Epilogue

Rejoicings, Regret and Confusion

Pope Pius XI may not have expressed regret for the support for the invasion provided by the Italian episcopate and encouraged by many strident voices from within the Vatican, nor does he seem to have regretted turning a blind eye to the horrors of the occupation. Yet by late 1937 he had begun to regret his alliance with Fascism. We may never know the whole story, for Secretary of State Pacelli and his staff managed to shield much of the pontiff’s growing disenchantment with Mussolini from public view. Nonetheless, that disenchantment would grow in intensity during the course of 1938. The conclusion drawn by David Kertzer from his study of the Vatican Secret Archives for the period is that, ‘disillusioned and despondent’, the pontiff ‘worried that he had not been true to the sacred trust placed in him. He had let his patriotic sentiments as an Italian colour his judgement. He vowed to do all he could in the little time he had left to make amends.’¹

Given the horrors of the invasion of Ethiopia, and the unholy alliance that facilitated it, the pontiff had good reason to worry that he had not been true to the sacred trust placed in him. However, even in the months that followed, he seems never to have condemned his cardinals for preaching the crusade and declaring the invasion a holy war.

And neither, apparently, did the average Italian cleric have such worries, for the clergy launched the New Year with great rejoicing. On 9 January 1938, at a political celebration convened by Mussolini at Palazzo Venezia, sixty archbishops and some two thousand priests applauded a speech by Archbishop Giuseppe Nogara of Udine in which he asked for God’s protection for Mussolini, ‘so that He will help you to win all the battles which you so wisely and energetically are directing for the prosperity, the greatness and the glory of Christian Rome’.

The Duce, in turn, was effusive in his thanks to the clergy for their support for the invasion, replying that the collaboration between the Catholic Church and Fascism had borne great fruits for all. Under no illusions about the contribution of the Church, he expressed his gratitude for ‘the efficient cooperation given by all of the clergy during the war against the Abyssinians … remembering with particular sympathy the example of patriotism shown by the Italian bishops, who brought their gold to the local offices of the Fascist Party, while the parish priests were preaching to the Italians to resist and fight’. The hall resounded to the cries of ‘Duce! Duce! Duce!’²

But the rejoicing over the war in Ethiopia gradually gave way to a growing concern as the Duce increasingly mimicked Hitler. It seemed that the excesses of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia were soon to be experienced in Europe. The boot was now on the other foot, and the Holy See was outraged. Having not said a word when Mussolini’s racial laws were passed in Ethiopia, the pope now condemned the prospect of such legislation in Italy. Denigrating Jews—including those who had converted to Catholicism—the laws were regarded by the pontiff as the ‘new heresy’, and the clerics followed suit. As Daniel Binchy put it, when Mussolini ‘imported the racialist myth from Germany, and grafted it on to his own “doctrine”, it was precisely those prelates who had hitherto stood highest in favour of his regime who echoed the Pope’s condemnation in uncompromising language’.³

One of the strongest supporters of Fascism referred to by Binchy was, of course, Ildefonso Schuster, Milan’s cardinal archbishop, who had proclaimed that the rampaging armies in Ethiopia were doing God’s work. He was one of the first to change his tune when confronted with the realities of totalitarianism on his own doorstep, particularly when it seemed that the Catholic Church in Germany might be about to suffer the same fate at the hands of Hitler that the Ethiopian Church had suffered at the hands of Mussolini.

On 12 March 1938 the German army invaded Austria, where it was warmly welcomed by the head of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Archbishop Innitzer, who issued a pro-Nazi statement to be delivered in all Austrian churches. Shocked, the pope suddenly found his voice. Forgetting his ‘neutrality’ towards the national Catholic Churches, and apparently discovering that he did, after all, have the authority to intervene and rein in their errant clerics, he had Innitzer reprimanded in a Vatican radio broadcast, and summoned him to Rome for a dressing-down.⁴

A few weeks later the ailing pontiff was confronted with another shock: a state visit to Rome by Adolf Hitler. All eyes were now on the Nazis, and the turmoil in Ethiopia was now conveniently forgotten. Indeed, Pius XI increasingly gave the impression of having entirely lost interest in the fate of Ethiopia. Nevertheless, he made an exception when events there concerned him. For example, the Vatican and the Fascist administration were still at loggerheads following the latter’s move to sever the links between the Ethiopian Church and the Copts, and to declare the independence of the Ethiopian Church under the umbrella of the Italian administration. That did interest the pontiff, and in mid-1938, in a daring bid to resurrect the old plan of the Holy See to bring the Ethiopian Church under Rome, Archbishop Castellani was received by the pope at the pontifical palace of Castel Gandolfo. Castellani was seeking permission for the Ethiopian bishop Yohannis, a Fascist appointee, to visit Rome for a papal audience.

