Benito's shadow.

Rome in America

Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimiento to Fascism

Peter R. D'Agostino

University of North Carolina Press, $22.50, 393 pp.

It is well known that President George W. Bush and Pope John Paul II share many views on human ethics. During his June trip to Rome, the president made it quite clear that he understands the Vatican's keen interest in shaping the morals of the American church. Televised reports of the president's visit also reminded viewers that John Paul is not only a religious leader. The fact of the pope's power over the Vatican bathed the meeting in the pomp and ceremonial glow of an affair of state and an encounter between statesmen and rulers. One could only imagine how diminished the whole event might have seemed if the pope were not also a king, even if the kingdom itself is only 160 acres in size. Americans watching might have been surprised to learn, though, that as recently as 1920, the pope, an exile in his own land, could not effectively claim title even to those few acres, and that an international battle had raged for half a century over the church's rights to a bit of Roman real estate. The successful outcome of that struggle meant that the American president, leader of the world's only superpower, came to Rome as an equal, even a supplicant.

A close relationship among American Catholicism, politics, and the Vatican is really nothing new. In a book of landmark significance, Peter D'Agostino confronts the complex history of Roman influence on the American church during a century of stress that rivals our own perilous age. The author traces the international quest for the restoration of papal temporal power from the pontificate of Pius IX, who witnessed the unification of Italy, lost all his territories, and became a virtual prisoner in a Vatican now claimed by the Italian state, to the Fascist Italy of 1929, when Pius XI resumed his temporal monarchy over a Vatican City the size of a postage stamp. He proceeds to the beginnings of World War II, when Pius XII began to realize the costs of the church's all-too-cozy relationship with Mussolini, who had restored his realm.

D'Agostino's tough-minded judgment is that the American Catholic Church from 1870 to 1940 was no innocent bystander watching all this warily from a distance while carefully tending to its own assimilation into American life. As D'Agostino shows, American Catholics were deliberate and willing partners in the drive to re-establish the church's power in Italy. This single-minded goal shaded every feature of American Catholic life from parish associations to public rituals to school textbooks. Catholic politics, too, had a Roman thrust, with the tragic result that the American church--its pulpits and its publications--became a willing apologist for the rise of Mussolini and Italian Fascism between 1922 and 1940. D'Agostino's book should be required reading for American Catholics interested in the international politics of religion and the possibilities--and consequences--of Vatican involvement in the life of nations. For scholars, the history of American Catholicism will never be the same.

D'Agostino's account is neither a polemic nor an expose. It is first and foremost good history, characterized by deliberate, methodical, even dry, research. The argument is this: the nineteenth-century drive for Italian unification and nationhood, the Risorgimiento, which began with revolts in 1848 and culminated in the expropriation of the Papal States (1860) and finally the invasion of the Vatican (1870), left the papacy with no territorial power in Italy. The church scorned the new state (Liberal Italy) as a usurper of the pope's rightful position until the "Roman Question" of papal temporal power could be resolved. Between 1848 and 1929, the papacy propagated an "ideology of the Roman Question" in politics, theology, media, and ritual. The "ideology" (a term D'Agostino employs in a technical sense) "argued that the pope required the temporal power for spiritual independence and for the health of civilization itself" and "ferociously cudgeled Liberal Italy as an illegitimate polity." Early papal intransigence (1848-1914) gave way to "transformation" (1914-29) as the church and the Italian state warily engaged one another, and finally to "realization" (1929-40), when the Lateran Pacts (1929) gave the papacy a "small temporal sovereignty, the State of the Vatican City." The trouble is, of course, that by 1929 Liberal Italy was dead, and the man who resolved the Roman Question was Mussolini.

