called on Mussolini to outlaw its sale. The Duce assured him he would. 14

Pius also pressed Mussolini to ban objectionable films and plays. Even before the signing of the Lateran Accords, the pope sent Tacchi Venturi to talk with Mussolini about how they might best collaborate in this effort. In a January 1929 meeting, the two men discussed American films. Tacchi Venturi branded them a cesspool of sin and obscenity; Mussolini voiced agreement, calling American cinema a “school of corruption that will end up ruining the Nation if it isn’t stopped.” Pleased, Tacchi Venturi asked the dictator to “study how the censorship system could be made most effective.” 15

“Italy Bans Sex Appeal in Pictures … Film Censorship Rules Ordered Tightened Due to Pope’s Protests.” So read the headline in the March 20, 1931, Los Angeles Times , reporting Mussolini’s response to the pope’s complaints. 16

The pope’s demands on Mussolini at times seemed overwhelming. He hectored the Duce on objectionable women’s dress, books, Protestant proselytizing, films, and plays. He also regularly asked Mussolini to take action against ex-priests. Until the fall of the Papal States, the Church had been able to isolate such miscreants from the public. But following Italian unification, it lost all power over them. What especially incensed the Vatican was ex-priests teaching in public schools, which the pope thought scandalous. 17

Pius had begun urging the Duce to act well before the concordat was signed. In January 1925 he asked Mussolini to fire the prominent church historian and ex-priest Ernesto Buonaiuti from his professorship at the University of Rome. Buonaiuti had long been a thorn in the Vatican’s side. A modernist who argued for separation of church and state, he had earlier been relieved of his teaching position at one of Rome’s most prestigious seminaries. In 1921 the Church had excommunicated him after he questioned whether the body of Christ was literally present in the Eucharist. 18

In response to the pope’s 1925 plea, Mussolini ordered the ex-priest suspended for the year from his teaching position, but Buonaiuti’s faculty colleagues lobbied for his reinstatement. 19 In early 1927 the pope again, through Tacchi Venturi, urged the dictator to fire him. Mussolini replied that, while he wanted to keep the pope happy, he did not want to be accused of ignoring the law in order to please the pope. He suggested instead that he find other ways to prevent Buonaiuti from teaching. 20 Three days later Tacchi Venturi paid a visit on the minister of education, Pietro Fedele, to try his luck. Fedele was not happy to see the pope’s emissary but was well aware of his special ties to the Duce. “I think it opportune from now on,” he wrote the next day to Mussolini, “that each time Father Tacchi Venturi comes to see me or someone in my cabinet, I send you a report of the conversation.”

Fedele assured the emissary that the ministry would again suspend Buonaiuti from teaching. Tacchi Venturi expressed satisfaction but added a papal warning. Should the government ever allow the ex-priest back in the classroom, Pius would forbid Catholics from attending the University of Rome. 21

Buonaiuti remained on the University of Rome faculty until 1931 when, ironically, he ran afoul not of the pope but of Mussolini. A new law mandated that all Italian university professors swear allegiance to the Fascist regime. Of Italy’s twelve hundred faculty members, no more than a dozen or so refused. One of them was the ex-priest Ernesto Buonaiuti. He, along with the others, was dismissed. 22

In another case, erupting shortly after the concordat was signed, the pope demanded that the ex-priest Giuseppe Saitta be fired from his position as professor of medieval philosophy at the University of Pisa. This case was especially ticklish for Mussolini because, in leaving the priesthood, Saitta had become an ardent Fascist. He edited Vita Nuova, a publication of the Fascist Federation of Bologna, and was a follower of Mussolini’s court philosopher, Giovanni Gentile. Indeed, he had been a student of Gentile in Palermo. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.168-72)

Ludwig had heard the Duce address rallies in a military voice that brought to his mind the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky exhorting a crowd. But in the interviews, Mussolini never spoke loudly. Although he seemed not to understand jokes, observed Ludwig, he did have a kind of grim humor. He had only one ancestor in whom he took any pride, he said. One of his forefathers had lived in Venice and killed his wife because she was unfaithful. What recommended him to Mussolini was his élan in pausing, before fleeing the city, to place two Venetian coins on his wife’s chest to pay for her burial.

Despite himself, Ludwig, a man of the left, was being won over. When Mussolini went on to express his admiration for Caesar, Ludwig asked if a dictator could ever be loved.

“Yes,” replied Mussolini, “provided that the masses fear him at the same time. The crowd loves strong men. The crowd is like a woman.” 30

Later the Duce elaborated, “For me the masses are nothing but a herd of sheep, so long as they are unorganized.” They were incapable of ruling themselves. Creatures of feeling and emotion, not intellect, they could not be won over by rational arguments. “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason ... can never be the motive force of the crowd .... The capacity of the modern man for faith is illimitable. When the masses are like wax in my hands, when I stir their faith, or when I mingle with them and am almost crushed by them, I feel myself to be part of them."

Here Mussolini paused. Sometimes, he told Ludwig, the crowd that he had excited disgusted him. "Does not the sculpture sometimes smash his block of marble into fragments because he cannot shape it to represent the vision he has conceived?" It all came down to this: "Everything turns upon ones ability to control the masses like an artist."

But by this time Mussolini had lost his major link to the world of high culture, having increasingly pushed Margherita Sarfatti away. He no longer felt the need for her political advice or encouragement, and now that she was over fifty, putting on weight, and suffering from gout, she no longer stirred his passion. 32 Americans, slow to get the word, still viewed her as one of the people closest to the Duce. During a 1934 visit, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt received Sarfatti in the White House, even as back home her star was fading. Galeazzo Ciano, then undersecretary for press and propaganda, had her biography of Mussolini, Dux, pulled from circulation. Perhaps Ciano’s wife, Edda Mussolini, had pressured him. She despised her father’s former mistress. In any case, in the wake of the Lateran Accords, and later, as Mussolini sought to make a good impression on Hitler, the aging Jew had become an embarrassment. In 1935 he ordered the Italian press to ignore her. Following the anti-Semitic racial laws three years later, she would flee Italy, making her way to South America. She would return to Italy only after the war. 33

Mussolini was increasingly isolated. “Fundamentally,” he told Ludwig, “I have always been alone. Besides, to-day, though not in prison, I am all the more a prisoner.” 34 Around the same time, he explained to an admirer, “One must accept solitude.… A chief cannot have equals. Nor friends. The humble solace gained from exchanging confidences is denied him. He cannot open his heart. Never.” 35

The year 1932, wrote one of Mussolini’s early biographers, marked the completion of the transition from the man to the mask, the reality to the legend. He had learned how to appear taller than his five-foot-six-inch frame, affecting the look of the medieval condottiere, a Renaissance warlord. His girth was expanding; despite his meager diet, he fought a constant struggle against the family tendency to fat and weighed himself every day. But his larger bulk gave new fullness to his face and helped nourish the effect of a latter-day Caesar. 36

A vast government and Fascist Party effort went into nurturing the cult of the Duce. In 1929 a French observer in Italy marveled at how ubiquitous the Duce’s resolute face was: “In the news rooms, at the pastry shop, the beauty parlor, in phone booths, in smoke shops … it’s an obsession. You have to ask yourself if he keeps that mask on even when he is sleeping.” 37

Pius XI viewed these efforts with some alarm. One day, during an audience with Cesare De Vecchi, the pope startled the ambassador by asking if he could count on him to take Mussolini some personal advice. Nervous but curious, he agreed.

“Tell Signor Mussolini in my name,” the pope began, “that I do not like his attempts at trying to become a quasi-divinity and it is not doing him any good either, quite the opposite. He should not be trying to put himself somewhere between the earth and the heavens.… Have him reflect, in my name, that God, Our Lord, is only one.” Mussolini “could only be an idol, a fetish, or a false god, or at most a false prophet.” He should realize, said the pope, that “sooner or later people end up smashing their idols. Tell him that if he doesn’t change what he is doing, it will end badly for him.”

