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Fascism and Political Religion in Italy: A Reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2014

WALTER L. ADAMSON
WALTER L. ADAMSON*
Affiliation:
Emory University, 561 S. Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA; wadamso@emory.edu
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Abstract

This article challenges the currently dominant understanding of Italian Fascism as a ‘political religion’, arguing that this view depends upon an outdated model of secularisation and treats Fascism's sacralisation of politics in isolation from church–state relations, the Catholic Church itself and popular religious experience in Italy. Based upon an historiographical review and analysis of what we now know about secularisation and these other religious phenomena, the article suggests that only when we grasp Italian Fascist political religion in relation to secularisation properly understood, and treat it in the context of religious experience and its history as a whole can the nature of Italian Fascism be adequately grasped.

Fascisme et religion politique en italie: une réévaluation

Cet article remet en question la conception actuellement dominante du fascisme italien en tant que ‘religion politique’. Il soutient que cette conception est basée sur un modèle dépassé de la sécularisation et considère donc la sacralisation de la politique par le fascisme en dehors du contexte des relations entre l’Église et l’État, de l’Église catholique et de l’expérience religieuse du peuple italien. L’auteur se fonde sur une revue de l’historiographie et sur l’analyse de ce que nous savons de la sécularisation et de ces autres faits religieux pour suggérer que ce n’est qu’en interprétant la religion politique du fascisme italien à l’aune d’une sécularisation bien comprise, et en la considérant dans le contexte plus général de l’expérience religieuse et de son histoire, que l’on peut véritablement saisir la nature du fascisme italien.

Faschismus und politische religion in italien: eine neubewertung

Der Autor dieses Beitrags stellt die gegenwärtig vorherrschende Auffassung in Frage, dass der italienische Faschismus eine ‘politische Religion’ gewesen sei. Er vertritt die These, dass diese Auffassung sich auf ein veraltetes Modell der Säkularisierung stütze und die Sakralisierung der Politik durch den Faschismus isoliert betrachte, ohne den Beziehungen zwischen Kirche und Staat, der katholischen Kirche selbst und dem religiösen Erleben des Volkes Rechnung zu tragen. Der Beitrag vermittelt einleitend einen historischen Rückblick und analysiert unsere heutigen Kenntnisse über Säkularisierung und das damalige religiöse Umfeld. Auf dieser Grundlage kommt der Autor zu dem Ergebnis, dass das Wesen des italienischen Faschismus nur angemessen verstanden werden kann, wenn seine politische Religion in Beziehung zur Säkularisierung, wie sie sich im Lichte neuerer Erkenntnisse darstellt, und im Rahmen religiösen Erlebens und seiner Geschichte in ihrer Gesamtheit betrachtet wird.

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Articles
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Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 43 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 For Italian Fascism, the works of Emilio Gentile are of paramount importance, esp. ‘Fascism as Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 2/3 (1990), 229–51; The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy, tr. K. Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an Interpretation’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5, 3 (2004), 326–75, and Politics as Religion, tr. G. Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Other important works on the topic include Steigmann-Gall, Richard, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burleigh, Michael, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror (New York: Harper Collins, 2007)Google Scholar; Griffin, Roger, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar and Iordachi, Constantin, ‘God's Chosen Warriors: Romantic Palingenesis, Militarism, and Fascism in Modern Romania’, in Iordachi, ed., Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), 316–57Google Scholar.

2 Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism’, 329.

3 The best recent discussion is Roberts, David D., ‘“Political Religion” and the Totalitarian Departures of Interwar Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category’, Contemporary European History, 18, 4 (2009), 381–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Burrin, Philippe, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History and Memory, 9 (1997), 321–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eatwell, Roger, ‘Reflections on Fascism and Religion’, in Weinberg, Leonard and Pedahzur, Ami, eds, Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 145–66Google Scholar, and Maier, Hans, ‘Political Religion: A Concept and its Limitations’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8, 1 (2007), 5–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Gentile, Politics as Religion, 138–9 (original emphasis).

5 Gentile, Politics as Religion, 140.

6 Adamson, Walter L., ‘The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of “Il Selvaggio”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 30 (1995), 556–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this work, however, I was insufficiently attentive to the relationship between the sacralisation of politics and ‘secular religion’, treating them synonymously.

7 For the aesthetic view, see Schnapp, Jeffrey T., Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; for the sceptical view about audience, see Bosworth, R. J. B., ‘Everyday Mussolinism: Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy’, Contemporary European History, 14, 1 (2005), 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 Gentile, Sacralisation, 69.

