The Pope and Mussolini (19 page)

Early in 1926, upset by the latest reports of violence against a Catholic Action headquarters, this time in the northern city of Brescia, the pope again told Tacchi Venturi to lodge a complaint. After meeting with government officials, the Jesuit again tried to get the pope and Gasparri to see things from Mussolini’s perspective. Many of the most active members of Catholic Action in Brescia, Tacchi Venturi reported,
were also well-known Popular Party activists: “From this comes the confusion and almost identification of the one with the other.” He continued, “The government does not lack clear proof that the [Brescia] Catholic Action, along with its semi-official paper,
Il Cittadino
, is often nothing but the disguise used by the anti-government political party.”
¹³

While local Fascists often took aim at adult Catholic Action groups, Mussolini was more exercised by the role played by the youth groups. As he solidified his dictatorship, he recognized how important it would be to mold children into loyal Fascists. A few months before the negotiations with the Vatican began, he announced the founding of his own national youth organization, the Opera Nazionale Balilla. It had four sections. The Balilla was for boys eight to fourteen, and the Avanguardisti for those fourteen to eighteen; they had their female counterparts in the Piccole italiane (Little Italian Girls) and the Giovani italiane (Female Italian Youth). Members wore quasi-military uniforms.
¹⁴

For Mussolini, the Church’s national network of youth groups—ranging from the Catholic Boy Scouts through various Catholic Action organizations for older youths—offered unwanted competition. Gaining control of the youth was important enough to him to risk angering the pope. He began by outlawing the Boy Scout groups. Angered by the news, the pope sent Tacchi Venturi to warn him to back off.

In early 1927, upset not only by the dissolution of the Catholic Boy Scouts but by signs that the ban would soon extend to the Catholic Action youth groups, the pope ordered the talks suspended. He demanded that Catholic Action be specifically excluded from regulations that would allow only those non-Fascist youth groups whose activities were “predominantly religious.” Much of what drew youngsters to the Catholic groups was their recreational activities. Pius worried that if the groups offered only prayer and religious instruction, membership would dwindle. He sent Tacchi Venturi to give Mussolini an ultimatum: unless he relented, he could forget about reaching a deal on the Roman question. Realizing that he was in danger of overplaying his hand, in late February 1927 Mussolini sent word to his prefects to leave
the Catholic Action youth groups alone. Pleased, the pope had Francesco Pacelli resume the talks.
¹⁵

Over the next months, as the negotiations continued, the pope met with Pacelli several times a week. Fresh reports of Fascist violence against local Catholic groups would come in from time to time, and the pope would again threaten to break off the talks. But by now he had invested too much in the negotiations, and too much in his support for Mussolini and the Fascist regime, to risk having them fail. He blamed the violence on anticlerics surrounding Mussolini who were trying to thwart the dictator’s will. Other points of conflict arose as well. In April 1928 the pope complained about the recent creation of the Fascist girls’ organizations. He was especially pained by their practice of marching with muskets on their shoulders. But again, the fault was not Mussolini’s. “There are many things that are going on that Mussolini does not know about,” said the pope.
¹⁶

The pontiff had earlier told the cardinals of the Curia that negotiations with the government were under way. But fearing that opposition might form, he decided against convening them until an agreement was reached. He worried in particular about Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti, an influential voice on international affairs known to be hostile to the Fascist regime. In order to remove Cerretti from Rome during the crucial months of the negotiations in 1928, he sent him to Sydney, Australia, as his legate to the International Eucharistic Congress. The cardinal would return only after the agreement was completed.
¹⁷

In October 1928, just as an agreement seemed near, the pope got unwelcome news: the king was having second thoughts and might not sign it. Victor Emmanuel III—named after the man who had robbed the pope of his territories—was, the pope knew, no friend of the papacy. Two years earlier Pius XI had further antagonized the king when his mother, known for her Catholic devotion and good works, had died. The king had wanted the pope to preside over her funeral or at least offer a public tribute, but the pope would do neither. Count Dalla Torre, editor of the Vatican daily, had prepared a flattering obituary of
the queen mother, but it was never published—the pope had forbidden it.
¹⁸

