Feuilleton

✥ One of my most vivid childhood memories—I was seven—is the image of the police setting up checkpoints in the streets of Italy in 1978 after the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Moro was later assassinated in cold blood, and five members of his security detail were murdered. His body was found in a car parked symbolically on a street in Rome between the headquarters of the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party. The day he was kidnapped, Moro was going to a session of the Chamber of Deputies, where a discussion was to take place regarding the formation of a new government led by the Christian Democrats, with the support, for the first time, of the Communist Party.

The year 1978 was the peak of a prolonged national crisis that shook Italy from the complacency of the “economic miracle” of the previous two decades. The Years of Lead lasted from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s (with the after-effects extending into the early 2000s). Domestic political violence in Italy claimed the lives of hundreds and tested the Italian Republic’s constitution and the covenant opposing political cultures had made after World War II. Other countries in Europe had similar waves of domestic terrorism in those same years, but nothing like that in Italy in terms of length and pervasiveness. Assassins eliminated politicians, leaders of workers’ unions, judges and lawyers, police officers, and journalists. These political killings were carried out by terrorist organizations on the extreme right and the extreme left.

There were also terrorist attacks aimed at the general population, such as the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan of 1969 and the Bologna train station bombing of 1980, that came from neo-fascist forces allied with segments of what we would call today the “deep state.” These attacks had a more long-term political goal, usually called “the strategy of tension,” aimed at instilling fear and legitimizing the militarization of the constitutional order. The groups carrying out these attacks sought to halt the integration of Socialists and later Communists into national government coalitions. Domestically, the terrorists were alarmed at an alliance between centrist Catholics and the Partito Comunista Italiano, which had given up the prospect of a Marxist revolution to embrace a social-democrat platform. Internationally, they saw a risk of Italy falling to a grand coalition of Catholics and Communists that would choose to walk a third way between membership in N.A.T.O. and side with Moscow-led Eastern Europe.

The Years of Lead were the central political experience in Italy during the Cold War. The multi-party system of the First Republic crafted a fundamental consensus about the need for a political and law-enforcement response to terrorists that was legal, within the boundaries of the Constitution. Parliament resisted the calls, coming especially from the neo-fascist party, to bring back the death penalty and to create a special, military criminal court. The response to terrorism with legal tools instead of a military intervention that would have quickly devolved into civil war—which was exactly what the terrorists wanted—came from the state but also from the workers’ unions, the universities, and the Catholic Church. On the left, the fear was a military dictatorship like in Greece or Chile; on the right, of a descent into chaos and civil war supported by the Soviet Union, thus pushing the Iron Curtain to the West.

An Italian historian, Guido Panvini, calls the relationship between Italian Catholics and domestic terrorism a “family album.” Right-wing Catholics criticized the Christian Democrats and Pope John XXIII, who had failed to firmly condemn communism and had shown himself supportive of the decolonization process in the Third World. Some in right-wing Catholic milieus ended up legitimizing the use of violence as a tool of resistance against the supposed enemies of Christendom. This kind of right-wing Catholic political militancy, however, remained marginal: Secularization tamed Catholics on the right, too. On the radical left, doubts about the ability of reformism of both Christian Democrats and the parliamentarian left to solve the urgent problems of contemporary society became in the early 1970s the certainty that reformist projects had failed everywhere in the West. Revolution thus became, in the eyes of some, the only realistic possibility. Eschatological demands were mixed with political tensions. Several young students from respectable Catholic families embraced armed struggle as an extreme way to fight for social justice in the same years of the development of post–Vatican II liberation theology: The goals were different, but the social backgrounds were often the same. The early 1970s was a time when a number of young Italian Catholics felt the call to “serve the people” in the manner of the Maoists in China.

The years immediately following the Second Vatican Council were a crucial turning point. The reflection on the connection between Christian faith, political activism, and revolutionary choice changed the lives of many and cut short the lives of many others. This wave of activism came from the realization that many solutions to the problem of poverty, hypothesized before and after the 1968 student protests, had been inadequate. Radicalized youth believed that the spiritual and moral participation of Christians in the suffering of the poor was no longer sufficient. Instead, it was necessary to seize power and change the system with a revolution that was, for some of them, a continuation of the war of liberation from fascism from 1943 to 1945.

The Years of Lead appear in the albums of all the major ideological families of the First Republic in Italy. There were Catholics on both sides of that war, just like there were capitalists on both sides. This time also produced stories of martyrdom some say should be officially recognized by the Church. Aldo Moro’s beatification process is underway; his kidnapping and assassination coincided with the final months of the pontificate of Paul VI, the last Italian pope. It was also the end of the era when the Catholic Church in Italy and the (Italian) papacy still enjoyed a special kind of authority that the Church historian Adriano Prosperi called a “higher sovereignty”: morally superior to the state, but at the service of the republic that Catholics had helped build in the aftermath of the war.

Indeed, the Catholic Church in Italy and the Vatican of Paul VI were crucial in defeating the ultimate temptation of many Italians, Catholics included: adopting the political agnosticism that said one was neither with the state nor with the terrorists. In these young armed militants’ rejection of terrorism and nihilism, there was a grand moral coalition, a real alliance between the two major parties, the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party, the Church in Italy and the Vatican, the justice system, the police, the armed forces, and the civil servants. Catholics rallied to the defense of the republic in what sometimes became very public prophetic and political acts. The archbishop of Milan, the Jesuit biblical scholar Carlo Maria Martini, led a years-long conversation working toward peace among the factions. This dialogue culminated on June 13, 1984, with the surrender of weapons by terrorists of the Red Brigades to Martini in the archbishopric of Milan.

One of the most significant killings during the Years of Lead occurred about two years after Moro’s death. In February 1980, Vittorio Bachelet, an academic and former president of Italian Catholic Action, was assassinated in Rome by the Red Brigades. At the funeral, his twenty-four-year-old son Giovanni said, “We also want to pray for those who killed my dad so that, without taking anything away from the justice that must triumph, on our lips there will always be forgiveness and never revenge, always life and never the request for the death of others.”

—Massimo Faggioli

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✥ Congratulations to Christopher J. Mannerino, whose story “Sketches by Boz” is the winner of our annual Christmas ghost story competition. This year’s runners-up are Rewi Kendall for “Irrigation Channel Thirty-Eight” and Meghan Cox Gurdon for “Mine Is Simon.” Look for their stories on THE LAMP’s website throughout Christmastide.