Prisoner of the Vatican (51 page)

Mussolini acted quickly to consolidate his power and by the mid-19205 had abolished all political organizations other than his own. In this he was helped by the Vatican, which decided that its best bet was to pull the plug on its own Catholic party and support Mussolini's more effective efforts to rid Italian society of the scourge of socialism. For his part, the Duce saw the tremendous benefit to be had—both domestically and internationally—by becoming the first Italian leader to make peace with the Church. And so, on February 11,1929, Mussolini himself, alongside the Vatican's secretary of state, Pietro Gasparri, signed the Lateran Pacts, ending the hostility that had existed between church and state since the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861. The Vatican agreed to recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state and of its capital in Rome. In exchange, the pope was given a large payment for the loss of the Papal States and a concordat regulating relations between the Catholic Church and Italy. The Vatican was deemed to have the rights of a sovereign state, to be called Vatican City. The Catholic religion became Italy's sole official religion. Catholic religious instruction was made obligatory in the public schools, and Catholic religious imagery was returned to schoolrooms and public offices throughout the country.

On July 25,1929, after celebrating mass in St. Peter's, Pope Pius XI led a joyful procession through the great doors of the basilica and into the public square, where he pronounced his blessings to the multitudes. For the first time in almost fifty-nine years a pope had left the walls of the Vatican.

The following year, in deference to the Vatican, the fascist state abolished September 20 as a national holiday. The origins of modern Italy in the battle against the political power of the papacy had now become a part of history that Italians were encouraged to forget.

Fascism's fall a decade and a half later left Mussolini's deal with the Vatican intact, with the Lateran Pacts enshrined in the new, postwar Italian constitution. But the Savoyard monarchy was not so lucky. Angered by the king's support for fascism and his cowardly behavior during the war, the Italian people voted to replace the monarchy with a republic. Although it had taken longer than Pius IX had imagined, his prediction had finally come true: Rome had room for but a single sovereign.

One consequence of this burying of the hatchet was that Italy became a country rather unlike others, a country unable to celebrate its own birth, a country whose founding fathers had become an embarrassment.

Not a year now goes by without a torrent of new books bemoaning the Italians' lack of national spirit and the weakness of their allegiance to the Italian state. The role played by the Vatican's decades-long refusal to recognize the state's legitimacy is hard to ignore here. Yet Italy today is a country where placards marking historic battles for national unification—at least those in its capital and in the rest of what were once the Papal States—must carefully avoid mentioning against whom those battles were actually fought. Teaching schoolchildren the views of the greatest hero of national unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, has now become unthinkable. Celebrating the date when the capital was finally captured from the hands of the principal foe of national unification is considered unseemly, the name of the enemy itself unmentionable.

September 20, 2002, passed in Rome with little public notice. The annual mass held by the Catholic faithful, mourning the anniversary of the day when Rome was taken from the pontiff, received, as usual, no more than a paragraph in the papers the next day. On the front page of Rome's daily newspaper on September 21, the only story related to church and state was a piece written by Monsignor Manlio Asta defending the placement of the crucifix in public classrooms on the grounds that the cross was a universal symbol of European civilization.
¹²

But two months later, Romans witnessed a dramatic scene. A black Mercedes convertible pulled up to the Montecitorio Palace, the home of Italy's House of Deputies. The car bore a distinctive license plate:
VATICAN CITY
i. Gingerly, but without assistance, the elderly, ailing passenger, dressed in his white robes and white skullcap, emerged from the back. There to receive him were the presidents of the House and the Senate. As John Paul II made his way into the great hemisphere of the parliamentary hall, an enthusiastic burst of applause erupted from the assembled dignitaries, a rare joint session of the House and Senate, with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the members of his cabinet present. The pontiff spoke for forty-six minutes, urging the Italian state to more fully embrace Catholic values. When he finished, the members of parliament and cabinet ministers rushed to greet him, some getting down on their knees before him, others kissing his hand. For the first time since Pius IX lost the Holy City, the distinctive papal white and yellow flag flew proudly over the center of power in Rome.

Far from sacred today, by contrast, are the heroes of Italian unification, their motives questioned, their honesty impugned, and their project of national unification itself viewed negatively by the growing chorus of voices emboldened by the current atmosphere to express sentiments that in an earlier period would have targeted them for public scorn.

