The Pope and Mussolini (13 page)

Mussolini had no use for luxury, and his dingy apartment lacked even a kitchen. The sitting room, which visitors described as permeated by the sickly sweet scent of cheap eau de cologne, featured a table covered with Mussolini’s violins. Back when Edda was a baby, he used to stand by her crib and play until she fell asleep. In later years, while awaiting the car that would take him to the office, he sometimes cranked up his player piano and played a violin accompaniment.
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Given the number of long-term affairs Mussolini maintained, together with the parade of one-night—or more accurately, one-afternoon—stands, it is amazing that he not only found time to run the government but insisted on reviewing even the most trivial details. He trusted no one other than his brother, Arnaldo, who was now in charge of
Il Popolo d’Italia
, with whom he spoke every night by phone, and to a lesser extent Sarfatti. Each day he worked through an enormous stack of police and political reports, met with a large number of people, and read a pile of newspapers. “I am in the habit,” he told a deputy, “of reading all the Italian newspapers, including those that don’t deserve it.”
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Drawn from the aristocratic or, more commonly, professional elite, previous prime ministers had had no mass base, no real political party behind them, and showed little if any interest in popularity. The idea of traveling around the country holding public rallies was something they would have found distasteful, had it even been conceivable.

Onto this scene came the former Socialist rabble-rouser from Milan, the blacksmith’s son who boasted of his humble origins, a man exuding a virile popular appeal. Soon Mussolini was traveling from town to town—to places that had never seen a head of government—exhorting the curious crowds with his mesmerizing staccato harangues. He was becoming a master at mass hypnosis. What he understood, in a way that none of his predecessors had, was that people were ruled most of all by emotion, and that their reality had less to do with the external world than with the symbolic one he could fashion for them.

In Cremona he used what would become one of his most potent rhetorical gambits, a ritualized call for crowd response.

“Whose is the victory?” he bellowed.

“Ours!” they shouted back.

“Whose is the glory?”

“Ours!”

“Whose Italy is it?”

“Ours!”
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From May to October 1923, Mussolini visited towns and cities from Venice, Lombardy, and Piedmont in the north, through Emilia, Tuscany, and Abruzzo in the center, to Naples in the south, and both of Italy’s major islands: Sicily and Sardinia. No prime minister had gone to Sardinia for an official visit in the six decades since it became part of Italy. The next year he repeated the round. People were hungry for a strong leader, a savior who would bring stability, order, and a brighter future. The better off saw him as the man who had stopped the Communist threat. For the rest, he was the
figlio del popolo
, the common man, one of their own.
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The foreign diplomatic community in Rome considered Mussolini an intriguing but enigmatic figure. The Belgian ambassador to the
Holy See recorded his observations of him at a diplomatic reception: his feet planted in the middle of the floor, his chin thrust out, Mussolini would say no more than a few words to those who came to greet him. “His serious, haughty face, his taciturn bearing, were impenetrable. One only read on his bronze mask, in his hard eyes, a rare energy.” He made an indelible impression, recalled the ambassador: “I’ve kept from that evening the chilling vision of a man who seems utterly immune to any fear nor subject to any emotion.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Although the pope had spent many years in libraries, he had, thought Monsignor Confalonieri, the personality not of a librarian but of a small businessman. The young priest attributed this to the pope’s roots, for the industrial region of his birth was known for just such men. Pius XI thought in concrete terms and was uncomfortable with improvisation. He insisted on reasoning everything through and carefully studied all the reports that came to him. Once he did make a decision, he stuck to it. Criticism only made him dig in. The pope, complained
the former secretary of state Cardinal Merry del Val, was “stubborn as a mule.”
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