The Pope and Mussolini (64 page)

To date, rather little attention has been paid to Eugenio Pacelli’s role in Italy in the years leading up to the war. His relations with the
Fascist regime, and his role in preventing the elderly and irascible Pius XI from doing anything to upset the Vatican’s collaboration with it, have remained curiously out of the limelight.

Pius XII, Pope Pacelli, died in 1958. His successor, John XXIII, convened a Second Vatican Council and dramatically changed the Church’s direction. No longer would Jews be demonized. Interreligious understanding would be prized, not scorned. Freedom of religion and speech were to be applauded, not attacked.

Since those heady years of the Second Vatican Council, both Pope John XXIII and the Council itself have become controversial among those in the Church who yearn for the old days. Pius XII has become their hero, defender of the Church’s eternal verities. Meanwhile, his predecessor, Pius XI, remains all but forgotten.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
HE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, OR SO THE COMMON NARRATIVE GOES
, fought heroically against Italian Fascism. The popes opposed the dictatorship, angry that it had deprived people of their civil rights. Italian Catholic Action, the Church’s organization of the laity, stood as one of the most potent forces opposing the regime. The Fascist “racial laws” in 1938, in this comforting narrative, sparked indignant protests from the Vatican, which denounced their harsh treatment of the Jews.

Unfortunately, as readers have seen in these pages, this story bears little relation to what actually happened. The Vatican played a central role both in making the Fascist regime possible and in keeping it in power. Italian Catholic Action worked closely with the Fascist authorities to increase the repressive reach of the police. Far from opposing the treatment of Jews as second-class citizens, the Church provided Mussolini with his most potent arguments for adopting just such harsh measures against them. As shown here, the Vatican made a secret deal with Mussolini to refrain from any criticism of Italy’s infamous anti-Semitic “racial laws” in exchange for better treatment of Catholic organizations. This fact is largely unknown in Italy, and despite all the evidence presented in this book, I have no doubt many will deny it. That the Duce and his minions counted on the men around the pope to keep Pius XI’s increasing doubts about Mussolini and Hitler under
control is a story embarrassing for a multitude of reasons, not least the fact that the central player in these efforts was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the man who would succeed Pius XI. There is no cause dearer to Church traditionalists today than seeing Pacelli—Pope Pius XII—proclaimed a saint.

With the opening in 2006 of the Vatican archives covering this dramatic period, the full story of these years, in all its richness, emotional highs and lows, and surprises can finally be told. Cardinal Pacelli’s daily logs of his meetings with the pope, along with tens of thousands of other documents that shed light on this history, are now available in the Vatican Secret Archive. Precious documents are also found in other newly opened Church archives for the period, including those at Rome’s Jesuit headquarters. There we find the copious papers of the pope’s shadowy private emissary to Mussolini, Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi.

While Church documents offer precious new insight, they do not tell the full story. Much is to be learned from the records of the Fascist regime itself. Thanks to its files, no other period of history offers such vivid descriptions of Vatican intrigue or such graphic accounts of its scandals. Among those whose exploits are mercilessly chronicled in one such thick Fascist police file is the papal protégé who became a cardinal in these years despite a long trail of pederasty accusations. It is in such police files, as well, that we learn of the strange assassination attempt against Father Tacchi Venturi, and the secret he so desperately sought to conceal. We have all this thanks to the regime’s extensive spy network in the Vatican, whose reports fill scores of boxes in the state archives. They tell tales of prelates’ jostling for power that no Vatican document would record. They describe papal investigations whose embarrassing revelations remain today safely ensconced in Vatican “personnel” files hidden from view.

Over the course of the seven years of archival research that went into this book, I compiled digitized copies of twenty-five thousand pages of documents from these different archives. I also pored through thousands of pages of published Italian, French, British, American,
and German diplomatic correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. The work was rarely tedious, for the surprises kept coming. The challenge of piecing together documents from different archives to solve long-standing puzzles was intoxicating.

The relationship of the two larger-than-life figures at the center of this book turned out to be even more intriguing than I suspected. This was not because Mussolini and the pope were so different—although of course in many ways they could scarcely have been more different—but rather because of all they had in common. Both had explosive tempers. Each bristled at the charge of being the patsy of the other. Both demanded unquestioned obedience from their subordinates, whose knees literally quaked in fear of provoking their wrath. Each came to be disillusioned by the other, yet dreaded what would happen if their alliance were to end.