De Vecchi rushed to Palazzo Venezia, where the Duce took a look at him, still in his formal morning suit, and laughed. The embarrassed ambassador explained that he had come directly from the Vatican with a personal message from the pope.

“Calm down,” said the Duce, “tell me everything.” As De Vecchi did his best to repeat what the pope had said, a smile—somewhere between ironic and incredulous—came over Mussolini’s face.

“Are you sure these are all the pope’s words?” asked the dictator. “You haven’t by any chance added anything of your own?”

A flustered De Vecchi assured him he had not.

“Then tell me,” said Mussolini, “what you think?”

“The same as the pope,” replied De Vecchi, or at least so he claimed in his later memoir. 38

While the pope was worried about the growing idolization of the Duce, most of Italy’s clergy were not. The 1933 example of a priest from Bergamo, in northeastern Italy, may be extreme, but it gives some sense of the strength of the Mussolini cult. Having received a signed photograph of the Duce as a prize for a special act of Fascist loyalty, the priest wrote a thank-you note: “I kissed that figure of Your pensive face, and the characters that your hand wrote.… Your image … will remain sacred to me, and with the help of God I will try never to do anything to fail to deserve it.… Duce, every day I have prayed to the omnipotent Lord for the holy souls of Your parents and Arnaldo … and for You and for the Fatherland.” 39 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.174-6)

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 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.178-80)

MUSSOLINI SHOULD NOT HAVE been surprised that Pius wanted his help in combating the Protestant threat. 24 In the wake of the concordat, the pope had been unhappy about the new instructions the government had put out, specifying how non-Catholic religions were to be treated. “I told the head of government,” recalled the nuncio, who brought Mussolini the pope’s complaint, “that the desire to equate the Catholic Religion with the Protestant cults, which are parasites that live by damaging the true religion, was not only entirely unjust but offensive to us.” 25 The following year, 1931, the pope sent his nuncio back to renew his pleas. Protestant propaganda, he told Mussolini, posed the greatest danger the country faced. The government had to act more aggressively against it. 26

In trying to get the government to repress the Protestants, the pope looked for arguments he thought would appeal to Mussolini. None seemed more promising than the claim that loyalty to the Catholic Church and to the Fascist regime were one and the same. Protestantism, the pope insisted, was anti-Italian, a foreign force that posed as much a danger to Mussolini as it did to the Church.

Catholic Action members were ever on the lookout for signs of Protestant activity. In a typical case, in May 1931, the Catholic Action heads in one central Italian town wrote to Mussolini denouncing a man who was distributing Protestant literature there. They asked the Duce to ensure that “Protestant propaganda be forbidden in any form.” 27

For his part, Mussolini was reluctant to break up Protestant meetings and confiscate their literature. In November 1932, when the pope once again sent his nuncio to demand action, the Duce cut him off. “It’s better not to exaggerate,” replied the impatient dictator. The campaign was making a bad impression on leaders in Protestant countries, he added—they were appalled by the Vatican newspaper’s hysterical anti-Protestant screeds. 28

Undaunted, a few months later the pope repeated his conviction that Italy’s Protestants were “the greatest cross” he had to bear. On hearing this from the nuncio, Mussolini again pointed out how few Protestants resided in Italy. Again, this made no impression on the pope. 29

While the nuncio Borgongini was the pope’s main emissary in these efforts, Tacchi Venturi played a part as well. He would spend years trying to convince Mussolini that a vast, evil conspiracy, led by Protestants and Jews, was at work, aimed as much at the Fascist dictator as at the Catholic Church. 30 He relied on a network of informants to feed him the latest news on the occult conspiracy. In June 1933 he sent Cardinal Pacelli a copy of one such report.

“I believe that in communicating the attached information I am not doing something unwelcome,” Tacchi Venturi wrote in his cover note. Of the report’s accuracy, he told Pacelli, “I do not believe it is possible to harbor any doubts, as its author is not only as honest as they come, but in an especially well placed position to know what he is speaking about.”

Tacchi Venturi’s secret informer recounted that he had recently seen a ministry of internal affairs circular addressed to all of Italy’s prefects, telling them to keep an eye out for political activity by priests. This seemed odd, he thought, for “the whole world knows with what great enthusiasm all the clergy, all the Italian Catholic associations, all the Italian Catholics love the Duce and the Regime.”

There was but one explanation for why the government would waste its resources on such surveillance: “at the center of the government, that is, in the ministries, there are high bureaucratic officials who are either Jews or Masons who want the Prefects to think that the clergy and the Catholics should always be considered … as enemies!!” 31 Instead of wasting their time investigating priests, he said, government authorities should be looking into “the formidable, underhanded, subversive activities of the Jews, the Masons, and the Protestants who, disguised as admirers of Fascism, have become practically the feudal lords of Italy, as they never were in the past.” Mussolini had to be warned. 32

THE CHARGE THAT JEWS were the evil force behind a worldwide conspiracy against Christianity and European civilization had long been heard in the Vatican; the Jesuits of La Civiltà cattolica were among its most avid proponents.

A feature article, titled “The World Revolution and the Jews,” had appeared in the Vatican-supervised journal in late October 1922, as the Fascists were marching on Rome. It described a world in chaos, where secret forces orchestrated labor strikes and unrest in pursuit of the goal of Communist revolution. The credulous masses participating in the revolts were mere stooges, manipulated by an occult power that showed telltale signs of coming from “the ghetto.”

The world’s future, the article warned, would be determined by the battle then being waged in Russia. The leaders of the Bolshevik reign of terror were not “indigenous Russians” but rather “Jewish intruders” who slyly masked their true identity behind Slavic-sounding pseudonyms. A list of the 545 highest officials of the Bolshevik regime revealed, the author claimed, that true Russians numbered no more than thirty. “Those of the Jewish race comprise a full 447”; the rest were a hodgepodge of other nationalities. In short, although Jews comprised less than five percent of Russia’s population, “this tiny minority today has invaded all the avenues of power and imposes its dictatorship on the nation.” 33 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.191-3)

The pope too had doubts about the Nazis. “With the Hitlerites in power,” asked Pius XI the previous spring, “what could one hope for?” 7 But within weeks of Hitler’s appointment, he began to have a more positive view. “I have changed my opinion about Hitler,” he told the surprised French ambassador in early March. “It is the first time that such a government voice has been raised to denounce bolshevism in such categorical terms, joining with the voice of the pope.”

“These words,” French ambassador Charles-Roux recalled, “pronounced with a firm voice and with a kind of recklessness, proved to me how much the new German chancellor had gained in Pius XI’s eyes by launching a declaration of war to the death against Communism.” 8 Britain’s envoy to the Vatican similarly noted how obsessed the pope seemed to be with the Communist threat. It was impossible to understand Pius’s actions, he argued, without realizing this. 9

The pope’s surprisingly positive view of Hitler produced consternation and confusion among Germany’s Church leaders. In the campaign for the March 1933 elections, the German Catholic bishops had unanimously denounced the Nazis and strongly supported the Center Party. On March 12 the pope met with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, to tell him of the need to change course. On his return to Germany, the archbishop informed his colleagues. “Let us meditate on the words of the Holy Father,” Faulhaber reported, “who, in a consistory, without mentioning his name, indicated Adolf Hitler before the whole world as the statesman who first, after the pope himself, has raised his voice against Bolshevism.” On March 23 Hitler reciprocated by declaring that the Christian churches were “the most important factors in the maintenance of our national identity.” He pledged to protect “the influence to which the Christian confessions are entitled in school and education.” Two days later, speaking with Cardinal Pacelli, the pope expressed his appreciation of what Hitler had said, praising his “good intentions.” By the end of the month, the German bishops announced that they would no longer oppose the Nazi leader. 10 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.200)

