A Civil War (76 page)

The authoritative prelate incidentally let slip a few words – the Church ‘does
not and cannot remain neutral between good and evil' – which, while sounding, on the one hand, like a necessary if vague appeal to the highest principles, on the other hand did not help orientate individual believers in a situation that compelled them, if necessary, to risk ‘calm', ‘tranquility' and ‘order' in choosing between positions which also needed to be defined in relation to the problem of ‘good' and ‘evil'.

The polyvalence of the appeals issued, above all by the bishops, with their various tones and emphases, stemmed very largely from the fact that they gave no precise indication as to who were to be the recipients of the condemnations and warnings. It was a repeat performance of ‘deprecating the deeds' without ‘denouncing the culprits', which had characterised the attitude of ecclesiastical teaching regarding Fascism and the war.
¹⁵
The intransigent Fascists were the first to resent this ambiguity; the anti-Fascists were offended by it; most people were bewildered or, conversely, felt authorised to set their consciences at rest, without any undue traumas, delegating the government once again to the hierarchy. The root problem – namely that of the legitimacy of the political command exercised by the actually existing authorities – was evaded.
¹⁶
Thus it might happen that declarations by manifestly pro-Fascist papers such as
L'Italia Cattolica
turned out to be very similar to stances taken by the highest ecclesiastical authorities. In that Venetian magazine the following words are quoted from St Paul's
Epistle to the Romans
: ‘Let every soul be subject to authority. Whoever resists authority, resists God's design and merits eternal damnation. Therefore, according to your duty pay the tributes, enlist and fight. In these things too the authorities are instruments which God uses.'
¹⁷

There is clear assonance here not only with the bishop of Mantua, who urged respect for the authorities and for the German troops, only to find his admonition immediately re-launched by an RSI poster,
¹⁸
but also with many of the vague appeals to respect for unnamed authorities. Even in one of the most well-known episcopal documents, the
Lettera degli arcivescovi e vescovi della regione piemontese al clero e al popolo nella Pasqua 1944
(‘Letter of the archbishops and bishops of the region of Piedmont to the clergy and the people at Easter 1944'), the effort seems to be to reconcile ‘obvious considerations of prudence with constant concern about not letting oneself be dragged into performing actions that were in any sense compromising and binding', maintaining for that end ‘on the
principal point … an able and eloquent silence' – where, however, ‘ability' was such as to be to the detriment of eloquence, if the latter was taken to mean the vehicle of an emphatic strength of conviction.
¹⁹
And ability revealed itself as ambiguity when the bishops condemned the ‘bloody guerrilla warfare of armed bands' (the Fascists in no way regarded themselves as bands involved in guerrilla warfare) and ‘any form of reprisal and violence from whichever side it may come and whatever justification it may flaunt'. On the fundamental point of the RSI's legitimacy, the Piedmontese bishops took cover behind St Thomas: ‘The use of power will be God's if it is exercised according to the precepts and norms of divine justice; instead it will not be God's if he who holds it uses it to commit injustice', and behind Leo XIII: ‘In all things in which the law of nature or the will of God is violated, commanding is as iniquitous as obeying.'
²⁰

Of an altogether different feather was the moral tension that had inspired the letter of the Dutch bishops of 25 July 1941, which was immediately circulated in France as well.
²¹
In contrast to so many instances of caution, greater clarity must be recognised in the pragmatic argumentation of Monsignor Giuseppe Angrisani, bishop of Casale Monferrato:

When all was over Monsignor Angrisani wrote: ‘The bishop, like all the other bishops of this wretched northern Italy, torn between brothers and bloodied by fratricidal massacres, had not the slightest intention of taking one or the other side.'

