Berlusconi Defends Mussolini For Supporting Hitler At Holocaust Memorial
By FRANCES D'EMILIO 01/27/13 01:18 PM ET EST
ROME — Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for "having done good" despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe on Sunday held Holocaust remembrances.
Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.
The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month's election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.
In 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Mussolini's regime passed the so-called "racial laws," barring Jews from Italy's universities and many professions, among other bans. When Germany's Nazi regime occupied Italy during the war, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps.
"It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then," Berlusconi said of Mussolini's support for Hitler. "Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it."
Berlusconi added that "within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good."
More than 7,000 Jews were deported under Mussolini's regime, and nearly 6,000 of them were killed.
Outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.
Among those voicing condemnation were prominent Jewish figures abroad.
Mussolini `'modeled his anti-Jewish laws after the Nazi Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from civil service," Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.
`'It is the height of revisionism to try to reinstate an Italian dictator who helped legitimize and prop up Hitler as a `reincarnated good guy,'" said the rabbi, whose organization monitors anti-Semitic incidents worldwide.
Berlusconi's praise of Mussolini constitutes "an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy," said Rosy Bindi, a center-left leader. "Only Berlusconi's political cynicism, combined with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship."
Italian laws enacted following the country's disastrous experience in the war forbid the defense of Fascism. A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint on Monday to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.
Hours later, Berlusconi issued a statement saying he `'regretted" that he didn't make clear in his earlier comments that his historical analyses `'are always based on condemnation of dictatorships," the Italian news agency LaPresse reported.
He also contended that the political left was trying to exploit his comment about Mussolini for election campaign fodder.
Advocating aggressive nationalism, Mussolini used brutish force and populist appeal evoking ancient Rome's glories to achieve and keep his dictatorial grip on power, starting in the early `20s and lasting well into World War II. His Fascist "blackshirt" loyalists cracked down on dissidents, through beatings and jailings.
He encouraged big families to propagate the Italian population, established a sprawling state economy and erected monumental buildings and statues to evoke ancient Rome. Mussolini sought to impose order on a generally individualistic-minded people, and Italians sometimes note trains ran on time during Fascism.
With dreams of an empire, he sent Italian troops on missions to attack or occupy foreign lands, including Ethiopia and Albania. Eventually, Italian military failures in Africa and in Greece fostered rebellion among Fascist officials, and in 1943 he was placed under arrest by orders of the Italian king. His end came at the vengeful hands of partisan fighters, who shot him and his mistress, and left their bodies to hang in a Milan square in April 1945.
Berlusconi's former government allies have included political heirs to neo-fascist movements admiring Mussolini.
In 2010, he told world leaders at a Paris conference that he had been reading Mussolini's journals, and years earlier Berlusconi had claimed that Mussolini "never killed anyone."
Berlusconi is running in Feb. 24-25 Parliamentary elections and has repeatedly changed his mind on whether he is seeking a fourth term as premier. Monti is also running, but polls put him far behind front-runner Pier Luigi Bersani, a center-left leader who supported Monti's austerity measures to save Italy from the Eurozone debt crisis.
Polls show about one-third of eligible voters are undecided.
"God's rotweiller" failed to address the sex abuse scandals scarring his church, bets on next pope begin
By Natasha Lennard - Monday, Feb 11, 2013 2:09 PM UTC
(Credit: AP)
Pope Benedict XVI set a couple of precedents in recent months. He became the first social media pontiff, opening a Twitter account late last year. And as of Monday, he is the first pope since the middle ages to resign.
These nontraditional moves aside, though, Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, was a fiercely conservative Catholic leader who failed to challenge a widespread child sex abuse scandal in the church. His papal legacy will include the maintenance of a system of impunity for abusers of the church’s most defenseless and innocent members. The Guardian’s Rome correspondent John Hooper noted .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/11/pope-beneditc-resignation-paradoxical-papacy :
~~~~~ The abuse scandals dominated his seven years as leader of the world’s Catholics. Before his accession, there had been scandals in the United States and Ireland. But in 2010, evidence of clerical sex abuse was made public in a succession of countries in continental Europe, notably Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Benedict’s native Germany.
