Benedict’s homeland presented him with both promising opportunities and grave problems in the years following the end of the First World War. First of all, there seemed to be reason for believing that a resolution of the Roman Question was a realistic prospect. The emergence of the Partito Popolare Italiano (henceforth PPI or the Popolari) also suggested that Catholics, with their programmes of economic and social reform based on the Church’s social teaching, would have a powerful influence on Italy’s future development. On the other hand, in the aftermath of the war there appeared in Italy, as in other parts of the devastated and disrupted continent, the threat of revolution and the painful, violent reality of serious political and social disorder, which would take its final form in the emergence of Fascism. Thus, in the last years of his pontificate, Benedict was obliged to dedicate himself to the pursuit of social peace, just as he had struggled to bring peace among the nations between 1914 and 1918.
The First World War transformed the relationship between Italy and the Papacy. In part, this was the result of the steady, quiet diplomacy of Benedict’s friend Carlo Monti who managed to smooth things over, despite the constant, and sometimes bitter, arguments over such matters as Palazzo Venezia, Article 15 of the Treaty of London, the Pope’s unfortunate newspaper interviews and the anti-clerical outbursts of Italian politicians and newspapers. He ensured that a much warmer, more relaxed and co-operative spirit prevailed between the governing bodies of the two powers at the end of the war than had been the case at the beginning. To give but one example of the new relationship: in May 1920, the Italian government offered, without any prompting on the Vatican’s part, a gift of four hundred rifles with which to equip the Vatican Palatine Guard, one of the Pope’s ‘armed forces’.1 Such a gesture would have been inconceivable in the pre-war period, when Giolitti, the author of the famous aphorism that Church and State in Italy were ‘two parallels that should never meet’, was the dominant figure in Italian politics. The cordiality of relations between the Vatican and a succession of Liberal prime ministers, Orlando, Nitti, Bonomi and even Giolitti himself, was one of the novelties of the Italian post-war political scene. In December 1920, King Victor Emanuel even sent his condolences to Benedict on the death of the latter’s brother, Giannino.2
The war accelerated processes of change that were wider and more radical than those on the strictly diplomatic/political level. As Pietro Scoppola has observed, the war radically altered the position of Catholics in Italian society and politics.3 The support of at least some Italian politicians for Intervention, and the participation of the Italian Catholic masses, especially the peasantry, in the war, combined with the patriotic mobilization of both the Catholic clergy and lay organizations in the war effort, removed once and for all the anti-patriotic, anti-Italian stigma which had been attached to Italian Catholics since the Risorgimento. Some diehard anti-clericals, especially revolutionary Interventionists like Benito Mussolini, might continue to inveigh against the Church, but they did so with increasingly less conviction especially since their fellow Interventionists, the Nationalists, had been moving in a Catholic direction since before the war, anxious to enlist Catholic and Church support for their vision of a strong, authoritarian Italian State with imperial ambitions.4 Much, though by no means all, anti-clerical venom still sprang from the revolutionary Left which, however, was discredited in the eyes of many by its militant neutralism, pacifism and ‘defeatism’ during the course of the war. There was also an obstinate residue of masonic anti-clericalism in the old Italian political class, especially among Republicans and Democratic Liberals, which would effectively impede further progress in the process of reconciling the Papacy and Italy during Benedict’s lifetime. Nevertheless, on 9 November Church and State in Italy came together in a unprecedentedly official way when the Cardinal Vicar of Rome celebrated a solemn Te Deum for the Italian victory over Austria in the Church of Aracoeli, in the presence not only of the mayor of Rome and government ministers, but of HRH the Duke of Genova, Lieutenant General of the Kingdom, in the absence of the King who was still at the front. Monti’s account of a reception in Rome for Bishop Endrici of Trento, whose internment by the Austrians had made him a national hero, the very symbol of Catholic, patriotic Italy, also records that it closed with cries of ‘Long live the King!’, ‘Long live Italy!’, ‘Long live the Pope!’5
The new détente between Italy and the Vatican had an international dimension. Monti made systematic attempts to align the policies of the Vatican and Italy in some areas of international relations, most notably Anatolia and the Middle East generally, for the intended benefit, it has to be said, primarily of Italy. Thus he sought to encourage the ‘planting’ of Italian missionaries in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire and to enlist Vatican support against French pretensions in Syria and Lebanon (see Chapter 8). Another key area for Italy after 1918 was the Adriatic, and more specifically the new north-eastern provinces which Italy acquired under the terms of the Versailles Peace Settlement. The new Italian authorities faced problems with the local Slav clergy almost from the moment they arrived: the Bishop of Trieste, for example, refused to sing a Te Deum in his cathedral to celebrate the Italian take-over.6 As Monti’s diary shows, the resistance of the local clergy and even bishops to the authorities’ policy of ‘Italianization’ of the large Slav minorities provoked serious disputes which the Vatican attempted to settle. In January and February of 1919, the row over Italian treatment of the recalcitrant bishop of Spalato (Split) was so serious that it led to a brief rupture in relations between the Vatican and Italy.7 There were further problems over the behaviour of the bishops of Trieste and Veglia in 1920.8 The German-speaking minority in the newly acquired province of Trento also posed a problem, which the Italian authorities sought to resolve by transferring the Germans in the diocese of Trento to that of Bressanone, and by removing Trento itself from its subordination to the archiepiscopal see of Salzburg and making it immediately subject to the Holy See.9 These problems were not satisfactorily resolved during Benedict’s pontificate, nor even after the signing of the Concordat between his successor and Mussolini in 1929. The problem of recalcitrant German and Slav clergy rumbled on long afterwards, and was only effectively dampened down by the complete removal of Slav and German bishops.10
From Benedict’s point of view, a major benefit of improved relations with Italy was an amelioration of the working conditions of the Vatican and its offices. In general terms, Vatican officials were now treated with more respect and consideration than they had been in the past, cardinals, leading ecclesiastics (including Mgr Tedeschini) and lay members of the Papal Court being given diplomatic number plates for their vehicles in December 1918, for example.11 The ‘guarantees’ and ‘immunities’ of the Law of Guarantees were now being transformed into real, ‘extraterritorial’ privileges for the Holy See. The amicability in the relations between the ‘two Romes’ also manifested itself in matters that pertained more directly to the life of the Church within the Kingdom of Italy itself. The fact that Carlo Monti was Director-General of the Fondo per il Culto not only meant that damaging disputes about appointments to benefices, and most especially to bishoprics, could now be avoided, but that the Vatican was automatically consulted on wider ecclesiastical matters within the competence of the State. In particular, the Vatican was consulted on two major issues affecting the life of the Italian Church: the first was consideration