Political religion and secularisation

For Gentile, a ‘religion of politics’ involves the consecration of a ‘secular political entity’, the formalisation of ‘an ethical and social code of commandments that binds the individual to the sacralised entity’, the notion of ‘followers’ as a ‘community of the elect’ whose ‘political action’ has a ‘messianic function’ and the creation of a ‘political liturgy for the adoration of the sacralised collective entity through the cult of the person who embodies it, and through the mythical and symbolic representation of its sacred history’.Footnote ⁴ A ‘political religion’ is then one of two main sub-species of a religion of politics, one that, as ‘a form of sacralisation of politics’, has ‘an exclusive and fundamentalist nature’ – in contrast to a ‘civil religion’, which separates church and state and does not rely on the ideology of any particular political movement. A political religion

Few scholars seriously doubt that Italian Fascism involved a sacralisation of politics, and I have defended the concept in earlier work.Footnote ⁶ There are of course some historians who regard the practices to which it refers as more ‘aesthetic’ than ‘religious’, while others doubt that it attracted many ordinary Italians.Footnote ⁷ Those like Gentile who uphold it most fervently see it as fundamental to Italian Fascism's efforts at totalitarianism, itself conceived as an ‘experiment’, hence to be evaluated more in terms of aspirations than results.Footnote ⁸ Yet this leaves us with an important question. What is the status of political religion as religion? Was the fascist sacralisation of politics that undergirded fascism's ‘religion’ conceived as a bona fide alternative to Christianity and ultimately aimed at replacing it? Early defenders of a political religion thesis such as Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron (who were more concerned with Nazi Germany than Fascist Italy) seem to have believed that it was.Footnote ⁹ Yet Gentile is ambiguous on this question. On the one hand, he paraphrases the well-known passage from Mussolini's 1932 encyclopedia entry on Fascism in which Mussolini declares that he ‘had no intention of placing a new god on the nation's altars, as Robespierre had done’ since ‘he recognised “the God of the ascetics, of saints, and of heroes, alongside God as he is seen and prayed to in the honest, basic hearts of the people” ’.Footnote ¹⁰ On the other hand, Gentile presents political religion as part of an open-ended totalitarian ‘experiment’ aimed at ‘conquering society’ in order to realise an ‘anthropological revolution’ by creating ‘the new man’ and a ‘new civilisation’.Footnote ¹¹ Might not such a wholly new civilisation also offer its self-understanding as a new religion?

If the ultimate status of Fascist political religion remains unclear in Gentile's account, so too is its treatment of the religion's component parts. At a minimum, it would seem necessary to distinguish the ‘cult of the lictor’ (the effort to translate Fascist ideology into symbolic practices) from the ‘cult of the Duce’ (a more populist celebratory form only partly guided by the Fascist Party and not directly connected to ideology). Gentile acknowledges the distinction, but ultimately fuses them by treating ‘the myth and cult of the Duce’ as ‘the most spectacular and popular aspects of the lictorial cult’.Footnote ¹² This move effectively undercuts any inclination he might have had to probe the relationship between them. Yet it seems clear that the Duce cult ultimately makes a mockery of Fascist political religion in a way that the cult of the lictor, however ridiculous some of its rituals may have appeared, did not. Moreover, this relationship seems to be borne out by chronology. For the cult of the Duce reaches full intensity only in the mid 1930s, just as the Fascist ideological project begins to crumble in the face of its failed implementation, as Alexander De Grand has persuasively argued.Footnote ¹³ And it may well be that an intensified cult of the Duce reflected not only the failure of Fascist programmes but the increasingly perceived emptiness of the cult of the lictor, which tended to be displaced by it. Indeed, Gentile himself concedes that the invasive ritualisation of those years sometimes exceeded ‘the limits of the ridiculous in an exasperated search for a conformity of behaviour such as to produce conformity of conscience and belief’.Footnote ¹⁴ In the end it is difficult to resist David D. Roberts's conclusion that ‘the regime ended up with a superficial focus on style, with an absurd cult of the Duce, with a pathetic accent on anti-Semitism, and with a debilitating confusion and rivalry over institutional focus’.Footnote ¹⁵

Linked to this problem of the Fascist political religion's component parts is the problem of understanding its relation to other, then available, forms of experience with potential transcendental dimensions. In this regard, I would like to recall Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi's argument that what Gentile calls sacralisation of politics, when placed in the context of other aspects of the regime such as its productivist values, involved a deep sensory alienation; while exciting the senses, in part through ritual, Fascism also denied pleasure, private enjoyment and the body.Footnote ¹⁶ If Falasca-Zamponi is right on this point, as I believe she is, then we should expect that ordinary Italians must have actively pursued other more emotionally satisfying forms of activity. One of these certainly was consumerist pleasure (in so far as it was available), as the work of Victoria de Grazia suggests.Footnote ¹⁷ Another no doubt was traditional religion, especially those popular forms bound up with festivals. And, within the sacralisation of politics, surely Falasca-Zamponi's analysis helps to explain why the cult of the Duce, however absurd, must have seemed more satisfying than ‘Fascist Saturdays’ with the Balilla (the Fascist youth organisation).

Our need to understand the relation between the fascist sacralisation of politics and other forms of religious (or more broadly ‘sacred’) experience is certainly one of the reasons why exploration of the broader historical context of modern secularisation seems to me so vitally important. Gentile has provided a good contextualisation of fascist political religion in terms of developments in modern Italian history – the Risorgimento, the problems of the post-unification state, the political-religious legacy of liberal Italy and the Italian experience of the First World War – and his work in this regard has received important recent supplements.Footnote ¹⁸ However, neither he nor any other historian has placed the fascist sacralisation of politics in relation to secularisation.Footnote ¹⁹ Such beginnings of an account as we do have come to us from sociologists of religion for whom politics is a secondary concern.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, most of the richest studies of secularisation come from the discipline of religious studies generally and do not even consider political religion or the sacralisation of politics. While the scope of my own remarks on this connection here must be limited, I hope at least that a brief review of some leading ideas about secularisation processes can help to illuminate a few essential points about it.

Contemporary sociologists of religion are divided on the question of whether the concept of secularisation and historical narratives associated with it remain of value, given the resurgence of religion in recent decades. Yet even some of those who have become most sceptical of the concept and prefer other terms do not deny that recent centuries have witnessed a continuous and dramatic reshaping of the historical role of religion, especially western Christianity.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, contemporary accounts of secularisation are now nearly uniform in rejecting the secularisation narrative held by many of the most important European thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century (Weber, Durkheim and Freud among them) who believed that religion was somehow inherently at odds with an increasingly rationalised culture and destined to fade away, leaving us without transcendental beliefs and with the ‘disenchantment of the world’.Footnote ²² In this view, traditional religions were doomed and, when the question of political religions was raised, the prevailing notion was that alienated citizens of the new atomised ‘mass society’ would seize upon them as substitutes for traditional faith.Footnote ²³ Thus, insofar as the rise of political religions could be traced to processes of secularisation, the idea was that the weakening of traditional religions was their source.

