Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy

Between Conflict and Dialogue

Daniela Saresella

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350061446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Communisme, post-communisme et socialisme

Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy explores the critical moments in the relationship between the Catholic world and the Italian left, providing unmatched insight into one of the most significant dynamics in political and religious history in Italy in the last hundred years. The book covers the Catholic Communist movement in Rome (1937-45), the experience of the Resistenza, the governmental collaboration between the Catholic Party (DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) until 1947, and the dialogue between some of the key figures in both spheres in the tensest years of the Cold War. Daniela Saresella even goes on to consider the legacy that these interactions have left in Italy in the 21st century. This pioneering study is the first on the subject in the English language and is of vital significance to historians of modern Italy and the Church alike.

1

Christianity and Socialism in Italy: The First Period

The contest

The break between conservative and democratic Catholicism coincided with the French Revolution. Between 1789 and 1792, the world of the Church was divided into those who wished to bring back the ideals of the Ancien Régime and those who were ready to face up to the issues of ‘modernity’ raised by the revolution and accept the positive elements that it had introduced. Whether Jansenist or anti-Jansenist, despite the different theological choices that marked their point of departure, democratic Catholics shared the need to forge an agreement between religion and democracy.¹ More significantly, these believers, spurred on by the new myths of radical renovation, concentrated on rediscovering the experiences of the first Christian communities: convinced that models and inspiration could be found there, they devoted themselves to re-reading the Bible and the gospels.

In this context, the interest in social issues was not the prerogative of a single line of thought. While it remained true that the French Revolution, and François-Noël Babeuf in particular, directed its attention towards the problems of the poorer classes, it was just as true that certain conservative Catholics did not hesitate to stress that many contradictions stemmed from the affirmation of the capitalist system, which had upset long-established social relations. The confrontation between the Catholic and the socialist worlds initially took place in Germany, Belgium and France.² In France, it was primarily Frédéric Ozanam, founder of the Société de Saint Vincent de Paul, who committed himself to helping the poor. A firm believer in the need for an understanding between Catholicism and democracy, he thought that the church should accept the new political and social developments emerging from the French Revolution. In Germany, too, in the early nineteenth century, certain Christians, such as Franz von Baader and Adam Heinrich Müller, were fierce critics of capitalism, emphasizing the inhuman exploitation suffered by workers in modern factories. At the same time as publication of Marx and Engels’s Communist Party Manifesto, the Catholic bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, in his sermons in Mainz Cathedral, was thundering against the egoistic concept underlying the relations between factory owners and proletarians. A critic of unbridled capitalism, Ketteler did not wish to abolish the market economy but hoped that it might be transformed in the interests of social well-being.³ This awareness that it was necessary to take action in the world also changed the character of the Catholic movement, so much so that during the 1800s the work of religious congregations assumed an important role in the fields of education and social assistance. In particular, many religious men and women moved from a cloistered life of contemplation to more active participation, distinguishing themselves in the field of social commitment.⁴

The utopian socialist movement was, as is well known, suffused with strong religious feeling.⁵ However, this link between Christianity and the Left was hard put to overcome the affirmation of Marx’s concept of materialism and his conviction that it was not only the exploitation induced by the capitalist economic system that had to be eliminated, religion, too, which formed the system’s social basis and was regarded as the ‘opium of the people’, must go the same way. This Marxist philosophy, with its aspects of atheism and materialism, triggered the Church’s reaction, together with its concern that as a doctrine it would erode Christian sentiments in Western culture. Above all, alarm was raised by its subversive view of social equilibrium, which the ecclesiastical institutions – possessors of enormous wealth – could not tolerate.

