CONTENTS:

(4) ANTI-CATHOLICS AND ANTI-ITALIANS

(5) JOHN BOND IN ROME

(6) MUSSOLINI AND ITALIAN FREEMASONRY

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(4) ANTI-CATHOLICS AND ANTI-ITALIANS

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"Saint Patrick's Day in America—1926"

With its dense imagery and fuzzy cross-hatching, it is hard to believe that this cartoon is only a hundred years old.

The anti-Irish vehemence seems quaintly old-fashioned too— but the authors were on the far edge of Protestant evangelicalism, in a cosmic time-warp of their own.

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In fact, the print  reverses an image from 70 years earlier.

There we see Irish Catholics and Irish Catholicism landing on American shores— with nary a hint of the devastating Potato Famine (1845-52) that propelled them.

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Saint Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland in the Fifth Century. Then in America in the Twentieth Century, the refounded Ku Klux Klan somehow reversed the process.

Paddy's "snakes" deserve a closer look:

* Control of Schools * Control of Press * Temporal Power * Superstition * K(nights) of C(olumbus) * Anti Prohibition * Rome in Politics * Intolerance * Union of Church & State *

These were clearly 1926 issues. Back in 1855, Institutional Catholicism was only an abstract menace in America, not a real-life presence.

Brother Jonathan and Young America could scarcely envision a large and entrenched Catholic population, a massive Catholic school system, an extensive Catholic press and countless Catholics entering local and even national politics.

As for the Knights of Columbus ("K of C"), they were not founded until 1882.

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Then there was the bigger picture: Toward the turn of the century, surges of Catholic immigration from other places (especially Italy and Poland) began diluting the old Hibernian majority.

The Irish, however, often dominated the Church hierarchy and shaped the public face of American Catholicism.

Anti-Italianism was rife but— curiously enough— not explicitly anti-Catholic, although the Popes were all Italian and the Church spread its tentacles from Rome.

In fact, the deadliest eruption of anti-Italian feeling occurred in New Orleans in 1891, where over half the population was Catholic.

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Politically subversive rats infested with mafia criminality, violent anarchism and presumably other diseases?

Anti-Italianism in those years was blatantly racist, with a heavy dose of political and cultural anxiety tossed in.

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857,046 immigrants arrived in the United States in 1903, including some 285,000 Southern Italians (the largest single group).

In terms of threat, however, the half-million or so non-Italians barely figure in this issue of Judge, a popular satirical magazine.

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Meanwhile, the ghost of President William McKinley— assassinated in in 1901 by a Detroit-born anarchist of Polish (not Italian) extraction— reacts to the perils of immigrant dumping with a distinctly Italian gesture.

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Fare le Corna...

Configuring the horns of the Devil to ward off the Evil Eye— utterly all'italiana.

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(5) JOHN BOND IN ROME

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When we open John Bond’s, In The Pillory: The Tale of the Borgia Pope, it looks and feels like a quirky “period piece”.

But bigotry often has a timeless quality and this is another case in point. We already focused on the "Saint Patrick's Day in America—1926" print from that same moment.

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In The Pillory was published in 1927 (by way of The Fellowship Forum and The Independent Publishing Company, both of Washington DC).

Still, it breathes the centuries-old air of anti-Catholic fact and fantasy, especially the rock-ribbed British Protestant kind. Guy Fawke's Night bonfires, "No Popery" and all that...

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Embedded in Rome, in the very lair of the Papal Beast, Bond signed off on his preface in December 1926 (Year IV of the Fascist Era).  He is putting the Catholic Church In The Pillory, he explains, in the person of that stellar reprobate Pope Alexander VI Borgia (reigned 1492-1503):

"There is more than one Chamber of Horrors in the Museum of History, but none like that of the Borgia. The central figure is that of Roderigo Borgia, who as Alexander VI sat on the papal throne for upward of eleven years; around him are grouped his mistresses; a brood of bastard children; a retinue of henchmen and an endless procession of victims. It was the darkest period in the life of Christianity, just before the dawn of the Reformation. Rome had become a sink of unspeakable corruption where, in the words of Dante, 'Christ was sold every day.'"

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In Pillory, Bond seeks to distance himself...at least somewhat... from anti-Catholicism of the more vulgar sort. His alleged argument is not with that faith ...as a faith... but its authoritarian abuses—especially in the political sphere.

