The Myth Of Catholic Italy In Post-Fascist Newsreels

Giulia Evolvi

Introduction

Catholicism is a ubiquitous topic in the Italian mainstream media, both in

news and entertainment. Italian newscasts often focus on Catholic religion, and

television stations broadcast a consistent number of religious biopics.1 In 2014, Italian

television broadcast 663 religious programs, the majority of which featured

Catholicism. Among religious programs, 95.5% of news, 88.2% of television dramas

and 73% of movies were about Catholicism.2 This data shows how Catholicism is

pervasive in the Italian media and fulfills a role that is substantially more important

than that of other religions in Italian television. The prevalence of Catholicism in the

Italian media is not surprising if we consider that 75% of the population self-

identifies as Catholic.3 The media not only mirror Italian mainstream religiosity, but

also have an active role in framing ‘Italianness’ as intrinsically Catholic. According

to Ardizzoni4, the Italian media use four topoi to create an image of ‘Italianness’.

Together with soccer, music, and localism, Catholicism is one element the media use

to promote national identity.

The present article argues that the media’s use of Catholicism to frame

national identity is not a recent phenomenon; on the contrary, religion has been

employed as a symbolic resource for the creation of a feeling of ‘Italianness’ since

the post-war period. With the end of the Second World War, the Monarchy of the

House of Savoy, and the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, Italians found

themselves challenged with the task of creating a new national identity. Italy needed

to overcome the burden of its Fascist heritage, and to present itself on the European

and international political scene as a democratic and modern country. As Hibberd5

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writes, ‘the concept of nationhood entailed explicit overtones associated with the

regime of 1930s […] yet, at the same time, the reconstruction of Italy [...] would

require the presence of a strong social cohesion and a sense of collective identity.’6

The formation of a new collective memory in the post-war period passed

through social and cultural representations, including media production. Among

different symbolic resources employed to create a new national identity, Catholicism

was a characteristic of Italy often emphasized by national media.

Analyzing newsreel stories about religion produced in the two decades after the

Second World War, this study explores religious representations in the Italian media

in order to understand which aspects of Catholicism have informed the creation of

national identity. The first section presents theoretical frameworks that inform the

diffusion of national identities through the media and the creation of national myths.

The second section contextualizes the historical and political situation of the period

with attention to religion and the media. The third section discusses the historical role

of newsreels focusing on the production of the national agency ‘Istituto Luce.’7 The

fourth and fifth sections present the elements of Catholicism that newsreel stories

emphasized the most; they focus in particular on the intertwinement of politics and

religion and the role of the Catholic Church in creating a shared image of the past and

in describing modernity. In conclusion, the article explains how the post-war media

used Catholicism to erase Italy’s Fascist past, and how this phenomenon informs

contemporary media representations in Italy.

Media, nationalism, and language

The media often have the role of endorsing ideologies in order to create a

common feeling of a shared history and culture. Creating values and meanings that

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inform identity, the media have been pivotal in promoting nationalism and the

standardization of language.

Benedict Anderson8, in his exegesis of nationalism Imagined Communities,

defined nationality as a cultural artifact that connects citizens through an ‘imagined’

feeling of commonness; nationality unifies citizens despite the fact that they do not

constitute a community based on direct and personal knowledge. National identity is

therefore an artificial feeling, not a natural one. Media are central in the formation of

nationalism because the circulation of information helps to create a homogenization

of national history and culture, through which citizens feel part of an ‘imagined

community’.,Within the framework of the nation-state, communication practices and

technologies, indeed, have an impact on what concerns the organization of a

communication system.9 Anderson’s work can usefully describe the role of the media

in Italy, as previous scholarly works employed his framework to explore the creation

of Italian identity.10

Anderson identifies language as another element that contributed to the

creation of national identity, along with the media. The fragmentation of Latin in

vernacular languages gave birth to different national realities and consciousness in

Europe. At the same time, the Catholic Church continued to employ Latin as an

official language for liturgy until the Second Vatican Council, in 1962-1965.11

During the process of unification in the 19th century – Risorgimento – the

Italian Monarchy put efforts into the creation of a common language, given the

linguistical heterogeneity and the richness of local dialects in Italy. Fascism

encouraged the use of dialects during the 1920s, but from 1932 it started promoting

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the use of standard Italian, introducing linguistic autarchy12. Despite the regime’s

effort to promote the role of Italian and to prohibit foreign terms, during Fascism the

use of standard language was limited to upper and middle urban classes. Furthermore,

the reduction of internal migration and emigration abroad prevented the working class

from overcoming their linguistic isolation.13

As a result, in the post-war period, non-educated Italians – which constituted

the majority of the population – would still predominantly speak local dialects. With

the diffusion of sound in cinema, radio and television, as well as the restoration of

freedom of press after Fascism, Italy engaged in a process of language unification and

centralization. From the 1960s, after the introduction of Italian for Catholic liturgies,

religious socialization started to become a venue for the standardization of Italian, as

well.

