Introduction
In recent years there has been a sustained revival of interest in the subject of political religion.Footnote 1 Naturally, this revival has met with a varied reception among academics. Ian Kershaw, for example, has dismissed the category of political religion as ‘a currently voguish revamping of an age-old question’.Footnote 2 For his part, Roger Eatwell has questioned the concept and criticised it for overstating the affective side of Fascism while neglecting its more rational appeals.Footnote 3 Despite these objections, used carefully, the concept of political religion can be illuminating.Footnote 4 Above all, it has to be underlined that political religions are a by-product of modernity that developed only after the constitution of a political sphere independent from traditional religions and after the latter had been turned into a private matter. Nevertheless, this did not mean the disappearance of the sacred from the public sphere, as the classic secularisation thesis would have it. Rather, the twentieth century experienced a diaspora of the sacred, where a resacralisation was the consequence of the process of secularisation itself.Footnote 5 As a heuristic device it is especially helpful for understanding the deeper motives that lay behind the actions, practices and thoughts of the most committed members of the diverse totalitarian communities, especially the most murderous ones, actions that otherwise would remain in the terrain of the pure irrational, brutal and bestial. Nevertheless, the concept has its limits too and is particularly weak in explaining the institutional and organisational dynamics and practices of totalitarian regimes.
However, and despite this proliferation of publications on the topic, the perspective of contemporary Catholics on political religion has hardly been touched upon, except for two articles written by Emilio Gentile and Renato Moro.Footnote 6 This neglect of the theme by scholars of contemporary Catholicism is especially striking, since the views of representatives of traditional religions are obviously of paramount importance and interest to confirm or disallow the existence of political religions between the wars. This article deals with the two intellectual branches of Italian Catholic Action (the official lay association of the Vatican during the 1930s): the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI) or Federation of Catholic University Students, and the Movimento laureati (Association of Catholic Professionals). An astonishing number of the future Christian Democrat elite that would rule the country after the Second World War were formed in these associations. Unsurprisingly, most of the existing literature has tended to focus on the formation of the above-mentioned ruling class, neglecting other topics of equal importance, such as that under discussion here.Footnote 7
This article follows above all the definition of political religion given by Emilio Gentile, that is, a brand of religiosity that sacralises an ideology, a movement or a political regime, through the deification of a secular entity, whether it be the class, the nation state or the race, and turns it into the ultimate explanatory tool of human existence.Footnote 8
The Catholic Church had, at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, viewed modernity as pagan or paganising and the modern and secular state as an expression of exaggerated statism or ‘statolatry’. In 1888, Leo XIII had, in his encyclical Libertas, condemned this phenomenon and characterised its supporters as those who made of the state an absolute and omnipotent entity that discarded God. It was the very principle of the sovereignty of the state that they perceived as giving birth to a new form of paganism.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, the concepts of a new paganism or statolatry were at this time still used in very generic terms and the historian has difficulty in finding in them and their contents the perception of a proper alternative religiosity. It was in the inter-war period and especially the 1930s that there emerged a growing awareness of the presence of new alternative sacral frameworks and not just the return to immemorial times of pagan worship, but also the consciousness of the novelty represented by the totalitarian experiments and their potential threats to Christianity and humankind in general. By 1935, the former ecclesiastical assistant of the FUCI, Giovanni Battista Montini – the future Pope Paul VI – was concerned about present culture, which he perceived as predominantly anti-Christian and ‘pagan and . . . tend[ing] to submerge us’.Footnote 10 Along similar lines, the anti-Fascist Catholic, Alcide de Gasperi, was forced to admit in 1936 that ‘myth . . . is a necessity of our times, an epoch more inclined to accept simple formulae, sentimental and at times irrational. Without a “mystique” . . . one does not win over the masses . . . Fascism, socialism and Nazism, all of them have their own mystique’.Footnote 11
The anti-fascist Catholic and frequent contributor to Azione fucina and Studium (the publications of the FUCI and the Movimento laureati respectively), Igino Giordani, clearly diagnosed the emergence of different and new religiosities, outside the institutional frameworks of the traditional ones. Furthermore, he viewed them as a product of modernity and secularisation and their frequent existence in a syncretic fashion, a feature of political religions that is widely recognised by scholars working currently in the field. He described these emerging spiritualities as ‘a sort of big American warehouse, where anyone can find anything: false churches, elastic credos, diverse philosophical combinations and spiritual solutions for every digestion’, with surrogates for every genuine religious value: ‘theism for spirit, idealism for ideal, modernism for modernity, religiosity for religion’.Footnote 12 Similarly, the influential Giulio Bevilacqua warned of the dangers of these new movements that searched for redemption through the power of the sole faculties of man and the quest for an intra-mundane or inner-worldly transcendence, writing against all those who preached a ‘secular Gospel for man’ and the proliferation of ‘social messianisms’. Interestingly, in the same article, Bevilacqua explicitly used the term ‘political religions’, to characterise the different forces that in a Promethean and Nietzschean fashion proclaimed heaven on earth and the advent of a new superman who was devoted in heart and soul to a newly found sense of earthly collectivity.Footnote 13 Furthermore, he explained the surge of the phenomenon of the sacralisation of politics as a direct consequence of the perceived inter-war spiritual crisis, which had left man fragmented and divided in his most intimate self and looking for a new sense of unity, belonging and destiny. In this way, Europe was experiencing the deconsecration and devastation of the temples of the Catholic faith and the ‘surfacing of new temples and multiplication of new altars devoted to the human Demiurge’.Footnote 14
Both the FUCI and the Movimento laureati saw the twentieth century as an age of extremes and the diverse totalitarian experiments as attempts to overcome nineteenth-century individualism, pragmatism and liberalism. As such, it was an epoch that exacerbated antinomies: individual–society, liberty–authority, spirit–matter, novelty–tradition, reason–will, among others. Furthermore, it was a century that had renounced the balanced use of reason, opting instead, in an age of mass politics, for ‘new mystiques’Footnote 15 capable of mobilising the masses for great history-making enterprises.