of establishing a congrua, that is a payment to parish priests to supplement the revenues from their benefices which had been seriously diminished by wartime inflation.12 The decision to do so, as Jemolo points out, ‘meant that another bastion of Liberal ecclesiastical policy fell unnoticed – namely the principle of “no state subsidies for religion”’.13 The second was the proposal to expropriate the endowments from which these revenues were derived.14 As Monti argued, to have proceeded in the latter case would have been to commit a seriously ungenerous act, given the patriotic behaviour of the clergy during the war.15 In both cases, the outcome was satisfactory. In 1919, the Holy See’s own financial position, precarious at the best of times, was threatened by the Italian government’s decision to tax all earnings from interest and dividends. The unprecedentedly good relations between Gasparri and the first post-war Prime Minister, Nitti, eventually ensured that the Vatican’s investments continued to be exempt, in accordance with the terms of the Law of Guarantees.16 A not dissimilar measure was proposed by Prime Minister Giolitti in 1920, to have all stocks, bonds and shares registered in the name of individuals, which would have been especially burdensome for religious houses whose heads were often ageing: at each death of the person in whose name the titles were registered, death duty would have had to be paid. Once again, Gasparri was able to persuade the government to exempt the Church’s holdings from this provision.17
There was nearly always a quid pro quo, even a strictly financial one, for these ‘favours’: from the beginning of 1919 onwards, the Italian government sought the Vatican’s support for a new war loan.18 As time passed, the demands grew. In January 1920, Schanzer, the Italian Finance Minister, was putting pressure on the Vatican to instruct its envoys in North and South America to mobilize support for the loan from Italian immigrant communities19 and in February Benedict agreed that various Vatican organs, including the administration of the Apostolic Palaces, would subscribe several millions of lire to the new loan.20 Thus began a process, which was consolidated by the financial arrangements attached to the Lateran Pacts of 1929, which would bind the finances of the Vatican to those of the Italian State.
Given the transformation of relations between Italy and the Holy See, and the obvious reservoir of good will on both sides, why was a resolution of the Roman Question not achieved in Benedict’s reign, and especially in the aftermath of the war, which was undoubtedly a very propitious time for it? Even before the end of 1918, there were strong expectations in Italy, and to a lesser extent in international circles, that a comprehensive agreement between the Pope and the Italian State was not far off21 and a growing belief in more restricted, Italian governmental circles that the unofficial relations with the Vatican carried on by Carlo Monti would be transformed into official, diplomatic ones at any moment.22 On the Vatican’s side, there was certainly a very strong desire to reach a settlement, much thought and discussion had gone into ways of achieving it23 and Carlo Monti himself had a powerful ambition to bring it about.24 The casual evidence would suggest that Benedict’s ideas about a solution of the Roman Question changed during the course of his reign. In 1916, he told Monti that he did not want ownership of the Vatican palaces, etc., let alone territorial sovereignty, nor ‘internationalization’ of the Law of Guarantees, i.e. guarantees by the powers to maintain it.25 This statement may have been solely prompted by the Vatican’s need to disassociate itself from speculation being raised in the German Catholic press about precisely these questions at that moment in time, and also from Erzberger’s earlier schemes (see Chapter 4). On the other hand, Benedict’s opposition to ‘internationalization’ was consistent throughout the war, the reason given being, as he pointed out to Carlo Monti, that such an arrangement would result in the replacement of one ‘master’, Italy, by several, that is other powers.26 By the end of the war, however, there is evidence that both Benedict and Gasparri were beginning to favour some element of territorial sovereignty in any solution of the Roman Question, and that even ‘internationalization’ was beginning to look like a attractive prospect to them.27 This change of tack may have been prompted by the Palazzo Venezia incident which seemed to suggest the dangers to the Holy See of being merely a ‘guest’ of the Italian State on the latter’s property (see p. 99).
For a brief few days in the spring–summer of 1919, the Roman Question came close to being resolved. In fact, Monti had sounded out the prospects for talks with Orlando on Gasparri’s behalf as early as December 1918.28 There is also evidence that Gasparri made his own private soundings with Nitti.29 But real progress came in May when, as a result of an almost chance conversation between Mgr Kelley (later Bishop of Oklahoma City) and the Italian Prime Minister Orlando, in Paris, negotiations were opened for a settlement.30 Kelley managed to persuade Orlando that Italy’s hopes of succeeding to the position of leading Catholic power, following the demise of the Habsburg Empire, depended upon a settlement with the Holy See.31 With Orlando’s approval, Kelley travelled to Rome, where he presented himself to Gasparri. The Cardinal Secretary of State and Benedict responded rapidly and favourably to Orlando by despatching Mgr Cerretti, the Under-Secretary of State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, to Paris with an outline plan for an agreement: the ostensible reason for Cerretti’s visit to the Peace Conference was the question of the future of German missions.32 The essence of Cerretti’s bargaining position consisted of a) territorial sovereignty over the Vatican, and possibly some adjoining areas and b) international guarantees. According to Jemolo: It did not advocate any financial contribution on the part of Italy, nor any modifications of the Italian juridical system … but it spoke in general terms of an eventual Concordat that would restrict the application of ecclesiastical laws.’33 This gradualist approach, first seeking to remedy the defects of the Holy See’s legal position so painfully revealed by the war, before tackling the thorny issue of Italian ecclesiastical laws, was a sensible one in view of the dogged commitment of Liberal politicians like Sonnino to the ‘fetish’ of State jurisdiction over the Church. During the course of the negotiations, Cerretti expressed his optimism at the likely reaction of the Italian people to a settlement. Orlando was more realistic:
If, Orlando told Mgr. Cerretti, the cataclysmic happenings of the past four years are succeeded by an epoch-making event such as the solution of the Roman Question, we may find that the shock delivered to the organism has brought the patient to the verge of what I would almost describe as nervous prostration … Therefore, all things considered, it might be better to await the signature of the peace treaty before opening negotiations.34
Further progress in the talks was prevented by the fall of Orlando’s government in June. In any case, though, as he himself claimed, he could probably have squared the King, who was a notorious anti-clerical, it is doubtful whether Orlando could have carried his cabinet colleagues with him on any agreed package, owing to the opposition of Sonnino, and it is even more unlikely that he could have got such a package through Parliament at this stage. The secret of the talks was very carefully kept: not even Carlo Monti was informed. Cerretti did not give up. In November 1921 he tried to interest Monti in what he described as a ‘San Marino’ solution of the territorial dimension of the Roman Question.35