Furious, and fearing that the Ethiopian prelates would think that the office of the viceroy had supported the scheme, the Italian government informed the pope that Castellani would have to be replaced.⁵ However, the Holy See, perfectly willing to resist Mussolini’s instructions when it wished to do so, refused to remove the apostolic delegate. In fact, Pacelli complained of excessive government support for ‘other religions’ in Ethiopia, and that the government was hampering the construction of Catholic churches there, ‘lamenting that even the Moslems in Ethiopia were better protected than the Catholic Church’.⁶

The Vatican was quite right about the status of Islam in Ethiopia. The Italians had built a large mosque in Addis Ababa, and their administration was winning the support of many Ethiopian Muslims. The fact is that for Mussolini, the alliance with the Catholic Church had served its purpose. He had got what he wanted, and now he had no need for Castellani. Thus, his response to Pius XI was that the archbishop could remain in Addis Ababa only if he fell in line with the policies of the Fascist administration.

Castellani had to make a choice, and he chose to side with the Fascists and remain in Addis Ababa.⁷ Thus the dispute was resolved, but in the process the Holy See lost its final bid for control of the Ethiopian Church. For the Catholic Church, the holy war against the heretics, the righteous fury of the cardinals, the massacres of the Ethiopian clergy, the jihad and the church-burning campaigns had come to nothing.

Not surprisingly, Pius XI was displeased by the way in which the Catholic Church had been used by Mussolini and then, in effect, dumped when he no longer needed a holy war. In mid-1938, Tacchi Venturi, the pope’s private emissary to the Duce, was bitterly reminding the dictator how essential the backing of the Church had been for him, that support having been ‘not the least important reason for the Italian victory in Ethiopia’.⁸ The war-mongering clerics themselves had little to say, the new policy in Ethiopia having taken the wind out of their sails. In any case, by 1938 most of their black-shirted ‘missionaries of the Cross’ had been sent to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where, having to contend with a well-armed enemy rather than defenceless civilians, many of them met their end.

Thus Archbishop Schuster’s glorious campaign against Ethiopia’s ‘heretics and schismatics’ was soon forgotten, and the rabble-rousing faded to an embarrassed silence. As regards the invasion, an acute case of collective amnesia was falling upon the Italian episcopate.

As for Pius XI, he had other things to worry about. Concerned that Hitler threatened the institution of the Catholic Church in Germany, on Christmas Eve 1938 he had no hesitation in personally delivering to his cardinals a denunciation of Mussolini’s growing closeness to the Nazis, which had resulted in the Duce’s adoption of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and the appearance of the swastika in Rome. Once again, the pope’s speech calls into question his claim of neutrality towards clergy of national Catholic Churches regarding political matters, which some scholars cite to explain his failure to restrain the Italian clerics and denounce Fascist excesses in Ethiopia.

A few weeks later, as the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Treaty which had sealed the alliance between the Church and the Fascist government grew near, Mussolini feared that the pontiff was about to deliver a stinging rebuke to his regime. However, the rebuke never came. On 10 February 1939 Pope Pius XI, whose clergy had sacralised the brutal invasion of Ethiopia, and who had turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of the invaders during the occupation that followed, died without having made amends. A speech he had prepared concerning the Church and Fascism lay beside his bed; the speech was never given, and Secretary of State Pacelli had all the printed copies destroyed.⁹

In 2006 the original document came to light. Not surprisingly, the pope’s last thoughts were expressions of concern about the difficulties the Catholic Church might suffer under Fascism in the future. It was a sufficient critique of Mussolini’s policies to have annoyed the Duce, and was clearly an attempt by a dying man to unburden his conscience. However, it was not the ringing denunciation of Fascism that some had expected, nor was it a powerful statement of pontifical regret or even confession of a mistaken or naive policy of the past. And it made no mention of Ethiopia.

