The Pope and Mussolini (12 page)

In December forty club-wielding Fascists broke into a Catholic youth group meeting on church grounds in the northwestern town of Aosta, smashed the doors and windows, tore up the billiard table, and took their cudgels to the crucifix and the sacred images on the walls. When an outraged bystander tried to stop them, they beat him.
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That same week in Padua, Fascist thugs ordered a teenager to remove his Catholic youth group badge. When he bravely refused, one of them put a gun to his head, while another ripped the badge off.
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And on a December evening near Vicenza, a car pulled up outside a local Catholic youth club headquarters. Seven Blackshirts got out, carrying rifles. While their comrades stayed outside, three barged into the room. The men waved their rifles menacingly at the twenty terrified youths gathered there and ordered them to be quiet. They then directed their rifles at the two priests who were conducting the meeting, forcing them to drink bottles of castor oil.
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Throughout 1923 such attacks continued, duly noted and lamented in the Vatican daily newspaper. But as the violence erupted periodically over the next years, the Catholic press adopted a common refrain: the attacks were the work of isolated extremists outside Mussolini’s control.
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Local Catholic Action groups, created by Pius X in 1905 to provide a framework for organizing the Catholic laity, were among the most frequent targets of these attacks.
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No group was dearer to Pius XI, who
earned a reputation as “the Pope of Catholic Action.” Men and women, boys and girls each had their own groups. The university students had a unit of their own, divided into separate chapters by university. Catholic Action activities were to be religious and educational but in fact went far beyond, for the pope thought of its members as ground troops for re-Christianizing Italian society, and this would require much more than simply prayer and lessons. To keep a close eye on the organization, he appointed Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo, the substitute secretary of state and one of Gasparri’s two undersecretaries, to be its chaplain. The Church hierarchy was to be in charge. “You have only to follow the advice and the instructions that come from above,” the pope once explained to a group of the Catholic Action lay leaders.
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The pope was unhappy and indignant about the attacks on local parish priests and Catholic Action clubs. But Mussolini proved adept at using the violence to his benefit, convincing the pope that he was the only man in Italy who could keep the rowdies under control. The
L’Osservatore romano
articles reporting the episodes of bludgeoning and castor-oil-guzzling almost all ended with respectful pleas to Mussolini to see that those responsible be punished. Occasionally, when local sentiments ran particularly high, Mussolini had a few people arrested, but it was rare that the culprits were ever brought to trial, much less convicted.

By early 1923 Mussolini had good reason to think that his strategy was paying off. A deal with the pope was taking shape. While he would not abandon the violence that had proven so effective in intimidating his opponents, he did not want to unduly anger the pope. He would continue to restore privileges that the Church had not enjoyed for many decades. In exchange, he needed the pope to eliminate the remaining Catholic opposition to his rule.

C
HAPTER
FOUR

BORN TO COMMAND

I
N THE SPRING OF 1923, THE POPULAR PARTY FOUND ITSELF IN AN
untenable position. It depended above all on Church support, but the pope had decided to end it. In April, at the pope’s direction, the Vatican daily told its readers that, given Mussolini’s efforts on behalf of the Church, there was no longer any need for a Catholic party. Later in the month
La Civiltà cattolica
took up the pope’s new line, singing the praises of the Fascist government. “The shouts of Mussolini’s squads, ‘down with Bolshevism!’ ”—the journal enthused—“are attracting supporters and sympathy from one end of Italy to the other.… In its thought, sentiment, action, all of fascism consists simply of a protest and revolt against socialism.” It praised Mussolini for his efforts to restore order, hierarchy, and discipline. “Fascism,” the journal proclaimed, “seeks to place spiritual values once again in the place of honor they once occupied, especially as required by the battle against liberalism, to restore the most conspicuous of these, religious upbringing and the nation’s Catholic inspiration.”
¹
Heartened by these signs that the pope thought the Popular Party dispensable, Mussolini issued an ultimatum: unless the party gave him its unqualified support, he would dismiss its two government ministers and cast it out of his coalition.
When party founder Don Luigi Sturzo and his colleagues refused, the ministers were forced out.
²

The pope now found it intolerable that Don Sturzo should continue to serve as Popular Party head. Rome’s Catholic newspaper,
Corriere d’Italia
, carried a plea by a domestic prelate of the pope urging the priest to resign. Readers assumed that the request came from the pope himself.
³

Behind the scenes, Pius was indeed demanding that Sturzo resign, but the priest was slow to comply. Impatient with the foot dragging, the pope sent Tacchi Venturi, his special envoy to Mussolini, to see him.
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Sturzo complained that in forcing him to step down, the pope was undermining the one party “that is truly inspired by Christian principles of civil life and … today serves to limit … the arbitrary rule of the dictatorship.” This plea made no impression on Pius XI.
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Reluctantly, Don Sturzo agreed to obey the papal command. The pope sent Tacchi Venturi to work out the timing of the public announcement with Mussolini and to get him to play down the news in the press. In no case, said the pope, should the government “boast about a victory.”
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Over the next twenty-four hours, the Jesuit worked closely with Mussolini to orchestrate Sturzo’s removal.
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Pius had hoped that mollifying Mussolini in this way would help end the ongoing violence against Popular Party activists and priests, but his action had the opposite effect. Once it became clear that the pope was pulling Church support from the Catholic party, members found themselves increasingly isolated and subject to the depredations of local
squadristi
. In late August a Fascist newspaper proclaimed that the regime’s greatest enemy was no longer socialism but the Popular Party. Fascist squads were soon on the prowl.