The pope was himself affected by one of these scandals. It emerged that, while he was archbishop of Munich, a known molester was quietly re-assigned to duties that, in time, allowed him to return to pastoral duties and make contact with young people. ~~~~~
The pope’s failure to properly confront the darkest aspect of his church was particularly disturbing to critics who remember that, while serving under his predecessor John Paul II, then-Cardinal Ratzinger had overseen the Vatican department charged with addressing sex abuse cases. According to Hooper, “the future Pope Benedict personally read much of the testimony and, say his apologists, he was deeply shocked and moved by what he learned.”
Commentators already reviewing Benedict XVI’s papacy have highlighted the paradox that as a fiercely rigorous theological scholar and doctrinal purist, he earned the epithet “God’s rottweiler,” “But after several years into his new job he showed that he not only did not bite but barely even barked,” noted Reuters .. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/11/us-pope-resigns-idUSBRE91A0BH20130211 .
He also tallied a decidedly mixed record when it came to interfaith relations. According to Reuters, “Israel’s chief rabbi praised Benedict’s inter-faith outreach and wished him good health.” But Benedict angered Jews, noted Hooper, when he allowed the wider use by Catholics of an old liturgy that includes a Good Friday plea that Jews be “delivered from their darkness.”
Benedict had served in the Hitler Youth as a child when it was compulsory in Germany, but has vociferously condemned his country’s past treatment of Jewish people. According to Reuters, “he prayed and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, most of them Jews, died there during World War Two.” Yet, controversially, he lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Britain’s Richard Williamson. “The Vatican said Benedict had been unaware of Williamson’s views when he acted,” wrote the Guardian’s Hooper.
In a 2006 lecture he caused outrage when he said that Muslims were “only evil and inhuman.” He attempted to mitigate the damage with a trip to Turkey later that year, during which he prayed in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque with a Turkish Mufti.
In electing Benedict at age 78, the Cardinals had, according to commentators, hoped for a brief, stopgap pope after John Paul II’s long reign. Benedict XVI likely caused more controversy than had been desired. A Twitter account was a thin, modern gloss on a deeply conservative, traditionalist papacy.
A Vatican spokesman said Monday that the pope does not fear schism in the church after his resignation, since his choice to step down was prompted by health concerns, not problems with the papacy. But the betting has already begun over who will take his place. Experts believe a non-European could be chosen. Peter Turkson from Ghana, now head of the Vatican’s justice and peace department, is often tipped as Africa’s front-runner. Two Latin American candidates are also looking like strong possibilities — Odilo Scherer, archbishop of the huge diocese of Sao Paolo, or the Italian-Argentine Leonardo Sandri, now heading the Vatican department for Eastern Churches.
Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com. More Natasha Lennard. .. http://www.salon.com/writer/natasha_lennard/
Every pope mixes the roles of CEO and Vicar of Christ, but a comparison of Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, suggests just how different those roles really are.
Some see the pope as an administrator of that enormous multinational corporation called the Catholic Church. Others prefer to see him as the corporeal symbol of something still more vast: the human spirit and its relationship to the Holy Spirit. Vatican John Paul II
Pope Benedict XVI, left, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is seen with the late Pope John Paul II during mass in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Sept. 11, 2002. (Pier Paolo Cito/AP)
In practice, every Vicar of Christ has something of the CEO about him. But when it comes to Benedict XVI, who rose to power in the Vatican as its enforcer of orthodoxy, one always suspected his heart was more in administration than incarnation. And his announcement that he will resign because he can no longer perform his duties to his own satisfaction is proof enough of that. It is a responsible decision, and a worthy one. It is even brave, considering how little precedent there is for it. (The last papal resignation was before Columbus sailed to America.) But it is not inspiring.