Pius now worried that the years of difficult negotiations might all be for naught. Desperate to find a way to win the king’s approval, he focused on what he knew most bothered the monarch: the possible expansion of the lands under the pope’s control. He decided to abandon his earlier demand that the vast gardens of the Villa Doria Pamphili, on the Janiculum Hill above the Vatican, be added to Vatican territory.
¹⁹

“If they don’t accept under these conditions,” Domenico Barone, Mussolini’s negotiator, told Pacelli, on hearing the news, “they are idiots.”
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MUSSOLINI AND THE KING
, so different in personality and background, had by the late 1920s settled into a stable if peculiar relationship. At one point Mussolini said that it was as if the two shared a bedroom but had separate beds. But they did have a number of traits in common, not least their discomfort around priests. Both, too, made casually cutting remarks about those around them. The king once, characteristically, described Italy’s chief general, Pietro Badoglio (whom he would years later choose to replace Mussolini as prime minister) as having “the brains of a sparrow and the hide of an elephant.” Mussolini, for his part, frequently ridiculed the king in private. The pint-size monarch made a poor impression, he complained, unworthy of a great nation. He was a “sour, treacherous little man.” At various times he dubbed Victor Emmanuel “an empty carriage,” a “dead tree,” and an “old hen whose feathers should be plucked.” But he did not tolerate ridicule of the king by others, including his wife. Coming from the same antimonarchical background as her husband, Rachele, ill at ease among the wealthy and the well bred, was never comfortable anywhere near the royal family. Mussolini undoubtedly understood this, but whenever she began telling her favorite joke about the king needing a ladder to mount his horse, he told her to be quiet.
²¹

Every Monday and Thursday morning at ten, the Duce, in frock
coat and top hat, went to meet Victor Emmanuel III in the vast and majestic Quirinal Palace, where the king would sign a raft of government decrees and personnel appointments. On those mornings, observed Quinto Navarra, he was like a different Mussolini. For the rest of the week, the imperial, dictatorial Duce who intimidated his ministers appeared frequently in his Fascist militia uniform, in a never-ending series of parades and rallies, the supreme leader in the regime’s complex choreography of power. But during his mornings at the royal palace, Mussolini played the part of the respectful prime minister, mindful of the king’s prerogatives in what was still formally a constitutional monarchy.
²²

ON FEBRUARY
7, 1929, Cardinal Gasparri called in the ambassadors to the Holy See and told them that a historic agreement was soon to be announced, ending the decades-long dispute between the Church and the Italian government. The cardinal was about to become the public face of a treaty that would be hailed by churchmen around the world. But it was a bittersweet moment for him. In recent years he had been getting clear signals that the pope no longer valued his services. Although down-to-earth, Gasparri had his pride. He had been stung in 1929 when the pope, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination, snubbed him. His staff had made plans for a gala festival, a mass to be held in his honor in the Sistine Chapel, presided over by the pope; the cardinals of the Curia would all be there, along with the whole foreign diplomatic corps. But the pope did not attend, and the dignitaries who did gossiped about his surprising absence.
²³

By early 1928, Gasparri was no longer young. Suffering from diabetes and heart disease, he slept poorly. The once-jovial secretary of state increasingly appeared depressed and was quick to get misty-eyed. When others remarked on his pallor and the fact that his hands had begun to shake, he assured them that he felt fine. The pope urged him to take some time off to rest, but Gasparri, fearing that the pope would take advantage of his absence to replace him, insisted there was no
need.
²⁴
He did not know how long he could hold on, but he wanted to be present to bask in the glory of ending the seventy years of hostility between Italy and the Holy See.

