[LINK] "Reshaping the Vatican State, 1929"

[rfmcdonald]

Far Outliers quotes extensively from a passage in Michael Burleigh's recent Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror that describes how Fascist Italy and the Vatican State came to a sort of convergence in their perspectives on politics and public life, even at the expense of their former ideological purities.

Unlike the Treaty, the Concordat between the Vatican and the Italian state took two years to negotiate. For Pius XI it was a significant step in the re-Christianisation of Italian society, in the re-establishment of a 'Res publica Christiana'. It ended the unified Italian state's usurpation of the right of defunct Italian principalities to veto nominations to bishoprics and many other ecclesiastical offices and to appropriate the revenues of vacant benefices. The state now accorded civil recognition to the sacrament of marriage, which remained indissoluble as it had been under the civil code. The Roman Segnatura, the supreme ecclesiastical court, would henceforth deal with dispensations or nullifications. In other respects, the Church's antipathy to artificial birth-control harmonised with the Fascist state's militant quest for births. Fascism also wanted women on the maternity bed or in the kitchen in ways that conformed with Catholic models. Religious instruction was reintroduced into secondary as well as primary schools, thus negating the wish of the first Fascist education minister to teach older children philosophy rather than religion. The state also agreed to recognise diplomas awarded by pontifical universities. Most importantly, in article 43, the state conceded an autonomous space to Catholic Action: 'The Italian state recognises the organisations affiliated to the Italian Catholic Action in so far as these shall, as has been laid down by the Holy See, develop their activities outside all political parties and in immediate dependence on the hierarchy of the Church for the diffusion and realisation of Catholic principles.' In other words, a state that in May 1929 formally styled itself 'totalitarian' had conceded the Church's right to operate a variety of associations independently of such Fascist organisations as the Balilla youth movement, which had to desist from scheduling its activities to subvert Catholic holidays. Of course, the general climate created by Fascism stealthily leached into the Italian Church itself through something resembling osmosis. Even as it resisted Fascism, the Church tried to keep up with its heroic version of modernity. Under a regime that was ostentatiously virile, the Church endeavoured to 'de-feminise' its own image in favour of a more muscular tone. Clerical novels celebrated priests who were war veterans and athletically built devotees of 'extreme sports' -Pius XI himself being a keen climber.