Abstract
The Vatican's attempts to induce the Fascist regime to take action against Protestants have long been familiar to students of Church-State relations under that regime. Madigan's is the first extended study in English based on the recently opened Archivio Segreto Vaticano and the Tacchi-Venturi papers in the Jesuit archives in Rome. It encompasses the actions of papal servants, the spread of Protestant sects and counter-measures at ground level, together with clericalist ideology. Pope Pius XI appears as an agitated figure in the background.
What we may call the thesis of the ‘nefarious descent’, notably developed by the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, argued, with extraordinary intellectual contortions, that the main forces opposed to the Catholic Church – the Enlightenment, liberalism, ‘idolatry of the State’, socialism, anarchism and ‘bolshevism’ – were all fruits of the same evil tree that had its roots in the Protestant Reformation. This thesis was the counterpart to the one which asserted that only deference to the Catholic Church could ensure political and social stability. In the 1930s, with liberalism defeated and Freemasonry suppressed, the ‘invasion’ by modern Protestant sects was seen as a new trick of Satan threatening the hoped-for restoration of a confessional State in Italy.
The groups which caused so much alarm among the Catholic authorities were, firstly, evangelical Protestant ones, descended from the eighteenth-century Great Awakening, which often became united with the native Waldensians, of medieval origin, who rejected the Catholic priesthood and were misleadingly regarded as proto-Protestants. These were joined by chiliastic sects which traditional evangelical Protestants looked at askance: Pentecostalists, Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. The Waldensians apart, these churches were almost all of American or, to a lesser extent, British origin, their missionaries generally being Italians who had converted abroad. The Methodists were particularly well financed and, together with other evangelical groups, enjoyed diplomatic support from the USA and Britain. The generally lower-class Pentecostalists were, as such, more vulnerable, quite apart from the fact that their practices of glossolalia and convulsive ‘spirit-possession’ exposed them to grotesque misrepresentation. All of these groups were militantly anti-Catholic. Basing their criteria of true Christianity on the Bible alone, they regarded the Roman Church as pagan. Their rejection of priesthood and hierarchy gave them certain affinities with secular anti-clericalism. Freemasonry, the bête noire of the Catholic Church, was quite strong in evangelical Protestant movements. Again, their social commitment gave them certain affinities with socialism. All of this, combined with their espousal of the Risorgimento, gave some credence to the thesis of the ‘nefarious descent’.
The ‘Conciliation’, that is, the Lateran Accords of 1929, gave hope to clericalists of a revanche against anti-clericalism and a Catholic restoration. Protestants, on the other hand, rejoiced in the clauses on religious freedom, which seemed to enlarge what they had enjoyed under the Albertine Statute of 1848. The Vatican was deeply suspicious of the replacement of the term ‘tolerated cults’ by that of ‘approved cults’ (culti ammessi).
The central figures of Madigan's story are Monsignor Francesco Borgongini-Duca, the first Papal Nuncio to the Italian State, and the Jesuit Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, Pius XI's personal envoy to Mussolini. Borgongini established close working relations with Arturo Bocchini, chief of police and with the under-secretary of the Interior Ministry, Guido Buffarini-Guidi. Both were anti-Protestant and, more particularly, convinced that Pentecostalism threatened the ‘health’ of the nation. Borgongini was dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the Concordat, as he understood it. In fact his technique was to give highly restrictive and indeed perverse interpretations to particular clauses, for instance to what was meant by ‘proselytism’. Both his and Tacchi-Venturi's argumentative strategy was to claim that what threatened Catholicism also threatened Fascism. The Jesuit and the Pope, however, were frustrated at Mussolini's personal refusal to take the alleged Protestant threat seriously. Not only was Il Duce, like many Fascists, a veteran anti-clerical, he would also have been aware of the adverse diplomatic consequences of the persecution of Protestants.
A suggestive section of Madigan's book is that on Villa San Sebastiano in the Fucino Basin (Abruzzi). An enquiry concluded that, in this community, accusations of the bishop's failure to combat Methodism, and indeed the mercurial fortunes of Methodism themselves, stemmed from the animosity of certain families towards the aforementioned prelate. Were similar factors at play elsewhere?
The Protestant ‘threat’ was inflated and so too were claims about the success of counter-measures. Protestants remained a small but resistant minority. Observers might blame the inadequacy of local clergy, whether through indolence, ignorance or poverty, or, yet again, they might lament the lack of cooperation by the Fascist authorities.
The alliance between Fascism and the Catholic Church was an opportunistic one between rival totalitarianisms, but it was one cemented, as Madigan shows, by certain shared obsessions. Catholic spokesmen had a long history of depicting ideologies condemned by the Catholic Church, including Protestantism, as alien to Italian tradition and values. Now, Fascist ideologues shared with them a hostility to ‘materialistic’ Anglo-Saxon culture and fear of Italo-American missionaries as agents of US imperialism. Madigan states, however, that, contrary to the traditional picture: ‘one truth revealed by the anti-Protestant campaign is how little unified the Fascist government was about eliminating the Protestant threat’. One might suggest, further, that the irregularity of cooperation between the State authorities and the ecclesiastical ones was partly an outcome of the complexities of the regime more broadly as a coalition of ‘authentic’ Fascists, who were radicals of a sort, and conservatives.