In 1999 the archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, one of the Italian Church's best-known figures, published a small book on the Risorgimento. There he quoted Feodor Dostoyevsky as asking, in 1877, apropos of Cavour's success in unifying Italy: "And so just what did Count Cavour accomplish? A little second-rate kingdom, of no international importance, without ambitions, made bourgeois." Biffi went on to assert that the Risorgimento had in fact undermined Italy's stature: "Just at the moment when—with an 'Italian' government, an 'Italian' parliament, and an 'Italian' army—we were welcomed among the peoples as an autonomous, identifiable subject, it would seem that we no longer had anything to say to anyone." In the old days, when Italians had been divided into different states, "they continued to teach something to everyone." By contrast, "once they had achieved the hoped-for unity and political independence, they tried only to imitate a bit of everyone, especially the French and the English, up to the present day, when they have resigned themselves to being a cultural colony of the United States."

The big mistake, both of the Risorgimento's leaders and of liberals more generally, in Cardinal Biffi's estimation, was their failure to recognize Catholicism as the cornerstone of Italian national identity. Trying to establish a nation based on other principles—the principles of the Risorgimento—could only lead to disaster.
¹³

Today there is little doubt in Rome who is the most powerful leader. One man alone is the object of great reverence, one man alone is seen as embodying society's deepest aspirations, a man whose every act is the object of adulatory front-page coverage in the press, even of the left. And were Garibaldi somehow to come to life and climb down from his horse on top of the Gianiculum, he would be better advised to keep his thoughts on the Vatican to himself. From the perspective of Italians of the twenty-first century, the hero of Italian unification, the Hero of Two Worlds, is looking more and more like an embarrassing crackpot.

Acknowledgments

Notes

References Cited

Illustration Sources

Index

T
HANKS ARE DUE
, first of all, to Wendy Strothman and Eric Chinski, who both believed in this book from the beginning and who made me feel welcome at Houghton Mifflin. Eric's keen editorial eye and literary sensibility have resulted in a better book. Thanks, too, to Janet Silver at Houghton Mifflin for her strong support and for her help in crafting the final version of the book.

Authors whose books are based primarily on archival materials depend on the goodwill and aid of those who run and control the archives. This book is no exception. It has been made possible by help from archivists at the Vatican (particularly at the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and the Archivio della Congregrazione per gli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari), at the Archivio di Stato di Roma, and at the archives of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères in Paris. I would like to thank in particular the director (Giuseppe Talamo), the curator (Marco Pizzo), and the archivist (Fabrizio Alberti) of the archives of the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano in Rome for their help. Thanks too to Carmelo Catania for assisting me with the photographing of images at that archive. At the archive of the Museo Civico del Risorgimento, Bologna, I would like to thank the directors, Mirtide Gavelli and Otello Sangiorgi.

Valuable advice along the way was offered by Giuseppe Pizzorusso and Matteo Sanfilippo, who also read a much longer, early version of the manuscript and provided helpful comments. John A. Davis and Scott Lerner are also to be thanked for their comments on that draft, as are Paolo Zaninoni, my multitalented editor at Rizzoli, and Gian-vittorio Signorotto. Thanks to Michael Putnam for his help on my schoolboy Latin.

At Brown, I was greatly aided by my excellent research assistants, Simone Poliandri and Vika Zafrin. Erick Castellanos, Chiara Sartori, Jenny Asarnow, Kathy Grimaldi, Shirley Gordon, and Matilde Andrade also provided valuable assistance at Brown, and thanks are due to Laura Scotto and Vittoria Serafini for their work with archival material in Rome.

For their help in the final production process at Houghton Mifflin, I'd like to thank Meg Lemke, for her careful work in coordinating the publication process, and Luise Erdmann, whom I was fortunate to have as manuscript editor. Finally, my appreciation, as always, for all the support provided by my literary agent, Ted Chichak.