The fact that this view was largely overthrown by the late 1970s, however, does not mean that all disenchantment narratives disappeared with it. On the contrary, important scholars of religion continue to uphold versions of a disenchantment thesis. In Charles Taylor's view, secularisation does disenchant in the sense that the specific kind of ‘magical thinking’ that prevailed, for example, in the European middle ages, becomes more and more marginal in modern life.Footnote ²⁴ But this is a specific kind of magical thinking and not ‘enchanted thinking’ in general. Hence we should not be surprised by the ‘return of the sacred’ to modern life in forms Taylor refers to as ‘reenchantment’ – forms that can be quite compatible with a modern scientific world-view and that infuse secular realms having no direct connection with traditional religion.Footnote ²⁵

To understand how the West might have moved historically from a culture and social system dominated by the Catholic Church as well as ‘magical thinking’ to one in which traditional religions of all sorts operate in a much delimited social sphere while various forms of spiritual reenchantment operate in spheres traditionally thought of as secular (the market economy, the state), most contemporary scholars of religion rely on an account of secularisation based on structural differentiation. Here the basic notion is that, beginning in the late middle ages, European societies began to move (in the vocabulary of Niklas Luhmann) from a primarily ‘stratified’ form of social differentiation in which social classes are arranged in a vertical hierarchy within a single system (understood as a ‘great chain of being’) to a primarily ‘functional’ form of differentiation in which an ever-increasing number of functional subsystems (primarily the state, the economy, institutional religion and science) are arranged horizontally in the sense that each has functional independence and none of them can claim to be the basic system.Footnote ²⁶ In this way, ‘society’ ceases to be a unit and becomes a set of ‘differences’ – subsystems based on independently functioning system-environment distinctions. Hence ‘religion’ is transformed (and demoted) from a sort of master institution infusing society as a whole, which is seen as given by and ultimately reigned over by God, to a separate autonomous ‘sphere’, which, in Luhmann's terms, manages a discrete problem, that of the contingency of human life. Thus, as Casanova puts the point: ‘if before, it was the religious realm which appeared to be the all-encompassing reality within which the secular realm found its proper place, now the secular sphere will be the all-encompassing reality to which the religious sphere will have to adapt’.Footnote ²⁷

Historically, this transformation involved a number of familiar developments including jurisdictional challenges to Church authority by emerging nation states and capitalist markets (for example, regarding investiture), the rise of states with centralised administrations, the growth of cities, the recovery of ancient wisdom during the Renaissance, major scientific discoveries and the growth of a scientific enterprise, global exploration, the development of print and the growth of vernacular languages as a vehicle for printed texts (both secular and sacred), and the rise of both Protestantism and modern capitalism. Secularisation within this historical context refers to the non-religiousness of the institutions within all the subsystems outside the religious subsystem. That is, the various secular subsystems tend to develop pragmatic norms based on ‘functional rationality’ and thereby establish themselves as culturally independent from the values embodied in the traditional universe of the ‘sacred’. These developments lead to increasing cultural complexity in the sense that individuals are asked to follow different norms of behaviour depending on the subsystem in which they are operating. Meanwhile, organised religion, which was never ‘thing-like’ but always ‘in process’ and, in that sense, ‘an invented category of analysis’, now responds by ‘mobilising’ itself in relation to concrete challenges both internal and external, the latter a function of its transformed environment.Footnote ²⁸

Thus, even though structural differentiation creates a social network of subsystems each with an autonomous ‘logic’, because each subsystem also has the others as part of its environment, secularisation is a thoroughly interactive process, and, as the historical literature on its emergence has increasingly emphasised in recent years, we need to understand religious transformation in the early modern period in a non-dichotomous fashion which treats science and Enlightenment together with religion, and religion together with political mobilisation and revolution.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, for example, in thinking about the rise of nationalism in France, David Bell, drawing on the work of Marcel Gauchet, argues that secularisation in the eighteenth-century meant not ‘de-Christianisation’ but a shrinkage in the domain of religion such that God becomes more distant but still exists, hence signalling the historical need for an expanded role of collective humanity. Thus, as new forms of religious belief, such as deism, arise, they are accompanied by new forms of political talk based on the ‘nation’ and, indeed, by a stronger sense of individual agency. In this regard, Bell argues that Rousseau offers a perfect example of what is going on in the century: a new emphasis on the need for civil religion as well as a new more privatised, personalised and humanised religion of man – an ‘interiorisation of religious belief’. In this way, as God becomes more distant from creation, secular spaces open up that include a self-regulating universe, a self-fashioning self, and a new kind of politics based on the nation and popular sovereignty.Footnote ³⁰

In a related but broader argument, Giovanni Filoramo also turns to Gauchet and considers his contention that we live in a post-Christian society and that Christianity is itself configured as a ‘religion that is an exit from religion’. Such a contention, he continues, is misleading because even if we might in some sense live in (or be moving into) a post-Christian era, we certainly do not live in a post-religious one. What happens in western culture beginning in the eighteenth century is not that Christianity is somehow overcome but that its sense of the sacred becomes diffused in the various secular spheres.Footnote ³¹ ‘If it is true, in other words, that secularisation has subtracted from the traditional religions a series of action fields and life spheres, rendering them profane and autonomous, it is also true that these fields and spheres – quite independently of the traditional religions – themselves become the producers of the sacred in different ways in various times’.Footnote ³² In other words, just as for Taylor disenchantment gives way to reenchantment, so too more generally for Filoramo, the process of structural differentiation that produces a delimited religious sphere also produces a detachment of ‘the sacred’ from the religious sphere and a diffusion or ‘diaspora’ of the sacred into some or all the non-religious spheres. Once firmly joined, ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ come to operate with much greater independence.Footnote ³³

Filoramo writes suggestively of this diffusion of the sacred as its ‘metaphorisation’ and as its transformation from an adjectival position to that of a noun. That is, in traditional religions the sacred refers to a certain quality of predesignated (often scripturally designated) things – hence ‘sacred’ as an adjective – while in the modern context the sacred increasingly becomes a more general power, hence a kind of independent thing that attaches itself to other things, investing them with magical or fetishistic qualities. Closely connected with the phenomenon of diffusion, he continues, is a process involving the individuation of spiritual life – a process classically explored in Thomas Luckmann's The Invisible Religion (1967). For as the sacred and spirituality become more and more independent of their sources in traditional religion, individuals become free, in effect, to create their own ‘religions’ via syncretism and bricolage.Footnote ³⁴ More broadly we could say that as traditional religious institutions become more functionally defined, as ‘the sacred’ becomes available outside traditional religion, and, as a variety of economic, political and social forces strengthen modern individualism, individuals become prone to forging their own idiosyncratic religious outlooks and practices as part of their effort to find an appropriate mode of self-reflection and forms of personal identity.

