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  • Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia)
  • Roy Domenico
Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia). Edited by Daniele Menozzi and Renato Moro. (Brescia, Italy: Editrice Morcelliana. 2004. Pp. 411. €28.00.)

Daniele Menozzi, of the Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, and Renato Moro, of the Università degli studi "Roma Tre," edited this worthy volume based on research and conferences at the University of Florence and at the University of Urbino's Romolo Murri Foundation. Given the book's concentration on the Spanish, French, and Italian experience, "totalitarianism" here mainly concerns its right-wing dimensions rather than its communist one. Nor does German [End Page 839] Nazism figure much except in discussions of Mussolini's alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, given the enormous volume of recent work on how the Holy See or the German Catholic Church faced Nazi racism, Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo provides needed context and reminds us that Rome's response to interwar Latin totalitarianism was ambivalent. One question provoked by the book's title might be the choice of the word "totalitarianism," a concept that touches every essay in one way or another. Among the central questions for historians of fascism are ones of definition; "what is fascism," for instance, or "what is totalitarianism?" Such queries apply to this book. How totalitarian was Mussolini's state? Menozzi and Moro acknowledge difficulties with this term that, they note, the Church did not use until about 1938 (p. 374). Other concepts at work include secularization and, more important for the purposes of the book, what the Italians call statolatria or "state worship." The essays in Cattolicesimo e totalitarianismo mix Catholic elements into this stew. Many of the figures dealt with here ponder the idea of a universal state, often in efforts to reconcile the Church and Mussolini's regime, recalling both pagan and the Christian Roman Empire, medieval Christendom, modern Italian nationalism, and the Duce's "resurrected" empire in Africa.

Menozzi and Moro group the collection into three sections. The first, titled "Authority," deals with the Church and the new twentieth-century "false religion" of statolotria. Menozzi begins with a discussion of Pius XI's 1925 encyclical, Quas primas on the "social kingdom of Christ" and its interpretation as either a political call to arms or as a "spiritual document." Quas primas occurs in many of the following studies. The next chapter, by Giovanni Vian, samples Italian bishops for their ideas on power and authority, concepts that they preferred over anarchy and mob rule. For them, Fascism offered solace and the Lateran Accords. Alfonso Botti concludes with a study of the Spanish Church and the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and recalls the question here of whether or not he was, indeed, a totalitarian? Like the split over Quas primas, Botti finds diverse judgments on the regime, from (at times) suspicious Jesuits to more sympathetic Augustinians. The second section of Menozzi and Moro's book, titled "Nation," begins with Maria Paiano's chapter on "Liturgy and Fascist Regime," focusing on the work of Emanuele Caronti, head of a Benedictine community in Parma, author, and editor of two liturgical publications. Carmelo Adagio follows Paiano with a complementary examination of the liturgy and Spain. Maurizio Tagliaferri then adds a study on the work of the nationalist author, Alfredo Oriani, an investigation based on previously unpublished sources. Mussolini's Fascists lionized the work of Oriani (who died in 1909) and embraced him as a herald of their movement. In 1940, however, the Church placed his work on the Index, raising Mussolini's ire and prompting Tagliaferri to ask if the affair might be regarded as a condemnation of the regime. Ilaria Biagioli concludes this section with a discussion of the French activist, Maurice Vaussard, and his campaign against nationalist "heresy" in Europe's post–World War I rubble. The third section, "Unity," implies the attempts to reconcile the Fascist state with the Church. It begins with Simona Urso's examination of endeavors to harmonize Fascism with Dante's vision of a medieval [End Page 840] universal empire, for which the "veltro" or "hound" served...

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