Abbreviations used for archival sources

ASV: Archivio Segreto Vaticano

SS: Segreteria di Stato

EM: Epoca Moderna

AAEESS: Archivio Storico, Sacra Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari

SE: Stati Ecclesiastici

ASR: Archivio di Stato di Roma

Questura di Roma

Prefettura di Roma

Tribunale Civile e Correzzionale

MAE: Archives, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris

CP: Correspondance Politique

MAES: MAE, Saint Siège

MAEI: MAE, Italie

Abbreviation used for published documents

DDI:
Documenti diplomatici italiani,
from series i, vol. 13 (1870), to series 2, vol. 22 (1889). Ministero degli Affari Esteri (1960–1997). Roma: Libreria di Stato.

Complete citations for nineteenth-century newspaper articles may be found in the endnotes. All other published works cited in the endnotes may be found in References Cited.

Prologue

1.
Falti nuovi,
p. 36.

Introduction: Italy's Birth and Near Demise

1. According to one estimate, only 2 percent of the population had played any role in bringing about Italian unification (Mazzonis 2003, p. 140).

2. This portrait of Bismarck is based largely on Pflanze (1990). The quotation is also from Pflanze (1990:46).

1. Destroying the Papal States

1. Aubert 1990b, p. 147.

2. Blakiston 1962, n. 292, Odo Russell to Earl R., 16 February 1864. Russell occupied a peculiar position because Britain had no official ambassador to the Holy See, so
technically Russell had no diplomatic status in Rome. Yet despite this, and despite his known sympathy for the Italian liberals, he met regularly with Antonelli and often with the pope himself (d'Ideville 1875, p. 43).

3. Cadorna 1898, pp. 9–10. The move of the capital to Florence came at no small cost, outraging especially the citizens of Turin, where fifty-two died in protests.

4. Mack Smith 1989, pp. 21–22.

5. Tivaroni 1897, p. 285; Mundt's comments are quoted in Negro 1977, p. 161; Pirri 1958, pp. 102–3; Coppa 1990, p. 188.

6. Blakiston 1962, n. 303, O.R. to Earl R., 14 November 1864.

7. Lawlessness and disorders of various kinds were rampant in the South in these years, the flames fanned by partisans of the old Bourbon dynasty and opponents of the new Italian state. Branding the problem one simply of brigandage, the government declared martial law and sent in large numbers of troops from the North to restore order.

8. Blakiston 1962, n. 305, O.R. to Earl R., 22 November 1864. On receiving Russell's report, the London foreign office decided that the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, should read it himself. The note that he penciled in the margin shows that he shared Antonelli's and Prince Altomonte's interpretation of the French emperor's motives. "It has been evident for a long time," Palmerston wrote, "that the object of the Emperor as regards Italy is not its unity but its division into separate states."

9. Blakiston 1962, n. 310, O.R. to Earl R., 17 January 1865.

10. Blakiston 1962, n. 335, O.R. to Earl of C., 22 January 1866. The pope's remarks here are a paraphrase.

11. Blakiston 1962, n. 329, O.R. to Earl of C., 3 July 1866.

12. Blakiston 1962, n. 330, O.R. to the Earl of Clarendon, 10 July 1866.

13. Blakiston 1962, n. 353, O.R. to Lord Stanley, 27 July 1866; n. 354, O.R. to Lord'S., 23 August 1866; n. 357, O.R. to Lord'S., 4 December 1866; n. 359, O.R. to Lord'S., 15 December 1866.

14. Viallet 1991, pp. 336–37; Mack Smith 1956, pp. 158–61.

15. Mack Smith 1956, pp. 164–65.

16. Blakiston 1962, n. 349, O.R. to Lord'S., 16 January 1868; n. 383, O.R. to Lord'S., 26 March 1868.

2. The Pope Becomes Infallible

1. Quoted in Martina 1986, p. 329.

2. Martina 1986, p. 331: Pius IX letter to Franz Josef 19 February 1864.

3. Aubert 1990a.

4. This is my translation of the Italian text.

5. On the ties of the Jesuits to the aristocracy, see Aubert 1972, p. 8.

6. Blakiston 1962, n. 310, Odo Russell to Earl R„ Rome, 17 January 1865. Russell wrote of his meeting with Antonelli: "I am assured that he opposed its publication, but was overruled by the Pope, Merode, and the Jesuits, who are now all powerful in Rome."