The 1919 talks reveal just how much good will there was in Italy at this time, and also Benedict’s willingness to try all avenues to reach a settlement. Not surprisingly, therefore, secret discussions continued under both Nitti in 1920 and Bonomi in 1921, though without any successful outcome.36 Italy’s steadily deteriorating parliamentary political situation, set against a background of Socialist, and later Fascist, violence in the north and centre pushed relations with the Vatican, always a contentious issue, to the bottom of the government’s priorities. The re-establishment of relations between the Holy See and France in 1920 must have resurrected hopes of a similar development in regard to Italy, but no such thing materialized. Benedict’s own contribution to the attempts to reach an agreement is to be found in his encyclical Pacem Dei Munus Pulcherrimum (On Peace and Christian Reconciliation) of May 1920. In it, the Pope made a significant relaxation of the intransigent papal boycott of the Italian State. In a section entitled ‘Papal Concession’, Benedict noted that good relations between nations were ‘maintained and fostered by the modern custom of visits and meetings at which the Heads of State and Princes are accustomed to treat of matters of special importance’.37 He therefore decided to relax the ban imposed by his predecessors on the visits of Catholic sovereigns and heads of state to Rome, while taking the opportunity to reiterate his demand, ‘now that peace is made among the nations that “for the Head of the Church, too, an end may be put to that abnormal condition” which in so many ways does such serious harm to tranquillity among peoples’.38 The ground had been prepared beforehand with great care; in particular, Gasparri himself had negotiated the niceties of the protocol of such visits with Nitti, and publication of the encyclical was delayed while the question of the resumption of relations with France was finally resolved.39 According to Monti, ‘the impression created by the document has been enormous’.40
Benedict was not to see ‘peace’ with Italy in his lifetime: he probably never expected it, though he certainly strongly desired and strove for it. And no matter how many concessions he might make in pursuit of that end, he maintained his dignity and defended the sacrosanct rights of the Holy See in the face of the dispute with Italy, until the end. When Count Santucci, a leading member of Rome’s ‘black’ aristocracy, was made a member of the Italian Senate in October 1919, the Vatican was clearly at a loss to know how to deal with the situation.41 Two years later, Mgr Pizzardo, the new Sostituto, forwarded a request from Prince Colonna, who as one of the princely ‘Assistants at the Papal Throne’ occupied the number two lay position in the Papal Court, and was therefore one of the most eminent of all the ‘black’ nobility, that he be granted permission to make a formal visit to the Spanish Ambassador to the Quirinale on the occasion of the wedding of the Ambassador’s daughter. Benedict wrote on the note ‘Negative … only a private and simple visit!!’42
The post-war relationship between Italy and the Vatican was also strongly influenced by the emergence of a ‘Catholic’ party – the PPI – in 1918. The presence of a political party of Catholic inspiration in the Italian parliament inevitably complicated relations between the Vatican and the Italian government, and in part helps to explain the failure of the democratic regime to resolve the Roman Question. The emergence of the PPI was another consequence of the First World War and the role which Italian Catholics played in it. Leading figures from the Catholic movement like Luigi Sturzo and Filippo Meda felt that Italian Catholics had politically come of age, that they were now mature enough to play a direct role on the political stage. As Federico Chabod has stated: The most notable event in Italian history in the twentieth Century […] was the official return of the Catholic masses to Italian political life.’43 It is arguable whether any section of the Italian masses had played a political role before 1913 (when universal adult male suffrage was introduced), but certainly the entry of the PPI on to the Italian political stage was to have enormous consequences for both Church and State in Italy.
Gasparri later claimed that, The PPI emerged as a result of a process of spontaneous generation without any political intervention on the part of the Holy See, neither for nor against.’44 This statement is strictly speaking true, though it is also a trifle disingenuous. It is a well-known fact that no Italian Catholic at this time could make a major political act without the consent of the Vatican. The emergence of a party of Catholics was a revolutionary act which upset all of the established bases of the Vatican’s policy towards the involvement of Catholics in Italian politicial life, the ground rules for this having been set in Pius X’s reign. Though, because of the war, there had been no Italian general elections since 1913, the rules were clear: Catholics could only stand as candidates and vote in elections under the guidance of the bishops and the local branches of Count Gentilone’s Unione Cattolica Elettorale (see Chapter 2). Those Catholics elected as deputies were expressly forbidden to claim that they represented Catholics as a political party.45 The electoral activity of a Catholic-inspired political party was impossible without the complete lifting of the non expedit decree issued by the Sacred Penitentiary in 1864, in other words without the approval of the Vatican.
So Benedict was presented with an interesting dilemma in the late autumn of 1918 when leading Italian Catholics, grouped around Luigi Sturzo, expressed their desire to form a ‘Catholic’ political party and sought the Pope’s permission to do so. On the advice of Cardinal Ferrari of Milan, Sturzo and Santucci went to see Gasparri. According to Molony, Gasparri said that the Vatican would raise no objection so long as the Church and Catholic Action were not involved: ‘Gasparri even accepted the theoretical possibility of some sort of alliance with the Socialists instead of the Liberals.’46 It was a very theoretical possibility given the ideological gulf between the Socialist Party and Italian Catholics. When asked by Sturzo to raise the non expedit, Gasparri replied that only the Pope could do that.47 On the basis of this understanding, the PPI was launched by Sturzo and his friends. In January 1919, the Vatican dissolved the Unione Elettorale as no longer serving any useful purpose and this was taken as a signal by various Catholic organizations, the bulk of the Catholic press, and thousands of the parochial clergy and the Catholic laity to adhere to the party.48
For Benedict, the major assurance of the probity of the new party was the presence at its head of Luigi Sturzo. The fact that Sturzo was a priest does not seem to have worried Benedict at this time, though it was later to be used as a stick by both Liberal politicians and the Fascist leader Mussolini with which to beat the Vatican. In fact, priests rose to become leaders of Catholic parties in a number of countries in Europe in the inter-war years: Mgr Seipel in Austria, Mgr Kaas in Germany and the wretched clerico-Fascist, Mgr Tiso in Slovakia. Benedict had known Sturzo when he was Sostituto, and the story goes that it was he who gave the Sicilian priest permission to accept the post of deputy mayor in his home town, ‘for the public good’ in 1905.49 Such was Benedict’s esteem for Sturzo that in 1914 he appointed him Secretary-General of the Unione Popolare, the main organization of the Italian Catholic movement. Though Sturzo opted for Italian Intervention in 1914, seeing in it an opportunity to finally create a truly united Italian nation, united that is, morally and culturally, and to challenge the existing Liberal political class, he did not criticize Benedict’s Peace Note of 1917.50 According to De Rosa, Benedict had a particular affection for Sturzo, and until the end of his own life in 1959 Sturzo always said Mass on the anniversary of the Pope’s death.51 Benedict and Sturzo had much in common: both suffered exile (in Sturzo’s case, outside of Italy) and both had to bear the pain and bitterness of the failure of their best efforts and sacrifices in great causes.
