How the Lateran Treaty made the Catholic Church into a state in 1929 Photo: This is a souvenir of the creation of the Vatican State by the Lateran Pacts. Its “trinity” of King Victor Emmanuel III, Pope Pius XI and Il Duce (The Leader) Benito Mussolini celebrates the new unity of temporal and spiritual authority. This accommodation between church and state was called the “peace of Laetitia” (pax Laetitia) after the Roman Goddess of Joy. However, it helped legitimise a regime that by 1929 had already spread terror by political assassination, military tribunals and a police state. Until 1860 Pope Pius IX ruled over his Papal States which stretched across the Italian peninsula, dividing it in two. The following year, when urged to accept a peaceful settlement to avoid an armed assault he indignantly refused. Even after the Pope’s subjects voted overwhelmingly to join Italy, he remained adamant: “This corner of the earth is mine; I received it from Christ”. [1] In 1871 Italy was finally unified by absorbing the Papal States. The Pope, now deposed as King of Rome, retreated behind the walls of the Vatican, where he continued to fight the Italian state with every means at his disposal. He excommunicated the King of Italy. He also lashed out at the secular values of his kingdom. In his 1864Syllabus of Errors he condemned more than eighty “errors and perverse doctrines” including separation of church and state, a free press and secular education. Most Italians understood such “errors” to be presented “as a none too oblique condemnation of the Italian Kingdom”. [2] Pope Pius IX also directly forbade Catholics to participate by way of voting or any political involvement in the workings of the “godless” Italian state. After the unification of Italy, for 58 years a succession of popes refused to acknowledge the new country that had swallowed up the papal kindom. They refused to even set foot on its soil. With pathos Pius IX depicted his own boycott as a tale of persecution and talked of being a “prisoner in the Vatican”. In 1929 the long wait finally paid off when Mussolini proved willing to enter an alliance with the Vatican. A precondition of the negotiations was destruction of the parliamentary Catholic Italian Popular Party. Pius XI disliked political Catholicism because he could not control it. Like his predecessors, he believed that Catholic party politics brought democracy into the church by the back door. The demise of the Popular Party caused a wholesale shift of Catholics into the Fascist Party and the collapse of democracy in Italy
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 09:58:28 +0000
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