A Civil War (146 page)

All this afflatus, nourished by a Gospel that did not come to bear the sword, found its final outlet, moreover, in the apologia of the grey ‘scuola sociale cristiana', presented as ‘the application of the eternal and universal principles of the Gospel to the contingent needs of social life'.
⁸⁴

At the opposite pole, the Catholic Communists polemicised, with intellectual haughtiness, against the pretension of deducing politics from religion and
from the ideals connected with it such as fraternity, justice and mutual love.
⁸⁵
It is not remotely true, they maintained, that ‘it is impossible to accept a political line without the philosophy that is behind it', otherwise the Catholics who call themselves democratic would have to accept the enlightenment and ‘immanentist idealism'.
⁸⁶
Lurking in the background of so much abundantly professed separatism lay a totalitarian integralism – a philosophy of history that saw in Communism (and precisely that of Stalin) the secular arm to which providence had assigned the task of realising the perfect Christian society.
⁸⁷
Following such lines and such principles, truly the Christian God, the true God, will be, if we ‘are worthy of our faith, the natural crowning, through supernatural grace, of the efforts of the atheist of good will'.
⁸⁸

In reply to these professions of faith came the warning that ‘the unity of the Christian spirit' can never be broken.
⁸⁹
And the ‘
giornale di battaglia
of Christian Democrat youth' went on to explain: ‘Catholicism, Christianity is by its very essence integralist, that is, it comprehends private and public life, projects its morality on all the problems of private and public life. In this sense we Christian Democrats or
Popolari
intend to define ourselves and to be integralist, with no oscillations and no discontinuity – in a word, coherent.'
⁹⁰

From this integralism the newspaper, paying little regard to coherence, drew a firm stance against the transfer of power: ‘Only our organic conceptions of man, the family, society, the state places the most clear-cut limits on the action of those in power and the sphere within which mutual rights are to be exercised.'
⁹¹

From their reading of some copies of
La Punta
, and from ‘hasty readings of Giuseppe Toniolo', the Catholic partisans of the Modenese mountains attempted to ‘invent an ideology of Christian Democracy'. At the party's first provincial congress (in October 1945), they affirmed the principle that the proposed reforms should not be seen ‘as the limit that we put on the reforms requested by other currents', but should be deduced ‘precisely from Christian doctrine'.
⁹²

Democrazia Cristiana adopted the first and third of the three positions outlined above – a feeble interest in politics specifically, the religious duty to participate, and integralism – some concessions being made to the second. This is one of the paths that led to that
realismo
on which they were subsequently to build so notable a part of their fortune. The Communists proved weak in their dealings with the Catholics in being so unaware of such complex facets of the latter's behaviour. The second position was naturally extraneous to Communist culture. Replying to a Christian Democrat protest against the lay funerals of partisans, ‘Bülow' (Arrigo Boldrini) let slip that in the Garibaldi formations there were ‘elements of various political tendencies and of
consequent
religious ideas'.
⁹³
The Communists would have preferred it if all the Catholics had belonged to the first position: that way, at any rate, they could consider them a fact to acknowledge, and if possible govern, as such. The Communists were aware of the existence and strength of the third position, and knew they had to combat it, when it was not possible to reach any compromise with it. But here it was often the Catholics, and above all the clergy, who had no qualms about opening hostilities.

Sure of their hegemonic strength, but at the same time secretly wishing to be recognised as equals by so ancient and noble a potentate, the Communists often assumed an attitude of respectful and tactical forbearance towards the Catholics. Moscatelli wrote of one commander, ‘our comrade since recently': ‘He's still a bit weak on the religious side, but seems keen to overcome this. In any case it's almost a good thing that he should be like this; it will come in handier for our work among partisan believers.'
⁹⁴

Another document reads: ‘In these countries there is also the question of the Church and comrades should not set themselves against it. Communists are not believers but they cannot go against Catholics who have twenty years of Fascism behind them. We must not go against the Church, although we know that Catholicism has always supported the bourgeoisie.'
⁹⁵

Urging that the chaplain be given a good welcome, a political commissar wrote: ‘Think of the USSR's change of policy over religion; they are excellent examples to follow.'
⁹⁶

Il Popolo
might limit itself to being ironical about statements of this kind.
⁹⁷
But other broadsides thundered much more loudly. One need only mention the
Estratto del catechismo sociale
published in Padua in 1944, under the editorship of the diocese's branch of Catholic Action, which enjoyed the freedom of the press granted it by the RSI. True to the best reactionary tradition, the pamphlet attacks, on every level, not only communism, but also socialism and liberalism.
⁹⁸
As they had already done with regard to the war as such, the Catholic hierarchies seemed to be concerned that the current disorder was a source of immorality, in the most traditional sense of the word, and their concern was reinforced by the fear of a Communism which was a fomenter of dissolute customs. The patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Adeodato Piazza, extended this concern even to souls in purgatory. He wrote to Monsignor Nogara, bishop of Udine: ‘It is to be hoped that the possible collapse does not also have damaging repercussions on people's souls, especially of those who have the greatest need in Purgatory (as it would indeed have if the Masses offered for souls were to be interrupted).'
⁹⁹

But it is from the same tissue of ‘Christian and patriarchal solidarity', which favoured the indirect support given to the partisans by ‘many parish priests of the so-called “peripheral” clergy … a genuine governing class in Friulian agricultural society',
¹⁰⁰
that the fear sprung that even the militia in the Osoppo brigades was a vehicle of immorality. Shortly after the Liberation a parish priest wrote:

And another priest, referring to the
osovani
(members of the Osoppo brigades) shows equal alarm about this liberty:

