The Pope and Mussolini (10 page)

Pius XI began his daily round of appointments at nine
A.M.
, often by meeting his secretary of state. When visitors entered, they sank to a knee, which for many was already trembling, for given the pope’s authoritarian nature, his brusque manner, and his insistence that his orders
be obeyed to the letter, his visitors were rarely at ease. They then stood up, took a couple of steps, and bowed again before taking a final two steps and genuflecting a third time. Given the confined space and their nervousness, some stumbled. Luigi Sincero, one of the highest-ranking cardinals, remarked that preparing to see the pope was like preparing for an exam as a schoolboy. Other high prelates admitted to nervously reciting a prayer as they crossed the pope’s threshold. In departing, visitors again dropped to a knee and repeated the same three bows in reverse as they backed out.
¹⁰

Pius XI at his desk, 1922

(
photograph credit 3.1
)

When the last morning visitor left, often not until two
P.M.
, the pope took his lunch. He was fond of eating risotto, Milanese style, with saffron, or a thick Italian vegetable soup and a piece of meat with cooked vegetables, followed by fruit. He drank a half glass of wine along with several glasses of water. There was perhaps no more telling reflection of his view of the pontiff’s dignity than his insistence on dining alone. While both Pius X and Benedict XV had eaten with their assistants or invited special guests to join them for a meal, Pius XI would not allow anyone to eat in his presence, although he did have his aides stand beside him to go over reports and write down his orders. One day, some weeks after his election, his weary assistants, not looking forward to years of standing as he ate but afraid to say anything, surreptitiously brought in little stools, which they placed against the wall. When they completed their reports, they sat down. Taken aback, the pope looked up from his plate but said nothing. The stools remained.
¹¹

After a brief nap, at four
P.M.
the pope walked out to the courtyard, where Swiss Guards, awaiting him, dropped to their knees, their right hands on their berets and their left clutching their long ax-topped poles.
¹²
In those first weeks, an elderly coachman sat with his long whip raised in his right hand, perched over two beautiful black horses. Within a few months, the carriage would be replaced by the pope’s first automobile. After a short ride, the pontiff began his hour-long walk through the Vatican gardens, hands often clasped behind his back, a black fedora perched over the white skullcap on his head. In cooler weather, he wore a white double-breasted coat that reached his feet.
These were not leisurely strolls but purposive strides befitting the “mountaineer pope,” as he repeatedly circumnavigated the gardens. An aide in long black gown, a clerical collar around his neck, struggled to keep up with him, several paces behind.

Pius XI during his walk in the Vatican gardens, accompanied by Monsignor Carlo Confalonieri

(
photograph credit 3.2
)

Following his walk, the pope devoted an hour to private prayer before returning to his office. At six or seven he began a new series of appointments, primarily with members of the Curia, the Holy See’s central administration. After the last of them, he recited the rosary with his secretaries and at ten
P.M.
ate supper. The last thing he did each night was return to his office and take out a massive bound register.
There he recorded all the gifts he had received that day and all the expenses he had incurred. At midnight he went to bed.
¹³

ROME IN THESE YEARS
was a study in contrasts, as the ancient, the medieval, and the early modern rubbed up against the new. Since Italian troops had seized the city in 1870, the social landscape had been transformed. Monasteries had been converted into government buildings and schools. Men from the north streamed into the city to take up government jobs in Italy’s new capital, and impoverished peasants from the center and south arrived in wooden-wheeled oxcarts with all their belongings, the booming population of civil servants and construction industry creating new jobs.

Although the Church no longer ran the city, Rome still seemed to have a church on every block. Priests in their black cassocks, nuns in their habits, tonsure-headed Dominicans in their white robes, maroon-gowned Franciscans, Greek Catholic seminarians in their blue cassocks and red sashes, and a kaleidoscope of other monks and seminarians clogged the city’s roads. Carabinieri in their Napoleonic hats and red-striped trousers mixed with an assortment of soldiers and municipal police. Wet nurses, to whom the middle classes entrusted their infants, did their best to make their way through the crowded streets with their little wards.

