The Catholic Church’s once greatly feared penalty of excommunication is now as farcical as it is futile.

In 1521, Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther. In 2017, Pope Francis issued a postage stamp honoring Luther and marking 500 years of the Reformation.

Czech reformer Fr. Jan Hus was excommunicated in 1410 and burned alive in 1415. In 1999, Pope John Paul II expressed “deep regret for the cruel death inflicted on Jan Hus” by the Catholic Church.

In a twist of delicious irony, Vatican II embraced the very reforms the Council of Constance had branded “heresies” that led to Hus’s barbaric execution, as I wrote in The Stream.

In May 2020, the Vatican excommunicated the celebrity mosaic artist Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik for absolving a sexual partner in confession. The ex-Jesuit, accused of sexually abusing 25 nuns, had his excommunication lifted later the same month, supposedly at the intervention of Pope Francis.

This month, Rome excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for thumbing his nose at Pope Francis and at Vatican II. Viganò wears his excommunication as a “badge of honor.” His supporters have canonized him a folk saint.

Heretics or Heroes?

One man’s heretic is another man’s hero. And one generation’s heresy is often celebrated as the next generation’s orthodoxy.

Take the case of church historian Fr. Ernesto Buonaiuti (1881-1946). He was excommunicated by Pius XI in 1926 for being a “modernist.” His excommunication was of the severest kind, rendering him a vitandus (person to be avoided) — so serious that any church Buonaiuti entered had to be reconsecrated.

This June, just a month before Viganò’s excommunication, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, celebrated a Eucharist in the crypt of Bologna Cathedral in memory of Buonaiuti, virtually rehabilitating the excommunicated priest.

In his homily, Zuppi, a leading candidate for the next pope, quoted Buonaiuti’s writings, praising his love for the Church and his willingness to forgive the hierarchy who had consigned him to perdition.

Traditionalist Catholics went ballistic. The Italian pro-Latin Mass blog Messa in Latino screamed out its headline: “Is there anything Catholic left? Let’s also remember Lucifer!” It blasted Zuppi for failing to understand that Buonaiuti’s soul “at the very least will be in purgatory for a few thousand years, unless, as an excommunicated person, he ends up straight in hell.”

Church’s U-Turn on Modernism

Why do I smell the incense of hypocrisy within the Buonaiuti-bashing brotherhood? Buonaiuti was partly condemned as a “modernist” for using biblical criticism and for his historical investigation of the early church. Today, both disciplines are rigorously practiced in Protestant, Catholic, and secular academies (with full approval of hierarchy in the case of Catholics).

But historical criticism in his day was seen as a threat to Catholic dogma, because it threatened to erode the fiction that many dogmas were rooted in the early church or Scripture. As Catholic dogmatic theologian Dr. Michael Seewald explains: “Putting it bluntly, the Catholic Church does the opposite of a used car dealer.” While the used car dealer “wants to sell an old car by advertising it as much as possible as new, the Catholic Church constantly sells new cars, but passes them off for old cars.”

Buonaiuti and his colleagues fell foul of Pius XI for using historical tools to demonstrate the later accretion of several dogmas, a technique that was subsumed under the umbrella term “modernism” in Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.

And here’s the real problem with heresy hunting: Why did the popes condemn modernism as a heresy while the Catholic Church was playing second fiddle to fascism (and Nazism to a lesser extent) during the same period as Buonaiuti’s condemnation?

I’m reminded of Yale professor Wallace Notestein, who used to tell his students: “If you copy from one book, that’s plagiarism; if you copy from many books, that’s research.” Similarly, if one priest takes a position at variance with the pope, it’s heresy; if the pope, the hierarchy, and whole swathes of clergy adopt a heterodox position, that’s orthodoxy.

Cohabiting with Pagan Fascism

New documents from the Pius XII secret archives, first opened to historians in 2020, reveal that this is precisely what happened during the Fascist era in Italy. In a Mephistophelean bargain, the Italian Catholic Church benefited from what Italian historian Emilio Gentile calls a “syncretic form of cohabitation” with Fascism under Pius XI and Pius XII from 1922 to 1945.

