The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  In the eyes of many Italians, Mussolini had assumed godlike qualities, but along with the adulation came a dash of fear. As two members of the Institute of Fascist Culture were leaving the institute’s headquarters, they ran into the elderly caretaker. One of them jokingly pointed to the other and told the befuddled custodian, “Do you see that man? He’s an immortal.”

  “What do you mean?” replied the old man. “All men are mortal!”

  “Ah! I see! So you think Mussolini too is a mortal!”

  “I didn’t say that!” insisted the frightened custodian.15

  Around the same time, Foreign Minister Ciano had a visitor, Prince Philipp of Hesse, a man Hitler often used to send messages to Mussolini. It was Hesse who, earlier that year, had hand-carried Hitler’s letter to Mussolini informing him of the imminent invasion of Austria. Grandson of a German emperor and great-grandson of Britain’s Queen Victoria, Hesse had been a Nazi Party member since 1930. He had done much to win the German aristocracy over to the Nazi cause. When he arrived at Ciano’s office that day, he was clearly embarrassed. He had come, he explained, to see Ciano about a private family matter. In 1925 Hesse had married Victor Emmanuel’s daughter, and his mother-in-law, Queen Elena, had asked him to intercede on their behalf with the Duce. They wanted an exception to the racial laws to be made for their Jewish doctor. “It seems,” Ciano wrote in his diary, “that the Queen is very angry about the expulsion, and also the King, who trusts this doctor very much, but does not dare to speak to the Duce. And both of them count on my friendly mediation.” Delighted to have the upper hand with the nervous German aristocrat, Ciano smiled. What would the Führer say, should he mention Hesse’s request to him? he wondered aloud. At this the blood drained from Hesse’s face.16

  In early September Pius XI told Tacchi Venturi to draft a message for Mussolini, on the need to exempt baptized Jews from the racial laws. The pope approved the draft, then added something else. Tell Mussolini, he instructed his Jesuit envoy, that Italy’s racial laws might well “provoke reprisals on the part of Jews throughout the world.”17 A few days later Tacchi Venturi brought Mussolini a more pointed papal message. As an Italian, the pope said he was truly saddened to see “a whole history of Italian good sense forgotten, to open the door or the window to a wave of German anti-Semitism.”18

  But as the first racial laws were made known, what most upset the pope, and certainly what most bothered those around him, was not their impact on Italy’s Jews but the fact that they were to apply to Catholic converts from Judaism as well.

  After meeting with the pope on September 20, Tacchi Venturi prepared a memo, as he often did, to convey the pope’s wishes to Mussolini. Jews who had shown special merit—especially in military service in the Great War—had, he noted, been exempted from the new laws. The pope was pleased to learn of this exception but wondered why no similar provision had been made for Jews who had “separated themselves from the Synagogue, asking for and receiving baptism.” The Church “wants each of them to abhor Judaic perfidy and reject Jewish superstition, [and so] cannot forget these, its children.” These converts were especially at risk, added the pope’s envoy, because their own families shunned them, regarding them as traitors.

  It made no sense, argued Tacchi Venturi, for Mussolini to exempt Jews who had served in the war and not those who had embraced Catholicism. The merit of the former was “certainly inferior to that much larger one that is the renunciation of the blindness and obstinacy of their error without which a Jew could not become a true Christian.”19

  In the wake of the racial laws, a parade of Jews and former Jews sought help from Italy’s bishops. Uncertain what the pope expected of them, the bishops bombarded the Vatican with requests for guidance. In a typical letter, in late September, the archbishop of Turin told of all the Jews who had come to ask for his aid. If they thought they would get it, they were mistaken. “I must ordinarily limit myself,” he reported, “to suggest they remain calm, that they wait for further regulations, and they have faith in the government, etc.” But while he could dismiss the Jews, he did not feel he could do the same for those Catholics who had converted from Judaism and were being treated as if they were Jews. It was for this reason that he wrote.