But it was perhaps the later renowned Belgian theologian, Yves Congar, who, in an article for the FUCI periodical Azione fucina in 1935, displayed the greatest and most sophisticated attentiveness to the topic of the diaspora of the sacred and its development in inter-war Europe. In his view, behind the wave of contemporary lack of faith lay not just a void, a mere renunciation of the ambit of the religious and the sacred but ‘a spiritual movement of a scope and continuity that was truly impressive. In a word, the movement can be defined as the substitution of a tout of Christian life by a tout of secular life . . . and the constitution of a purely human spirituality’.Footnote 16 Congar spoke of a modern ‘mystique of science’ and a ‘mystique of humanity’, impregnated with a rationalism and a spirit of immanence and a sense of indefinite progress and inner-worldly salvation.Footnote 17 He went on to note the total character of the new religions, their enveloping of all aspects of human existence, their
not representing a particular idea, an idea among many other ones, but a total and radical point of view, that imposes itself like an absolute, that in principle demands a likewise total and radical disposition . . . In fact it is a FAITH and a revelation . . . and a cult.Footnote 18
Naturally, it was in the totalitarian experiments of Left and Right being carried out in contemporary Europe that the intellectuals of Catholic Action found in their most developed forms political religions, with their own faiths, rites, dogmas and rituals, cults and martyrs.
Bolshevism
From the beginning of the 1930s, some writers of both Azione fucina and Studium started increasingly to probe the religious nature of communism, particularly in its Russian variant.Footnote 19 Though, formally, Marxist doctrine professed a radical atheism, in practice, Bolshevik Russia exhibited many religious traits. Even the League of Militant Godless, founded in 1925, with its mockery of Orthodox priests, anti-Christmases and alternative Easters, somewhat unwittingly and unconsciously demonstrated the existence of a messianic spirit and a ritual and cult.Footnote 20 Similar in nature was the so-called ‘God-builders’ movement, which revolved around Aleksandr Bogdanov, Leonid Krassin and Anatoly Lunacharsky. Though admittedly a minor wing within Bolshevism, the God-builders sought to develop socialism more as a religion than a science and they depicted Marx as a prophet, in the quest to establish Bolshevism as a secular religion through a sense of community, rituals and public festivals.Footnote 21 Soviet communism was therefore not perceived as solely representing a titanic and antireligious struggle against Christianity or as a massive movement of apostasy, but as an alternative religiosity that sought to inaugurate a wholesome and total secularisation of the Christian credo, replacing it with its own dogmas, charismatic leaders, sacred texts, rituals, ceremonies and festivals. According to the university student Vittore Branca, in the USSR the Soviet leaders were energetically embarked upon the building of a ‘new civilisation’, through a ‘messianic spirit’, all with the help of diverse ‘mystical-religious tendencies’, with the ultimate goal of establishing a ‘new Gospel’.Footnote 22
What was additionally troubling about Bolshevism was its perceived universal vocation, as expressed in the cases of Spain and Mexico, countries where the Catholic Church experienced a new tide of religious persecution. These ‘militant atheists’, according to the Jesuit Enrico Rosa, were ‘threatening every corner of the civilised world, with the intention of corrupting and driving men to a new barbarism that is even worse than the old pagan one’.Footnote 23 Rosa continued along the same vein, insisting that Communists and socialists ‘unleash upon the nations the bloodiest wars and the most savage revolutions, accompanied by massacres of human life’.Footnote 24 In his mind, Rosa had no doubts: ‘communism was the most terrible and ferocious enemy of religion and civilisation’.Footnote 25
Whereas Rosa's analysis of Bolshevism was charged with strong moralistic undertones that rendered his perspective somewhat ahistorical and unable to grasp the novelty represented by Bolshevik totalitarianism and its ensuing sacralisation of politics, others in the associations proved more able and perceptive in capturing the uniqueness of Soviet communism in this realm. What was most salient to these intellectuals was the strong charge of utopian vision, the presence of millennial expectations in Russian Bolshevism, its sense of radically altering the old order and starting everything anew, and the fervent drive to transform human nature itself.Footnote 26 For Igino Giordani communism was ‘essentially religious’, despite its avowed atheism, and its enormous power of attraction lay precisely in its presenting itself ‘as a religion . . . that aspires to realise an atheist Kingdom of God’ and to ‘organise the state as a satanic Church’.Footnote 27
Precisely because Soviet communism was not merely an economic or social order but also an alternative religion, some in the associations could comprehend ‘the sacrifice of its members and the intransigent exclusivism of its doctrine’, which was due to Bolshevism being ‘the new religion of the proletariat that must enlighten the whole world’.Footnote 28 According to Bevilacqua, what was additionally disconcerting was that this new religion of the ‘terrestrial paradise’ had extended itself and ‘rooted itself in the soul of the masses through a tenacity that is both new and desperate’. In the view of the Lombard priest, the struggle was titanic, between two different and opposing faiths: ‘one cannot overcome completely a faith if not with another faith’.Footnote 29
