Introduction
On 30 November 1934, Carlo Torello and Giuseppe Ricci arrived at the Hofburg Palace in Brixen/Bressanone for their audience with Bishop Johannes Geisler.Footnote 1 They were hoping for a rather perfunctory meeting, at which they would request and then receive the requisite permission to teach at primary schools in the Alpine diocese. Their transfer from the Piedmontese diocese of Acqui Terme had been ordered by Italy’s Minister of Education, Francesco Ercole, and approved by the bishop of Acqui Terme, Lorenzo Delponte. Ercole intended for these two Italian-speaking primary-school teachers to join the state’s ongoing campaign to assimilate the sizeable German-speaking student population in the newly annexed borderland. The fact that Torello and Ricci happened to be Catholic priests meant they could also satisfy the state’s obligation to provide religious instruction in the classroom. In other words, this reassignment presented an efficient solution to a seemingly straightforward set of problems for the Fascist government in Rome.
Unfortunately, the situation was not so simple. Ercole had ordered the two priests’ transfer in their capacity as state employees, but their concurrent status as members of the Catholic clergy meant they required authorisation from the local bishop before they could assume their new positions. When they presented themselves to Bishop Geisler on that late November day, however, the prelate refused to grant them the necessary viaticum to fulfil any duties as spiritual instructors in his diocese (Geisler Reference Geisler and AA.EE.SS.1934a). In fact, he demanded they remove themselves from his bishopric within twenty-four hours or face formal censure. Alarmed, the two men hastily retreated to Bozen/Bolzano – outside the bounds of Geisler’s jurisdiction – where they awaited further instructions (Delponte Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934b).
This turn of events caused no small amount of anxiety for Torello and Ricci; Ercole had directed them to begin their new positions by 1 December or forfeit their careers as public schoolteachers, so they were caught between their obligations to the Church and to the government. They could choose to obey their secular superiors or their divine superiors but, at least in this situation, not both. This incident was especially fraught because only five years earlier Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI had formally reconciled the political animosities that had defined the relationship between the Holy See and Italian state for more than 60 years.Footnote 2 Since then, relations between the two Roman authorities could largely be characterised as an ‘armed peace’, one that required constant vigilance so as not to imperil the détente (Pertici Reference Pertici2009).Footnote 3 In this context, one might have expected civil and religious authorities to tread cautiously when questions of secular or ecclesiastical authority arose. Yet Geisler’s decision to expel Torello and Ricci from his diocese overtly risked Rome’s rather tenuous Church-state relationship. The danger only intensified in early December when Mussolini responded with a threat to expel all Church representatives from the state education system. These choices suggest how seriously both institutions took the situation on the northern frontier; at the same time, a remarkably quiet end to the matter in early February illustrates the extent to which the highest authorities were ultimately willing to compromise to save a critical – if fragile – alliance.
These dramatic events that took place over the course of a few short months between late 1934 and early 1935 could have remained a footnote in the story of Fascism’s relationship with the Catholic Church, or of its efforts to ‘Italianise’ South Tyrol’s German-speaking population. However, the relative abnormality of Geisler’s actions has made the Torello-Ricci affair a valuable lens with which to examine broader questions about interwar South Tyrol and its relationship to Rome. As Carlo Ginzburg brilliantly illustrated in his micro-historical study of a sixteenth-century miller, it is precisely when individuals or institutions react in seemingly irrational or defiant ways to the established order that historians can best study the contours of that order (1980; Ravel Reference Ravel2007, 286). Unlike some of the most well-known micro-historical studies, the story of Geisler’s challenge to Fascist Rome by and large did not involve the lives of ‘obscure’ individuals (with the notable exception of Torello and Ricci); there are several studies of Bishop Johannes Geisler, and scholars have spent considerable time analysing the relationship between the Fascist regime and the Holy See.Footnote 4 Instead, the Torello-Ricci affair provides an opportunity to better understand the political and cultural infrastructures of power in the region.Footnote 5 Untangling the motivations behind Geisler’s decision, the escalating tensions it precipitated, and, ultimately, the discussions that led to its resolution reveal much about Fascist – and Church – ambitions in the annexed territory of Trentino-South Tyrol.Footnote 6
The Torello-Ricci affair underlines the great importance civil and religious officials both placed on gaining and maintaining the moral authority deemed necessary to educate the region’s children. Certainly it also reflects concerns over political and economic authority in the region, but it was the battle over the ostensibly apolitical power to determine – and protect – what was ethically ‘correct’ for the community that dominated the Torello-Ricci affair. Moral authority had become entangled with the politics of education and childrearing by the early twentieth century (Hall Reference Hall1997, especially 594–595). Leaders increasingly portrayed children as the promise (or demise) of their nation’s future, a decidedly modern view that developed alongside a belief in the malleability of their intellectual, physical, and moral fitness. Consequently, education – and especially early education – emerged as the primary tool with which leaders believed they could mould their nation’s future (Durkheim Reference Durkheim1953, 73; Hunter Reference Hunter2000; Reese Reference Reese2001). Educators were billed as protectors of the community’s future moral health, and Geisler’s refusal to allow Torello and Ricci to teach in his diocese reflects the importance he placed on the Church’s identification and approval of qualified ‘moral guardians’ (Hunter Reference Hunter2000, xv). In this case, even ordained Catholic priests could not be trusted with the responsibility if they were deemed ‘foreign’ to the population.
