The Pope and Mussolini (76 page)

13.
These comments were made in late 1932. MAEI, vol. 266, 298–99, Charles-Roux à président du conseil, 15 decembre 1932.

14.
ASMAE, AISS, b. 4, protocollo 24, De Vecchi a Mussolini, Roma, 21 luglio 1929; De Vecchi 1998, pp. 15–16.

15.
Arnaldo Cortesi, “Pope Pius at 75: Scholar and Leader,” NYT
Magazine
, May 29, 1932, p. 3.

16.
C. Wingfield,
Annual Report 1934
, January 12, 1935, R 402/402/22, in Hachey 1972, pp. 287–88, sections 138–40.

17.
Tardini 1988, p. 296 (entry for 13 febbraio 1934); Charles-Roux 1947, p. 62.

18.
Papin 1977, pp. 56, 62; Confalonieri 1957, p. 188; Ottaviani 1969, pp. 504–5.

19.
Pierre van Paassen, “A Day with the Pope,” BG, February 11, 1934, p. C5.

20.
Tardini 1988, p. 313; Charles-Roux 1947, p. 23. On Tardini, see Riccardi 1982 and Casula 1988.

21.
Tardini 1988, p. 355.

22.
Confalonieri 1969, pp. 42–43.

23.
R. H. Clive,
Annual Report 1933
, January 1, 1934, R 153/153/22, in Hachey 1972, p. 259, sections 117, 118; Agostino 1991, p. 19.

24.
ARSI, TV, b. 8, fasc. 442, 446. In the months following the signing of the accords, Tacchi Venturi continued his pressure on the pope’s behalf. In May 1930 he sent Mussolini a list of locations of Protestant churches in Italy. ARSI, TV, b. 19, fasc. 1408, “Protestanti. La situazione in Italia nel 1930,” with draft of Tacchi Venturi a Mussolini, 3 maggio 1930.

25.
ASV, ANI, pos. 23, fasc. 2, ff. 129r–130r, 4 giugno 1930.

26.
“The Holy Father,” Monsignor Pizzardo reported to the nuncio in February 1931, “has revealed that the true and serious danger that threatens the religious and national unity of Italians is to be found in the growing Protestant propaganda, about which the government does not seem to adequately concern itself.” Mussolini’s zeal “for a praiseworthy defense of the spiritual unity of the Nation” should, the pope argued, “be directed with sufficient energy against the above-mentioned heretical, foreign propaganda.” Borgongini passed this papal request on at his next meeting with De Vecchi. ASV, ANI, pos. 49, fasc. 2, f. 21r, 15 febbraio 1931.
   Between the two world wars, the Vatican launched an aggressive anti-Protestant campaign. Moro 2003, p. 317. The pope helped set the tone in his Epiphany encyclical in 1928,
Mortalium animos
, forbidding Catholics to participate in organizations or meetings that encouraged dialogue among different Christian groups: “So, Venerable Brethren, it is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics: for the union of Christians can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it, for in the past they have unhappily left it. To the one true Church of Christ, we say, which is visible to all, and which is to remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it.” The English text of the encyclical is at
http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11MORTA.HTM
. See also Perin 2011, p. 151.