As Pacelli knew, Mussolini was worried that the United States—not a League of Nations member—might join the international boycott. Previously, both Republican and Democratic administrations had taken a benevolent view of the dictator, thinking that he offered the strong leadership that the rather aimless and undisciplined Italians needed. President Roosevelt, although having little personal sympathy for Mussolini, had expressed his belief that the Duce had accomplished a good deal for Italy. America’s press had also been supportive. But the war triggered a precipitous change. American newspapers increasingly noted similarities between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. “A tyrant remains a tyrant no matter how benevolently he may philosophize and smile,” editorialized The New York Times. Roosevelt took a much dimmer view as well, and in early 1936 he would publicly denounce Italian Fascism. 41 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.223)

Among the twenty men who were given the cardinal’s hat that December was the oft-accused pederast Camillo Caccia. The pope’s master of ceremonies thought the promotion was long overdue. When the list of new cardinals in 1929 had come out and his name was not on it, Caccia was furious. 19 In October 1930 Turin’s newspapers reported rumors that he was about to be named the city’s archbishop. The stories, according to a police informant in the Vatican, prompted “rather salacious comments.” 20 Another informant, in March 1931, relayed that Caccia was furious with the commander of the Papal Gendarmes for reporting on Caccia’s recent intimate relationship with a young priest. The pope had learned the news and was not pleased. Earlier, the informant recalled, only his old ties with the pope had saved Caccia from the fate that Pius had meted out to Monsignor De Samper under similar circumstances. 21

Despite the stories surrounding Caccia, rumors that the pope was about to name him a cardinal had gathered force. This led to a new burst of allegations in 1933, as others in the Vatican came forward claiming to have seen Caccia with boys and young men in compromising situations. Among them, a count from the black aristocracy—those elite Rome families who had stuck with the popes in their decades-old battle against the new Italian state—told of the time Caccia, in his apartment at the Vatican, had been caught in the act of fondling two students while plying them with wine and liquor. Interrogated, the boys, still drunk, said that Caccia had lured them to his rooms by promising them a large sum of money. Rome’s clergy, claimed the informant, disliked the pope, viewing him as an ill-tempered despot. Should he go ahead, despite Caccia’s predatory reputation, to name him a cardinal, his popularity, or so the informant argued, would reach a new low. 22

Caccia got a clear sign of papal favor, and a presumption that he would at last be named a cardinal, when Pius asked him in August 1934 to be part of the papal delegation at the Eucharistic congress in Buenos Aires. 23 But around the same time, another police informant raised doubts as to the pope’s intentions. One of Caccia’s supporters, during an audience with the pope, had put in a good word for him, praising the hard work Caccia had done on the pope’s behalf. Given his increasing girth, the friend argued, Caccia was encountering difficulty in maintaining his frenetic pace, so perhaps the time was right to reward him. The pope, irritated by the request, turned his back on his visitor. “Have him eat less!” he muttered. 24

Yet Pius retained an affection for Caccia, whom he had known since he was a boy in Milan, and so in the end, he added him to the list of new cardinals in 1935. If the allegations against him were well known within the Vatican, they seem not to have diminished the enthusiasm of his reception among his new colleagues. “Stout, jovial and humorous,” the British ambassador to the Holy See observed in mid-1938, “Cardinal Caccia is perhaps the most popular member of the Sacred College.” 25 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.231-2)

W HEN GERMANY’S AMBASSADOR, DIEGO VON BERGEN, ENTERED the pope’s library in early 1936, he feared the encounter would be uncomfortable. It was Pius XI’s custom to meet with every ambassador at the new year. In the ten minutes allocated to each, he offered his blessing and briefly bestowed praise or blame for the government’s recent actions. As it happened, Bergen’s meeting would turn out to be even more unpleasant than he had expected.

The pope had much to complain about. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, two-thirds of all schoolchildren in Munich, capital of Germany’s largest Catholic region, Bavaria, had been attending Catholic parochial schools. By 1935, this number had been cut in half. In another two years, it would shrink to three percent. 1

These “so-called conversations,” Bergen recalled, “are monologues by the Pope, who takes it for granted that his words will be heard without demur and received with deference.”

Shouting and waving his arms and becoming ever more agitated, Pius bemoaned all the ways the Third Reich was persecuting the Church. When Bergen attempted to get a word in, the indignant pope simply raised his voice further. The allotted ten minutes had long since gone by, yet the pope railed on. “There have always been those who have said that the Church is destined to disappear,” he warned the ambassador. “But it is they who have always disappeared, not the Church.” Then the pope pressed the electric buzzer he had had installed on his desk, beckoning the attendant outside to open the door for his departing visitor. 2

Upset, Bergen went directly to Cardinal Pacelli’s office to complain. He regarded the former German nuncio as an old friend. How much of what Pius said, he asked, should he pass on to his superiors? The pope’s harsh words, he pointed out, would anger them. Pacelli recommended that he report only the gist of the pope’s comments, leaving out his more inflammatory remarks.

“This episode has shown yet again,” Bergen would tell the German foreign minister, “how Cardinal Pacelli constantly strives to pacify, and to exert a moderating influence on the Pope, who is difficult to manage and to influence.” It was best, he added, not to take the pope’s outbursts too seriously. Mussolini, on the basis of his experience with the pope’s tirades, was said to have advised, “Don’t get excited about it. The best thing to do is just to let the old gentleman have his say.” 3

The Duce’s increasing embrace of the Führer angered the pope. Nor was he happy that Britain and France were doing so little to stop Germany’s military buildup. On March 7, 1936, Hitler sent German military forces into the Rhineland, the strip of land at the border of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands that, according to the 1919 Versailles Treaty, was to remain demilitarized. The German troops had orders to retreat at the first sign of counterattack by the French, but the French did nothing. “If you had sent in 200,000 men,” the pope told the French ambassador the following week, “you would have rendered an immense service to the whole world.” 4 Europe moved one step closer to war.

Events in Spain were also leading to greater collaboration between the Duce and Hitler. An electoral victory by Spain’s leftist Popular Front in the spring of 1936 triggered a military rebellion. The Church, long identified with the old elites and now with the rebellious officers, quickly became a target of popular anger at the revolt. 5

Spain had worried the pope ever since the king’s abdication five years earlier. In 1933 the pope issued an encyclical criticizing the Spanish government’s efforts to curb Church influence. 6 Yet Pius was inclined to work with the more moderate government elements to find a solution. His efforts were thwarted both by anticlerical extremists in the government and by the hostility of many in the Spanish Church hierarchy who were opposed to any compromise with the leftists. 7

The outbreak of the civil war in July 1936 brought unspeakable horrors. Seven hundred priests, monks, and nuns were killed. Priests’ ears were cut off and passed around as if they were trophies from a bullring. Nuns’ rotting remains were dug up from their graves and left exposed—French newspapers published photographs. Monasteries were transformed into socialist headquarters, religious services were banned, and almost all of Barcelona’s churches were set ablaze. On August 12 Cardinal Pacelli went to the Spanish embassy to protest. 8

Although Francisco Franco, leader of the Spanish military revolt, has sometimes been compared with Mussolini, the Duce had no particular affection for him. Franco wasn’t much of a general, he thought, cowardly keeping far from the front. And the sadism of the Spanish forces was appalling. “For them,” Mussolini remarked, “executing a thousand men is like eating a plate of macaroni.” 9

Motivated less by ideological camaraderie with Franco than by a desire to limit the international influence of the leftist government in France, Mussolini soon found himself conferring with the Nazis on how best to help the insurrection. In October the first Russian airplanes, tanks, and other supplies began arriving to shore up the Spanish government. The Italian Catholic press urged Mussolini to send Italian troops to aid the rebels. 10 By year’s end, he had dispatched thousands of blackshirted militia and soldiers to help Franco. 11 The pope did not share in the enthusiasm for the war. He was horrified by the bloodcurdling accounts of anti-Catholic atrocities but balked at endorsing an armed revolt against an elected government. Nor was he eager to see Mussolini embroiled in a war that would push him further into Hitler’s arms. 12

JUST AS HE WAS GETTING the first reports of civil war in Spain, the pope received more disturbing news from Germany: the Nazis were planning to put hundreds of German monks and nuns on trial on charges of sexual perversion. Over the next year, the highly publicized trials would receive front-page coverage in the German press. “Corrupters of Youth Clad in Cassocks” screamed one headline. “Bottomless Depravity in the Monastery” declared another. The priests were accused of luring children in their charge into sexual acts and seducing vulnerable young women as well. To make matters worse, German authorities had renewed their case against the Jesuits, accused of illegally exporting funds. 13 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.241-4)

Their meeting took place at the president’s family home in Hyde Park, New York. The only record of their conversation comes from Roosevelt’s recollections several years later. What most impressed him, he said, was Pacelli’s seeming obsession with the threat of a Communist takeover in the United States. He sounded, thought the president, much like Father Coughlin. The cardinal kept repeating, “The great danger in America is that it will go communist.” Roosevelt countered that the real danger was that the United States might become fascist.

