More than any other ruler of modern Italy, Benito Mussolini has been friendly to the Vatican. What is his religion?
Benito's father was a freethinker of the most virulent, nationalistic, antiPapal sort. Benito was not baptized. His mother was devout. In his Diary of the War, Benito reminisces as follows :
"I went to mass. That Christmas is still vividly remembered. Very few did not go to the Christmas mass. My father and a few others. . . . I remember I followed my mother. In the church there were many lights and on the altar, in a little flowered crib, the Child born in the night. It was all picturesque and it satisfied my fancy. The odor of the incense alone disturbed me so that sometimes it gave me unbearable discomfort. At last the notes of the organ closed the ceremony. The crowd swarmed out. Along the street was a satisfied chatter. At midday there smoked on our table the traditional and excellent noodles of Romagna."
But Benito was still a young man when he went to atheistic Lausanne (Switzerland) and debated with a Protestant clergyman the proposition: "God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease." Benito upheld the affirmative before a huge Socialist audience.
At middle age, Benito wrote a book: The Real John Huss. Huss was one of the first of the Reformation martyrs, and Benito praised him passionately. Benito was, at this point, a protestant but not a Protestant.
Came the War. Benito caught fire of d'Annunzio, and in 1919 he said: "I yearn for a paganizing people, loving life, struggle, progress, not blindly believing in revealed truths, nay despising miraculous pharmacopoeia. It has no room in an intense movement of minds and activities for formulae, parties and men monopolizing divine 'specifics!'"
Three years later, Benito was Dictator. As he shed Socialism, so he shed anticlericalism. In Parliament he rose. Said he:
"I affirm here that the Latin and imperial tradition of Rome today are represented by Catholicism. If, as Mommsen said, 25 or 30 years ago, one cannot stay in Rome without a universal idea, I think, and affirm, that the only universal idea which today exists in Rome is that which radiates from the Vatican. I am very uneasy when I see national churches being formed, because I know that there are millions of men who will no longer look to Italy and to Rome. For this reason, I offer this hypothesis: If the Vatican were to definitely renounce its temporal dreams—and it already seems to have started on this path—profane, lay Italy should furnish the Vatican with material aid; those material facilities for schools, churches, hospitals and so forth, which a lay power has at its command. For the development of Catholicism in the world, the increased millions of men who throughout the world look to Rome should be a matter of profit and pride to us who are Italians."
Still irreligious, he became an ally of the world's greatest religious organization. Is this a first step towards a true profession of religious faith? Piero Chiminelli, in The Christian Century, asks the question and leaves it unanswered.