The Mussolinization of St Francis of Assisi

In 1925, Benito Mussolini proclaimed that Italy had given the world the ‘most holy of saints to Christendom and humanity’: St Francis of Assisi. The following year, as part of the ‘Holy Franciscan Year’ in celebration of the seventh centenary anniversary of the saint’s death, Mussolini proclaimed Francis’s feast day a national holiday. In this article, I examine how the 1926 anniversary impacted Francis’s legacy in the context of Italian culture, fascist ideology and shifting Church–State relations. I will trace this history through several works linking contemporary issues with the saint, including Fr. Paolo Ardali’s San Francesco e Mussolini (‘Saint Francis and Mussolini’) (1926), a book which attested to the attempted rapprochement between the Holy See and the Italian National Fascist Party in the lead up to the 1929 Lateran Pacts. Ardali’s text exemplified the radical reinterpretation of St Francis’s political legacy considering Mussolini’s cult of personality and autocracy. Placing Ardali’s work in conversation with theories of charismatic leadership and fascism as itself a form of political religion, I also argue that Ardali’s comparison between Mussolini and St Francis anticipated a broader cultural, post-war afterlife of the fascist co-option of religious ideas.