Just ten years earlier, Mussolini had called the Vatican a “nest of thieves” and called priests “black germs,” while Church publications openly declared that being Catholic was “incompatible with being a fascist.” And yet, that rainy February 11, 1929, Mussolini was sitting in a Roman palace next to the pope’s right hand, signing a treaty by which Italy recognized that “thieves’ nest” as an independent state and granted it enormous privileges. . In return, the Church and the new regime were beginning to be quite compatible.
The Lateran pacts, which celebrate 95 years today, were an exercise in pragmatism on both sides. The dispute between the Church and the Kingdom of Italy went back much further: since in 1870 the Piedmontese troops crossed the Porta Pia to take Rome and make it the capital of the unified Italy, five popes had declared themselves “prisoners in the Vatican” and were They had refused to acknowledge the loss of their earthly kingdom. Pius XI knew that continuing to confront his country (for 400 years all popes, including him, had been Italian) was absurd.
Mussolini also made his calculations. He had declared himself an atheist on numerous occasions and his black shirts had harassed and attacked priests and young Catholics, but already in power he knew that he needed the conservative and religious masses who shared his anti-communist discourse. Therefore, although his 1919 electoral program promised “the confiscation of the property of the religious orders and the abolition of the privileges of the bishops,” the treaty he signed in the Lateran palace “in the name of the Holy Trinity” gave the Church a state and much more.
The great milestone of the treaty was the creation of the small state of Vatican City and the recognition of the Italian monarchical state by the Holy See. In addition, Mussolini granted the Pope sovereignty over other basilicas and religious buildings in Rome, and compensated the Church to settle the losses caused by the conquest of the Papal States in 1870. But along with these great agreements there was a lot of small print.
Italy would have to build a train station in the Vatican and ensure that there was electricity, water and telephone. He would also prohibit buildings in Rome from being built higher than the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica and ensure that no airplanes flew over the new papal state. Along with these agreements, a concordat also granted generous tax benefits to the Italian Church and gave it a monopoly on religious education in the country. Priests were exempt from compulsory military service and would even have their own prisons if they committed a crime.
Since nothing is free, Italy not only received in return the recognition of the Holy See and the long-awaited end to a dispute that had been ongoing for six decades. According to the pact, from now on the pope had to advance the name of all future bishops to the Government to ensure that Mussolini had no “political objections.” And these new bishops, upon taking office, had to swear “before God and the Holy Gospels” fidelity to the State and the Government, and commit to respecting it and having it respected by their priests.
Pope Pius XI had made history. Before him, his predecessors in the previous fifty years had not even dared to go out on the balcony of St. Peter’s to salute after being elected, for fear that, when they looked at Rome from there, they would be seen as recognizing the Italian occupation. . Now the Holy See once again had a state, albeit a small one, and the pope was once again an earthly authority as well as a divine one. However, the agreement with Mussolini in 1929 had something of a pact with the devil that was going to bother him for the rest of his life.
The pontiff had come to refer to the Duce as an “envoy of Providence” and shared with him not only a fierce anti-communism, but also a considerable distrust of parliamentary democracy. He also agreed with many of the policies promoted by his government against divorce, gambling, pornography, or alcoholism. He even supported his colonial adventures in Africa. However, Pius XI began to separate from Mussolini after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.
The Pope becomes enraged with the Duce’s cult of personality, but above all with the increasingly closer rapprochement between Mussolini and Hitler. In 1937 he published a very harsh encyclical against the Nazis’ treatment of the Catholic religion and against their racist theses. With the promulgation of racial laws in Italy starting in 1938, the Pope protests that they endanger Italian Jews converted to Catholicism, but a greater rupture is proposed.
Pius XI, already ill, calls an American Jesuit with experience in the fight against the segregation of African Americans to the Vatican to help him write an encyclical denouncing racism. Hiding it from his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, who opposes a confrontation with Germany, orders 300 copies of the document to be printed to be distributed among the Italian bishops at a meeting around the 10th anniversary of the Lateran agreements. The Pope was going to make it public on February 11, 1939, but he died on the 10th.
The text of the encyclical denounced racism and warned the Italian bishops of the presence of fascist spies who reported on their conversations. But it never saw the light of day: Pacelli, in charge of the Vatican after the death of Pius XI and who would soon be elected his successor, received a request from Mussolini not to publish it. His tenure as Pius XII was to give rise to countless controversies over whether he should have publicly denounced the Holocaust and done more to prevent it.
We do not know if Pius The Duce, who had defined Rome in his youth as “a parasitic city of landladies, shoe shiners, prostitutes, priests and bureaucrats”, had first conquered it and then made it the center of his fascist dream of resurrecting the Roman Empire. Along the way, he signed a strategic peace with the Church that strengthened his position and whose consequences are, even today, difficult to fully assess.