11 Gentile, ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism’, 327–8.

12 Gentile, Sacralisation, 132.

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14 Gentile, Sacralisation, 63–4.

15 Roberts, David D., The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth-Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 335Google Scholar (original emphasis).

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19 Gentile recognised the importance of secularisation by addressing it at the outset of ‘Fascism as Political Religion’, but then did little with it. The same is true of Moro, Renato, ‘Religion and Politics in the Time of Secularisation: The Sacralisation of Politics and Politicisation of Religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6, 1 (2005), 71–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See above all Filoramo, Giovanni, Le vie del sacro: Modernità e religione (Turin: Einaudi, 1994)Google Scholar and Che cos’è la religione: Temi, metodi, problemi (Turin: Einaudi, 2004), esp. Chapter 8.

21 See, for example, Filoramo, Le vie del sacro, 33–6, and Luckmann, Thomas, ‘Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?’ Sociological Analysis, 51, 2 (1990), 127–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition to these two works and the other book by Filoramo (n. 20), the following account of secularisation is largely based on Beyer, Peter, Religions in Global Society (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar and ‘Rethinking Secularisation’, Hedgehog Review, 8, 1–2 (2006), 7–22; Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, tr. Burge, O. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Luckman, Thomas, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (London: Macmillan, 1967)Google Scholar; Luhmann, Niklas, Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1984)Google Scholar and ‘The Paradox of System Differentiation and the Evolution of Society’, in Alexander, Jeffrey C., ed., Differentiation Theory and Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 409–40Google Scholar; Sheehan, Jonathan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularisation: A Review Essay’, American Historical Review, 108, 4 (2003), 1061–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Taylor, Charles, ‘Religious Mobilisations’, Public Culture, 18, 2 (2006), 281–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007) and ‘Disenchantment – Reenchantment’, in Levine, George, ed., The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 57–73Google Scholar.

22 The rationalist view prevailed well into the 1970s; see for example, Wilson, Bryan, ‘The Return of the Sacred’, Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, 18, 3 (1979), 268–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See, for example, the discussion in Gentile, Politics as Religion, 66, of Carlton J. H. Hayes, who believed that ‘a religious vacuum had been created that the masses felt they had to fill with a new faith, and the totalitarian movements provided them with this new faith’.

24 See Taylor, ‘Disenchantment – Reenchantment’. Taylor cites Wilson, Stephen, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London: Hambledon and London, 2000)Google Scholar.

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27 Casanova, Public Religions, 15.

28 On religion as an invented category of analysis, see Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment’, 1072; on the notion of mobilisation in modern religious institutions, see Taylor, ‘Religious Mobilisations’.

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31 Filoramo, Le vie del sacro, 19–20.

32 Filoramo, Che cos’è la religione, 334.

33 See Sharp, Lynn L., Secular Spirituality: Reincarnation and Spiritism in Nineteenth-Century France (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

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35 Luckmann, ‘Shrinking Transcendence?’ 132.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid. 133.

38 Luckmann, ‘Shrinking Transcendence?’ 133–4.

39 See Casanova, Public Religions.

40 See Roy, Olivier, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

41 See Beyer, Religions in Global Society, 103.

42 Filoramo, Le vie del sacro, 28.

43 See Taylor, ‘Religious Mobilisations’.

44 Ibid. 296.

45 Classic works on the topic such as Jemolo, A. C., Church and State in Italy 1850–1950, tr. Moore, D. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960)Google Scholar and Rosa, Gabriele De, ed., Storia dell’Italia religiosa, iii: L’età contemporanea (Rome: Laterza, 1995)Google Scholar are now complemented by Pollard, John, Catholicism in Modern Italy: Religion, Society and Politics since 1861 (London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar and Kelikian, Alice, ‘The Church and Catholicism’, in Lyttelton, Adrian, ed., Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44–61Google Scholar.

46 The most important are Gentile, Sacralisation, and Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The regional study is Taurasi, Giovanni, Intellettuali in viaggio: Università e ambienti culturali a Modena dal fascismo alla Resistenza (1919–1945) (Milan: Unicopli, 2009)Google Scholar.

47 Among the classic studies are Binchy, D. A., Church and State in Fascist Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1941)Google Scholar; Rossi, Ernesto, Il manganello e l’aspersorio, ed. Franzinelli, M. (Florence: Parenti, 1957; Milan: Kaos, 2000)Google Scholar; Webster, Richard A., The Cross and the Fasces: Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960)Google Scholar and Scoppola, Pietro, La Chiesa e il fascismo: Documenti e interpretazioni (Bari: Laterza, 1971)Google Scholar. See also recent syntheses by Scoppola, ‘Patti lateransi’, in Grazia, Victoria de and Luzzatto, Sergio, eds, Dizionario del fascismo, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 2002/2003), II: 342–7Google Scholar, and Pollard, J. F., ‘Fascism and Catholicism’, in Bosworth, R. J. B., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 166–84Google Scholar.

