The Pope and Mussolini (16 page)

On Christmas Eve 1924 the pope appeared in St. Peter’s Square and symbolically removed the seal from the Holy Door, to be left open for the duration of the year. Over the course of the following twelve months, he gave 380 speeches, as more than a million pilgrims streamed in from all over the Catholic world. Often he spoke without notes; other times he jotted down themes; but he rarely wrote out what he was going
to say. His speech remained distinctively slow and deliberate, with pauses as he looked downward and to the left. After considering what to say, he lifted his head upward and slightly to the right and resumed speaking, often by repeating his last word, as if to confirm that it had been the right choice after all.
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Pius XI, 1925

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photograph credit 6.1
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The demanding schedule took its toll. A few weeks into the Holy Year, Rome’s police chief received a confidential report. Although the pope was in reasonably good health, it said, he found papal life stifling. A man who reveled in the outdoors and relished physical activity was now confined to the tiny precincts of the Vatican and burdened with constant meetings, audiences, and ceremonies. Most of all the pope missed the fresh mountain air and even in winter insisted on leaving his bedroom window open. The pope’s aide, Father Venini, thought the pope looked tired. Perhaps he was not getting a good night’s sleep, for
he kept telling Venini to do something about the mice that scurried across his bedroom floor at night.
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The pilgrimage to Rome, Pius believed, was one of the most sacred acts a Catholic could perform.
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Hundreds each day waited on their knees in the grand halls of the Apostolic Palace, hoping to kiss the pope’s ring as he walked by and, if they were especially lucky, receive a commemorative medal from his hands.
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It was hard not to be awed by the spectacle of the white-robed pope surrounded by scarlet-gowned cardinals, assorted chamberlains, and gendarmes with cape and sword, dressed in high stiff ruffs and knee breeches.
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The enormous rooms, with beautifully painted ceilings and walls covered with Renaissance art, combined with the quaintly dressed papal attendants, gave visitors the impression that they had traveled centuries back in time.

In a typical audience, Pius received hundreds of pilgrims, both clergy and lay. The men wore formal dress, although those who lacked such attire got by with a plain dark suit. Women wore black dresses, with sleeves. A black mantilla or black lace scarf covered their heads. The pope entered the hall surrounded by an escort of Noble Guards and chamberlains, along with the master chamberlain, Monsignor Caccia Dominioni. Pius made his way to a raised throne, where he sat facing the crowd. The pilgrims’ leader spoke first, offering words of devotion and praise. The pontiff replied in his slow, deliberate, precise way, typically by referring to the beauty of the country the pilgrims came from and the piety of its Catholic population. He then directed praise at the senior cleric leading the group. As he offered his concluding benediction, the pilgrims got down on their knees.

Something of the emotional impact of the Holy Year comes across in an account recorded by the popular English writer Edward Lucas, a Quaker who was in St. Peter’s for the closing ceremonies on Christmas Eve 1925. There was nothing like Vatican ritual, he wrote, anywhere in the world. Most impressive of all was the papal procession. The pope’s Noble escorts, acting as ushers, scurried about, in their medieval outfits, with dazzling sword-hilts. Lucas felt transported back to the Middle
Ages not only by the costumes but by the faces of the princes, prelates, priests, and monks. These, he observed, seemed not to change.

