The Pope and Mussolini (6 page)

“We will vote for Your Eminence,” De Lai told him, “if Your Eminence will promise that you will not choose Cardinal Gasparri as your secretary of state.”

Achille Ratti, archbishop of Milan, 1921

(
photograph credit 1.1
)

“I hope and pray,” responded Ratti, “that among so many highly deserving cardinals the Holy Spirit selects someone else.” But, he added, “if I am chosen, it is indeed Cardinal Gasparri whom I will take to be my secretary of state.”
³⁰
Whether Ratti had already promised as much to Gasparri is not clear, although it seems likely. Inexperienced in
Vatican affairs, he may in any case have wanted to have the experienced diplomat alongside him. Or he may have been savvier than they thought and recognized the value of a secretary of state who would help shield him from the demands of the
zelanti
.

“Your Eminence would be making a serious mistake,” Cardinal De Lai warned.

“I am afraid that it would likely not be the only mistake I would make should I sit on Saint Peter’s throne, but it certainly would be the first.”

By the twelfth ballot, the last on the third day of voting, twenty-seven cardinals gave their support to Milan’s archbishop.
³¹
Early the next day the cardinals again assembled in the Sistine Chapel. At ten
A.M.
they began depositing their thirteenth ballot, which was again inconclusive. It was on their next vote that Achille Ratti passed the two-thirds mark.

Fifty-two cardinals formed concentric circles around the stunned cardinal as he sat straight in his chair, head tilted down as if his shoulders bore a new weight. The cardinal deacon asked the obligatory question in a voice that even the most hard-of-hearing could make out: “Do you accept the election that selects you canonically to be the supreme pontiff?” Ratti did not respond immediately, and some of the cardinals grew nervous. After a full two minutes, he raised his head and replied in Latin. His voice trembled with emotion. “While deeply aware of my unworthiness,” he began. The cardinals knew that they had a new pope.
³²

As all this was going on, a train from Naples pulled into Rome’s station on the other side of the Tiber. Out stepped the two American cardinals, William O’Connell of Boston and Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia. Having made the long ocean crossing aboard the
Woodrow Wilson
, then rushed from Naples to Rome, the men were unhappy to discover they had arrived too late. O’Connell had special reason to be displeased, as he owed his career in good part to the patronage of Cardinal Merry del Val. Had he been there to give him his support and that of Dougherty, perhaps things might have gone differently. Even
more infuriating was the fact that the same thing had happened when Pius X had died seven and a half years earlier: no provision had been made to allow time for the Americans to get to Rome. Then too O’Connell had gotten to Rome only after the new pope had been elected.
³³

From the Sistine Chapel, Ratti was escorted to the nearby sacristy, where for the first time he put on the white papal robes. Three gowns had been readied, prepared for any eventuality, one small, one medium, and one large. The middle size fit him perfectly. He wore a white cassock, white silk stockings, and red silk slippers along with a red velvet cape, its border lined with ermine. On his head, over a white skullcap, he wore a red camauro, a papal cap with white ermine trim, pulled down to his ears. As he returned to the Sistine Chapel and walked to the throne placed in front of the altar, the cardinals got down on their knees. Each then approached him, in turn, kissing his foot and asking for his blessing. The man who had delighted in trekking through the mountains would now—if he followed the practice of his four predecessors—never leave the claustrophobic confines of the Vatican palaces.
³⁴

The world had been looking on eagerly to see who would emerge from the conclave. Italians, whose 40 million people were 99 percent Catholic, showed the most interest, but the 260 million Roman Catholics outside Italy eagerly awaited word as well.
³⁵

Crowds had been waiting in St. Peter’s Square since the conclave began, their eyes drawn to the chimney, where the smoke produced by the burning of the paper ballots following each round would tell them when a pope had been elected.
³⁶
Thirteen times over four days black smoke had belched from the chimney, but near noon on the fourth day, as the damp crowd stood under rainy skies, arms began pointing to the ribbon of white smoke wafting from the Apostolic Palace. Forty-five minutes later a cardinal emerged on the central balcony of St. Peter’s church, facing the square, and slowly raised his right arm. “
Habemus papam
 … we have a pope.” Achille Ratti had chosen the name Pius XI, explaining that Pius IX had been the pope of his youth and Pius X had
called him to Rome to head the Vatican Library.
³⁷
The man who until a few years earlier had presided over a small staff of librarians was now responsible for the world’s 300 million Catholics.

The cheering throngs began pushing toward the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica. Ever since 1870, when Italian troops had seized Rome and the popes had proclaimed themselves “prisoners of the Vatican,” no pope would show his face outside, even from one of the windows facing St. Peter’s Square. Each of the three popes chosen since Pius IX’s death had blessed the faithful inside the basilica.