Benedict was an extremely interested spectator as the PPI took form in early 1919, establishing groups in both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, and drawing up its programme. This was for the Pope the ultimate test of the new party’s probity. Sturzo opted for ‘aconfessionalism’, that is the deliberate disassociation from the Church, opening its membership to all regardless of religion, which in Italy meant that its non-Catholic members were rare birds indeed. But the programme was clearly inspired by Catholic, religious principles. According to a carefully planted ‘Nota’ in the Jesuit organ La Civiltà Cattolica, the programme had the Pope’s nihil obstat,52 indeed there is a possibility that some aspects of the programme were modified to conform with Benedict’s ideas, particularly those relating to the Church. It is clear from the Vatican Archives that Benedict and Gasparri wished to consult widely for opinions on the PPI programme, but they were overtaken by events and there was only time to sound out the opinions of the bishops of the Veneto region of north-eastern Italy. Most of the bishops welcomed the new party, seeing in it a new and more efficacious form of Catholic social action: only Cardinal La Fontaine, Patriarch of Venice, was unhappy, arguing that the PPI would to be an embarrassment to the bishops.53 Gasparri took further advice from the noted French Catholic social thinker, Mgr Pottier, on what attitude the Church should adopt towards democracy.54
When Padre Enrico Rosa, the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica, submitted the draft of his Nota for Benedict’s comments, in his reply the Pope only expressed reservations about two items of the PPI’s programme, the one which called for the identification of paternity and the extension of the franchise to women. As far as the latter was concerned, the Pope took a pragmatic line. Though it seems likely that he did not approve of women’s suffrage in principle, on the grounds that it would take them out of their ‘natural sphere’, he declared that, ‘The totality of social conditions in our times renders it [votes for women] a social necessity in some countries, that is in order to counter the generally subversive votes of the socialists with the supposedly conservative votes of women.’55 It is at this point that a certain divergence of attitude towards the PPI between Benedict and his Secretary of State became apparent. Benedict was prepared to suspend judgement on the party and its policies, as he explained in the letter ‘until it [the PPI] has given a practical demonstration of what it stands for’.56 And no doubt the passsage in the Nota which expressed the hope that ‘interference from government, banks and newspapers closely connected to the government would not upset the equilibrium of the party and its broad moral programme’57 was also inspired by Benedict. Gasparri was never to show such sympathy and understanding of the difficulties of the position in which Sturzo and the party were to find themselves.
But the Pope and his Secretary of State were united in their attitude to one policy of the PPI, the one which related to the Church and the Roman Question. The PPI programme had said very little about this problem, restricting itself to the following rather bland statement in Point VIII: ‘Freedom and independence of the Church in the full development of its spiritual authority. Freeedom and respect for the Christian conscience considered as the foundation and safeguard of the life of the nation, of the liberties of the people and of the continuing development of civilisation in the world.’58 The statement aroused the wrath of such integristes as Fr Agostino Gemelli, founder of the Catholic University of Milan and later a close adviser of Pius XI and Francesco Olgiati, who quickly constituted a ‘right-wing’ faction inside the PPI. It also caused disappointment inside the Vatican.59
Worse was to come. In his speech to the first congress of the PPI in Venice in March 1919, Sturzo took up a clear position on the Roman Question:
If today there exists a territorial question between Church and State, then we must respond by saying that for us the unity of Italy is sacred. Nor are we prepared to accept the internationalization of the law of guarantees which would violate the sovereignty of the State. Once the territorial dimension has been excluded from any Church and State dispute, it is the duty of every Italian to help resolve it.60
It was less than helpful for the Vatican that the PPI leader was publicly committing his party to a policy which constituted a repudiation of the absolutely minimum negotiating position of the Vatican, and precisely at a time when negotiations were going on in Paris between Cerretti and Wilson. Benedict was unhappy with Sturzo’s statement,61 and Gasparri expressed this unhappiness in a very firm letter to the Sicilian priest: The way in which the dispute [between the Holy See and Italy], that is the way of giving the Holy See effective liberty and independence … the party [the PPI], individual Catholics, and even more importantly priests, must leave to the interested parties, that is to the Holy See and the Italian State …’62 Sturzo would not have known of the negotiations in Paris, and probably did not know of the negotiations that were to continue under Nitti, but Benedict and Gasparri must have felt that his public stand at Venice did not augur well for parliamentary ratification of any negotiated solution of the Roman Question.