A further stage in the analysis of Soviet communism as a political religion was provided by the promulgation of Pius XI's encyclical Divini Redemptoris, on 19 March 1937.Footnote 30 Though this document is mostly noted for its characterisation of communism as ‘intrinsically perverse’,Footnote 31 it has some elements that are interesting for the analysis of Bolshevism as a political religion. Naturally, in the eyes of the pontiff, it was a ‘false’ religion as opposed to Catholicism, the only ‘true’ religion. Furthermore, Pius XI denounced in communism what he saw as a ‘false redemption’ and a ‘false mysticism’ and its dynamics as a twisted ‘crusade for the progress of humanity’.Footnote 32 He went on to condemn communism's ‘presumed new Gospel’ and its alleged ‘message of health and redemption’ as well as the ‘Soviet paradise that is earthly’.Footnote 33
The encyclical served to further the debate among the members of the organisations. By the late 1930s it was clear to many of their members that there was now in the USSR a new and antagonistic religious order, which had assumed the ‘redemptive mission for humanity’ and which, like all religions, ‘needed its own martyrs and sacrifices’.Footnote 34 Nevertheless, it was probably G. B. Tragella who most cogently perceived the phenomenon of a new inner-worldly sacral narrative and universe within Soviet Russia. His contribution is particularly interesting since he linked the triad political-religion/totalitarianism/modernity and introduced the novel concept of ‘totalitarian religion’.Footnote 35 As a totalitarian phenomenon, Bolshevism ‘reclaimed the whole man and the entirety of humanity’ and in this fashion, ‘communism becomes a religion . . . with its own Index for heterodox doctrines’, where the general secretary of the Communist party was the ‘the high priest of this new religion’.Footnote 36 For Tragella, communism was a fully-fledged religion, with its dogmas, martyrs, rites and celebrations: ‘This new religion has its own dogma: the proletariat; its prophet and messiah: Lenin, whose bodily remains already are the object of a cult; its sacred texts: the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin . . . its own morality: the interest of the people’.Footnote 37
National Socialism
Unlike Bolshevism, where there were few hesitations or doubts about the totalitarian and religious nature of the Russian experiment, in the case of National Socialism, the writers of the associations exhibited a certain degree of ambiguity and ambivalence, at least during the first half of the 1930s. Some fucini even demonstrated a high degree of admiration for the German nation. An anonymous university student, writing to the ecclesiastical assistant Emilio Guano from Munich at the end of 1936, could not repress his high regard for ‘this German people, who have the sense of organisation in their blood, the sense of unity and thus of force, of cordiality, tradition and power’.Footnote 38
Part of the associations’ ambiguity was due to the signing of the concordat between Hitler's government and the Holy See in July 1933, an arrangement in which, to the surprise of the Vatican authorities, the German state conceded practically all the papal negotiator's demands.Footnote 39 However, persecution and harassment of the Catholic faithful was soon to follow. Indeed, attacks on Catholic associations, clergy and faithful, though they occurred before the concordat, increased after its signature, especially with regard to Catholic youth organisations. Baldur Von Schirach, the Reich Youth Leader, on 17 June 1933 had prohibited dual membership in Catholic youth associations and the Hitler Youth,Footnote 40 though it was not until 1939 that the Catholic Young Men's Association (JMV) was eventually disbanded by the Gestapo, making membership of the Hitler Youth mandatory. A far more sinister turn of events occurred during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in June 1934, when Erich Klausener, General Secretary of Catholic Action, and Adalbert Probst, National Director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association, were assassinated.Footnote 41 Following this, in 1935, Joseph Goebbels launched through the Ministry of Propaganda a major defamation campaign directed against the Catholic clergy.Footnote 42 Naturally, these and other similar events did not go unnoticed in the FUCI and Movimento laureati circles. The Night of the Long Knives, for example, was quickly criticised as a sign that Germany was undergoing ‘an era of renewed pagan barbarism . . . even worse than the one of Antiquity’.Footnote 43
All these elements, plus the frequent violations of the concordat, led many in the organisations to start viewing National Socialism as an expression of an alternative and secular religiosity that had as its final aim the replacement of the Christian religion. Nazism was a ‘kind of religion or secular and nationalistic and “racist” faith, with a whole series of conceptions and ideas, or as the Germans prefer to call [it], a “vision of the world”.’ It was a faith that aimed to animate and transform the entire life of the German people, in both the public and private spheres, and to infuse into the consciousness of all Germanic people the notion of a ‘divine mission’. Additionally, this new religiosity attributed to Adolf Hitler ‘an extraordinary mandate from God to realise the absolute unity of the German people’.Footnote 44 Furthermore, in this new secular faith, the Christian concept of the immortality of the soul was profoundly subverted and replaced with an intra-mundane conception of immortality or the ‘survival of the spirit of the nation and the race’. It was, in sum, the new ‘religion of the heroes of the Aryan race’.Footnote 45 Striking a similar chord, Guido Gonella denounced Nazism's pretence of wanting to ‘aryanise the heavens, proclaiming the apostles of neo-paganism’.