In each stage, pursuing the Roman Question had a profound impact on the culture of the American church and "generated boundaries separating Catholics from other Americans." By comparison, it appears, the controversies over Modernism, which have received so much scholarly ink, were sideshows. D'Agostino argues that belief in the Roman Question became a driving force that united "liberal" and "conservative" thinkers; involved bishops, clergy, and laity; and transcended ethnic boundaries. The author notes the early appearance of Catholics of Irish and German descent in public rituals. While he acknowledges the importance of Italian priests, nuns, and parishioners, particularly as Italian migration to America began to swell, he points out that between 1875 and 1946, "there was no Italian or Italian-American bishop in the American hierarchy." Instead, Irish and German bishops led the way. Indeed, it was William O'Brien (auxiliary bishop of Chicago under Cardinal George Mundelein) who, dressed in his sacred vestments, gave the Fascist salute during the playing of the Giovinezza (the Fascist anthem) at a seminary dedication in 1936. This is not a ploy by D'Agostino to shift responsibility for the Roman Question from Italian-American Catholics (though one is curious about the enthusiasm displayed by Irish-American prelates for Mussolini). Rather, he wants to show that American Catholicism in this period cannot be characterized solely through its ethnic divisions and local communities. There was, he makes clear, a more "catholic" identity forged through solidarity with and devotion to the papacy itself.

D'Agostino's book is of great importance, not least because of its direct challenges to received thinking. The author overturns the vision of two generations of historians and theologians. The first (John Tracy Ellis and John Courtney Murray) reassured both Americans and Roman prelates that traditional hierarchical Catholicism was suited to a pluralistic American democracy that itself differed crucially from the virulently anti-Catholic nations of liberal Europe. A more recent generation (Jay Dolan and James Hennesey) has claimed for American Catholicism an inherently democratic nature first seen in colonial outposts, later manifesting itself in parish struggles for control, and finally vindicated by Vatican II. D'Agostino will have none of this American-Catholic "exceptionalism," which, he believes, establishes a fictitious foil in an intransigent, monolithic Europe and conveniently ignores--even denies--both the determined intervention of the Vatican in American affairs and the dynamic struggles within European Catholicism.

Just as important is D'Agostino's discussion of fascism and anti-Catholicism. Here he makes two key arguments that are likely to prove controversial. First, he states that international Catholicism's preoccupation with the ideology of the Roman Question made the U.S. church a key player in dealing with Mussolini. Both the papacy and the Fascist government actively used U.S. Catholicism to influence American opinion. At the 1926 Eucharistic Congress in Chicago, Italian dignitaries mingled freely with American prelates, who welcomed them openly to seats of honor and lauded Mussolini's government in staged rituals ("Viva il Re, Viva Mussolini, Viva il Papa!"). D'Agostino strongly suggests that Monsignor Enrico Pucci, Roman press agent of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and therefore the most important source of Italian information for American Catholic newspapers after 1919, was in fact a Fascist spy in the Vatican. D'Agostino claims, "there was no American Catholic antifascism," and argues that "ideology, not utilitarianism, structured American Catholic responses to fascism." (Commonweal, for example, was a strong supporter of papal claims to territorial sovereignty, and while it published articles by notable anti-Fascists such as Don Luigi Sturzo, the magazine also published favorable commentary on Mussolini.) Even if, as D'Agostino cautions, religious groups in America in general tolerated or looked on Mussolini with a sympathetic eye (astonishingly including even the Jews until the mid 1930s), the unique relation of American Catholicism to Rome made connections to Fascist Italy at once more intimate, more important, and more dangerous. To put the matter bluntly, the ideology of the Roman Question led the U.S. church to tolerate and even to support Italian fascism.

This conclusion leads to a second difficult claim, but once again this intellectually courageous historian does not flinch. Recent discussions of anti-Catholicism in the United States (from historians John McGreevy and Mark Massa, SJ, for example) have focused attention on the illiberal attitude of American liberals toward Catholics since World War II. D'Agostino recognizes the long tradition of bigotry in American history. He joins in criticizing the work and "unwholesome motives" of men like Paul Blanshard, who called the Vatican a "totalitarian church" comparable to the "totalitarian state" centered in the Kremlin. On the other hand, he writes, "I would suggest, however, that the Catholic Church's relationship to fascism since 1922 and the near absence of any selfcritical Catholic evaluation of those two decades contributed in part to these postwar criticisms of the church." If D'Agostino is right, and he has made a powerful but undeniably controversial case in this book, then Roman Catholics in America will have to look closely at the U.S. church's history with open eyes. And further, before accepting so easily the recent "faith-based initiatives" that commingle Vatican interests with those of the U.S. administration, Catholics will have to consider deeply not only the present, but the recent past. So be it. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we will save our church.

W. David Myers is associate professor of history at Fordham University. He is the author of Poor, Sinning Folk: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Cornell).