Week 65

 

On January 18^th 1919 – after more than a few decades of laborious efforts, both public and private, misgivings and recriminations – the Italian Catholics had at last a party of their own. And a genuinely modern one in so far as political parties were concerned: the foundation of the Partito Popolare Italiano, incarnation of a tradition that stretched back into the past centuries but at the same time – and arguably to a larger extent – an expression of those growing sentiments of modernity that, by means of the new social awakening of the great masses, had opened the way to what appeared to be a reconciliation of political, national and religious conscience.

The key, distinctive trait of the new Catholic formation was its clear and explicit a-confessional nature; that is, the new Party, while it made no secret of its intention to appeal to the Italian religious masses and to operate (in so far as possible) in agreement with the Church hierarchy (and to an extent with the support of the Church), was not conceived as a political arm of the Catholic Church, nor as a body subordinate to the Church, dependent from it for political guidance or responsible to the Higher Clergy (outside of course of the personal responsibilities of individuals in matters of religious conscience) – rather as a political formation operating within the Italian system, dependent and responsible towards the body of its electors. On the other hand, the Popular Party claimed no authority whatsoever on religious matters or on any of the “political” matters that were of competence, or directly involved the Church – this meant especially, the “Roman question” and the perspective of a possible conciliation between the Italian State and the Roman Church.

This choice, in the mind of the Party's founder – father Luigi Sturzo – was a clear and necessary one, aimed both at safeguarding the Party's ability to carry on its political action on the same ground and in the same conditions of the old liberal forces and of the other growing mass formation, the Socialist Party, and at protecting the prerogatives, rights and authority of the Church from the various dangers resulting from a direct political engagement.

The new Party – explained the Catholic newspaper Il Messaggero on January 29^th - “both with its program and with its name, displays a clear intention to prevent any possible confusion that may in any way result in an involvement of the Holy See”.

The acceptance of this a-confessional character though, had not been without frictions and recriminations, coming at the end of decades of doctrinary, organizational and political elaboration, both within the Church and the national Catholics, concerning the relations with the Italian State, the approach to the new social instances and in a larger and larger measure the reaction to the spread of socialist ideas.

The Great War and the incumbent end of the long parliament of 1913-19, with the growing debate over the introduction of proportional suffrage (after that of male universal suffrage in 1913 had already brought the larger masses closer to the political scene), had been a clear incentive for the Catholics to increase their efforts for the formation of a proper political force. In the new political scenario of early 1919 – and on this matter the Church largely agreed with the more politically oriented Catholics and members of the Clergy – a large and substantial abstention of the Catholic masses would have only worked in favor of the socialists, with their increasingly radical program; while a return to the system of local, conjunctural agreements to support liberal-conservative candidates (which had begun already in the 1904 elections and had then seen its “institutional” form with the so called “Gentiloni pact” of 1913) appeared unpopular for the hostility against the “pact” that had taken root during the conflict, and likely conductive of further frictions between the progressive and conservative souls of the Catholic movement, as well as generating disillusionment among the masses of land workers, which after the war were less and less patiently awaiting for the compensations promised in exchange for their sacrifices.

It was therefore with a broad and “non-religious” statement of intention that the new Partito Popolare Italiano was announced, to great surprise and clamor, on January 18^th 1919 – after a few weeks of internal debate and the cautious support of the Church to the works of the founding congress (which was more of a private meeting than a proper congress – the Partito Popolare had its first national congress in June 1919, in preparation for the elections of November 16^th 1919).

The program, subscribed on January 13^th by a “provisional committee” of G. Bertini, G.B. Bertone, S. Cavazzoni, A. Grandi, G. Grosoli, G. Longinotti, A. Mauri, U. Merlin, G. Rodinò, C. Santucci, with f. Luigi Sturzo acting as political secretary, opened with an appeal:

To all men, free and vigorous, who in these fraught times feel upon themselves the high responsibility and duty to cooperate towards the supreme ends of the Motherland without prejudices or preconceived notions, we make our appeal so that, banded together, they may fight in favor of the ideals of justice and freedom in their full integrity.

And, while the representatives of the victorious nations take council to lay the ground for a fair and lasting peace, the political parties of every nation need to offer their contribution to strengthen those tendencies and principles which will serve to prevent any future danger of new wars, to give a stable configuration to the Nations, bring forward ideals of social justice, improve the general conditions of labor and develop the spiritual and material energies of all the nations united in the solemn bound of the “Society of Nations”.

[…] Hence we support the political and moral program, heritage of the Christian peoples, that the most distinguished of voices first reminded us all of [a reference to Benedict XV's letter of August 1917], and now strongly promoted by Wilson as a fundamental part of the new world order. […] Therefore we ask that the Society of Nations recognizes the rightful national aspirations, furthers the progress towards universal disarmament, abolishes the secrecy of treaties, establishes the freedom of the seas, supports in international relations social legislation, labor equality and religious freedom […] and that it may be bestowed with the power to enact sanctions and with the means to protect the rights of the weaker peoples against the overpowering desires of the stronger ones.

None of these arguments was, in itself, anything exceptional in the Italian post war political landscape, as more or less all political formations supported some version of Wilson's fourteen points – with most distinctions rising at the time of their practical application and, as we saw in previous weeks, especially in the definition of the extent of those “rightful national aspirations”. What is more relevant is the explicit “national” character of the Popolare program – the Catholics had played, willingly or unwillingly, their role in the Great War (Sturzo had been, albeit with moderation, favorable to the Italian intervention) and submitted to the authority of the Italian State – it was time for the large masses to play their “national” role. A realization that proceeded on parallel ground to the efforts made by the leader of the socialist reformers Filippo Turati to promote – as much as he could in the context of his declining political leadership – the view that for the working classes and for the socialist masses especially, the Great War had been a “national” experience; a fact which called for a substantial revision of the traditional reformer approach to the ways of access of the masses to the political life of the nation, or of the way of involving the masses with the political life of the nation, according to the point of view.

A matter this one of substantial relevance for all “national” political forces – that is, with the exception of the revolutionary fraction of the socialist movement, that persisted in its blindness to the fact that the experience of the Great War had certainly spread new sentiments among the masses, but a proper doctrinary internationalism was by and large not one of them. Whether the Great War can be taken as the completion of the Italian national unification, as the final “national” formative experience for the Italian masses (as the contemporary literature on the conflict was often keen of suggesting, not much unlike what their predecessors had done for the Risorgimento wars), or just as one moment of the evolution of the masses' approach to their own unified nation (whatever the nature of this unity was to them); it is a fact that the acceptance of these instances of unity represented and symptomatized a matter of fact conciliation between the Italian Catholic movement and their idea of the Italian Nation, which had taken place despite the persistent friction between the official Church and the Italian institutions. This growing desire of the Catholics to truly and genuinely cooperate to their national life, and to restrain no longer their activities to economical and cultural matters, but to be “complete” political individuals as well as complete Catholics, was something that demanded an answer.