The Lateran Treaty

On 11 February 1929, in the Lateran Palace in Rome, the Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri, acting on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III and Pope Pius XI, signed three documents: a political treaty, a financial convention and a concordat. After the place of signature they became known as the Lateran Pacts or the Lateran Treaty. They put an end to the so-called Roman Question, a dispute that had lasted since 1870, when Italian troops occupied Rome, the last remnant of the Papal States. The Holy See recognised the Kingdom of Italy with Rome as its capital, and Italy recognised the Pope’s sovereignty over a tiny territory around St Peter’s Basilica, which became a state called the Vatican City State. The concordat made Catholicism the sole religion of the state and granted the Church in Italy wide privileges. For the Church it was the solution to a problem that four of Pius XI’s predecessors had failed to resolve. For Mussolini it was his greatest political success since taking power: a dictator who a few years earlier had condoned the murder of the leader of the opposition now gained, in the eyes of millions of Catholics in Italy and around the world, the stature of a statesman who had reconciled the nation with its Church.

The prisoner of the Vatican

For more than a thousand years the popes had been not only the leaders of the Church but also the rulers of a secular state in central Italy, the Papal States. During the unification of Italy the new kingdom seized most of its lands in 1860, and on 20 September 1870, after the French garrison had withdrawn, Italian troops entered Rome through a breach by the Porta Pia. The city became the capital of Italy. In 1871 parliament passed the Law of Guarantees, which granted the Pope royal honours, personal inviolability, the right to receive envoys, the use of the Vatican and Lateran palaces and an annual endowment of more than three million lire. It did not, however, give him sovereignty, and above all it was a unilateral act of a state that could amend it at any moment. Pius IX rejected it and never accepted a single lira.

The popes declared themselves “prisoners of the Vatican”. For almost sixty years none of them set foot outside the Vatican walls, so as not to acknowledge Italian authority over Rome in doing so. Newly elected popes blessed the crowds not from the outer loggia of the basilica but from inside the church. Catholics were forbidden to take part in parliamentary elections. This ban, known as the non expedit, was gradually relaxed from the beginning of the 20th century, and in 1919 Benedict XV allowed the priest Luigi Sturzo to found the Italian People’s Party, which that same year became the second-largest force in parliament. Yet the dispute was only half dead. Both sides had long known that the papacy would not recover Rome; all the Church now sought was a scrap of land that would guarantee the Pope’s independence from any secular power. Liberal politicians even held talks on the subject, and in June 1919 in Paris the Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, met an envoy of the Vatican about it, but none of them dared to make a compromise that would mean giving up even a fragment of Italian soil.

Mussolini and the Church

Mussolini had started out as a socialist and a militant anticlerical, the author of pamphlets against priests. After the war, as he built the Fascist movement, he quickly grasped that in a Catholic country one could not govern against the Church. In his very first speech in the Chamber, in June 1921, he said that the Latin and imperial tradition of Rome was now represented by Catholicism. When he became Prime Minister in October 1922, he had crucifixes hung in classrooms and introduced religious instruction in primary schools, and the state saved the Vatican-linked Banco di Roma from bankruptcy. In 1925 he married Rachele in church – they had long been married in a civil ceremony – and had his children baptised.

The Vatican responded with cautious goodwill. Pius XI, elected in February 1922, distrusted parliamentary democracy, feared communism and did not want the Church tied to a single party. In July 1923, under pressure from the Vatican, Sturzo resigned as secretary of the People’s Party, and in 1924 he went into exile. When the Fascists murdered Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 and the opposition was counting on the fall of the government, the Vatican did not back it and discouraged Catholics from cooperating with the socialists. Fascist violence did not spare Catholics either, however. In August 1923 Blackshirt thugs beat to death Father Giovanni Minzoni, who organised Catholic youth, in Argenta, and in the years that followed they attacked the premises of Catholic Action. The Pope protested, but did not break off the talks.

Three years of secret negotiations

The first discreet contacts between Mussolini and Gasparri were made as early as January 1923. Negotiations proper began in August 1926. The government was represented by the Councillor of State Domenico Barone, and the Pope by the lawyer Francesco Pacelli, brother of Eugenio Pacelli, then nuncio in Germany and later Pope Pius XII. For more than two years they met in secret, with Pius XI personally following every detail. They argued over the size of the territory, compensation, marriage, schools and the youth organisations that the regime wanted to monopolise within its Opera Nazionale Balilla. From the outset the Pope made one condition: the political treaty had to go hand in hand with a concordat regulating the position of the Church in Italy. When Barone died on 4 January 1929, Mussolini concluded the negotiations himself, meeting Pacelli many times.

The signatures were made at noon on 11 February 1929 in the Lateran Palace, the seat of the Bishop of Rome. The date was not chosen by chance: it was the anniversary of the first apparition at Lourdes. Gasparri, then seventy-six years old, a cardinal since 1907 and one of the most eminent canon lawyers of his age, signed the documents on the Pope’s behalf. Mussolini signed them as head of the government.

