The Italians (20 page)

The common wisdom in Italy is that Fascism was free of anti-Semitic overtones until 1938, when, under pressure from Hitler, Il Duce
introduced legislation that stripped Jews of their Italian citizenship and barred them from public employment and many of the professions. But this is just not true. The Fascists did plenty of racial theorizing, just like the Nazis. And in her diaries, Mussolini’s mistress, Clara Petacci, paints the Duce as a thoroughgoing anti-Semite.
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What is true is that the Fascists, unlike the Nazis, never countenanced the systematic extermination of the Jews. Disaster came with Germany’s occupation of much of the peninsula after Italy pulled out of the Second World War. Though many Italians risked their lives to protect Jewish friends and neighbors—a higher percentage of the Jewish population was saved than in any other occupied country apart from Denmark—between eight thousand and nine thousand people were deported to the Nazi death camps. Few returned.

Today, the Jewish community numbers only about forty thousand. But its contribution to postwar Italy has been out of all proportion to its size. It has brought Italy a Nobel prize, won by the astonishing Rita Levi-Montalcini, who lived to the age of 103 and was still active in medical research in her late nineties.
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Other distinguished Italian Jews have included the writer and painter Carlo Levi and the author and chemist Primo Levi. The founder of the group that owns
La Repubblica
and
L’Espresso,
Carlo De Benedetti, is a Jew, as are two prominent former daily newspaper editors, Arrigo Levi and Paolo Mieli. Among prominent Italians with one Jewish parent are the late novelist Alberto Moravia, the architect Massimiliano Fuksas and the bestselling anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano. The current head of Fiat and heir to the Agnelli fortune, John Elkann, is also half Jewish.

For centuries, the only way to worship as a Christian in Italy without following the dictates of Rome was as a follower of the Blessed Waldo. The son of a rich family in the French city of Lyon, Pierre Valdo, or Waldo, gave away his possessions and began preaching the idea that the way to godliness was through poverty. He soon acquired a band of followers who, in 1184, were declared heretics after they refused to accept that, in order to preach, they had to secure the permission of the local clergy. Unsurprisingly, their sect developed an anti-ecclesial bias that foreshadowed some of the teachings of Luther and Calvin by more than three centuries. It anticipated by many hundreds of years more the ordination of women: Waldensian preachers could be of either sex.

Though given refuge in Piedmont by a Savoyard, the Waldensians were attacked on more than one occasion by his successors. In 1655, the then Duke of Savoy ordered a massacre that appalled Protestant Europe and moved Milton to write a sonnet, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont,” that alludes to the Waldensians’ role as forerunners of the Reformation:

Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,

Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones

By then, the Waldensians had adjusted some of their ideas and become, in effect, the Italian representatives of Calvinism. Despite subsequent persecution and much discrimination, they clung on in their heartland in the Cottian Alps on the border between modern-day Italy and France until 1848, when they were granted full civil and political rights. In the 1970s the Waldensian Evangelical Church united with the Italian Methodist Church to form the Union of Methodist and Waldensian Churches, which has a combined membership of around thirty-five thousand. Another fifteen thousand Waldensians—the descendants of Italian emigrants—are scattered throughout the Americas. Their biggest U.S. settlement is Valdese, in North Carolina.

For other Italians, the sole way to register disagreement with the teachings of the Catholic Church was Freemasonry. English Masons founded the first known lodge in Florence in the eighteenth century. It seems to have wound up after the publication of the first anti-Masonic papal bull in 1738.

With its code of secrecy, Freemasonry was ideally suited to the hatching of plots and played a crucial role in nurturing those who helped to bring about unification. Garibaldi, Mazzini and Cavour were all Masons. From an early stage, indeed, Freemasonry in Italy was more political, conspiratorial and anticlerical than in most of the English-speaking world. It was only after the Second World War that one of the two main Masonic movements in Italy gained recognition in America (but not in England, Scotland or Ireland, where the Masonic authorities withheld recognition until 1972).

Freemasonry today constitutes an important, if shadowy, force in Italian society. But it remains seriously compromised by the activities of Licio Gelli, a “Brother” who gained control of Propaganda Due (P2), the most prestigious lodge, and fashioned from it a covert organization that was implicated in several scandals in the 1980s, notably the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the still mysterious death of its chairman, Roberto Calvi. The P2’s members included senior figures in the armed forces, the intelligence services, business, politics, the civil service and civil society. One was Silvio Berlusconi.

More recently, Freemasonry in Italy has suffered from internal divisions and claims of southern lodges being infiltrated by organized criminals. In Calabria particularly, senior mobsters of the local mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, are said to have become Masons as a way of furthering their penetration of legitimate business. The heartland of Freemasonry in Italy, however, is Umbria, and especially the city and province of Perugia. When in 1993 the head of that city’s Masons was asked why Freemasonry should have made such inroads there, he replied: “It’s simple: because we are secular and we have been subject to papal domination for four hundred years.” Every year, Perugia commemorates a massacre by the pope’s troops in 1859 after the inhabitants of the city had expelled the papal governor and offered to become part of a unified Italy.

It has often been noted in this context that the regions that once formed part of the Papal States were also the ones that, after the Second World War, constituted the “Red Belt,” where support for the Communist Party was strongest (though, since Tuscany, which was never ruled by the popes, also formed part of the Red Belt, the causal link between the two may not have been as simple as is often made out).