The contrast with Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, is striking. The late pontiff was in much worse shape. At the age of 84, he was a year younger than Benedict is now, but afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, which petrified his features, palsied his hands and slowly, agonizingly stopped his once powerful and athletic body from functioning.
As my colleague Rod Nordland and I wrote .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2005/02/27/precious-suffering.html .. during the death watch of 2005, because John Paul was the leader of a billion Roman Catholics, because he was the first pontiff of the satellite and Internet age, reaching out to billions more, and because he was John Paul II, who had ruled the church for more than 26 years, “in that public experience of suffering lay enormous power.” And he knew it.
After recovering from the pistol shot that almost took his life in front of St. Peter’s in 1981, John Paul declared that suffering, as such, is one of the most powerful messages in Christianity. “Human suffering evokes compassion,” he wrote in 1984, “it also evokes respect, and in its own way it intimidates.” In 1994, as age and infirmity began to incapacitate John Paul publicly, he told his followers he had heard God and was about to change the way he led the church. “I must lead her with suffering,” he said. “The pope must suffer so that every family and the world should see that there is, I would say, a higher gospel: the gospel of suffering, with which one must prepare the future.”
At the time of John Paul’s last long battle against his own death, many Catholics saw his pain as something like the agony of Jesus himself, and neither John Paul nor those around him discouraged such comparisons. When asked a few years ago if he might consider resigning, John Paul reportedly asked, in reply, “Did Christ come down from the cross?” That pope was not doing a job, he was carrying out a divine mission, and his pain was at its core.
This exaltation of suffering may be difficult for many non-Catholics to understand. (Protestant crosses, typically, do not depict Jesus at all, much less in the death throes shown by Catholic crucifixes.) But suffering, as scholars point out, is at the very core of the faith; it is the vital link between the human experience and that of Christ as savior. He was a suffering victim who seemed to have been defeated by the earthly powers of his time. But in his moment of apparent weakness and defeat, Christians see him as triumphant, dying for humanity’s sins and opening the way to heaven.
If there has been one consistent tenet of the Catholic Church in the modern world, moreover, it is the sanctity of life. One may disagree with the way this is interpreted in the fight against abortion or the efforts to keep alive through medical means bodies and brains that are basically dead. Certainly I do. But you had to hand it to John Paul. He was not fighting for “quality of life.” He was fighting for life, period.
Benedict, on the other hand, has presented himself to the world too often as fighting for doctrine. His vision of the church was not as something transcendent and all embracing—catholic with a small “c” if you will. He was very clear about this. Benedict’s vision was of a church that would be smaller, more exclusive, more rigid in its beliefs.
Now that Benedict has decided to step down, one must speculate that his core motive is not to enjoy retirement at Castel Gandolfo or some monastery in Rome, but to be able to choose—perhaps even hope to dictate—who will be his successor.
That’s what a good CEO would do. But one likes to imagine that the Vicar of Christ, as we saw with John Paul II, would fight for life literally and symbolically until the end, leaving the choice of his successor purely to the College of Cardinals working, as they understand it, the will of God.
It wasn't easy to read all that suffering in the name of Christ stuff, and i'm glad to see Benedict resigning for the reason he gave. He may live longer as a result and, all else aside, for me anyway, that's a good thing for him.
When people think of the Vatican and World War II, they think immediately of Pius XII, the controversial pontiff between 1939 and 1958. But before him, there was a little-remembered pope, Pope Pius XI, who was loudly outspoken against the Nazis and was determined to call the world's attention to their atrocities. "The Pope's Last Crusade" tells that story, along with that of the pope's partnership with an American Jesuit, which breaks new ground about war-time conspiracies within the Vatican.
Pope Pius XI had left the Vatican in late April 1938, earlier than usual for his summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo. He intended it to be an obvious snub directed at Adolf Hitler who was meeting the first week in May with Italian leader Benito Mussolini.
