The Pope and Mussolini (37 page)

In a number of long conversations with Cardinal Pacelli in mid-November, Pignatti urged the Vatican to enlist its nuncios’ help for the war effort. Convincing bishops and other influential Catholics around the world of the justness of Italy’s war aims would be crucial. The cardinal replied that such efforts were well under way—and that the Vatican had already accomplished quite a bit. Pacelli went so far as to add some advice of his own. It was critical, he told Mussolini, to win American support. The Duce should launch “an intense and intelligent Italian propaganda in the United States in the newspapers, in the universities, in the magazines, with means and forms best suited to the North American mentality.”
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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.
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The coordinated campaign by the Italian government and the Vatican, aimed largely at the Italian American community, proved successful. The Italian American press continued to support Mussolini. In Philadelphia, two hundred thousand Italian Americans marched to protest the League sanctions.
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In other cities with large Italian immigrant populations, similar rallies were held, and petitions flooded Congress.
Most influential of all, radio priest Charles Coughlin, who broadcast to tens of millions of Americans every Sunday, blasted the sanctions week after week.
⁴³

Born to Irish immigrant parents in 1891 in Hamilton, Ontario, and ordained in Toronto, Coughlin had moved to Detroit in the early 1920s, preaching at a simple frame church he built there. He soon started a modest radio program devoted to religious topics. By 1930 the young priest was broadening his scope, focusing on the plight of the poor. He supported Roosevelt during his first bid for the presidency in 1932 but soon turned against him and in 1934 founded his own political party, the National Union of Social Justice. Around this time he began to denounce “Jewish bankers” and to embrace Mussolini. As contributions poured in, Coughlin—now the most popular religious figure in the country—replaced his modest wood frame church with an ultramodern sanctuary. Its most striking feature was the large stone tower that rose above it, topped by a powerful radio transmitter. His fulminations alarmed many in the Church hierarchy.
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The Pittman-McReynolds Bill, calling on the United States to join in the sanctions, triggered an outpouring of protest from the Italian American community. Overwhelmed by thousands of letters and countless Italian American delegations, the congressmen, in the words of the head of the American arms control agency, “trembled openly in their boots.” The bill was defeated.
⁴⁵

Every Italian soldier bound for Ethiopia was given a copy of a new collection of prayers,
Soldier, Pray!
In his introduction to the booklet, Augusto Gemelli, the indefatigable rector of the Catholic University of Milan, urged the young Italians to battle:

Go where the Fatherland sends you and God calls you, ready for everything.…

Trust, even if God asks you to sacrifice your life.…

Soldier of Italy, your sacrifice, united with the sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God among men, will achieve the salvation and greatness of the Fatherland.
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Over the next months, Italy’s bishops outdid one another in their fervent professions of Fascist faith and in their proclamations of divine backing for the war. Monsignor Navarra, bishop of Terracina, near Rome, captured the mood: “O Duce! … Today Italy is fascist and the hearts of all Italians beat as one with yours.… God bless you o Duce! Let Him sustain You in your daily, titanic work, and ensure … victory to the Italian armies.”
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AS ITALY BECAME INCREASINGLY ISOLATED
, conspiracy theories gained new momentum. Not least among them was the Protestant-Jewish-Masonic-Communist plot that many in the Church had long decried. In early November the archbishop of Amalfi sent a circular to his priests, with a message to share with parishioners in their Sunday sermons: “The League of Nations is acting under the influence of occult forces.” He went on to list them: “Freemasonry, Bolshevism, Anglicanism.” They were fighting Italy because they could not tolerate the sight of the Fascist regime living “in perfect collaboration with the Catholic Church.”
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British and French denunciations of the war angered the Duce, and he feared the impact that economic sanctions might yet have. This offered a new opening for Tacchi Venturi, who had been pushing his conspiracy theories on the Duce for years.

On November 30 the Jesuit arrived at Palazzo Venezia, sent by Pius to discuss hopes for an early end to the war. He quickly turned to the subject most on his mind.

“Has Your Excellency read the articles ‘Who wants the war? Behind the Ethiopian affair?’ in the November 16 and 30 issues of the [French] journal
La Revue hebdomadaire
?”

“Yes, I am familiar with them.”

“Then you’ve seen how the anonymous author clearly demonstrates that Freemasonry, tied to the Communists and Bolsheviks, has constructed a unified front with the goal of trying to bring about the end of Fascism, of Mussolini, and bringing about revolution in Italy. It
is a revolution that it considers—not wrongly—the indispensable means of installing a Bolshevik empire in Italy.”

Before Mussolini could reply, Tacchi Venturi completed the picture:

“Believe me, Excellency, we are dealing with a terrible trap plotted with the complicity of the League of Nations, which is under the domination of the Jews and the Masons.”

