The Pope and Mussolini

Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, David I. Kertzer traces the intertwined careers of Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church played a central role in making Italian Fascism possible and keeping it in power.

The book opens in early February 1939, in the final days of Pius XI's life. The eighty-one-year-old pope, disillusioned by Mussolini's embrace of Hitler and adoption of anti-Semitic racial laws, drafted a speech for Italy's bishops, summoned to Rome for the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Accords, the 1929 agreement between the Vatican and Italy. He planned to warn them about Fascist spies in the Church and denounce the regime's racist turn. His inner circle, fearful of losing the privileges Mussolini had granted the Church, believed the pope was growing reckless. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the secretary of state, urged him to postpone. Pius refused. He died on February 10, one day before the address. Mussolini greeted the news with relief and contacted Pacelli, who ordered the pope's desk cleared and the printed copies seized. Three weeks later, Pacelli was elected pope as Pius XII.

Kertzer traces the parallel origins of the two men who came to power in 1922. Achille Ratti, born in 1857 near Milan to a devout Catholic family, served as a librarian and scholar before an unexpected 1918 assignment as papal envoy to Poland, where he absorbed the fierce anti-Semitism of the local Catholic elite and developed a lasting horror of Communism. Elected pope in February 1922, he took the name Pius XI. Benito Mussolini, born in 1883 into a revolutionary, anticlerical family, rose from Socialist editor to founder of the Fascist movement. Originally fiercely anticlerical, he pivoted to courting the Church after entering parliament in 1921, recognizing that Vatican support could neutralize the Catholic Popular Party. In late 1922, his March on Rome forced King Victor Emmanuel III to invite the thirty-nine-year-old Fascist leader to form a government.

Despite ongoing Fascist violence against Catholic groups, Pius XI saw potential in Mussolini. Both shared hostility toward parliamentary democracy, fear of Communism, and conviction that Italy was in crisis. Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the Vatican secretary of state, secretly met Mussolini and agreed on a confidential intermediary: the Jesuit priest Pietro Tacchi Venturi. Mussolini showered the Church with privileges, including crucifixes in classrooms, Catholic instruction in schools, and increased payments to clergy. In exchange, the pope undermined the Popular Party, forcing its leader into exile. The partnership survived the 1924 murder of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, when public outrage nearly toppled Mussolini. The pope dispatched Tacchi Venturi with messages of support and used the Vatican-supervised Jesuit journal La Civiltà cattolica to warn Catholics against joining the opposition. By 1926, Mussolini had dissolved all opposition parties and established a full dictatorship.

On February 11, 1929, the Vatican and Italy signed the Lateran Accords, establishing Vatican City as a sovereign state and governing Church-state relations through a concordat, or formal church-state treaty. The pope publicly credited Mussolini as "the man that Providence had us encounter." In late 1929, Pius replaced Gasparri with Eugenio Pacelli, the pope's ambassador to Germany, as secretary of state. When Mussolini ordered Catholic Action, the Church's principal lay organization, shut down in 1931, the pope responded with an encyclical (official papal letter) titled Non abbiamo bisogno, denouncing Fascist encroachments but distinguishing between "good" and "bad" Fascism. After mediation by Tacchi Venturi, the pope accepted terms largely favorable to Mussolini, ushering in years of deep collaboration in which Catholic Action worked alongside Fascist police and priests served as chaplains to Fascist youth organizations.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, La Civiltà cattolica published articles warning of a worldwide Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy, and Tacchi Venturi shared these theories with Mussolini. When Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933, the pope was initially encouraged by his anti-Communist stance. Under papal pressure, the German bishops reversed their opposition to the Nazis, and Pacelli signed a concordat with the Nazi government. The pope soon realized the agreement would not be honored as the Nazis dismantled Catholic institutions and promoted a pagan racial ideology.

In October 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Although the pope privately opposed the war, he did not resist it publicly, and Italy's clergy enthusiastically supported the campaign. Italy conquered Ethiopia by May 1936, partly through the use of poison gas. In late 1936, the pope suffered a serious health crisis. As he lay bedridden, Mussolini deepened his alliance with Hitler, signing a secret agreement that created the Rome-Berlin "axis." Despite his weakness, the pope issued Mit brennender Sorge in March 1937, an encyclical read from German pulpits denouncing Nazi violations of the concordat, though it never mentioned Nazism by name.

In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. When the German leader visited Rome that May, the pope retreated to his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo rather than witness the spectacle. In June, Pius secretly commissioned the American Jesuit John LaFarge to draft an encyclical on racism and anti-Semitism, keeping the project hidden from Pacelli. Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, head of the Jesuit order, called the pope "mad" and worked to delay the project.

On July 14, 1938, Mussolini launched his anti-Semitic campaign with the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, declaring Italians "of Aryan origin." Behind the scenes, Tacchi Venturi reached a secret agreement with Mussolini: The new anti-Jewish laws would be no harsher than those the popes themselves had historically imposed, and in exchange the Catholic press would "abstain from discussing this topic in public." On September 6, speaking to Belgian Catholic radio staff, the pope departed from his prepared text and declared that "anti-Semitism is inadmissible. Spiritually we are all Semites." L'Osservatore romano, the Vatican newspaper, omitted these words from its published account.

Beginning that September, the government issued laws revoking the citizenship of foreign-born Jews, expelling Jewish students and teachers, and barring Jews from military service and large businesses. Neither the Vatican nor Pacelli objected to these measures. The Vatican protested only a proposed marriage law it viewed as violating the concordat. Mussolini refused all modifications, and the racial laws were finalized on November 10.

LaFarge's draft encyclical, Humani generis unitas, reached the pope only in late January 1939, having been deliberately delayed by Ledóchowski. The pope died on February 10, one day before his planned address. Pacelli ordered all copies of the speech destroyed and seized the draft encyclical. Neither text would be seen during Pacelli's lifetime. Elected Pius XII on March 2, Pacelli immediately signaled conciliation, meeting the German ambassador within forty-eight hours and instructing L'Osservatore romano to avoid anything that would "irritate" Italy or Germany.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Pius XII confined himself to generic appeals for peace. After Italy's Grand Council of Fascism, the regime's top governing body, voted to depose Mussolini in July 1943, Tacchi Venturi sought changes to the racial laws only on behalf of Catholic converts from Judaism, explicitly acknowledging that the laws contained provisions "worthy of confirmation." Pius XII approved these limited requests. After Italy signed an armistice, German forces occupied the peninsula. On October 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up over a thousand Jews near Rome's old ghetto and shipped them to Auschwitz; only sixteen survived. Over the course of the war, 7,500 of Italy's Jews were sent to the death camps. Mussolini, installed as a puppet ruler in northern Italy, was captured by partisans in April 1945 and executed alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci. Pius XII died in 1958; his successor, John XXIII, convened the Second Vatican Council, which reversed the Church's direction by ending the demonization of Jews and affirming freedom of religion.

Kertzer concludes that the commonly accepted narrative of Catholic resistance to Fascism bears little relation to what actually happened. The Vatican played a central role in legitimizing the regime, Catholic Action worked alongside Fascist authorities, and the Church provided Mussolini with his most potent arguments for adopting anti-Semitic measures.