In Luckmann's view, this process accelerated in European societies at the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, even as traditional religious institutions remained highly visible. There was, in his estimation, a certain inevitability about this transformation: ‘Societies that pass a certain level of complexity and achieve a high degree of functional differentiation cannot maintain the social universality of an essentially religious world-view oriented to the supremacy of a salvational articulation of the “great” transcendences. In such societies norms and orientations including those that refer to transcendent realities cannot be transmitted to everyone in basic socialisation processes as successfully as mythical world-views were transmitted to the entire community in archaic societies’.Footnote ³⁵ One of the consequences of this transformation was the formation and intensification of new political ideologies in the nineteenth century, which ultimately became ‘political religions’ in the first half of the twentieth. These political religions ‘severely challenged . . . the Christian “sacred universe” ’, as they merged with or even sought to replace ‘dominant religious themes of Christian origin’.Footnote ³⁶ Yet this challenge was of brief duration. In the end, modern political religions proved no more capable than traditional religions of integrating social structures. They tried; they failed. No ‘new men’ were produced. For in the case of the political religions, just as with traditional religions, ‘the functional segmentation of modern social structure proved to be highly unfavourable to the social construction of a taken-for-granted, obligatory model of transcendent reality’.Footnote ³⁷

The historical trajectory of modern religion then, if only by default, is the individualisation of the transcendent – ‘invisible religion’ in Luckmann's vocabulary, ‘privatisation’ in that of Casanova. Luckmann is insistent on the point: ‘In no modern industrial society are Christian themes the only specifically religious representations offered on the newly formed “market” of transcendence’. And in no modern society does the ‘sacred cosmos’ have ‘one obligatory hierarchy’ or an articulation ‘as a consistent thematic whole’ but always ‘consists of assortments of social reconstructions of transcendence’.Footnote ³⁸ Casanova is much more guarded on the point, especially from the point of view of the apparently revived public or political function for traditional religions in recent decades.Footnote ³⁹ Yet neither Luckmann nor Casanova nor any of the other scholars of religion so far mentioned want to argue that traditional religions are likely to disappear anytime soon. Indeed, it has been shown that they respond to the new ‘market of transcendence’ rather creatively.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, traditional religions may remain strong because they are not simply a matter of managing contingency in Luhmann's terms but continue to offer fertile sources of political and cultural identity as well as institutional loci for social movements. Finally, as Luhmann himself has argued, the critical value of traditional religions may paradoxically be enhanced by the fact that they no longer perform vital social and intellectual functions such as healing the sick or explaining the origin of the world and can thus play a role as a critical force ‘outside the system’.Footnote ⁴¹

So what, then, does a secularisation perspective with its concepts of functional differentiation, dispersion of the sacred and privatisation finally offer us? I want to argue that it provides a broad heuristic for grasping the evolving historical role of religion over the past few centuries, one that offers us important clues about the nature of traditional and popular religions, the sacralisation of politics, and private religious or spiritual experience in the modern world. Moreover, I believe this heuristic suggests that there will be strong interconnections among these various religious manifestations. Traditional religious institutions, political religions emanating from states and non-institutional or non-official religious forms such as ‘popular religion’ or ‘spiritism’ all observe one another, because, in Luhmann's terms, each is part of the environment of all the others. Each can react to the others, mimic the others, learn from the others. Of course cultures also matter greatly, and every national culture will experience secularisation differently. I am in no sense suggesting that a general understanding of secularisation can handle all the work of historical explanation, a matter to which we will return shortly.

First, however, I should like to add a point to the preceding discussion and consider its implications. After presenting his concept of a dispersion or ‘diaspora of the sacred’, Filoramo argues that we should understand the way modern groups and individuals seek to make ultimate sense out of their existence primarily as a ‘process of sacralisation’, and that we should reserve the term ‘religion’ just for when we refer specifically to the ‘institutional dimension’. He therefore notes that, ‘even if I continue to speak of modern (and postmodern) religion’, his main concern is with the more general ‘sacred’ rather than ‘religion’.Footnote ⁴² I believe that this is an important point, and that it offers us a reason to prefer the description ‘sacralisation of politics’ over that of ‘political religion’. The sacralisation of politics in general, and the fascist sacralisation of politics in particular, was part of the historical dispersion of the sacred and constituted neither a religion nor a replacement for religion nor even, necessarily, an alternative to religion. Rather it was an effort to adapt to a new world of the diffused sacred just as traditional religious institutions were seeking to do. Similarly, the sacralisation of politics was not a response to a ‘weakened’ religion but a stage in the historical trajectory of modern religious experience. In Luckmann's terms, it was an effort to hold on to some of the aura of traditional forms of ‘great transcendence’ based on the supernatural, while substituting for it a syncretic, socially integrative, immanently based world-view and associated set of practices that refused to surrender to the pluralism of individual syncretism and bricolage.

Charles Taylor has offered what I regard as a fruitful perspective for thinking about cultural difference regarding national experiences of secularisation.Footnote ⁴³ Disenchantment, he argues, begins in important respects with the Newtonian world-view, which retains God but de-emphasises his political presence through the king and reconceives his primary role as that of the architect of the universe's magnificent design. In the post-Newtonian world we are more likely to be ‘one nation under God’ than to experience ourselves as ruled by God. However, there are many culturally contextual factors that will affect the degree to which a post-Newtonian world-view alters political outlooks and, thereby, political processes. Thus, for example, societies with a state church are more likely to retain some ‘ancien-régime’ or, in Taylor's quaint vocabulary, ‘paleo-Durkheimian’ elements, while those without such a church are more likely to be post-Newtonian and ‘neo-Durkheimian’. Indeed, societies with

Obviously, Taylor might also have mentioned Italy in this connection, which presents us with the unique circumstance of a universal church that also held significant state territory until 1861 and that still holds Vatican City. And, just as obviously, there are many other factors besides the presence of a state church which affect the post-Newtonian, politico-religious dynamics within a society, not least of which would be a large struggling peasant population with active local traditions regarding a ‘cult of the saints’.

A related point arises if we consider the relation between a society that retains strong religious institutions and popular religious traditions – strong ‘visible religion’ – well into the modern era and then also experiences a strong sacralisation of politics. Classical secularisation theories thought of this as an unlikely situation given that, for them, the sacralisation of politics or political religion was most likely to arise in societies in which visible religion was ‘weakening’. I want to argue just the opposite. Societies in which visible religion remains strong are those most likely to experience a strong sacralisation of politics, whether one is thinking (in Gentile's terms) of a ‘civil religion’, such as is commonly associated with the United States, or a ‘political religion’, such as those that prevailed in early twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.

Finally, I would like to note an ambiguity within any sacralisation of politics: that it will have ‘ideological’ components as well as ‘ritualistic-symbolic’ ones, which must be distinguished analytically even if they are inseparable in the phenomena themselves. Thus if, from the ideological point of view, we look at the fascist sacralisation of politics we may say that it is anti-Christian in the sense that its designers developed it from a perspective that was derogatory toward religious thinking and practice. Yet, we also need to acknowledge that, from the ritualistic-symbolic point of view, fascism's sacralisation of politics is heavily indebted to Christianity, even parasitic upon it and impossible without it. Hence, paradoxically, the fascist sacralisation of politics might be anti-Christian (or anti-Catholic) in intent and yet very attractive to Christians (and specifically to Catholics). Indeed, it is quite possible that the fascist sacralisation of politics will be as attractive or even more attractive to fervent Catholics than to less devout Catholics or non-Catholic secularists.