"They... recognize the distinction between Catholicism as a religious creed and Popery as a fraudulent and un-Christian institution. Our warfare is directed not against Catholics, whether they are of the Roman or the Greek or any other persuasion —it is directed solely and wholly against the Neo-Caesarism of the popes. Our quarrel is not with the profession of any religious faith but with a political system invented and kept alive to enslave the minds of mankind and to destroy the freedom of conscience."

We may or may not take Bond’s protestations of quasi-tolerance at face value, as he thrashes his way through a time-worn tale of poisoned chalices, mutilated corpses, papal mistresses and orgies on the very altar.

In any case, he ends his preface with a rousing call-to-arms:

‍"The Borgias are dead and gone but they are still brewing poison in the Vatican."

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What can that possibly mean? After four centuries, Zombie Borgias prowl the Papal Palace... crafting the same old toxin... and thus BENITO MUSSOLINI?

I have read through Wild Man several times (a journey I would not recommend to most)—and the screed becomes more puzzling rather than less.

Rome as the Eternal Capital of Catholic Evil? Not a new concept.

Bond’s animus, however, was “directed solely and wholly against the Neo-Caesarism of the popes”—their political and territorial imperialism, that is to say.

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Something is missing here... A lot of Italian history, in fact... The Risorgimento, just to begin.

In 1870, the rapidly emerging Kingdom of Italy annexed the City of Rome and expunged the last remnant of the State of the Church from the world map.

A half century later, Bond was sounding the old alarm —long after most observers had consigned Papal Caesarism to the dustbin of history.

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Writing in 1927 (Pillory) and 1929 (Wild Man), this Borgia-obsessed anti-Catholic polemicist had a very specific development in mind —the looming Patti Lateranensi (Lateran Accords) between the Papacy of Pius XI and the newly-fascist Kingdom of Italy.

Fascism and the Vatican... The double threat of Duce and Pope... There was only one sticking point: the Duce himself.

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Benito Mussolini may have been many things but even a mildly observant Catholic was never one of them.

The eventual Duce's radical blacksmith father named him after Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary and anti-cleric. Then in the course of his tumultuous career, he bounced from the Left (Socialism) to the Extreme Left (Anarchism) to a newly-invented Right (variously National Socialism, Corporate Statism and/or Fascism).

Mussolini remained (more or less) an atheist until the very end, thereby proving Bond's main point: Cynical Opportunism was the true Roman Way— time-honored and Borgia-approved —whether garbed in a cassock and triple tiara or a black shirt and tasseled fez.

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Bond attests with some pride, "This book has been written from a good post of observation under the very eyes of the fascisti government but not under its guidance or by its dictation.” (Wild Man, Preface, p.10)

That was no small claim, since the Mussolini regime kept journalists on a very short leash— even foreign eccentrics like Bond. Still, there was much to observe in those days, weeks and months.

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The author of Wild Man signed off on his preface in 1928, but the title page reads 1929 —just in time for a stop-press update (see below) regarding the 11 February 1929 Concordat.

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On paper at least, the Patti Lateranensi (Lateran Accords) ended the long stand-off between the Church and the avowedly secular Kingdom of Italy— as it emerged from the Risorgimento, until it was subsumed into Mussolini's Fascist State.

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Going into the negotiations, there were complex issues of protocol and more. The Church did not yet recognize the Italian government, so the Pope could not deal directly with Mussolini, King Vittorio Emanuele III or their representatives.

What was the current legal and diplomatic status of the Church? After 1870, was it still a geopolitical entity or not? Was Pius XI merely a religious leader or also a head of state?

And who spoke for Italy? In theory, it was a constitutional monarchy ruled by King Vittorio Emanuele III, whom Mussolini served as Prime Minister. In real terms, however, the Duce was the Duce (Leader or Commander) and called most of the shots.

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Bond observes,“In their ideal fascisti state they furnish the political hierarchy which co-operates in its own fashion and upon its own terms with the hierarchy of the church.” (Wild Man, pp.102-3)

Since expediency is all that counts— on both sides— "faith" and "belief" are left out of the equation.

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How about Bond's "World-Alliance Between Clericalism and Fascism", with its ancient roots?

Did it actually exist or were the Lateran Accords a strictly Italian affair— firmly lodged in the present day?

