Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy Manuel Borutta

10 Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy Manuel Borutta The culture wars of the nineteenth century affected all aspects of European societies:· politics and religion; .media, arts and science; private and public sectors; urban and rural areas; upper and lower classes; men and women; and adults and children. What was at stake in these conflicts was the place and meaning of religion: while liberals strove to differentiate between politics and religion in public and private spheres, democrats and radicals wished to replace faith by knowledge. Various religious denominations - Protestant, Jewish and Catholic - fought against secularization and for the political and public character of the Church and religion, asserting the supremacy thereof over state and science. As Europe's public religion par excellence, Catholicism was at the heart of these debates: the pope incarnated the fusion of temporal and spiritual power. Catholic rituals and symbols domi nated public space, and ultramontanism openly challenged the rationalist project of modernity. 1 In Italy, this conflict was particularly fierce. Not only did it cause a cul ture war, but also a 'real' war between the nation and the papal state, and it divided society into secularist (bourgeois, male, urban) and Catholic (clerical, female, rural) blocks. These divisions have been preserved in two scholarly worlds which until today remain largely distinct from each other. 2 Ironically, for a long time neither camp perceived the Italian case as a proper culture war. 3 The anti-]esuit campaign of the 1840s, the conflict between state and Church in Piedmont after 1848, and the Risorgimento's struggle for Rome, were considered independently of another, and not as elements of one culture war (perpetuated after 1870). The latter was understood as an exclusively Prussian or German phenomenon and identified with Bismarck's fight against the Catholic church after 1871. 4 Anti-Catholicism was an important feature of the Italian culture war. But due to various reasons among which the country's image and self perception as essentially Catholic, it was underestimated and, to some extent, hidden by the term 1anticlericalism'.5 Recent interventions have dramatized the Italian culture war and demonized the Risorgimento's 191 192 Manuel Borutta anti·Catholicism. By exaggerating the violence of the conflict,6 reproducing anti~Masonic conspiracy theories and confining the Risorgimento to a tel eology, which stretches from Reformation intolerance to the totalitarianism of the twentieth century/ they continued the culture war of the nineteenth century and, therefore, did not succeed in changing the dominant para· digm.8 Against these tendencies to disregard or mystify the phenomenon, I want to suggest an analytical use of the term 'anti-Catholicism'. In this chapter, I will reconstruct the radicalization of the Italian culture war and explain the anti-Catholic turn of the Risorgimento after 1848. 1 will high light the anti-Jesuitism of the 1840s, the culture war in post-revolutionary Piedmont, the representation of the Catholic clergy in different media and the Risorgimento's battle for Rome. Anti-Jesuitism in Italy, 1843-1848 In the beginning, the Risorgimento seemed to live in harmony with Catholicism. There was 'a powerful, liberal Catholic movement in the Italian Church, partly influenced by the French reformer de Lan1menais and led by theorists like Rosmini and Lambruschini. They argued for reforms in Church-state relations and (in Lambruschini's case) the introduction of religious liberty'.9 Many men1bers of the clergy supported the project of national unification.10 The abbe Vincenzo Gioberti's Del prirnato morale e civ ile degli italiani (1843), a neo-Guelph vision of an Italian confederation under the presidency of the pope, was the most popular text of the Risorgimento. For Gioberti, 'a union of eighteen centuries' had brought Italy and the Holy See together as a family: just as the pope lived physically in Italy so diet Italy 'live spiritually in the pope'.11 When the new pontiff, Pius IX, introduced liberal refonns in the Papal States, he seemed to incarnate these neo-Guelph aspirations and encouraged the hope of a symbiosis of the Italian nation and the Catholic religion.12 Then, however, Gioberti's Prima to was criticised by prominent Jesuits like Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, and the nation became 'the subject of a vigorous debate within Catholic intellectual circles [ ... J about the respective roles of Church and nation as the principal source of political sovereignty'.13 In this debate, Gioberti depicted the Jesuits as the most dangerous enen1ies of the Italian nation and Catholic religion. In the second edition of his Primato (1845), he described the Society of Jesus as a source of evil that negated bourgeois values and male virtues, incarnated the antithesis of friendship, tnarriage, fa1nily and fatherland, and destroyed the human species. 