On 16 November 1919 Italy held its first general elections under both universal male suffrage and proportional representation. Only five days before, the Vatican had announced the lifting of the non expedit: it had certainly taken its time to do so. According to the judgement of the Sacred Apostolic Penitentiary, ‘because the non expedit was a positive law of the Church relating to a very specific situation, it should be abandoned for a greater and universal good, that is to save society from an anti-Christian and anarchic threat …’; furthermore, it declared that it was licit to support and vote for the PPI because it was ‘inspired by Christian principles … and is no threat to Christian doctrine or morality’.63 The Penitentiary further affirmed that it was ‘not necessary for successful candidates to swear an oath of obedience to the Church and … and in the present case for many reasons it would be dangerous’.64 It would indeed have been dangerous, giving the impression that the deputies and senators of the PPI were the servants of the Church, which was exactly the accusation being made against them by their enemies. As one of the leading historians of the PPI has commented: ‘Without Vatican tolerance, the PPI would have had to struggle for electoral support, but with Vatican sanction in the official sense it would have ceased to be what Sturzo wanted it to be – an autonomous political party/65 Nevertheless, the Vatican reserved to the bishops the right to object to the programme of a local candidate and to that person himself.66
Though Gasparri was privately elated at the outcome of the elections, claiming that if women had had the vote the Popolari would have won three hundred rather than the hundred seats they did win in the Chamber of Deputies,67 he was already showing signs of concern about the party’s conduct. In essence, the problem was that the emergence of the PPI on to the parliamentary stage rather complicated the direct interlocutory relationship which the cardinal had established with the leading Liberal politicians, largely through the mediation of Carlo Monti. As a result of the electoral success of the PPI, the Liberals had lost many seats and the Nitti government was consequently facing a crisis. Gasparri, in a conversation with Monti, agreed with him that in the circumstances of the time a crisis would have had ‘grave consequences and for that reason he has given instructions to Don Sturzo in this sense’.68 A few days later the conversation, and the Secretary of State’s assurance, was repeated.69 Precisely what form those ‘instructions’ took, by whom they were conveyed and what effect they had, we do not know. It is difficult to see how he could have given ‘instructions’ to a party with which he claimed the Vatican had no links. If he did give such instructions, he certainly did not do so face to face because he never saw Sturzo again after the meeting in December 1918. Gasparri seems to have tied himself too closely to the old Italian political class, especially to Francesco Nitti. Benedict displayed more prudence and circumspection in his attitudes towards Italian politics, a quality which Monti appreciated. Recording a conversation with the Pope in June of 1920, Monti wrote: ‘Gasparri … though he is an able, if somewhat crude, diplomatist and a distinguished canon lawyer, does not understand internal politics very well.’70
But by the spring of 1920, Benedict had more reason to share Gasparri’s anxieties about the PPI. The Secretary of State believed that ‘the direction taken by certain tendencies in the Party and the admission of untrustworthy elements … give rise to grave concerns’.71 What Gasparri was referring to was the estremista faction led by the Cremonese peasant leader, Guido Miglioli, who had sought to change the PPI’s name to ‘The Party of the Christian Proletariat’ at the 1920 Congress in Venice.72 Miglioli had supporters in the Catholic or ‘white’ peasant leagues in other parts of northern Italy, like Bergamo and Verona. Their militant tactics in the struggle with the landowners over tenancy agreements and sharecroppers’ contracts,73 and their support for co-operation with the Socialists led them to be called the ‘white bolsheviks’ and aroused Benedict’s concern. In a letter to Mgr Marelli, Bishop of Bergamo, in March 1920, Benedict warned against the adoption of the Socialist methods of class struggle by the diocese’s Catholic trade union organization, the Ufficio di Lavoro: ‘Those who are responsible for such an institution … must above all keep in mind and follow scrupulously that doctrine of Christian wisdom built around social science, set out in the memorable encyclical Rerum Novarum and other letters of the Apostolic See’, and he went on to advise the bishop not to hesitate, if he felt it necessary, to remove the organization’s officers.74 As a result of the Pope’s intervention, the bishop expelled the radical Catholic trade unionist, Romano Cocchi, a supporter of Miglioli, from the Ufficio di Lavoro and sacked two priests in charge of it.75
Benedict issued no great encyclicals on Catholic social doctrine during the course of his pontificate, certainly nothing as coherent or complete as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum or Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931). But his letter to the Bishop of Bergamo constitutes a comprehensive restatement of his, and the Church’s, established teaching on the Christian ethics of industrial relations. Underlying his teaching was the belief that ‘distinctions between social classes are of the natural order and in consequence are the will of God’, and the resulting need of the poor to resign themselves to their lot.76 He utterly rejected, therefore, the theory and practice of class war, and with them socialism, which he explicitly described as ‘the enemy’. On the other hand he reiterated the legitimacy of the right of workers to organize themselves in unions and to bring about an improvement in their material situation.77 He had, after all, given his blessing to the creation of a Catholic trade union organization – the Confederation of Italian Labour, which emerged almost simultaneously with the PPI in 1918: by late 1920 it had one million members. While stressing the need for the poor to remember their duties as well as their rights, he asserted that the ‘better off should regulate their interests with the proletariat more by equity than right’, and he reminded the clergy of their obligation to educate their parishoners in the pursuit of these goals.78 He concluded with an appeal for ‘social peace’: ‘The cause of truth and justice cannot be defended by violence or disorder’:79 exactly the same judgement he had made about the war.
The Bergamo episode was emblematic of a much bigger, more serious and developing situation: the pre-war militancy of the working class, which Benedict had witnessed as Archbishop of Bologna, had in the post-war period become general, affecting sections of the Italian Catholic movement as well. Under the influence of the radicalism born out of the experience of trench-warfare, and the example of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Italy in the early 1920s witnessed an upsurge of militancy on the part of unionized workers and peasants, the so-called ‘Red Two Years’, marked by protests against rent and price rises, strikes, occupations of the factories and land, many of which were accompanied by acts of violence.80 The bitter class warfare that developed frightened both Catholics and Liberals, and to some extent divided the Catholic movement, most especially the PPI, and the clergy, for the Catholic peasant leagues, like those in Cremona, Bergamo, etc., could sometimes be as militant and instransigent, if not more so, than their Socialist counterparts, and they were often led by priests. Violent agitations in the countryside of the Veneto region prompted Benedict to address a letter to its bishops formulated in much the same terms as the one to the Bishop of Bergamo.81 It may also have been prompted by a letter which his sister Giulia forwarded to him from a local priest deploring ‘the unfair and immoral’ contracts imposed on the landlords by the white leagues.82 As a result of these events, Catholic landowners and businessmen, and the middle classes generally, drew closer to their Liberal counterparts, and when their leaders, Nitti, Giolitti and Bonomi, appeared unable to stem the tide of militancy, some of them eventually turned to Fascism.83
In August of I92O, when the threat of revolution in Italy had reached its height in the Occupation of the Factories in the major northern Italian cities, Benedict once more took up his pen, this time in the form of a motu proprio ostensibly motivated by the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation by Pius IX of St Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church, but since that was not due until December 1920, it is legitimate to believe that he was inspired by more immediate events. In the motu proprio, he first of all voiced his concerns about the decline of the family, which he attributed to the effects of the war, and reminded his readers of the example which the Holy Family offered to Catholics.84 He then turned once again to the problems of class hatred and class warfare ‘which today is desolating a not so small part of Europe’.85 This last statement was the result of the reports he was getting from Mgr Achille Ratti, his nuncio in Poland, of the horrors of Bolshevik rule and civil war in Russia, which would soon extend to Poland when the Red Army invaded that country in September, of Nuncio Pacelli who witnessed the short-lived Soviet in Bavaria and information about the persecution of the Church under the Soviet in Hungary. Finally, he condemned the Utopian dreams of ‘a universal republic’ and ‘absolute equality’ among men.86 Monti says that Benedict told him he was preparing an encyclical on Communism.87 It never appeared, but this document may certainly be regarded as a good substitute: it is also significant that it was directed to the whole Catholic world, that is the universal Church, and not just to Italy.