Background
To better understand why Geisler would so directly flout the authority of Fascist Rome and, unintentionally, the Vatican, and to understand the threat it presented to Mussolini, Pius XI, and their delicate relationship, one must keep in mind some of the peculiarities of Fascist Italy’s standing in its northernmost borderland. South Tyrol, alongside Trentino, Venezia Giulia, and Istria, were all portions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire ceded to Italy after the First World War. Italy had framed its claims to them with the rhetoric of birthright (historical, geographical, and nationalist), but the fact that the territories had been part of the multilingual Austro-Hungarian Empire for several centuries meant Italy inherited populations with quite distinct political, cultural, and social characteristics. This plurality often vexed Fascist officials and complicated their attempts to assert authority over these annexed lands. Two legacies of Habsburg rule were particularly notable in the context of the 1934 Torello-Ricci affair. First, South Tyrol contained a sizable German-speaking population and second, local clergy had long played a central role in Tyrolean politics and education.Footnote 7
Many European observers felt that postwar Italy had exceeded its ‘natural’ boundaries, given that it contained several hundred thousand non-Italian-speaking citizens in its new borderlands.Footnote 8 Austro-Hungarian census data from 1909 reported that German speakers comprised approximately half the entire population of Trentino-South Tyrol, and most of them resided in the northern half, known as South Tyrol (Alto Adige in Italian). Influenced by the same popular equation of language with nationality that inspired criticism of its annexation, Mussolini and his Fascist regime viewed the presence of German speakers as a significant obstacle to establishing Italian cultural and political sovereignty along the new border. Still, that same logic gave officials a measurable goalpost in Italy’s campaign to legitimise control of the territory: if all residents spoke Italian, the territory would obviously be Italian (Brix Reference Brix1982, 16–17, 54). The Fascist government’s solution to the problem was therefore to develop a comprehensive Italian-language education system to transform all South Tyroleans – German, Ladin, and Italian speakers – into unquestionably ‘Italian’ citizens loyal to the Fascist state.
As ever, deciding on these objectives and the tools with which to achieve them did not translate directly into success; many German-speaking residents viewed Rome’s linguistic crusade as an existential threat to their culture, history, and way of life. From their first days in South Tyrol’s classrooms, the Italian state’s teachers faced pushback and disapproval from some portion of the territory’s German speakers. But if its multilingual character appeared to pose the most obvious challenge to securing Italian sovereignty in the borderland, many Fascist officials perceived the local German-speaking clergy as the greatest source of opposition to Italianisation. The almost ubiquitous presence of clergy in Trentino-South Tyrol had deep roots: from the central position of Trent in the emergence of the Vatican’s sixteenth-century Counter Reformation to the clergy’s nineteenth-century involvement in establishing rural banks for local peasants to the 1906 establishment of a Tyrolean People’s Party at the behest of local prelates, the Church’s power had long extended beyond spiritual authority and well into the politics, economics, and culture of the area. This long-standing influence on Tyrolean society both gave rise to and strengthened the fusion of religious and ‘national’ (Tyrolean) identifications and established the Church’s hegemonic position as the local institution with the moral authority to work ‘above secular partisanship and petty politicking’ in defence of local interests (Grzymala-Busse Reference Grzymala-Busse2015, 8).Footnote 9
More than simply defending local interests, however, the Catholic Church in South Tyrol had long wielded an enormous amount of moral authority that the Fascist state – and particularly its plans to transform the education system – directly threatened. Like most forms of power, moral authority is built on earned trust, and as such requires consistent renewal through behaviour that the community deems virtuous (Grzymala-Busse Reference Grzymala-Busse2015, 12; Hunter Reference Hunter2000, 113). The practices and values associated with the Church had broadly become part of the community habitus in South Tyrol – as in much of Italy – but, even as the dominant arbitrator of individual and collective integrity, the Church’s moral authority was always a form of ‘negotiated consent’ (Eley Reference Eley1980, 163–164). In other words, nothing about the Church’s moral hegemony was guaranteed, and prelates were generally aware of the need to maintain community trust to uphold their moral authority (Sarri Reference Sarri2017, 209). For the clergy of South Tyrol, that meant supporting German-speaking parishioners’ desire to educate their children in their primary language.