On one side stood the political representatives of the Italian State, on the other the overwhelmingly Italian agents of the Universal Church.

They were all fighting for space in both the Eternal City and the new Italy— and by 1929, they were ready to make a deal.

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Bond sketched in the terms of the Accords, which were negotiated "in deepest secrecy".

First there were issues regarding the Papacy and its political relationship with the rest of the world. Italy recognized it as a sovereign entity with its own (minuscule) territory, its own laws and its own diplomatic relations with other states. The Kingdom of Italy would retain most Church properties seized during the Risorgimento but agreed to pay compensation.

In the eyes of many, these were relatively minor concessions compared with the rest. The Italian State— quite stunningly —granted the Catholic Church massive influence in the daily lives of any and all Italians, some of whom were not even nominally Catholic.

In the Lateran Accords, Catholicism was privileged as Italy’s official religion. Catholic religious instruction was introduced in Italian public schools. The Church was given an essential role in defining the norms of marriage. And God only knew where this was going to end…

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Two constituencies were particularly alarmed by the Lateran Accords, Italian Jews and Italian Freemasons.

From the very beginning, Jewish equality was bred into the DNA of the liberal Kingdom of Italy as it emerged from the Risorgimento.

‍Many Italian Jews still viewed the Catholic Church as their natural enemy, especially those who had been liberated from Ghettos only with the fall of the Papal regime sixty years before.

As for the rise of Mussolini, some Jews might pretend—for a while, at least—that the Fascist State was not a threat, merely the natural heir to the empowered Italy of the Risorgimento.

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Until they were proven tragically wrong...

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(6) MUSSOLINI AND ITALIAN FREEMASONRY

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John Bond was the European Correspondent of The Fellowship Forum, “Freemasonry’s Representative at the Nation’s Capital” in Washington DC.

He had not a word to say about Italian Jews, which included a conspicuous number of prominent Masons. Still, he devoted 27 impassioned pages with 9 illustrations to the plight of Italian Masons more generally.  

Freemasonry is an international movement that came out of the European Enlightenment, uniting liberals, free-thinkers and especially opponents of "Catholic Superstition".

Its enlightened humanism could take curious twists and turns, however—as we saw in early 20^th-century America with the rise of “Militant Freemasonry” locked in step with the Ku Klux Klan.

In Italy, Masonry had its militant aspect as well— linked to the Risorgimento struggle for national unification.

Giuseppe Garibaldi, “Hero of the Two Worlds”, was initiated in Montevideo (Uruguay) in 1844, then received the High Degrees of the Scottish Rite in Turin in 1862. Wherever he went, he forged connections with fellow masons— often nationalist patriots essential to his endeavors.

In the spring of 1864, representatives of Italy’s 72 lodges met in Florence and on 21 May, they proclaimed the formation of the Grande Oriente d’Italia—a central coordinating lodge for the emerging nation— with Garibaldi himself as Grand Master.

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ROME OR DEATH! Garibaldi’s stirring pledge to unite Italy and retake its natural Capital.

In 1907, Italy’s Freemasons added a bronze laurel wreath with their Compass and Square to the base of the National Garibaldi Monument at the crest of the Janiculum Hill.

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This fraternal tribute didn’t remain there long. After the Lateran Treaty of 1929, Mussolini reoriented the equestrian statue —with Garibaldi looking out over the great expanse of Rome, not peering down on the newly relinquished Vatican City.

The Duce then removed the Masonic emblems, replacing them with orthodox Fascist symbols (the Compass and Square were reinstated in 1943).

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What did Benito Mussolini think of Giuseppe Garibaldi?

On one hand, Garibaldi was a prodigious military and patriotic phenomenon. Without his Risorgimento, there would be no modern Italian state —the Duce’s included.

On the other hand, Garibaldi was a free-wheeling liberal and an old-fashioned democratic individualist —totally out of step with the Duce’s boldly totalitarian program.

Also, leaving ideology aside, the Duce could not bear to be upstaged.

Even in death, Garibaldi was too charismatic for the Duce’s liking and Garibaldismo too deeply engrained in the Italy’s patriotic soul.

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And then there was the Masonic thing…

Mussolini was relentlessly on point in his messaging, so Freemasonry was an intolerable distraction at very least.