Fascism's pursuit of a reconciliation and alliance with the Catholic Church

The existing historiography provides ample background on religious politics in Fascist Italy from the Risorgimento forward.Footnote ⁴⁵ We also have important works on the Fascist sacralisation of politics, including an intriguing regional study of Modena.Footnote ⁴⁶ And there is an extensive historiography on the Fascist courtship of the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁴⁷ In general, the picture that emerges from the latter may be sketched as follows. The origins of Fascist alliance policy go back at least to 1914 when the Nationalist lawyer Alfredo Rocco suggested a number of ‘points of contact’ between Nationalists and Catholics in which ‘may be found the germ of the whole religious policy of Fascism’, as Richard Webster puts it.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such ideas were of course anathema to the ‘Fascists of the first hour’ whose leader, the anticlerical Mussolini, trumpeted their collective sentiment in demanding the ‘eviction’ (sloggiare) of the pope from Rome.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, approaching power, a politically realist Mussolini reversed his public attitude toward the Church. Indeed, in his maiden speech to Parliament (1921), he affirmed that ‘the Latin and imperial tradition of Rome is today represented by Catholicism’, and even that ‘the only universal idea that today exists in Rome is that which radiates out of the Vatican’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Then, once in power, Mussolini pursued the dual objective of courting the Vatican while also seeking to eliminate the Catholic political party (PPI) with, it must be said, the Vatican's tacit support. Central to the courtship was the Fascist policy of giving the Church the sense of respect that had been sorely lacking in the politics of the liberal era.Footnote ⁵¹ The courtship intensified once Mussolini assumed dictatorial powers in January 1925, and negotiations toward a reconciliation and an ‘alliance’ began in August 1926 with Rocco as principal negotiator for the regime.Footnote ⁵² At this point, Mussolini was firmly rejecting the ‘religious agnosticism of the state’ and maintaining that the idea of a ‘separation of church and state’ was ‘as absurd as the separation between spiritual and material’.Footnote ⁵³ Of course, there were many prominent Fascists who opposed the negotiations.Footnote ⁵⁴ Still, it is clear that the Church bargained hard and won major concessions including the right to its own schools and an influence on public education, as well as a guarantee that its mass organisation, Catholic Action, could continue to operate independently.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, under the Lateran Pacts (1929), ‘Italy became a confessional state, unique among the great powers of contemporary Europe’.Footnote ⁵⁶ And while some Fascists like Giovanni Gentile accepted the reconciliation with reluctance, others saw it – in the words of Paolo Orano – as

And indeed the Duce himself continued to refer to Italy as a ‘Catholic nation’ throughout the 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁸

None of this should suggest that the church–state relationship under Italian Fascism was problem-free. In 1931 and again in 1938, significant conflicts erupted over what the regime regarded as the political aggressiveness of Catholic Action, and these sparked harsh words from Church leaders, even if neither conflict in the end proved difficult to resolve. Yet, in general, in the words of Giovanni Miccoli, ‘the history of relations between the Church and fascism is the history of a long and substantial collaboration’ – a view that Emilio Gentile affirms in his own way by referring to the relationship as one of ‘cohabitation’ (convivenza).Footnote ⁵⁹

However, the fact that Fascism and the Catholic Church enjoyed a ‘substantial collaboration’ or ‘cohabitation’ renders rather poignant the one major lacuna in the current historiography: our total lack of an account integrating this relationship with the fascist sacralisation of politics.Footnote ⁶⁰ So, for example, in his seminal, book-length account of the fascist sacralisation of politics, Gentile offers just six pages on ‘cohabitation’. And while he has, more recently, published important work on Catholic politics during the ventennio, the two topics remain largely separated in his work, which results in a somewhat contradictory picture.Footnote ⁶¹ On the one hand, Gentile emphasises the ‘totalitarian’ nature of the regime and the uncompromising fanaticism of its sacralisation of politics. It sought ‘the primacy of politics in every aspect of human life’ and developed a ‘project’ involving ‘the total subordination of all those values belonging to the private sphere (religion, culture, morality, love and so forth) to the supreme political value which was embodied in the state alone’. Even in historical reality, ‘by the end of the 1930s the tentacles of the party had come to reach every part of Italian society’.Footnote ⁶² On the other hand, however, Gentile not only concedes ‘cohabitation’ but argues that Mussolini was ‘convinced that Fascism . . . should avoid a war of religion, for in this domain, it was highly probable that it would lose’. Moreover, he cites a 1934 speech by Mussolini in which the freedom of religion is affirmed not simply out of respect for Catholicism's strength but because Mussolini understood that the strength of the regime depended in part upon avoiding the sort of divisiveness that would result from ‘any intervention in strictly religious matters’.Footnote ⁶³

Clearly it would be helpful to have a historical narrative in which the development of those Fascist practices considered to represent a sacralisation of politics was presented together with Fascism's courtship of the Catholic Church. Moreover, such a narrative should avoid privileging either set of initiatives, since there is no prima facie reason why we should see one of them as somehow primary and the other as secondary. Yet, just as clearly, I cannot attempt anything like the necessary narrative here: an articulation of the main issues with which such an account would need to deal will have to suffice.

One of those certainly is the politics of anticlericalism in liberal Italy as a larger context for grasping the two sides of fascist religious politics. Should we think of the fascist sacralisation of politics as an outgrowth of a now repressed anticlericalism (i.e. that what had to be explicitly denied for the alliance policy to work was what drove the sacralisation of politics)? I am frankly unsure of what a careful review of the evidence would show in this respect. What is clear is that, for reasons suggested by Taylor, Italy had a strong anticlerical tradition that was very much bound up with liberal Italy in the sense that the latter was seen as committed to being a ‘laical state’. The best existing studies have shown that anticlericalism attenuated a little during the Giolittian era, until the Libyan War (1911) and the Gentiloni Pact (1913) heightened it again.Footnote ⁶⁴ Mussolini was of course anticlerical in these years, but when he became an interventionist he also turned toward a Mazzinian concept of duty with its religious resonances.Footnote ⁶⁵ That conviction together with the need to have Fascism overcome the legacy of liberal Italy, as well as the early support Fascism enjoyed from the Vatican, gave Mussolini strong incentives to place the Catholic Church at the centre of his political programme. Hence, while political opportunism surely played a role in his thinking, there were also genuine convictions which led Mussolini to accord the Church this centrality. Above all, as he suggested in 1924, ‘a people cannot become great and powerful, conscious of its destinies, if it does not draw religion near and consider it an essential element of its public and private life’.Footnote ⁶⁶

A second issue with which a properly integrated historical narrative on fascist religious politics would have to deal is the connection between fascist totalitarianism and fascism's acceptance of an independent Church. That is, to what extent did the fascist totalitarian ‘project’ or ‘experiment’ preclude the latter? My suspicion is that a full review of the evidence would show very little conflict between the two initiatives, if only because most of the prominent Fascists who envisioned its totalitarian designs understood that it was more important to enlist the power of the Church than to risk the whole experiment by seeking to limit the Church's freedom within the socio-religious sphere. Certainly if we look at how Mussolini himself defined totalitarianism, this conclusion is strongly suggested. ‘In the Fascist concept of a totalitarian state’, he wrote in 1934, ‘religion is absolutely free and, within its own sphere, independent. The outlandish idea of founding a new religion of the State or subjecting to the State the religion professed by the totality of the Italian people never even entered the antechamber of our minds’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Fascism, then, was not seeking a totalised society that would give its secular politics a role parallel to that which traditional religion played in medieval European society. Rather totalitarianism for Mussolini seems to have meant seeking a political sphere totally under Fascist control as well as one that was top dog in a hierarchy of spheres and socially invasive from that dominant position – but not one aimed at the eradication of other spheres such as the religious sphere, even in principle. In this sense, Mussolini favoured a totalitarian politics but not a fully totalitarian society.