‘They go off and return … different from when they left' complained the parish priest of Frassené in Cadore in his turn.
¹⁰³
The arrival of ‘that lot from Bologna, the damnation of our land' and particularly the infiltration of ‘Emilian elements', again in the parish priest's view fomented a corruption in standards of conduct.
¹⁰⁴
‘With the coming of the Gramsci', wrote the parish priest of Cergnai, ‘the young are beginning to desert the church and abandon religious practices; immorality and acts of violence are constantly on the increase.'
¹⁰⁵
And the parish priest of Chies d'Alpago: ‘Even women are enlisting … with consequences that are all too well known.'
¹⁰⁶
A dean of Belluno cathedral, monsignor Palatini, even goes so far as to comment on the deportation of girls to Germany, as workers, writing in his diary: ‘With what consequences for morality it is easy to imagine, all the more so since, with the due exceptions, in young women there is a noticeable slackening of morals and an appalling frivolity, the consequences of which are being felt.'
¹⁰⁷
The retrospective reproaches of the Fascists as corrupters of
youth made by another parish priest from the Belluno area sound a similar note to those used against the partisans.
¹⁰⁸

These Veneto priests, in their way, were paying homage to the pedagogic virtues of Resistance experience which redounded from the political and military into questions of ethics and conduct. The Resistance was, however, favourably recognised as possessing these virtues by two rather more enlightened churchmen, padre Luigi Rinaldini and don Giacomo Vender, for whom the rebel movement ‘constitutes an educative environment' for the ‘awareness it can give of the need to risk one's life for an idea, for liberty, justice, the life of one's country'.
¹⁰⁹

As the field open to judgments widened under the pressure of public events, the family came under fire as well. Witness the Fascist Roberto Farinacci, who did not hesitate to denounce the Italian family as ‘incapable of being a school of civil, patriotic, and religious education'. The only future remedy would be to remove children from their families and gather them together in state boarding schools: ‘And the parents? They'll just have to calmly recognise their incompetence and step down gratefully.'
¹¹⁰
The problem of the family was, however, faced only to a limited extent and, save only a few exceptions, warily, by the
resistenti
. The presence of the Catholics and, above all, the widespread wish not to irritate them in the name of a ‘religious peace', the keys of which were left in the hands of the Catholics themselves, goes some, though not all of the way, towards explaining this reticence. The stances taken by the Christian Democrats on this score are well known. The last paragraph of
Idee ricostruttive della Democrazia cristiana
states that the democratic state ‘will safeguard public morality, protect the integrity of the family and assist parents in their mission of educating the new generations in a Christian manner'.

In this context it was natural that the ‘juridical efficacy of religious marriage' should be defended.
¹¹¹
The evangelism of the Christian Socialists was no less intransigent and hide-bound on this point. ‘When the moral unity' of the Italian people is at stake, wrote one of their newspapers, those who profess the theory of free love are ‘free to keep it to themselves and good luck to them, but God forbid that it should affect the moral solidity of the Italian family with unhealthy ideas and scurrilous words'. Likewise, let those who are atheist ‘go ahead and live their
intimate drama: but God forbid that they should touch, or threaten the ethico-religious unity of our people'.
¹¹²
The Catholic Communists, then, transferred into Soviet socialism, as they imagined it to be, the full realisation of the Catholic ideal of the family, or at any rate the presence of the conditions for bringing it about.
¹¹³

Even the most secular of the Resistance parties, the Action Party, trod very carefully on the question of marriage. One of its most elaborate programmatic documents proposed the ‘restoration to the state of sovereignty in the matter of matrimonial legislation', but was careful to add: ‘taking opportune measures to ensure that the religious wedding ceremony also is legally binding to all civil intents and purposes'
¹¹⁴
– that is to say, marriage regulated by the 1929 Concordat was to be saved. During Badoglio's forty-five days,
La Voce Repubblicana
, a newspaper which was to be on the margins of CLN policy, had written that ‘regeneration' and the ‘re-consecration of the disrupted family, the
truly
essential nucleus of civil society' was necessary.
¹¹⁵

‘For the defence of the Italian family' was an article by Togliatti published in
L'Alba
, the newspaper printed in the USSR for the Italian prisoners. In it appears the argument that Fascism only chattered about defending the family, seeking all the while to take possession of it.
¹¹⁶
The reduction of divorce to a bourgeois luxury was not incompatible with an attitude which superimposed on ancient working-class traditions of scant attention paid to the ritual formalities of the union between the sexes the concern, once again, not to alarm the Catholics.
¹¹⁷

Earlier we saw, in a stance taken by Secchia, how for relations between comrades the repudiation of the family model was the order of the day in the Communist Party, but how, at the same time, the metaphor of the party and/or the band as ‘like a family' was widespread. Even at that time the ‘ambiguity of the very concept of working-class cultural autonomy' appeared particularly difficult to resolve as far as social and moral conduct was concerned: ‘Was it a question of being capable of thinking independently what the
borghesi
thought or else of thinking differently from the
borghesi
and even in opposition to them?'
¹¹⁸

Among the
resistenti
positions appear in which loyalty to the family and loyalty to the cause (whatever name one gave the latter) clashed frontally, and in conformity with classical tradition. ‘At certain moments of life', wrote Moscatelli, in tune with Pajetta's positions, already mentioned, ‘you cannot think of your family and your
patria
at the same time: either the one or the other. I have made my choice'. Moscatelli added that, although he had a sister who was arrested and ill-treated, ‘in the exchange of prisoners I never give her name because the Garibaldini come first'.
¹¹⁹