The passage from a situation of speech diversity to language standardization

can be described with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of ‘centripetal forces’. 14 According to

Bakhtin, languages are not isolated phenomena, but rather they evolve with society.

What happened in Italy after the unification of the country, and in the post-war period

in particular, is that a literary language modeled on the Tuscany dialect slowly

prevailed as the common unitary language. The media in Italy had the centripetal

capacity of opposing regional heteroglossia – different word meanings and uses

within the same language – and transposing this literary language into a verbal form.

The famous Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini affirmed that Italian was

born thanks to the media, contributing to the creation of a common identity among

Italian citizens.15

Fascist and post-war myths

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The media, therefore, were important elements in post-war Italy in spreading

nationalism and a standard language among the population. Furthermore, they

constructed a ‘myth of Italianness’ that would make citizens feel as part of the same

community. Roland Barthes’s work16 describes the creation of national myths and

ideologies that develop in relation to media consumption. For Barthes, myth

expresses a meaning that goes beyond its form, in a semiotic process that brings

together signifier, signified and signification. Myth is a particular kind of

metalanguage that describes different realities through the creation of images. Barthes

uses the image of a French black soldier saluting the flag as an example of

mythology: in a process of distortion, the picture does not only refer to the soldier as

a person, but it becomes the ‘very presence of France imperiality’.17 According to

Barthes, myth is a form of communication that includes visual media (like cinema),

and that is able to create images and metaphors of reality.

Barthes’ idea of myth is useful to account for the creation of media images to

promote national identity in Italy, both before and after the Second World War.

Benito Mussolini, himself a journalist, saw newspapers, cinema and radio production

as important resources to spread the Fascist ideology and create a ‘Fascist myth’. The

Fascist regime employed the press for propaganda,18 encouraged the construction of

cinema theaters, and promoted cinema production.19 For example, newsreels shown in

cinema theaters had a pivotal role in framing the plan for the transformation of the

Pontine Marshes into fertile land; thanks to newsreels, the process of land reclamation

was transformed into a ‘heroic act to discipline nature and create an ideal fascist

landscape’.20 In particular, Fascism used Ancient Rome as an inspiration for

characteristics of virility and strength, stressing the political and cultural

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achievements of the Roman Empire as a model for Fascist ambitions. Fascism has

been considered, alongside other totalitarianisms, as a ‘political religion’, which

operated a sacralization and a ‘cult’ of Il Duce, often comparing him to historical

figures such as Roman emperors.21

The ‘Fascist myth’ was closely connected with the project of modernity, and

widely supported by media, specifically cinema. During the two wars, increasing

anxieties about modernity in Europe saw technological and cultural progress as

leading to immorality and lack of order. Fascism provided Italy with an alternative

form of modernity, where economic development did not bring social emancipation,

but rather attention to order and self-discipline. For example, colonialism, often

celebrated in movies of the period, was seen as a modernizing force to ‘bring order’

to Africa.22

In the post-war period, Italy needed to spread new values to create an

alternative modern identity that would break with its Fascist past and the celebration

of Ancient Rome’s glory. Media, and cinema in particular, had an important role in

describing the liminal moment of the transition between dictatorship and republic, as

well as addressing the anxieties of the post-war period.23 According to Lichtner,24 the

Italian media actively changed the historical Fascist memory, promoting a mis-

remembrance of the role of Italians in the regime. In doing so, they created a new

post-war myth, that of ‘Italiani brava gente’ (Italians good people), to stress the naïve

and kind character of a population that allegedly would have been unable to support

the atrocities of a dictatorship. Lichtner writes that Catholicism is a cornerstone of the

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‘Italiani brava gente’ myth, since it serves as the source of morality and good

behavior.

However, Catholicism has had a controversial role in Italian history and has

not always been in agreement with the government. The unification of Italy in 1861

was inspired by secular values and coincided with the confiscation of the lands of the

Vatican State and a considerable reduction of papal power. As a result, the Pope

forbade Catholics from participating in the politics of the new state or voting until

1905.25 The Catholic Church developed a controversial relationship with Fascism. On

the one hand, the Vatican was suspicious of the excessive sacralization of the Fascist

state and the quasi-pagan character of Ancient Rome-inspired civil rituals, and

wished to maintain a separate identity from Fascist Italy.26 This suspicion was

reinforced by Mussolini’s atheism. On the other hand, the Catholic Church, while

openly criticizing the anti-Christian nature of Nazism and communism, had been

reluctant in commenting upon Fascism’s neo-paganism. Despite this controversial

relationship, in 1922 Pope Pius XI signed the Lateran Pacts with the regime. The

Lateran Pacts gave the Catholic Church substantial material benefits, and Pope Pius