Mussolini's presentation of his concept of totalitarianism certainly squares with recent assessments of the 1929 Concordat between the regime and the Church, which one historian has called ‘utterly untotalitarian’ and another regards as having made ‘a mockery of Fascist totalitarian pretensions’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet, since no one doubts that Fascism sought total control over the political sphere, the analysis of Fascist totalitarianism ultimately pushes us to a third key issue: what was the Fascist approach to garnering mass support? No doubt the regime had hopes for the future – a ‘project’ in Giovanni Gentile's terms – based on visionary ideals such as a ‘new man’ that were in no way inspired by religious ideals or values, but, quite apart from such hopes, the regime needed support for its governance and policies just as any government does. How should we understand its efforts in this regard? To what extent can we speak of a single, coordinated regime policy for obtaining mass support? Or does the evidence point rather to regarding the totalitarian sacralisation of politics and the Fascist-Catholic alliance as two independent initiatives aimed at appealing to different constituencies? One might suppose, for example, that the alliance policy was aimed at a mass audience while the sacralisation of politics was targeted more toward political activists. Yet, quite possibly too, there was no such design. What is clear is mainly that the Fascists understood that both Catholic Rome and Imperial Rome were central to the Italian cultural heritage of romanità that they were seeking to promote in every imaginable way. Moreover, it is clear that there was no exclusion of Catholicism from Fascist ‘image politics’. If, for example, we distinguish between the Fascists as ‘they actually were’ and Fascism as ‘it actually was’ on the one hand, and the ‘images of themselves’ that Fascists constructed (or encouraged the construction of) on the other, then we can see, as Luisa Passerini has suggested, that the Duce image Mussolini self-constructed and the cult of the Duce others constructed were anything but anti-Catholic or anti-religious.Footnote ⁶⁹ Rather they were efforts to imbue the Duce with the sort of ‘sacred aura’ traditionally associated with men regarded as holy.Footnote ⁷⁰

A fourth issue that a fully integrated account of Fascist religious politics would need to tackle is the nature and degree of division among prominent Fascist leaders regarding Fascism as itself a ‘religion’ and Fascism as oriented by a Catholic alliance. That is, the long-standing recognition by all historians of Italian Fascism that there was in fact a wide range of views regarding what Fascism was and should become ought to be more fully probed in relation to the regime's religious politics. One focus might be the crisis of 1931, which was not only a church–state struggle but very much a conflict internal to the regime between political realists and the party's more intransigent, anticlerical wing, which seems to have feared that capitulation might lead to a full ‘clericalisation’ of the regime.Footnote ⁷¹ In any case, Mussolini, Gentile, Rocco, Giuseppe Bottai, Roberto Farinacci, the various Party secretaries and Mussolini's brother Arnaldo – a practising Catholic and editor of Il Popolo d’Italia until his death in 1931 – would be essential to such an analysis. Prominent non-regime Catholic Fascists such as Agostino Gemelli, rector of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, and such independent intellectuals as Giuseppe De Luca, Piero Bargellini, Camillo Pellizzi and Giovanni Papini might also be included in it.

Finally, I would suggest that a fully integrated account would need to look carefully at the nature of the interconnections between Fascism and Catholicism on the ground. Here, happily, much good work has already been done, and the problem in some measure is to fully synthesise what we already know. For example, we know from the splendid research of Mimmo Franzinelli that ‘during the Fascist ventennio thousands of ecclesiastics of every order and rank – parish priests, parsons, military chaplains, friars, abbots, missionaries, spiritual assistants to the Fascist Balilla and the Militia, provosts, nuns, abbesses, bishops, archbishops, apostolic delegates, cardinals – wrote to Mussolini’ personally, generally to ask favours (often pecuniary in nature).Footnote ⁷² These entreaties typically paid off; Mussolini seems to have been generous not only toward individual Catholics but also toward supporting institutional projects such as the 1935 renovation of the Milan Duomo.Footnote ⁷³ Franzinelli's work also shows that Catholic priests played important roles in all the Fascist political campaigns (such as the ‘Battle for Grain’) and even sometimes accompanied squadristi on violent missions, some of which involved attacks on Catholic political organisations.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, we know that ‘the rather brutal ras (boss) of Turin’ claimed to be a practising Catholic.Footnote ⁷⁵ And we know that Fascist and Catholic rituals were sometimes synthesised, as when Fascists interred ‘martyrs’ killed in 1934 within Florence's church of Santa Croce in a syncretic ceremony in which both Mussolini and the Archbishop of Florence participated.Footnote ⁷⁶ Finally, there were also some major exhibitions, such as the Exhibition of Augustus's Bimillenary held in Rome in 1937–8, which could be – and were – collaborative efforts of Church and state, given that the person being venerated reflected a legacy of romanità with which both institutions could identify.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Catholic pursuit of a shared agenda with Fascism

The politics of Catholic mobilisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been extensively studied both for Italy and for Europe generally.Footnote ⁷⁸ Likewise, we are reasonably well-informed regarding the changing practices of ordinary Catholics in the Italy and Europe of this period.Footnote ⁷⁹ In these connections, one could say, in brief, that the Catholic answer on the institutional level to the secularisation of the nineteenth century was the politicisation of religion, while the answer of ordinary Catholics both to secularisation and to the activism of the Church that it spawned was to privatise their experience much in the way Luckmann's account suggests they would. To this privatisation or de-institutionalisation of religious practice the Church responded by developing stronger forms of internal authority (for example, by means of the doctrine of papal infallibility), increasing the coherence of religious doctrine, seeking to gain control over the increasingly popular practice of pilgrimage, creating more saints and promoting the cult of Mary.