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, some degree of ambiguity remained, especially the distinction made by some in this realm between the government and ‘a minority of influential and fanatical elements’ who nurtured the project of establishing a ‘Germanic religion’.Footnote 47 Others, however, especially after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, now decidedly affirmed ‘that until a recent time and with an effort of good will, it was possible to make a distinction between the government of the Reich and the anti-Christian ideologues of the National Socialist movement, between Hitler and Rosenberg’.Footnote 48 Now it was the whole of the Third Reich that was perceived by many as pursuing the quest of establishing a political religion. As time passed, increasing numbers of Italian Catholics recognised in Nazism an existential core of religious character, which, according to Klaus Vondung, meant that at its root lay religious experiences that led to the manifestations of a new faith, an inner-worldly religion that aimed at the deification of the national community as a unity of common blood.Footnote 49 An increasing number of members of the organisations started to denounce the ‘mystique of blood as the basis of a religious evaluation of the race’.Footnote 50
Of particular relevance in this context was the publication in Studium in 1935 of an article by Dietrich Von Hildebrand, the German philosopher and theologian who had escaped Nazi Germany in 1933 and settled in Vienna. According to Von Hildebrand, Nazi ideology and theology was centred on four cardinal points: anti-personalism, materialism of the blood, anti-rational relativism and a profound anti-Christian ethics.Footnote 51 Nazi theology presented a true and proper ‘anti-spiritual cult’, where the Christian cardinal virtues of justice and charity were substituted by the ‘virtue of combat’. An ‘ethic of struggle’ was introduced in place of the virtues of humility and moderation, all with the purpose of ‘glorifying a brutal idol of humanity’.Footnote 52 In Von Hildebrand's view, Nazism as a political religion represented a modern phenomenon that responded to the collapse of German liberalism and the destruction of the old certainties produced by the First World War and the consequent yearning of many Germans for a new sense of community where they could feel wholesome again, in this case, in ‘the community of the blood’.Footnote 53 Along similar lines, Bevilacqua, a priest closely associated with the FUCI, saw Nazi Germany as dominated by new idols such as the ‘libidinous of force . . . the idolatry of man, the race and soil’.Footnote 54
One of the most insightful observers of Nazism as a political religion during this period was Mario Bendiscioli. Bendiscioli, a member of the Movimento laureati, was one of the most knowledgeable Italians of the time with regard to the religious evolution of German society; he published, during the 1930s, two volumes that are particularly relevant to this study.Footnote 55 Bendiscioli was convinced that ‘racist neo-paganism’ was increasing in influence in a potent fashion, and tending to install itself as a ‘truth or universal myth, even beyond Germany’.Footnote 56 One of his favourite targets was Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, founder of the German Faith Movement and an SS man, whose interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita influenced Himmler and the SS.Footnote 57 Hauer founded his movement in order to glorify his society's great romantic and idealistic literary figures and philosophers, and to blend with a positive view on Hinduism and Buddhism.Footnote 58 Hauer was ‘one of the first to realise and proclaim that the German faith should become the religious aspect of the racist ideology of Nazism’.Footnote 59 Bendiscioli firmly rejected Hauer's hierarchical use of the Leader cult and his establishing of a series of rites and symbols to mark the calendar year, such as ‘the feast of spring, the feast of summer, the feast of the equinox, commemoration of the dead, consecration of life . . . all secular parodies of the Christian sacraments’.Footnote 60 In effect, the Nazis had introduced a new calendar and festive year, as a symbol of how they embodied the inauguration of a new era. The Nazi festive year commenced on 30 January, the celebration of the ‘seizure’ of power. It continued with Heroes’ Memorial Day on 16 March, an attempt by the government to monopolise the memory of those fallen in the First World War. Then came the celebration of Hitler's birthday on 20 April, an important event in consolidating the Leader cult and myth. Other important dates were 21 June and the celebration of the summer solstice, and festivities held during September of every year at Nuremberg to celebrate the party.Footnote 61 Though Bendiscioli traced the roots of the Nazi political religion back to the pan-Germanic movement of the nineteenth century, he was at pains to establish the modern and novel nature of the experiment. In this sense, he saw in the First World War the true catalyst for the establishment of this new religion. It was a new phenomenon of the inter-war years and in line with the needs of an emerging mass society. He also perceived it as an all-embracing and totalitarian experiment that left no single aspect of human existence untouched: ‘The religion of the race appears as a new experience, attuned to the times, apt to perform a radical renovation of society, beyond all past ideological schemes.’Footnote 62