XI initially hoped that the authoritarian regime would contrast the secularism of

modernity, notwithstanding the quasi-religious state sacralization.27 While Fascism

and Catholicism were two very different systems of values, they shared anxieties of a

possible moral decadence in European modernity.28

Therefore, the relationship between Fascism and the Catholic Church was far

from unproblematic, with the regime trying to impose state control on the religious

apparatus and the Pope trying to gain advantages from an alliance with Mussolini. In

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1947 the Italian democratic government acknowledged the previous ‘concordat’ with

the Catholic Church, recognizing in Catholicism the same role of state religion it had

during Fascism.29 In the two decades after the war, a number of intellectuals denied

the sacred character of Fascism and established an ‘anti-Fascist paradigm’ that

insisted on the failures of the regime. However, some Catholic and ex-Fascist

intellectuals analyzed the phenomenon as a political religion, fully recognizing the

appeal it had on the population, and the competition it established with the Catholic

Church in terms of circulating quasi-religious values and beliefs.30 The controversial

role of Catholicism within the Italian state made the media emphasis of Catholic

values in the post-war period an interesting choice to inform identity.

There are two elements in post-war Italy that strongly contributed to the

media attention to Christian values. First, the Catholic Church had a central role in

post war politics, because the Christian Democratic Party was pivotal in the transition

from monarchy to republic31. This helped to make Catholicism an element to inform

the post-war national identity, in contrast with the ‘Fascist myth’:

With Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi at the helm, the DC [Christian Democrats] dedicated Italy to what it considered its Catholic essence. A Catholic Italy was the ideological glue that united all Christian Democrats and gave their party its intellectual and cultural integrity32

Second, the Italian media continued to be heavily controlled by politics in democratic

Italy too, and were used to ensure consensus. Indeed, ‘[n]ot only had the Christian

Democrat party inherited form the Fascist a public apparatus whose functioning and

structures it did not substantially modify, but it also occupied this apparatus.’33 While

Italy was a democratic country trying to break with its Fascist past, the state enhanced

continuity with the Fascist media apparatus rather than creating a new media system.

8

As a result, state control over the media persisted, and public broadcasting was

structured according to the influence of the main political parties. Unlike left-wing

parties, the Christian Democrats embraced the media as a resource to inform and

educate the public, as well as to spread the core values of their political ideology. For

example, Ettore Bernabei, director of the public broadcast service RAI between 1960

and 1974, was affiliated with the Christian Democrats and emphatized spreading

Catholic values via the media.34

To create a new post-war myth of Italianness, the media drew heavily from

elements of Catholicism, but they needed to break from the associations the Church

had with Fascism and to focus on aspects that would create a positive image of

democratic Italy. This study explores the aspects of Catholicism that were

emphasized to promote a new identity by the Italian media in the two decades after

the war. In particular, it focuses on two elements.

First, the article explores the intertwinement between politics and religion,

looking at the representation of Italian politics in the media in relation to Catholic

values. Second, the study analyses how Catholicism was framed as an element of

modernity by the Italian media. Lichtner writes that the post-war media restored

elements that preceded Fascism, like Catholicism.35 I argue that the media presented

Catholicism as something that could reconcile the Italian pre-Fascist past and its

modern role on the global social and political scene.

In exploring these two elements, the article aims at analyzing the role of

Catholicism in the Italian media in the post-war period in relation to the

contemporary pervasiveness of religion in the mainstream media.

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Newsreels in Italy: Istituto Luce and Settimana Incom

This study analyzes newsreel stories created by the national agency Istituto

Luce36. Founded in 1924 by the Fascist regime, Istituto Luce was under state control

during the war.37 Mussolini encouraged cinema-going through the construction of

cinematic theaters, and newsreels were shown together with movies. Even if Istituto

Luce ceased to be a tool for propaganda with the end of Mussolini’s dictatorship and

became formally independent, it remained a recognized national source of news

information under the influence of the Christian Democrats.38 Because the Italian

post-war media system occupied the same structures as the Fascist media, cinematic

production and cinema-going activities remained relevant after the dictatorship: in

1950, there were 7500 cinema theaters with an estimated 579,500,000 spectators per

year. Cinema-goers were probably attracted by movies rather than newsreels, but the

success of cinema gave visibility to newsreels as well. In this context, newsreels were

sources of knowledge and education in the cinema environment.39

This study focuses in particular on the Incom agency that produced the

newsreels ‘Settimana Incom’ (Incom Week) for Istituto Luce from 1946 to 1965. The

government made it compulsory, starting from 1949, to show national news films for

six months a year, and the result was to favor the Incom company, which gained

considerable advantage from the agreement.40 Within Istituto Luce, different agencies

were active in the production of newsreels and documentaries; the Incom company

was chosen because of the timeframe of its activity and for its wide range of newsreel

stories about religion. Incom started in 1938 under the direction of Sandro Pallavicini

as a private company and a competitor of the monopoly of Istituto Luce; however, in

