L’interesse superiore: Il Vaticano e l’Italia di Mussolini by Lucia Ceci (review)

Access to previously closed archives over the past few years has added immensely to our knowledge and understanding of the pontificate of Pius XI. Among the most rewarding new investigations must be Lucia Ceci’s study of relations between the Holy See and Fascist Italy. A professor of contemporary history at the University of Rome Tor Vergata campus, Ceci presents a balanced and richly documented work.

The start of L’interesse superiore serves as a corrective, reminding us of Benito Mussolini’s fundamental anticlericalism and contempt for Catholicism. Inspired by the pagan works of Giosue Carducci and his relationship with Giacinto Menotti Serrati, Mussolini, the budding socialist, produced page after page of anti-Catholic invective (most famously his pornographic novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress [Forli, 1910]). Despite his World War I journey into rightist politics, Mussolini still displayed no interest in the Church, at least until he began to consider alliances with Don Luigi Sturzo’s Popular Party. Stung by Sturzo’s rebuke, Mussolini wrote in July 1922 that the Popular Party was an entity simultaneously sacred and profane, one that “begins with God and ends with the devil.” But Italy was anxious to resolve the Roman Question, and the ever-crafty Duce responded as prime minister with overtures to the Vatican. Through Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini’s government placed the crucifix in schoolrooms and made religious study obligatory in elementary classes (extended to middle schools in 1930). The pre-Fascist liberal divorce laws ended, and—in a particularly magnanimous act— Mussolini stopped negotiations for the sale of the Chigi collection of manuscripts to the Vatican Library and opted instead to present it as a gift to the pontifical former librarian. This and the destruction of the Popular Party all led to the Lateran Pacts in 1929 and Pius’s celebrated statement that Mussolini had given God back to Italy and Italy back to God. But the era of good feeling was short-lived. Fascism’s latent contempt resurfaced as did Papa Ratti’s suspicions of Fascism, expressed in his 1931 encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno. Ceci points out, however, that, anxious to mollify the dictator, Italy’s episcopate and the Curia second-guessed their pope and even undercut him. She is particularly good on discussions concerning the so-called “Lessona” decree (named for the colonial minister), which condemned interracial marriages after Italy’s 1936 conquest of Ethiopia. Pius’s desire to challenge the measure was muffled by the “patriotic” Italian clergy, which, despite the pontiff, acquiesced to the regime’s policies.

Ceci’s decision not to include a discussion of Pius XII and the Holocaust may perplex some readers. Of course, many other books and articles have addressed that debate, and we may be at a point where the next step will be the release of Papa Pacelli’s archives. Ceci, rather, uses the archives that we do have and devotes her book to the Holy See and Mussolini, not Hitler. That said, she enlightens us with an account of Ratti and the Duce’s own racial issues, primarily the aforementioned repercussions of the Ethiopian war and the 1938 antisemitic measures. The “consensus” of 1936 had evaporated, and despite his physical decline Pius found new strength with which to make existence miserable for the Duce. The last year of Pius’s life became a second low point in Church-state relations—almost as bad, Ceci notes, as the one that followed 1929. Pius XII faced a quite different situation in which Germany more and more determined what happened in Italy. When the Nazi-ordered roundups of the Jews began in fall 1943, the deposed Mussolini was establishing his collaborationist Salò Republic, a regime without diplomatic ties to the Holy See and one that suffered its icy silence. By then, the doomed Italian anti-cleric hardly entered Pacelli’s thinking.