Secretary of State Pacelli, whose enthusiasm for Fascism lasted longer than Papa Ratti’s, and who had long managed to curtail some of the pope’s more vehement outbursts against the actions of Mussolini’s government, succeeded the pontiff as Pope Pius XII. The risk of an impending split between the Vatican and Fascism had now passed. Mussolini and Hitler would work together for foreign conquest, Hitler would invade Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the world would be engulfed by war. The Italians would invade Albania and Greece, and then, in concert with Nazi Germany, would invade and dismember Yugoslavia. Employing the same techniques of exemplary repression that they had tested and honed in Ethiopia—village burning, massacres, deportations and concentration camps— not infrequently under the direction of the very same military commanders, they would leave behind them a trail of suffering and death.

The War Continues

Although the crusade against the Ethiopian Church had officially been brought to an end by early 1938, the war continued much as before, with the policies of collective punishment and exemplary repression of civilians still in place. Commander Cavallero continued military attacks on churches and monasteries, but not on well-known or strategic targets. They were concentrated on smaller, lesser-known and more remote Christian centres that would not attract undue attention. In sworn testimony for the UN war crimes trials, an eyewitness of events in November 1938 in eastern Shewa, as the war entered its fourth year, reported: ‘We saw those troops [Muslim askaris under Italian command] plundering all the property of the peasants and burning villages, including churches … while bombing all the country all around there [Tamo], their infantry set on fire many famous churches by [flaming] torches’.¹⁰

The Italians continued to strike civilian as well as military targets; in the first quarter of 1939 in Bichena, Gojjam (see Map 10), under the command of Colonel Leopoldo Natale, churches and houses were still being attacked:

The Italians burned two churches and then plundered and burned approximately 5,000 houses in Baranta District in Bichena … This took place in the month of Yekatit 1931 EC (February 1939) … The Italians first plundered and then burned all of the houses of Lamchow in Bichena, without leaving a single house standing, under the pretext that some of the natives of the country had become Patriots with Dejazmach Belay Zelleqe. The houses burned were approximately 200. Also three churches were burned down: Wasda St Michael, Ganaz St Mary and Sakala St Gabriel.¹¹

However, over the course of 1939 international developments triggered doubts about the future of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. There were expectations among Ethiopians that Italy would become embroiled in a European war, and that its enemies would come to their aid.¹² The day before his dismissal as viceroy, even Graziani had frankly admitted as much.

Thus the new viceroy had inherited a virtually impossible task. Resistance was again escalating, there was widespread corruption throughout the Italian administration and morale among the Italians was sinking. In addition, the Duke of Aosta had to deal with the aftermath and legacy of Graziani’s tenure. While he maintained the death sentence for Ethiopians found in possession of arms, he saw no point in keeping innocent men, women and children in prison, and so he set about reviewing the situation of the thousands of Ethiopians serving life sentences in concentration camps and prisons in Ethiopia, Somalia, the Dahlak Islands and Italy.

At the age of thirteen, Tibebe Kassa of Debre Libanos was transferred from Danane concentration camp to a prison camp at Mogadishu, where he spent much of 1938. He was returned to Danane for a few months and was then transferred to Eritrea to be incarcerated in a prison at Nefasit. He was eventually released in February–March 1939, slightly less than two years after his capture at Debre Libanos.

By then the situation in Ethiopia was very tense, and there was something of a stalemate between the Patriots and the Italians, prompting the Duke of Aosta to warn Mussolini that a European war ‘would bring on the high seas the task of pacifying the country and jeopardise the conquest itself’.¹³

Finally, the duke’s fears came to pass. Following Hitler’s invasion of Poland and Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in September, and Germany’s invasion of France in 1940, Mussolini, expecting a share of the fruits of what he perceived to be Hitler’s inevitable victory, declared war on Britain and France.