The failure of the PPI to adopt what was regarded as a satisfactory strategy in the local elections of May and October 1920 was another factor leading to divisions in the Catholic movement in Italy, and the estrangement of the party from the episcopate in large areas of northern and central Italy, and ultimately from the Vatican itself. Though the tide of Socialist violence and militancy was soon to ebb, and was to be replaced by the threat and reality of violence from the Fascists, that was not apparent in the summer and autumn of 1920, when the Socialists seemed to be carrying all before them. The necessity for a united ‘clerico-moderate’ electoral front against the Socialists seemed, therefore, to be an absolute imperative, but Sturzo and the PPI executive had agreed on a policy of ‘intransigence’, that is an absolute refusal to enter into such alliances. The memory of the way in which Gentilone had allowed the Liberals, especially Giolitti, to shamelessly use Catholics as voting ‘fodder’ in the pre-war period was undoubtedly a powerful influence on Sturzo’s decision; he wanted to ensure that the PPI did not become a bag of votes into which the Liberals could dip at will.88 But that was not much help for local bishops and clergy facing the Socialists – which in some areas meant violence directly against priests and the Church. According to Molony, seven Catholics died as a result of Socialist attacks at Sestri, Mantua and Siena where, in the last-named, a church was attacked.89 In a village near Bologna, a church was invaded at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve and the congregation turned out into the street, and in other parts of Emilia two priests were killed.90 For someone like the integriste Cardinal Boggiani of Genoa, the behaviour of the PPI in these circumstances was all too predictable, and Cardinal La Fontaine of Venice was not surprised either, though he did at least succeed in persuading the local section of the party into an alliance with Liberal-Conservatives in his see city.91 Even someone as sympathetic to Sturzo as Cardinal Ferrari of Milan appealed to him to relax his intransigence for the sake of the peculiar needs of the Lombard capital.92 Monti lamented what he called ‘the indiscipline of the PPI in Bergamo and Bologna’,93 meaning their refusal to enter into ‘clerico-moderate’ alliances.
The outcome of the local elections of 1920 was a great success for the Socialists. But the PPI was also successful, even in areas where some of its more right-wing members broke ranks and entered into personal alliances with local Liberal notables.94 After those elections, it is clear that the PPI and the Vatican were drifting further and further apart, and this reflected a wider split inside the Italian Catholic world. The gulf between the two was emphasized by the appointment of Giuseppe Dalla Torre, national president of Italian Catholic Action, as editor of L’Osservatore Romano. The Vatican organ was severely critical of the PPI strategy during the local elections of both May and October, and under Dalla Torre’s direction space was increasingly devoted to the activities of Catholic Action, at the expense of coverage of the party. In an interview with his friend Buonaiuti in September 1921, Gasparri revealed the full extent of the Vatican’s disillusionment with the PPI. He also made it clear that he could see no hope for progress in relations between the Holy See and Italy in a political situation effectively dominated by that party, and he concluded ominously, by saying that as far as a solution of the Roman Question was concerned, ‘We are still awaiting our man.’95
That man would turn out to be Benito Mussolini, former revolutionary Socialist, and by mid-1921 the Duce (leader) of a new political movement, Fascism, which was going from strength to strength. Founded in March 1919 as a radical, patriotic alternative to the neutralist Italian Socialist Party, the fasci were from the beginning characterized by a strong ex-servicemen’s element and a consequently natural resort to the use of political violence. Until the middle of 1920, Fascism remained a small, minority movement – it won no seats in the November 1919 elections – largely restricted in geographical terms to the cities of northern Italy. Its programme also remained radical – anti-clerical, anti-capitalist and anti-monarchical. Its opportunity came in the wake of the Occupation of the Factories, when Fascism extended its established strike-breaking activities into a wave of reaction against the working-class movement. But the spectacular growth of Fascism in 1920 and 1921 took place, not in the big industrial cities, but in the small towns and countryside of northern and central Italy, in a rural and agrarian setting, rather than an urban, industrial one. Here the class war had not abated; on the contrary, the bitter conflicts over labour contracts, tenancy and share cropping agreements were reaching their peak, as we have seen. And the victories of the Socialists in the local election of 1920 created the impression that if the revolution had failed in the towns with the end of the Occupation of the Factories, it was about to triumph in the countryside.