Another favourite target in Bendiscioli's analysis was the work and figure of Alfred Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Although Hitler rejected any notion that this work constituted an official party statement, it nevertheless sold over a million copies.Footnote 63 Bendiscioli described Rosenberg's book as constituting the ‘sacred book of militant racism’,Footnote 64 saying that his racially-based religion was a fruit of his frustrated nationalism, from which derived the need for ‘a German religion and a German Church that would become the theological-ecclesiastical substratum of the unity of the race and the Reich’.Footnote 65 Bendiscioli went beyond figures such as Hauer or Rosenberg. In his perspective it was the regime itself that was involved in the building of a political religion, particularly through the Hitler Youth, the SS and SA. What makes Bendiscioli's writings most remarkable is his uniting in a cluster of concepts the terms totalitarianism, political religion and modernity and applying them to the National Socialist experiment. He worriedly observed the establishment of new dogmas in Nazi Germany: the self-redemption of man, the ethics of the wellbeing of the national community above the welfare of the individual, its radical activism, the national character of its ‘church’ and liturgy and the newly found sense of the ‘heroism of the morality of the Germanic religion’.Footnote 66 In the Italian author's perspective, the sacralisation of politics was an integral part of the totalitarian thrust present in Hitler's movement, in an effort to commence time anew: ‘The racist idea presents itself as the new truth, the new light that must dissipate the darkness of illusion and error . . . That is why it is affirmed as a totalitarian vision of the world that fills the entirety of man’.Footnote 67
What undoubtedly gave a major boost and encouragement to the analyses given by the intellectuals of Catholic Action on the sacral nature of the Nazi regime was the publication, in March 1937, of the encyclical – written in German – Mit brennender Sorge. Footnote 68 In this document, the Pope strongly rejected and condemned the aspects of Nazi ideology that constituted a political religion. Speaking against those who preached that the race, people, or the state were the supreme values of human existence, he solemnly declared that only ‘superficial souls can make the mistake of speaking of a national God, of a national religion’.Footnote 69 Pius XI went on to express his disapproval of the adulteration of sacred notions of the Christian heritage. He rebuked the use of terms such as ‘revelation’ when they were only used to express ‘suggestions that come from the blood or race’. Striking at the heart of the Nazi quest for an intra-mundane transcendence, the pontiff continued with the rejection of the notion of an immortality that was nothing more than ‘the collective survival through the continuity of one's own people’.Footnote 70 In sum, what was being spread in Germany through a bombardment of propaganda was a ‘Gospel that has not been revealed by the celestial Father’.Footnote 71
The Movimento laureati reacted immediately to the promulgation of both encyclicals against Bolshevism and Nazism and decided to devote their spring meeting at Florence in 1937 to the analysis of the papal documents. But it was probably Stanislao Ceschi who, in a letter to Igino Righetti of 23 March 1937, best expressed the now dominant views with regard to Nazi Germany and its danger as a totalitarian regime: ‘I have found the encyclical on neo-paganism truly magnificent. It has penetrated the most intimate fibres of Catholics, even of those numb from a sad servitude.’Footnote 72
Italian Fascism
However, it was in the case of Fascist Italy that the intellectuals of Catholic Action found in its most developed form the existence of a political religion.
As early as 1931, Pius XI had condemned, in the encyclical written in Italian, Non Abbiamo bisogno, some aspects of what he perceived to be false religious elements in Fascist ideology. Written during the heat of the crisis of 1931 over the youth groups of Catholic Action, the encyclical firmly denounced the regime's intention of monopolising the education of the young, an effort that the Pope qualified as a clear example of ‘pagan statolatry’ and of a ‘new religiosity . . . that becomes persecution’.Footnote 73 However, much of the polemical vein contained in the papal document was tempered and watered down when at the end of the encyclical the pontiff explicitly affirmed that with the document he did not intend to ’condemn the party as such’ but only the practices that went against Catholic teaching.Footnote 74 Indeed, ambiguity and ambivalence characterised the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Fascist totalitarian trajectory.Footnote 75 Many of these hesitations were certainly due to the sharing of some common elements, such as the cult of authority and hierarchy, organicism and the antidemocratic tendencies exhibited by both institutions during the inter-war years. Moreover, the Church had applauded and supported several of the regime's efforts, from the demographic battle and the fight against indecency and pornography to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.Footnote 76 Furthermore, the signing of the Lateran Pacts in 1929, and especially the concordat with its very generous provisions for the Church, had heightened this ambiguity, leading many Catholics to believe that the Fascist government was a possible and unexpected ally for the Christian restoration of Italian society.
