The ratification of the Lateran Treaty

On 7 June 1929, in one of the halls of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican, the Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and the Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri exchanged the instruments of ratification of the Lateran Treaty, signed in February that year. Under the treaty’s final article, the agreements came into force at the moment of the exchange. At noon the Carabinieri left the area around St Peter’s Basilica and their place was taken by the Swiss Guard. Thus the Vatican City State, the smallest state in the world, came into being, and Pope Pius XI became its first sovereign. In the documents of that day both sides affirmed their will to observe the agreements loyally “in letter and in spirit”. Behind this formula, however, lay a bitter dispute that over the previous four weeks had almost wrecked the whole undertaking.

It is often said that the treaty “was ratified” on 7 June. That is a simplification. Ratification was a process: the Italian parliament approved the treaties in May, the King and the Pope signed the instruments of ratification, and on 7 June these were exchanged, which gave the agreements legal force.

Parliament and a quarrel over words

After the treaties had been signed in February, Mussolini had to steer them through parliament. Formally this was not difficult. The Chamber of Deputies, elected in the March plebiscite from a single list approved by the Fascist Grand Council, consisted solely of men of the regime. On 14 May 1929 it passed the law implementing the treaty and the concordat almost unanimously. The Senate, which still included senators appointed for life in the liberal era, did so on 25 May. There were 317 votes in favour and six against, among them the philosopher Benedetto Croce, the jurist Francesco Ruffini and the journalist Alberto Bergamini. Croce told the Senate that alongside those who believed Paris to be worth a Mass, there were others for whom hearing or not hearing Mass meant infinitely more than Paris, because it was a matter of conscience. On 27 May the King signed the law.

The real problem was created by Mussolini himself. During the debate in the Chamber in mid-May he delivered a long speech intended to reassure anticlerical Fascists and liberals. He argued that the Fascist state remained fully sovereign, that the Church within the state was “not sovereign, and not even free”, that religion was to be taught in the spirit of Fascism, and that the young would belong to the state. He also said that Christianity, born in Palestine, would have remained a small sect had it not come to Rome and become Catholic. For the Pope these words were unacceptable, especially on the education of the young, which the Church regarded as its own domain.

Pius XI replied publicly. On 14 May, addressing the pupils of the Jesuit college at Mondragone, he declared that if it were a matter of saving even a single soul he would be ready to negotiate with the devil himself, and that he would not give way on education. At the end of May, in a letter to Cardinal Gasparri published in L’Osservatore Romano, he took issue with the Prime Minister’s arguments and called some of them heretical. He also recalled that the treaty and the concordat formed a whole: if one fell, so would the other. Neither side, however, wanted a breach. In the final hours before the exchange of ratifications a compromise formula was agreed and entered into the protocol: both sides undertook to observe loyally not only the treaty, with its irrevocable mutual recognitions of sovereignty, but also the concordat.

The seventh of June

Mussolini arrived at the Vatican before noon, in diplomatic uniform, and was received with the honours due to the head of government of a foreign state. The ceremony was short. Gasparri and Mussolini confirmed that the instruments of ratification of King Victor Emmanuel III and of the Pope were in order and signed the protocol of exchange. An hour after the Prime Minister had left, at noon precisely, the treaties came into force. The Carabinieri left their posts, and the border of the new state was taken over by Swiss Guards in full dress uniform. Contemporary accounts emphasise the cordial atmosphere of the day.

On the same day the Pope promulgated the first laws of the new state, headed by its fundamental law. Under it the Pope, as sovereign of the Vatican City State, held full legislative, executive and judicial power. The laws came into force at midnight on 7–8 June. The state covered about 44 hectares and had a few hundred inhabitants; it had its own flag and soon its own post office, coinage, railway station and radio station, which Guglielmo Marconi inaugurated in 1931. Italy paid the compensation provided for in the financial convention, and the Pope entrusted its management to a specially created office.

The following weeks brought gestures that had been awaited for sixty years. The first Italian ambassador to the Holy See was Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the quadrumvirs of the March on Rome, and the first nuncio in Rome was Archbishop Francesco Borgongini Duca. On 25 July 1929 Pius XI went outside the Vatican walls for the first time, leading a eucharistic procession in St Peter’s Square. In December King Victor Emmanuel III paid the Pope a visit in the Vatican, and the Pope visited the King at the Quirinal, the former papal palace.

A fragile accord

The quarrel of May 1929 foreshadowed future conflicts. The Fascist state sought complete control over the education of the young, while the Church defended its organisations, above all Catholic Action, whose existence was guaranteed by the concordat. In the spring of 1931 Fascist squads attacked its premises, and at the end of May the government dissolved its youth organisations. On 29 June 1931 the Pope issued, in Italian, the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, in which he condemned the “pagan worship of the State” and Fascism’s monopoly on education. A compromise was reached in September: Catholic Action survived, but confined to religious activity and subordinated to the bishops.

The last great clash between Pius XI and Mussolini concerned the racial laws of the autumn of 1938. The ban on marriages between “Aryans” and Jews violated the article of the concordat that recognised the civil effects of every church wedding, and the Vatican protested, though to no effect. The Pope died on 10 February 1939, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the signing of the treaties, while preparing an address to the Italian bishops gathered for the occasion.

Significance

The exchange of ratifications closed the Roman Question and created a state that outlived Fascism, the war and the monarchy. The treaty’s article on the neutrality and inviolability of the Vatican proved its worth during the Second World War. When Italy entered the war on Germany’s side on 10 June 1940, the diplomats of the Allied countries accredited to the Holy See moved onto Vatican territory, among them the British envoy and the Polish ambassador. From September 1943 to June 1944 the Vatican was a neutral island in German-occupied Rome, and Jews, escaped prisoners of war and anti-fascist politicians hid in papal buildings, including extraterritorial ones. At the same time the reconciliation of 1929, and the papacy’s acceptance of the regime with which it had signed the agreement, helped Mussolini to build a dictatorship that enjoyed broad support. It was this dictatorship that led Italy into war in Ethiopia, in Spain, in Albania and finally at the side of Adolf Hitler.