Systematic violence by the Fascist squads against the various organizations of the working-class movement – Socialist party branches, trade union offices and above all the peasant leagues (Catholic as well as Socialist) – spread across northern and central Italy, with the result that by the summer of 1921 a virtual civil war reigned in many of these areas. Frequently the authorities, military, police and judicial turned a blind eye to Fascist activities,96 and in some cases they helped them, on the grounds that Fascism was a healthy, patriotic reaction against the threat of Bolshevik revolution, a spectre that was, of course, also haunting other parts of Europe at that time. This feeling was undoubtedly shared by many Catholics, clerical and lay, but the Catholic press, and in particular L’Osservatore Romano, consistently deplored the spread of Fascist violence: on the eve of the May 1921 elections, its attitude to the Socialists and Fascists was effectively ‘a plague on both your houses’.97 The attitude of La Civiltà Cattolica towards Fascism was much more severe. At this time, the Jesuit journal was edited by Padre Enrico Rosa, a man whom Benedict appointed, and who was to persist in his anti-Fascism even after Mussolini had established his regime.98 As early as January 1915, as agitation for intervention in the war mounted in Italy, La Civiltà Cattolica had attacked the doctrines of pre-war nationalism which were ultimately to form the central core of Fascist ideology from 1919 onwards, in particular castigating ‘exaggerated nationalism’, the obsession with state power and authority and the belief that war was the natural condition of mankind.99 This stand clearly reflected the position which Benedict had taken up in his encyclical Ad Beatissimi of the previous September. As the tide of Fascist violence rose in the spring of 1921, ha Civiltà Cattolica repeatedly condemned it.100
Benedict was able to follow the rise and spread of Fascist violence, especially against Catholic organizations, and even churches, in the reports from clergy and bishops which poured into the Vatican from the end of 1920 onwards. Bishop Rossi of Udine, for example, reported that following the victory of both Socialists and Popolari candidates in the May 1921 general elections in his area, Fascists from as far away as Trieste, Monfalcone and Ravenna took their revenge by instigating a reign of terror in the city and burning down the diocesan printing press.101 According to Bishop Longhin of Treviso, in his own diocese, and in the provinces of Venice, Vicenza and Bassano, the Fascist squads, ‘armed with clubs and hand grenades’, carried a campaign of violence against both Catholic and Socialist organizations.102 The Bishop of Padua, Pellizzi, said that the situation in his diocese was even worse.103
In the May 1921 elections, Mussolini and 35 Fascists managed to get elected to Parliament on the coat-tails of Giolitti, that is in a National electoral ‘bloc’ which the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Italian politics had created in order to defeat the Socialists. The PPI, true to its declared electoral intransigence, refused to join, and the Socialists won almost as many seats as before. The chief winner was Mussolini, who now set his sights on power, which inevitably involved major compromises in order to win the support of the Italian establishment. Sheer opportunism and the need to placate increasing numbers of supporters from the middle and upper classes led Mussolini to play down, and eventually abandon, both anti-capitalism and republicanism. A desire to win Catholic support prompted a similiar change in his attitude to the Church. In the Manifesto of the Fascio of 1919 proof of the anti-clerical sentiments of the majority of the first Fascists was given by a clause which demanded the confiscation by the State of all the endowment funds of the Italian Church,104 and in November 1919, in an editorial in his own daily newspaper, Mussolini declared: ‘there is only one possible revision of the Law of Guarantees and that is its abolition followed by a firm invitation to His Holiness to quit Rome’.105
But by the autumn of 1920, Mussolini had seen the light and without abandoning any of his instinctive and lifelong anti-clericalism and atheism, the Fascist leader recognized the crucial importance of the Church in Italian politics, as he revealed in a letter to Gabriele D’Annunzio: ‘I believe that Catholicism can be used as one of the greatest forces for the expansion of Italy in the world.’106 And with the same opportunism which had motivated his other swings to the Right, Mussolini made a direct overture to the Church in his maiden speech to Parliament in June 1921, when he brazenly declared that ‘Fascism neither preaches not practices anti-clericalism’, and he followed this up with an offer of material aid to the Church in Italy if it would abandon its ‘temporalistic dreams’.107 This Damascene conversion seems to have cut little ice in the Vatican; neither of its major press organs, La Civiltà Cattolica nor L’Osservatore Romano, deigned to comment on the speech.
By the time that Benedict lay on his deathbed, in January 1922, Italy had become virtually ungovernable. Fascist violence continued to spread in the provinces, and in Rome government was paralysed by a parliamentary crisis, indeed the regime itself, the Liberal State, had effectively entered into crisis, a crisis that would not be finally resolved until after Mussolini took power following the March on Rome ten months later. Even in his last agonies, Benedict could not escape the problems of Italian politics: Giolitti appealed to the Vatican to persuade Sturzo to lift the veto on PPI participation in any government which he led.108 His attempt failed; the Popolari would only accept the premiership of Facta, Giolitti’s colourless lieutenant, and so Italy drifted further into chaos with yet another weak, coalition government.
Would Italian history have been different if Benedict had not died in January 1922? Would he have refused to accept the reality of Fascist power after the March on Rome, would he have refused to push the PPI aside and would he have refused to make a ‘marriage of convenience’ with Fascism as his successor was to do? The answer is almost certainly ‘no’ to all these questions. Though he was less eager to come to terms with Fascism than Achille Ratti, the future Pius XI – and it is also certainly true that L’Osservatore Romano’s attitude to Fascism radically changed after Ratti’s election in February 1922 – it is doubtful if Benedict could have resisted the drift of events in Italy from 1922 onwards. And though he would have found the prospect of doing a deal with the Fascists rather more distasteful than his successor found it, he would not have shrunk from grasping the opportunity to settle the dispute had he been offered it. His concern for the future of the Church in Italy, and above all his desire to establish true independence and liberty for the Holy See would have compelled him to make the sacrifice. The lines of Vatican policy towards the PPI and Italian politics generally had already been established by the end of his pontificate. The Vatican was disillusioned with the experiment in a mass ‘Catholic’ political party for which, it has to be said, it had never had a great deal of enthusiasm. The distancing of the Church from the party, which was undoubtedly to become more pronounced under Pius XI, who was rather less tolerant of independent-minded Catholic lay, and even worse, clerical politicians, than Benedict, was, nevertheless, an established part of Vatican policy by the end of the latter’s reign. Equally, the increasing ecclesiastical emphasis on the importance of the work of Catholic Action, a Catholic organization strictly under the control of the Holy See and Italian bishops, had become a feature of Vatican policy long before January 1922. Indeed, one of Benedict’s last public utterances included a lamentation of the fact that, as he saw it, the Catholic press in Italy did not give sufficient attention and coverage to Catholic Action.109
It seems likely, therefore, that had he lived, it would have been Benedict, and not Achille Ratti, who would have played, on behalf of the Catholic Church, a key part in the tragic destruction of nascent Italian democracy in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it is regrettable that he was used, posthumously, to damn the PPI and facilitate a rapprochement between the Vatican and Fascism when it came to power in 1922. On the eve of Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister of Italy, L’Osservatore Romano published a letter from a parliamentary deputy who claimed to be a friend of Benedict, Stanislao Monti-Guarnieri, in which he reported the Pope as saying: ‘The Pope has nothing to do with the Partito Popolare. I have not recognized it as a party and I do not wish to recognize it now so that I may disown it later.’110 The editor of the paper, Giuseppe Dalla Torre, and the Cardinal Secretary of State, Gasparri, were clearly behind this letter, and it is all the more unfortunate that they should have traduced Benedict’s memory in this way, for Monti-Guarnieri was regarded by Carlo Monti, who was truly Benedict’s friend, as an extremely unreliable busybody.111