14 To Pier Dionigi Pinelli (later Piedmont's minister of the interior), Gioberti wrote: l hope, my dear Pierino, that we will crush the Fathers in every way. This hope keeps me alive. I hate the Jesuits (in a political way) like Hannibal hated the Romans. ls Culture War in Risorgimento Italy 193 Anti-jesuit sentiment was easy to mobilize in nineteenth-century Europe because since the Enlightenment there had been a strong popular and elite tradition of suspicion and scapegoating of the Society.16 During his exile, Gioberti had witnessed successful anti-jesuit campaigns in Brussels, Paris and SwitzerlandY In Il Gesuita moderno (1846), a tract of five volumes totalling approximately 3000 pages, whose second edition saw a print run of 12,000 copies, he attacked the Jesuits as a political sect that wanted to destroy both Italy and Catholicism. Gioberti called them 'bodily sisters' of Austria and warned his readers about an 'Austro-jesuitical faction'. He bor· rowed notions from botany and epidemiology to describe the Society of Jesus as a threat to the nation, one that had to be eradicated.18 In 1848, Gioberti travelled to Rome three times in order to persuade the pope to suppress the order. But in April, his battle was lost: Pius IX rejected the prospect of a papal presidency over a federation of Italian states and refused to wage war against Austria. 19 A year later, Gioberti's writings were put on the Index librorum prollibitorurn, together with those of Antonio Rosmini and Gioacchino Ventura. Liberal Catholicism was marginalized within the Church. 20 Yet outside the Church, Gioberti's anti-jesuit campaign had already been joined by journalists, novelists and cartoonists who depicted the Fathers as enen1ies of progress, civil society, nation and mankind.21 In January 1848, the Jesuit Francesco Pellico, a brother of the Risorgimento writer Silvio Pellico, wrote to the Piedmontese king, Carlo Alberto: 'Journals and libels [libelli] wage war against us'. He demanded the tightening ofcensorship and the banning of a new edition of Gioberti's Gesuita, but without success. 22 After a series of anti-Jesuit manifestations and riots during the revolu tion of 1848-49, the Society of Jesus was expelled from most parts of Italy and formally banned from the kingdom of Sardinia.23 The anti-Jesuit law, extended to Italy in 1866 and to Rome in 1873, violated important prin ciples of the Piedmontese constitution (religious freedom, inviolability of property).24 It was, however, both emancipatory and repressive at the same time. The banishment was also legitimated with ideals of individual freedom: it was depicted as a 'liberation' of the Jesuits from their strict obedience.25 According to the ex-seminarist Aurelio Bianchi-Giovini, they could render themselves useful as priests, professors or missionaries and get in touch with human society without blushing. 'They would not be Jesuits anymore, but human beings'. 26 Anticlericalism in Piedmont, 1850-55 Since anti-Jesuitism worked with conspiracy theories and metaphors of infec. tion, it seemed logical to extend the aggression towards other religious orders and the clergy in general. An important step from anti-Jesuitism to anticler icalism was the culture war in the kingdom of Sardinia. Pre-revolutionary 194 Manuel Bortttta Piedmont has been called a 'modern theocracy'.27 In February 1850, the relation between state and church changed fundamentally. The minister of justice, Giuseppe Siccardi1 proposed a bill for the suppression of the separate system of church courts and the legal immunity enjoyed by the clergy, and the extension of state control over certain ecclesiastical property. Breaking with tradition/ Siccardi did not try to gain the approval of the Holy See for this action.28 The Siccardi Laws provoked massive protests by the Catholic clergy and press. Il Giovinetto cristiano depicted Siccardi as a 'minister of the devil'. Yet Siccardi did not see himself as anti-Catholic, but 'just/ defined Catholicism differently: as a merely spiritual affair- an understanding that was/ however, not shared by most Catholics. 29 They caused a break between the liberals and Catholic moderates, but were cheered by the liberal and democratic press as a turning point in Piedmont's history. Cartoonists showed the minister as a modern Hercules who smashed the clerical hydra and a bourgeois Jupiter/Moses whose Tablets of the Law struck the clergy like a lightning bolt ('Let there be light!'), associating this light with the Genesis and with the Enlightenment at the same time.30 In the years that followed, anticlericalism became a mass movement in Piedmont.31 The press was the driving force behind this developtnent. Piedmont's rnost important daily, La Gazzetta del Popolo, established a col umn called 'Black Sack' (Sacco Nero), that reported stories of clerical miscon duct in Italy/ Europe and the world on a daily basis. The clerical sins were many. In the year 18541 they included: fake miracles; violent repressions against believers, atheists and people of different faiths; crimes against the state; theft; sexual excesses, and capital crimes such as the abandonn1ent, sexual abuse and murder of children.

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