For Fascist officials, the fact that some of the most prominent and powerful South Tyroleans were also some of the most vocal supporters of maintaining German-language instruction was a significant impediment to Italianisation. The clergy’s opposition only increased when it came to transitioning the language of religious instruction from German to Italian, and this subject quickly became one of the most contentious issues between local clergy and the Fascist regime (Cristofolini Reference Cristofolini1925, 86). Prelates had long maintained that all Christians had the right to pray – and therefore to learn to pray – in their mother tongue (Binchy Reference Binchy1970, 546–547). Pius XI’s first Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri (Reference Gasparri, ARSI and Affari1927), proclaimed: ‘the absence of a priest that speaks the language of the faithful is equivalent to the total spiritual abandonment of them, and this causes incalculable damage to their souls’. From the perspective of the local clergy, it would make the Church’s ongoing efforts to defend against the rising tide of secularism much more difficult if students were forced to study their religion in an unfamiliar language (Raffl Reference Raffl and AA.EE.SS.1923).
Members of the Tyrolean clergy wielded substantial power in this debate, not only because of their considerable moral authority, but also (and relatedly) because of their historic control over religious instruction in the region (Dessardo Reference Dessardo, Caimi and Vian2013). Under Habsburg rule, only members of the clergy had the right to teach the Roman catechism, which was required in all state schools.Footnote 10 Church leaders in Brixen/Bressanone and Trent used pragmatic and pedagogical justifications to insist on the continuation of this arrangement after Italian annexation. Extensive damage from the recent war and a long history of teaching religion in the local schools meant that most parishes lacked the necessary resources to hold regular classes in Church facilities, especially during the winter months. More substantively, Bishop Celestino Endrici of Trent wrote, his clergy had been trained in seminaries with specialists in catechetical pedagogy, and it did not make sense for students to be taught by educators without such preparation (Reference Endrici1923). As one priest later explained:
You can be an excellent teacher of the Chinese language and history without living the life of the Chinese and loving China. Not so with religion. The life of the religion teacher must be an example that confirms what he imparts with words; his heart must love God and the Church to lead his students and imbue them with passion for the faith (‘Insegnamento religioso parrocchiale’ 1931).
According to Endrici, the ‘harmonious cooperation between school, family and Church’ in South Tyrol created a respectful, moral, and faithful character among his parishioners (Reference Endrici1923). Maintaining this practice under Italian rule, he argued, would allow the Church to nurture the feelings of duty, sacrifice, and love for the students’ new fatherland. On the other hand, to change this practice would cause many residents to resent the Italian state and create a serious hurdle to ‘instilling feelings of affection and trust’ toward the Italian nation (Endrici Reference Endrici and AA.EE.SS1919).
There is no doubt that regional Church leaders maintained this rationale with sincerity; at the same time, their push to retain control over religious instruction was intimately bound up with a more worldly desire to protect their moral authority in the community. As Gasparri urged Endrici shortly after annexation, his clergy needed to fulfil their duties with ‘utmost zeal and energy’ so that ‘the Catholic interests in Trentino did not suffer’ (Endrici Reference Endrici and AA.EE.SS1919; Gasparri Reference Gasparri1919). To protect the Church’s presence in the South Tyrolean classroom was deemed essential to safeguarding the Church’s role in South Tyrolean society (Sarri Reference Sarri2006, 120).Footnote 11 The initial strategy of local ecclesiastical authorities would be to treat Italian authorities with respect and tact, but the priority would always be to ensure the Church’s continued importance in the region (Endrici Reference Endrici and AA.EE.SS1919).
Perhaps as a sign of the power of Tyrolean prelates, one of the Italian state’s key concessions immediately following annexation was to leave religious instruction in the clergy’s hands (Ufficio centrale per le nuove provincie 1921). Under Italy’s Liberal government – between 1918 and late 1922 – this arrangement was not particularly remarkable because the Roman catechism had largely remained the remit of parish priests outside school hours since Italy’s nineteenth-century unification.Footnote 12 The situation became more complicated after educational reforms in 1923 formally established religious instruction as part of the Italian state school curriculum. Giovanni Gentile, the primary architect of these reforms and Mussolini’s first Minister of Education, presented (Christian) religion as ‘the ideal foundation for every other academic subject’ (Molina Reference Molinan.d.-b, 312–313). Aiming to educate students to fully embody the spirit of italianità – Italian-ness – in service of the state, Gentile believed introducing children to Christian tenets such as filial piety, obedience, and discipline would lay the groundwork for instilling the totalitarian principles of Fascism (Gentile Reference Gentile and Spingarn1922).Footnote 13 Importantly, Gentile directly asserted the primacy of the state’s political objectives for religious instruction over the ‘spiritual’ mission of Catholic doctrine; religious lessons needed to ‘adhere to the aims and programmes of the educational mission of the state,’ not to those of the Church (Gentile Reference Gentile1924). Members of the clergy could continue their catechistic instruction on Church grounds, but the subject of religion in schools would be the responsibility of Italy’s classroom teachers.Footnote 14
The Ministry of Education implemented the new curricular requirements in most of the kingdom without significant incident, but the situation in the former Habsburg territories of Trentino-South Tyrol and Venezia Giulia required more circumspection, and a more tactful approach was initially adopted. The administration provisionally granted clergy continued control over the administration of religious instruction in school and, at least temporarily, preserved a fragile alliance between the state and prelates in Trent and Brixen/Bressanone (E. Guadagnini Reference Guadagnini1922).