1. Diario, II, p. 540, 2 May 1920.
2. Ibid., p. 567, 26 December 1920.
3. Scoppola, pp. xlii–xliv.
4. Webster, p. 37.
5. Diario, II, p. 413, 18 December 1918.
6. Ibid., II, p. 398, 19 November 1918.
7. Ibid., II, pp. 27–31.1 and 3–8 February 1919, pp. 430–4.
8. Ibid., II, pp. 484–5, 2 August 1919 and p. 526, 9 January 1920.
9. Ibid., II, pp. 517–8, 21 December 1919.
10. Pollard (1985), pp. 91–103.
11. Diario, I, pp. 447–8, 8 August 1916 and II, 21 December 1918.
12. Jemolo, p. 166.
13. Ibid.
14. Diario, II, pp. 410–11, 19 December 1918.
15. Ibid., p. 411.
16. Margiotta Broglio, p. 385, Gasparri to Nitti, 4 April 1919.
17. Diario, II, p. 555, 19 June 1920.
18. Ibid., II, pp. 511–2, 10 December 1919.
19. Ibid., II, p. 526, 9 January 1920.
20. Ibid., II, p. 532, 1 February 1920.
21. Ibid., II, p. 403, 7 December 1918, p. 408, 14 December 1918 and p. 410, 19 December 1918.
22. Ibid., II, p. 422, 16 January 1919 and pp. 410–11.
23. See the voluminous files in Stati Ecclesiastici, 1350, Italia 1915–1924, on the ‘Questione Romana’, AAES.
24. Diario, II, pp. 403–5, 7 December 1918.
25. Ibid., I, pp. 415–6, 7 August 1916.
26. Ibid., I, p. 331, 20 January 1916.
27. Ibid., II, pp. 403–5, 7 December 1918, conversation between Monti and Gasparri.
28. Ibid., II, pp. 410–11, 19 December 1918.
29. Gasparri, p. 49.
30. Binchy, pp. 235–7.
31. Ibid., p. 235.
32. Ibid., p. 236.
33. Jemolo, p. 166.
34. Ibid., p. 167.
35. Diario, II, p. 568, 27 December 1921.
36. Jemolo, p. 167.
37. Carlen (ed.), IV, p. 174.
38. Ibid.
39. Gasparri, p. 187.
40. Diario, II, p. 552, 31 May 1920.
41. Ibid., II, p. 507, 18 November 1919.
42. AAES, Stati Ecclesiastici, 1914–1918, 1447–1448, p. 596, Pizzardo to the Pope, 28 November 1921.
43. Chabod, p. 43.
44. Gasparri, pp. 233–4, 267.
45. Pollard (1996), p. 76.
46. Molony, p. 16.
47. Ibid.
48. Pollard (1990), p. 78.
49. Mellinato, pp. 273–4, where he says that this event took place in 1899: this is impossible, Sturzo was not elected to public office until 1905; De Rosa (1977), p. 186.
50. De Rosa (1977), pp. 182–3.
51. Ibid., p. 394.
52. Mellinato, p. 275.
53. AAES, Italia, 1918–1921, 953–5, 346, ‘P.P.I., Pareri dell’Episcopato Veneto sul programme sociale dei cattolici nell’Ora presente’, letter of 27 January 1919.
54. Ibid., p. 348, ‘Mons. Pottier sulla questione del movimento democratico el il ruolo della Chiesa’.
55. Mellinato, pp. 277–8.
56. Ibid., p. 278.
57. La CC, 70, 1919, vol. 1, p. 276.
58. As quoted in Molony, p. 49.
59. Ibid., p. 51 and pp. 56–7.
60. Corriere della Sera, 2 7 March 1919.
61. Diario, II, p. 460, 6 April 1919.
62. As quoted in Diario, II, p. 462, n. 68.
63. AAES, Italia, pp. 954–5, fasc. 346, letter from Cardinal Giorgi to Gasparri, 13 November 1919, 40–42 (in confirmation of a previous verbal judgement).
64. Ibid., p. 42.
65. Molony, p. 66.
66. AAES, Italia, p. 955, fasc. 348, unsigned, undated memorandum in Gasparri’s handwriting.
67. Diario, II, p. 508, 20 November 1919.
68. Ibid., II, p. 516, 13 December 1919.
69. Ibid., pp. 519–20, 24 December 1919.
70. Ibid., p. 556, 17 June 1920.
71. AAES, Italia, p. 955, fasc. 348, unsigned, undated memorandum in Gasparri’s handwriting.
72. Molony, p. 61.
73. Foot, pp. 420–8.
74. La CC, 71, 1920, vol. 2, p. 104.
75. Cento Bull, p. 39.
76. La CC, ibid., p. 105.
77. Ibid., p. 101.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., p. 106.
80. Pollard (1998), p. 23.
81. Scottà, p. 452.
82. ASV, SS, Guerra, 1920, rub. 80, fasc. 1, Venice, 20 April 1920.
83. Pollard (1990), p. 40.
84. La CC, 21 August 1920, pp. 290–1.
85. Ibid., p. 293.
86. Ibid.
87. Diario, II, p. 491, 2 September 1918.
88. Molony, p. 84.
89. Ibid., p. 96.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., p. 85.
92. De Rosa (1974), p. 72.
93. Diario, II, p. 565, 7 November 1920.
94. Molony, p. 85.
95. As quoted in Molony, p. 102.
96. Pollard (1998), p. 35.
97. O’Brien, p. 39.
98. Pollard (1985), p. 141.
99. La CC, 16 January 1915, p. 129.
100. Ibid., 72, 2, 1921, p. 7 and 373.
101. Scottà, pp. 452–3.
102. Ibid., p. 460.
103. Ibid., p. 452.
104. Delzell (ed.), p. 13.
105. Il Popolo d’ltalia, 18 November 1919.
106. As quoted in Margiotta Broglio, p. 52.
107. Scoppola (1971), pp. 52–3.
108. See Pollard (1985), ch. 2.
109. Molony, p. 108.
110. L’Osservatore Romano, 29, pp. 30–31, 1922.
111. Diario, II, p. 49, 10 March 1917 and p. 106, 7 June 1917.