“Mr. President,” replied Cardinal Pacelli, “you simply do not understand the terrible importance of the communist movement.”

“You just don’t understand the American people,” responded Roosevelt. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.249-50)

In the summer of 1936, the German bishops had asked the pope to prepare an encyclical urging the Nazi government to respect the terms of its 1933 concordat with the Church. In early 1937, in his sickbed, the pope met with three German cardinals and two bishops who had come to discuss the proposal. Pacelli, not wanting to antagonize Hitler, advised the pontiff against issuing his criticism in the form of an encyclical: he should simply send Hitler a pastoral letter, to be shared only with the German bishops. But Pius XI spurned Pacelli’s advice. He wanted to issue an encyclical that all Germans—and all the world—would read. The result was dramatic. On Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, bishops and priests throughout Germany read the encyclical, Mit brennender Sorge (“With Deep Anxiety”), from the pulpit to people unaccustomed to any public criticism of the Nazi regime. 11

“It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the [German] Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action.” Thus began the encyclical. While the Church had entered into the concordat with the German government in good faith, said the pope, “anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy.” He lamented the destruction of Catholic parochial schools, despite the concordat’s provision protecting them. He castigated those who idolized race and nation, deeming them guilty of distorting and perverting “an order of the world planned and created by God.” He took aim at efforts to blend Christianity with race worship: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe.” Although he never mentioned Nazism by name, he thanked those priests and laypeople “who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God’s rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism.” The reference was clear.

While the encyclical was hard-hitting, it could have been harsher. For months, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had been working on a separate document, offering a list of fundamental tenets of Nazism that the Church deemed to be grave errors. Among them were passages clearly taken from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Worried that branding Nazi ideology un-Christian might lead Hitler to renounce the concordat altogether, the pope had decided on a less direct attack. He was supported not only by Pacelli but by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, Germany’s most important archdiocese. Throughout the drafting project, the Jesuit general Ledóchowski did all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Hitler, urging the pope to “avoid going into questions that are very difficult and subtle.” The term Nazi was deleted from the draft; nor was any mention made of the persecution of the Jews. The encyclical was to have been accompanied by a list of errors condemned by the Church, including basic tenets of Nazism, but it never made it out of the Vatican. 12

Diluted though the encyclical was, Hitler was furious, outraged not only by the unprecedented public attack but by the pope’s ability to have the message distributed so widely without his knowledge. He ordered the police to close down Catholic publishing houses and sent agents to diocesan headquarters and monasteries throughout the country to seize their files. “I will heap disgrace and shame on the Catholic Church,” he told one visitor, “opening unknown monastic archives and having the filth contained in them published!” 13 Convinced that he knew the Church’s weak point, he threatened to reveal graphic tales of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy and moved quickly to gather incriminating evidence. When word of the police raids got out, the bishop of Berlin and the archbishop of Breslau ordered all files dealing with complaints against priests burned. The pope urged all of Germany’s bishops to follow their example. 14

Worried that Italian newspapers might portray the encyclical as a denunciation of Nazism rather than a plea that the terms of the concordat with Germany be respected, the pope let the Duce know that this was not his intention. 15 Pacelli, for his part, was eager to avoid a break with the Nazi government, afraid it would leave the Church there defenseless. 16 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.258-60)

FEW IN ITALY WERE aware of these tensions. The vast majority of Catholic clergymen still considered Mussolini to be the man God had sent to save the nation, a message priests regularly shared with their parishioners.

Eager to highlight this support, Mussolini decided to organize a huge gathering of bishops and priests at Palazzo Venezia. The occasion was billed as a celebration honoring the clergy who had distinguished themselves in the “battle for grain,” the campaign for agricultural self-sufficiency that he had been pushing for over a decade. Invitations, signed by a Catholic Fascist journal editor, went out in mid-December. By attending the January 9 event, these priests and bishops would offer “the most solemn honor to the Duce, Founder of the Empire, thus increasing its Christian significance.” The archbishop of Udine, Monsignor Giuseppe Nogara, would address the Duce on their behalf. 19

Bishops flooded the Vatican secretary of state office with letters asking what to do. “It seems to me,” wrote one Tuscan bishop, “that it takes a lot of nerve for a journal editor to mobilize bishops and priests to give solemn homage to the Duce Founder of the Empire.” But “I wouldn’t want to be the only one absent.” 20

Cardinal Raffaele Rossi, secretary of the Curia office responsible for issues affecting the clergy, sought advice from the secretary of state. Pacelli informed him he saw no objection to having the clergymen take part in the event. But before he received Pacelli’s reply, Cardinal Rossi forwarded yet another bishop’s question about the Fascist fête—and offered his opinion that the invitations should not be accepted.

The cardinal had put Pacelli in an awkward position, for allowing a journalist to convene Italy’s bishops was undeniably unseemly. Pacelli consulted the pope, who agreed that such an invitation “did not merit being accepted.” Yet neither the pope nor Pacelli was eager to offend the Duce. 21

Confusion reigned in the secretary of state office over the next two weeks. 22 Monsignor Tardini, who had replaced the newly elevated Pizzardo as undersecretary of state for extraordinary ecclesiastical affairs, engaged in a curious dance with the Italian ambassador. On December 30 he told Pignatti that he felt uncomfortable with such a massive political demonstration by the clergy, especially by the bishops. Pignatti responded that if he wanted him to take the matter up with Mussolini, he would need to set down the Vatican’s objections in writing. A few days later, meeting with Pignatti, Tardini repeated his plea. Pignatti responded the same way. But no formal request ever came. Tardini drafted the letter, but in the end the pope decided not to send it. 23

On Sunday morning, January 9, 1938, two thousand priests and sixty bishops marched in solemn procession through Rome’s streets as the curious and the Fascist diehards lined their route to applaud. Preceding them were carabinieri in dress uniform, a military band, and a color guard of black-cassocked priests holding Italian flags aloft, Awaiting them at the Victor Emmanuel monument in Piazza Venezia was Achille Starace, head of the national Fascist Party. He stood alongside Rome’s party chief. Both men accompanied the bishops up the marble stairs, where they deposited their laurel wreaths at the tombs of the Unknown Soldier and the heroes of the Fascist Revolution.

The procession then re-formed for the short march into Palazzo Venezia, passing by the balcony outside Mussolini’s office, where a beaming Duce responded to their Fascist salutes. At noon, they overflowed the Royal Hall. After the enormous group recited another prayer, they cheered as the Duce made his entrance. Archbishop Nogara rose to ask God’s blessing on the man who had done so much for Christianity. A parish priest then strode to the front to recite the motion that the two thousand priests had unanimously approved: “The priests of Italy invoke and continue to invoke the Lord’s blessing on Your person, on Your work of restorer of Italy and founder of the Empire, on the Fascist Government.” He ended, “Viva il Duce!” The room shook as the assembled priests and bishops roared “Duce! Duce!” 24 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.271-3)

Through it all, the pope continued to press Mussolini to help him with Hitler. The Duce’s interest in dampening tensions between the pope and the German dictator was clear: were the pope to denounce the Nazis and excommunicate Hitler, it would be impossible to persuade Italians to tie their fate to the Third Reich.