Such dispensation entailed significant risk for the government, however, as it signalled the official acknowledgement of an alternative source of moral authority. For a government aspiring to become a totalitarian nation-state, this concession was less than ideal (Sarri Reference Sarri2014, 81–82). The arrangement also meant that instructors tasked with moulding students into model ‘Italians’ might openly advocate for the education of their students in non-Italian languages. A de facto approval of these beliefs posed a notable problem for the Fascist state. While local clergy argued for a spiritual obligation to teach religion in the students’ language of choice, to many Italian officials, it seemed they had become ‘the champion of nationalism and, it would be better to say, of German regionalism, within the Tyrolean fatherland’ (Molina Reference Molinan.d.-b, 312). Even where Italian-language instruction proceeded without open protest, many civil authorities were convinced that any local German-speaking clergy made ‘Italian’ interests second priority (Molina Reference Molinan.d.-b, 320).
Presented with these hazards, it seems strange that a regime with the stated goal of establishing totalitarian conceptions of italianità and the state would allow clergy to continue to oversee religious instruction in its multilingual borderlands. Yet, as with all aspects of the regime, the reality was far more complicated than its rhetoric. The Fascist school system relied on religious organisations and individuals to achieve several of its goals. On a practical level, the Ministry of Education and its affiliated organisations required an increasing number of teachers to work in a growing network of schools if it was to reach all of Italy’s children. Nuns, monks, priests like Torello and Ricci, and lay religious teachers filled many of those positions – either at the behest of their religious order or the ministry – without requiring significant financial output from the cash-poor central government. Moreover, gaining the cooperation and collaboration of local clergy in the educational project was tantamount to gaining the cooperation and collaboration of much of Trentino-South Tyrol’s population. As a measure of how tightly fused ‘national’ and religious identifications were for many residents of the region, the involvement of local clergy as school teachers or support staff was broadly seen as an indicator of Church approval and therefore of moral and physical safety for their children.Footnote 15 If the Fascist state were ever to supplant the Catholic Church as the preeminent moral authority in Trentino-South Tyrol, then, it needed to use the Catholic Church to prove its fitness as a source of moral authority.
Cooperation was not only beneficial to the Fascist regime, of course; a peaceful relationship with the civil government ensured the Church greater access to the population and, by extension, greater opportunity to advance its own mission (Ceci Reference Ceci2017, 129; Pertici Reference Pertici2009; Moro Reference Moro2020). When Ercole requested Torello and Ricci’s transfer, the diocesan ordinary in Acqui Terme, Lorenzo Delponte, saw it as an ‘irrevocable’ demand from the civil government in Rome that he could not refuse without endangering the relationship (Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934a, Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934b). The quandary he faced was largely a consequence of the ambiguity over whether catechists were employees of (and therefore answerable to) the state or the Church. Delponte had to walk a narrow path between protecting the needs of his own clergy and parishioners (and therefore Church hierarchy and authority) and maintaining open relations with the Fascist government.Footnote 16 So, unlike Geisler, Delponte approved the priests’ reappointment to Brixen/Bressanone, but he also expressed his deep unhappiness in a strongly worded appeal to Ercole not to make additional requests without prior approval from the relevant diocesan ordinaries (Reference Geisler and AAV1934b). It seems Delponte accepted that, for the Church to maintain – let alone to expand – its reach and moral authority in Fascist Italy, it needed access to state resources and, ideally, state sponsorship. He also seemed to recognise the potential fragility of the recent rapprochement between the Vatican and the Fascist government.
Fascist attempts to gain the upper hand
The Church-state reconciliation was always at risk because of the regime’s totalitarian aspirations, especially when it came to its new borderlands (Pertici Reference Pertici2009). Despite the enmeshed relationship with the Church, Fascist officials knew that the regime’s desires to Italianise the borderland and create a totalitarian society were unattainable if German-speaking clergy remained within South Tyrol’s schools. Over the course of the 1920s, they employed a variety of tactics aimed at dislodging them from influential positions, first using citizenship grounds to expel foreign clergy and members of religious orders. Civil administrators also actively encouraged Italian ‘nationalist’ priests to transfer voluntarily to the borderland and created programmes to train a new generation of clergy in South Tyrol who spoke Italian and supported the Fascist project (Rocco Reference Rocco1927).
