Preface xv
Those nearer the centre, including Vatican officials like Monsignor Giovanni
battista Montini (the future Paul Vi, 1963–1978), were horrified by the concordat
and by Mussolini’s insistence that the Vatican withdraw support for the left-wing
catholic Partito Popolare. on the other hand Pius xi also continued to support
strongly Azione Cattolica, a youth movement which sought to instruct catholics
in the faith, and also the boy scouts, as alternatives to Fascist youth movements.
That brought him into direct conflict with Mussolini, who feared such activity
might turn people away from Fascism and in particular from his regime’s excesses.
Hence in his encyclical ‘non abbiamo bisogno’ of 1931 Pius xi denounced the
regime’s attempt to stifle catholic organizations and what he saw as pagan idol-
atry. Mussolini, however, was undaunted and, under pressure from Hitler, in
July 1938 published his Manifesto della razza (Racial Manifesto), a set of new
laws for Fascist italy which included horrific anti-Jewish legislation, stripping
Jews of italian citizenship and with it any positions in government or the profes-
sions. He promised that the new anti-Jewish laws would not be harsher than
those which popes themselves had imposed on Jews for centuries, indeed that
some of the restrictions they had traditionally enforced in the papal states would
be excluded:
as for the Jews, the distinctive caps—of whatever colour—will not be brought back,
nor the ghettoes; much less will their belongings be confiscated. The Jews, in a word,
can be sure that they will not be subjected to treatment worse than that which was
accorded them for centuries and centuries by the popes who hosted them in the
eternal city and in the lands of their temporal domain.indeed increasingly in the late 1930s many italians cared little about what Mussolini
did in this respect and were prepared to espouse anti-semitic attitudes when they
thought he and Hitler would prevail. nevertheless, although eugenio Pacelli (the
future Pius xii)—and even more the pope’s private envoy to Mussolini, the Jesuit
Pietro tacchi-Venturi—played a significant role in preventing him from speaking out
publicly against the new racial laws, Pius xi did send a letter of protest to Mussolini.
so, ironically, the papacy’s rapprochement with the government meant that in the
years before 1938 it indirectly encouraged, though never endorsed, the use of racial
legislation.
Relations between the papacy and Germany were even more convoluted. in 1933
the same Pacelli, cardinal secretary of state from 1930, negotiated a concor dat
between the Vatican and Hitler. in the 1920s and early 1930s both Pius xi and
Pacelli believed that there was a difference between Mussolini’s Fascism, which they
calculated might be used to defend catholicism and bring authority and order to
society, and German ‘racist’ Fascism, or nazism. From the Vatican perspective in the
1930s, Fascism might seem able to save europe from communism, particularly
since article 31 of the concordat protected Azione Cattolica. Pacelli had spent
much of the 1920s as papal nuncio in Munich. Yet although he loved German life
and culture, he recognized nazism as evil and anti-christian. neither he nor Pius
xi subscribed to nazi policies. They disliked nazism as pagan, materialistic, and
inhumane, and they hated its racial doctrines. between 1933 and 1936 Pius xi