In March 1938 Mussolini reported to the pope on his latest efforts, taking credit for the Nazis’ recent suspension of the embarrassing show trials of the Catholic clergy. Over the previous two years, hundreds of priests and monks had been jailed, many charged with committing sex crimes against young boys. These “immorality trials” generated huge press coverage. Goebbels, in a nationwide radio speech, charged that the “sacristy has become a bordello, while the monasteries are breeding places of vile homosexuality.” 28 The pope thanked Mussolini for this help but added that if normal relations were to be restored between the Vatican and the Third Reich, he would have to persuade Hitler to allow Catholic schools and Catholic Action groups to function freely again. 29

Italy’s clergy had no more love for Hitler than the pope did, but their attitude toward Mussolini was very different. Their greatest worry was that, in an increasingly uncertain world, something might happen to threaten Mussolini’s rule. While strolling through St. Peter’s Square one day, Marchetti Selvaggiani, the cardinal vicar of Rome, shared this thought with Cardinal Pizzardo. “If Mussolini were to go,” he said, pointing to a nearby streetlight, “you would see me hanging from that lamppost.” 30 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.275)

IN THE WAKE OF the Nazi takeover of Austria, Mussolini was feeling ill used. Humiliated by the invasion that he had long vowed to prevent, he summoned Tacchi Venturi and told him it was time to put an end to Hitler’s dreams of world domination. Half measures would be of no use, he warned, and hopes that Nazism would somehow simply peaceably fade away were naïve. Something dramatic was required, and it would have to come soon.

Who was in a position to take such action? The one man who could stop Hitler, the Duce told the flabbergasted Jesuit, was the pope. By excommunicating Hitler, he could isolate the Führer and cripple the Nazis. 17

What he proposed was so explosive that Tacchi Venturi would not put it in writing. He requested an urgent meeting with the pope, where he told Pius what Mussolini had said. 18 Knowing how temperamental Mussolini could be, and in any case not inclined to take such draconian action, the pope never seriously considered following the suggestion.

Curiously, Hitler’s excommunication may once have been officially considered at the Vatican, although there is no evidence that the pope knew anything about it. It was in January 1932, a year before Hitler came to power. The ground for excommunication was neither Hitler’s pagan ideology nor his campaign of race hatred but the fact that he had acted as a witness in a wedding of which the Church disapproved. That month a high German Church official told Italy’s ambassador to Germany that Hitler was in serious trouble with the Vatican. Joseph Goebbels, his acolyte, had gotten married, with Hitler serving as a witness. Goebbels, like Hitler, was Catholic, but the woman he married was not only a divorcée but a Protestant, and the ceremony had been performed by a Protestant pastor. For such a sin, excommunication, reported the high German prelate, was being discussed. If excommunication was in fact considered, the Vatican finally decided against it. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.280)

WHILE VISITING ROME IN JUNE 1938, JOHN LAFARGE, A FIFTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD American Jesuit priest, was surprised to receive a message that Pius XI wanted to see him at Castel Gandolfo.

On his arrival at the pope’s summer residence, LaFarge was escorted to a patio, where the pope had just returned from a walk. His white cane lay on a ledge behind him. The pope told LaFarge he wanted to talk to him about the problem of racism. He had sought him out because his recent book, Interracial Justice, was the best one on the subject he had ever read.

Although largely unknown in Vatican circles, LaFarge was an intellectual presence in the American Church. He was born in Newport, Rhode Island, his father a prominent artist, his mother a descendant of Benjamin Franklin. LaFarge graduated from Harvard in 1901 and was ordained four years later. He then spent fifteen years in Maryland ministering primarily to African-American congregations. In 1926 he joined the editorial staff of America, and in 1934 he founded the Catholic Interracial Council, aimed at promoting interracial understanding. Three years later he published the book that brought him to the pope’s attention. 1

As they sat together, Pius XI entrusted the American priest with a shocking mission. He was to secretly draft an encyclical on what the pope considered to be the most burning questions of the day: racism and anti-Semitism. Hitler’s visit to Rome the previous month was still on his mind, and he no longer felt that his words condemning the glorification of race in his 1937 encyclical were enough. He had been mulling over the idea of a new encyclical when he learned that just the right person was visiting Rome. God, Pius told the flummoxed American, had sent him.

LaFarge expressed doubt that he was up to the task. But the pope persisted: “Say simply what you would say if you yourself were pope.” He went on to outline the topics he wanted addressed and the principles that should guide LaFarge.

“Properly,” the pope added, “I should have first taken this up with Father Ledóchowski before speaking to you; but I imagine it will be all right.”

The pope was being less than forthright here, for he knew the Jesuit general would not be sympathetic. Even more telling was the fact that the pope had kept the matter secret from Cardinal Pacelli and the entire secretary of state office. Nor did he consult the various Vatican offices whose experts normally drafted papal encyclicals.

“The Pope is mad,” Ledóchowski remarked, in English, after meeting with Pius that Sunday and learning of the task he had given the American Jesuit. 2

The next day Ledóchowski met with LaFarge. Taking advantage of the American’s anxiety—“I am simply stunned … the Rock of Peter has fallen on my head,” LaFarge confided to a friend—Ledóchowski suggested that two more experienced Jesuits help him.

When LaFarge arrived in Paris a few days later, these colleagues joined him. Over the summer they worked on the encyclical, to be known as Humani generis unitas , “On the Unity of Humankind.” If the pope had chosen LaFarge due to his work against racism in the United States, Ledóchowski had chosen his two colleagues—the forty-six-year-old German Gustav Gundlach and the sixty-nine-year-old French Jesuit Gustave Desbuquois—for very different reasons. Ledóchowski viewed the Jews as enemies of the Church and of European civilization, and he would do all he could to prevent the pope from slowing the anti-Semitic wave that was sweeping Europe. Gundlach and Desbuquois had previous experience working on papal encyclicals and closer ties with the Vatican. They would help constrain LaFarge, who keenly felt his utter lack of experience.

Gustav Gundlach, professor of moral philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, was one of the foremost Jesuit experts on the Jews. In 1930 he had authored the entry on anti-Semitism in the authoritative German Catholic theological encyclopedia Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche. There Gundlach differentiated between two kinds of anti-Semitism. The first, which went against Church teachings, fought Jews “simply because of their racial and national foreignness.” The second, embraced by the Church, combated the Jews “because of the excessive and deleterious influence of the Jewish segment of the population.” 3

In September the three men completed their draft and sent it to Ledóchowski, assuming he would send it immediately to the pope. Instead, he sent an “abridged version” to Enrico Rosa. It was Rosa, then La Civiltà cattolica director, whom the pope had turned to a decade earlier to explain the dissolution of the Friends of Israel. But Pius’s attitudes toward the Jews were now evolving away from Rosa’s. In turning to LaFarge, the pope had kept clear of him. Yet the draft encyclical now lay on his desk.