Engels, on the other hand, who had a religious education, dealt with the question of religion rather differently from Marx. He showed interest in the original Christian Church and emphasized the considerable ground shared by early Christian experience and the modern workers’ movement: in both cases, groups of the poor and oppressed were persecuted by those in power, who were desperate to maintain the status quo. Unlike Marx, who considered religion mainly a tool of the ruling class for controlling the lower social levels, Engels did not express a negative view of Christianity, believing that it might assume a positive function in the evolution of the lower classes – this had happened, for example, in Germany at the beginning of the 1500s during the peasant uprisings. Karl Kautsky took the same line and in 1902 wrote that the socialist movement had many features in common with early Christianity, since its origins, like the latter’s, were proletarian.⁶

The first official condemnation of socialism by the church came in the encyclical Qui plurius of 9 December 1846 and the concept was reinforced by Pius IX in December 1864 in the encyclical Quanta cura and the Sillabus errorum, in which, whilst stigmatizing the century’s ills, emphasis was placed on the ‘deadly error of communism and socialism’. Leo XIII, who had already inspired a doctrinal analysis of socialism, dealt systematically with the problem in the Rerum novarum, which was published in May 1891.⁷ The intention of the first part of the encyclical was to confute the theory of socialism, while in the second part alternative solutions were put forward, dictated by general ideals of solidarity between classes and a corporative model that was little suited to the industrial society of the late nineteenth century.⁸

Italy’s singularity

Italy was constituted as a national state in 1861, incorporating within its territory regions that were part of the Vatican State. The break between the Holy See and the new state took place with the occupation of Rome in 1870. Pius IX, shutting himself away behind the Vatican walls, refused to recognize the Italian state and issued the Non Expedit decree in order to prevent Italian Catholics from participating in political elections. Thus Italy, led by liberal-inspired forces, was created with a certain inherent fragility and, in the Catholic Church, had to deal with a powerful and hostile entity within its own borders. The Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica (founded in 1850) resolutely maintained that in Italy, while the government represented ‘legal power’, the church represented ‘real power’ and this was a fair picture of the true state of things, given the strong roots of Catholicism in the country and the elitist policies of the liberal forces.

Catholic aversion to the Italian state was not only due to the accusation that it was a ‘usurpatory state’, guilty of confiscating lands from the Holy See: Italy was also an expression of those liberal and secular ideas that the church had been inveighing strongly against since the time of the French Revolution. Criticism of economic conditions in Italy, driven by the emergence of new and modern systems of production and the development of the church’s social doctrine, was encompassed in this more general context of cultural conflict.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Italy was still a backward country. Characterized by deep economic differences between north and south, it began the process of industrialization very late (after the protectionist shift of 1887). While in Germany the Sozialdemokratische Partei was founded in 1875, the PSI emerged many years later, in 1892, when the main organizations linked to the Second International had already been founded.

The majority of PSI members were anticlerical, but the party, unlike the German SPD, had roots both in industrial areas (Milan, Turin, Genoa) and in the countryside (especially in the Emilia Romagna region), and the peasantry were profoundly influenced by Catholicism. This gave rise to the creation of ‘evangelical socialism’ in Italy and the appearance, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of the figure of Camillo Prampolini in the Emilia area. Prampolini argued that socialism was the accomplishment of the ideals of the first Christians, and his ideas were echoed by Francesco Paoloni, founder of the magazine Il seme, who advocated a pedagogical project based on evangelical notions for farmers in the Lazio region.⁹

In Italy, due to the slow pace of economic development, contact between the Catholic and socialist worlds began late compared to other European countries. They shared a common interest in their aversion to the policies of the liberal state and their concern for the ‘marginalized’ elements of society and the victims of the economic transformations brought about by the new methods of production.

In 1885, the first attempts by a Catholic to deal with the challenges introduced by socialism were made by Father Carlo Maria Curci, the Jesuit author of Di un socialismo cristiano nella questione operaia (‘On Christian Socialism with regard to the issue of the workers’), who revealed a strong sensitivity to social issues. After arguing that the aim of socialism was to find remedies for a system marked by ‘an economic disorder that is not temporary and accidental’, but alters the very fabric of society, with effects that are ‘pernicious for most of society itself’, he suggested the need to unite the terms ‘Christian’ and ‘socialism’. Moreover, Curci pointed out how, according to the apostle Paul, Christ had intended to encourage the renewal of humankind and that the task of this ‘new creature’ would be to create a ‘new society’.¹⁰ Ideas along the same lines came from the Unione Cattolica per gli Studi Sociali (Catholic Union for Social Studies), founded in Padua by Giuseppe Toniolo. In 1894, the latter drew up the Programma dei cattolici di fronte al socialismo (‘Catholic programme with regard to socialism’) in which he argued the need to adopt a Catholic social doctrine in order to solve the problems of contemporary society.¹¹