These methods reinforced a more general strategy of ‘gradual assimilation’ that defined the first few years of Fascist rule. Advocates hoped that exposing German and Ladin speakers to the Italian language in stages would more organically – and therefore less confrontationally – allow the Italian spirit to overwhelm all vestiges of Germanic rule. In terms of educational policy, the strategy entailed introducing Italian as the language of instruction one grade at a time, starting with the youngest students in the 1923–24 school year; older students were allowed to finish their studies in German or Ladin with Italian as a secondary language (Molina Reference Molinan.d.-a, 76). The significant exception to this policy was religious instruction, which long remained in the students’ primary language despite what seemed like annual attempts to assimilate the region to national policy. Unable to circumvent the moral authority of the Church, Fascist bureaucrats were consigned to asking diocesan leaders to provide Italian-speaking clergy in Italian-speaking and mixed-language communities, warning that Italian speakers might turn to Bolshevism or even Protestantism for spiritual guidance if they were not ‘adequately counselled’ by clergy in their own language (Pasolli Reference Pasolli1922; G. Guadagnini Reference Guadagnini1925, 12; Gasparri Reference Gasparri, ARSI and Affari1927).
Many party officials in Rome were dissatisfied with the progress of ‘gradual assimilation’ and increasingly pressured regional administrators to implement more aggressive Italianisation policies (Rocco Reference Rocco, ARSI and Affari1928). This impatience did not produce the desired results, however: when the local superintendent of schools announced that all lessons, including religion, would be taught in Italian starting in the 1928–29 school year, priests and residents alike held public protests (Bresciani Reference Bresciani1931, 4; Ricciardi Reference Ricciardi1933; Butti Reference Butti1927; Marziali Reference Marziali and AA.EE.SS.1932). Many clergy flatly refused to teach German-speaking students in Italian and vowed to work outside the school system to instruct their youngest parishioners if the government failed to rescind its new directive (Schlechleitner, Gamper, and al. Reference Schlechleitner, Gamper and e. al1926; ‘Konferenz der Dekane’ 1928).
These were not empty threats; by mid-1928 and with the support of their bishops, most German-speaking clergy in Trentino-South Tyrol had walked out the schoolhouse doors and set up a system of ‘parish schools’ that met on Church grounds for German-language instruction in theology and catechism once or more each week.Footnote 17 Presented as purely religious classes, civil authorities could not easily interfere without imperilling relations with the Holy See, a prospect Fascist Rome found especially undesirable as diplomats finalised the Lateran Accords. The situation frustrated local school officials who contended that lessons were ‘not just Sunday catechetical instruction, as was done in other Italian regions, but were a type of German school that acted as counterpart to the Italian elementary school’ (Molina Reference Molinan.d.-c, 408).Footnote 18 Even the Vatican’s Mons. Gustavo Testa bluntly concluded that ‘the parish catechism schools have a completely political character.’ Still, he admitted, ‘even the appearance of criticism of these schools by the Holy See would certainly create unpleasant situations’ (Reference Testa1933). Meanwhile, the lack of German-speaking clergy in the classroom meant that Italian-speaking lay primary-school teachers (that is, not clergy) predominantly taught the mandatory lessons in religion. On the surface, this outcome was exactly what Fascist officials had desired. Unfortunately for them, however, it enraged many German-speaking parents who elected to heed the request of their parish priest and send their children to German-language parish schools for additional instruction (‘Konferenz der Dekane’ 1928). This choice was a clear rebuke of the state’s licence to impart religious instruction and, by extension, to exert moral authority without the consent of diocesan Church leaders.
This compromise, such as it was, ultimately did not mollify local prelates. There was no guarantee that parents would send their children to an extracurricular parish school, in which case – assuming clergy were right and German-speaking students did not understand Italian sufficiently – it was suddenly uncertain these students would receive any religious instruction. Furthermore, lay primary-school teachers were rarely trained in the pedagogy Endrici had emphasised in his initial call for clergy to continue teaching in the schools. Yet, when Geisler attempted in 1931 to send German-speaking clergy back into the schools to teach lessons in the catechism, he received a clear message that most of them had no interest in returning, and it would only weaken the good will between them if he forced the issue. In short, the bishop risked losing his authority as the moral guardian of the faithful (Geisler Reference Geisler1931).