Liberation

Italy’s declaration of war against Britain triggered a sea change in British policy towards the war in Ethiopia. Italy was now Britain’s enemy, and by mid-1940, with the Italo-Ethiopian war in its fifth year, forces under British command had arrived in Ethiopia to unite with the Ethiopian Patriots. In January 1941 three simultaneous attacks were launched on Italian East Africa, from Eritrea, Sudan and Kenya. Within three months a relatively small force of British, South African, Nigerian, Sudanese and Kenyan soldiers, fighting alongside the Ethiopian Patriots, had crushed the enemy, and the considerably larger Italian army in Addis Ababa had surrendered en masse. The British opened up Danane, freed the prisoners, and used the camp for incarcerating Italian prisoners of war. Emperor Haile Selassie, who had never lost his faith in God, and had regularly prayed in the church established in the greenhouse of his residence in England, was flown to the Sudan, finally arriving at Debre Marqos in central Ethiopia on 6 April 1941.

Reaching Fiché on 1 May, the sovereign went to give thanks at the monastery of Debre Libanos, where, received by Patriots, he found (in his words) only ‘a few clergy’. In his memoirs the sovereign lamented, ‘The monastery has been burned down by the Fascists, the clergy exterminated at the hands of the enemy, its treasures looted, and the entire vicinity abandoned and neglected. When We saw all this, We were extremely saddened and deeply moved.’¹⁴

The emperor returned to Fiché to see where military commanders Aberra and Asfawessen Kassa had been executed, and then made a triumphant entry into Addis Ababa on 5 May. At midday he raised the Ethiopian flag to a 21-gun salute, precisely five years after the Italian flag had first been raised on the same spot.¹⁵

Haile Selassie delivered a moving speech, outlining the background to the Italian invasion, and the horrors of the occupation. He shared the pain of those who had suffered during the massacre of Yekatit 12:

How many are the young men, the women, the priests and monks whom the Italians pitilessly massacred during those years? … The blood and bones of those who were killed with spades and pickaxes, of those who were split with axes and hammered to death, pierced with bayonets, clubbed and stoned, of those who were burned alive in their homes with their little children, of those who perished of hunger and thirst in prison, have been crying for justice.

Yet even in his hour of triumph, the emperor maintained his dignity and faith:

When we say let us rejoice with our hearts, let not our rejoicing be in any other way but in the spirit of Christ. Do not return evil for evil. Do not indulge in the atrocities which the enemy has been practising in his usual way, even to the last. Take care not to spoil the good name of Ethiopia by acts which are worthy of the enemy.¹⁶

The Ethiopians followed their emperor’s instruction not to repay evil with evil. The Italians were treated honourably, graciously and with Christian charity. The man whom Mussolini had denounced as a monstrous barbarian ensured that, despite the catalogue of atrocities the Italians had meted out to the Ethiopians, as Professor Del Boca observed, ‘Not a hair of an Italian’s head was harmed’.¹⁷

The 1940s

Following the entry of the British army into Addis Ababa on 6 April 1941, British Military Intelligence began closely watching the activities of the Catholic missions, and Archbishop Castellani in particular. The investigations revealed that in the papal legation in Addis Ababa a wireless transmitter of the latest Italian military type was being operated by nine Italian soldiers who had been demobilised just before the arrival of the British. These soldiers were in possession of passes signed by Castellani, who, however, did not communicate their presence to the British military command, although ‘he was aware of the obvious irregularity of such an arrangement’. In addition, two other officials of the Italian government ‘had been posted to the Legation in nebulous appointments under the express direction of Dr Franca’ in his former position as director of the Italian Department of Political Affairs. Subsequent investigations found that ‘various currencies and some bullion’ had been transferred from the Banca d’Italia to the papal legation just prior to the arrival of the British. In addition, the legation was found to be transferring capital out of Ethiopia by receiving money from Italian residents and telegraphing instructions to Rome using ‘the clandestine radio transmitter for the payment of the sums to the recipients by the Vatican’.¹⁸

More evidence of direct support by the Catholic Church for the Italian military was uncovered in the Consolata, San Vincenzo and Capuchin missions. Arms and ammunition were discovered in May 1941 in the storehouse and the priests’ quarters of the Capuchin mission in Dire Dawa, and ‘the mission at Atsbi Teferi was found to be the depository for a large quantity of arms, ammunition, and hand grenades, which were found in the priests’ rooms and even hidden in the altar canopy of the church itself’.¹⁹

British Intelligence concluded that the activities of the Italian Catholic missionaries in Ethiopia, including those of the apostolic delegate, were actively Fascist and subversive of peace and order. Brigadier Lush of the Occupied Territory Administration in Ethiopia informed Sir Philip Mitchell, the chief political officer in Nairobi:

