Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [36]
While his thugs murdered with impunity, Mussolini decried Bolshevism and advocated land reform. In January 1922, with Sturzo steering his party on a middle course, Benedict, “the pope of missions,” died at age sixty-seven, of pneumonia caused by flu. He was one of history’s greatest popes. The February conclave elected Achille Ratti, a former Vatican archivist whose career Benedict had transformed by dispatching him to Poland as the papal nuncio, then naming him archbishop of Milan. Ratti in Kraków witnessed the Bolshevist fist bent on crushing the church. In Bologna, during a 1921 commemoration of Italy’s victory in the Great War, he allowed Fascists to drape a banner in the cathedral. Behind his bookish background, the eleventh pope to take the name Pius was a stern authoritarian skeptical of a “free church in a free state.” Pius XI wanted Catholic solidarity behind his office, a lordly vision that saw democracy as a sideshow. He was also determined to end the stalemate with Italy.
“A myth is a faith, a passion,” Mussolini declared. “Our myth is the greatness of our nation.”82 In 1922, with a ragtag army of 30,000 Fascisti, Mussolini marched into Rome, a power strut that Italy’s generals could have halted well before its arrival in symbolic triumph, but in a country so politically fragmented, Mussolini’s militant charisma straddled many lines. Substantially poorer than France and Britain, Italy faced severe unrest: 400,000 engineering workers occupied factories in September 1920.83 The society hungered for order, a center, stability to feed prosperity. “Violence is a brutal necessity to which we have been driven,” Mussolini told parliamentarians in 1922. “We are prepared to disarm if you, too, are prepared to disarm.”84
As snakes peel their skin, Mussolini the arriviste prime minister shed his raw anticlericalism. He awarded stipends for parish priests; he advocated restoring religious education in public schools and a crucifix in every class. Mussolini had his three out-of-wedlock children baptized; he married their mother. Where Liberal Italy held to a negotiating posture no prewar pontiff would embrace, the Fascist strongman saw a Catholic-majority country and decided to convert it to his agenda. In the mating ritual of demagogue and pontiff, Mussolini met secretly with Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the secretary of state, in 1923, and sent a message: if His Holiness broke with the Catholic Party, Il Duce would seed government funds in the faltering Banco di Roma, where Vatican investments teetered. Pius XI ordered Father Sturzo to quit the PPI. Sturzo withdrew from politics; later on he moved to America.
When the Fascists murdered the leader of the Reformist Socialist Party, the PPI withdrew from the parliament in protest, throwing Mussolini’s government into a crisis. Just when a movement was gelling around the Catholic Party for an alliance against Fascism, Pius XI denounced any collaboration between Catholics and the left. The pope equated Lenin’s persecutions in Russia with even a democratic form of Socialism in Italy. Despite Catholic parties in Italy and Germany pushing for alliances with the moderate left against the Fascist right, Pius wanted the church as the absolute center of Catholic lives. Politics, coalitions, closing ranks to thwart political gangsters, all eluded the pope’s purview. Imagine Mussolini’s delight: the pope was hammering his Catholic enemies. Pius saw Fascism as corrupt, but considered it the lesser of two evils whose leader signaled a receptivity to restoring the church’s high role in society. Aloof from ground-level politics, Pius failed to see the value of pluralism over a unilateral dealing with Il Duce for Catholic