48 Webster, Cross and Fasces, 36–7.

49 Cited in Scoppola, ‘Patti lateransi’, 342.

50 Cited in Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo, 53.

51 For details, see Scoppola, ‘Patti lateransi’, 343.

52 For the concept of alliance – explicit and prominent in Rocco – see his ‘Chiesa e stato’, Il Resto del Carlino, 4 Apr. 1922, cited in Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo, 54–9.

53 See his letter to Rocco of 4 May 1926 reprinted in Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo, 119–21.

54 Scoppola, ‘Patti lateransi’, 344, cites Giovanni Gentile's 1927 remark that a reconciliation with the Church represented an ‘ugly utopia’.

55 See Scoppola, ‘Patti lateransi’, 344, and Webster, Cross and Fasces, 109–13.

56 Webster, Cross and Fasces, 110.

57 Paolo Orano, preface to Cuesta, Ugo, Mussolini e la chiesa (Rome: Pinciana, 1936), 9Google Scholar.

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60 The closest I have found to such an account are a few suggestive pages in Duggan, Christopher, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 475–87Google Scholar.

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62 Gentile, ‘Fascism in Power: The Totalitarian Experiment’, in Lyttelton, ed., Liberal and Fascist Italy, 143, 162, 165 (original emphasis).

63 Gentile, Sacralisation, 70–1.

64 See Lyttleton, Adrian, ‘An Old Church and a New State: Italian Anticlericalism 1876–1915’, European Studies Review, 13, 2 (1983), 225–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Webster, Cross and Fasces, 12–16.

65 On Mussolini's Mazzinianism, see Levis Sullam, L’apostolo, vii–viii, 57–62.

66 Cited in Miccoli, Fra mito della cristianità e secolarizzazione, 121. See also Longhitano, Rino, La politica religiosa di Mussolini (Rome: Cremonese, 1938), 253Google Scholar.

67 Mussolini, ‘Stato e chiesa’, Le Figaro, 18 Dec. 1934), reprinted in his Opera omnia, ed. E. Susmel and D. Susmel, 35 vols. (Florence: La Fenice, 1951–1963), 26: 399–401.

68 Roberts, Totalitarian Experiment, 278; Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 89.

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72 Ibid. 6. See also Franzinelli, , Stellete, croce e fascio littorio: L’assistenza religiosa a militari, balilla, e camicie nere 1919–1939 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1995)Google Scholar.

73 See Franzinelli, Il clero del duce, 137.

74 Ibid. 25.

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84 Bosworth, R. J. B., Whispering City: Modern Rome and Its Histories (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 178–9Google Scholar.

85 See Mangoni, Luisa, L’interventismo della cultura: Intellettuali e riviste del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1974), 241Google Scholar, for a strong version of this thesis. For a more restricted version (to my mind more congenial), see Menozzi, Daniele and Moro, Renato, eds, Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo: Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia, Spagna, Francia) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004)Google Scholar, esp. the article by Simona Urso, ‘L’aquila imperiale e il veltro dantesco: Il fascismo come orizzonte messianico, universalista e cattolico’, 247–74. See also Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 183, in which he writes of Fascism and Catholicism as sharing ‘a totalising vision of society with an organic structure and a connection to the sacred’.

86 See Moro, ‘Religion and Politics’, 8–81.

87 Francesco Traniello, ‘Chiesa cattolica’, in De Grazia and Luzzatto, eds, Dizionario del fascismo, II: 274.

88 Kelikian, ‘The Church and Catholicism’, 60.

89 Pollard, Catholicism in Modern Italy, 96.

90 See Jemolo, Church and State in Italy, 188–9, and Pollard, ‘Fascism and Catholicism’, 181.

91 Ibid.

92 See Moro, Renato, ‘Afascismo e antifascismo nei movimenti intellettuali di Azione Cattolica dopo il ’31’, Storia contemporanea, 6, 4 (1975), 733–99Google Scholar. For the counter-argument, see Malgeri, Francesco, ‘Chiesa cattolica e regime fascista’, in Boca, Angelo Del, Legnani, Massimo and Rossi, Mario G., eds, Il regime fascista: Storia e storiografia (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 177Google Scholar.