The pope rejected being present while the "crooked cross of neo-paganism" flew over Rome. Hitler's anti-Semitic campaign had become the pope's great preoccupation.
Many scholars think that Pius XI's crusade against Hitler, which took place in the last months of his life, could have changed course of events, possibly even the severity of later atrocities against the Jews.
As the Nazis increased their threats in their march toward war, the pope realized that it might at that moment be the Jews, but then it would be the Catholics and finally the world. He could see that the Nazis would stop at nothing less than world domination.
Pius had few allies at the Vatican, where many even believed that Communism was a greater danger than Fascism. Therefore, many prelates thought, the enemy of their Communist enemy must be their friend.
But Pius saw Hitler as an insane presence in the world and had been searching for a means of applying pressure and rallying international leaders against Nazism. It would not be easy. He was 82 years old and increasingly ill. At the same time, powerful cardinals and bishops around him feared the pope's activism against Hitler. In particular, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, counseled caution in challenging Hitler and Mussolini. Pacelli eventually would eventually succeed Pius XI.
The pope, undeterred, reached out for help beyond the walls of the Vatican, seeking out an American Jesuit journalist, John LaFarge, who had just come to Italy. LaFarge had just written a book, "Interracial Justice," which portrayed the lives of American blacks who lived in the poorest strata of society. While LaFarge defended African Americans against the myth of racial superiority, the concept applies, he wrote, "to all races and conditions of men ... all tribes and races, Jew and Gentile alike..." (Twenty-five years later, in 1963, LaFarge stood with his friend Martin Luther King at the March on Washington.)
The pope summoned LaFarge to Castel Gandolfo on June 25, 1938. The American priest was shocked that the pope even knew his name. Pius told LaFarge he was to write an encyclical that would use the same reasoning he employed when discussing racism in the United States. It was to be the strongest statement ever made by the Vatican, in defense of the Jews and rejecting the Nazi doctrine of anti-Semitism.
Sworn to silence, LaFarge took up the papal assignment clandestinely in Paris. The pope's directive, however, had thrown LaFarge into the hazy realm of Vatican politics. The leader of the Jesuit order worldwide, Wlodimir Ledochowski, promised the pope and LaFarge that he would facilitate production of the encyclical. Privately, Ledochowski, an anti-Semite, conspired to block LaFarge at every turn.
In late September 1938, after about three months of work, LaFarge traveled to Rome with his papal mission complete. His superior, Ledochowski, welcomed him and promised to deliver the encyclical right away to the pope. He dismissed LaFarge and directed him to return home to the United States. Ledochowski did take care of the speech -- by burying it for months in Vatican bureaucracy.
The pontiff, unaware of these machinations, was stepping up his criticism of the Hitler, and Mussolini. He criticized Mussolini's imitation of systematic attacks on Jews in Germany and Austria. As in Germany, Jews in Italy were banned from attending school, from holding public positions or serving as doctors, lawyers and in other professional functions. Pius XI condemned these actions.
"Spiritually," the pope said, "we are all Semites."
In the fall of 1938, LaFarge realized finally that the pope still had not received the encyclical. He wrote a letter directly to the pope, implying that Ledochowski had the document in hand for months already. Pius XI demanded delivery, but did not receive it until Jan. 21, 1939 with a note from Ledochowski, who warned that the language of the document appeared to be excessive. He advised caution.
The pope, finally with LaFarge's text, planned immediately to issue the encyclical after a meeting with bishops on Feb. 11, in which he would condemn fascism. He worked on that speech on his own, jotting down ideas, rewriting and editing it by hand. Rumors, meanwhile, had reached Mussolini that the pope might be planning to excommunicate him or even Hitler, also a Catholic, a blow that could actually damage their popular power base.
Pius XI died on Feb. 10, 1939, a day before his planned speech. Vatican doctors said he had suffered complications of a heart attack, and despite administering stimulants, they had been unable to revive him.