Despite the pope’s apparent change of heart on the Jewish question, he had done nothing to rein in the stream of anti-Semitic venom that was being published in Rosa’s journal. As Hitler was terrorizing the Jews of Germany, and while Austria, Hungary, Poland, and other European countries were introducing laws to restrict Jews’ rights, the journal—its pages approved in advance by the Vatican secretary of state office—was urging them on. In May 1937 La Civiltà cattolica published an article on “The Jewish Question and Zionism,” praising the work of “the illustrious English Catholic author, Hilaire Belloc,” a notorious anti-Semite. The article got to the point with its opening: “It is an evident fact that the Jews are a disruptive element due to their spirit of domination and their preponderance in revolutionary movements.” Belloc, the journal reported approvingly, compared Judaism “to a foreign body that produces irritation and reaction in the organism in which it has penetrated.” Giovanni Preziosi—a former priest and noted Fascist—was delighted by the Jesuit journal’s screed. He had long been pushing Mussolini to launch a campaign to protect Catholic Italy from the Jewish threat. The Civiltà cattolica article, he gushed, was “so perfect that I would wish to present it to those Italians who, for love of Jewish gold, deny the existence of the Jewish peril.” (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.287-80)

In late May, Pius had learned that a new biography of Cesare Borgia was about to go on sale at newsstands in inexpensive, illustrated installments. Borgia was not a topic the Vatican was eager to have explored. Born in 1475, he was made a cardinal at age eighteen. Borgia’s father was Pope Alexander VI. Renouncing his cardinal’s hat in his early twenties, Borgia went on to become a military leader, fathering two children by his wife and many more with other women. 23 The pope got word to Ciano that he wanted all copies of the biography destroyed. 24

Mussolini’s son-in-law ordered a halt to the newsstand publication. The government would permit the biography to be published only as a single, weighty volume, which would cut down dramatically on its readership. 25

But the Vatican soon learned that, despite Ciano’s order, the popular installments were still on sale. On instructions from the pope, the nuncio Borgongini met with Ciano on June 13.

Indignant that his order had not been followed, Ciano picked up the phone and called the second-in-command of the popular culture ministry, the minister being out of town.

“Rizzoli [Angelo Rizzoli, the publisher],” Ciano told him, “is the most anti-Italian, anti-fascist, anti-Catholic person imaginable.” The book, he charged, was “a lurid speculation, prepared by the Jews.” Borgongini had pointed out to Ciano earlier that the author of the biography, Gustav Sacerdote, was Jewish. Rizzoli had to be taught a lesson. “Put your knee on his throat,” instructed Ciano, “and slap him around so that he never forgets it.” 26

A week after that meeting Ciano let the nuncio know that not only had the popular installments of the Cesare Borgia biography been banned, but so had the book itself. The following week Cardinal Pacelli wrote a note of thanks. 27 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.294-6)

..... The pope also expressed concerns about the latest accusations that Catholic Action was involving itself in politics. “I pray to the Lord every day,” said the pope, “that Signor Mussolini not touch Catholic Action.” He added, “you can obtain anything from the pope just as long as you don’t attack Catholic Action.” 33

A week after the meeting, the pope, ignoring Pignatti’s warning, resumed his attacks on “exaggerated nationalism.” In remarks to two hundred students at Rome’s College for the Propagation of the Faith, he took his criticism a step further. There was but one, big human race, he told the students; and in a comment that would infuriate Mussolini, he added, “One can ask how it is that Italy, unfortunately, felt the need to go and imitate Germany.” 34

The pope reserved his strongest words for his defense of his beloved Catholic Action. “I warn you,” he said, clearly addressing Mussolini, “not to strike Catholic Action, and I beg you for your own good, for he who strikes Catholic Action strikes the pope, and he who strikes the pope dies.”

Angered above all by the charge that he was imitating Hitler, Mussolini ordered that no Italian paper publish the pope’s speech. 35 Ciano told the nuncio Borgongini that if the pope continued such attacks, he would provoke a major rift. “I spoke very clearly to Borgongini,” Ciano recalled. “I explained the promises and the aims of our racism.” The nuncio again tried to minimize the pope’s remarks. Pius had only wanted to be sure that Italian racism remained within proper bounds. Ciano was pleased: Borgongini “appeared to me to be very convinced. And he revealed himself to be very anti-Semitic.” 36 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.298)

Worried about the damage the pope could do to the anti-Semitic campaign, Pignatti turned to a man who could help. On August 4 he traveled south to the Sorrento peninsula, where Father Ledóchowski was staying in a Jesuit residence recovering from a recent illness. “I went to see the general of the Jesuits,” Pignatti later explained, “because in the past … he did not hide from me his implacable loathing for the Jews, whom he believes are the origin of all the ills that afflict Europe.”

The ambassador found Ledóchowski well informed about the problem and highly sympathetic to Pignatti’s cause. “Father Rosa,” he said, “told me that the pope did not understand.” His illness was robbing him of his mental abilities: “It is terrible, but that’s the way it is.” During the pope’s illness, Pius had prayed to God to take his soul to Him, but “the Lord did not grant the pope’s prayer, and as a result the Church today is going through a serious crisis.” Pius “does not reason and does not want to hear reason.” Cardinal Pacelli was at his wit’s end: “The pope no longer listens to him as he once did. He carefully hides his plans from him and does not tell him about the speeches he will give.”

Those around the pope, reported Ledóchowski, were terrified by what would happen if his condition deteriorated further. 39 He urged the ambassador not to let the pope’s rants compromise the Church’s good relations with the Fascist regime.

Pignatti replied that they could not ignore the pope’s rants, for the foreign press—especially in France—was exploiting his words, and Catholics throughout the world were heeding them, “ignorant of the fact that the common Father of all the faithful was mentally debilitated.” The pope’s remarks “were causing a tide of hatred against Italy that was compromising it both morally and materially.”

Ledóchowski agreed. A crisis loomed. After pledging the ambassador to secrecy, he confided: “The danger is too great not to do whatever is necessary to find a remedy.” 40

Just what “remedy” the Jesuit general had in mind is far from clear. But he would spend the next months doing all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Fascist racial policy, offending the Nazis, or offering any hope for the Jews. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.300-1)

But the pope’s mood could change quickly. When Tardini reported that a new Fascist Party head had been appointed in Bergamo, he added his hope that the situation there would improve. “If they take away another [Fascist Party] membership card,” replied the pope, in a flash of his old temper, “I will intervene energetically! I will make a scandal! I will let the world know! Taking away a person’s membership means taking away his bread.” He grew more agitated: “Fascism will look really good! One doesn’t become old for nothing! Old folks have a certain immunity, and I intend to take advantage of it!” 46

If the ailing pope was upset with Mussolini, he was also developing a dim view of his countrymen. "The Italians," the pope told Tardini, when the subject of the new racial laws came up in their conversation in mid-October, "are a bunch of sheep." Then he added, "For this we certainly don't need to be grateful to Mussolini." (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.331)

The pope met with Tardini and Tacchi Venturi to discuss next steps. Tardini mentioned that the government had banned publication of articles critical of racism, even if they only criticized the German variety. “But all this is a disgrace!” said the pope. “I am ashamed, not as pope, but as an Italian! The Italian people have become a flock of stupid sheep. I will speak up, have no fear of that. The concordat means a lot to me, but my conscience means more.... Here they have become like so many Farinaccis. I am truly upset, as a pope and as an Italian!”

Once the storm—as Tardini described the pope’s outburst—passed, Tacchi Venturi, not one to be easily thrown off course, incongruously took out a photograph of the pontiff and asked him to sign it, with a dedication to Mussolini’s son Bruno, who was to get married a few days later. “I have little taste for putting my signature under the name of Mussolini!” said the pope. But he signed the photo anyway, as Tacchi Venturi had known he would.

Their business over, Pius XI and the Jesuit began to reminisce. “They are two old men,” reflected Tardini, recalling the scene, “one eighty-two and the other seventy-seven, sprightly and intelligent.” They traded references to the Old and New Testaments and chuckled over stories of the men they had known, some long gone. 11 It was the kind of easy banter that the pope would have with few others.

