A Civil War (75 page)

In a town like Carrara, located at one of the confines of the Gothic Line, agreements with both the Fascist and the German authorities created a situation that was on the one hand grotesque, and on the other highly dangerous for those partisan formations that refused to accept this kind of compromise:

Further to incidents and consequent contacts with republican and German authorities, the activity of the CLN of Carrara is by now public knowledge; the president is known; various commissions, including the food commission, function in collaboration with the state bodies; but German negotiations with the Julia partisan formation to obtain free passage across the Cisa, have been ‘conducted irresponsibly, and several spies who were sent among the formations [which had not accepted the agreements], have facilitated and possibly caused a massive roundup'.
⁸⁶

On several occasions, agreeing to dialogue with the Fascist authorities could offer an opportunity to make provocatively unacceptable requests to them. The Communist delegate sent by the CLN (along with a Christian Democrat) to the provincial head and the
podestà
of Modena, who undertook to save the installations if the partisans refrained from attacking the retreating Germans, declared that on the contrary the struggle needed stepping up, and demanded both the immediate resignation of the two functionaries and that they make a public anti-German declaration.
⁸⁷

The final transitional phase would obviously be that in which contacts with the enemy intensified, taking on a different, increasingly differentiated meaning according to whether they were with the Germans or the Fascists. In the case of the former, once they had surrendered, all that remained to be done was to hand them over to the Allies as prisoners of war. With the latter, the question was a good deal more complex because it predetermined, at least in part, the future of the Italians who had chosen to fight for the wrong side. The watchword ‘surrender or perish' did not rule out discussing the terms of surrender; but there was always the risk of slipping towards a negotiated and rather too tranquil handover of powers. Witness this motion presented on 27 June 1944 to the Tuscan CLN by the Action and the Communist parties:

The motion was not passed, and the CTLN limited itself to recalling a less drastic one, which had been passed the previous 24 May, when the Christian Democrats had polemicised against the ‘political infantilism', ‘ideological prejudices' and ‘romantic sentimentalities' that appeared to them discernible in the intransigent positions.
⁸⁸
Things were to change in April 1945 with the general collapse, but the Communists' insistence on insurrection, which they were prepared to start alone if need be, should nonetheless be attributed to the firm commitment to avoid not only another 25 July at the topmost level, but also a creeping series of widespread events of the same nature.
⁸⁹
Even if ‘insurrection' was scarier than ‘liberation',
⁹⁰
when the showdown came this sort of prudence was shelved in favour of a formula championed from the beginning of the movement,
⁹¹
implicit in which was the anti-Fascist, and not just anti-German, character of the victory, and which could be imprinted in the collective memory as summing up the entire event. It is symptomatic that the ex-partisan workers questioned in a recent research inquiry tend to call the whole Resistance an ‘insurrection'.
⁹²

The civil war presented the Catholic Church and its various components with more arduous problems than those connected with the patriotic war. The latter could always be seen as falling within the traditional framework of conflicts between states, even between Catholic states, before which the Church, from long experience, knew how to conduct itself. Already the ideological character that the 1940–43 war had acquired – that of both a Fascist war and an anti-Bolshevik war – had created for the Catholic Church, as an institution and in relation to individual consciences, the particular problems that have been mentioned earlier. After 8 September the only problem that seemed to have been definitively solved was the identification of the victor. But even here, the mere question of what attitude it should take towards the strictly national aspect of the war became difficult for the Church – and not so much because of the change of sides, which in fact allowed the Church to feel easily in unison with the anti-German sentiments of a large part of the Italian population (as in fact occurred in the South), but because there came to the fore, as we shall presently see, the problem of obedience owed to the occupying foreign authorities as guardians of order.

It was the civil war, however, that created a particularly difficult situation. It revealed the line of ‘tranquil loyalism' to the government followed during Badoglio's forty-five days as being no longer viable.
¹
It complicated the process of what has been called ‘the succession'.
²
It made dramatic what for most Italian Catholics had never constituted a serious problem of conscience, namely being both Catholic and Fascist. At a still higher level, it revealed the conflict between observing the fifth commandment and killing in time of war, now that it was necessary to kill other Italians. While in normal wars each of us, when he returns home, can be absolved for having done his duty, the civil war opened up a problematic field that it was not easy for the ecclesiastical authorities to occupy with clear and unambiguous directives.

In any case, several distinctions need to be made from the start – distinctions that are not limited to that between the higher and lower clergy, incontestable though that distinction is. This distinction has been emphasised by left-wing historiography, starting with Roberto Battaglia's
Storia della Resistenza
(which is naturally wholly in favour of the lower clergy), but is already present in the contemporary sources
³
and then in the memoirs,
⁴
as well as in the way
things actually were. On the other hand, it has been minimised or even denied in Catholic-inspired historiography and journalism. The fact is that an exceptional situation like the civil war, inserted in a great international ideological war, brought to light the multiplicity of planes on which the Church moved, all of them real enough but all resistant to any
reductio ad unum –
be it the appeal to a providential game between parties in which each would perform his office, or a bishop condemning partisan violence, or the tendency to highlight a rather too lucid and ‘objective' ecclesiastical strategy capable of controlling and transporting to the glory of the institution the multiple threads of the often contradictory experiences lived by Catholics.
⁵

The contradictions throng around one fundamental one: to remain
super partes
and at the same time to take sides. This is not simply a question of opposition between being religious and being political, for both elements were to be found at both poles of the dichotomy. The political (and military) choice of the Resistance, in a situation which called into question automatic institutional forms of legitimisation, was inevitably supported by profound, deep-rooted motivations for a Catholic who wanted to choose his allegiances as a Catholic, according to his religious convictions. On the other hand, Catholic piety was embodied in an institution, which as such operated politically.

