Catholic Students at War: The FUCI 1940–43

Abstract

The initial years of the Second World War are still a rather neglected topic in the historiography of Italian Catholicism. Whereas the Resistance has rightly received much scholarly attention, the previous period is often regarded at best as a preparatory ground for future events, thus concentrating on the ‘after’ at the cost of overlooking the ‘during’ and too often placing a somewhat undue stress on the anti-Fascist potentialities of the Catholic world, as if this was the main preoccupation of the faithful of the time.¹ This somewhat teleological reasoning fails to consider the internal dynamics of Catholic mentalities and values, and their frequent contradictions and demands, in the deeply disturbing and changing reality of the Second World War. Moreover, this perspective tends to neglect perhaps the most crucial elements in the experience of many Catholics, namely, the forceful effect that the war had on religious faith, with the pressures it generated and the conflicts that arose between church, fatherland and authority. In this respect, the FUCI offers an excellent basis for the analysis of these and other issues. Designated as president of the association in May 1939, Aldo Moro had to tackle a series of difficult problems from the outset.² Moro had been born on 23 September 1916, so he belonged to that generation of the littorio that had almost entirely grown up in the symbolic, political, and social universe of the Fascist regime. Perhaps more important in his intellectual and religious itinerary was the fact that he came from a family that had no strong ties to the traditions of social or political Catholicism as Montini had, for example. His father, a school inspector, had had a secular upbringing with no great Catholic sympathies. His mother, a teacher, was imbued with that typical southern spirituality, expressed in an idiosyncratic, personal, and intimate adhesion to the Gospels, an attitude that would leave its mark on the young Aldo in the sense that his line of spirituality was less ‘militant’, less ‘intransigent’ than had been the case of Montini and Righetti.³ It was a more ‘secular’ line of spirituality with Dominican undertones, as Mario Casella has cogently suggested.⁴ Moro entered the FUCI chapter in Bari in 1934, where he became acquainted with bishop Marcello Mimmi, a leading local figure in matters such as the Gospel groups and the liturgical movement. In 1937 he became president of the local student group. As we have already seen, he participated in the Littoriali della cultura e dell’arte in 1937 and 1938, with a distinction in both.