While many Romans were impressed with all that was new—not least the electric tram, whose tracks crisscrossed the cobblestone streets, and the ever-growing number of automobiles on the impossibly narrow, winding, bumpy roads—signs abounded of a country that was still largely composed of semiliterate peasants. Horse-drawn wine carts descended from the countryside to deliver goods to the city’s many
osterie
. Signs outside the fancier of these eateries promised
vini scelti
and
ottima cucina
. Alongside them, more modest shops simply advertised
pane e pasta
. Small produce shops, a riot of colors thanks to their stocks of fruits and vegetables, lined the roads, the tiny premises serving as the shopkeeper’s living quarters as well. In early spring, small
grapelike tomatoes arrived from the south. Greengrocers artfully arranged carrots, turnips, and broccoli around their doors. Romans also shopped at the small markets that sprang up each morning in the city’s little piazzas. There grocers constructed impressive pyramids of oranges, apples, and white figs. Pasta vendors piled up mounds of freshly made macaroni and spaghetti. Plucked chickens hung by their feet from stall awnings. Gleaming, tightly packed rows of fish attracted those who could afford it.

The larger outdoor markets, their stalls protected from sun and rain by broad umbrellas, attracted a wide range of customers. Princes’ fur-coated majordomos jostled alongside poor women in knitted peasant shawls. After haggling over price, women placed their modest purchases in large checkered handkerchiefs. Flower vendors balanced huge baskets brimming with daffodils, mimosa, carnations, and violets on their heads. Other hawkers sang the praises of their motley mix of clothes, folding knives, and onions, their wares swung over their shoulders or carried on trays hung from their necks.

Occasionally a distinctive, well-dressed figure could be seen sitting at a table in the middle of a small piazza. On benches arranged around him, his patrons—mainly old men and women—sat awaiting their turn. On his table lay an inkwell, some sheets of paper, and a blotting pad. He penned letters and filled out forms for the illiterate. Priests knew which streets had shops that sold clerical garb. Seminarians knew where to find secondhand bookstalls. Tourists consulted their guidebooks to locate the stalls that sold antiques and jewelry, not all of it fake. Old women stopped occasionally at a modest streetside shrine, saying a prayer to the fading image of the Madonna and Christ child that graced the stucco wall.

Mules and donkeys carried bricks and barrels, scarlet tassels hanging from their harnesses and scarlet cloths on their backs. Laundry hung from clotheslines that stretched across the narrow streets. Cobblers pounded their shoes, and stonecutters chipped their stones in tiny, dark shops. Women shouted down from their windows to bargain with peddlers on the street below. They put their payment in a basket
and lowered it down by rope. The vendor replaced the coins with goods for the return trip. When the scorching sunlight gave way to clouds and rain, Rome burst out in umbrellas, from the tattered green ones of the scavengers to the shiny black ones that liveried servants held over the heads of the city’s elite. Other than the automobiles, which had no need of them, practically every vehicle sprouted an umbrella as well. “There are few more grotesque silhouettes in Rome,” wrote one observer earlier in the century, “than her cabmen, with their weary, ewe-necked horses and their ramshackle open victorias, shrinking under umbrellas which look like old mushrooms.”
¹⁴

The pope got to see none of this, for he refused to venture beyond the Vatican walls. For decades, every pope had suffered the ignominy of living on a tiny plot of land surrounded by the very state that had seized the Church’s territories and drastically reduced its political power. The neighborhood outside, squeezed into the land between the Vatican palaces and the Tiber, retained something of the scent, sound, and feel of the old regime, a shabby, overpopulated jumble of small streets and alleys. Only when visitors made their way west through the narrow streets, filled with vendors of sacred memorabilia, did the magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica and Bernini’s colonnade suddenly appear.
¹⁵

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