Later that day Tardini, Tacchi Venturi, and Borgongini gathered in the apartment of Cardinal Domenico Jorio. 12 As prefect of the Congregation for the Discipline of the Sacraments, Jorio oversaw marriage regulations. The pope had asked the men to find a way out of the impasse. They came up with a plan, which the pope approved. The nuncio and Tacchi Venturi would try to convince government officials that it was not in their interest to cause a rupture in relations with the Holy See “for the few, rare cases [of mixed marriages], when it is possible to find a way out.” They would try to get a copy of the proposed law, “to be in a position to advise on appropriate modifications.” 13

But when Tacchi Venturi asked Mussolini for a meeting, the Duce refused, telling him to put what he wanted to say in writing. 14 So the Jesuit subsequently sent the Duce a letter, in which he claimed that the Catholic Church had long opposed mixed marriages. They were “extremely rare and only tolerated for serious reasons of conscience.” The pope, he assured Mussolini, was willing to go even further to reach an understanding: “The Holy Father is ready to see to it that they are even rarer and can never take place without being directly subject to the Holy Pontiff’s direct review.”

In his desperation to reach a deal, Tacchi Venturi was not only willing to make the pope a direct participant in the racial campaign, he was concealing a distinction that was crucial to the Church and central to the Vatican’s problem with the racial laws. The pope’s principal objection involved not the ban on what the Church considered to be “mixed marriages”—that is, marriages between Jews and Catholics—but rather those uniting two Catholics, one of whom had once been Jewish or who had a Jewish parent.

The Jesuit devoted the final page of his letter to singing the Duce’s praises. He concluded by describing himself as “one who loves You and the Fatherland, one who—and I say it without a shadow of boasting—feels incapable of betraying You and Fascism.” 15

But the proposal failed to move Mussolini. Guido Buffarini, the intimidating undersecretary for internal affairs, told them the news: the Duce would never allow the pope to grant exceptions for mixed marriages; nor would he want to have the king review such requests. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.334-6)

By Emma Fattorini Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech That was ... 2011 p.163)

The Holy Father retorted and said to Fr Tacchi Venturi: "But this is gross! . . . I am ashamed . . . I am ashamed of being Italian. And you, Father, please tell Mussolini! Not as Pope but rather as an Italian, I am ashamed of myself? The Italian people has become a flock of stupid sheep.

"I shall speak out, I will not be afraid. I am impelled by the Concordat, but even more by my conscience. I will not be afraid! I prefer to go and ask for alms. Nor will I ask Mussolini to defend the Vatican. Even if the square is full of people I shall not be frightened! Here they have all turned into so much stubble. I am truly saddened, as Pope and as an Italian" (ibid., pp. 27-38; Fattorini, pp. 183-184). The Catholic Church and Racial Laws by Sergio Pagano

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 of 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 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.354-5)

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 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.559)

IT WAS NOW SEVEN MONTHS since the pope had secretly summoned Father LaFarge to Castel Gandolfo to prepare a draft encyclical on racism and anti-Semitism. But he had received nothing. Unable to keep the secret from his advisers any longer, he told Tardini about the project and asked him to find out from Ledóchowski what had become of the American Jesuit’s work.

When, months earlier, Ledóchowski had sent the draft encyclical to Rosa, he had enclosed a cover note: “I send Your Reverence a copy of Father LaFarge’s work with the prayer that you look through it and tell me … if it can be presented in this form to the Holy Father as a first draft.” Ledóchowski quickly answered his own question: “I very much doubt it!” Rosa never got to finish his revisions. 29 On Saturday evening, November 26, while sitting at his desk, the sixty-eight-year-old former Civiltà cattolica editor suffered a heart attack and died. 30

Still Ledóchowski kept the draft encyclical from the pope. In reluctantly forwarding it to the pope in January, he attached a letter of his own. Tellingly, he referred to the encyclical’s subject as “nationalism,” not racism, much less anti-Semitism. “It seemed to both Father Rosa and me,” Ledóchowski told the pope, “that the outline does not correspond to what Your Holiness had desired.” Rosa had been working on a new outline but died before he could complete it. Ledóchowski gave no explanation for what he had been doing with the material since Rosa’s death, but he offered to assist the pope in any way he could in preparing a more acceptable version. 31

Rumors of the secret encyclical against racism had somehow leaked out, and Mussolini and his entourage were worried. In late January a police informer sent in a long report on the latest high prelate to criticize Nazi racism and its Italian echoes. The archbishop—or patriarch as he was called—of Venice had recently given a sermon for Epiphany, which L’Osservatore romano had published. Nothing, Cardinal Piazza had said, justified the “excessive exaltations of races,” which had no scientific basis and went against basic Church teachings. 32 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.363-4)

The bishops had already arrived in Rome for the celebration that had meant so much to the pope, a celebration for which Ciano had his hopes and Mussolini his fears. On the pope’s desk was the folder of Humani generis unitas, the encyclical prepared by Father LaFarge. Rejecting the idea that a good Christian could embrace racism, it demanded an end to the persecution of the Jews. It was Pius XI’s fervent hope that such a statement be issued, but among those who survived him, many were eager to see it buried along with the pope. 51 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.369)

It is not clear whether the rumors that the pope was about to deliver a denunciation of Fascism drew on leaks about the pope’s plans for a secret encyclical against racism. There is every indication that Fathers LaFarge and Gundlach, although unhappy that their efforts had been sabotaged, kept their vow of secrecy, and neither Ledóchowski nor Rosa had any interest in letting anyone outside know of the pope’s plan. Pius XI, having received the text only three weeks before his death, never had a chance to do anything with it.

Learning of Mussolini’s concern, Pacelli moved quickly. On February 15 he ordered the pope’s secretary to gather up all written material the pope had produced in preparing his address. He also told the Vatican printing office to destroy all copies of the speech it had printed, copies that Pius had intended to give the bishops. The vice director of the office gave his assurance that he would personally destroy them, so that “not a comma” remained. Pacelli acted two days after learning of Ciano’s worries that the text of the pope’s speech might get out. Pacelli also took the material that Ledóchowski had sent the pope three weeks earlier—what has since come to be known as the “secret encyclical” against racism—eager to ensure that no one else would see it.

The words the pope had so painstakingly prepared in the last days of his life would never be seen as long as Pacelli lived. Only twenty years later, four months after Pacelli died, would Pope John XXIII, in one of his first acts, release excerpts of the speech. But he excised those passages that were most critical of the Fascist regime, presumably to protect Pacelli, suspected of having buried the speech in order not to offend Mussolini or Hitler. Only with the opening of the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XI in 2006 has the world seen the full text.

The speech was far from the ringing denunciation of the Fascist regime that Mussolini had feared, but the Duce would not have been pleased to have it heard by Italy’s bishops and then read by millions around the world. The pope complained about efforts to conceal and misrepresent his speeches, and warned the bishops to be on their guard when they spoke with “the so-called hierarchs” of the government. “Be careful, dearest Brothers in Christ, and do not forget that often there are observers and informers (you would do well to call them spies) who, of their own initiative or because charged to do so, listen to you in order to condemn you, after, it is understood, having understood nothing at all and if necessary just the opposite.” He went on to bewail “these pseudo-Catholics who seem happy when they believe they have identified a disagreement or discrepancy between one Bishop and another, or even better between a Bishop and a Pope.” He then urged the bishops never to use a telephone when saying words they did not want known, for their lines were likely tapped. (“We have never once in all these years used the telephone,” the pope proudly noted.) (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.373)

On the eighteenth, as the cardinals gathered in Rome, Diego von Bergen, Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See, came to talk to his Italian counterpart. Bergen was eager to tell Pignatti of his recent conversation with Cardinal Pacelli: the cardinal had been moved by Hitler’s message of condolence and asked to have his own personal thanks, and that of the Sacred College, communicated to the Führer. Pacelli also wanted to let Hitler know that he hoped conciliation between the Reich and the Holy See would now be possible. The message had greatly pleased the Nazi government.

“The ambassador told me,” recounted Pignatti, “that if the conclave’s choice should fall on Cardinal Pacelli, Pacelli would do everything he could to reconcile with Germany, and probably he would succeed.”