1946, after the dissolution of the Fascist regime, it started to produce newsreels for

1

Istituto Luce. According to Istituto Luce’s website, 41

For around twenty years, in the limelight of Italian cinema screens, it [Settimana Incom] closely followed the history and evolution of Italian society in the post-war era until the years of the economic boom, and the most important international events in the tense context of the Cold War, with 2551 editions, 13260 videos and 350 hours of film42.

Incom was one of the leading film companies in the post-war era 43. Settimana Incom

was a weekly newsreel produced by Incom, aimed at consolidating Italian prestige

worldwide, and underlining the effort of post-war reconstruction in Italy44 .

This study selected a sample of 261 newsreel stories produced by Incom for Istituto

Luce from 1946 to 1965. This number represents the totality of newsreel stories that

were labeled as ‘religious’ in the Istituto Luce digital archive; the definition includes

stories that specifically cover religious events (such as the discourses of the Pope),

and stories that treat religion only marginally (such as festivals where people

assemble outside a church). The Istituto Luce digital archive displays newsreel stories

that are divided by topic. Therefore, this analysis does not take into account full

issues with stories on different topics, but rather specific stories in the ‘religion’

category. This article employs the term ‘newsreel’ to indicate single newsreel stories

instead of full issues with multiple stories. All the newsreels analyzed are all in black

and white, with two exceptions,45 and they all feature sound. The majority of the

newsreels present a voice-over that describes the news, employing the standard

Italian language that the media aimed at diffusing in the country.

The 261 newsreel stories have been classified in ten different categories

according to their main focus, as shown in Table 1. Videos are labeled ‘Pope’ when

they feature the Pope or they focus on the hierarchies of the Church. The category

‘politics’ includes all the newsreels that are specifically about political events, like the

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congress of the Christian Democratic Party, but also videos where political

personalities attend rituals. ‘Assemblies’ indicates events where lay people –

generally workers, farmers or youth groups – come together to participate in a

religious gathering. ‘Folklore’ includes all the events where religion is expressed in

popular forms of religiosity, while the label ‘miracles’ indicates videos that describe

the happening of a miracle, involving saints and/or ordinary people. Newsreels were

labeled as ‘culture’ when they focused on art, literature, and cultural events.

‘Entertainment’ indicates newsreels about travel, cinema, sports, and celebrities.

‘Deliberations’ describes videos about decisions within the Catholic Church, while

‘religious festivals’ focuses on religious processions and rituals linked to a particular

celebration. Finally, ‘other religions’ include videos about religions other than

Catholicism. The different categories clarify which aspects of Catholicism were

emphasized in the newsreel productions.

This study chose to focus on newsreels because of some characteristics that

distinguish them from other kinds of short films and movies. Newsreel issues are

released regularly and, unlike movies, focus on weekly news, covering a wide range

of social and political topics; therefore, in the same issue there are stories on topics

not directly related. Newsreels generally have a standard length (each story is forty-

five seconds to two minutes in case of Settimana Incom) and their presentation is

straightforward rather than interpretative or didactic.46 Lacking the immediacy of

radio or television, newsreels constitute a commentary on news with emphasis on

what is considered more socially relevant.47 According to Caprotti,48 newsreels are

important tools for the study of Fascism because, being sponsored by the government,

they constituted resources for the self-representation of the regime. Not only in Italy,

1

but in various European countries, newsreels were employed by Nazi-occupied

governments as a tool of propaganda.49

This study, however, takes a different angle by analyzing newsreels not as a

propaganda tool, but rather as a part of the national media system that can provide a

unique description of the values that the post-war government wanted to use to shape

Italian identity. Furthermore, this research assumes the innovative perspective of

focusing on Catholicism, an important feature of Italian society that has not been

widely taken into account when addressing the historical role of the media in Italy.

Religion, politics, and the Pope

Istituto Luce’s newsreels often present religious characters together with

political ones; as shown in Table 1, there are twenty-nine newsreels about politics. In

the newsreel ‘Proclamation of the dogma of the assumption of Mary’, 50 for example,

the Italian Prime Minister, De Gasperi, and the French Prime Minister, Schuman, are

showed at a religious ceremony; these two politicians are also considered among the

fathers of the European Union.

