The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  “It is with deep anxiety and growing surprise that We have long been following the painful trials of the [German] Church and the increasing vexations which afflict those who have remained loyal in heart and action.” Thus began the encyclical. While the Church had entered into the concordat with the German government in good faith, said the pope, “anyone must acknowledge, not without surprise and reprobation, how the other contracting party emasculated the terms of the treaty, distorted their meaning, and eventually considered its more or less official violation as a normal policy.” He lamented the destruction of Catholic parochial schools, despite the concordat’s provision protecting them. He castigated those who idolized race and nation, deeming them guilty of distorting and perverting “an order of the world planned and created by God.” He took aim at efforts to blend Christianity with race worship: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe.” Although he never mentioned Nazism by name, he thanked those priests and laypeople “who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God’s rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism.” The reference was clear.

  While the encyclical was hard-hitting, it could have been harsher. For months, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had been working on a separate document, offering a list of fundamental tenets of Nazism that the Church deemed to be grave errors. Among them were passages clearly taken from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

  Worried that branding Nazi ideology un-Christian might lead Hitler to renounce the concordat altogether, the pope had decided on a less direct attack. He was supported not only by Pacelli but by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, Germany’s most important archdiocese. Throughout the drafting project, the Jesuit general Ledóchowski did all he could to prevent the pope from denouncing Hitler, urging the pope to “avoid going into questions that are very difficult and subtle.” The term Nazi was deleted from the draft; nor was any mention made of the persecution of the Jews. The encyclical was to have been accompanied by a list of errors condemned by the Church, including basic tenets of Nazism, but it never made it out of the Vatican.12

  Diluted though the encyclical was, Hitler was furious, outraged not only by the unprecedented public attack but by the pope’s ability to have the message distributed so widely without his knowledge. He ordered the police to close down Catholic publishing houses and sent agents to diocesan headquarters and monasteries throughout the country to seize their files. “I will heap disgrace and shame on the Catholic Church,” he told one visitor, “opening unknown monastic archives and having the filth contained in them published!”13 Convinced that he knew the Church’s weak point, he threatened to reveal graphic tales of sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy and moved quickly to gather incriminating evidence. When word of the police raids got out, the bishop of Berlin and the archbishop of Breslau ordered all files dealing with complaints against priests burned. The pope urged all of Germany’s bishops to follow their example.14

  Worried that Italian newspapers might portray the encyclical as a denunciation of Nazism rather than a plea that the terms of the concordat with Germany be respected, the pope let the Duce know that this was not his intention.15 Pacelli, for his part, was eager to avoid a break with the Nazi government, afraid it would leave the Church there defenseless.16

  In May, Mussolini took up the pope’s cause with the German foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath. The dispute with the Church, Mussolini told him, was harming the Third Reich’s reputation. Based on his own experience, he advised the Nazis to allow religious instruction in the public schools, something he had done to great profit in Italy. By doing “small favors to the higher clergy,” Mussolini suggested—he gave as examples providing free railway tickets and tax concessions—he had won them over, “so that they even declared the war in Abyssinia a holy war.”17

  It was advice that, in one form or another, the Duce was regularly giving the top Nazi leaders. The previous fall Germany’s justice minister, visiting Rome, had asked him how he had succeeded in nourishing such good relations with the Church in Italy. Mussolini boasted that after a brief period of difficulty in 1931, he had brought the Vatican in line. But he advised: Never let your guard down. The Catholic Church, he explained, is like a rubber ball. If you don’t keep up the pressure, it will return to its original shape.18

  ––

  IN LATE MAY 1937 five hundred Chicago priests gathered at a local seminary, as they did four times a year, to attend their diocesan conference.19 When Archbishop George Mundelein rose to speak, there was no indication that what he would say would be of any interest outside Chicago. But his remarks would trigger an international cause célèbre.20 Lashing out at the Nazi regime for its persecution of the Church, he told his priests, “Perhaps you will ask how it is that a nation of sixty million intelligent people will submit in fear and servitude to an alien, an Austrian paper hanger, and a poor one at that, and a few associates like Goebbels and Goring, who dictate every move of the people’s lives.”21

  The outraged German government demanded an apology from the Vatican. Cardinal Pacelli, replying on behalf of the pope, refused. No such apology could be considered, he said, unless the German government first ordered a stop to the constant stream of attacks on the Church in Germany’s newspapers.