Something surprising caught people’s eye. Members of the noble papal guard appeared on the balcony just above the central massive door of St. Peter’s, facing the square, and hung from its rail a red tapestry bearing the papal coat of arms. As the white-robed pontiff emerged onto the balcony to bless them, a hush spread through the vast piazza, and people fell to their knees. No one would forget the sight of Italian soldiers, stationed in the piazza to keep order, presenting their arms alongside the papal Swiss Guard. Together they saluted the new pope.
³⁸
It was a rare moment of peace in a city in the grip of growing panic. Violence and chaos were spreading through the country, and the government was paralyzed. Before the year was out, the new pope would find himself facing a decision of enormous importance.

C
HAPTER
TWO

THE MARCH ON ROME

P
REDAPPIO, THE SMALL TOWN IN ROMAGNA WHERE BENITO MUSSOLINI
was born, is no more than two hundred miles from Achille Ratti’s birthplace in Lombardy, yet their childhood experiences could hardly have been more different. It was not so much the Rattis’ greater wealth but the difference between a conservative, religious family and one immersed in the insurrectionary enthusiasms of Romagna. The Rattis’ heroes were saints and popes; the Mussolinis’ were rabble-rousers and revolutionaries.

Achille Ratti was already a twenty-six-year-old priest when Mussolini was born in 1883. Romagna was then the epicenter of Italy’s anarchist and socialist movements, and Benito’s father, Alessandro, a bigmouthed blacksmith, eagerly preached his revolutionary faith to any who would listen. He named his son after Benito Juárez, an impoverished Indian who became Mexico’s president, scourge of Europe’s colonial powers, and enemy of the Church. He named Benito’s younger brother, Arnaldo, after Arnaldo of Brescia, a priest who had led an uprising that drove the pope from Rome in 1146 and was later hanged. The boys’ long-suffering mother, Rosa, did not share her husband’s revolutionary ardor. A regular churchgoer, she taught in the local elementary
school. Each night, as her children lay sleeping, she made the sign of the cross over their heads.
¹

The family lived in a third-floor, two-room apartment. Benito and Arnaldo slept in the kitchen atop a big sack of corn husks on an iron bed their father had forged. Their parents shared the other room with their sister, Edvige. To enter the apartment, they had to walk through their mother’s schoolroom, which occupied the rest of the floor.

Alessandro and Rosa had a stormy marriage. Not only did Alessandro have lovers, but he often returned drunk at night from local pubs and picked fights with his wife. Somehow she won one argument, and they sent Benito, age ten, to board at a nearby school run by Salesian monks. He did not last long. During a squabble with a classmate, he pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed the boy in the hand. The Salesians expelled him. Benito continued his roughhouse ways, but, a bright boy, he somehow made it through secondary school. He began work as a substitute schoolteacher in 1901, losing one of his first jobs when his affair with a married woman came to light.

Unable to find a new post, Benito headed for Switzerland in search of work. There he joined the local world of socialists and anarchists, drawn by their excited talk of revolution. Swiss police soon produced a report on him, leaving us a description of him as a young man: five and a half feet tall, stocky, with brown hair and beard, he had a long, pale face, dark eyes, an aquiline nose, and a large mouth.
²

In Lausanne in 1904, Mussolini agreed to debate a local Protestant pastor on the existence of God. After trying to impress his audience with citations ranging from Galileo to Robespierre, he climbed onto a table, took out a pocket watch, and bellowed that if there really was a God, He should strike him dead in the next five minutes. Benito’s first publication, titled “God Does Not Exist,” came the same year. He kept up his attacks on the Church, branding priests “black microbes, as disastrous to humanity as tuberculosis microbes.”
³

Mussolini’s passion was for polemics and politics, and he would soon devote himself full time to both. By 1910 he was back in Forlì, near his family home in Romagna, editor of the local socialist weekly
and secretary of the town’s Socialist Party. That same year he tried his hand at fiction, publishing a steamy novel,
The Cardinal’s Mistress
.
⁴

In these first years of his political career, Mussolini cut a striking figure, part left-wing wild man and part Don Juan. Sporting a mustache that he would keep for the next decade, he always seemed to know how to become the center of attention. A transgressive roughhouser, more than a little bit of a provocateur, he was someone you would rather have on your side than against you. One of his most memorable traits was already on display: his steely stare. At once both intimidating and mesmerizing, Mussolini’s gaze transfixed his listeners. His eyes seemed to bulge out. In 1910 a local union organizer described the experience: “He looked me over with one of those raisings of the eyebrows that reveals all the white of the eye, as if he wanted to take in some distant fleeting sight, giving his eyes and his face the pensive look of an apostle.”
⁵

In 1912, while still in his twenties, Mussolini was named to one of the Socialist Party’s most influential posts, editor of the national party newspaper,
Avanti!
, based in Milan. He moved from the modest provincial outpost of Forlì to Italy’s bustling financial and cultural capital.

As editor of
Avanti!
, Mussolini took aim at the Socialist Party’s reform faction. Only revolutionary action, not parliamentary politics, he insisted, would bring about a new order. In 1913, when police south of Rome killed seven farmworkers during a protest, he called for revenge: “Death to those who massacre the people! Long live the Revolution!” he told a rally in Milan. In his newspaper he wrote, “Ours is a war cry. Those who massacre know that they can be, in their turn, massacred.”
⁶