A ‘martyr’ in the quest for political unity

The first mentions of Don Minzoni’s ‘martyrdom’ appeared around the twentieth anniversary of his death, which was commemorated with memorial masses organised by the newly formed DC (Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio Reference Formigoni, Pombeni and Vecchio2023, 17–32). Giuseppe Spataro, one of the party’s founders, sought to re-establish ties with the former Popular Party and inquired about how the priest had been remembered in Ravenna. Alieto Benini, the headmaster of Dante Alighieri high school, informed Spataro about ‘pilgrimages’ to Minzoni’s tomb, the ‘funeral service’, which included a ‘memorial speech’, and initiatives to remember ‘our martyr’ in other towns.Footnote ¹ In April 1944, the congress of the DC took place in Naples: at the conclusion of the assembly, Giulio Rodinò recalled the ‘Christian Democrats fallen in the struggle for the Christian faith and for democratic ideals, from Don Giovanni Minzoni to Renato Vuillermin’ (Damilano Reference Damilano1968, 66) – the latter was a Catholic partisan killed in 1943 (Griseri Reference Griseri, Traniello and Campanini1984). The politician established an ideal connection between the two figures, a bond that was rooted in the interpretation of the liberation struggle as a ‘second Risorgimento’ (Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2021, 535). According to the Christian Democrat, the battle against Nazi-Fascism was to draw inspiration from the example of the ‘martyrs’ of the first Risorgimento, considered the precursors of those who sacrificed themselves for faith and freedom, such as Don Minzoni and Vuillermin.

The DC’s efforts to preserve Don Minzoni’s memory were evident in the publication of two commemorative biographies, released in August 1944 and 1945. The first, a pamphlet, opened the series ‘I profili della Democrazia Cristiana’ (Profiles of Christian Democracy) and reproduced speeches given by Giuseppe Donati and Alessandro Brenci in August 1924 (Caliò Reference Caliò2022, 110–111). The introduction stated that its aim was to pay ‘a devoted tribute of remembrance’ to the priest killed by the Fascists, in the certainty that the words spoken 20 years earlier carried ‘a poignant relevance today’, a recognised affinity in the climate of ‘dark fratricidal struggle’ that, in ideational terms, linked the context of the 1923 murder to the events following 8 September 1943. The priest’s death was attributed to the fact that Don Minzoni had fought ‘for a political and social idea’ emanating from the gospel – namely, ‘for Christian democracy’Footnote ² – a formula that strengthened the link between the ‘martyr’ and the newly formed party.

The significance accorded to martyrdom also appeared in a second commemorative biography, edited by the Ravenna branch of the DC shortly after the liberation. According to the authors, with the death of Don Minzoni ‘the Catholic priesthood’ had marked ‘another stage in its martyrdom’, an expression that placed the priest’s sacrifice in a temporal sequence composed of moments when the clergy fought and fell for the national cause, a sequence that culminated with priests participating in the Resistance movement. The authors referred to the legal proceedings relating to the murder of Don Minzoni, and concluded by arguing that the Christian Democrats were honouring the memory of the priest by wanting to ‘heed his warning’, which was not ‘one of vengeance but of pacification’, not ‘of hatred but of brotherhood’, not ‘of struggle but of co-operation’. The warning was addressed to all parties, so that all ‘the healthy energies of the torn homeland’ would co-operate ‘for the common good’, in the knowledge that only ‘through harmony of minds’ could the country hope ‘that the wounds would heal and the storm would subside’.Footnote ³