What was agreed

The treaty had 27 articles. In it Italy reaffirmed, in accordance with Article 1 of the Albertine Statute of 1848, that the Catholic religion was the sole religion of the state. It recognised the sovereignty of the Holy See in the international sphere and its full and exclusive authority over the Vatican, “thus creating the Vatican City State”. The new state covered about 44 hectares: St Peter’s Basilica, the Apostolic Palace, the museums, the gardens and a few other buildings, mostly enclosed by the old walls. St Peter’s Square belonged to the Vatican but was to remain open to the public and policed by the Italian police. A dozen or so other buildings in Rome, among them the Lateran and the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St Paul Outside the Walls, as well as the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, were granted extraterritorial status. An attack on the person of the Pope or an insult to him was to be punished in the same way as an attack on or insult to the King. Cardinals were to receive in Italy the honours due to princes of the blood. The Holy See declared that it would remain aloof from temporal disputes between states and from international congresses convened to settle them, unless the parties jointly appealed to its mission of peace. The Vatican was to be regarded “always and in every case” as neutral and inviolable territory. In Article 26 the Holy See declared the Roman Question definitively and irrevocably settled and recognised the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy, with Rome as its capital. The Law of Guarantees was repealed.

The financial convention settled the accounts for 1870. Italy undertook to pay the Holy See 750 million lire in cash and to hand over government bonds with a nominal value of one billion lire. In it the Pope noted that, in view of Italy’s post-war financial situation, he had limited his claims to what was “strictly necessary”. Indeed, the sum was smaller than the amount the state would have owed the Holy See had it paid the endowment provided for in the Law of Guarantees since 1871.

The concordat, of 45 articles, was as important to the Church as the treaty. The state recognised the civil effects of church marriage and left questions of its validity to the church courts. Religious instruction, hitherto given in primary schools, was to be extended to secondary schools, and it could be taught only by teachers approved by the bishop. Priests who had left the priesthood or incurred ecclesiastical penalties could not hold posts that brought them into contact with the public. Bishops were chosen by the Holy See, but before an appointment it was to ask the government whether it had any political objections, and bishops swore an oath of loyalty to the state and the King. The state recognised the organisations of Catholic Action, provided that they operated outside all political parties and under the direct control of the hierarchy. Clergy were forbidden to belong to any political party. This provision finally ruled out a Catholic political party in Italy, while at the same time preserving Catholic organisations independent of the regime. Their existence was soon to become the main bone of contention.

“The man whom Providence has placed in our path”

Mussolini presented the reconciliation as the work of Fascism, which had achieved what the liberal governments could not. On 13 February Pius XI, addressing the professors and students of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, said that the agreement had required a man such as the one “whom Providence has placed in Our path”, a man free of the prejudices of the liberal school. These words, later repeated as the description of Mussolini as the “man of Providence”, went round the world. The Pope added that he had given God back to Italy and Italy back to God.

Six weeks later, on 24 March 1929, Italians voted in the first election in which they could only accept or reject a single list of 400 deputies chosen by the Fascist Grand Council. Many parish priests urged the faithful to vote “yes”. According to the official figures, more than 98 per cent of those voting supported the list. The liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce and a few other senators opposed the treaties, pointing out that the state was abandoning the principle that citizens were equal regardless of their faith. In exile, anti-fascists wrote that the Church had given the dictatorship its moral blessing. The treaties still had to be ratified, and in May, during the debate in parliament, it became clear that Mussolini and the Pope understood them quite differently.

Significance

The Lateran Treaty was one of the most durable achievements of Fascist Italy. The Italian Republic wrote it into its constitution in 1947, and the concordat was not revised until 1984. The Vatican City State exists to this day. For the road to the Second World War, however, its significance was above all political. Reconciliation with the Church gave Mussolini a degree of support at home that no propaganda could have bought, and abroad the respect of conservatives and Catholics who for years afterwards were happy to see him as a defender of order against Bolshevism. Strengthened in this way, the regime was soon able to reach for an empire: six years later it invaded Ethiopia, with which in 1928 it had still concluded a treaty of friendship, and a large part of the Italian episcopate blessed that war.

The Lateran model also found imitators. In July 1933, a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power, the Holy See signed a concordat with the Reich, negotiated by Eugenio Pacelli, by then Secretary of State. It, too, guaranteed the rights of the Church and of Catholic organisations in return for the withdrawal of the clergy from politics, and the Catholic Centre Party had dissolved itself two weeks earlier. Hitler treated it as international recognition of his regime and began breaking it almost from the first day. The Vatican’s neutrality, written into the treaty, took on real meaning during the war: the papal state, surrounded by Rome and, from September 1943, by a city occupied by the Germans, survived as a neutral enclave in which diplomats of the countries fighting the Axis found refuge.