Newsreels about politics and religion are not limited to Christian Democrat

characters, but they also show a constant presence of Catholic values in civil events

or political news. An example of the influence of Catholic values in Italian politics is

represented by the media’s approach to the Cold War. The newsreels tend to frame

the Eastern Bloc’s politics in a negative way, from a Catholic point of view as well as

from a political one. Explicit critiques are expressed in the newsreel ‘Like in the

Catacombs’,51 which regards a non-political exhibition about the Martyrs of the

Church. The newsreel features Ukrainian refugees and underlines the impossibility

for these people to profess their religion in their country, implicitly criticizing the

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Eastern Bloc for its lack of religious freedom. This newsreel represents an example of

how political commentaries were often influenced by religious views.

Religious influences in politics are also exemplified by the way the Pope

features in the newsreels. As shown in Table 1, sixty-one newsreels focused on the

Pope; he is not only presented as a spiritual leader, but as a complex character who

can offer moral resources in various aspects of life. Different newsreels describe the

personal characteristics of the Pope, making him a fully mediated character. The

newsreel ‘We have a Pope’52, describes the election of John XIII underlining how the

new Pope is ‘humble and good’, somehow more ‘human’ than his predecessor.

Among the various aspects of the Pope’s personality and life, his proximity with

political personalities and his participation into civil events are often emphasized.

Another case is the newsreel ‘A man of good will’,53 which shows the President of the

Italian Republic, Segni, going to the Vatican to confer Pope John XXIII a prize for

peace. Successively, the Pope visits the Quirinal Palace, former summer residence of

the Popes and official residence of the President of the Republic from 1946. For the

first time in history the Pope performs the blessing from the Quirinal balcony,

together with Segni. People listening to the Pope below the balcony are not referred

to as ‘the Italian Catholics’, but as ‘the citizens of the Italian Republic’. This

construction of the Italian citizens as fundamentally Catholic, and the presence of the

Pope together with political characters can be analyzed using Barthes’ idea of myth:

the intertwining of the sacred and profane is perceived as beneficial for the political

personalities, as they are expected to follow the religious doctrine to develop their

political judgment. It reinforces the myth of ‘Italiani brava gente’, presenting a

population that benefits from the moral guidance of the Church.

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Tradition, modernity, and otherness

Newsreels often present Italy as a modern country, the only democracy in the

Mediterranean region and among the founders of the European Union. However,

there are also a consistent number of newsreels that describe Catholicism as an

element of traditional Italian culture. For example, twenty-nine newsreels focus on

folklore, showing typical dances and costumes framed in a religious context. The

newsreel ‘From Sicily Celebrations of Saint Agata’54 presents a popular celebration to

honor a Saint and evoke her martyrdom, with historical costumes, dances and a

procession of her statue. Saint Agata is believed to have healing powers for women

who have no breast milk to feed their babies; women, therefore, have a special role in

this celebration. Similar to those about folklore, thirteen newsreels about miracles

focus on local traditions, rural life and religion as historically part of the Italian

culture. These representations are consistent with some features of Italian religiosity:

according to Pace,55 even if the majority of Italians are Catholic, they often profess an

‘extra-ordinary’ religious activity that is linked to a pagan heritage. The Church often

tolerates and incorporates forms of worship and superstition, especially for healing

purposes. Newsreels about miracles and folklore exemplify the tendency, described

by Lichtner, to create a post-war Italian identity by emphasizing pre-Fascist forms of

religiosity.

However, some newsreels frame Catholicism as a necessary aspect of the

modernization of the country, as well. The post-war period was characterized by an

emphasis first on agriculture, and then on industrialization, to promote reconstruction

and economic growth. Newsreels classified as ‘assemblies’ often feature workers and

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farmers engaging in religious activities. The Church gave special attention to the

spirituality of the working class, representing, for example, groups of Christian

workers. This is exemplified by the newsreel ‘Congress in Rome of the farmers’,56

where the Pope meets with Italian farmers and reaffirms how the working class is

important for the religious and political life of Italy. The newsreel ‘A prize for the

meritorious’57 focuses on young people that moved from the south of the country to

the more industrialized north to study as specialized workers. This newsreel

underlines the necessity of preparing new workers for an increasingly industrialized

country during the period of economic growth. It has a religious character because it

features religious authorities and explains that Italy is ‘a country that is industrializing

with the necessary spiritual assistance’.58 Therefore, similarly to the framing that

describes Italian citizens as necessarily Catholic, workers’ identities are inseparable

from Catholicism.

Other elements of Italian modernity are presented as intertwined with religion.

For example, newsreels classified as ‘entertainment’ often focus on cinema and

celebrities in relation to Catholicism. The newsreel ‘Consultation in St Peter’59

underlines how the Pope was sympathetic toward cinema. According to the voice-

over, the Pope fully understood the possible educational implications of movies, and

said that ‘cinema could raise to become an expression of the glory of God’.60

Describing developments in industrialization and the entertainment industry, the

newsreels present modernity as a goal that needs to be attained without abandoning

the moral support of the Catholic Church.