This bishop is, moreover, an example of how in the very person of a prelate simple practical prudence and genuine religious ardour could coexist. In fact,
on 14 November 1944 Monsignor Angrisani asked to be shot in the place of 150 hostages from Ozzano.
²³

Another exemplary case of the question of obedience or disobedience to the existing authorities is that of don Aldo Moretti, awarded the
medaglia d'oro
in North Africa, when still convinced that it was not an ‘unjust war', and one of the organisers of the Friuli Osoppo partisan formations. The semi-formal annexation to Germany of the province of Udine led to the existence of a particularly close intertwining of the patriotic and anti-Fascist aspects of the struggle. Don Moretti recognised the illegitimacy of the government installed by the Nazis (it was illegitimate enough in Germany, its standing in Italy can only be imagined), but at the same time recognised the occupier's ‘right to govern within the bounds of what regards public order'. He then sought to save himself from contradiction by clinging to the argument that annexation to the Reich of the territories of the Pre-Alps and the Adriatic coast was not altogether perfect: if it were so, ‘in theory, it might make it difficult in all honesty entirely to legitimise the armed resistance and to equate it with that provided for by Holy Scripture'. The declaration of war on Germany by the ‘Italian state that had constitutional continuity' had then, don Moretti goes on to say, remedied the situation.
²⁴
Don Moretti did nonetheless get the local branch of the Christian Democrats to reject the orders prepared by the CLNAI against Fascist traitors and collaborationists.
²⁵
These contradictions reoccurred in don Moretti's direct superior, the bishop of Udine, but weighted the opposite way, in the name of public order on the one hand, and on the other – and this is the thorniest point – of respect for human life. Monsignor Giuseppe Nogara, whom Bianchi defines as an ‘uomo possibilista', published, in the
Rivista diocesana udinese
, one of his declarations of 12 December 1943, in which he recommended obedience to the legitimate ordinances of authority – because in matters relating to the maintenance of order even a de facto government has to be obeyed. The following January the bishop, who had previously even offered himself to the Germans so long as ‘you leave my children in peace', invoked ‘respect for life', without naming anyone in particular who had violated it; and then in March and April, with the other bishops of the Adriatic coast, he condemned the occupier's abuses of power, but
also the acts of violence and excesses of those opposing him.
²⁶
On 30 November 1944 the same prelate addressed a letter to his parish priests enjoining them to exhort the partisans to present themselves and to hand their weapons over to the Germans, on the guarantee that they would not be deported. A Garibaldi source has no hesitation in defining this policy as treason, since in a phase of the most violent roundups, such as that taking place, it induced surrender. The Germans, for their part, had made sure that they distributed safe-conduct passes to those parish priests who presented themselves. Even the commanders of the Osoppo brigade repudiated the bishop's letter, alleging – ‘hypocritically', comments the Garibaldi document – that it had been extorted from him. The Christian Democrats managed to get the bishop to withdraw the controversial document.
²⁷

There are, besides, many cases of priests urging the partisans to present themselves – in the Chiavenna zone, for example, or in Piedmont, where the priests appealed to family reasons.
²⁸
Ada Gobetti recounts the case of a youth who presented himself, induced by a ‘foolish priest', was hanged by the Germans, and died crying ‘Viva i partigiani!'
²⁹

The notification of 5 December 1943 after the Fascist reprisal for the killing of Colonel Gino Gobbi, and the homily subsequently pronounced for Christmas that year by Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, Archbishop of Florence, are among the documents that best lend themselves to several of the present reflections. Both were widely circulated, being published by
L'Avvenire d'Italia
on 7 and 28 December, and then the homily in a pamphlet entitled ‘The paths of peace'.
³⁰
The cardinal deprecated ‘the struggle between sons of the same land', deprecated ‘the acts of oppression, the impositions, the acts of violence, the excesses', warned that ‘rash actions produce reactions that often go beyond the provocation'. The speaker's most astute and subtle words, and the most equivocal for his listeners, were those in which he reminded them that ‘every act of violence, every blow, every illegal use of arms is criminal, because no one can take the law into his own hands, unless it be to apply the well-known principle: each law permits
violence to be rejected with violence'. Was this, then, a go-ahead, for those of a mind to take it as such, even for armed resistance against violence exercised by an illegal authority? In fact, Dalla Costa went on to assume almost the guise of counsellor to the prince. The cardinal asked ‘those holding public office or exercising public functions' to respect first and foremost the law prohibiting violence, and to show an example of equanimity ‘in their own interest' and ‘because nothing increases the influence of he who is in command than the use of means that are in keeping with perfect justice'.