The hardest distinction to mediate was thus that between religion as an institution – administrated, though not exclusively, by the leaders of the hierarchy – and religion as a question of conscience. Both levels contained the duality of being
super partes
and of taking sides. At the first level, this duality generated diplomatic prudence, broken at times by compromise with, or opposition to, the Nazi-Fascist authorities. At the second level, emphasis was laid on the religious piety shared by friends and enemies, victors and vanquished, and active engagement alongside one's friends against the enemy, out of a religious inspiration to rebel against oppression and injustice. ‘Thou source of free life, give us the force to rebel' is written next to an image of Christ.
⁶
‘Pastoral activity', to which Catholic historiography has often appealed, though failing to devote as much attention to the sheep as to the shepherds, does not appear to be sufficient as a mediating category. In fact, pastoral activity took the form of diplomatic caution, provoking the reactions of those who ‘had by now made a clear choice of sides'.
⁷
Nor is the distinction exhaustive between a plane on which the Church performs a ‘Benedictine' function of preserving society from chaos, and a plane where it orientates the masses over which it exercises its influence in a pro-Resistance direction.
⁸

The function of the shepherd who must never abandon his sheep could lead the Church – and this was no novelty, either – to paying the price of submission to, or collaboration with, established power, whatever that power might be. From an ethico-political point of view, it is legitimate to speak in such cases of opportunism, but from a pastoral–institutional point of view one has to recognise the coherence of those priests who considered it more important to tend the souls of others than to tend their dignity as citizens or, if one prefers, to think too deeply about the reasons for a choice made by so many people as men and citizens. This attitude seems to me to be exemplified by a chaplain of the Pusteria Alpine division who, on being captured by the Germans in Grenoble, refused to follow the deported officers because they had refused to collaborate and were defined by him as ‘rebels': ‘I didn't want to go to Poland, my ministry didn't permit me to starve to death among barbed wire, thus cutting short work that was so useful for the soldiers.' When, subsequently captured by the Allies, he was taken to England, this priest ‘immediately became an enthusiastic collaborator of the victors'.
⁹
An opposite example is don Olindo Pezzin. Chaplain of the 13
^th
sector of the Frontier Guard, stationed at Malles Venosta, where the South Tyrolese handed fugitive soldiers over to the Germans but wanted to hide the priest even though he was dressed as an Italian officer, don Pezzin gave himself up to the occupiers as a prisoner in order to remain close to the men who had been entrusted to him.
¹⁰

In reality the Church, in the multiplicity of forms it took on RSI territory, found itself facing the same problems of the relationship between political and legal morality with which all the Italian inhabitants of those regions had to reckon. It seems to me at least as useful to try to understand certain features of the complex and not always coherent behaviour of this sizable portion of the Italian Catholic world as to conduct research into ‘the Catholics of the Resistance'.

Consider above all the classic problem of the obedience that should be withheld, in principle, from a government deemed illegitimate, but accorded in
practice to the same government insofar as it was acting as guardian of common interests, and above all of public order. As one descends from diplomatic formulations, and first and foremost those of the highest Vatican authorities, to how individual priests and individual Catholics accounted for their conduct, it becomes increasingly hard to face this problem simply by remaining irenically and cautiously equidistant. And so prudence and diplomatic ability, and the age-old claim of being non-political, slip in the direction of ambiguity.

In October 1943, Monsignor Evasio Colli, bishop of Parma and director general of Catholic Action, published in
L'Avvenire d'Italia
– in reply to a libellous statement that had appeared, as a
ballon d'essai
, in the Fascist newspapers – a declaration that ‘this association has never made mention of the state, nor of Fascism, nor of the Republic in any written document. Catholic Action must not engage, has not engaged, does not engage and will never engage in politics. If it were to do so it would betray its mission.'
¹¹

The Secretariat of State's general directives would maintain ‘an attitude of superior impartiality before the armed conflict', avoid ‘manifestations that might appear either as purely political proclamations or as statements of preference towards one of the belligerent forces'.
¹²
But when asked for advice by the vicar cardinal of Rome, Marchetti-Selvaggiani, as to how he should behave in response to Fascist pressure to collaborate in dissuading the young from draft-dodging, the assistant secretary of state, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini [the future Pope Paul VI], replied with words whose meaning slid from diplomatic prudence to what was to all effects acquiescence. Montini said that one should ‘confine oneself to recommending calm and obedience to the public authorities. To give other advice would mean entering what is still an open question.'
¹³

On 15 October 1943 Monsignor Ambrogio Marchioni, secretary of the nunciature in Italy, had a meeting with General Rodolfo Graziani. To the marshal's request that he take the part of, or at least express sympathy for, the cause of the Social Republic, the monsignor replied by insisting again on the neutrality of the Church and ‘still more of the Vatican', which did not permit any ‘political intervention in favour of one of the belligerents or in favour of one part of the citizens against another of the same nation'. The duty of priests, rather, was to ‘instil calm, tranquility, order, so as to ensure that ill-advised actions do not produce serious reprisals against so many innocent people or the entire population'.
¹⁴