There are, besides, many cases of priests urging the partisans to present themselves – in the Chiavenna zone, for example, or in Piedmont, where the priests appealed to family reasons.28 Ada Gobetti recounts the case of a youth who presented himself, induced by a ‘foolish priest’, was hanged by the Germans, and died crying ‘Viva i partigiani!’29
The notification of 5 December 1943 after the Fascist reprisal for the killing of Colonel Gino Gobbi, and the homily subsequently pronounced for Christmas that year by Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, Archbishop of Florence, are among the documents that best lend themselves to several of the present reflections. Both were widely circulated, being published by L’Avvenire d’Italia on 7 and 28 December, and then the homily in a pamphlet entitled ‘The paths of peace’.30 The cardinal deprecated ‘the struggle between sons of the same land’, deprecated ‘the acts of oppression, the impositions, the acts of violence, the excesses’, warned that ‘rash actions produce reactions that often go beyond the provocation’. The speaker’s most astute and subtle words, and the most equivocal for his listeners, were those in which he reminded them that ‘every act of violence, every blow, every illegal use of arms is criminal, because no one can take the law into his own hands, unless it be to apply the well-known principle: each law permits violence to be rejected with violence’. Was this, then, a go-ahead, for those of a mind to take it as such, even for armed resistance against violence exercised by an illegal authority? In fact, Dalla Costa went on to assume almost the guise of counsellor to the prince. The cardinal asked ‘those holding public office or exercising public functions’ to respect first and foremost the law prohibiting violence, and to show an example of equanimity ‘in their own interest’ and ‘because nothing increases the influence of he who is in command than the use of means that are in keeping with perfect justice’.
It was Voce Operaia, the Roman newspaper of the Communist Catholics, which – jealous guardian of a dual orthodoxy – was most directly affected, and missed no opportunity to make the most of the clergy’s contribution to the Resistance, that assumed the task of giving an answer, respectful in form but firm in substance.31 The cardinal was reminded that he could, if he wished, choose not to speak out, but there was no way in which he could steer a middle course; and then the paper went so far as to vindicate, in principle, the liberty to judge even the actions of legitimate authorities. If – the open letter argued – it is still lawful for a Catholic to discuss case by case whether one need obey the legitimate authority or what the nation and people feel to be the true authority (always to exclude the latter would mean excising Catholics from any historical movement), here this problem did not even arise, because it was clear that the Nazi-Fascists were also an illegal authority.
At times indiscriminate condemnations pronounced by the clergy acquired greater intensity when the victims of abuses of power and acts of violence were priests. In such cases there seems to emerge a sort of request for special, institutionally guaranteed treatment for those exercising the sacerdotal function. The bishop of Padua, Carlo Agostini, promoter of Fascist-style patriotic manifestations, protested in a letter to the provincial chief when some priests were arrested, claiming that they were ‘holy persons’, sanctioned by the laws and conventions in force both in Italy and in the ‘Great Germanic Reich’.32 The bishop of Reggio Emilia, Eduardo Brettoni – who on 21 December 1943, in a telegram to the GNR Command, had deprecated as ‘private violence … the brutal crime that had destroyed the life of the primo seniore Fagiani’, killed by partisans – protested, with a message published in the ‘Bulletin’ of his diocese, against the execution of don Pasquino Borghi for having given refuge to partisans and allied prisoners. Eight other people had been shot with the priest; but the bishop, without so much as a word about them, wrote that 30 January 1944 ‘will be sadly remembered in the annals of this Diocese … for the execution … of one of our priests’. The bishop passed no comment on the charges and the sentence (‘they are the tasks reserved for the dispassionate judgment of history’); but warned that if, as was rumoured, ‘grave acts of violence in the form of insults and blows’ were ‘used … [the culprits] have incurred excommunication … in accordance with canon 2343, paragraph 4, of the code of canon law’.33