It was
Voce Operaia
, the Roman newspaper of the Communist Catholics, which – jealous guardian of a dual orthodoxy – was most directly affected, and missed no opportunity to make the most of the clergy's contribution to the Resistance, that assumed the task of giving an answer, respectful in form but firm in substance.
³¹
The cardinal was reminded that he could, if he wished, choose not to speak out, but there was no way in which he could steer a middle course; and then the paper went so far as to vindicate, in principle, the liberty to judge even the actions of legitimate authorities. If – the open letter argued – it is still lawful for a Catholic to discuss case by case whether one need obey the legitimate authority or what the nation and people feel to be the true authority (always to exclude the latter would mean excising Catholics from any historical movement), here this problem did not even arise, because it was clear that the Nazi-Fascists were
also
an illegal authority.

At times indiscriminate condemnations pronounced by the clergy acquired greater intensity when the victims of abuses of power and acts of violence were priests. In such cases there seems to emerge a sort of request for special, institutionally guaranteed treatment for those exercising the sacerdotal function. The bishop of Padua, Carlo Agostini, promoter of Fascist-style patriotic manifestations, protested in a letter to the provincial chief when some priests were arrested, claiming that they were ‘holy persons', sanctioned by the laws and conventions in force both in Italy and in the ‘Great Germanic Reich'.
³²
The bishop of Reggio Emilia, Eduardo Brettoni – who on 21 December 1943, in a telegram to the GNR Command, had deprecated as ‘private violence … the brutal crime that had destroyed the life of the
primo seniore
Fagiani', killed by partisans – protested, with a message published in the ‘Bulletin' of his diocese, against the execution of don Pasquino Borghi for having given refuge to partisans and allied prisoners. Eight other people had been shot with the priest; but the bishop, without so much as a word about them, wrote that 30 January 1944 ‘will be sadly
remembered in the annals of this Diocese … for the execution … of one of our priests'. The bishop passed no comment on the charges and the sentence (‘they are the tasks reserved for the dispassionate judgment of history'); but warned that if, as was rumoured, ‘grave acts of violence in the form of insults and blows' were ‘used … [the culprits] have incurred excommunication … in accordance with canon 2343, paragraph 4, of the code of canon law'.
³³

Hand in hand with this tendency to practise a sort of separatism was the other, predominant one that saw the force of the clergy springing from the fact that they lived among the people and, in the case of active warfare, among the combatants. From this point of view, military chaplains of the RSI and partisan chaplains were driven at times by similar motivations. On the one hand, there was the Vatican, which managed to get Germany to concentrate all prisoners who were priests at Dachau, though this meant separating them from those they were meant to be assisting; on the other hand, there was the reaction of a deported priest, don Roberto Angeli, who regretted this measure: ‘If our priesthood was not for others, what value did it have? That sterile sacred selfishness could only devalue us morally both in our own eyes and in those of others.'
³⁴

In a declaration by Giovanni Sismondo, bishop of Pontremoli, the double standard is particularly evident. Writing about himself, the bishop, who was awarded the Resistance's silver medal for military valour, wrote of himself: ‘Our approach was always impartial … We always tried to maintain relations with all the Commands of the various warring parties.' From the military commands the bishop then descends to the men: ‘Hide the outcasts; betray not him that wandereth' (Isaiah, 16.3) and ‘Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the pilgrims (Mark, 25, 33).'
³⁵
These words were pronounced after the event (in 1946), when the Christian Democrat hierarchy and leadership were beginning to distance themselves from the Resistance, following a process that
in the years of the Cold War would lead the Catholics almost to mute their participation in it.
³⁶
This attitude, like the opposite one of vindicating the Catholic contribution, shifts a contradiction onto the plane of journalism and historiographic reconstruction.