The Vatican, Italy and the Cold War

Abstract

Italy was on the ‘front line’ in two senses during the Cold War. On the one hand, the southern end of Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’, Trieste, was on Italy’s redrawn frontier with Yugoslavia. It was still in Italian hands, but only just, and it continued to be disputed with Tito’s new communist regime until 1954. Even more significantly, it could be said that the ‘front line’ in the Cold War actually passed through Italy itself and that the war was ‘fought’ on Italian territory because Italy possessed the second largest Communist Party in the West. Allied in a ‘popular front’ with the still strongly marxian Italian Socialist Party, it presented a formidable challenge in the crucial 1948 general elections. Pope Pius XII and the Italian church hierarchy viewed this situation in apocalyptic terms, especially in 1948. Their response was, as the sociologist Gianfranco Poggi has described it, ‘one of maximum involvement and maximum commitment’ of the Church’s resources.1 The Catholic Action movement, with its massive presence in most areas of Italian civil society, was summoned to battle, a huge propaganda effort was launched in 1948, and in the longer term, popular devotions and the papal cult of the personality were employed against the ‘enemy’, along with the unleashing by the Holy Office in 1949 of the Church’s ultimate weapon — excommunication of all those involved in any way with the left.