The majority of Istituto Luce religious newsreels focus on Catholicism, but

eighteen newsreels within the sample focus on other religions, especially Islam and

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Hinduism. Non-Christian religions are represented as exotic and often in the context

of folkloric traditions. For example, the newsreel ‘Eclipses on the sacred river

Ganges’61 represents Hindu traditions as ‘superstitions’, with close-ups of the sacred

cows and face paintings. This vision of ‘otherness’ is consistent with Said’s idea of

‘orientalism’, according to which the Orient is a discursive construction of the West

that creates a binary thinking between ‘us’ and ‘others’. 62 It is indeed interesting to

note how the newsreel frames the Ganges ritual in India as ‘superstition’ and ‘pre-

modern’, while Italian forms of Saint worship and folklore are considered legitimate.

The presence of newsreels that describe other religions as ‘primitive’ emphasizes, by

contrast, the role of Catholicism as a modern religion. The different representations of

Catholicism within Istituto Luce’s newsreels – both in relation to tradition and to

modernity – are not oppositional with each other as they might seem. On the contrary,

they valorize the pre-Fascist role of religion and underline the flexibility of the

Catholic Church to conciliate the traditional character of Italian culture with

industrialization and modernity. Catholic representations are therefore not limited to

the Church as an institution, but encompass many religious aspects, including pre-

Christian elements:

Hence, if the image of innate Italian goodness inevitably derives from the country’s role as the historic home of Catholicism and the Papacy, it is not the result of a passive or straightforward religious affiliation. Rather, it is often represented as a morality based on a deeper religiosity that embraces Roman pietas and pagan legacies of superstition and intimacy with gods, demigods and saints, for example, even when these customs place it at odds with the Church establishment.63

Representing Catholicism as the only legitimate religion and its folkloric traditions as

able to endorse the advent of modernity, the newsreels create a memory of common

history that is consistent with Anderson’s idea of imagined community. The Italian

1

collective past, informed by Catholicism, becomes the basis for a future impregnated

with nationalistic values, and able to adapt Italian identity to modernity while

forgetting the Fascist parentheses.

Conclusions

Istituto Luce’s newsreels, alongside with other national media, had an

important role in post-war Italy both a source of entertainment and as a way to

educate a population with a low level of schooling in the common traditions of the

country, promoting at the same time the use of a standardized language.

The creation of identity after the Second World War compelled the Italian Republican

government to use the media in order to spread new values that would contribute to

erasing the Fascist ones. The Pope blessing the ‘Italian Republic’ from the Quirinal

Palace was not only a religious message, but created a new framework for Italian

identity. Rome was no longer Mussolini’s Ancient Rome, but the Rome of

Christianity. The authoritarian figure of Il Duce was replaced by the paternal one of

the Pope. In addition, Republican leaders (such as De Gasperi) were guided by

Christian values.

Similarly, the rhetoric of progress was no longer a Fascist one, but rather the

idea of industrialization led by religious values. Newsreels put emphasis on both the

traditional and modern aspects of Catholicism, an old medium adapting to a new

society. In doing so, newsreels mirrored how the country was coming to terms with a

new ‘project’ of modernity that needed to differentiate itself from the Fascist

modernity. Instead of a modernity based on order and hierarchies, the post-war period

celebrated a new, ‘democratic’ form of progress. Catholicism, as suggested by its

central role in newsreels, was an important resource to frame the new democracy as

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modern but, at the same time, inspired by moral and ethical values. This is

exemplified by both the connection between Catholicism and politics, which

connoted the Italian democracy as intrinsically Catholic, and by presenting the

Catholic Church as an institution that is both tied to tradition and able to promote the

modernization of the country.

Two remarks emerge from the analysis of the newsreels. First, newsreels

emphasized only certain aspects of Catholicism to support the myth of ‘Italiani brava

gente.’ The media created a new ‘imagined community’ whose past did not coincide

with the Fascist one anymore, but that would draw on pre-regime and post-regime

elements. The Catholic Church, indeed, is presented in the newsreels as a flexible

system of values rather than as an institution, and the Pope as a human character

rather than an undisputed leader. After two decades of dictatorship, Italians were

likely to be suspicious of rigid institutions and absolute leaderships, aspects of the

Catholic Church that the media chose not to emphasize.

Secondly, post-war media did not change the communication apparatus of the

Fascist regime, but rather used the same mechanism and inhabited the same social

spaces in diffusing new ideologies.64 Instead of being a propaganda tool, newsreels

became sources for self-reflection of the democratic government upon its citizens.