27.
ASV, ANI, pos. 49, fasc. 2, ff. 122r–122v, 14 maggio 1931, Alanna. The Church loudly protested attempts by Protestants to establish churches in Italy and pressured government officials to prevent them from being built. Some of these are discussed in Rochat 1990, pp. 218–22. On April 8, 1931, just as the Catholic Action crisis was heating up, Borgongini told De Vecchi that the pope wanted the government to act “energetically to stop this insane propaganda.” De Vecchi tried to calm the nuncio, reminding him that the concordat allowed members of other religions to conduct their religious activities in peace. But mindful of the pope’s increasing irritation over the treatment of Catholic Action, the ambassador saw a new way to get the pope to back down. Once the relations between the two parties were placed back “on the right track,” he told the nuncio, the government would find a way to satisfy the pope’s desire to prevent Protestant proselytizing. ASV, AESI, pos. 794, fasc. 389, f. 55r, 9 aprile 1931. Some months later
La Civiltà cattolica
followed up with an article titled “The Duty of Catholics in the Face of the Protestant Propaganda in Italy.” It began by asking whether Italy truly did face a “Protestant danger,” responding with a resounding yes. Protestantism, the Vatican-supervised journal informed its readers, meant “de-Christianization.” And it linked the Protestant enemy to another enemy, liberalism, described as of “pure Protestant origin.” The journal then issued a call for action. In a section headed “Unmask the Enemy!” it warned of a vast Protestant conspiracy. Fortunately, the journal informed its readers, the Roman Catholic Church had the Duce on its side, for he, too, realized the danger to national unity should Italians turn away from the Rome-based Church. “Il dovere dei cattolici di fronte alla propaganda protestante in Italia,” CC 1932 IV pp. 328–43. In an article in 1932,
L’Osservatore romano
had described the Valdese church, the largest Italian Protestant community, centered in the northwest, as “
un’associazione a delinquere
,” a criminal organization, a term associated with the mafia today. Spini 2007, p. 133.

28.
ASV, ANI pos. 23, fasc. 4, ff. 47r–47v, Borgongini, “Udienza del Capo del Governo,” 22 novembre 1932.

29.
ASV, ANI, pos. 23, fasc. 5, ff. 15r–19r, Borgongini a Pacelli, 18 marzo 1933. The meeting with Mussolini was on March 14.

30.
The Church was widely pushing this conspiracy theory in these years. In May 1931, in response to a Vatican request to Italy’s bishops to report on local Protestant activity, the bishop of Monopoli, near Bari (in southern Italy), lamented the existence of a group of Protestants in his diocese. They were led, he reported, by immigrants returned from the United States. Embracing the view that the Protestants sought to subvert both the Catholic Church and the Fascist regime, he called on the authorities to put a stop to it. But he feared the government would not take the needed action lest it offend the United States, which was under the thumb of Jews and Masons, who were behind the Protestant attempts to undermine the Catholic Church. Perin 2010, pp. 147–48.

31.
The ellipsis is in the original.

32.
ASV, AESI, pos. 855, fasc. 548, ff. 38r–39r.

33.
“La rivoluzione mondiale e gli ebrei,” CC 1922 IV, pp. 111–21.

34.
In
Part III
, I will discuss the Vatican’s role in preparing the ground for the introduction of Italy’s anti-Semitic “racial laws.”

35.
“Il socialismo giudeo-massonico tiranneggia l’Austria,” CC 1922 IV, pp. 369–71.

36.
The Vatican had long viewed Freemasonry as one of its most dangerous enemies. The first group appeared in Rome in 1724, seven years after the organization got its start in London. Beginning with Pope Clement XII in 1738, pope after pope had excommunicated those who joined the Masons, vilifying them for bringing Catholics together with Protestants, Jews, and nonbelievers. The Masons, seen as the source of secularization and an alternative to a Church-centered society, would later be blamed for the French Revolution, as well as for Italian unification and the demise of the Papal States.
   In his 1884 encyclical,
Humanum genus
, Pope Leo XIII launched a new anti-Masonic campaign, branding Freemasonry a “synagogue of Satan.” In the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
La Civiltà cattolica
and other Catholic publications continually warned of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. They would soon add a third enemy, Socialism, to the evil plot. A vast Jewish-Masonic-Socialist conspiracy, they said, aimed at overthrowing all that was good and Christian in Europe and replacing it with a world order run by Jews. The new code of canon law of 1917 confirmed the Masons’ excommunication. Vian 2011, pp. 106–16. The first Italian national Masonic association arose with Italian unification in 1859 and quickly established lodges through much of the country. Seeing the Church as the main bulwark of reactionary regimes rooted in the Middle Ages, the Masons were firm supporters of the new Italian government that had displaced the Papal States. Calling for equality of all religions, they campaigned to keep priests out of the public schools. Emblematic was the Masons’ most prominent member, Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of Italian unification and caustic critic of the Vatican and of clerical power. Conti 2006. Adriano Lemmi, national head of the main Italian Masonic order in the late nineteenth century, famously called the ending of the pope’s temporal power “the most memorable event in world history.” Populated in large part by the middle classes, the organization counted some of Italy’s most important late-nineteenth-century politicians among its members. At the time of the First World War, the main national Masonic organization had about twenty thousand members in 486 lodges. Although the great majority of the members came from Catholic families, Italy’s tiny Protestant and Jewish populations were overrepresented. Conti 2005.

