Catholics and Communists in Twentieth-Century Italy: Between Conflict and Dialogue
DANIELA SARESELLA
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The cover photo, which shows Christian Democratic éminence grise Aldo Moro as a prisoner of the Red Brigades terrorists, neatly conveys the essence of this book. Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in 1978 while he was trying to broker an “Historic Compromise”, an attempt to win Communist Party support for a Christian Democrat-led government then confronted by the threat of terrorism from the extreme left, like the Red Brigades, and from the far right, the neo-Fascists.
The author talks about the “singularity of Italy”, by which she means that Italy, “backyard” of the papacy, was also home to a century-long dialectic between a strong Catholic social, economic and political movement and a powerful Marxist-dominated working-class movement. In the 1890s, the establishment of the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) was quickly confronted by an emergent Catholic movement. But until the arrival of a common enemy, Fascism, on the scene, the occasions of dialogue between Italian Catholicism and Marxism were few and infrequent. The only Marxist theoretician who saw possibilities of an alliance between the Catholic and other peasant masses was Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s in his famous Prison Notebooks. During Fascism’s rise to power in the early 1920s, leading figures in the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) espoused the anti-Fascist cause, but a temporary, tactical alliance of Catholics and Marxists in ­parliament against Fascism was obstructed by the Vatican. Yet, even in the ­suffocatingly oppressive atmosphere of late-1930s Fascist Italy (especially in Rome), a group of Marxist-leaning young Catholics came together to form the “Movement of Catholic Communists” (MCC).