The church saves Mussolini

100 years ago, Mussolini effectively ended Italy's rule of law

On January 3, 1925, Benito Mussolini succeeded in performing political jujutsu against Italy's legal system. Buoyed by the Italian church's support, Mussolini used his own legal troubles to destroy the rule of law.¹

Mussolini's legal and political troubles began seven months earlier. On June 10, 1924, Fascist thugs with ties to him murdered Italy’s top Socialist lawmaker, Giacomo Matteotti. Later that day, Matteotti had been scheduled to give a speech in parliament accusing Mussolini’s young government of corruption.

The public assumed—with good reason—that Mussolini had ordered the murder. Italy was in an uproar. Even conservatives began to distinguish between nationalism, which they embraced, and tyranny, which they weren’t prepared for.

Mussolini’s opponents had caught him acting above the law. As David I. Kertzer puts it in his 2014 book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, “The end of the regime seemed near.”²

Mussolini’s regime had begun less than two years earlier with the support of a vital constituency. Within days of becoming prime minister, Mussolini had taken immediate steps to make good on his promises to the church to restore its influence in Italian society. He had taken his new cabinet to Mass, and he had ordered his cabinet ministers to kneel.³

Mussolini had followed up this symbolism with action:

He ordered crucifixes to be placed on the wall of every classroom in the country, then in all courtrooms and hospital rooms. He made it a crime to insult a priest or to speak disparagingly of the Catholic religion. He restored Catholic chaplains to military units; he offered priests and bishops more generous state allowances; and to the special delight of the Vatican, he required that the Catholic religion be taught in the elementary schools.⁴

The Vatican was delighted. Having lost most battles in Italy's decades-long culture war, the church in 1924 “had no particular fondness for democratic government.”⁵ It had political reasons for overlooking Mussolini’s unsavory past, his previous association with the political left, and his obvious ignorance of religious matters. The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, admitted with a chuckle that “Mussolini thought all Catholic holidays fell on Sundays.”⁶

Cardinal Pietro Gasparri and Benito Mussolini sign the Lateran Pacts in 1929.

Gasparri called Mussolini a “great character.” Mussolini was certainly a colorful character: unlike his predecessors, Mussolini in office held frequent, entertaining rallies with his political base as if he were perpetually running for office.

Mussolini was a political entertainer, but people around him spoke of “two different Mussolinis.” On Mussolini was “expansive and spontaneous, guided by his instincts,” Kertzer says, but the other was disloyal and deceptive. Kertzer quotes Giuseppe Bottai, a member of the Fascist Grand Council:

[Mussolini was] small, petty, with the little envies and jealousies of common men, quick to lie, to use deception and fraud, dispenser of promises that he had no intention of keeping, disloyal, treacherous, mean, lacking in affect, incapable of loyalty or love, quick to dump his most faithful followers.⁷

Mussolini often denied what most Italians before his day would call reality, understanding that “people were ruled most of all by emotion, and that their reality had less to do with the external world than with the symbolic one he could fashion for them.”⁸

But having watched Mussolini’s rise and his early days in office, Cardinal Gasparri concluded that “Providence makes use of strange instruments to bring good fortune to Italy.”⁹

A month after Mussolini’s legal and political crisis began, the Italian church gave him its full support. The Pope published an article in the Vatican newspaper denying Mussolini's involvement in the murder and directing Christians to avoid legal means of dismissing Mussolini.

If Mussolini were removed, the Pope warned, the political left would rise, and the church was incapable of making an alliance with the left.¹⁰

The Pope’s article, along with a subsequent speech the Pope gave that complemented his article,¹¹ was a political turning point for Mussolini. He survived his legal and political crisis, and before parliament on January 3, 1925, he took full, triumphant responsibility for Matteotti‘s murder as well as other recent violence:

I and I alone assume full political, moral, and historical responsibility for everything that has happened. . . . If all the violence was the result of a particular historical, political, and moral climate, then I take responsibility for it, because I created this historical, political, and moral climate. . . . Italy, sirs, wants peace, wants tranquility, wants calm. We will give it this tranquility, this calm through love if possible, and with force, if it becomes necessary.

The implication in Mussolini’s admission, of course, was that for the sake of domestic tranquility, his political survival was more important to Italy than the rule of law.

Kertzer calls Mussolini’s January 3 speech before parliament “the most dramatic speech of his career.” After the speech, Kertzer writes, “the Fascist assault on the last vestiges of democracy in Italy began.”¹²

The trial of Matteotti’s Fascist murderers wouldn’t come for another year. By then, Mussolini’s thumb on the scales of justice made the outcome palatable to his regime:

With the help of a Fascist prosecutor, a Fascist judge, and the national head of the Fascist Party as their defense attorney, two of the five defendants were acquitted. Dumini—Mussolini’s American-born henchman—and two of his comrades were found guilty of involuntary homicide and freed less than two months later.¹³

Ironically, Mussolini’s legal troubles, which began 100 years ago this month, resulted in the end of Italy’s rule of law.

When a nation’s church makes league with the powers that be, God may appear to that church in the guise of Pontius Pilate. Who will it be, Pilate asks his compromised visitors, Jesus or the violent political actor Barabbas?¹⁴ A hundred years ago, the Italian church seems to have answered a similar question: the rule of law or a tyranny? The church’s choice became its nation’s fate.

Sociology Professor Fabrizio Bernardi explains this 1933 fresco featuring Mussolini on horseback and the seated Pope.

1. I published the story of Mussolini’s political turnaround on my old blog in 2019. I republished it here as a cautionary political devotion this past summer (2024) when the events in this story began to reach their centennial dates.

2. David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, First edition (New York: Random House, 2014), 68-73.

3. Kertzer, 33.

4. Kertzer, 49.

5. Kertzer, 51.

6. Kertzer, 48.

7. Kertzer, 81.

8. Kertzer, 61.

9. Kertzer, 48.

10. Kertzer, 74.

11. Kertzer, 76.

12. Kertzer, 76-81.

13. Kertzer, 78-80.

14. Matthew 27:17-21; Mark 15:7-15; Luke 23:18-19; John 18:40. Barabbas, Mark says, “had committed murder in the revolt.” Mark 15:7 NNAS.