These pages, then, recount the story of two men who came to power in Rome in the same year and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. Scholarly, proper, and devout, Pius XI had spent much of his adult life poring over old manuscripts. He longed for the medieval times when the Church’s verities went unquestioned. Mussolini, apostle of the new, was a rabble-rouser, a violent bully, and a visceral anticleric. As readers of this book have seen, their relationship did not end well. Pius XI, who had earlier hailed Mussolini as the Man sent by Providence, ended his life feeling ill-used. Mussolini was no happier. As he told the members of the Fascist General Council, the pope was a disaster.

For the three Bears
Sam, Jack, and Charlie
nipotini straordinari
From their Zaide

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
T WAS IN 2002, WHEN POPE JOHN PAUL II AUTHORIZED THE OPENING
of the archives of the papacy of Pius XI, that I decided to write this book. In 2003 materials related to the Vatican’s relations with Germany were made available to scholars, followed three years later by the general opening of the archives for the Pius XI years. The period was such a dramatic one, and the controversies over the role of the Vatican in the major events of the time so heated, that I found the challenge irresistible.

My work began in earnest during a sabbatical year I spent in Italy in 2004–5. Although the main Church archives dealing with the pope’s relations with the Fascist regime were not yet open, the archives on the other side—the Italian Fascist government—were, and I spent many months working in Italian archives, primarily the Central State Archive and the archives of the Italian Foreign Ministry. Three years later, with the opening of the Church archives at the Vatican and elsewhere, a bounty of new sources, and new insights, became available.

Having worked on this book now for nearly a decade, I have accumulated many debts. None is greater than to Alessandro Visani, who worked alongside me from practically the start of the project, as we pored over correspondence and memos shoulder to shoulder in the Italian archives and then in the various Church archives. Visani, who
has a doctorate in the history of this period, brought not only his outstanding archival research skills but an infectious enthusiasm and prodigious energy to the project, in work done on both sides of the Atlantic.

I have also been fortunate that a number of talented research assistants at Brown—both doctoral students and undergraduates—have helped with the work for this book. Among them I would like to thank Stephen Marth, Simone Poliandri, Harry Kasdan, Andy Newton, and Monica Facchini. I would also like to thank Anne-Claire Ignace, who helped me with the work in the French Foreign Ministry archives in Paris. Thanks as well to various staff members at Brown who helped support my labors: Matilde Andrade, Catherine Hanni, Katherine Grimaldi, and Marjorie Sugrue. I also acknowledge with gratitude research funding provided by the Paul Dupee University Professorship at Brown University.

My ability to write the book was facilitated in various ways—and certainly made more pleasant—by the hospitality of colleagues and institutions in Italy and France during my 2011–12 sabbatical year. Special thanks to the Foundation for Religious Sciences, John XXIII, in Bologna, and its director, Alberto Melloni; to the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center and its resident director, Pilar Palaciá; to the American Academy in Rome, its director, Chris Celenza, and its president, Adele Chatfield-Taylor; and to Gilles Pécout, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Many colleagues have been kind enough to answer my questions and provide help in various ways. Among them I would especially like to thank my colleague in Italian studies at Brown, Massimo Riva, for my frequent pestering about questions of Italian literary history, English renderings of various Italian dialect and literary materials, and an assortment of other issues. Among the other friends and colleagues whose help I would like to acknowledge are Alberto Melloni, Emilio Gentile, Evelyn Lincoln, Lesley Riva, Ronald Martinez, Charles Gallagher, S.J., Robert Maryks, John A. Davis, Giovanni Pizzorusso, Matteo San Filippo, Reda Bensmaia, Dagmar Herzog, Lucia Pozzi, and Alberto Guasco.

Special thanks are due to Mauro Canali, one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of the Italian Fascist regime, for his help in the state archives and for our discussions of this period of Italian history. Thanks as well to Bonifacio Pignatti, grandson of the eponymous Italian ambassador to the Holy See of the late 1930s, for allowing me to use a photograph of the ambassador from the family archives.

Wendy Strothman, my friend and literary agent, deserves special credit. Her deep knowledge of books and publishing, her literary judgment, and her strong support have meant much to me. I am also fortunate to have had David Ebershoff, of Random House, as my editor. It is rare to have an editor who is also such a talented and accomplished writer himself, and I feel deeply grateful to have had the benefit of David’s keen literary eye and his belief in the importance of this book. He has made this a much better book. Thanks as well to David’s talented assistant, Caitlin McKenna, for all her editorial efforts. I am grateful as well for all the other support I received at Random House and would like to thank especially Dennis Ambrose, Michelle Jasmine, Susan Kamil, Michael Gentile, and Lani Kaneta for all they have done.

Finally, to my wife, Susan Dana Kertzer, who has lived with this book for many years, sharing in the pleasures of life in Italy. She has never let me forget the goal of writing a book that not only the experts but people who know little of this history will want to read. If I am lucky, one of her book groups may even read it.

NOTES