In this respect, the FUCI and the Movimento laureati constituted no exception. Indeed, fuelled by Fascist visions of modernity, the intellectual groups of Catholic Action elaborated their own project of an alternative modernity during these years,Footnote 77 endorsing almost all the policies enacted by the regime. Furthermore, the consensus with the Fascist government lasted well into the war years.Footnote 78 Part of this ambiguity revolved around the very nature of the Fascist regime as a totalitarian experiment. While there were concerns and occasional fears about the all-embracing and apparently endless demands for power by the state, there were some who regarded positively the totalitarian dynamic present in Fascist Italy, especially when compared to Bolshevik Russia or Nazi Germany. The ecclesiastical assistant, Adriano Bernareggi, deploring the fragmentations and divisions produced by both socialism and liberalism, spoke of the need for a unifying and coherent world-view capable of offering certainty and refuge in the uncertain times of the post-war crisis. In the religious realm, this ‘totalitarian’ idea was provided by Catholicism. In the political-social ambit he also asserted the need for a ‘central idea, a conception that dominates everything, embraces and co-ordinates, a totalitarian idea and conception. Among us, it is Fascism that embodies this notion from a social and political perspective.’Footnote 79 Striking a similar chord, others viewed as integral elements of the Fascist totalitarian experiment the just balance between discipline and liberty and the supposed space it gave to true personality. In this sense, Fascism represented a superior and organic synthesis, fuelled by the spirit of romanità that was at the heart of its totalitarian nature, representing ‘discipline, hierarchy and law’.Footnote 80
Nonetheless, both in the associations and in the rest of the Italian Catholic world, there were some voices that expressed their concern with regard to the Fascist sacralisation of politics. More often than not, one has to look for these criticisms between the lines since they were usually expressed in guarded terms, not only due to fear of Fascist censorship, but also because they could irritate the overwhelming majority of fucini who were favourably disposed towards the regime.
From its very beginnings, Fascism had tried to affirm itself as a political religion. As early as 1923, speaking of the nascent Fascist experiment, the Fascist Piero Zama had declared that
Religion is the sense of mystery manifested in diverse forms . . . A people . . . that faces death for a commandment, that accepts life in its purest conception as a mission and offers it in sacrifice, truly has that sense of mystery that is the fundamental motive of religion . . . [and that the Fascist] rites of religion, the moving silences of the “black shirts” in the face of brothers who have abandoned the terrestrial combatFootnote 81
were all aspects of the new religiosity offered by Fascism. For Giuseppe Bottai, Fascism represented much more than another political regime. For the hierarch, Fascism ‘was something more than a doctrine. It is a political and civil religion . . . it is the religion of Italy’.Footnote 82 In 1932, Mussolini himself solemnly affirmed that ‘Fascism was a religious conception’, in which man was viewed in an immanent relationship with a superior law that elevated and made him a member of a spiritual society.Footnote 83
Some in the associations viewed with growing concern the deification of the state under Fascism, the ‘myth of the new state’,Footnote 84 a state that was not merely a guardian of society but that understood itself as the foremost pedagogue in the nationalisation of Italians and as the institutional framework where true liberty could be reached by individuals. Furthermore, in the Fascist sacralisation of the state, the state was conceived as the supreme spiritual reality, the only sphere in which citizens could realise their full potential as material and spiritual beings.Footnote 85 This trend was accentuated in the period 1935–40. Emilio Gentile has spoken of a totalitarian acceleration during these years, manifested in a major effort to define the totalitarian state ideologically, an ever-growing collaboration with Nazi Germany and the enormous growth of the role, power and institutions of the party.Footnote 86
It is against this historical background that some Catholic intellectuals expressed their concerns with regard to what they saw as a burgeoning tendency in Fascism to advance as a totalitarian regime and as a political religion. They strenuously defended man's supra-terrestrial destiny against those who tried to enclose man within intra-mundane limits, and against those who divinised ‘pantheistic conceptions of the state’.Footnote 87 Others, such as Fausto Montanari, saw in Fascism and other similar movements a reaction against the bourgeois order of the nineteenth century, which was depicted by the Fascists as conformist, centred in the wellbeing of the individual, selfish and without regard for the cause of the collectivity. As such, Fascism represented a reaction in the opposite direction, with its emphasis on ‘dynamism’ and ‘heroism’ and, above all, by its affirmation that to live it ‘was necessarily a myth’.Footnote 88 Twentieth-century man – and in this it is not difficult to perceive an indirect observation on Fascism – in his myth-making mania had idolised ‘brutal and destructive energy’ and had ‘sacrificed the individual to the collectivity’.Footnote 89 Montanari went on to note how many citizens had accepted this sacrifice willingly, as a form of liberation and as a means of obtaining a higher degree of spirituality, something that in the writer's perspective amounted to ‘a gloomy and desperate heroism’ and to ‘the destruction of the individual for the welfare of the species’.Footnote 90 What was worse about this predicament was that the disillusionment caused by nineteenth-century individualism meant that ‘we no longer believe in the value of the individual person and, thus, we throw our hopes into the abstract collectivity’Footnote 91 as a means to regenerate and give ultimate meaning to human life. Moreover, in this disenchanted world, God and religion had simply become two myths among many others.Footnote 92 The intellectuals of Catholic Action had no problem with an ‘Ethical State’, as long as it was not the one theorised by Giovanni Gentile, but one inspired by Christian ethics. In the case of Gentile's conception of the state, an exasperated sense of nationalism made the state ‘become a monstrous being, in which individuals disappear, losing every liberty and natural right’.Footnote 93 It was precisely the Christian notion of personhood, that is, of man as a being created by a transcendental God and with ultra-terrestrial ends, that made some in the organisations fearful of the Fascist sacralisation of the state. In a similar vein, Gino Ferroni observed the novelty of the Fascist state-building enterprise with regard to the old liberal conception. In the scale of absolute values, the individual had been replaced by a deified state: ‘The state . . . now extends its sphere of action, it becomes the protagonist of the ethical idea, it propounds its own conception of life, in which it is the state itself that is the main reason for life’.Footnote 94 It was the omnipotence of the state with respect to society, with its own sacred narrative, the intent to impose an exclusivist ideology and under the dominion of a single party, that most worried these Catholic intellectuals, a historical reality that could lead only to the mushrooming loss of Christian influence over Italian society.