Giovanni Minzoni was the young parish priest of a small town outside Ferrara, about thirty miles northeast of Bologna. He was known for his courage as a military chaplain at the front during the war, and his popularity with local youth and devotion to the Popular Party were getting in the way of local Fascist Party recruitment. One night, as he walked down a dark alley on his way to the parish recreation room, the
priest realized he was being followed. Before he could turn around, two men jumped him, smashed his head with clubs, and fled. With blood pouring from his wounds, the priest struggled to his knees, then fell again. Somehow he lifted himself up and staggered toward his church, but he did not quite make it, collapsing, unconscious, nearby. Horrified parishioners found him sprawled there, his skull crushed, but still alive, and carried him in. By midnight he was dead.

As was his custom, Mussolini blamed the attack on unknown “assassins” who would be mercilessly tracked down and brought to justice. But although the assailants were found, they were never punished.
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Ferrara’s archbishop chose not to attend Minzoni’s funeral, sending a Fascist priest in his place. The Vatican newspaper published a brief note on the murder, commenting that the news had saddened Mussolini.
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Pius said nothing about it, accepting Mussolini’s claim that the violence was the work of “idiots” and “undisciplined comrades.”
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In mid-August, in the midst of the latest wave of violence, the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See, Eugène Beyens, met with the pope, who, he discovered, was more concerned about the danger of Communism than with any threat from Fascist violence. “Nothing is more fatal to civilization,” Pius told him, “than communism. In the course of a few days, it destroys the work of several centuries.” Only if France, Belgium, and Germany formed an alliance—despite their recent past as bitter enemies—could the Communist advance be stopped. “Mussolini is no Napoleon, nor even perhaps a Cavour,” the pope remarked, “but he alone understood what was required to free his country from the anarchy that a powerless parliamentary system and three years of war had reduced it to.” He added, “You see how he has gotten the nation to follow him. May he revive Italy! It is such men predestined for greatness who can bring about peace who are lacking today. May God soon give us some such beacons, so that they guide and enlighten humanity!”
¹¹

EVEN IN THESE EARLY YEARS
, when formally he was simply the prime minister of a coalition government, Mussolini sought to build a personal
cult. He began to appear more frequently in his uniform as leader of the Fascist militia, with black shirt and cavalry boots.
¹²
Growing up as he did, he had thought sports were a pastime for the elite, not for people like him. But now he took up skiing, fencing, race car driving, boating, horseback riding, and tennis. His flying lessons had suffered a setback in 1920 when he crashed his plane; he had been lucky to escape with only minor injuries. He was not bad as a fencer, but he never became much of a tennis player, despite having a world champion as his private tutor. Many of the photos of him on the ski slopes showed him gripping poles but lacking not only a shirt but also skis, offering some idea of how confident he felt in that sport.
¹³

As his family ran to fat, Mussolini worried about putting on weight. He ate little meat, drank no alcohol, and weighed himself daily. Alarmed by his sister’s increasing girth, he tried to use his rough charm to get her to diet, apparently to little effect. “I saw the latest photographs,” he wrote her in 1925. “You have gotten terribly fat. You terribly need to lose weight instead. Reduce yourself to the essentials as I have, because fat not only does bad things, it kills.”
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Fretting about his own thinning hair and receding hairline, he began rubbing a variety of lotions onto his scalp, each morning nervously checking to see if they had done any good. Years later this was one battle he gave up, shaving his head in an effort to resemble a Roman emperor.
¹⁵

When Rachele teased him about his habit of splashing great quantities of eau de cologne on his face and body each morning, he replied that a man who was not attractive to women was worthless.
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Rachele and their three children—Edda, Vittorio, and Bruno—had not come to Rome with him, and he was not eager to have them there. He had initially stayed in the Hotel Savoia, then at the Grand Hotel, while Margherita Sarfatti took up residence in the Hotel Continental, not far away. When Mussolini first sneaked out of his hotel to visit Sarfatti, his driver alerted the security squad. Before long, bellboys suspiciously resembling undercover policemen were prowling the Continental’s halls, on the lookout for Mussolini’s furtive visits.
¹⁷

“Dearly beloved, my beloved!” began the letter on hotel stationery
that Sarfatti wrote on New Year’s Day 1923, two months after he became head of the government. “I want to begin the year by writing your name on a piece of paper: Benito, my love, my lover, my beloved. I am, I shout to the rooftops, I glory in being, passionately, entirely, devotedly, hopelessly yours.” Whenever Mussolini could get away, he joined Sarfatti at her summer house in the hills near Lake Como, north of Milan. There they went for long walks and horseback rides, followed at a discreet distance by his bodyguard. More difficult for his police escort were the times when Mussolini, who loved to drive at high speeds, took Margherita and her fourteen-year-old daughter for a ride in his Alfa Romeo.
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Margherita soon found Mussolini an apartment in Rome, where they could have more privacy, and she also found him a housekeeper, Cesira Carocci. A tough, short-haired woman, tall, thin, and lacking in all social graces, she soon came to be referred to as
la ruffiana
, the procuress. Fiercely devoted to Mussolini, she helped arrange not only Margherita’s visits but those of other women as well.