Hand in hand with this tendency to practise a sort of separatism was the other, predominant one that saw the force of the clergy springing from the fact that they lived among the people and, in the case of active warfare, among the combatants. From this point of view, military chaplains of the RSI and partisan chaplains were driven at times by similar motivations. On the one hand, there was the Vatican, which managed to get Germany to concentrate all prisoners who were priests at Dachau, though this meant separating them from those they were meant to be assisting; on the other hand, there was the reaction of a deported priest, don Roberto Angeli, who regretted this measure: ‘If our priesthood was not for others, what value did it have? That sterile sacred selfishness could only devalue us morally both in our own eyes and in those of others.’34
In a declaration by Giovanni Sismondo, bishop of Pontremoli, the double standard is particularly evident. Writing about himself, the bishop, who was awarded the Resistance’s silver medal for military valour, wrote of himself: ‘Our approach was always impartial … We always tried to maintain relations with all the Commands of the various warring parties.’ From the military commands the bishop then descends to the men: ‘Hide the outcasts; betray not him that wandereth’ (Isaiah, 16.3) and ‘Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the pilgrims (Mark, 25, 33).’35 These words were pronounced after the event (in 1946), when the Christian Democrat hierarchy and leadership were beginning to distance themselves from the Resistance, following a process that in the years of the Cold War would lead the Catholics almost to mute their participation in it.36 This attitude, like the opposite one of vindicating the Catholic contribution, shifts a contradiction onto the plane of journalism and historiographic reconstruction.
The habit of negotiating on an equal footing with the powers that be from one institution to another was so deep-rooted that contacts with the German and Fascist authorities must in another respect have appeared obvious to the ecclesiastical authorities. But here too the existence of the RSI posed knotty problems. The Germans, as occupiers, could in fact be recognised as having an authority with which it was legitimate to have contacts in a ‘climate of formal and bureaucratic mutual respect’.37 This was the line taken by Northern Italy’s most representative cardinal archbishop, Idelfonso Schuster, who in May 1944 not only accepted the visit of General Wening, commander of the German forces in Northern Italy, but sent one of his prelates, Monsignor Giuseppe Bicchierai, on a return visit. By contrast, in the same month Schuster agreed to receive the podestà and two vice-podestà, but did not return the visit.38 Less careful, or simply more spontaneous, the bishops of Modena, Boccoleri, and of Carpi, Dalla Zuanna, paid an official visit to the head of the province, with the easily predictable result that on 30 March 1944 La Gazzetta dell’Emilia published an exultant communication which concluded by recalling how victory was ‘the sole guarantee of salvation also for religion, the indispensable spiritual nourishment for our profoundly patriotic and Catholic people’.39
Oscillating conduct and coded messages are borne out by the judgments, contrasting in time and place, found expressed in the reports of the Fascist authorities. Thus early reassurance arrived from Grosseto that ‘the clergy has given no cause for comment, supporting the authorities in the campaign of internal resistance’.40 But after a few months the censor of the correspondence pointed out that ‘the clergy is very sharply rebuked for its hostile demeanour to the republican state, and for the favour it has shown towards the partisans which feeds the spirit of rebellion’.41
For a strongly partisan zone, Mario Giovana’s detailed and balanced description of the conduct of the lower clergy of the valleys around Cuneo comes closer to reality: ‘reserve that was flaunted but lackin
g in hostile acts’, ‘assistance conceded with caution and moderation’, ‘inactive sympathy’, rare cases of ‘active collaboration with the partisans, leading to the death of some parish priests’.42
One point was particularly dear to the heart of the RSI, and interwove with another that attracted less attention on the part of the ecclesiastical hierarchies: the Holy See’s recognition of the Republic and respect for the Lateran Pacts.43 Recognition – for which, for that matter, risky official applications do not appear to have been made – was never granted, despite pressure to do so.44 On 27 September 1943 a note by the secretary of state, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, explained that the Holy See
does not as a rule recognise de jure governments that are set up in wartime, because of the war, when there is already a legal government. If the new Mussolini government has de facto power in one part of Italy, one could at the most – bearing this fact in mind – have some not official but confidential and I should say private contacts with it, because there might be questions to solve at the practical level.45