Buonaiuti was an exception. In 1931, when Mussolini demanded an oath from university professors, only 12 out of 1,200 faculty refused to comply with the Duce’s orders. Buonaiuti was professor of History of Christianity at La Sapienza University, Rome. He and his dissenting colleagues were sacked and subjected to a chilling isolation.

Buonaiuti lambasted Fascism as promoting the pagan worship of the state. Contemporary scholarship agrees with the anti-fascist priest’s assessment. “For fascists, the foundations and essence of political militancy were always summed up as the principle of ‘faith,’ a key word in fascist political language,” notes Emilio Gentile, author of the magisterial The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy.

In 1925, a year before Buonaiuti’s excommunication, Fr. Luigi Sturzo, leader of the Popular Party, warned that Fascism was “profoundly pagan, and in contrast with Catholicism” because it dealt with “state-worship and deification of the nation.”

“For some time Catholics have been complaining of the use of theological terms and rituals to exalt fascists and fascist festivals. On several occasions, orators, journalists and ministers have let slip the word god, attributing it to Mussolini, and the word godhead when speaking of Italy,” Sturzo wrote.

Fascist politician Paolo Orano acknowledged that “Mussolinism is a religion,” because faith in the dictator was “the preparatory phase in Italian religiousness,” in which patriotism had to be “intensified to the point of mysticism; and holiness, martyrdom and belief must be considered as powerful forces in the building of civic consciousness.”

A Deal with the Devil

Pius XI, who excommunicated Buonaiuti, became pope in 1922, the same year Mussolini became prime minister. He would “make a fateful agreement with the dictator, codified in the 1929 Lateran Accords,” writes Prof. David Kertzer in The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler.

“In exchange for Catholic support for his regime, Mussolini agreed to end separation of church and state in Italy, establish Vatican City as a sovereign state ruled by the pope, and grant the church political powers it had not enjoyed for decades.”

“The dictator relied on the pope to ensure Catholic support for his regime, providing much-needed moral legitimacy. The pope counted on Mussolini to help him restore the Church’s power in Italy,” Kertzer writes in The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe.

In January 1925, Pius XI asked Mussolini to fire Buonaiuti from his professorship at La Sapienza. Mussolini ordered Buonaiuti suspended for the year, but faculty colleagues lobbied for his reinstatement. In early 1927, the pope again urged the Duce to fire the ex-priest. Mussolini said he wanted to keep the pope happy, but did not want to be accused of ignoring the law.

Days before he died on February 10, 1939, Pius XI, who now bitterly regretted his alliance with Fascism, summoned Italy’s bishops to deliver an address denouncing Mussolini’s embrace of Nazi racism. Suspecting his end was near, he ordered the Vatican printing office to print a copy of the speech for each bishop.

As soon as he heard of Pius XI’s death, Mussolini contacted Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli requesting the prelate not distribute the speech. Pacelli ordered the Vatican printing office to destroy all copies. Pacelli would be elected at the conclave as Pius XII. Catholicism’s alliance with Fascism would continue.

Saving the Jews

While Pius XII refused to protest against Mussolini’s racial laws against the Jews (1938) or against Hitler’s deportation of over a thousand of Rome’s Jews to Auschwitz (1943), Buonaiuti saved 13-year-old Giorgio Castelnuovo from deportation by hiding him in his home in Rome, risking his own life.

The priest’s courage earned him a place among Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Jerusalem in 2012.

Avvenire, the Italian bishops’ newspaper, paid tribute to Buonaiuti in 2022, calling him a “misunderstood … very modern seeker of the Gospel” who “still awaits a fitting place among the Catholic prophets of the twentieth century.” It praised his refusal to bow to the “pagan and inhuman system” of Fascism as the “greatest of ethical acts in Italian Catholic history during Fascism.”

Ironically, after his own excommunication, Archbishop Viganò excoriated Buonaiuti for “welcoming scientific and historical studies on the Bible” into the Church.

Viganò’s heretic is Zuppi’s hero. And as Mussolini had two friendly popes on his side, Xi Jinping and the Chinese communists have Pope Francis well stitched up in their pockets.

Ultimately, given its trajectory of flip-flopping on excommunications, who knows when the Church might canonize Viganò and Buonaiuti together with Luther and Hus as saints?

 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.