The Fascist government had only slightly more success in 1932 when it proposed returning clergy to the classrooms – thereby obviating any ecclesiastical pretext for the parish schools – by transferring Italian-language clergy from more southern dioceses to serve as primary-school teachers in South Tyrolean schools. Not even Endrici, whose diocese primarily consisted of Italian speakers, appreciated this suggestion that was ‘determined by national motives’ rather than spiritual ones. If the prelates fully accepted the importation of Italian-speaking clerical catechists and primary-school teachers, he wrote, the local population would likely lose its trust in the Church and, in turn, the Church would lose moral authority within the community (Reference Endrici and AA.EE.SS.1932). Geisler’s response to the superintendent’s proposal was far more direct; though he had come to his office in 1930 as a prelate whom Roman officials believed could work with the Fascist regime, he now was quite open about his displeasure with civil authorities. He claimed that imported catechists and clerical primary-school teachers would be ‘functionaries of the state and answerable only to the state’ and frequently referred to them as ‘strangers’ (forestieri) or even ‘foreigners’ (stranieri) in his correspondence. Their presumably strong sense of Italian nationalism, he continued, could lead them ‘to prejudicially judge German speakers [allogeni] in general and the clergy in particular as third- or fourth-rate citizens and quasi-enemies of the fatherland’ (Reference Geisler1932). Moreover, because the job of the catechist was objectively of a purely religious nature, they were ethically obligated to refuse collaboration with a political institution that parishioners saw as their persecutor (Geisler Reference Geisler and AAV1934b, 13). Ultimately, Geisler concluded, the arrival of new Italian-language priests in his diocese would only ‘serve to cloud the already delicate political situation’ (Reference Geisler1932).
In theory, the bishop was employing a well-established and mutually agreed-upon principle – at least in the modern era of the nation-state – that matters of faith needed to ‘remain separate from politics so that it could not be used as an instrument of nationalisation or de-nationalisation’ (Gasparri Reference Gasparri, ARSI and Affari1927). To Fascist leaders in Trent and Rome, however, Geisler’s disapproval suggested that he did not see himself as a bishop of a diocese within the Italian nation-state. Moreover, his apparent intransigence did little to sway civil authorities; by the time Ercole initiated Torello and Ricci’s transfer in late 1934, his ministry had already reappointed several Italian-language clergymen to Trentino-South Tyrol (Geisler Reference Geisler1932). In some ways, this fact makes Geisler’s reaction even more peculiar. Then again, the circumstances were somewhat different for Torello and Ricci than for those who had come before. The regime certainly remained (perhaps wilfully) ignorant of the power dynamics in Brixen/Bressanone, and its impatience to Italianise the borderland had only increased. Yet Ercole had recently replaced the long-time superintendent of schools, Luigi Molina, who had reduced public opposition to the transfer of Italian-language clerical classroom teachers by appointing them to schools within bilingual communities. With Molina’s departure, the ministry demanded greater attention to the Italianisation of South Tyrol’s rural communities, where German often remained the only language of use. It was in this context that Ercole demanded the transfer of Torello and Ricci to Geisler’s diocese without informing the Vatican or the diocesan ordinary.
Geisler’s frosty welcome of the two teacher-priests was somewhat surprising, but it was not entirely unforeseen. Though Ercole had not apprised the bishop of the priests’ reappointment, Geisler had learned of their imminent arrival from his colleague in Acqui Termi. In his response to the news, Geisler urged Delponte to follow Vatican protocol and not to approve the transfer north without his own invitation in hand. Canonically, Geisler was on firm ground: if priests did not have approval for their reappointment from the relevant ordinaries, it did not matter what the Minister of Education (or any other politician) wanted, for ‘first they are priests, then teachers’ (Letter from Geisler, 4 December 1934, appended to Delponte Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934b).Footnote 19 Torello and Ricci later explained to officials in Bozen/Bolzano: ‘we are ready to give up fifteen to twenty-three years of teaching sooner than failing in our duty as priests’ (Letter from Torello, 5 December 1934, appended to Delponte Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934b).Footnote 20 Nevertheless, it seems Delponte hoped Geisler would see the prudence in maintaining good relations with the civil government. Perhaps due to his own ignorance of the situation in Brixen/Bressanone, Delponte proceeded to send Torello and Ricci to Brixen/Bressanone along with a personal note imploring Geisler to grant the priests the necessary permission since they were transferred as primary-school teachers, not as catechists (Delponte Reference Delponte and AA.EE.SS.1934b). Geisler remained unmoved: without formal notice from the Ministry of Education, he would not risk the ire of his priests and parishioners for collaborating with the state’s ‘de-nationalisation’ efforts (Geisler Reference Geisler and AA.EE.SS.1934a).