Bishops in some quarters grumbled about the circumstances of his death and questioned the kind of stimulants he had been given in an attempt to revive him. Cardinal Eugene Tisserant of France, the pope's best friend and a former French intelligence officer, wrote in his diary that the pope had been murdered.
Pacelli, the secretary of state, became Pius XII, and the Vatican immediately toned down its vocal protests against Hitler and Mussolini. One historian, Conor Cruise O'Brien, the noted Irish writer and politician, in 1989 said that those months in 1938 were crucial as Hitler measured how the world would react to his campaign against the Jews.
"Had Pius XI been able to deliver the encyclical he planned, the green light would have changed to red. The Catholic Church in Germany would have been obliged to speak out against the persecution of the Jews. Many Protestants, inside and outside Germany, would have likely to follow its example."
How effective Pius XI's efforts might have been can never be known. It was only clear that he took a stance in favor of absolute morality and defended to his last breath his principles of decency and humanity, nothing more, nothing less.
Francis 'will open files on Hitler's Pope', says friend
Pope Francis. In an interview with The Tablet, Rabbi Skorka said he was convinced his friend – who he predicted would be a "revolutionary" Pope – favoured opening the archives to clarify once and for all Pius's role. Photo: REUTERS
Decades of doubt over the role played by "Hitler's Pope" under the Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s may be answered if Pope Francis, as a close friend has suggested, opens the Vatican archives.
By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor 9:58PM BST 18 Apr 2013
Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who has known the Argentine former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio for 20 years, said he had discussed the role of Pius XII – the man long dubbed as "Hitler's Pope" – at length with the new pontiff.
The Rabbi, who recently co-authored On Heaven and Earth, a book of interviews with his friend, said he had made clear that he thought Pius's legacy ought to be "investigated thoroughly".
"It's a terribly sensitive issue, but he says that it must be investigated thoroughly," he said. "I have no doubt that he will move to open the archives."
In an interview with The Tablet, Rabbi Skorka said he was convinced his friend – who he predicted would be a "revolutionary" Pope – favoured opening the archives to clarify once and for all Pius's role.
It follows decades of speculation about the extent to which Pius cooperated with the Fascist regime in Italy and Nazi Germany during his reign which began in 1939.
Critics have accused him of remaining silent over the holocaust – a suspicion which has only been strengthened by the Vatican's refusal so far to give scholars access to the archives from his reign.
But there is also evidence that Pius may have helped arranged the exodus of 200,000 Jews from Germany in the 1930s.
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, as he was known before his election as Pope, is said to have written to archbishops around the world urging them to secure visas for "non-Aryan Catholics" and Jewish converts to Christianity to travel to their countries from Germany.
Moves towards canonising Pius XII have been under way in Rome for decades but two years ago a group of prominent Roman Catholic scholars publicly urged Pope Emeritus Benedict to halt the process until more was known about his wartime role by opening the archives.
Benedict had attracted criticism only months before when he approved a decree recognising Pius's "heroic virtues", a statement which moved him a step closer to sainthood.
Rabbi Skorka, who is now the rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Argentina, built a close friendship with Cardinal Bergoglio during his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
The two leaders attended each other's services and their friendship paved the way for a closer relationship between Catholics and Jews in Argentina, which has the largest Jewish population in Latin America.
The two leaders discuss Pius's attitudes to the war in their book but conclude that it is impossible to draw firm conclusions.
Rabbi Skorka, told The Tablet that Francis was a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism or "any kind of fanaticism" and added: "What is certain is that the Jews now have a very good partner in the Vatican."
He disclosed that the Pope had twice telephoned him in Buenos Aires since his election as Pope last month and they had privately discussed his hopes for his pontificate.
"I think he's going to change everything that he believes needs to be changed," he said.
"He is not a person to take on this role in a passive way.
