Religione di guerra e legittimazione della violenza

The ‘cultural turn’ of historiography on the First World War has allocated to the religious discourse an essential place in the definition of symbols and representations that fuelled the mobilization of war and played a crucial role in the interwar period: a set of rites, practices and semantics that aimed at fusing religious faith and patriotism, in order to nourish the spiritual consensus of war and cement the nation in the fight against the enemy. The support for war was also pursued, in a religious key, on the devotional, charitable and propaganda fields. Consequently it led to the addiction to physical violence and often in its celebration. In the years immediately following the conflict, the liturgies of mourning, with their strong emotional impact, became occasions for the self-representation of the communities shaped by the war, in a close link between nation, war violence, and Catholicism. This was one of the grounds around which an ideological harmony between Church and fascism occurred, at central and peripheral level. Such connection did not result in the hegemonic affirmation of the clerico-fascist paradigm, but rather in the difficulty of understanding the authentic nature of the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919. In the post-war years – I argue – the narrative schemes proposed by the religion of war led to an endorsement, at least defensive, of the political violence that Fascism was preparing to theorize and implement, in an offensive and systematic way, with much other intensity.