The Virgin and the Bear: Religion, Society and the Cold War in Italy

This article examines the wave of Marian apparitions that spread across Italy in the weeks leading up to the national election of April 1948, held to elect the first parliament of Italy's post-Fascist Republic. By widening the conventional notion of what is 'political,' the article weaves together the broad political narrative of 1948 with social and psychological dimensions, in order to understand how such factors as popular piety conditioned the conduct of the campaign, as well as its outcome. The 1948 apparitions reflected an individual and collective search for meaning, order and protection on the part of ordinary Italians who worried about the implications for the faith and for the country of a Communist win at the ballot box. This was evidence of the extent to which the cult of the Virgin Mary had moved from fighting secularization, to fighting the spread of Soviet Communism. That hundreds of people flocked to the sight of an alleged apparition in an age that knew the radio, air travel and the atom bomb suggests that the traditional division between the 'modern' and 'pre-modern' era—the former rational, secular, scientific, the latter irrational, confessional, superstitious—may not hold.