Sometimes the fact that the highest ecclesiastical authorities avoided appointing new bishops to the sees that fell vacant during the twenty months of RSI government, so as not to have to ask for the assent of that government, was offered as proof of their firm determination not to recognise the Fascist Republic.46 In fact this behaviour touches on the second question mentioned above: the request that the Lateran Pacts be respected by a government that one did not, however, wish to recognise. Nothing would have prevented the Holy See from seeking the assent of the government of the South, which had certainly not renounced its potential jurisdiction over the entire national territory. But such a patent gesture would have been at odds with the cautious line that had been chosen, and might have led to RSI reprisals precisely in the concordatory sphere which the Holy See had most at heart (the threats to establish a national church, bandied about by Roberto Farinacci, ‘Crociata italica’ and Lando Ferretti47 were all too clearly senseless). In abstract terms, even a clear anti-concordatory, and even persecutory, act on the part of the Fascists might not have been altogether unwelcome for the Church, insofar as it could then have turned this to its own honour and advantage. All the same, prudence and experience taught that it was better for certain privileges, such as those assured by the Concordat, not to be undermined by anyone, not even by an illegitimate authority, since it was easy to mar but difficult to mend them, and the public spectacle of their violation was in itself scandalous. Indicative of this is the episode of the extra-territorial convent of San Paolo, which Pietro Koch’s band of Fascists overran, capturing the numerous people who had sought refuge there.48 The Fascist press posed a dilemma that had its share of logic: either the Vatican recognised the RSI and renewed the Lateran Pacts with the republic, or else it did not recognise it and ‘the matter therefore becomes Badoglio’s affair’. The reaction of Il Popolo, organ of the Christian Democrats, was extremely violent, but conducted on extremely slippery ground:
Is it necessary to recall that … the obligations of the Italian state are automatically assumed by the occupying authorities, the only real and integral authority responsible for the San Paolo incident? Does it need recalling that if even the international juridical personality of the republican government is highly problematic or nonexistent, that government nonetheless has as its head a physical person who is the very same person who signed the Lateran Pacts?49
Another Christian Democrat newspaper of the capital, Il Segno, went to great pains to refute the thesis by which the appeal to the Lateran Pacts had no value if the Social Republic was not recognised.50 An irreverent comment, however, came from a minor paper, expressing what was very likely the view of many resistenti, but paradoxically deeming it best not to voice it publicly: ‘Both of them are right’, the Church and the Fascist regime both in bad faith since 1929.51
In many Fascists genuine stupor can be detected both at the ingratitude that the clergy and Catholics in general were showing them, and at the fin de nonrecevoir with which they now greeted the request that for so many years had not fallen on deaf ears: We have the same enemies, why aren’t you with us? After recalling the ‘debt of recognition’ that Fascism deserved from the Church a note from the Corrispondenza Repubblicana, inspired by Mussolini himself, stated: ‘The reasons for which the clergy should be at our side have already been mentioned: because we are fighting against all its age-old and relentless enemies.’52 Lower down the hierarchic ladder, the secretary of the fascio for Firenzuola expressed the same concepts: how can the priests not side with those who are fighting ‘against masonic sectarianism, against Bolshevism, against atheism and against anarchy?’53
We might think that the small minority of ecclesiastics who came out openly in favour of the RSI did so precisely because they were receptive to appeals of this kind.54 Responsive to them certainly was that medico condotto (district doctor) from Fabbrico (Reggio Emilia) who expressed the wish for a ‘perfect fusion between religious and military forces. Only then will Italian conciliation between the state and the Church be a true, profound and absolute reality.’55 Also responsive to them appears to have been the canny republican army colonel, a member of the Republican Fascist Party (PFR), who kept only a photo graph of the pope in his office in Udine.56 Highly responsive, naturally, was the group headed by don Tullio Calcagno and the Cremonese ‘Crociata italica’ (‘Italic Crusade’),57 as well as the more moderate group that gathered around