The priest’s memory represented the unifying trait, the cohesive force that was to bind different political parties, all motivated by the common goal of working together to rebuild the social fabric of the nation, which was perceived as irreparably compromised by 20 years of dictatorship. This spirit of unity can also be found in the commemoration at the Dante Alighieri high school in Ravenna on 26 August 1945 delivered by Alieto Benini, who, in evoking the figure of Don Minzoni, appealed to ‘citizens’ and ‘men of all parties’. In a passage where he compared the priest and Giacomo Matteotti, considered ‘protomartyrs of freedom’, to those ‘shot, tortured and massacred’ during the Nazi occupation, Benini argued that from this ‘bonfire of passion, pain and sacrifice’ came forth ‘a wonderful light of moral values’ that served not only ‘to erase the infamy of those who … betrayed and murdered their own brothers’, but also to bestow on them the right ‘to rebuild a homeland and a future without dishonour and without shame’. Arguing that Don Minzoni’s life had been ‘fruitful’ in terms of these moral values, Benini concluded:

For Benini, Don Minzoni’s sacrifice redeemed Italy from the guilt of Fascism and projected the country towards the possibility of rebirth and prosperity on radically different moral foundations. This regeneration primarily concerned the civil sphere, aiming at the reconciliation of Italians. However, it also had to deal with a meta-political dimension (Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2024, 106–107): the possibilities of renewing the country were somehow associated with the idea that the hoped-for revival of civil life would be weak or incomplete if it were not fuelled by a spiritual yearning stimulated by the Catholic religion.

Thus conceived, the framework of the martyrology therefore hinged on the spirit of unity that should inspire Italian political dynamics, an element that placed it in stark contrast to the fascist martyrology of the early 1920s, in which the commemoration of the victim served to strengthen the bond between the fallen and the community of the living, but drove them to perpetuate the struggle against the ‘internal enemy’ (Suzzi Valli Reference Suzzi Valli, Janz and Klinkhammer2008). As evidenced by the case of Giovanni Berta, killed in Florence in 1921, during the ventennio the fascist martyrology assumed different forms, a complexity that emerges from the depictions of the militant as a Christological figure: in addition to facilitating a reading that made Berta inherently good, the pairing of Jesus and the fallen soldier contributed to evoking the notion of resurrection, the strongest moral principle in the Catholic tradition (Martin Reference Martin2024, 174–184). In this perspective, the use of models from Christian martyrdom in fascist martyrology prompts an analysis of Benini’s commemorative speech from another angle: it is symptomatic of both the erosion of war myths caused by a generalised desire for peace and justice, which was believed to be achievable only through the establishment of a democratic system (Moro Reference Moro, Formigoni and Saresella2017), and the need to deflect the venomous legacy of Fascism through an appeal to Don Minzoni’s legacy, which was meant to guide people towards forms of democratic coexistence and, more specifically, a political system animated by Christian principles.

The dynamics that relate to the detachment from the Fascist legacy can be observed by broadening one’s focus from commemorations and commemorative biographies to street names, a field that allows for further reflection on these aspects. As is well known, Fascism profoundly transformed the urban layout of cities, a change that is recognisable above all in the decision to name squares and streets after ‘early Fascists’ or particularly important leaders. This practice continued during the period of the Italian Social Republic, when the change in street names took on a decidedly antimonarchist tone (Albanese Reference Albanese, Albanese and Ceci2022; Ridolfi Reference Ridolfi2004; Ertola Reference Ertola2024). During the Resistance and the early years of the Republic, cities changed their street names again: many from the Fascist era disappeared to make way for ‘martyrs of freedom’, such as Don Giovanni Minzoni.

This survey has considered the records of archival superintendents, who acted as intermediaries between municipalities and the ministry of education, and the deliberations of municipal councils. Analysis of this material shows that references to martyrdom were present in various forms. Frequently, the list of proposed street name changes submitted by a local council was introduced with references to recent political upheavals, which were considered grounds for changing urban place names to ‘eliminate the general discontent of the population’ and to honour ‘the martyrs and heroes’ who, since the conquest of power by Fascism, had made ‘the ultimate sacrifice for freedom’.Footnote ⁵ The decision taken by local leaders to change the face of cities by focusing on the stories of the men and women who died because of the regime, rather than by restoring the liberal-era names, implies the logic of renewal, of breaking with the experience of the 20 years of Fascism.