Another ambit in which there was a growing concern among some Catholic intellectuals was Fascism's projected anthropological revolution and its quest to create a new man, another feature typical of political religions recognised by specialists in the field.Footnote 95 As the Fascist Mario Carli pointed out, the task was to regenerate and reinvigorate Italians, to ‘remake the minds of Italians’Footnote 96 so that they would leave behind the heritage of cosy bourgeois culture and be instead devoted to action, cultivate creative intelligence and be staunchly committed both heart and soul to the deified nation. Furthermore, the new Italian would be able to see ‘in sport and the muscular development of the race a guarantee of his future prosperity’.Footnote 97 The new man was supposed to be infused with Fascism's militarisation of politics, creating the new type of the citizen-soldier, imbued with the heroic, mystical and warrior morality of the party in order to produce a ‘warrior society’.Footnote 98 Like many other Fascist myths, the myth of the new man was to be located in the regenerative experience of the First World War, which had created ‘the revolutionary of Mazzini and Nietzsche's superman’.Footnote 99
The intellectuals of Catholic Action could not approve the bellicose and militaristic conceptions that lay behind the concept of the Fascist new man, which stood in sharp contrast with St Paul's teaching on the Christian new man and the virtues of charity, humility and hope that he was supposed to embody. Fascism's new man, perhaps more than any of its myths, represented its religious impulse to begin time anew, and incorporated in this project, in a syncretic fashion, some Christian elements. For Fausto Montanari, the Fascist anthropological revolution represented yet another attempt by man to reach beyond the limits of humanity and the natural laws set by God, in which ‘man to become more than man tries to become absorbed in the great all’.Footnote 100 According to the Italian intellectual, the new man was modelled on the figure of Cain. It was a ‘mastodon superman’ who in his path destroyed everything of worth in civilisation: laws, truth, morality.Footnote 101 It was a myth that revolved around a complete arbitrariness of thought and action, all for the ‘illusion of reaching the divine infinite’.Footnote 102 He firmly denounced the ‘void of futurism’, the ‘inhumanity of collectivism’ as driving forces behind the myth of the new man, a destructive myth, that in its quest to establish an alternative religiosity endangered the true values of Catholicism.Footnote 103
At the heart of Fascism's intended anthropological revolution lay an erroneous way of understanding human personality, which it characterised as a mere ‘force of will’ or voluntaristic attitude towards life and societal matters, where force, instincts and sheer power were the main elements driving this conception of reinvigorating and regenerating human nature.Footnote 104 It was a Nietzschean-derived myth, that exalted the ‘will to power and the Dionysiac passion of the superman, who wants humanity as his pedestal’, a new man that was ‘beyond good and evil, truth and error’ and ‘against any idea of equality, piety or brotherhood’.Footnote 105
But it was perhaps Father Giulio Bevilacqua who most cogently understood the new religiosity involved in Fascism's myth of the new man. Contrasting this myth with the Christian concept of heroism, he denounced what he perceived as the ‘heroic conception of life that exalts our era’, a notion charged with bellicosity that responded to young people's need for greatness, glory and supreme liberty and a new sense of transcendence capable of offering a total conception of life. It was such a powerful myth that the ‘modern soul is disposed to every desperate gesture of annulment’ in order to achieve it.Footnote 106 It was a myth that ‘induced life to immolate itself to the idol, to instinct’, where there were no true heroes but just the ‘deluded, the juggler, the mad, the delinquent’.Footnote 107 He went on to denounce the ‘tendency of too many contemporary heroes to identify their own self with the cause, with the ideal’, whether it be the nation, justice or God himself.Footnote 108
Some intellectuals of Catholic Action also expressed a concern and criticised the cult of the Leader, the cult of the Duce and his charismatic figure in Fascist Italy, another central myth – and probably the most popular one – in Fascism's political religion.Footnote 109 Fundamental in the construction of this myth was Mussolini's co-opting of the ideals, power and imagery of the ancient Roman empire of Augustus and his successors. During the Fascist period, the government restored Augustan monuments in the northern Campus Martius and introduced obelisks into the urban space as had Augustus. Indeed, the figure of the emperor became the object of Mussolini's emulation, particularly after the establishment of the empire in 1936. He perceived himself as Augustus’ continuator, both politically and militarily. A high point in this process was the celebration in 1937 of the bimillenium of Augustus’ birth by means of the grandiose exhibition Mostra Augustea della Romanità. Augustus was the central figure in this exhibition, which recorded the entire scope of ancient Roman history, a display that aimed to demonstrate the continuity between the