  Berlin recalled Diego von Bergen, Germany’s ambassador to the Holy See. “The Holy See will realize,” he warned, “that its unexpected and incomprehensible conduct in this matter, as long as it is not remedied, has eliminated the conditions necessary for a normal state of relations between the German Government and the Curia. The full responsibility for this development rests solely with the Curia.” 22

  If Cardinal Pacelli took the lead in this crisis, it was partly because the pope was still in such bad shape. Weakened by his failing heart and short of breath from his asthma, the pope had little of his old energy. One visitor said the pope looked as though he had “a ray of eternity on his face.” Pius XI’s illness, Pacelli observed, had left him “extremely emotional.” He could not see the frail pope, he told a fellow cardinal in April, without crying. Ever more frequently, when asked to act, the pope responded, “That will be for our successor to do.”23

  By May the pope had retreated to Castel Gandolfo, where loudspeakers were installed for his public audiences to amplify his thin voice. On his eightieth birthday, he was supposed to inaugurate the new Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but he had to cancel at the last minute.24

  Tensions between the Holy See and Germany triggered speculation that the ailing pope might soon excommunicate Hitler.25 The pope’s disgust with the Nazis was also having an impact on his attitude to the Spanish civil war, as he was suspicious of Franco’s close ties with Hitler. Mussolini was sending men and munitions to support Franco’s struggle against “communism,” but the pope, he complained, while denouncing Communism in an encyclical, was doing nothing to support the revolt.26 Meeting in May with the primate of Spain, Cardinal Isdro Gomá, Franco told him how important it would be to have the pope’s public backing. Gomá agreed and informed the Vatican secretary of state office that a letter signed by the Spanish bishops would be published announcing their support for Franco. Pacelli urged the pope to have the document published as part of the Vatican’s official acts—the Acta Apostolicae Sedis—but the ailing pope refused. “This, cardinal,” he said simply, “no.”27

  For Catholics outside Italy, the Holy See’s support of the Italian Fascist regime was becoming ever more uncomfortable. The Vatican’s latest embarrassment came on June 9, when French fascist thugs murdered Carlo Rosselli, a founder of the most important Italian anti-Fascist organization in exile. Matteotti, Amendola, now Rosselli—Mussolini’s minions had murdered three prominent leaders of the opposition, men of great moral stature.28

  Tacchi Venturi was meanwhile working tirelessly t
o stamp out Catholic criticism of the Italian dictatorship. On July 12 Dino Alfieri, minister of popular culture, asked him to handle the latest incident. England’s most important Catholic magazine had recently published a letter blasting Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Its author, a Dominican, was upset that British fascists were claiming to have Vatican support. He cited Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno, to argue that the pope opposed Fascism.

  Informed of the matter, Monsignor Pizzardo, the Vatican undersecretary of state, drafted a letter to the archbishop of Westminster, leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.29 The offending piece in the British magazine, complained Pizzardo, “places Italian fascism and German racism on the same level with regard to the Catholic Church as if the former merited the same reproval and the same condemnation as the latter.” Its author should have distinguished more clearly between the two regimes. While the Church had condemned “the excesses of National Socialism,” the controversy over Italian Catholic Action in 1931 had quickly been settled. “Since that time,” Pizzardo concluded, “it is true that not only have there been no noteworthy cases of friction between the Ecclesiastical Authority and the Italian Government, but there has often been even a fruitful collaboration between them.”

  Pizzardo sent the draft to Tacchi Venturi, who returned it with suggestions for strengthening its praise of the Fascist regime.30 He also advised that a copy be sent to the master general of the Dominican order, so that he could add his own “just warning.” Pizzardo made all the suggested changes and sent the letter. The chastised offender duly published a humiliating retraction in the magazine.31

  THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR threatened to drag Europe into a larger conflagration. In August, Italian submarines began sinking ships bound for Republican-controlled Spanish ports, while Hitler accelerated Germany’s rearmament. Despite the rising world tensions, Mussolini still found time for his daily visits with his young mistress, Clara Petacci, and for sporadic flings with other women.

  Mussolini had hitherto been able to keep details of his many affairs out of the world press. This changed in early 1937, thanks to a seductive twenty-nine-year-old French reporter. Magda Fontanges gained worldwide notoriety when she shot and wounded the French ambassador to Italy. She had tried to kill him, she said, because she blamed him for ending her affair with Mussolini. Her trial filled the world’s press with steamy stories describing their trysts. Fontanges later published her own bodice-ripping account in an American magazine under the title “I Was Mussolini’s Mistress.”32 In three lurid installments, Magda described in breathless detail how Mussolini had seduced her. The second installment opened with a full-page illustration of Fontanges in Mussolini’s arms as they kissed. Its inscription read: “Holding me tightly, he gives me his first kiss. I feel a sensation of intoxication.” Later in the piece she described the dictator’s love nest in Palazzo Venezia as he guided her toward the sofa in the darkened room.

  “He has embraced me again, growing very tender,” she recalled. “Then a sort of frenzy sweeps him, he becomes brutal, and he says, ‘You have known Il Duce—now you shall know the man!’

  “He has taken off his coat, and in his sports shirt he appears astonishingly young. Heeding nothing but his instinct, he leaps at me. Before I have time to utter so much as an exclamation, I am caught up in strong arms.”33

  The French scandal led to a raft of foreign news reports about the Duce’s voracious sexual appetite. The reports, said Mussolini, were greatly exaggerated. “If I had had to couple with all those women that they claim I have,” he told an interviewer, “I would frankly have had to have been not a man, but a stallion.” Two years later, as he bantered with a woman acquaintance, he quipped that his flesh did not allow him to be a saint. While few things tempted him—he ate mostly fruit and vegetables and had no interest in money—he had one weakness, he acknowledged, that would always stand in the way of any saintly aspirations.