  Tardini, saying that he had shared the archbishop’s letter with the pope, replied with a promise to bring the Turin cases, mentioned by the archbishop, to the government’s attention. He asked Tacchi Venturi to take up the matter.20

  Italy’s Jews were feeling increasingly isolated. Primo Levi, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Turin, recalled those first months of the racial laws. “My Christian classmates were civil people. None of them or my professors directed a hostile word or gesture toward me, but I felt myself being distanced from them.… Every glance exchanged between them and me was accompanied by a small but perceptible glimmer of diffidence and suspicion. What do you think of me? What am I for you? The same as six months ago—one of your equals who does not go to mass—or the Jew?”21

  In a September diary entry, a Jewish woman described her family’s plight. Her husband, a scientist, was despondent: he had recently received a letter containing an article he had written and submitted to a journal. “ ‘The editor returns it herewith,’ ” his wife noted; “a few embarrassed words, ‘no longer able to proceed with publication, most regretful,’ etc. He opened the next letter. ‘The president of the Academy of Science wishes to advise that, following instructions received to that effect, he is removing his name from the membership list.’ … The fearful sense of emptiness invaded him again, sweeping over his heart. He saw, suddenly and for the first time how his one true reason for living had been torn from him.”22

  In another Jewish household, a young girl refused to come out of her room and would not eat. It was to have been her first day of school, but she would not get to share in the excitement with the other girls, for she was Jewish. Distraught, her mother entered her room “with my heart in my throat,” as she recalled in her diary. She described the scene: “Young people’s tears are so difficult to dry.… The room was quiet, looked empty. Then I saw her, stretched across the bed, asleep. Her cheeks were still wet and her hand still clutched her handkerchief, and her ‘why’ still echoed in the quiet room.”23

  HAVING GOBBLED UP AUSTRIA in March, the Nazis were now threatening to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland. In a September 12 speech at Nuremberg, Hitler vowed that should the territory not be given to them, the Germans would take it by force.24 Panic spread through Europe. By late September, six hundred thousand people had fled Paris, worried that a German attack was near.

  In the midst of this frenzy, the Duce seized an unusual opportunity. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, invited him to mediate the Sudetenland dispute at a peace conference to be held in Munich.

  The French, British, German, and Italian leaders arrived at the conference site on September 29. The thickset Mussolini, dressed in his tight-fitting uniform, his chin jutted forward, and his face set in his best Caesar-like pose, acted as though he—rather than Hitler—were the host. Ciano, also in uniform, hovered around his father-in-law. Chamberlain, with his fancy suit, his abundant eyebrows, lined face, and hands bent by rheumatism, was the picture of the aristocratic diplomat of English stamp. Hitler, in business suit, was ill at ease, constantly in motion, his face pallid. Knowing only German, he clung to Mussolini, the sole German-speaker among the other government heads.25

  A photo from the meeting shows Mussolini in his light-colored military uniform, his head shaved bald, staring somewhat menacingly as Chamberlain, in dark suit and high collar, appears to be struggling to convince him of something. For Mussolini, the umbrella-carrying British prime minister was the embodiment of the effete values his Fascist regime was battling. “I never want to see umbrellas around me,” he once said. “The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope’s soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.”26

  While
the Duce was in Munich, the pope went to the Vatican radio station to broadcast a plea for peace. He spoke not in Latin but in Italian, eager that his message be heard. Tears reddened his eyes as he addressed “all Catholics and the entire universe.” “While millions of men live in fear of the impending danger of war and of the threat of unprecedented massacres and ruin,” he said, “We share in Our paternal heart the trepidation of so many of Our children and We invite the bishops, clergy, members of religious orders, and all the faithful to join Us in the most insistent, hopeful prayer for preserving peace with justice and charity.”27

  Back at the Munich conference, Mussolini offered his peace plan—or perhaps more accurately, he presented Hitler’s peace plan and called it his own. Germany was to be allowed to seize the Sudetenland. The British and French government heads agreed to this humiliating capitulation in exchange for Hitler’s promise to stop there. No representative of Czechoslovakia was invited to the meeting that dismembered the country.