I am anxious to rid this country of an active and intelligent organisation, far more dangerous than the mediocre Fascists who have been removed by various purges which have taken place since our arrival here; but I realise the political and international complications of such drastic action. I would, however, strongly recommend that the Vatican be approached with a view to transferring Mgr Castellani to some other post and that I should be given a free hand to deport the majority of the Italian Catholic priests.²⁰

After considerable diplomatic manoeuvring between Emperor Haile Selassie (who also wanted Castellani expelled), the British military in Ethiopia and the Foreign Office in London, the apostolic delegate was finally deported from Ethiopia on 29 November 1942, though he apparently retained his title until 13 December 1945.

It is worth noting that, whereas before the Italian invasion the Ethiopian government had welcomed—and, indeed, invited—Catholic missions into Ethiopia, after the war foreign Catholics frequently found themselves no longer trusted by the Ethiopians, because they were now identified with Italy and the invading forces. Even British attempts to get the emperor to agree to allow non-Italian Catholic clergy back into Ethiopia were initially met with considerable resistance.²¹

Archbishop Castellani would not be replaced until 1957, when Monsignor Joseph McGeough was installed in Addis Ababa as the new apostolic nuncio to Ethiopia.

The End of the Duce

In September 1943, by which time it was apparent that Germany would probably lose the war, Italy surrendered and joined the Allies. As a result, the Germans invaded Italy and occupied Rome for several months until the Allies swept up northwards through southern Italy. In the confusion, the Italians suffered what amounted to a civil war; the Fascist dreams of a ‘new Italy’ were shattered amidst poverty, food shortages, reprisals, public executions and social chaos. The Vatican was for a time virtually under siege, and in October the Germans rounded up Jews in Rome and deported them to the death camp at Auschwitz.

In April 1945 Mussolini and several other notable Fascists were executed by partisans. A few days later Hitler committed suicide as the Russian army closed in on Berlin, and by May Germany had surrendered. The Second World War was effectively over.

The moderation of the Italian strategy of terror and extermination in Ethiopia, and the radical change of policy towards the Ethiopian Church, both of which accompanied the replacement of Graziani by the Duke of Aosta in late 1937, brought the sacralisation of the war in Ethiopia largely to a close. It might be thought that this prevented the situation in Ethiopia reaching the acme of horror achieved by the Italian-supported clerico-Fascist regime of Ante Pavelicć in Croatia, where the long-standing hostility of Croatian Catholics towards Orthodox Serbs would result in the cruel deaths of hundreds of thousands of Orthodox—sometimes at the hands of berobed Catholic clerics themselves. However, there was actually a remarkable parallel between the two pogroms, for the overall death toll of Ethiopians at the hands of the Italians was of the same order of magnitude as the death toll in Croatia—around three-quarters of a million (see Appendix I),²² and both involved large-scale religious persecution encouraged by Catholic clergy, failure of the Vatican to denounce the war-mongering Catholic clergy, and the instigation of Muslims to commit atrocities against Orthodox Christians.

The Great Forgetting

Pius XI’s secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli, who succeeded him as Pius XII in 1939, survived the war and continued to reign until his death in 1958. In 1945, looking back over the decade since the launch of the invasion of Ethiopia, which disempowered the League of Nations and took the nations of Europe on the slippery slope towards world war, Pacelli must have recalled how, while he was secretary of state, the Roman Church promoted the invasion as a holy war, thus sharing with Mussolini the awful responsibility for what followed.

Yet as Christopher Duggan observes, the Vatican encouraged the inclination on the part of Italians to ‘quietly forget’ about Fascism and their support for it, thus discouraging any systematic reckoning with the past. After the fall of the Duce, both the Holy See and the Italian Catholic Church lost no time in deflecting attention away from the Church’s powerful support for Fascism. They announced that totalitarianism was incompatible with Christianity—a complete reversal of Pius XI’s declaration that Fascism contained nothing incompatible with Christianity. The contrived argument was now that, owing to the incompatibility of the two doctrines, no Catholic could ever have been a Fascist.²³ Thus a veil was drawn over Fascism, and apart from a fleeting reference in Graziani’s memoir, scarcely anything of Italy’s brutal persecution of the Ethiopian Church would ever be published, or even mentioned. It was as if it had never happened.

