Italian Catholics During the 1930s: The Role of the Laity, Ecclesiology, Literature, and New Models of Sainthood in the Age of Totalitarianism

Abstract

Italian Catholics During the 1930sThe Role of the Laity, Ecclesiology, Literature, and New Models of Sainthood in the Age of Totalitarianism Jorge Dagnino (bio) Keywords Italian Catholics, 1930s Italy, Italian Totalitarianism, Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI), fucino, fucini, Emilio Guano Introduction The Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (FUCI), the section for university students of Italian Catholic Action, is perhaps best known as the organization where many future Christian Democrats who would rule Italy after the Second World War were formed. Unsurprisingly, most of the existing literature has tended to focus on the formation of this ruling class.1 Faced with the novel challenges presented by the totalitarian experiments in 1930s Europe, many Catholics were well aware that a new type of religiosity had to be offered to the new generations. What was perceived to be of paramount importance was the elevation and dignity of the lay faithful and the building of the individual personality, with the cultivation of the values of interiority, intimacy, and development of the self. The main goal was to become “master of myself and of my personality.”2 Additionally, since the totalitarians represented themselves as total solutions for the men and women of interwar Europe, a new, total Catholicism was deemed necessary to offer to the young as the only means of preventing them from succumbing to the attractions of the sacralization of politics being carried out by the [End Page 100] totalitarian regimes. Moreover, the fucini carried out an ecclesiastical modernization that, at least in part, involved religious secularization, with the adoption of a language, forms of action, and new models of sainthood that to some extent implied the politicization of the sacred. Above all, in the eyes of the intellectuals of Catholic Action, what was needed to put an end to the perceived crisis of Western civilization was a Catholicism capable of penetrating every aspect of private and public life. It was a religiosity that had to be in line with the needs of an emerging mass society. Christianity was presented as a palingenetic force, as an “integral revolution”3 capable of mobilizing the masses in an effort to sacralize them in an age of mass politics and secularization. Catholicism offered a unifying and organic vision capable of transcending the deleterious effects of the liberal version of modernity that so badly needed to be countered. The ecclesiastical assistant, Adriano Bernareggi4 deplored the fragmentation generated by liberal modernity between “physical man, ethical man, religious man, the thinker, the professional, the artist, the citizen,” calling for a central idea, capable of coordinating every aspect of life and giving it a spiritual dimension. That idea was, naturally, Catholicism, with its “totalitarian conception, through which religion appears inseparable from life.” Indeed, in times of a perceived epochal crisis, Bernareggi was optimistic and confident of the palingenetic role to be played by Christianity, as he envisaged a “society in which the Christian spirit regains its primordial role.”5 This newfound sense of optimism revealed a kind of “faith in the crisis”: the notion that, as a consequence of European culture being swept away and corroded as a product of its internal contradictions and flaws, the intellectual and spiritual fields could be filled with new ideas. Such ideas were based on the deeply felt sense that an epochal opportunity was being presented to Christianity to become, once again, the driving force of Western civilization. It was a Catholicism that presented itself in the robes of a spirit of conquest, dynamic, youthful, capable of filling the void left by the crisis of civilization. Catholicism, in these years, aimed at offering a “clear vision of the major problems of life, resolved under the light [End Page 101] of a totalitarian Christianity,”6 as the sole unifying force capable of overcoming the apparent contradictions and confusions between, for example, reason and sentiment, science and life, liberty and authority, and the natural and supernatural. Furthermore, this vision of Catholicism was fueled by a heroic conception of life, a Christianity that was not passively lived or restricted to closed and passive formulae, but which was passionately experienced as a “spiritual exaltation . . . a heroic and integral conception of the Catholic life,”7 capable of uncovering...