The Italian ambassador offered Bergen some advice, in the spirit of helping both their causes. The Reich’s relations with the Vatican could be repaired, he said, only if the German government took steps to improve the atmosphere. First, the German newspapers needed to tone down their criticism of the Vatican. The cardinals paid close attention to what was said in the foreign press, and recent hostile articles from Germany were not helping. 18

Pignatti also urged the German ambassador to do everything possible to get the four German cardinals to take a conciliatory attitude at the upcoming conclave. Should they preach a holy war against the Nazi regime, he warned, “all will be lost.” It was crucial they convince the other cardinals that an understanding with the Nazis was still in reach. Bergen said he would telegraph Berlin immediately to ask for an end to the polemics in the press. As for the German cardinals, he said, he was optimistic. 19

For the Italian ambassador, the question of how the German cardinals would behave at the conclave was too important to leave entirely to Bergen. On February 21 he visited Ledóchowski to enlist his aid; the Jesuit general said he would do all he could to help. 20

As the conclave neared, Pignatti checked back in with the German embassy, speaking to Bergen’s number two, Fritz Menshausen. The Nazi envoy, Pignatti reported, “repeatedly insisted on the candidacy of Pacelli as pope and Tedeschini”—former nuncio to Spain—“as secretary of state. This would represent the best solution for Germany and would make possible an easing in relations between the Holy See and the Reich.” 21

Pignatti rushed from one Italian cardinal to another, trying to convince them of the wisdom of choosing a pope who was favorably disposed toward the Fascist regime and would not publicly criticize the Nazis. With the German cardinals supporting Pacelli, if the French cardinals fell in line, he believed the rest of the non-Italians would as well. The Italian cardinals were a different story. They faulted Pacelli “for a weakness of character, for being easily influenced, and sometimes stumbling, as happens to people who are weak.” Pignatti related all this to Ciano, adding, “These points are, in my opinion, quite well founded.” 22 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.376-7)



The man who would have the honor of placing the papal tiara on Pacelli’s head was none other than Cardinal Caccia Dominioni. Somehow the Vatican and the Fascist police had been able to conceal the cardinal’s trail of pederasty accusations. The latest episode in the Italian police files had come only recently. While riding on a bus in Rome the previous August, a policeman had found his attention drawn to the cartons of foreign cigarettes that a young messenger boy was carrying. Suspicious, he discovered that they lacked the required Italian tax stamp. When he asked the lad where he had gotten the contraband cigarettes, the boy replied that someone high up in the Vatican had given them to him. Pressed further, the boy identified Cardinal Caccia. When the police phoned the cardinal to check the boy’s story, he confirmed the account and asked that the boy be left alone. “As Caccia Dominioni enjoys the reputation of pederasty,” the police informant concluded, “they are saying that the reason for the offer of these cigarettes was easily explained.” 34 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.382)

The Nazi government, too, was pleased by the new pope’s attempts to repair the damage done by Pius XI. In his memoirs, Ernst von Weizsäcker, the head of the German Foreign Office who would soon succeed Bergen as German ambassador to the Holy See, wrote, “If Pius XI, so impulsive and energetic, had lived a little longer, there would in all likelihood have been a break in relations between the Reich and the Curia.” 4 But as it was, for Hitler’s birthday, on April 20, the papal nuncio in Berlin personally gave the Führer the new pope’s best wishes. Throughout Germany church bells rang in celebration. The German newspapers were full of praise for Pope Pacelli, lauding him for warmly congratulating Franco and his compatriots on their conquest of Spain. The papers drew special attention to the pope’s remarks equating Communism with democracy. In reporting all this to Ciano, the Italian ambassador in Berlin remarked that the new pope had come at an opportune time. As the world was condemning the Nazis’ invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Reich needed, “perhaps for the first time, to have the Church with it and not against it.” 5

In May the pope met with Giuseppe Bottai, Italy’s minister of education and one of the men closest to Mussolini. Although the room was the same that Pius XI had used, Bottai was struck by how different it seemed. Early in his papacy, Pius XI had kept a spartan office, but as he aged he increasingly accumulated mementoes as well as oft-consulted tomes. As Bottai described it, the elderly Pius XI had been surrounded by a “picturesque disorder of furniture, ornaments, knick-knacks, papers, newspapers, books.” In contrast, Pius XII sat amid a “meticulous order.” His desk held only a few indispensable objects. Most of all, compared to the voluble, excitable Pius XI—certain that God was guiding him, apt to go off on tangents—his successor exuded a sense of calm and the air of someone who knew his job. 6

Over the next months, Mussolini became more confident that a new, happier era had arrived. Among the various bits of good news he received was the pope’s decision, in July, to reestablish relations with the right-wing Action Française. In response to a request from its leader, Charles Maurras—protofascist and France’s foremost anti-Semite—the pope reversed Pius XI’s 1926 ban on Catholic participation in the organization. The move angered not only the French government but also many of France’s most influential clergymen. 7

Pius XII, Pignatti reported, was not only a conservative but “has a clear sympathy, I would almost say a weakness, for the nobility, which is in his blood.” Roman nobles were delighted. His predecessor, coming from a modest social background, had shown little deference to them and over the years cut back on their privileges. Pius XII, a product of the black aristocracy, moved quickly to reintroduce their old prerogatives. 8

Mussolini got another encouraging report about the new pope, this one from Switzerland. His ambassador there had spoken at length with the papal nuncio, recently returned from Rome. The atmosphere in the Vatican, the nuncio reported, was “completely changed,” like a “breath of fresh air.” The Holy Father spoke “with much sympathy for Fascism and with sincere admiration for the Duce.” He was convinced that his reorganization of Catholic Action in Italy would remove a major source of tension with the regime. As for Germany, the new pope could not be more eager to come to an agreement. 9 (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.386)

Dino Grandi, dapper and goateed, one of the regime’s luminaries, sitting near the Duce, rose and delivered a speech such as the dictator had never heard. Mussolini alone, Grandi proclaimed, was to blame for the disastrous situation the country now faced. “The Italian people were betrayed by Mussolini,” said Grandi, who had served as Mussolini’s foreign minister and then ambassador to Great Britain, “the day that Italy began to be Germanized.” Mussolini, he charged, “engulfed us in a war that is against honor, and against the interests and the sentiments of the Italian people.”

Dumbfounded, his confidence shaken, Mussolini’s attempts to interrupt became progressively weaker, as Grandi called for deposing him and bringing back parliamentary democracy. Then Grandi turned left to face Mussolini: “You believe you still have the devotion of the Italian people? You lost it the day that you consigned Italy to Germany. You think you are a soldier: Italy was ruined the day you put on your commander’s stripes. There are hundreds of thousands of mothers who cry out: Mussolini killed my son!”

Seated at the long tables, some Grand Council members, astonished and furious, swore at Grandi. “You will pay with your head for this treachery!” shouted one. Those who agreed with Grandi considered whether to support his motion, which called for deposing the dictator, returning control of Italy’s military from Mussolini to the king, and restoring the constitutional order. They nervously wondered what fate would befall those who dared vote in its favor.

It was now well past midnight, July 25, 1943. Following hours of heated argument, the fateful vote was taken. Nineteen of the twenty-seven men—while fearful they might not survive the night—voted for the motion. They were relieved, perhaps even a bit surprised, when no Fascist militiamen stopped them as they left the room. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.391)

Over the course of the seven years of archival research that went into this book, I compiled digitized copies of twenty-five thousand pages of documents from these different archives. I also pored through thousands of pages of published Italian, French, British, American, and German diplomatic correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. The work was rarely tedious, for the surprises kept coming. The challenge of piecing together documents from different archives to solve long-standing puzzles was intoxicating. (David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini" 2014 p.406-7)

David Kertzer "The Pope and Mussolini": The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe – review 03/06/2014