Catholicism, in order to defend our religion?’ These words formed part of a long list of the attacks Farinacci had made on the behaviour of the Church that appeared in the June 1944 northern edition of Risorgimento Liberale. the Venetian review Italia Cattolica, issued directly by the Ministry of Popular Culture.58
It would have been wishful thinking for the Fascists to imagine that don Tullio Calcagno or the head chaplain of the Black Brigades, don Eusebio Zappaterreni, a Franciscan survivor of the Russian campaign, could, with their scanty and discredited followers, mobilise the uncertain, let alone constitute a powerful counterweight to the far larger minority of priests who openly sided with the resistenti, to the extent that some even became chaplains to Garibaldi partisan formations.59 In the Verona Charter it had been repeated that ‘the Religion of the Republic is the Roman Catholic Apostolic one’ (words which figured as the half-title of Italia Cattolica, mentioned earlier). But by and large the Fascist authorities appeared somewhat prudent, if not resigned, aware as they were of the impossibility of opening another highly risky front. Mussolini might well say to Padre Eusebio, on 26 September 1944, that ‘when the priests see the black shirts they ring the church bells to warn the red shirts’;60 but he could do nothing to prohibit those bells from being rung. In the twilight of the Social Republic, his well-chosen definition of himself as ‘Catholic and anti-Christian’, which had inspired him so fruitfully on so many occasions, was doomed to be irremediably frustrated.61
The odd tough and testy stance by the Fascists did not change matters. Farinacci’s paper, polemicising against the director of Catholic Action, Monsignor Evasio Colli’s declaration of disengagement, mentioned earlier, wrote that ‘at a tragic hour like this one cannot, in albeit deliberately equivocal prose, urge the young towards absenteeism, desertion, anarchy’.62 Reproaches for blindness and ingratitude were coupled with denunciations of the clergy’s absenteeist and fence-sitting attitudes, which were frequent in the reports of the peripheral RSI authorities.63 Some particularly suspicious Fascists even went so far as to see don Calcagno himself as ‘the Church’s hand in our ranks, and one of her pilasters in our formation. You never know, think the old Vatican foxes.’64
Again, Farinacci, not altogether wrongly, considered the formula that the military RSI chaplains had to ‘mutter’ in place of the oath ‘eel-like and Pharisaic’: ‘I declare that I am aware of the obligations inherent in the service of spiritual assistance with the military forces of the Italian Social Republic and am fully conscious of the regul
ations governing the position of military chaplains. I declare furthermore that I undertake to perform all my chaplain’s duties properly with all diligence and zeal.’65
In fact, even if they attached different weight to it, the figure of the RSI military chaplain constituted a mutual pledge given on the institutional plane by the Fascist state and the Church. The former (at odds, it seems, with German thinking)66 respected the Concordat and obtained indirect backing. The latter demonstrated that the Concordat was in any case in force. In fact, in addition to those who had volunteered (generally survivors from the 1940–43 campaigns), some bishops took the initiative of sending chaplains to the military formations of the RSI, including the black brigades, both ‘to try and do a bit of good even among wolves’, and to ‘establish useful relations with the parade-ground commanders in order to be able to make use of them later at an opportune moment’.67 The chaplains, wrote Italia Cattolica, ‘continue to do what they have always done’;68 but some put excessive zeal into it, like those who wore the badges of the SS above the cross.69
The authorisation for religious assistance to the partisans, granted by Pope Pius XII in October 1944 at Schuster’s request,70 and the presence, in various forms, of chaplains in the Resistance formations also answered both a religious need and a need for politico-ideological presence, aimed at combating the influence of doctrines that were dangerous for the Church.71 An identical web of motivations was at work in the bands who accepted or even requested chaplains: genuine respect for religious conscience, and demonstration of the fact that the clergy were on your side, both against the Fascists, and, perhaps still more important for the Communists, as part of the policy of unity with the Christian Democrats. On one occasion Vincenzo Moscatelli (‘Cino’) said: ‘From tomorrow you’ll have two chaplains because I don’t want there to be no Mass on Sundays, and in case you should die you won’t die like dogs!’72
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