37.
The most common variant of the ritual murder libel held that the Talmud required Jews to murder Christian children in order to use their blood to make Passover matzos.

38.
Romagna’s Catholic Action magazine is examined by Nardelli (1996, pp. 40–50), on which my description is based.

39.
One such article in 1927, in Padua’s diocesan weekly, dismissed American Protestants as no longer having a real religion, adding that Protestant ministers “would be more sincere if, like the Jews, they worshipped the golden calf.” Perin 2011, p. 185.

40.
Cardinal Merry del Val’s account of the pope’s words at their meeting, quoted in Deffayet 2010, p. 97.

41.
Here the pope proved prescient, for papal defenders subsequently did cite the decree dissolving the Friends of Israel as demonstrating that the popes opposed anti-Semitism. Wolf (2010, p. 121) characterized Pius XI’s tactic as “a sort of prophylactic defense in the form of a condemnation of modern anti-Semitism.” which Wolf termed “a mark of moral impoverishment because it is easy to condemn hatred of Jews in others while not changing one’s own anti-Semitic conduct.”

42.
“Il pericolo giudaico e gli ‘Amici d’Israele,’ ” CC 1928 II, pp. 335–44.

43.
Among the last letters the Jesuit received was one that Sarfatti wrote him a month before his death in 1956, which she signed, “Most devoted in Christ, Margherita Sarfatti.” Maryks (2011, pp. 309–10) found it in Tacchi Venturi’s archive, along with a note written by one of the Jesuit archivists, which identified Sarfatti as “Lover of Mussolini: A Jew converted and baptized by T[acchi] V[enturi], as were, too, her son [Amedeo] and daughter [Fiametta].” See also Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993, pp. 344–45.

44.
Liguria del Popolo
, 1 luglio 1933, quoted in Starr 1939, p. 113.

45.
Kent 1981, pp. 128–29.

46.
The term
mania
is found in MAESS, vol. 37, 36–38, Charles-Roux à Monsieur le Président du Conseil, 16 octobre 1932. Other references to the pope’s obsession with the Bolshevik danger are found in Charles-Roux’s reports of July 19 (MAESS, vol. 37, 12–13) and July 23 (MAESS, vol. 36, 14–15).

47.
ASV, AESS, pos. 474, fasc. 476, ff. 58r–58v, Pacelli a Monsignor Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, 2 gennaio 1933.

48.
In an effort to convince the minister of the seriousness and scope of the problem, Borgongini handed him a booklet he had prepared, titled
Protestant Proselytism in Italy
. It explained why Protestantism was the joint enemy of both the Catholic Church and the Fascist state. “The Protestant sects,” it began, “are anti-hierarchical. Their principle is that each individual is the interpreter of divine revelation and therefore free to form his own interpretation through reading the Bible. This principle is the basis of every democratic error, from liberalism to socialism to anarchism.” ASV, ANI, pos. 49, fasc. 2, ff. 281r–282r, Borgongini a Pacelli, 22 marzo 1935. The booklet is available at ibid., 284r; the quote is from p. 25. The booklet devoted twenty pages to listing every Protestant church in Italy.