"He's not a person who stays quiet when he knows that there is work to be done." He predicted that the Pope was unlikely to change Church doctrines but would revolutionise it in other aspects.
"On matters of customs, protocol, flamboyance, luxury, as well as in his approach to the poor, he is a revolutionary," he said.
He said that the first time the Pope had called from Rome he had picked up the telephone to hear a voice telling him jokily: "Hello it's Bergoglio.
"They trapped me here in Rome and they won't let me come home."
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- Pope Francis was harshly criticized on Thursday in an Argentine courtroom, where a woman said he didn't help protect her brother from the country's military dictatorship.
Graciela Yorio accused Jorge Mario Bergoglio of turning his back on her brother, the late Jesuit priest Orlando Virgilio Yorio, before and after he and another priest were taken by the junta's agents and tortured in 1976.
Bergoglio has said he did what he could as a young Jesuit leader with no real power to protect Yorio and other slum priests from being kidnapped by the right-wing junta. He testified in 2010 that he worked behind the scenes to win the freedom of Yorio and the other Jesuit slum priest, Francisco Jalics.
Graciela Yorio disagreed.
"My brother was practically abandoned by the church," said Yorio, who is one of more than 800 witnesses in a two-year trial of 67 defendants accused of human rights violations against 789 people who were detained at the junta's feared Navy Mechanics School.
Bergoglio told his authorized biographers for the book "The Jesuit" that he did everything in his limited power as a Jesuit leader to appeal to junta and church officials to free the men. He also testified in the lead-up to this trial that he tried to protect Yorio and Jalics, offering them shelter and protection at a time when any slum priest was in danger from right-wing death squads.
Yorio testified, however, that even before the March 1976 coup, her brother and Jalics were turned away by Bergoglio after being accused of being "subversive and extremists" for their work with the poor. She said they pleaded with Bergoglio to do something to stop "the rumors, because with these rumors their life was in danger."
But Bergoglio told them he was under too much pressure from church officials, and urged them to find a bishop who might help. None would, she said.
Prosecutor Eduardo Taiano has described what happened to Yorio and Jalics next: After saying Mass on May 23, 1976, they were separated from their parishioners in the Bajo Flores slum, near where Bergoglio grew up in Argentina's capital, and taken to the Navy Mechanics School's torture center. They were blindfolded, chained, gagged, prevented from going to the bathroom or allowed to drink or eat. Yorio was the victim of insults, death threats and electric shocks and was drugged and terrorized during constant interrogations, Taiano determined.
Graciela Yorio said she and her mother went to Bergoglio seeking help.
"We had three interviews, and he never told us anything. Yes, I do remember that he told us, 'I made good reports.' He also told me to 'be very careful, because a sister of another person who didn't have anything to do with this was detained,'" she testified.
Five months after being taken away, Yorio and Jalics reappeared, drugged and blindfolded, in a field north of Buenos Aires.
Bergoglio told his biographers and the court, in 2010, that the men were freed in part because he quietly and repeatedly intervened with junta leaders to plead for their release.
Yorio died in 2000. Jalics, who now lives in a German monastery, recently said he considers the whole episode to be closed.
But Graciela Yorio said both men felt abandoned by Bergoglio, and by the church hierarchy as a whole.
"My brother was abandoned, expelled, without a bishop, without the support of the Company of Jesus to protect him, and that's why he was kidnapped. He was practically abandoned by the church," she said.
.. this is obviously not new, just i don't recall it registering before .. lol, bumped into it on walkabout ..
Last Updated: Saturday, 27 September, 2003, 13:16 GMT 14:16 UK
Mussolini 'was angry at Hitler'
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini asked the Pope to excommunicate Adolf Hitler shortly before he went to Rome to seal their alliance in 1938, according to a Vatican document.
Details of Mussolini's secret request were found in the Vatican's recently opened secret archive which forms the basis of a book by Italian historian Emma Fattorini on the last days of Pius XI's papacy.
