Kevin Madigan - The Popes against the Protestants: The Vatican and Evangelical Christianity in Fascist Italy

The Popes against the Protestants

The Popes against the Protestants

THE VATICAN AND EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY IN FASCIST ITALY

Kevin Madigan

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven & London

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949521

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Contents

Preface

In this book I tell the story of Catholic resistance to Protestant and especially Anglo-American attempts to send missionaries, establish churches, and transplant evangelical Christianity to Italy. Even more precisely, it is a story of how Protestants did this in fascist Italy, that is, in an authoritarian and right-wing, national, ethnological regime that was, by and large, intolerant of much that America and Britain symbolized and, religiously, all that the reformed congregations represented. In short, this book treats the Vatican response to what it termed the Protestant invasion or the Protestant danger in the fascist period in Italy. I concentrate therefore on a period during which the Roman Curia was attempting to establish a new Catholic world at the same time that, to the profound dismay of the pope and the Vatican hierarchy, Anglo-American evangelical churches were trying to Protestantize that world. Church and state, joined politically in 1929, were generally united in what they opposed. As the historian John Davis has observed in The Jews of San Nicandro, While in many respects the objectives of the political movement that Mussolini had founded in 1919 were unclear, there was no uncertainty when it came to identifying its enemies. Quite true. While this story has not been ignored by scholars, mine is the first volume, I believe, to have benefited from the vast and rich resources of Vatican and Jesuit archives for this period, which were made available only in 2006. Because these archives hold documents corresponding to the pontificate of Pope Pius XI, my story will begin in 1922 and end in 1939. Fortunately, those are the years to which the anti-Protestant campaign largely corresponds, as the pressures of war and the priorities of a new pope moved to the fore in 1939.

The approach I have adopted is basically chronological. Since neither the evangelical nor the Vatican campaign was static but changed quickly in tactics over time, I have been able to link new themes with the chronology and to mix narrative, description, and analysis in an effort to chart a rapidly developing interaction over time. Dominating all chapters is the Vatican confrontation with the evolving Protestant danger; the ambitions of the pope to establish a confessional state; the tactics and legal thinking of his point man on Protestant Affairs, Francesco Borgongini-Duca; the vast resources the Vatican brought to bear in suppressing the Protestants; the frustrations of the Vatican with governmental officials as well as with their bishops and priests; and the remarkable resilience of the persecuted evangelical groups, which, though harassed, persecuted, and in some cases criminalized, outlasted all efforts to contain or suppress them.

There are scores of interesting themes upon which I have not touched and archival sources not used here. Limitations of time and space as well as the overwhelming richness of the newly available archives themselves suggested I not try to do more than was possible in a single book. My focus, again, is on the unfolding Protestant invasion and the campaign against it organized from the Vatican. While many of the narratives I analyze involve ordinary parishioners, I view them, if critically, through the lens of documents produced by those sympathetic with the popes desire to neutralize the effectiveness of Protestant proselytizing. Much, much more can be done, though perhaps with sources different from those I have relied upon, on the regional and local effectiveness of the anti-Protestant campaign.

In some cases, the paucity of archival materials on key aspects of the anti-Protestant campaign startled me. Though I had intended to say much about the role of Catholic Action, one of the principal organs of Catholic resistance to evangelical missionizing, the Vatican Archives contained relatively little about it; and though I spent time at the Institute for the History of Catholic Action (ISACEM) in Rome, the materials it has preserved for this topic were, by and large, ones I had already examined at the Vatican Archives. This key dimension of the anti-Protestant campaign remains for other researchers to pursue, and I do hope some choose to do so. Because so much of the activity of Catholic Action was organized locally, even if encouraged by the national offices, diocesan archives may bear more fruit than the Vaticans for a detailed study of its role and effectiveness. Here I do attempt to give a general picture of the efforts on the part of Catholic Action against the Protestant campaign, one based on reports submitted by Catholic parishioners and prelates to several congregations at the Vatican and to the powerful Jesuit Pietro Tacchi Venturi, in whose archives and those of the Jesuits in Rome they are now preserved. This picture, I stress, will leave to other scholars the important work of describing the work of Catholic Action on a local and diocesan basis in the 1930s.

In the course of my research at the Vatican Archive I discovered material compiled by the Missionary Union of the Clergy. The material had to do with a vast plan conceived in the late 1930s, when all previous efforts to inhibit proselytizing and conversion and even to eradicate evangelical Christianity had failed. The plan describes something like an ecclesiastical Overlord, involving forty-four thousand priests going out, apostolic style, to preach the true gospel and thus to push the evangelical occupier back and defeat evangelical Christianity. The plan involved rigorous educational preparation on Protestantism in such institutions as the Gregorianum, which had agreed to provide tuition. Because the Vatican archival materials on my subject ended in 1939, with the pontificate of Pius XI, I could not, even by examining other Roman and Italian archives, determine if the plan was ever implemented. I doubt it was, in part because of the pressures of looming war as well as, perhaps, the priorities of a new pope. That said, I have written a chapter-length treatment of this vast and arduous plan. If other scholars could determine what, if anything, happened to this plan, they will have contributed an important chapter to this story. Because I could not tell how this chapter of history ended I have consigned it to an appendix, though in truth the story it tells cannot, I think, be ignored. It expresses something about the seriousness of Vatican intentions when all else had failed.