The Pope and Mussolini (23 page)

Pizzardo became the pope’s main conduit for these American funds. When he helped arrange the gift of a luxurious automobile to the pope, rumor had it that the American car dealer paid him fifty thousand lire for his efforts. Pizzardo’s two sisters lived with him in the Vatican and rode through Rome’s streets in their own Cadillac, another American gift. “The car,” a less-than-gallant informant reported, “carries two ugly unmarried women, their tinted faces smeared with cosmetics, on the hunt for a husband.”
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In the forty-five-year-old Borgongini, who had lived his entire life in Rome, Cesare De Vecchi had an appropriate counterpart, for both were men of limited understanding of the world. The pope presumably appointed him because he liked his orthodoxy and valued obedience over sophistication. To handle more delicate matters, the pope would continue to use his own personal intermediary, Tacchi Venturi, who had survived the previous year’s scandal of his stabbing.
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Foreign ambassadors appreciated Borgongini’s courtesy and eagerness to be helpful, but he was not well suited for the social world of the diplomatic corps. He refused to attend diplomatic dinners, explaining that they would keep him up past his bedtime.
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The rather large, devout, doughty Borgongini and the small, dapper Fascist former artillery commander made a strange pair, although they would develop some affection for each other. “At bottom,” the nuncio said of De Vecchi, “he is a
good man. As long as he’s allowed to go around wearing his plumes and his big medal, he’s fine!”
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The new nuncio’s first meeting with Mussolini came in early August, shortly after the publication of the parliamentary speeches that had so upset the pope. Mussolini greeted him with a smile and politely asked him how he was doing.

“So-so,” he replied, explaining that the pope was upset with the Duce and had hinted that he might have to “do something very serious.”

“What can he do?” asked Mussolini.

“If the situation doesn’t change, we could end up having a rupture, which would be a very serious thing, only a couple of weeks after the beginning of diplomatic relations and at such a brief distance from the ratification.”

Mussolini was not amused: “Good God! In a country where you have just had religious marriages recognized, religious instruction introduced, legal recognition of the religious orders …”

Everything had been going smoothly, Borgongini explained, until the Duce gave his address to the Chamber of Deputies: “Everyone was
astonished. The Holy Father asked who had provoked such a speech. Nobody understood why Your Excellency spoke as you did.” The pope was so upset, said the nuncio, that he had nearly convened the Sacred College of Cardinals to announce that he would not ratify the accords. And then just when the unpleasant memory of the Duce’s parliamentary speeches was beginning to fade, the pope learned that Mussolini was having them published. He was furious.

Mussolini visits the new nuncio, Monsignor Francesco Borgongini-Duca, August 1929

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photograph credit 9.4
)

“Ah, but the pope,” responded Mussolini, “does not know how much difficulty I have found myself in.” Critics were complaining that the bodies of Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi—heroes of Italian unification and champions of separation of church and state—were rolling in their graves. He had had no choice, he told Borgongini, but to show that he was not placing the state at the mercy of the Church.

It was natural, he added, that after the exhilarating first days following the signing of the pact, some disagreements would crop up. “It’s like the first quarrels of newlyweds after returning from their honeymoon.”
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C
HAPTER
TEN

EATING AN ARTICHOKE

I
TALY HAD NO MORE IMPORTANT PATRIOTIC HOLIDAY THAN SEPTEMBER
20, the date when, in 1870, Italian troops conquered Rome. But while patriots celebrated the day, Vatican loyalists held special masses of mourning. In early September 1929 the pope sent his nuncio to see Mussolini. He wanted the holiday ended, to be replaced with one on February 11 commemorating the signing of the Lateran Accords.
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Mussolini was not sympathetic. “In all frankness,” he replied, “I must tell you that Italians cannot renounce the celebration of September 20.” The concordat said nothing about abolishing it. The event it marked had proven good for all, including the Church. It was all part of God’s design.
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Annoyed by Mussolini’s presumption in lecturing him on God’s wishes, Pius XI responded through his nuncio a few days later: if the concordat made no explicit mention of abolishing the holiday, it was only because it was “so obvious.”
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Negotiations continued up to the last minute, but the holiday was observed that year, albeit with little hoopla. Still, the pope had something to show for his efforts. In an effort to placate him, the Duce had given his promise that it would never be celebrated again.