Stepping back from the brink
Geisler insisted that he did not make his decision lightly, and that all ten members of his ‘permanent council’ had supported the expulsion (Reference Geisler and AA.EE.SS.1934a; Reference Geisler1935). His narrative of diocesan consensus only accentuated his glaring lack of consultation with the Holy See before ejecting the two teacher-priests, however.Footnote 21 This remarkable omission put Pius XI rather in a bind. The pope had both ecclesiastical and political reasons to support his bishop’s course of action: the authority to oversee the spiritual development of Christian children needed to remain the responsibility of the Church, and therefore the decision of who was fit to teach the catechism needed to lie with the clergy. Additionally, openly critiquing Geisler’s decision would suggest a limit to the pope’s control over his prelates. Still, Pius XI did not want to go head-to-head with Mussolini over the issue, especially given Geisler’s seemingly unilateral pronouncement. Vatican officials also understood that the reluctance to have catechists teach in Italian was not purely ecclesiastical. As the new Secretary of State (and future Pope Pius XII) Eugenio Pacelli observed, ‘it… appears that a part of the clergy of the German lineage does not hide its lack of sympathy for the government and the regime and this it does with that methodical tenacity typical of the Germans’ (Molina Reference Molina1931). Thus, a minor dispute over the appointment of two primary-school teachers in Trentino-South Tyrol jeopardised the fragile truce between the two most powerful and consequential institutions in interwar Italy.
State authorities in Rome certainly received the bishop’s refusal to comply with a government directive as a deeply political message and immediately accused him of inserting himself into matters of state. Ercole claimed in a letter to Mussolini that there was no reason for the bishop to refuse permission to Torello and Ricci unless he simply did not want priests who were of ‘complete Italian faith’ (Reference Ercole1935). Perhaps more consequentially, the minister claimed that the bishop did not have legal grounds for his actions. Geisler had claimed to be following Vatican protocols, but Ercole noted that Article 5 of the Lateran Accords only referred to the appointment of clergy members to positions within civil institutions, not their reassignment or transfer to other branches that required their services. As such, if left uncontested, the minister believed Geisler’s judgement would constitute a very dangerous precedent, ‘a result of which any provision of the civil authority relating to state schoolteachers who were clergy would come to be subordinated to the consent of the Diocesan Ordinaries’, which was clearly unacceptable (Reference Geisler1935).
In short, neither the pope nor the Duce were happy with the bishop because of the incredibly awkward political position his choice put them in, and yet both recognised the political peril of not supporting their subordinates’ actions (Borgongini Reference Borgongini1934).
A few days after Torello and Ricci’s expulsion, word reached the Holy See that the Ministry of Education was preparing a decree to exclude all clergy from working in the state school system if a satisfactory outcome to the crisis was not found (‘Si è detto che…’ 1934; De Vecchi Reference De Vecchi1934; Pacelli Reference Pacelli1935b; De Vecchi Reference De Vecchi1935). If, as Ercole later wrote, the first responsibility of teachers who were also clergy was to the Church, then it necessarily followed that they could not adequately collaborate with the state school system (Reference Ercole1935).
Of course, such a measure would not have benefited either the regime or the Holy See. For the state, the immediate problem would be the elimination of a significant number of teachers in schools throughout the kingdom and the exacerbation of the education system’s existing personnel struggles. It would also suggest that, contrary to the regime’s rhetoric, ‘purely political reasons were not unrelated to the sending of the two priests to Brixen/Bressanone’ (‘Si è detto che…’ 1934). Even more significantly, it would threaten at least some of the support Italy’s Catholics showed the Fascist regime, not to mention the respect from the international Catholic community that had grown since the 1929 Lateran Accords.Footnote 22 Likewise, a possible break with the Italian state alarmed Pius XI, as it would diminish the Church’s newly recognised relationship with and access to privileges of the state. It would also likely threaten support for the Holy See among Catholics who believed the Fascist regime had only ‘showed public respect and deference to religion and to priests’ (Ferrone Reference Ferrone2001, 15). One can presume rather reasonably, then, that if such a threat were realised, the future of the Concordat would have become quite uncertain – a likelihood with potentially grave consequences for both Mussolini and Pius XI.
Given the risk to all parties involved, top diplomats spent the following month scrambling to find an alternative solution. Ultimately, the papal nuncio to Italy, Giuseppe Pizzardo, and the Italian ambassador to the Holy See, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, worked alongside a Jesuit and mutually trusted ally, Pietro Tacchi Venturi, to find a way to preserve the authority – moral and political – of their respective institutions and the Lateran Accords (De Vecchi Reference De Vecchi1934).Footnote 23 The Church felt particular pressure to defuse a situation that appeared to be of its own making and pursued its defence on multiple fronts. First, a somewhat (but not entirely) chastened Geisler sent a letter of apology to the government in early January, most likely under strict orders from his superiors. In it, he expressed surprise that his refusal to accept Torello and Ricci was interpreted as an insult to the authority of the Fascist state. He absolutely did not mean to offend the government, the bishop wrote, but merely wanted to protect the Church and Christian faith. He was confident the German-speaking population would have viewed the two Italian-speaking teacher-priests as agents of de-nationalisation, which would have led to a sense of distrust in the Holy See. The bishop asserted his loyalty to the government and his consistent promotion of the work of the Fascist government whenever and wherever issues of religion were not involved (Reference De Vecchi1935).