Catholicism became an element to replace the regime’s values in a similar media

structure, creating the media image of a ‘good Catholic country’, where citizens

embraced Catholic values without questioning them.

The media in Italy had an important role in framing post-war identity, but in

general, as Anderson explains, the media system is central to the creation of

1

nationalism. The Italian case can inform the study of other similar media uses in a

global perspective, in order to understand the role of media and religion in a given

historical period. A venue for future research might include a comparative study of

European newsreels in the post-war period, to complete and complement previous

studies on the role of the media and newsreels within authoritarian propaganda.

Furthermore, a historical perspective on newsreels helps our understanding of some

characteristics of the contemporary media systems.

The current media system in Italy remains intertwined with politics, and

features many religious programs. While newsreels are not produced anymore,

cinema and television maintain the role of perpetuating a certain homogeneous Italian

identity that, according to Ardizzoni, is framed as Catholic. The contemporary media

system’s attention to Catholicism can, therefore, be explained as the result of a long

historical process, rather than a recent turn. The current character of ‘Italianness’ is

informed by the post-war use of Catholicism as a symbolic resource for the creation

of a national myth. Present Italian media still perpetuate to a certain extent the ‘Italian

goodness’ stereotype by reflecting the post-war tendency of portraying Italy as a

country of good people, modern but traditional at the same time, and, undoubtedly,

Catholic.

Notes

2

1 See Stefano Martelli ‘La visibilizzazione della religione in TV. Tra popolo fedele ed audience da primato.’ Sociologia della Comunicazione; Milly Buonanno, Italian TV Drama and Beyond: Stories from the Soil, Stories from the Sea, trans. Jennifer Radice, New. edizione (Bristol; Chicago: Intellect L & D E F a E, 2012).2 Source: Geca Italia, 2014, http://www.gecaitalia.it3 Source: Doxa, 2014, http://www.doxa.it/news/religiosita-e-ateismo-in-italia-nel-2014/4 Michela Ardizzoni, North/South, East/West: Mapping Italianness on Television (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).5 Matthew Hibberd, The Media in Italy, 1 edition (Maidenhead, England; New York: Open University Press, 2007).6 Idem, p. 437 Istituto Luce can be literally translated as ‘Light Institute’, but ‘Luce’ is also an acronym for ‘L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa,’ meaning ‘Educational Film Union Institute.’8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition, Revised edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2006).9 Raymond Williams ‘Introduction,’ pp. 8-20 in R. Williams, ed., Contact: Human Communication and its History (Thames & Hudson, 1981) 10 See Hibberd, The Media in Italy and Ardizzoni, North/South, East/West.11 Arturo Tosi, ‘The Language Situation in Italy,’ Current Issues in Language Planning 5, no. 3 (2004): 247–335, doi:10.1080/14664200408668259, p. 27812 Ruth Ben-Ghiat. ‘Language and the Construction of National Identity in Fascist Italy.’ The European Legacy 2, no. 3 (May 1, 1997): 438–43. doi:10.1080/10848779708579754.13 Tosi, 200414 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press, 2010).15 Tosi, 200416 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: POINTS, 1970).17 Idem, p. 1018 Francescomaria Evangelisti, ‘The Rhetorical Construction of Popular Front France in the Fascist Italian Press during the ‘Paris, 1937’ International Exhibition,’ Media History 0, no. 0 (March 30, 2015): 1–12, doi:10.1080/13688804.2015.1023784.19 Pierre Sorlin, ‘Italian Cinema’s Rebirth, 1937–1943: A Paradox of Fascism,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 14, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 3–14, doi:10.1080/01439689400260011.20 Federico Caprotti and Maria Kaïka, ‘Producing the Ideal Fascist Landscape: Nature, Materiality and the Cinematic Representation of Land Reclamation in the Pontine Marshes,’ Social & Cultural Geography 9, no. 6 (September 1, 2008): 613–34, doi:10.1080/14649360802292447., p. 63121 Luca La Rovere. ‘Interpretations of Fascism as a Political Religion in Post-Fascist Italy (1943–1948).’ Politics, Religion & Ideology 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 23–44. doi:10.1080/21567689.2013.849589.22 Ruth Ben Ghiat. ‘Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film.’ Critical Inquiry 23, no. 1 (1996): 109–44.23 Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. New Ed edition. University of California Press, 2004.24 Giacomo Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).25 Richard Samuels, ‘Tracking Democracies: Italy and Japan in Historical Perspective,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 3 (1997): 283–320, doi:10.1080/13545719708454955.26 Emilio Gentile, ‘New Idols: Catholicism in the Face of Fascist Totalitarianism,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 11, no. 2 (2006): 143–70, doi:10.1080/13545710600658479.27 Luca La Rovere ‘Interpretations of Fascism as a Political Religion in Post-Fascist Italy (1943–1948).’ Politics, Religion & Ideology 15, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 23–44. doi:10.1080/21567689.2013.849589, p. 27