All of these trends were taken to a new level by the First World War, which fundamentally reshaped European religious history, as it did so much else. Here again there has been much significant research for Europe generally (especially France) as well as for Italy.Footnote ⁸⁰ And it is clear from this work that the Great War greatly stimulated Christianity in Italy, even as it also traumatised believers both at the front and behind the lines. The war thereby created a potent context for the assertion of Church power at the social level, although it also raised questions about whether the Church could continue to manage the increasing intensity and diversity of non-institutional religious practices – questions which probably reinforced the interest in Fascism on the part of the Vatican and that certainly undergirded its own post-war campaign to ‘re-Christianise’ society.Footnote ⁸¹ Finally, we have a number of important works on the mobilisation of Catholics during the Fascist ventennio, especially from the point of view of the Church hierarchy and its social campaign. What we still lack, as one historian noted in 1998, is a comprehensive social history of Italian religiosity during the Fascist period, although significant strides have been made in this regard in recent years.Footnote ⁸²

What I want first to suggest, based on this historiography, is that the Church engaged in a broad social offensive during the Fascist period, one to which (as we shall see) ordinary Italian Catholics seem to have been responsive even as they continued to seek their own personal, religious directions. Originally formulated in the immediate aftermath of the war, the ‘project of total re-Christianisation’ took on greater form and urgency during the papacy of Pius XI, who succeeded Benedict XV after his death in January 1922.Footnote ⁸³ At the centre of his programme was the idea of a ‘social reign of Christ’, which Pius articulated in his encyclical Ubi Arcano (December 1922). Appointed to spearhead this reign was the lay organisation Catholic Action, which, although it had existed for decades, was completely reorganised and connected much more intimately to the clerical-institutional structure of the Church. Its mission was now conceived not only as a mode of converting or reinspiring individual souls but also, by means of a militant organisation of the faithful, as a way of proclaiming the literal reign of Christ on earth and thereby reinvigorating the religious underpinnings of civil society. Then, in 1924, the pope declared that the following year would be a Holy Year capstoned by a Jubilee – as if to compete with Mussolini's dictatorial ambitions already foreshadowed in the murder of Giacomo Matteotti. Even more brazenly, in December 1925, as the Holy Year was drawing to a close, Pius used his encyclical Quas Primas to take the further step of instituting the Feast of Christ the King – with the celebration set for the last Sunday in October and thus in direct competition with the anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome (28 October). Notably, the image of Christus Rex had been used in the Vendée to combat the de-Christianising objectives of the French Revolution, and it would now again come to represent counter-revolutionary, pro-Catholic ideals not only in Italy but throughout inter-war Europe.Footnote ⁸⁴

Much more could be said about the Church's re-Christianisation programme, which certainly helps explain why the Vatican bargained so hard over the reconciliation with the Italian state. Indeed, it has been argued that the Church aimed at nothing less than a restoration of its premodern position as a ‘totality’ in the fullest meaning of the word – and, in that sense, as a kind of ‘totalitarian’ power well beyond the narrower fascist concept of totalitarianism.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although the Church's conception of such a restored totality certainly did not represent totalitarianism in the modern political sense (however we may wish to conceive it), the words ‘totality’ and even ‘totalitarianism’ may help us remember that the Catholic Church was not simply sitting back and contemplating the Fascist political scene from the loggia of St Peter's Basilica. Quite the contrary: the ‘social reign of Christ’ represented an aggressive and self-confident social offensive on the part of the Church, one that was bound up with re-totalising pretensions of its own including the aspiration on the part of individual Italian Catholics, sometimes articulated in these years, to become a ‘total Catholic’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In that way at least, the social reign of Christ and the fascist political offensive, as well as the ‘totalitarian experiment’ with which that offensive was bound up, ran side-by-side.

Secondly, I want to suggest that the reality of re-Christianisation cut deep in inter-war Italy. Especially during the 1930s, membership in Catholic mass organisations such as Gioventù cattolica (Catholic Youth) expanded notably (from 250,000 in 1930 to 400,000 in 1940), as did the audience for Catholic radio and cinema (some 1600 parish cinemas were operational in 1935).Footnote ⁸⁷ Enrolments in parochial secondary schools also rose from 31,000 in 1927 to 104,000 in 1940. And in the countryside, where Fascist efforts at organising leisure activities and vocational training rarely penetrated, they were mostly handled by Catholic organisations, often those run by nuns.Footnote ⁸⁸ In addition, independent Catholic intellectual journals such as Vita e pensiero, Studium and Il Frontespizio, flourished during the decade, as did the more official La Civiltà Cattolica. Yet perhaps the most dramatic evidence of a Catholic revival during these years involved the large attendance at sponsored celebrations. As John Pollard has noted:

Less clear is the relation between this re-Christianisation and mass support for Fascism. Historians generally agree that the vast majority of Catholics supported the regime, that fervent Catholic Fascists were a distinct minority, and that anti-Fascist Catholics were even less numerous.Footnote ⁹⁰ In general, commitment on the part of Catholics to Fascism appears to have been superficial; as Pollard puts the point, ‘most Catholics went their own sweet way, no more committing themselves to the regime than the bulk of the population’. ‘What Catholics were really looking for’, he continues, ‘was not the radical extremism of fascism but the kind of Catholic, conservative, corporatist, and authoritarian state’ championed by Maurras and Action Française and perhaps best expressed by the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain.Footnote ⁹¹ To characterise the attitude toward Fascism of the vast majority of Italian Catholics, some historians have proposed ‘a-fascist’ as a category, but this usage remains controversial.Footnote ⁹²

Of course there were obviously also tensions between Catholics – especially among the more politically active and those working within Catholic institutions – and the Italian Fascist regime. The Church complained bitterly about Fascist ‘statolotry’ in moments of crisis, undoubtedly feared the prospect of a fascist totalitarianism (even if less so than a communist version) and was hostile to Fascist intellectuals such as Giovanni Gentile (whom it saw as seeking to undercut Church authority and influence). Moreover, many priests and military chaplains found it difficult to work with and within the Fascist hierarchy, and some of them complained. And, of course, some fervently political Catholics (especially those who had served in leadership positions with the PPI) mounted anti-regime efforts, mostly from exile. Yet it is also true that there was a marked political convergence between Catholic institutions and the Fascist state. As historians often note, they had many common enemies – most obviously, international communism, but also political and cultural liberalism, democracy, socialism, freemasonry, and American-style capitalism and its culture of consumption. And they also had many common commitments: to rural life and an expanding population as well as to the heritage of Rome and, thus, to the ideal of romanità.