In the vast majority of cases, changes in favour of Don Minzoni involved removing names referring to generic aspects of Fascism, such as ‘via del Littorio’ in the municipality of Seravezza,Footnote ⁶ ‘via XXVIII Ottobre’ in the municipality of ImolaFootnote ⁷ and ‘via XXIII marzo’ in the municipality of Scicli.Footnote ⁸ Only a small minority of municipalities opted to name streets after Don Minzoni instead of Italo Balbo, as happened in Rapallo.Footnote ⁹ Balbo held prominent positions in the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party, PNF) and was one of the quadrumvirs of the March on Rome. His power was particularly strong in the province of Ferrara, a territory where an episode of dissent had occurred in 1923, an unstable situation in which the murder of Don Minzoni matured (Segrè Reference Segrè and Cordova1980). In this case, the replacement of the main perpetrator of the priest’s murder, Balbo, with the name of his victim provides an opportunity to reflect on the ‘handover’ between Fascism and the Republic. During the regime, Balbo spread his own myth as an aviator, a belief that grew even stronger after his death in 1940 (Baravelli Reference Baravelli2021). If, as Isnenghi has argued (1996, 233–251), fascist myths of conquest were condensed in aviation ideology, then in this variation it is possible to glimpse the desire to move away from a set of values identifiable with strength and the will to power and to introduce others that are diametrically opposed to the regime’s warlike inspiration.

Equally significant is the change by Turin city council, which decided to replace ‘via Pierino Delpiano’, designated as ‘a person presented by the fascists as their martyr’, with ‘via Don Minzoni’.Footnote ¹⁰ Pierino Delpiano was a young Catholic killed in Turin in 1919 by a group of socialist demonstrators. In the interwar period, the Catholic world mobilised to commemorate him, claiming the blood tribute paid by Christians in the fight against the ‘red’ danger. Delpiano’s memory led to competition with Fascism, which attempted to appropriate his image (Vecchio Reference Vecchio and Acerbi2003, 250–251; Moro Reference Moro2020, 327).

With this street name change, the local ruling class decided to retain a name in memory of figures associated with the Catholic world who were victims of violence, although the perpetrators belonged to two different political outlooks. The significance of the change, decided by a council led by the communist Giovanni Roveda (on Roveda, see Castagnoli Reference Castagnoli and Tranfaglia1999, 103), lies in the fact that it responded to the need to conceal the violence perpetrated by left-wing political forces and previous conflicts with the Catholic front. If these divisions had been evoked in the post-liberation context, they would have undermined the political collaboration projects that were more feasible using the name of Don Minzoni. Second, the removal of the name of a Catholic who had become a ‘martyr’ under the regime in favour of the name of a priest killed by the Fascists was favourable to the Christian Democrats. This change helped avoid addressing the compatibility and ideological convergence between Fascism and Catholicism while emphasising the longstanding hostility held by Catholics towards Mussolini’s dictatorship (Menozzi and Moro Reference Menozzi and Moro2004, 373–387).

The context for questions relating to the collective guilt of Fascism and how to heal the national community was characterised by the rise of a largely self-absolving collective memory that tended to expunge Fascism from national history (Focardi Reference Focardi2005; Cooke Reference Cooke2011). In the liminal phase, antifascist political forces agreed to identify the ‘martyr’ Don Minzoni as one of the foundational figures for building democratic coexistence. In the process of memory formation, the priest was recognised as a point of reference not only for orienting the country towards a renewed political equilibrium, but also for guiding the Catholic world towards a new way of understanding its role within society. This understanding was rooted in the spirit of unity during the Resistance. However, signs of this unity began to weaken as early as 1945–7, when serious incidents of public disorder emerged and anticlerical campaigns restarted. Discussions in the constituent assembly reflected signs of political turmoil: during the session of 25 March 1947, the question of the concordat was addressed, and Lelio Basso expressed the concerns of the socialist parliamentary group that the constitution should not be ‘partisan’. He also expressed a hope for a ‘unanimous vote’, which, ‘as in our memory the name of Don Minzoni is associated with those of Amendola, Gramsci and Matteotti’, would demonstrate that Italian democracy had overcome ‘the old patterns of anticlericalism’ and was moving ‘towards broader horizons’.Footnote ¹¹