FOR SEVEN YEARS MUSSOLINI
had discouraged Rachele and the children from coming to Rome, but in November 1929 his wife arrived with all five children, including Anna Maria, born two months earlier. They moved into the magnificent Villa Torlonia, an early nineteenth-century palace with extensive grounds that lay just outside the old city walls.
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Mussolini’s family life was complicated by his continuing tie to Margherita Sarfatti, whose home in Rome had become a salon where artists and writers mingled with Fascist grandees. In Margherita’s eyes, Rachele was a barely literate peasant. She wore no lipstick or rouge and frequented no beauty salon. She had only two modest coats, which she alternated: a short sealskin and a silver fox that, one observer noted, was “the highest she has ventured in feminine extravagance.” She insisted on washing the dishes after their meals and refused to attend state functions, no doubt a relief to her husband. In a corner of the estate’s elegant gardens, she had an oven built so she could bake bread, along with a chicken coop and a pen where she kept two pigs.

Although Rachele was domestic, she was far from retiring when it came to her husband and children. “The true dictator in the family,” observed Edda, “was my mother.” When she did something wrong as a child, it was her mother she hid from, fearing the back of her hand. She counted on her father’s arrival to save her. Edda idolized her father, thinking him poetic, indulgent, and affectionate, unlike her mother. But it was Rachele who gave the family its sense of stability. “Even in my earliest memories,” recalled Edda, “I see her as tenacious and unmovable.” Nor was Rachele one to let go of a grudge. For many decades she refused to speak to her sister, who had tried to take advantage of her connection to the dictator. None of Mussolini’s children dared mention their aunt’s name in their mother’s presence.

In his elder daughter’s only half-joking account, the reason Mussolini had gone into politics was to be able to spend as little time as possible around his wife. As a young man he had “preferred the blows
from the policemen’s clubs and the clubs of his adversaries to his wife’s bitter recriminations.” Mussolini kept his own rooms in a separate wing of Villa Torlonia. While he occasionally met a lover there, he generally found it safer to use his office for his trysts.
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IN DECEMBER
1929, amid great pomp, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Helen came to the Vatican to pay the pontiff their respects. Sixty-eight years after the Italian kingdom was founded, a pope would finally greet its monarch. Soldiers lined the streets to keep the crowds back. Swiss Guards wearing ornate medieval body armor and high-crested silver helmets formed two lines for the royal couple to pass through. As the entourage made its way into the heart of Vatican City, the Palatine Guard band struck up the royal march. The king in military uniform, the queen at his side in a white lace dress with white veil and white royal cloak, were escorted up the papal stairway into the Apostolic Palace. They passed through several lavishly decorated reception halls to the small throne room, where Pius XI awaited them, seated under a velvet canopy.

After a twenty-minute conversation and an exchange of presents,
the king and queen went to greet Cardinal Gasparri at his quarters. There group pictures were taken. Pius XI thought it undignified to be photographed with visitors, royal or not; nor would he bow to Italian government pressure to reciprocate by visiting the Quirinal Palace. Rulers came to him. After the photographs, the secretary of state escorted the royal couple to St. Peter’s, where they knelt at the Tomb of the Apostles.
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That the day was a trying one for the anticlerical king was noted by Mussolini’s sister, Edvige, not one of his admirers; throughout his visit to the Vatican, she remarked, he bore “an expression even grimmer and more malicious than usual.”
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King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Helen visit the pope, December 1929

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photograph credit 10.1
)

It was an eventful time for Pius XI, who later that month traveled beyond St. Peter’s Square for the first time since becoming pope almost eight years earlier. Shortly after six
A.M.
on December 20, without any public announcement, a line of cars set out from the Vatican to St. John Lateran, on the other side of Rome. The pope was eager to say a mass at the church where, fifty years earlier, he had been ordained. It was the first time a bishop of Rome had entered his see since Pius IX proclaimed himself a prisoner of the Vatican in 1870.
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Pius XI, observed a French bishop, is “the most mysterious of men. He confides in no one, not even his closest advisors. He is very sensitive and even emotional, but he controls himself by his strong will and yields to no one. It is impossible to predict what he will decide to do.”
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A FEW MONTHS LATER
Mussolini’s favorite child, Edda, got married. He hoped this might bring him some relief. Although he adored her, she seemed to delight in tormenting him. Of all his children, she was by far the most like him: willful, impetuous, temperamental, adventurous, high-strung, and opinionated, ever ready with a cutting remark and a withering look, with a passion for riding horses and swimming. Flaunting convention, she wore slacks, drove fast cars, and smoked. With her sharp, chiseled features and athletic figure, she presented quite a contrast to her chubby younger brothers, who more resembled their mother.
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