elections within the party were henceforth ended;
the party was organised from above with Musso-
lini as its supreme head. Within two years the
party was bureaucratised and its violent activities
outside the law curbed.
The Pope and the Catholic Church were
another powerful and independent focus of power
in the state. With remarkable skill, Mussolini, an
avowed atheist, succeeded in reducing the polit-
ical influence of the Church. It had not been as
hostile to fascism as might have been expected,
since it saw in fascism a bulwark against atheistic
communism and socialism. The threat of social-
ism had already brought the Church back into the
politics of the Italian state before the war.
Mussolini built on this reconciliation of state and
Church. The outcome of long negotiations from
1926 to 1929 was the Lateran Accords; by recog-
nising papal sovereignty over the Vatican City, the
state returned to the papacy a token temporal
dominion in Italy; furthermore, Catholicism was
recognised as the sole religion of the state, and
much of the anti-clerical legislation was repealed.
The treaty won for the Church a position in Italy
it had not enjoyed since unification. Judged as
Realpolitik, Vatican diplomacy was successful. But
what of the moral standing of the Church? This
was to be compromised even more when the
Vatican attempted to preserve Catholic interests
in Germany by concluding a concordat with
Hitler in 1933. Temporary advantages led to
long-term damage. The Church was inhibited
from taking a clear moral stand and from con-
demning outright the crimes against humanity
1
ITALY AND THE RISE OF FASCISM 149
Mussolini in heroic pose, the conqueror of Abyssinia. © Bettmann/Corbis