Mussolini listened as the pope’s emissary spun this tale of a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying him. By the time he finished, the dictator, agitated, shouted that Britain and France were leading much of the rest of the world against him. They were eager, he asserted, to start a European war.
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Mussolini said little about the Jews, but increasingly he saw opposition to the war in conspiratorial terms. When he met with Tacchi Venturi two weeks later, it was he who raised the specter of an international plot. The Third Socialist International, Freemasonry, and the Liberals had formed a common front against Italy, the Duce told the Jesuit. Their goal was “to destroy the Regime that governs it at any cost.”

“No one has any doubt about this or can doubt it,” the pope’s envoy replied.
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C
HAPTER
SEVENTEEN

ENEMIES IN COMMON

S
PEAKING IN EARLY NOVEMBER TO A GROUP OF WOMEN IN BOLOGNA
’
S
massive central basilica, the city’s archbishop sang Mussolini’s praises: “The providential Leader of our Italian people, people of the saints—as he put it so well—of heroes, of geniuses, of colonizers, with that intuition that is truly unique to him and who thus towers over all in the current historical moment, has wanted to summons you Catholic, Italian women to a great mission.” The archbishop of Amalfi, echoing themes being expressed by bishops throughout the country, blasted the evils of the sanctions as the work of Freemasons and Anglicans and heralded the Duce as the new Moses: “I rejoice in the future greatness which is Italy’s destiny in the world. Italy, fatherland of saints and heroes. Italy reconciled with the Church and blessed by the Pope. Italy placed by the Fascist Government in a moral, Christian legislative design.”
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The pontiff was left to deal with the foreign reaction to the Italian clergy’s unseemly war fever. Britain’s emissary to the Vatican, Hugh Montgomery, peppered the Vatican with published extracts from the bishops’ incendiary speeches and implored Pius to put an end to them. The pope replied that he had dispatched envoys to the offenders to
encourage them to tone down their rhetoric.
²
But the speeches, and Britain’s protests, continued.

Britain and France had been putting together a proposal to end the crisis, and the pope had placed great hopes in it. The plan would partition Ethiopia, giving Italy some of its most desirable land. In mid-December the deal fell through when its terms were leaked to the press and political pressures in both Britain and France blocked it. The British foreign minister resigned in disgrace.
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Mussolini insisted that he would make no concessions. Nothing would stop him from conquering all of Ethiopia.
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In late November the Duce decided to organize a Giornata della Fede, literally a Day of Faith or Day of the Wedding Ring (
fede
meaning both “faith” and “wedding ring”). It was a brilliant propaganda idea that would further tie Italians—and especially women—to the war effort. To show their love for their country and their support for the war, all good Italians were to donate their gold wedding rings to the Fatherland.

Italy’s bishops were to urge Catholics to hand over their gold bands, and they were to bless the substitute steel rings the donors would get in exchange. When the bishops learned of the role they were to play, they bombarded the Vatican with requests for guidance. The pope was not eager for Italy’s high clergy to take such a public part in the war effort, not least because angry letters from Catholics abroad were denouncing the Vatican’s apparent embrace of the Fascist slaughter in Ethiopia. But he did not want to provoke Mussolini. Worried that a written circular to the bishops might leak out, he decided to send an emissary to pass his message on orally: “Be cautious.… Do not express judgment as to the right and justice of the Abyssinian campaign, and above all avoid using any words that can offend or be found displeasing to the other side.”
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While some of the high clergy shared the pope’s discomfort, the great majority found it impossible to restrain themselves.
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If they actually got the pope’s message, they ignored it. The Catholic press had
been full of articles praising the holy war to bring Christianity and civilization to the savages; prominent churchmen—such as the archbishop of Milan and the rector of the Catholic University—had embraced the war; and the pope himself had never directly expressed his misgivings about it to the clergy. So bishops in their diocesan bulletins and their homilies urged all good Catholics to offer their wedding rings to the holy cause. Priests established parish committees to ensure maximum local participation and, when the day came, donated their own gold pectoral crosses.
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In Milan, Cardinal Schuster personally blessed 25,000 steel rings—to be given as replacements—in his private chapel.
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The archbishop of Messina, an impoverished diocese in Sicily, informed his priests that he expected loyal Catholics to give at least thirty kilograms of gold. On the other side of the island, the bishop of Monreale required his priests to melt down the votive offerings that the faithful had donated over the years. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, a parish priest asked permission from his bishop to melt the bells atop the church to support the Duce and the war.
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December 18, the Day of Faith, found the country in a patriotic frenzy.
¹⁰
Mussolini was outside Rome dedicating the new town of Pontinia, one of his creations in the former marshlands. The local archbishop kicked off the ceremony. “Oh Duce! Those who think that they can get our people to bend are deceiving themselves.… Today Italy is fascist, the hearts of all Italians beat in unison with yours, and the entire Nation is ready for whatever sacrifice is necessary for the triumph of peace and of Roman, Christian civilization.” At the end of his remarks, the archbishop removed his pectoral cross and pastoral ring, adding them to the day’s haul.
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