28 Jorge Dagnino. ‘Catholic Modernities in Fascist Italy: The Intellectuals of Azione Cattolica.’ Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2007): 329–41. doi:10.1080/14690760701321304.29 James A. Toronto, ‘Islam Italiano: Prospects for Integration of Muslims in Italy’s Religious Landscape,’ Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 28, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 61–82, doi:10.1080/13602000802011069.30 La Rovere, 201431 See Samuels, ‘Tracking Democracies’; Ilvo Diamanti and Luigi Ceccarini, ‘Catholics and Politics after the Christian Democrats: The Influential Minority,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2007): 37–59, doi:10.1080/13545710601132912; Roy Palmer Domenico, ‘‘For The Cause of Christ Here in Italy’: America’s Protestant Challenge in Italy and the Cultural Ambiguity of the Cold War,’ Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (September 1, 2005): 625–54, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2005.00509.x; Mariuccia Salvati, ‘Behind the Cold War: Rethinking the Left, the State and Civil Society in Italy (1940s-1970s),’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, no. 4 (January 1, 2003): 556–77, doi:10.1080/1354571032000147764.32 Domenico, 2005, ‘’p. 63133 Cinzia Padovani, A Fatal Attraction: Public Television and Politics in Italy (Lanham, Md.; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 32.34 Idem35 Lichtner, 2013, p. 936 Istituto Luce’s newsreels are available in a digital archive that was entered in 2013 into the UNESCO registered heritage: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-6/newsreels-and-photographs-of-istituto-nazionale-luce/37 Caprotti and Kaïka, 2008’’38 Hibberd, 200739 Peter Baechlin and Maurice Muller-Strauss Newsreels across the World. (Paris: UNESCO. 1952)40 Idem, p. 1441Archivio Storico Istituto Luce: http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/42 The original text in Italian: ‘Per circa un ventennio, alla ribalta degli schermi cinematografici italiani, seguì da vicino storia ed evoluzione della società italiana dal dopoguerra agli anni della rinascita economica, e i più importanti avvenimenti internazionali nel clima teso della ‘guerra fredda’ condensati in 2551 numeri, 13260 servizi, 350 ore di filmati.’43 Scott L. Althaus, ‘The Forgotten Role of the Global Newsreel Industry in the Long Transition from Text to Television,’ The International Journal of Press/Politics 15, no. 2 (April 1, 2010): 193–218, doi:10.1177/1940161209358761.44 Maria Adelaide Frabotta, ‘Official Italian Newsreels of the 1950s: Europeanism and International Politics,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15, no. 3 (1995): 361–65, doi:10.1080/01439689500260241.45 The two colored newsreels in the sample are Pellegrino in Terra Santa (Pilgrim in the Holy Land), 10 January 1964, and Vacanze in Italia (Holidays in Italy), 24 June 1954. The newsreels titles in the article are translated by the author46 Baechlin and Muller-Strauss, 1952, p. 947 Althaus, 2010’’48 Federico Caprotti, ‘The Invisible War on Nature: The Abyssinian War (1935–1936) in Newsreels and Documentaries in Fascist Italy,’ Modern Italy 19, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 305–21, doi:10.1080/13532944.2014.925433; Federico Caprotti, ‘Information Management and Fascist Identity: Newsreels in Fascist Italy,’ Media History 11, no. 3 (December 1, 2005): 177–91, doi:10.1080/13688800500323899.

49 See the issue on newsreels of Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 69–117, doi:10.1080/0143968032000184506.50 Proclamazione del dogma dell’assunzione, 3 November 195051 Come nelle Catacombe, 21 February 1964. 52 Habemus Papam, 29 October 195853 Un uomo di buona volonta’, 17 May 196354 Dalla Sicilia Festa di S. Agata, 14 February 194755 Enzo Pace, ‘A Peculiar Pluralism,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2007): 86–100, doi:10.1080/13545710601132979.56 ‘Congresso a Roma dei coltivatori diretti, 25 March 1953.57 Premio ai benemeriti, 27 December 196358 In Italian: ‘Paese che si industrializza con la necessaria assistenza spirituale’59 Udienza in S. Pietro, 4 November 195560 In Italian ‘Il cinema puo’ assurgere a strumento della Gloria di Dio’61 Eclissi sul Sacro Gange, 27 December 195662 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed edition (New York: Vintage, 1979).63 Lichtner, 2013, p. 17664 Padovani, 2007

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Websites

Archivio Storico Istituto Luce (Historical Archive of Luce Institute): http://www.archivioluce.com/archivio/