  “You aren’t the only one in the world,” she pointed out. “I’ve always wondered what use having been virtuous is when one is old.”

  “In Romagna,” replied Mussolini, “we have a proverb.… In youth, give your flesh to the devil, in old age, give your bones to the Lord.”34

  Being a ladies’ man had always played a part in the Mussolini cult, and the Fontanges affair did nothing to change this. In early September, as a band played at a festival on a Sicilian beach, Mussolini danced with the local women, some young, some old, some thin, some fat, some attractive, others not. “Dancing is a religion in Romagna,” he said. “It takes the place of Catholicism.”

  As Mussolini swayed to the music, his secretary rushed onto the dance floor clutching a telegram. An Italian submarine, off the Sicilian coast, had just torpedoed a Russian cargo ship bringing provisions to Republican Spain. The attack was part of a recently imposed blockade that risked triggering a larger European war. After pausing a moment to read the message, the Duce chose another partner. When the song ended, he asked, “Are there other telegrams? If every turn around the floor they announce another torpedoing, I’ll never stop dancing.”35

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  VIVA IL DUCE!

  IN AUGUST 1937 NEWSPAPERS BEGAN REPORTING MUSSOLINI’S PLAN to visit Germany.1 It would be a fateful trip. For five days, in late September, Hitler stood at the Duce’s side, carefully choreographing a series of processions, marches, and inspections to impress Mussolini with the power of the Nazi regime and the Germans’ devotion to their Führer. The culmination came in Berlin on September 28 when eight hundred thousand people filled a field near the new Olympic stadium. Along the route leading there, nearly three million Germans cheered the dictators, having been brought in by bus and train from throughout the Reich. When the two leaders emerged onto the field the crowd roared. Hitler spared no praise, hailing Mussolini as “one of those rare solitary geniuses who are not created by history but who make history themselves.” Hitler later called him “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.”2

  Mussolini had carefully prepared his text in German and, after Hitler’s effusive introduction, rose to speak. When Fascist Italy had a friend, he proclaimed, it marched alongside him “right to the end.” But a sudden downpour spoiled the desired effect, as the master of bombast struggled to make out the blurry words on his rain-soaked sheets. The crowd had no idea what he was saying.3

  “Compared to Hitler’s demonstrations,” observed an Italian witness to the event, “those of the Italian Fascist seem like just a bunch of people running around shouting. In his speeches, Mussolini rambles, expressing commonplaces in dramatic fashion and self-evident truths with great solemnity. He addresses the ignorant masses, and speaks for them, gesticulating with his face, his body, his eyes, with the moves of a charlatan. Hitler is always composed. When Mussolini appears … hands on his hips, he seems like a circus ring master. Hitler by contrast seems like an apostle, a political, religious leader.”4

  Mussolini and Hitler in Munich, September 1937

  (photograph credit 20.1)

  The Duce was deeply impressed. “What I saw here,” he told his wife, Rachele, by telephone as he prepared to leave, “is unimaginable.”5

  Although he had promised he would convey the pope’s complaints, Mussolini never did mention them to Hitler.6 Amid the huge adulatory crowds and the imposing displays of military strength, he could not bring himself to raise such an unpleasant subject.7

  Mussolini vowed to host Hitler for a visit in the Eternal City that would outshine his own reception in Germany. Cardinal Baudrillart, writing in his diary, wondered whether the weakened Pius XI could survive such a painful sight.8

  For the Vatican, it was becoming increasingly important to differentiate between the two totalitarian states. Immediately following Mussolini’s visit to Germany, La Civiltà cattolica published a piece making just this distinction. People who equated Nazi Germany with Fascist Italy, the journal argued, “do a great
injustice to the Fascist Regime.” Hitler was seeking to unify the German people under a new, pagan religion, its slogan the divinity of the blood and the soil. Mussolini was doing the opposite, unifying Italians under the Catholic religion. The two could scarcely be more different.9

  On Mussolini’s return from Germany the pope, although upset that the Duce had not raised the issue of the Church with Hitler, again asked his help with the Führer. It was in Mussolini’s own interest, he argued, to get Hitler to stop persecuting the Church. Given Italy’s links to the Third Reich, the Nazis’ anti-Church campaign was harming Italian Fascism’s good name.10

  In another sign of his embrace of Nazi Germany, Mussolini announced in December that Italy was withdrawing from the League of Nations. Hitler had removed Germany from the League shortly after coming to power in 1933. The pope looked on with increasing unease. He was also embarrassed that so many non-Italian cardinals thought him naïve in expecting Mussolini to be a moderating influence on Hitler.11 “It is not the Duce who exercises any influence on the Führer,” remarked the French Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, “but rather the Führer who exercises it over the Duce.”12 In the pope’s Christmas speech to the cardinals, he again lamented the persecution of the Church in Germany.13 It was a message he was sharing with all who would listen.