Ms Fattorini, a university professor in Rome, suggests the demand reflected the Italian leader's anger over Hitler's annexation of Austria in March 1938.
Although she also says Mussolini's actions may have been an attempt to set up the Church, in that if it did not act, he could accuse it of failing to listen to his warnings.
"Despite the many stop and go situations, we are in fact in the middle of full Italian-German accord - and it is this that makes the request for an excommunication so sensational," Ms Fattorini reportedly said.
She said the document - found in the archive opened in February - showed Mussolini was playing a "double game".
'Harsher measures'
Despite being baptised a Catholic by his mother, in his adult life Hitler was not a practicing Catholic.
It is thought however he would have been aware of the significance of an excommunication and would have avoided the ruling at all costs.
The account of the meeting in April 1938 was taken by Holy See representative Pietro Tacchi Venturi.
Mussolini had urged the Vatican to adopt harsher measures against Hitler, according to Mr Venturi's own account of their talks.
"The head of the government told P. Tacchi Venturi in a private meeting that with Hitler it would be advisable to be more energetic, without half measures; not now, not immediately, but waiting for the best time to adopt these more energetic measures, for example excommunication," the record says.
In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and became a threat to Italian security - especially in Italy's German-speaking northern region.
However, Mussolini went on to sign a military alliance with Germany in 1939 and joined the war a year later.
It is not clear if the Church ever seriously considered excommunicating Hitler.
The Vatican archives relating to pre-war Germany were opened in a bid to counter charges that the Vatican did not do enough to prevent the Holocaust.
GOD'S BANKERS A History of Money and Power at the Vatican by Gerald Posner Pub Date: Feb. 3rd, 2015 ISBN: 978-1416576570 Page count: 728pp Publisher: Simon & Schuster KIRKUS REVIEW A dogged reporter exhaustively pursues the nefarious enrichment of the Vatican, from the Borgias to Pope Francis. In one of his previous works, Mengele (1986), former Wall Street lawyer–turned–accomplished historian and author Posner (Warlords of Crime; Hitler’s Children, etc.) followed the money connection from the Nazi criminals fleeing the Third Reich to Argentina—and struck Vatican gold. Laundering Nazi booty extracted from the Jews, protecting Nazi criminals as they found refuge across the globe, providing hush money for egregious cases of pedophiliac priests—these are just some of the tentacles of Vatican bankrolling since World War II. Having overcome its aversion to moneylending and capitalism as being practices of Protestants and Jews after Italian unification, the Vatican later established a stabilizing appeasement policy with secular leader Mussolini in the form of the Lateran Pacts. Pope Pius XI’s financial adviser, Bernardino Nogara, diversified Vatican finances through the Depression era, entangling Vatican and Fascist ties. The Reichskonkordat, a series of pacts signed by Hitler, extracted taxes from Catholic churches [enacted automatic payroll deductions of German Catholics (8-10%); money which flowed to the Vatican treasury ( http://www.amazon.com/review/R2XP6HNU9JH60T/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1416576576 )] and guaranteed the Vatican's silence regarding the Holocaust; it also funneled “blood money” from Nazi victims and supported the “ratline” for escaping Nazi criminals. Posner tracks the formation of the Institute per le Opere di Religione (the Vatican bank) in 1942 through its troubled survival into the present era, as it has battled accusations of mob ties, “gay lobby” scandals, WikiLeaks disclosures, lawsuits by victims of sex abuse and the insistence by the European Union on more transparency in the bank’s dealings. Pope Francis’ promises of reform are going to be closely watched. Posner bases his massive research on extensive interviews and documents found in the archives of governments and private companies across the world (the author was barred from the Vatican’s own Secret Archives). A meticulous work that cracks wide open the Vatican’s legendary, enabling secrecy. Review Posted Online: Nov. 15th, 2014 Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1st, 2014 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gerald-posner/gods-bankers/
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