III
It is the territorial aspect of the dispute which has chiefly occupied the attention of writers. Before the War, and even recently, various schemes of settlement were proposed. There was the famous “corridor” to the sea which was to permit the Pontiff and his emissaries free access to foreign nations without crossing Italian soil. There was a proposal that the Pope be granted unrestricted sovereignty over the “Borgo di San Pietro,” lying between the Vatican and the Tiber, or over the “Leonine City.”
All these and similar schemes evaporated not only because the Vatican refused to sponsor them, but also because no Italian government would consider ceding territory to a “foreign power.” “Not a single Italian citizen, not an inch of Italian soil” became something like a sacred refrain in Italian politics. And Mussolini himself has recently repeated very nearly these words.
To evade this difficulty, it was once proposed that the Pope be granted unrestricted sovereignty, pro forma, over the Vatican which he now merely “enjoys.” To this suggestion Benedict XV is said to have replied, “Ah, but the Vatican is a palace, not a territory.”
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Benedict XV as Cardinal Della Chiesa in 1914
For although the territorial aspect of the question is almost indifferent to the Vatican, it is not quite so. Or rather, it is not important how much territory the Pope is to rule over as sovereign, but it is essential that there be some. For, argues the Vatican, it would be absurd to accord the rank of sovereign to the Pope and then deny that he has a right to exercise it anywhere. And besides, a certain amount of territory is absolutely necessary to enable the Pontiff to exercise his spiritual dominion free and unhampered. The Vatican formula is that the “liberty and independence” which the Pope claims must be not only “real and perfect,” but also “manifest to the faithful of the whole world.”
Between these two claims – that the Vatican must have some territory and that the Italian state cannot cede an inch – there would seem to be a hopeless deadlock. This deadlock has been provisionally resolved, in a most ingenious manner, in the course of the informal conversations of the past eighteen months.
Behind the Vatican, to the west and southwest, there lies a large tract of land which is almost uninhabited. A portion of this land, perhaps of four or five square miles, is, according to the present tentative plan, to be added to the Vatican territory and constitute the material evidence of the Pontiff’s “liberty and independence.”³ But it need not be ceded by Italy in a political sense. It can first be cleared of its Italian inhabitants, technically speaking, by permitting them to take up legal residence elsewhere. Then it can be purchased outright by the Vatican. Since, in the meantime, the Italian government will have acknowledged the Pope’s sovereign status, it will not contest his right to exercise its functions over what belongs to him. But these functions need never become the occasion of a clash of political authority. There could be no clash over fiscal matters, for the State has never taxed Church property. There can obviously be no question of military affairs. Policing, care of roads and sewers and such like, could continue to be maintained by the Italian state; this would introduce no legal difficulty into the situation, since the Italian carabinieri frequently keep order during functions in St. Peter’s (which is an “edifice contiguous to the Vatican” and hence reserved to the Pope under the Law of Guarantees) although they never pass beyond the Bronze Door which symbolically separates the Kingdom of Italy from the domain of the Pope. If, then, there can never be an occasion for the Kingdom of Italy to contest the rights which the sovereign Pontiff exercises over this territory, his temporal status will be intangible, while Italy’s sovereignty will not have been diminished by an inch or a citizen.
This is not offered as a prophecy of the form which the ultimate material settlement will take. Many new factors may arise to modify it. But it presents, in broad outline, the type of settlement which at the present time is actually accepted by both sides as offering a practicable basis for further, and formal, negotiation.
IV
But it was not for the discovery of this formula that the solution of the Roman Question has waited these many years. What has made any approach to agreement seem so difficult (and to many students impossible) is the immaterial, imponderable factors involved.
For the first three or four years of Mussolini’s rule it seemed to many observers uncertain how long he would last. It is a fundamental of the Vatican’s policy that it cannot make agreements of first importance with individual statesmen, nor even with governments merely, but only with the nation itself, through a stable state truly representing the nation.