Don Minzoni’s memory as the compass of the early republican era

As has been aptly noted, for the political actors who had lived through the war, it became crucial to bring closure to this liminal period by institutionalising a new and stable relationship between individuals and political authority. In this context, memory served to ‘reach and negotiate the phase of re-aggregation in the political rite of passage leading to the rebirth of democracy’ (Forlenza and Thomassen Reference Forlenza and Thomassen2021, 541). The break-up of antifascist unity, the elections of 18 April 1948 and the polarisation of the world into two opposing blocs contributed to intensifying the struggle between political parties, a battle that concerned the ‘commemoration and interpretation of the past’ (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2019, 150), including the Resistance. In this heated phase, alongside antifascism emerged a strong anticommunism; this did not represent the ‘outcome of a sophisticated political assessment’, but rather took shape as an ‘ordinary people’s spontaneous and emotional reaction’ to what they associated with communism, conceived as a movement that promoted the subversion of the natural social order (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2019, 113).

Several studies have analysed the ‘varied’ anticommunism in republican Italy, focusing particularly on its Catholic variant (Scoppola Reference Scoppola and Ventrone2006; Pertici Reference Pertici2021). Reflecting on these aspects, Forlenza (Reference Forlenza2019, 120–121) showed how Catholic anticommunism was rooted in the Church’s battle against modernity, specifying that the hostility felt by Christian Democrats was amalgamated with ‘liberal-democratic values’. In the post-Second World War period, the encyclical Divini Redemptoris (19 March 1937) continued to serve as a point of reference for evaluating the communist phenomenon: against the backdrop of the bloc division caused by the Cold War, Pius XII pursued a strongly conservative line, condemning communism and expressing concern for the ‘Church of Silence’, a term referring to the persecution suffered by Catholic prelates and populations in Eastern Europe (Chenaux Reference Chenaux2011). Considering the Italian context, however, anticommunism was not tied to political strategy; rather, it was a worldview that placed Christianity at the origins of European civilisation and rejected totalitarianism in the name of freedom. Reflecting on the nature of the clash between Catholics and Communists, Giorgio Vecchio (Reference Vecchio and Pazzaglia1988, 455–456) suggested reconsidering the postwar years ‘from the perspective of historical continuity with the previous period’, widening the sphere of reference to include ‘psychology’ and ‘collective mentality’ and considering the processes of legitimisation and de-legitimisation that characterised the transition (see also Orsina and Panvini Reference Orsina, Panvini, Orsina and Panvini2016, 7–21).

The commemoration of the anniversary of the Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica (Italian Catholic Action Youth Movement, GIAC) can represent a useful starting point for reflecting on the transformations related to Don Minzoni’s memory. In September 1948 the Catholic scouting publication L’Esploratore retraced the association’s history, focusing on the deaths of Pierino Delpiano and Don Minzoni.Footnote ¹² Unlike what happened in the naming of streets, on the occasion of the GIAC anniversary these figures were presented together, despite the fact that their respective killers came from different political arenas – socialists in the case of Delpiano and Fascists in the case of Don Minzoni. The decision to place the two figures on the same level was indicative of the trends at work in the Catholic youth world, which, in the face of a profound state of uncertainty, attempted to restore meaning to existence by equating Fascism with movements inspired by Marxism. This equalisation revealed a rudimentary theory of totalitarianism, whose focus was the ‘condemnation of contemporary communism rather than the Fascist regime’ (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2017, 208, Reference Flores and Flores2019, 135–136).