  Mussolini returned to Italy to a hero’s welcome. In fields alongside the train tracks, farmers got down on their knees to greet the man who had brought peace to Europe. This was only one of many signs that, a month after the racial laws were first announced, his popularity remained high.28 For his part, Hitler would have to wait until the following year to see his war begin in earnest, but he drew an important lesson from the peace conference. In August 1939, as he was about to send German troops into Poland, he told his generals: “Our enemies are small worms. I saw them in Munich.”29

  Among those singing Mussolini’s praises was Milan’s Cardinal Schuster. In a gushing public letter, he proclaimed that “Italy is proud because its Duce made such a precious contribution to peace.” He suggested that a new church dedicated to peace be constructed to mark Mussolini’s triumph. Hearing of the archbishop’s proposal, the pope exploded. “What a disaster!” he exclaimed to Tardini. “I would never have believed it! I thought he was more intelligent than that!”30

  At a Grand Council meeting a few days after his return, Mussolini took aim at the handful of holdouts against the racial laws. He insisted that the Jews were behind what remained of antifascism in the country. Stung by the pope’s criticisms, he branded Pius XI “the most harmful pope ever for the future of the Catholic Church”31

  Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan, with Mussolini

  (photograph credit 24.2)

  The pope is a “calamity,” the Duce, in a pontificating mood, told Clara Petacci shortly after the meeting. “Today we are the only ones, I am the only one, supporting this religion.… And he does shameful things, like saying that we are all like Semites.” He worked himself into a fury. “You don’t know the trouble they are causing,” he told Clara, whose interest in such matters was limited. “He has upset all the Catholics, he gives nasty, shocking speeches. In a word, he is evil.” The Duce went on to muse that there was something unlucky about popes named Pius—they all brought disaster. Pius VI and Pius VII were both thrown out of Rome by Napoleon; Pius IX lost Rome and the Papal States; and Pius X saw all Europe erupt in war. “He is losing the whole world and now he risks destroying everything here as well. Ah, it’s a true calamity.” As a Catholic, he concluded, “I have to say that it would be hard to imagine a worse pope than this one.”32

  The Grand Council approved the new racial laws; La Civiltà cattolica published them, along with the official justification, all without comment. “Jewish elements lead all anti-Fascist forces,” the government proclaimed, and so further measures against them were urgently needed. Italian Jews were to be thrown out of the Fascist Party; they could not own or direct businesses having more than a hundred employees, own more than fifty hectares of land, or remain in the Italian military. Restrictions on their ability to exercise professions would soon be announced. Special secondary schools for Jews were to be established, joining the Jewish elementary schools that had already been authorized.33

  Ciano worried about the pope’s reaction to the latest round of racial laws, but he was relieved to learn that all might work out well after all. The Holy See would offer no objection, his chargé d’affaires at the Vatican told him, as long as the new laws did not treat Catholics who had converted from Judaism as if they were Jews. Most important, the Vatican insisted that nothing be done to violate the terms of the concordat: its language clearly guaranteed state recognition of all Church-sanctioned marriages. “This is the only point in the racist proclamation of the Grand Council,” the Italian diplomat told Ciano, “about which the Church would object.”34

  This reading of the pope’s position is confirmed by a note Domenico Tardini made on the day the new racial laws were announced. “This evening, at the request of the Holy Father,” he wrote, “L’Osservatore romano will publish a brief article, mentioning some concern and expressing the hope that the future law may remove every reason for reserve.”35

  The pope viewed the new racial laws as part of a larger, troubling pattern. Mussolini, rather than working with the Vatican to bring about a confessional state in which Catholicism infused Fascism with its values, seemed bent on creating a separate Fascist religion. In mid-September, Pius XI addressed this concern in remarks to a group of French union members. Some argue, said the pope, that everything should belong to the state, making it totalitarian. But such a claim was absurd. “If there is a totalitarian regime,” he told them, “totalitarian in fact and by right—it is the regime of the Church, because man belongs totally to the Church.”36