The fact that the pope’s subjects were doubly constrained—by his temporal and spiritual authority—could nevertheless explain why blasphemous swearing has traditionally been widespread in areas that used to form part of the Papal States. And not only there. In Italy, blasphemy goes far beyond the exclamations you hear in English, like “Jesus Christ!” or “Mother of God!” It ranges from phrases such as
Porco Dio
(literally, “Pig God”) to more inventive and obscene formulations involving, for example, the sex organs of the Virgin Mary. In Rome itself, there tends to be rather less blasphemy aired, it seems, perhaps because in the old days you never knew if a member of the clergy might be within earshot. Still, the same sentiments are discernible: it is in the capital more than anywhere that you will hear priests referred to as
bacherozzi
(“bugs” or “cockroaches,” from the way they seem to scuttle along in their black cassocks).

Immediately before unification, about one in every seven Italians was a subject of the pope. But the existence of his realm was just one of several ways in which Catholicism exerted a unique hold on the inhabitants of the peninsula and the adjoining islands. The earthly powers of the papacy enabled it—indeed, obliged it—to become involved in the political and diplomatic affairs of the peninsula in a way that did not happen to the same extent in any other part of Europe. Among the constitutional solutions proposed for a united Italy was an idea floated by an influential Piedmontese priest and author, Vincenzo Gioberti, who suggested it should be a confederation with the pope as head of state. That idea did not prosper, but—thanks, ironically, to the determination of an ardent Mason, Mazzini—Rome became the capital.
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That decision, more than any other perhaps, ensured the Church would have a huge influence on the new Italy.

At first, though, that seemed anything but likely. The seizure of Rome and the ejection of the pope from his home in the Quirinale Palace led to one of the longest sulks in history. Pius IX shut himself away in the Vatican and for almost sixty years he and his successors refused to have anything to do with the country that had stripped them of their earthly dominions. It was not until Mussolini came to power that the papacy relented. But to achieve reconciliation, Italy’s Fascist dictator had to concede extensive privileges. The Lateran Pacts consisted of two documents. One created the Vatican City State and solved what had come to be known as the “Roman Question.” The other, a so-called Concordat, governed relations between state and Church. It made Catholicism the state religion, made religion—or rather, the Catholic religion—a compulsory subject in schools, and turned the clergy into public employees whose salaries and pensions would henceforth be paid by the Italian taxpayer.

The fall of Fascism against the background of Italy’s ultimately disastrous intervention in the Second World War created a vacuum on the right of Italian politics. The Liberals, advocates of free-market capitalism, had played an important role before Mussolini came to power. But their party had long since become that of the upper and upper middle classes: the southern landowners, northern industrialists and some liberal professionals. The Christian Democrats, on the other hand, had an ideology that appealed to a much broader section of society, and especially the lower middle class, with its legions of peasant farmers, small-business people, clerks, skilled workers and civil servants. The Catholics promised moral leadership to a society that for the previous twenty-odd years had been in thrall to a creed that was now thoroughly discredited. They were looked on with favor by the occupying powers. And, not insignificantly, the pope excommunicated anyone who had given a hand to their most dangerous rivals. In 1948, a papal decree cast out of the Church anyone who spread the teachings of Communism.

It would be an understatement to say that the Christian Democrats had found a winning combination. Every prime minister from 1945 until 1981 was from Democrazia Cristiana (DC). And it was not until 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi first came to power—by which time the DC had collapsed—that a government was formed without a member of the party in cabinet.

The influence of the Church went far beyond government. Between them, the Church and the Christian Democrats created a web of associations that ensured backing in many areas of society for their shared beliefs. There was Coldiretti for peasant smallholders and the Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), a trade union confederation that split from the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) in 1950 to offer an alternative for Catholic workers. The Associazioni Cristiane Lavoratori Italiani (ACLI) offered a network of Church-inspired workingmen’s clubs. And the Confederazione Cooperative Italiane (CCI), which had been founded after the First World War, grew to the point that its web of “white” cooperatives was even bigger than that of the left-wing “red” original. The lay association, Azione Cattolica Italiana, also enjoyed a golden age of influence. By 1954, it was running more than four thousand cinemas showing only films approved by the Church.
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The 1950s were the heyday of Catholicism in modern Italy. The economy was booming. And though governments came and went with dizzying rapidity, there was always a Christian Democrat in charge. Already, though, the factors that would loosen the Church’s grip on society were present, if not yet identified as such. One was the movement of millions of Italians from the south to the north. Removed from under the attentive eye of the village priest into alienating new environments, the workers who traveled north often abandoned their observance, if not their faith. Another factor was the same creeping secularization that was beginning to gather momentum in other parts of Western Europe. By the 1960s, recruitment to the priesthood was falling sharply.

In 1974, Italians voted decisively in favor of divorce and even more emphatically in 1981 against a bid to rescind the abortion law that had been introduced three years before. It was against this background that the Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi negotiated a revision of the relationship between Church and state. The new 1984 Concordat made Catholicism self-financing. Under the new system, which is still in force, taxpayers can ask for 0.8 percent of their taxes to go to the Catholic Church or to one of a range of other denominations or religions.
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It is still public money, but at least atheists and Protestants can get their taxes diverted to a cause in which they believe.

The collapse of Christian Democracy in the early 1990s left the Church without a dominant party to represent its interests. But that did not mean it was robbed of its influence in parliament. Rump Christian Democrat parties formed part of Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalitions in 1994–1995 and 2001–2006. More important, many lawmakers in the Italian parliament who belong to other, nonconfessional parties follow the teachings of the Vatican and vote accordingly. Although there are fewer on the left than the right, there have often been enough to form a cross-party majority to block reforms inimical to the Vatican. Indeed, it can be argued that the Church’s direct political impact has been greater in recent years than it was when the Christian Democrats were in power. The DC was unable to prevent the introduction of divorce and abortion, yet like-minded Catholic deputies and senators have succeeded in restricting in vitro fertilization and stem cell research and blocking altogether the granting of legal status to civil partnerships—a reform the Vatican fears could open the way to gay marriage.