“Some of the clerics are in purple, some in black, some in cowls; one or two are bearded; some austerely robed in white.… Many are incredibly old; almost none look happy, care-free; many are lined and marked with anxiety. And then the cardinals … and then, carried high above all the rest, by servitors in red, and accompanied by two bearers of lofty feather fans, the Holy Father himself seated in his chair, with a great yellow mitre on his venerable head, and softly waving his hand from right to left in blessing.”
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Pius XI brought the Holy Year to a close by issuing an encyclical,
Quas primas
. Humanity could be saved, he said, only if all embraced the one true religion, Roman Catholicism. Like popes before him, he denounced the French Revolution as the origin of much evil, spreading harmful notions of the “rights of man.”
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He concluded by warning that “rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.” Those who failed to heed these words faced a terrible end, for Christ “will most severely avenge these insults.”
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The pope used the encyclical to announce a new Church holiday, Christ the King, designed to combat what he saw as the great plague of modern times: the spread of secularism. While Catholics greeted the encyclical, and the new holiday it announced, with enthusiasm, the same could not be said of Protestants. In the United States, the National Lutheran Council blasted the encyclical as “sectarian in the worst sense” and “hostile to very large groups of Christians.” It called on Protestants everywhere to boycott the pope’s new holy day.
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GIVEN HIS VIEW
of the dignity of the papal office, Pius XI refused to talk on the telephone or be photographed with guests. He kept a heavy schedule of public audiences but was not always eager to honor requests for private meetings. Once, when his secretary of state told him of an important personage requesting an audience, he expressed his reluctance. “But there is one excuse you cannot offer him,” added the
pope in one of his more lighthearted moments. “You cannot say I am not at home.”
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Rome’s clergy found Pius XI, compared to his recent predecessors Pius X and Benedict XV, cold and curt.
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During one of the pope’s daily walks, an elderly Vatican gardener nearby crumpled to the ground, felled by a heart attack. As other gardeners, along with a guard who had been accompanying the pope, rushed to help him, someone told Pius what had happened. He continued on his way. The incident became fodder for the gossip that swirled around the Vatican.
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Precious insights into the infighting around the pope come from the voluminous secret police informant reports sent from the Vatican. Since coming to power, Mussolini had set up a vast network of informants. Although their observations have to be read with care, given the various axes that the informants had to grind, they provide unmatched insight into what was going on in the Vatican in these years.
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Pius XI’s bursts of anger were becoming more frequent. One monsignor confided to an informant that when he had to see the pope, he trembled, “so great were the mortifications he had to suffer,” forced to remain on his knees. The pope treated Gasparri badly as well, this informant wrote, but fortunately the cardinal “has a thick skin, and pretends that he doesn’t notice anything.”
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The Belgian ambassador captured the view of the pope that was then common among the Vatican’s foreign diplomats. Pius XI was a learned man and certainly less obsessed with questions of dogma and religious discipline than Pius X, who had his infamous spy service. But he was just as stubborn as his namesake and lacked any hint of diplomatic skills: “He marches straight to the end. He is a character committed to the most noble and generous ideals, but not open to those who counsel patience.” Pius XI’s most salient personality trait, noted the ambassador, was his insistence that he be obeyed.
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A recently discovered letter, reported in the Vatican’s own newspaper, offers surprising, not to say flabbergasting, testimony of just how tough Pius XI was. In 1919, while he was in Warsaw as Benedict XV’s envoy, Achille Ratti had written to his assistant at the Vatican Library,
asking that someone bring him papers he had left in his desk, “along with the little revolver and ammunition” that he had left there. Amid the chaos and threats of revolution in Milan, Ratti had acquired a gun and kept it in his desk at the Ambrosiana Library. When he moved to the Vatican Library, he brought the revolver with him. Finding himself in Warsaw, under threat of a Red Army invasion, he did not want to remain unarmed.
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HAVING OFFERED A WELCOME
to an international surgeons’ convention, Mussolini emerged into Rome’s sunshine. Seeing their Duce appear unexpectedly, an excited group of Fascists outside raised their arms in the Fascist salute. Without thinking, Mussolini raised his arm in response. As he tilted his head back, a shot rang out. Violet Gibson, a mentally unstable middle-aged Irish woman, had fired her pistol at his head. Thanks to his salute, rather than piercing his temple, the bullet only grazed his nose, producing copious blood.

Mussolini insisted on going ahead with his scheduled address to a Fascist Party gathering later in the day, April 7, 1926, appearing with a large white bandage stretched over the bridge of his nose. His concluding remarks there—with their oblique reference to the assassination attempt—became legendary: “If I advance, follow me; if I turn back, kill me; if I die, avenge me.”
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The next day he flew to Italy’s African colonies. As he left, he is said to have joked that he was going with his nose already pierced.
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Around the country, the clergy led their flocks in prayers of thanksgiving, assuring the faithful that God was watching out for their leader. Just a few days before the attempted assassination, Pius X’s elderly sister had presented the Duce with her brother’s papal skullcap as a gift. Many believed that the former pope—who would one day be pronounced a saint—had produced yet another miracle.
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Mussolini would need more miracles that year, for as he solidified his dictatorship, disheartened anti-Fascists saw their only hope in his death. In September a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist hurled a
homemade bomb at Mussolini’s car. Again, the Duce seemed to be leading a charmed life—bouncing off the right side door, the bomb exploded, wounding several people but leaving its intended victim unharmed.
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The most dramatic assassination attempt came on October 31, when Mussolini was in Bologna to inaugurate a new sports stadium. As he drove through the city’s crowd-lined streets, a shot was fired. It did not miss its target by much, tearing through the ceremonial sash that the Duce wore across his chest. Several men from the crowd jumped on a sixteen-year-old boy, the presumed shooter, and killed him on the spot. Throughout Italy, outraged Fascists burned down what was left of the opposition press and beat those suspected of anti-Fascist sympathies.
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Relieved that Mussolini had escaped harm, the pope let him know of his “immense joy” in learning that he was “safe and sound thanks to Jesus Christ’s special protection.”
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The climate was now ripe for the Duce to secure his dictatorship. On November 5 a new law provided for internal exile for critics of the regime. Many would be sent from their urban homes to remote island and mountain villages, to be kept under police surveillance. Four days after the new law was announced, the remaining opposition deputies were ejected from parliament. Only members of the Fascist Party would be allowed to continue in office. By the end of 1926, Fascist unions alone were permitted, and strikes were banned. Mayors were no longer elected but appointed by the central government. Press censorship was tightened; a special tribunal was created to root out the remaining opposition, and capital punishment was reinstated.
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It had not been known in Rome since the pope had last ruled the city, more than a half century before.
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C
HAPTER
SEVEN

ASSASSINS, PEDERASTS, AND SPIES