  The pope was beginning to question whether he could continue to support Mussolini and his Fascist regime. But although his unscripted remarks continued to make both Fascist officials and his own advisers nervous, his opposition to specific anti-Semitic measures remained limited. Clearly those around the pope did not oppose them. Italy’s chargé d’affaires, Carlo Fecia di Cossato, informed Mussolini and Ciano that according to top Vatican officials, the recent racial laws “have not, as a whole, found an unfavorable reaction in the Vatican.” The only objection raised there regarded the violation of the Church’s right to define what constituted a legal marriage. “I had confirmation of these impressions from Monsignor Montini, substitute for ordinary affairs at the secretary of state office, especially that the major, not to say the only, concern for the Holy See regards the case of marriages with converted Jews.”

  Cossato added a note about the Jesuits, echoing Pignatti’s earlier advice. “The Jesuits,” he explained, “have always been convinced anti-Semites—albeit for doctrinal reasons different from ours.” But they could not let themselves be portrayed as opposing the pope. Better, he advised, to let the Jesuits demonize the Jews without calling attention to it, for “in the shadows and on the practical level they have been and they may still be our best allies.”37

  That same evening Cossato got to meet with Father Rosa, whose latest article on “the Jewish question” had recently been published in La Civiltà cattolica. Rosa told him he had written it on orders from the Vatican, “to dissipate the impression that readers might have of the total support for the racist measures adopted by the Fascist Government by the organ of the Society of Jesus.” But after speaking with Rosa, the envoy felt reassured. “The Jesuits,” he told Ciano, “are still today clearly and fundamentally anti-Jewish.”38

  SHORTLY BEFORE GOING TO the early October Grand Council meeting, Ciano summoned the papal nuncio and showed him reports he had received from a recent Eucharistic Congress. Borgongini saw the telltale markings of Mussolini’s colored pencil on the sheets. The dictator had been upset to learn of critical remarks made by priests at the congress. One in particular had angered him. “God,” the priest had warned, “will certainly punish the German people and all those who set out on their path.” The Duce did not want any conflict with the Church, said Ciano, but the pope must be told that unless he prevented priests from voicing such criticism, the government would be forced to act.

  “If there has been any intemperance of language,” the n
uncio assured Ciano, “certainly we will be the first to remind the sacred orators of their duty.” But the pope did not share the nuncio’s craven view. When, some days later, Pius learned of the priests’ “intemperate” words, he exclaimed, “Benissimo! Giustissimo!” (“Excellent! Just right!”) He added, “Someone needs to be saying these things!”

  At the same meeting with Ciano, Borgongini again conveyed the pope’s plea that Mussolini intervene with Hitler on his behalf. The pope had been upset to learn that the Nazis’ persecution of the Church was now extending to Austria and the Sudetenland. “Since it is clear that no one is able to influence Hitler aside from His Excellency the Head of the Government,” the nuncio told Ciano, “I beg you to tell His Excellence Mussolini that only he can get the Führer to stop his persecution.”

  Borgongini then turned to the question of the Fascist Party head in Bergamo. Here his words are of special interest, for they refer to the secret deal with Mussolini in mid-August, granting papal approval for the racial laws in exchange for concessions to benefit Catholic Action. “I asked the minister [Ciano] to take care of Bergamo,” the nuncio reported afterward to Pacelli, “for it was authoritatively promised that that federal secretary would be fired by the end of September, and yet he was still in his job.”39

  Reminded that he had not yet fulfilled his end of the bargain, Mussolini summoned Tacchi Venturi. The Bergamo question, he said, had gone on too long, or as he put it in his more colorful language, it had grown “la barba troppo lunga,” too long a beard.40 He would remove the party head there immediately. At the same time, he asked the pope to dismiss four members of the Bergamo Catholic Action board who had once been Popular Party activists.41

  When Pius heard what the Duce wanted, he expressed surprise that men with such a past could still be found in Catholic Action leadership positions. He had thought they had all been pruned out.42 Tardini was startled at how readily the pope ordered the four men dismissed. On October 14, the Bergamo newspaper reported the resignation of the four board members and the removal of Bergamo’s Fascist Party head.43