Second, Vatican Secretary of State Pacelli asked one of Pius XI’s closest aides, Domenico Tardini, to meet with Geisler and assess his intentions. It is interesting to note that Geisler requested the meeting be held at his residence in Brixen/Bressanone, citing concern that a summons to the Vatican might raise questions among parishioners and state officials about the pope’s faith in his leadership. Tardini’s report of the meeting largely covered the same ground as Geisler’s own correspondence, but the papal aide served as an important character witness for the bishop in the Vatican, claiming that Geisler was clearly a passionate pastor who only had his parishioners’ best interests in mind (Tardini Reference Tardini and AA.EE.SS.1935).
With Geisler’s apology and Tardini’s report in hand, Pacelli, Pizzardo, Tacchi Venturi and Mussolini met in early February to negotiate a resolution. Geisler continued to reject Torello and Ricci’s reappointment to any school where the students overwhelmingly spoke German, and Mussolini dismissed any suggestion that implied he did not have the authority to reappoint any teacher as he saw fit. Still, all who were present agreed that Geisler had acted out of order. Nevertheless, Pizzardo and Pacelli worked to convince the Duce that the principles on which the bishop had acted were honourable. South Tyroleans were loyal Italians, they assured him; they understood that as Italian citizens they needed to understand the Italian language. South Tyroleans merely rejected the state’s attempt to sideline the German language completely and, Pacelli quickly added, any sense that the regime was erasing their German heritage only benefited German National Socialism (Pacelli Reference Pacelli and AA.EE.SS.1935a). Mussolini maintained that he was not trying to ‘de-nationalise’ the population and, as a show of good faith, agreed not to take such independent action regarding Church personnel again. This concession made, Geisler agreed to place Torello and Ricci in schools in the town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, one of the few in his diocese where most of the residents spoke Italian (Pizzardo Reference Pizzardo1934; Tardini Reference Tardini and AA.EE.SS.1935). With both parties appearing resolute in their principles, Mussolini declared the issue ‘liquidato’ and the meeting concluded (Pacelli Reference Pacelli and AA.EE.SS.1935c).
Conclusion
Mussolini might have formally pronounced an end to the Torello-Ricci affair, but such a declaration did not end the contest for moral authority over the residents of South Tyrol. Tensions between regional Church leaders and civil authorities over political and moral authority re-emerged regularly for the rest of Mussolini’s reign. However, the debate over who had the right to appoint religious instructors in Trentino-South Tyrol’s schools appeared largely settled in the Vatican’s favour: the state would select catechists from a list of recommendations provided by the diocesan ordinaries.
More broadly, however, it seems both Pius XI and Mussolini recognised that the upper hand each had expected to gain from the 1929 Lateran Accords had not materialised – at least not when it came to South Tyrol. The civil government’s decision to order the reassignment of clerical teachers without first informing the pope had suggested a newfound confidence in Rome of the regime’s expanded moral authority and ability to Italianise the border region through more authoritarian tactics. In turn, Bishop Geisler’s choice to expel the two teacher-priests from his diocese on threat of formal censure illustrated just how misplaced such confidence was. Both decisions revealed cracks in the institutions’ facades of centralised authority and hierarchical discipline. Finally, the resolution that required compromise from both parties is clear evidence of both Fascism’s vulnerable position in Trentino-South Tyrol and the Church’s ongoing campaign to maintain its moral hegemony in the region.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Caterina Tomasi (Fondazione museo storico Trentino), Erika Kustatscher (Diözesanarchiv Brixen), Alejandro Dieguez (Archivio apostolico Vaticano), and many other archivists who helped me navigate a variety of archival collections. Many thanks are also due to Erica Moretti, Monique Laney, Maria Stella Chiaruttini, Malcolm McLean, and Modern Italy’s two anonymous reviewers for listening to ideas, editing drafts, and offering valuable feedback on the article.
Funding statement
Research for this article was only possible with financial support from Trinity College’s Barbieri Grant, the American Philosophical Society, and Auburn University’s Office of the Provost, College of Liberal Arts, and Department of History.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Eden McLean is the Joseph A. Kicklighter Endowed Associate Professor of History at Auburn University. Her first book, Mussolini’s Children: Race and Elementary Education in Fascist Italy (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) explored the roles of race and racism in Italian Fascism through their articulation in state-mandated youth culture. Her research has appeared in Contemporary European History and Contemporary Austrian Studies, and she is currently working on a manuscript that analyses Fascism’s attempts to ‘Italianise’ Trentino-South Tyrol, to explore the twin realities that national communities are illusory and the shared attributes that purportedly define those communities – language, history, culture, religion – are extraordinarily resilient.
Open access