One example of the climate of ideological conflict between the Marxist left and the government, when that tension was most acute and led to episodes of violence, was the murder of Giuseppe Fanin, a Catholic trade unionist killed by communists in San Giovanni in Persiceto (Bologna province) in November 1948, a few months after the attack on Palmiro Togliatti (Trevisi Reference Trevisi1998). The victim was soon elevated to ‘martyr’ status by the moderate press; the Catholic weekly magazine in Ravenna, L’Argine, dedicated an article to him entitled ‘Giuseppe Fanin, martyr for freedom. It is time for Emilia to become an Italian region’, to celebrate the ‘sacrifice’ of the young man and to argue that his death should ‘unite and strengthen’. Declaring themselves ‘children of the land’ where ‘D. Minzoni, Mario Baroncelli, and Marino Pascoli’ had fallen, the authors of the article asserted that Fanin’s sacrifice was a ‘guarantee of victory’.Footnote ¹³

The reference to Don Minzoni was based on the fact that he shared the same local context as Fanin, Emilia-Romagna, a region the authors wanted to become ‘Italian’: this passage is interesting because it concerns an area that has recently been defined as a ‘laboratory of anticommunism’ (Creatini Reference Creatini, Baldissara and Capuzzo2023). From the 1948 elections until the second half of the 1950s, the local episcopates warned the faithful about the communist threat, an appeal that would have greater resonance after the excommunication issued in 1949 (Menozzi Reference Menozzi and Finzi1997b, 441). In this light, it is interesting to note that local Catholics resorted to the rhetoric of the ‘internal enemy’, widely used by the Fascist regime: in addition to eroding the territorial hegemony of Togliatti’s party, the use of these rhetorical devices responded to other needs, necessities strictly connected to the contemporary papal orientation on the matter of ‘just war’. In 1947, Pius XII had evoked the Battle of Lepanto and the victory achieved by the Christians to warn against the threat posed by a contemporary enemy, allusively identified with Soviet communism (Paiano Reference Paiano2025, 33). In this sense, the wish for triumph expressed in the article represented a revealing element of the sensibilities at play in the Ravenna Catholic environment, which were inclined to uncritically embrace the self-representation of Catholicism as the ultimate bulwark for the defence of Christianity and European civilisation.

The resurgence of fascism in Italy after the Second World War posed a challenge to the values of the Resistance movement: during the first legislature, proposals for ‘reconciliation’ put forward by veterans of the regime took the form of demands for the rehabilitation of former Fascists, who were considered potential allies on the anticommunist front. These proposals also concerned forms of postmortem redemption: during the first half of 1952, Balbo’s widow, Emanuela Florio, sued Vincenzo Vacirca for defamation after he referred to the former Fascist leader as ‘the murderer of Don Minzoni’Footnote ¹⁴ in the newspaper La Giustizia and published numerous articles in the same journal referring to the 1924 trial between Balbo and La Voce Repubblicana (Baravelli and Veronesi Reference Baravelli and Veronesi2024, 134–135). In a letter dated 7 May 1952, Florio informed the lawyer Renzo Ravenna of the reprimand she had received from Vittorio Cini, a politician who had held senior positions during the regime, who considered it a ‘huge mistake’ to have filed a lawsuit. Balbo’s widow stated in her defence that she believed it was her ‘duty’ to ‘defend the memory of the dead’.Footnote ¹⁵ These words expressed a tendency towards a policy of remembrance based on the inclusion of all those who had died for their country, regardless of whether they had sided with the regime or had fought it, a tactic that was part of a broader plan developed by the right to replace antifascism with anticommunism as the cornerstone of the newly formed Republic (Focardi Reference Focardi2005, 31).

The first biography dedicated to Don Minzoni appeared in this political and cultural context, written by Don Lorenzo Bedeschi and published in 1952. During the civil war, Don Bedeschi participated in the Resistance and after the war he devoted himself to historical research, focusing on the phenomenon of modernism (Botti, Cerrato and Pivato Reference Botti, Cerrato and Pivato1984, 13–43). The author dedicated his biography to the ‘memory of the 53 priests killed in Emilia-Romagna during the tragic two-year period from 1944 to 1945’, a reference echoed in the preface by Alcide De Gasperi, who considered the text a ‘necessary work’ given the resurgence of ‘obvious nostalgia for the recent past’. The prime minister recognised Don Minzoni as a ‘shining example of resistance to all propaganda and policies of violence’ and Argenta as ‘one of the most glorious stages on the path of sacrifice and national reconstruction’ (Bedeschi Reference Bedeschi1952a).