Indeed, it has been persuasively argued by a number of scholars that the Church and the regime developed a ‘shared agenda’ in the wake of the Lateran Pacts, and that, for many Italian Catholics in the early 1930s, a common sense of a ‘ “different modernity” was not only, as before [in the 1920s], intuited and conceived as possible or imminent . . . but seemed . . . to be concretely realiseable’.Footnote ⁹³ That is, they saw in the 1929 reconciliation a shared recognition that Catholicism could be conjoined with Fascism to undergird a new, ‘healthy’ modernity based on religious faith rooted in the family, the local community and the Fascist corporation (which Catholics tended to link with the corporatism advocated by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum). Such a modernity could lead Italy to ‘national greatness’, to an ‘alliance of patriotism with religion’, and thus to a reversal of the concepts of secular modernity promoted by the common enemies of Catholicism and Fascism.Footnote ⁹⁴ As a young member of Gioventù cattolica wrote in 1933: ‘the twentieth century will witness the flowering of a new Christian civilisation, one toward which Catholic and Italian Rome will show the way and guide the march’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Such hopes should remind us not only about just how much Italian Catholics felt emboldened by the political reconciliation they had achieved with the Italian state, but also about the fact that Italian Fascism was indeed an ‘experiment’ whose future trajectory seemed quite unpredictable in the early 1930s, and thus quite open to being creatively shaped. Ultimately, of course, these hopes would prove to be illusory, yet they persisted well into the 1930s and may well have achieved their apogee in the East African colonialism of 1936–8, an enterprise that the Church not only supported but upon which Italian Catholics eagerly seized as a golden opportunity for missionary work.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, precisely when the hopes were dashed is a matter of some controversy among historians. The dominant view traditionally seems to have been that disillusionment set in 1938 with the biological anti-Semitism of the Racial Laws, as well with the fact that the latter, in banning ‘mixed marriages’, contravened the right of the Church to define marriage.Footnote ⁹⁷ More recent historians have typically disagreed with this interpretation. Guido Verucci claims to have found ‘abundant documentation demonstrating that in 1938 and succeeding years the Italian Catholic world not only confirmed its adherence to the regime but justified and exalted its choices in favour of war’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Indeed, some historians have argued that the ‘unique and decisive turning point’ when Catholics broke with the regime did not come until the winter of 1942/3, when the war effort appeared to be a lost cause and the popularity of Mussolini sank precipitously.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, however we see this final break, it is clear that Catholic support for Fascism remained the rule until very late in the ventennio.

Those who most forcefully maintain a political-religion thesis tend to assume that fascism sought to attract a mass following primarily on the basis of a secularised sacralisation of politics and that, to the extent that fascism succeeded, its success may also be explained in these terms. Yet even if the first point is true – which is highly debatable – it may well be that any success fascism enjoyed in terms of mass appeal had more to do with the fact that it seemed to fulfil and advance popular religious aspirations. For Fascism appears to have been understood by an overwhelming number of Catholics, and thus an overwhelming number of Italians, as sharing the agenda of the promotion of what we might call a counter-secular society – a society aiming ‘to preserve God against a secular society’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hence, it may well be that the degree of support enjoyed by the Fascist regime had less to do with its most self-conscious efforts to theatricalise itself than with its traditionalist policy of offering support and new political hope to the Catholic faithful.

Popular religion in modern Italy

There is a substantial scholarship on what is variously called ‘popular religiosity’, ‘popular religion’ and ‘popular Catholicism’ in Italy, much of it produced by Gabriele De Rosa, and much of the rest inspired by his work.Footnote ¹⁰¹ What it shows, first of all, is that there are clear differences between Catholicism as practised by Italians in everyday life and Catholicism as understood and promoted by major ecclesiastical institutions. These differences go back to the period of Tridentine reforms, if not before, and they intensified rather than diminishing in the period after 1800. They were – and are – perhaps especially pronounced in the Italian south, but they exist throughout the towns and rural areas of the peninsula, to a lesser extent in the cities. In general, the scholarship shows that, while institutional religion is resolutely Christocentric, popular religion revolves around image cults (usually paintings or statues of the Madonna or of saints that dispense miraculous favours), relic cults (in which saints are understood to watch over their relics, travel with them, and protect people who rightfully possess them), and cults of the dead (especially cults devoted to souls in purgatory or cults organised around the skeletal remains of those who died a sudden death, such as plague victims). In popular Catholicism, ‘saints and madonnas . . . are always more powerful than Christ, and these saints and madonnas have a fearsome dark side, which has no counterpart in the idyllic world of the tridentine pantheon’.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, while institutional Catholicism in Italy distinguishes between the image and the physical reality of the Madonna or the saint, there is typically no strong distinction of this sort in the popular mind.

Scholarship suggesting that popular Catholicism intensified and changed somewhat in character after the Napoleonic invasion of 1796 is also considerable.Footnote ¹⁰³ As Sergio Luzzatto has argued, ‘in the contemporary age, when Christian faith has become a non-obvious choice, those same marvels [saints and their powers] have seen their own value rise: they have become proofs of the existence of God’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus, in the nineteenth century, many features of popular Catholicism flourished in Italy, including Marian cults (sometimes connected with reactionary political movements as in the Tuscany of 1799), the worship of St Francis and other charismatic saints, and pilgrimages to sanctuaries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In addition, new devotional cults such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus arose, as did Eucharistic and Marian ‘congresses’ as well as cults of the fallen with their ‘mix of religious and revolutionary metaphors’ – all which represented in part a ‘popularisation of romanticism’ that, in turn, led to ‘the increasingly mass character’ of religious experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Devotional books also became wildly popular in this period. For example, Giovanni Bosco, who founded the Salesian Fathers in 1864 and was later canonised, saw his Il giovane provveduto per la pratica dei suoi doveri (1847) go through 118 editions by the time he died in 1888.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Most of this activity was at least tacitly approved by the Catholic hierarchy, even as it sought to control its impact by formalising its meaning. Yet, as Luzzatto's remarkable study of Padre Pio suggests, the Church's challenges in this regard could be formidable. Padre Pio, who was born Francesco Forgione to a southern peasant family in 1887, was a Capuchin priest who claimed to have received ‘stigmata’ (like those of St Francis) on 20 September 1918 – forty-eight years to the day from the Italian reconquest of Rome and in the heightened atmosphere of a world war coming to a close. Yet, from the Church's point of view, the issue raised by Pio's stigmata had little to do with circumstances: it had to do with whether it is possible for an alter Christus to exist. The problem was not new for the Church of course, yet Padre Pio presented it, as Luzzatto writes, with a ‘double complication’. For while St Francis received the stigmata late in life and kept them secret until his death, Padre Pio received them as a relatively young man who could presumably live on for many decades (he would die in 1968) and who had immediately made them public. Secondly, unlike St Francis, Padre Pio was a priest who could give mass. Hence, whenever he administered the sacrament of the Eucharist, his condition as a potential alter Christus became explicit and pointed him out – depending on one's religious sensibility – either as sublime or as supremely sacrilegious.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Not surprisingly, then, while the Vatican generally distrusted him, it also acknowledged his notoriety and ever increasing popularity by paying him homage, sending popes to visit his parish (which quickly became a pilgrimage shrine), and eventually canonising him.