Once Mussolini’s political survival seemed reasonably assured, it was necessary to discover what his concrete intentions toward the Church were. The Duce has a reverberating anticlerical past, and is the author of impassioned pamphlets in praise of Giordano Bruno and other rebels against ecclesiastical authority. Further, he had inherited the policy of the Nationalist Party, which had fused with the Fascists just after the “March on Rome.” The Nationalists were ardent proponents of a reconciliation with the Vatican, but for purely political and nationalistic reasons, which they did not always explain with the requisite discretion. Their aim was popularly interpreted as being that of “hitching the Vatican to Italy’s chariot wheel.”
Benito Mussolini reviewing adolescent RSI soldiers, 1944.
This fact aroused the misgivings of other nations. It is commonly understood in Rome that there were diplomatic efforts on the part of several governments to prevent a solution of the Roman Question. It required some time for Mussolini to establish the doctrine that no third power might exercise any pressure, direct or indirect, in any future negotiations between himself and the Vatican. The reaffirmation some eight months ago in the official Vatican organ, the Osservatore Romano, that the Roman Question was exclusively a matter between the Italian Government and the Holy See was rightly taken as indicating that a decisive stage in the informal negotiations had been successfully passed.
A further difficulty, and one which has bulked most largely in the daily news, arises from the fact that a solution of the Roman Question almost necessarily implies the negotiation of a concordat between the Vatican and the Italian Government. Although the two treaties are technically distinct, they are naturally under discussion contemporaneously. The rather vivacious debates which have on two or three occasions been carried on by the press of the two parties have had as their subject matter topics connected with the concordat rather than with the Roman Question as such.
A concordat, of course, is merely a diplomatic agreement between the Church and a government specifying rights and privileges to be accorded and guaranteed. In the case of the anticipated Italian concordat, many of these points are already decided or implied by present practice, such as the status of religious education in the public schools and the right of religious orders to own corporate property. As for the appointment of bishops, it is a principle of the Catholic Church that such appointments are made by it alone; but when cordial relations subsist between it and the civil authorities it desires to make appointments acceptable to the latter and may give informal notice of its intentions. This will presumably be the practice in Italy under the expected concordat. But it is still early to speculate concerning such details.
The greatest difficulty appears to have arisen over the broad question of the position of the Church in the new Italian state, and the division of authority, especially in regard to education. The Vatican and the Fascist Government are two absolutisms facing each other, each ruled by a very firm willed and energetic man. Moreover, each is constantly being pushed from behind by partisan zealots. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that the negotiations have sometimes been difficult, and indeed on several occasions have come to a temporary impasse.
Pius XI
The Pope has shown little desire to complain of the present educational system in Italy in practice. But he has several times denounced Fascism’s theoretical assumption of a state monopoly over the education of the young, and the Fascist doctrine that the individual exists for the State. The doctrine of the Church, on the other hand, is that the individual exists for the glory of God; that the unit of society is not the State but the family.
Mussolini has put his theory into practice by absorbing into the machinery of the State or of the Fascist party nearly all social and educational organizations such as labor unions, co-operative societies, charitable organizations, athletic clubs, and the like. Pius XI has apparently not objected to the process as such. He gave a kind of formal blessing to the Fascists’ nation-wide children’s organization, the Ballila, when he permitted the diocesan authorities to appoint priests as spiritual advisers to the clubs. But the Vatican will not concede that State – perhaps some future anti-clerical or frankly atheistic state has an inherent right to a monopoly of the education of the youth to the exclusion, conceivably, of Christian agencies. To concede this would be equivalent to a renunciation, on the part of the Vatican, of the Church’s ancient claim to be a authorized teacher; and further, might constitute a precedent which could be used against it in some future dispute with an unfriendly government.
When, recently, Pope Pius made a vigorous public statement to this effect, Mussolini startled the world by promptly ordering the absorption of the few score thousand remaining Catholic boy scouts into the Ballila. But this incident was in truth only one more of those occasions upon which two parties to negotiations, faced with an apparent impasse, publicly restate their positions and the limits beyond which they cannot make further concessions. The Osseruatore Romano hastened to explain that the Pope’s statement “was confined solely to a moral plane, and was in no wise politically and did not constitute intervention in the affairs of the state.” The informal negotiations have accordingly resumed, although no hint has yet been given as to the formula which will eventually be found in this particular difficulty.
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