R.J.B. Bosworth, in his weighty volume Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945, describes breifly Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Italy in 1919 by noting that many Italians wondered if Wilson was “the savior of mankind.”
Benito Mussolini, editor of Il Popolo d’Italia and aspiring fascist dictator, mused on that theme:
Wilson’s empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits.
Bosworth does not mention if Wilson met with Pope Benedict XV. Did he? [See below.] What does the Savior of Mankind need with the mere head of the Roman Catholic Church?
Italians, Mussolini included, would quickly sour on Wilson, claiming that the “great powers” were using the Fourteen Points and all the other swell parts of the post-war settlement to deliberately prevent Italy from claiming its place in the sun. And we know where that led…
UPDATE: A number of readers have sent me e-mails saying that Pope Benedict XV did meet with Woodrow Wilson (or maybe I should say Wilson met with the Pope) during Wilson’s 1919 visit to Italy.
12:19 pm on May 19, 2006