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In 1925, Giovanni Gentile— Benito Mussolini’s much-lauded “Philosopher of Fascism” —famously proclaimed the essential truth of the emerging "Corporate  State" (Stato Corporativo).

TUTTO NELLO STATO, NIENTE AL DI FUORI DELLO STATO, NIENTE CONTRO LO STATO.

(EVERYTHING IS IN THE STATE, NOTHING IS OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING IS OPPOSED TO THE STATE.)

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Who else but the Duce could enunciate the Doctrine of Fascism for the ages by way of the Italian Encyclopedia?

Who else but Giovanni Gentile could put the perfect words in the Duce’s mouth —and not for the first time?

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"If we accept that the Nineteenth Century was the century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy, it need not mean that the Twentieth Century is also a Century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy. Political doctrines come and go, but the people remain. Therefore, we can think of this as a Century of Authority, a Century of the Political Right and a Fascist Century. If the Nineteenth Century was the Century of the Individual (since Liberalism means Individualism), we can think of ours as a Century of Collectivism and by extension a Century of the State."

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Freemasonry was obviously “Outside the State”—the Fascist one, at least—and easy prey for the Duce’s henchmen.

As early as 1912, L’Idea Nazionale (The Concept of Nation)—a proto-fascist journal—began an intense campaign of anti-Masonic defamation.

Then in November of 1921, at the first Congress of the National Fascist Party, Freemasonry was ruled—by acclamation—as incompatible with Fascism.

This ban was then codified by the Fascist authorities and given quasi-legal force

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“FATTI E NON PAROLE” (DEEDS NOT WORDS) was a favorite slogan of the Mussolini Regime and Masonic Lodges proved irresistibly soft targets for blackshirted “squadre” (marauding "teams" of Fascist thugs).

In the first years after the March on Rome (1922), came coordinated raids on fraternal headquarters—including Rome, Milan and Palermo (October 11, 1924) and Florence (October3-4, 1925).

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There was nothing subtle or restrained about Benito Mussolini’s management of the “Masonic Problem” —and we can say much the same for John Bond’s coverage on the other side.

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In chronicling the persecution of his fellow Masons, he goes Full-Borgia— bombarding us with his most garish, sensational and fact-starved prose.

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In Florence, Masonic blood flowed for three days and three nights, with three hundred victims and counting???

Those events, in fact, are reasonably well-documented and genuinely horrible— if only 1% as bad as Bond claims (in statistical terms at least).

Three eminent local Masons were killed in the course of an overnight rampage (October 3/4, 1925) and we know their names: Giovanni Becciolini (a young Republican and Socialist), Gustavo Console (a lawyer and Socialist) and Gaetano Pilati (a wounded veteran of the Great War and a Socialist Deputy in the Chamber in Rome).

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Bond was reporting in the age of photography, so when he "shows us the picture” we might hope for more than a watercolor after the fact— disconnected from any eye-witness account.

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Verona, in fact, was notorious for its brutal squadrismo, so it is no stretch to imagine local Masons harassed by Fascists and probably worse. Still, I am yet to find evidence of the Masonic massacre that Bond presents in vivid detail.

Such events —even less dramatic ones too— simply don't get lost in Italian towns and cities. Wherever you turn, local historians are combing libraries, archives and newspaper files while interviewing the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of witnesses to history. And these days, we have the persistent testimony of the internet also.

As for Bond’s sourcing… According to him, the chilling tale of twenty-odd Masons thrown from the heights of the Fascist headquarters in Verona—with nary a day, month or  year attached— “traveled from mouth to mouth and is still related in the city”.

Utter hearsay... in other words... but no less compelling for all that? “Amid the Silence of a Shackled Press Lodges are Destroyed and Masons Tortured and Killed”.

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Bond and his friends grabbed any information that came their way —in the depths of the Fascist news black-out —and made of it what they could.

Maybe three dead Masons in Florence, then thirty, then three hundred? Like the old game of “Telephone” or “Whisper! Whisper!” —with decimal places spinning off along the way?

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When all is said and done…???

“All what?” we might ask.

For John Bond, every question had three possible answers: “Free Masonry”, “Benito Mussolini” and “The Catholic Church”.

But why choose one if you can jump in and claim all three?

Thus a "joint war on Free Masonry” waged by “both these men in black”: Mussolini and the Pope.

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