Bedeschi’s proposal followed another of his works that had been published shortly before, entitled L’Emilia ammazza i preti (‘Emilia-Romagna kills priests’), in which the author made clear his intention to present the number of priests killed during and after the Nazi occupation to the opponents of ‘both extremes’ (Bedeschi Reference Bedeschi1952b, 14). The pamphlet, with a preface by Egilberto Martire, consisted of profiles of priests who had lost their lives in the final stages of the war. To illustrate the diversity of situations concerning the clergy and their executioners, Bedeschi referred to the cases of Don Gianni Domenico and Don Pietro Rizzo, parish priests of San Vitale di Reno and Iolanda di Savoia, whose deaths were attributed respectively to communist partisans and fascists of the Italian Social Republic (Bedeschi Reference Bedeschi1952b, 16–17).

In this regard, the remarks introducing his biography of Don Minzoni were primarily intended to convey the idea of a Catholic opposition to fascism that was not limited to the final stages of the Second World War, but was rooted in the early 1920s. De Gasperi’s introduction and Bedeschi’s dedication represented two different desires animating the Catholic world: on the one hand, there was a pressing need to emphasise the long duration of its antifascism and the strength of its aversion to the regime; on the other, Bedeschi’s operation was part of the need felt by many Catholics to ‘qualify their own resistance as true because it was antitotalitarian’, a call fuelled by the vigorous anticommunism of the DC, which, at that time, was seeking agreements and compromises that went ‘beyond the boundaries of the parties of the democratic centre’ (Parisella Reference Parisella and Rosa1997, 727–737; Ungari Reference Ungari2005; Santagata Reference Santagata2017). It is possible to discern the presence of this last dimension by broadening the focus to a review of Bedeschi’s book published in the scout periodical R-S Servire. Towards the end of the article, the author claimed that Don Minzoni was a ‘glory’ of Catholic scouting, adding that the decision to write about him lay in the fact that Don Minzoni recalled the priests of that time in the ‘red lands’: in this sense, his profile served as a ‘warning to the killers of yesterday and the fascists of today’.Footnote ¹⁶

Anti-totalitarianism thus became the framework within which the Catholic camp could demonstrate its equidistance from both fascism and communism, but it was much more than an ‘abstract principle’. In a political-cultural climate marked by a state of uncertainty, anti-totalitarianism configured itself as a ‘marker of certainty’ (Forlenza Reference Forlenza2017, 224) to the extent that it was able to reassure Catholic militancy with regard to the fact that the newborn democracy remained firmly anchored to Christian principles, which were considered the only possible defence against totalitarianism, be it of the right or the left. This way of perceiving the positioning of one’s own political culture was not, however, shared by the entire Catholic world: on the thirtieth anniversary of Don Minzoni’s death, Il Risveglio, the periodical that was the voice of the Catholic democrats in Romagna (Trionfini Reference Trionfini, Saresella and Vecchio2012, 254), paid homage to the priest killed in 1923, stating that ‘he was not killed by the communists, but by the Fascists’ – an aspect to remember ‘especially … by certain of ours with too short memory’. Three decades after the killing, Don Minzoni taught that ‘a Christian must always be a martyr, never an executioner, persecuted rather than a persecutor’.Footnote ¹⁷ Placing the emphasis on these aspects, the article denoted a certain closeness of the local Catholic democrats to the progressive and restless currents of Italian Catholicism, which in those years was engaged in an initial reflection on peace – a theme monopolised by the Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party) (De Giuseppe Reference De Giuseppe, Saresella and Vecchio2012, 143).