Rome of Augustus and that of Mussolini.Footnote 110 In this regard, of particular interest is an article published by Fausto Montanari in the early months of 1938, in which he indirectly condemned the mushrooming tendency to worship Mussolini's figure. In sharp and veiled contrast with Fascism's appropriation of ancient Roman imagery, Montanari rescued the figure of Augustus as the emperor who had opened the path to the distinction between a political and a religious sphere.Footnote 111 According to Montanari, Augustus had kept the cult of the emperor at a symbolic level, but after his death it tended ‘to become increasingly personal and effective’ and had become such a burden that it ‘broke the minds of many emperors’ through all the megalomania and paraphernalia that it involved and the grandiose demonstrations, rites and rituals used to perpetuate it.Footnote 112
In a similar vein, the central ecclesiastical assistant of the FUCI, Guido Anichini, in an article written to commemorate the sixteenth centenary of Saint Ambrose, rescued his healthy sense of romanità, a conception that had nothing to do with ‘the pagan concept of the state and the emperor’.Footnote 113 The article has further meaning if we remember that Pius XI, before assuming the papal throne, had also been cardinal archbishop of Milan, as had Saint Ambrose. Anichini reminded his readers how Saint Ambrose had fulfilled, in perfect balance, both civil and religious functions, always aware of the distinction between the religious and the political realm. When he was called to assume political leadership, he always acted in the interest of the Christian common good, even if this meant challenging ‘the usurper Caesars’ who had attempted to establish a religion of their own, becoming the first priests and sacred figures.Footnote 114
Conclusion
Though much research is still needed with regard to European Catholic perceptions of the phenomenon of political religions in the inter-war period, at least the cases of the FUCI and the Movimento laureati tend to confirm the main thrust of Emilio Gentile's interpretation of the subject. In both organisations, there were several intellectuals who were able to grasp the novelty, attraction and potential destructiveness of the process of the absolutism of politics and the construction of alternative religiosities. Though the associations to some extent borrowed terms from the past to analyse the new reality, such as ‘paganism’ and ‘statolatry’, new key concepts emerged in the years under study that denote the recognition that something new was emerging. Concepts such as ‘political religions’, ‘totalitarian religions’, ‘new idols’ and ‘religion of the blood’, among others, speak of a conscious effort to come to terms with political regimes that not only aimed to remove, diminish or destroy Christian influence from society, but also strived to construct totalising sacred narratives that demanded exclusive allegiance and faith from their subjects, especially in the case of Italian Fascism.
It is also clear that the emerging political religions were viewed not just as a simple historical regression to barbaric times but as a by-product of modernity itself. Indeed, in the most interesting cases, some Catholic intellectuals united, into a cluster of concepts, the notions of totalitarianism, political religions and modernity. This was especially so in the cases of Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany. With regard to Fascist Italy, a strong sense of ambivalence prevailed, with only a minority of voices being able to comprehend the main tenets of the new Fascist religion. But even in the case of Mussolini's regime, some fully recognised the dangers of such central elements of the Italian political religion as the deification of the state, the myth of the new man, and the cult of the Leader as a charismatic and prophetic figure. In sum, the category of political religion as a heuristic device provides us with a deeper knowledge of the totalitarian nature of the Fascist experiment, more radical and revolutionary than has usually been recognised. Indeed, Fascist authorities were well aware of these criticisms and some registered the Catholic intellectuals’ preoccupation that Mussolini wanted to transform Fascism into ‘a true and proper religion’.Footnote 115 Father Giulio Bevilacqua, one of the most lucid observers of this phenomenon, was put under close surveillance by Fascist informants, who invariably spoke of him as an ‘anti-Fascist of the first order’ and as a priest who conducted ‘systematic work against the regime’.Footnote 116 It was precisely Bevilacqua who perhaps offered the most forceful reproof against the political religions of the inter-war period. According to the priest, idolatry was ‘the number one enemy of Christ’ in contemporary times and the ‘human mystiques’ simply produced a ‘cult of sheer force and violence’.Footnote 117 He bitterly concluded by stating what he perceived as a growing tendency of his times: the apostle of the modern world must become aware of a tragic and humiliating reality: the century of scientific analysis, the century of precise observations, of concrete realisations . . . is an idolatrous century’ with an ever-increasing presence of ‘new cults, new liturgies, new acts of faith, new symbols, new priesthoods, new inquisitions . . . new wars of religion’.Footnote 118
