The Lateran Pacts: background

For 59 years a succession of popes refused to acknowledge Italy by setting foot on its soil. (With pathos Pius IX talked of being a "prisoner in the Vatican".) In 1929 the long wait finally paid off when Mussolini proved willing to grant huge concessions in return for Vatican recognition of the Kingdom of Italy — of which he happened to be the dictator. Through the Lateran Pacts “Mussolini received a kind of moral recognition that the pope's predecessors had always denied to liberal governments.” [1]

A national holiday was proclaimed to celebrate this propaganda coup. [2] The commemorative postcard about the Lateran Pacts presents a united front of authorities, both spiritual and temporal: King Victor Emmanuel III, Pope Pius XI and Il Duce (Leader) Benito Mussolini. This mirrored the real situation, for with the Lateran Pacts “the divided allegiance of many Italians between church and state [was] a thing of the past”. [3] Nevertheless, the invocation of “the peace of Laetitia” the Roman Goddess of Joy, has been seen as somewhat cynical in view of the brutality of Mussolini's regime. [4]

 The Lateran Pacts have three parts: a political treaty (giving the Vatican its own micro-state), a financial convention (giving the Vatican reparations) and a concordat.

A precondition of the negotiations had involved the destruction of the parliamentary Catholic Italian Popular Party. Pius XI disliked political Catholicism because he could not control it. Like his predecessors, he believed that Catholic party politics brought democracy into the church by the back door. The result of the demise of the Popular Party was the wholesale shift of Catholics into the Fascist Party and the collapse of democracy in Italy. [5] 

A few years later the Pius would follow the same concordat strategy with Hitler to eliminate the Catholic party there and destroy German democracy, as well.  

Lateran Pacts amended, but never revoked

Although there have been revisions, the Lateran Pacts remain in effect today. Italians are still bound by them, as an Italian comedienne discovered in 2008 after she made a joke about the Pope for his anti-gay stance. She found that she had unwittingly contravened Article 8 of the 1929 Conciliation Treaty, an offence which can bring five years in prison for public insults against the pope “whether by means of speeches, acts, or writings”.

Eventually she was exonerated in a way which avoided challenging the Treaty. The Italian Minister of Justice decided not to proceed with the prosecution, “knowing the depth of the Pope's capacity for forgiveness”. This managed to circumvent the outrage whilst, at the same time, retaining the threat. After all, intimidation is the real aim of charging people with offences such as “blasphemy”, “religious defamation” and “offending the honour of the sacred and inviolable person” of Benedict XVI. [6]

And that is not all. Today the effects of the Lateran Pacts extend far beyond Italy. A few months after the Treaty was signed, the newly-constituted Vatican State joined the Universal Postal Union and later used this as a springboard to get influence in international bodies. In the end, the popes’ strategy of staying stubbornly within the walls of the Vatican for 59 years has paid off handsomely. It is thanks to the Lateran Pacts that the pope can now travel round the world as a head of state and even speak at the United Nations. (See “The Vatican’s triple crown: church, government and state”.) Mussolini's boast that the Lateran Treaty would “bury” the temporal power of the pope has proven wide of the mark. [7]

— MF 

Notes

1. Tracy H. Koon, Believe, obey, fight: political socialization of youth in fascist Italy, 1922-1943, University of North Carolina Press, 1985, p. 128. An excerpt from it is here.

2. "A holiday to celebrate the 1929 Concordat and one to commemorate the founding of the Fascist Squads replaced the “Statuto”, a national holiday that antagonized the Church because it commemorated the unification of Italy that had kept the Pope a virtual prisoner". This is a curiously uncritical repetition of the Pope's claim, when in reality this self-imposed confinement was part of a bargaining tactic. No one held the pope a prisoner in the Vatican. It was purely voluntary that for 59 years after losing their kingdom, the popes refused to leave the Vatican in order to avoid any appearance of accepting the authority of Italy over its former territories. Mabel Berezin, The Festival State: Celebration and Commemoration in Fascist Italy, Journal of Modern European History, June/July 2005, pp. 14-15.

3. George B. McClellan, Modern Italy: A Short History, Princeton University Press, 1933, p. 268. 

4. "Corrado", "Riflessioni mattutine", 31 March 2007.  http://vendicari.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html

5. John Cornwell, "Hitler's Pope", [an abridged version of his book of this name], Vanity Fair, October 1999.

6. Richard Owen, "Comedian Sabina Guzzanti 'insulted Pope' in 'poofter devils' gag", The Times, 12 September 2008.  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article4732048.ece

7. An excerpt of Mussolini's speech on Lateran Pacts before the Chamber of Deputies, 13 May 1929, is printed in John Francis Pollard, The Fascist experience in Italy, 1998, p. 73. Google reprint.