Despite the undeniable importance of popular religion for Italian culture, however, the literature on fascist political religion is almost entirely silent about it. Gentile, for example, presents the historical context for the fascist sacralisation of politics entirely in secular terms. When he discusses concepts of the ‘religion of the nation’ that developed during the Risorgimento, Catholic thinkers such as Vincenzo Gioberti are of course mentioned, but the nature of the power that Catholicism exerted in Gioberti's day is never discussed. Similarly, while the revival of traditional religion brought on by the First World War is acknowledged, its significance is reduced to being one of the ‘ingredients’ for a new, secularised ‘patriotic religion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In other words, while the wartime revival of Catholicism is relevant for understanding the origins of the fascist sacralisation of politics, it is not presented as similarly relevant to the meanings of Fascist rituals or to their appeal (to the extent that they had popular appeal). Likewise, the Fascist cult of the fallen is discussed but not the long-standing popular-religious cults regarding sudden deaths upon which the Fascist cult obviously drew, whether self-consciously or not. Moreover, while the fact that ‘fascist religion . . . harked back . . . to Roman religion’ is mentioned, its connections with popular Catholicism are not.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Finally, while it is noted that Mussolini believed that the Fascist mass liturgy should ‘have a “festive” element’, his belief is connected historically only with the festivals of the French Revolution and not with the popular-religious tradition of festivals in Italy.Footnote ¹¹¹

In contrast, the Fascist regime was from the beginning quite appreciative of the nature of Italian popular religion, as were, of course, some of its most famous critics such as Antonio Gramsci. As one historian heavily influenced by Gramsci points out, the school reform conceived by Giovanni Gentile in the earliest days of the regime

The regime's appreciation of the power of regionally based folklore also led it to promote the collecting of folktales, ‘the most famous of which, personally esteemed by Gentile and Mussolini, was “Songs, Tales, and Traditions from Italian Religions”, directed by Luigi Sorrento, which was brought out in thirteen volumes from 1925 to 1927’. And the regime ‘vigorously encouraged’ local patron-saint festivals, ‘tolerated the diffusion of Marian cults’, and contributed to the revived prestige of the sanctuaries at Loreto and Pompei.Footnote ¹¹³ Indeed, in 1925, the regime paid the train fares of pilgrims coming to Rome for the Jubilee.Footnote ¹¹⁴

During the Fascist ventennio, the professional disciplines of anthropology and folklore then emerging in Italy also became very interested in the peninsula's popular religiosity. In 1932, one anthropologist described, with a mix of astonishment and thinly veiled amusement, what happens to the statues of saints who fail to bring rain to the Italian south.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet, although he did not make the point, this anthropologist might have also noted that the regime, far from discouraging such childish practices, sometimes created syncretic practices of their own which reflected a not dissimilar mentality. By far the best known of these practices was its celebration of the ‘befana fascista’ – the kindly old fascist witch who brings toys to children on Twelfth Night.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The befana was of course a figure from folk tradition who, of late, had somehow managed to obtain a party card. As such, however, she offered a vehicle for some of the regime's more serious efforts at social welfare for children, even as she also facilitated the assimilation of a popular fable to a ‘wider fable of the regime in which . . . her character appeared to be sacrificed before the figures of the mother (the nation) and the father (the Duce)’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

However, by far the regime's most important use of popular religiosity came in 1926 as the nation celebrated the 700th anniversary of the death of St Francis, which came at a dramatic moment. Having declared himself dictator in January 1925, Mussolini then suffered four assassination attempts over the next two years, the second and most dramatic of them in March 1926, when an Irish woman who was attending the trial of Giacomo Matteotti's assassins in Rome, sought revenge by shooting at Mussolini on a Rome street. Not surprisingly, these failed efforts ‘contributed to the popular impression that Il Duce enjoyed the protection of divine Providence’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This was an impression that Mussolini had himself initiated when he saw to it that his war wounds were not only widely publicised but also cast him as ‘a political leader ready to fight in the trenches like a poor Christian’ and yet, at the same time, someone who, unlike other poor Christians, could not be killed.Footnote ¹¹⁹ 1926 was also the year in which Mussolini's former lover, the art critic Margherita Sarfatti, published her biography of him, Dux, which might be considered the birth announcement of the ‘cult of the Duce’. Among other features, the book dutifully presented what would become an iconic photo of the future Duce recovering in a wartime clinic.Footnote ¹²⁰ The book had a print run of 200,000 copies and would ultimately go through seventeen editions and appear in eighteen different languages.Footnote ¹²¹

After personally proclaiming 1926 as a Holy Franciscan Year, Mussolini gave speeches in which he recast the ‘poor man from Assisi’ as ‘the most saintly Italian, and the most Italian of the saints’. Indeed, someone in his audience could easily have mistaken St Francis for an irredentist or even a virile, audacious Fascist avant la lettre, given that, ‘alongside the elevation of his intelligence and character’, we also see someone in whom ‘the fervour of the apostles lives again, sudden and furious, in his Italian soul, unwilling to rest and dissatisfied by the borders of his land, which he is anxious to do everything he can to extend’.Footnote ¹²² And, as if to insure us that the connection between St Francis and the dictator praising him had fully registered, one priest responded to Mussolini's speeches by publishing a long pamphlet in which he laid out systematic parallels between the two lives, starting with the hard manual work they both did early in life (on low rations and while sleeping under the stars), moving on to their mutual love of animals (St Francis with his birds, Mussolini with his lioness), and then, finally, to the reformist spirit of their politics and their mutual love of country.Footnote ¹²³ No doubt Mussolini appreciated such parallels and sought to perpetuate them, as in 1928 when he accepted an invitation to sponsor and speak at the Fourth Cappuchin Centenary celebrated that September in Fossombrone.Footnote ¹²⁴

The idea that Mussolini was some sort of reincarnated saint also presents itself in a curious book, published in New York in 1936 by one Bonifacio Grandillo, in which he uses an elaborate numerological argument (based on the number 666) to claim that Mussolini's appearance on the world stage was prophesied by both St John the Divine and Dante.Footnote ¹²⁵ And, of course, more recent and far more reputable interpreters of Mussolini than Sarfatti have insisted upon his use of ‘elements from popular Christian tradition’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Still other historians have noted that the Mussolini family would come to find itself ‘at the centre of a cult in which were gathered phenomena belonging to the worship of divinities and certain forms of popular religiosity’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The point I most want to make here is that the cult of the Duce – as against the myth of Mussolini, which goes well back into his socialist past – is initially forged in 1926 around two foundational notions: that he was somehow invincible because of some special qualities in his physical body and that he also had the attributes of a saint, indeed one who could be thought of as a reincarnated St Francis. Given the robustness of popular Catholicism in Italy, it seems only reasonable to assume that the cult tradition of the Christian saints provided the most important context for the cult of the Duce – far more than pagan or Roman cults.

It also seems clear that being associated with the cult of the saints and with popular-religious traditions generally would have seemed a good thing to someone like Mussolini who coveted power and who would have understood just how saints – with their ‘fearsome dark side’ – had always been regarded as the most powerful forces presiding over Italian popular life. Thus, Mussolini's attempt to assimilate his own image to that of St Francis seems to me a fact of signal importance. Moreover, this effort in turn suggests that Mussolini's own self-fashioning as ‘Duce’, and thus the cult of the Duce more generally, were in part created by means of popular-religious imaginings. In this sense, in addition to the sacralisation of politics in the cult of the lictor, which we might think of as secular, we should also think of the sacralisation of politics implicated in the cult of the Duce – and think of it primarily as popular-Catholic. When we do so, we more fully appreciate why the omnipresent images of the Duce – like madonnas or images of saints – were so important to the Duce cult.Footnote ¹²⁸ For, like the image of the saint mounted at the village crossroads, the image of the Duce posted on a Roman wall was the same Duce who presided over Italy's political and social life. Moreover, and more generally, this way of regarding the cult of the Duce also deepens our appreciation of the fact that the Fascist sacralisation of politics had to do not only with secular rites based on Catholic models – as enthusiasts of the political-religion thesis see them – but also with the promotion of popular religion.