From the 1890s onwards, the Protestant minority in Italy, mostly Waldensian, also showed an interest in the fate of the workers’ movement. While still expressing reservations with respect to Marxist materialism, the Protestants considered the criticisms of the capitalist economic system formulated by the Socialists to have some justification.¹² The debate on social issues was tackled mainly in the journal Il Rinnovamento, published in Rome between 1903 and 1907 by the Comitato di Evangelizzazione (Committee for Evangelization). The discussion was subsequently continued in the journals La Luce and L’Avanguardia, the latter being a monthly publication by Italian-speaking Social Christians, founded and edited by Giovanni Enrico Meille and published between 1908 and 1910. La Rivista Cristiana, Bilychnis, Fede e vita and Lumen de lumine also took part in the debate. The Protestant intellectuals were rarely in agreement with socialist arguments, preferring the prospect of Social Christianity, but they still considered dialogue and exchange with the cultural and political proposals of the left to be possible.¹³ Amongst these socialist-leaning evangelists, it is worth remembering Pastor Enrico Meynier, author of two small volumes, one published in 1894, Il socialismo e il cristianesimo di fronte alla questione sociale (‘Socialism and Christianity and the challenge of the social issue’) and the other in 1902, Problemi sociali contemporanei (‘Contemporary social problems’).¹⁴

From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, Catholics in Italy had to deal with the sort of socialism that was rooted in society, and this particular feature created the conditions for possible collaboration. Be that as it may, in practice there was often a shared attempt to improve the living conditions of workers. In Milan, Don Umberto Benigni (who was to become one of the fiercest opponents of Modernism), together with Angelo Mauri and Filippo Meda, founded the journal La Rassegna sociale. They challenged the bases both of the liberal and the Marxist schools of thought and considered the Camere del Lavoro (official workers’ centres), once Christianized, as useful tools for solving the problems of both workers and farm labourers.¹⁵ Some Catholics even decided to cooperate with the socialists: Aristide Tagliabue, representing the Catholic workers’ mutual aid society, was on the organizing committee of the Camera del Lavoro in Monza in 1893; Don Anastasio Rossi (who was to become Bishop of Udine) collaborated with the Camera del Lavoro of Pavia and Don Luigi Cazzamali¹⁶ with the Camera in Lodi. Although the intention of these Catholic figures was to tackle the spread of socialist theories amongst the proletariat, their contact with the problems of the poor led them, in contrast to the corporative theories put forward by the Rerum novarum, to accept the strike as a means of defence by the workers and the idea of class war.¹⁷

The watershed at the end of the nineteenth century

The turning point in relations between Catholics and Socialists took place at the end of the nineteenth century. In May 1898, when the population of Milan organized strongly supported demonstrations to protest against food shortages, the part of the Catholic world which, since the French Revolution, had tended to condemn the nineteenth century’s modern, bourgeois, liberal civilization started to realize that another, far more serious problem was appearing in Italian politics: the rise of socialism.

The Italian government, headed by the Marquis Antonio Starabba Di Rudinì, reacted forcefully to the peoples’ uprisings, a policy largely supported by the Catholics. A gradual reconciliation between the Catholics and the state took place, united by their main concern of social subversion, the extremely serious problems between Italy and the Vatican were forgotten. For example, when Mother Francesca Saverio Cabrini was in Milan during the uprising, although sensitive to the needs of the ‘poorest of the poor’ through her work with her sisters alongside Italian emigrants in the United States in the las...