The day after Gasparri assembled the diplomats in the Vatican to tell them the news, Mussolini sent a telegram to all of Italy’s ambassadors with the same message. Word of the imminent signing ceremony was published in foreign newspapers, but the Italian press was silent, and few in Italy realized what was about to happen.
²⁵

“These are wonderful days!” Monsignor Francis Spellman—the only American in the secretary of state office—wrote to his mother in Boston from Rome on February 8. “Wonderful days to be alive and still more wonderful to be alive in Rome!” He added, “Everyone here is radiantly happy and well they might be. This Holy Father, Cardinal Gasparri and Monsignor Borgongini are assured of places in history and of course also Mussolini.”
²⁶

The final details of the Vatican-Italian or Lateran Accords were ironed out by Mussolini and Pacelli on Saturday evening, February 9, 1929.
²⁷
The first article specified that the Catholic religion was “the only religion of the State.” The accords had three parts. The first, the treaty proper, established Vatican City as a sovereign territory under papal rule, in which the Italian government had no right to interfere. (Previously the Vatican palaces and gardens, and St. Peter’s Basilica, had been under the pope’s control, but the Italian government had always regarded them as lying on Italian soil, and their legal status had been ambiguous.)
²⁸
The boundaries of Vatican City were largely to coincide with the existing medieval walls; St. Peter’s Square, which was not circumscribed by the walls, was to be considered part of the new city-state but would be open to the public and under Italian police supervision. In all, the territory comprised 109 acres. Offending the dignity of the pope would be regarded as a crime equal to offending the king. Ambassadors to the Holy See were to enjoy the same immunities and privileges as ambassadors to Italy. In addition to its sovereignty over Vatican City, the Holy See was granted special rights to Rome’s basilicas and to the papal summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, in the
nearby Alban Hills. All cardinals in Rome would be regarded as citizens of the new state.
²⁹

The second part of the Lateran Accords, the concordat, governed relations between the Holy See and Italy. The Italian government would not allow anything to take place in Rome that would interfere with the Vatican’s character as the sacred center of the Catholic world. The concordat recognized a series of Catholic feast days as public holidays, and for the first time the Italian state would recognize religious marriages. (Until then, couples who wed only in church were not considered legally married.) The concordat also specified that Catholic religious instruction, which the regime had already made mandatory in elementary schools, be extended to all secondary schools. Although no more than one in five Italian children made it beyond elementary school at the time, those who did would form the elite of the next generation, and their religious education was precious to the Church.
³⁰
In another provision dear to the pope, the Italian state accepted the right of Catholic Action groups to operate freely.

The third and final part of the accords consisted of a financial agreement. Italy would pay 750 million lire, plus one billion lire in Italian bonds (totaling roughly one billion 2013 U.S. dollars), in exchange for the Holy See’s agreement to give up all claims for the loss of its Papal States.
³¹

At nine
A.M.
on Monday, February 11, Dino Grandi, undersecretary of foreign affairs, arrived at Mussolini’s home. The Duce was in an unusually upbeat mood. In the car on the way to the signing, he sang an old Romagna folk song. While the Duce was happy, Grandi was nervous.

“Should I kiss the cardinal’s ring?” he asked.

Cardinal Gasparri would likely expect it, replied Mussolini. Giddy, he told Grandi he knew the best way to decide the question. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a coin, and flipped it. The dictator glanced at the result and announced, “We’ll kiss the ring!”
³²

At the Vatican early that morning, Gasparri and his undersecretary, Monsignor Borgongini, met in the pope’s private library, where they
assured the pontiff that everything was ready for the signing. They handed him the text of the treaty, fresh from the Vatican printer, along with a map that reflected the last-minute changes. After carefully examining the documents, the pope nodded his approval. Gasparri and Borgongini had to get going, but before leaving they knelt and asked for the pope’s blessing. They all felt the enormity of what was about to take place. Tears clouded Cardinal Gasparri’s eyes as he left the room.
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