93 For the notion of a ‘shared agenda’, see Nelis, ‘Clerical Response’, 262; for its ‘concrete realisability’, see Moro, Renato, ‘La religione e la “nuova epoca”: Cattolicesimo e modernità tra le due guerre mondiali’, in Botti, Alfonso and Cerrato, Rocco, eds, Il modernismo tra cristianità e secolarizzazione (Urbino: Quattro venti, 2000), 561Google Scholar.

94 See Guasco, Maurilio, Storia del clero in Italia dall’Ottocento a oggi (Rome: Laterza, 1997), 181–2Google Scholar.

95 Cited in Moro, ‘La religione’, 562.

96 See Ceci, Lucia, Il papa non deve parlare: Chiesa, fascismo e guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Laterza, 2010)Google Scholar and Negash, Tekeste, ‘The Ideology of Colonialism: Educational Policy and Praxis in Eritrea’, in Ben-Ghiat, Ruth and Fuller, Mia, eds, Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 112–15Google Scholar.

97 See Webster, Cross and Fasces, 113–15, and Scoppola, La Chiesa e il fascismo, 307–41.

98 Verucci, La chiesa nella società contemporanea, 123.

99 Soave, Sergio and Zunino, Pier Giorgio, ‘La chiesa e i cattolici nell’autunno del regime fascista’, Studi storici, 18, 3 (1977), 75Google Scholar. The date is corroborated by Franzinelli in Il clero del duce, 13, where he notes that letters to the Duce from Catholics remained numerous until the end of 1942, when they suddenly dropped off.

100 Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, 12 (original emphasis).

101 De Rosa, Gabriele, Vescovi, popolo e magia nel Sud (Naples: Guida, 1971)Google Scholar; Chiesa e religione popolare nel Mezzogiorno (Bari: Laterza, 1979) and Tempo religioso e tempo storico (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1987). See also Carroll, Michael P., Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar and Veiled Threats: The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Brown, Peter, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar and Pietro Angelini, ‘Religiosità popolare’, in De Grazia and Luzzatto, eds, Dizionario del fascismo, II: 488–94.

102 Carroll, Veiled Threats, 11.

103 See Pietro Stella, ‘Prassi religiosi, spiritualità, e mistica nell’Ottocento’, in De Rosa, ed., Storia dell’Italia religiosa, 115–42; Fattorini, Il culto mariano tra Ottocento e Novecento; Migliore, Mistica povertà; Riall, ‘Martyr Cults’ and Luzzatto, Padre Pio.

104 Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 11 (original emphasis).

105 See Migliore, Mistica povertà, 14, which marks out 1886–1926 as years of especially intense St Francis worship.

106 See Stella, ‘Prassi religiosi’, 126–8, and Riall, ‘Martyr Cults’, 255, 263.

107 Stella, ‘Prassi religiosi’, 119–23.

108 See Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 12–14.

109 Gentile, Sacralisation, 16–17.

110 Ibid. 75.

111 Ibid. 86.

112 Angelini, ‘Religiosità popolare’, II: 489–90.

113 Angelini, ‘Religiosità popolare’, II: 492–3. See also Cavazza, Stefano, Piccole patrie: Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo, 2nd edn (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003)Google Scholar.

114 Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 184.

115 See Battaglia, Raffaello, ‘Religiosità popolare italiana’, Lares, 3, 2 (1932), 19–26Google Scholar.

116 See Cavazza, Piccole patrie, 116–22.

117 Antonio Gibelli, ‘Befana fascista’, in De Grazia and Luzzatto, eds, Dizionario del fascismo, I: 153.

118 Luzzatto, Sergio, The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, tr. Randall, F. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), 20Google Scholar.

119 Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 191.

120 The photo is also reproduced in Luzzatto, Padre Pio, 192.

121 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 43.

122 Mussolini, ‘Messaggio francescano agli italiani all’estero’, San Francesco Assisi, 6 (1926), 7, now extensively cited in Migliore, Mistica povertà, 220–1, and in Paolo Ardali, San Francesco e Mussolini (Mantova: Paladino, n.d.), 29–31.

123 Ardali, San Francesco.

124 See Franzinelli, Il clero del duce, 76–7.

125 Grandillo, Bonifacio, Il messo di Dio: Mussolini profetizzato da San Giovanni il Divino e da Dante (New York; S. F. Vanni, 1936)Google Scholar. See also Gentile, Emilio, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome: Laterza, 2002), 138Google Scholar.

126 Tarquini, Alessandra, Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 111Google Scholar. See also Campi, Alessandro, Mussolini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001), 13–52Google Scholar.

127 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 87.

128 See Tarquini, Storia, 119–10, who cites a French visitor to the Rome of 1929 regarding the omnipresence of Duce images.