The sufferings of the Italians when the Germans invaded Italy in 1943 facilitated the Great Forgetting. Having now themselves become victims of a ruthless totalitarian onslaught, they were only too ready to forget their support for the Duce and his genocidal cult. Indeed, the role of the Italian episcopate in the promotion of Fascism and the barbaric crusade in Ethiopia was not only forgotten, but denied. None of the prelates involved in the sacralisation of the invasion was ever held to account, and in due course proceedings were initiated to canonise Cardinals Pacelli and Schuster.

Justice Denied

In 1948, after the Paris Peace Conference had addressed the terms of settlement between Ethiopia and Italy, the issue of Italian war crimes in Ethiopia was raised by the Ethiopians before the UN War Crimes Commission. They drew up charges against 50 suspected Italian war criminals, from which, under severe time pressure, they selected just ten for trial. Their list was headed by Badoglio, Graziani and Lessona.²⁴ Graziani was charged with murder and systematic terrorism, deportation and internment of civilians, pillage and wanton destruction, use of gases and deliberate bombardment of hospitals, torture, and wanton destruction of religious buildings.²⁵

The Ethiopian Ministry of Justice submitted a supporting portfolio of documentary evidence of war crimes to the commission, which included several incriminating telegrams issuing instructions to commit atrocities, Graziani’s telegram to Lessona of 21 May 1937 reporting the execution of the monks of Debre Libanos at Laga Weldé, his telegram reporting the executions at Borale,²⁶ and an affidavit sworn by Lij Hayle-Maryam Gazmu describing briefly how General Maletti took control of the monastery and conducted the massacre.²⁷

The Ethiopian submission was accompanied by a request that the defendants be tried ‘in accordance with international practice for the trial of major war criminals’, following principles of law and procedure ‘in accordance with those of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg’.²⁸

The UN War Crimes Commission accepted prima facie war crimes charges against the eight military officials listed as suspects, but owing to political and bureaucratic difficulties and persistent obstruction by Britain, the Ethiopians had no choice but to reduce the number of defendants to just two; they chose Badoglio and Graziani.

Britain took the lead in blocking Ethiopia’s attempts to bring the Italian suspects to justice. Britain—the very country that, while purporting to uphold the principles of collective responsibility at the League of Nations, had made Ethiopia its sacrificial lamb—once again betrayed its ally. The British government was opposed to committing to trial Badoglio, the leading defendant, because he had arranged for Italy’s surrender and was considered a suitably right-wing leader who would keep Italy safely in the Western fold in the face of what was perceived to be a growing Communist threat. Furthermore, the British government had only limited interest in crimes committed against non-Europeans, and having recognised Mussolini’s ‘conquest’ of Ethiopia, it was unwilling to acknowledge how it had been achieved. Nevertheless, the Ethiopian government stood its ground, publishing a two-volume set of documents entitled La civilisation de l’Italie fasciste, consisting of facsimiles and French translations of Italian telegrams ordering atrocities, and photographs of such atrocities being carried out.²⁹

To put a gloss of legitimacy on its manoeuvrings, the British Foreign Office argued that Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia had preceded, and thus was not a part of, the Second World War, which was deemed by the British government to have begun in September 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany. However, this was revised under pressure from the Chinese, who successfully demanded the trial of Japanese accused of invading China and committing atrocities against the Chinese well before Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. The commission’s acquiescence showed the British argument to be without merit, but Ethiopia did not have the political leverage to prevail.

The Ethiopian attempts to file their submission met with yet further procedural obstructions by the British government. Thus, abandoned by the British and most of the Allies, Ethiopia was obliged to approach the Italian government directly to surrender Badoglio and Graziani as war criminals—a futile request. In September 1949, under intense political pressure, and fearful of losing British support for its claims to Eritrea, Ethiopia abandoned its efforts to bring the Italian war criminals to justice.³⁰

Dramatis Personae

Rodolfo Graziani became chief of staff of the Italian Armed Forces and minister for war. He was the only marshal to stay loyal to Mussolini. Arrested in 1945 after Italy surrendered to the Allies, he was sentenced in Italy to nineteen years in prison in 1950 for continuing the collaboration with Adolf Hitler in the short-lived Fascist Salò Republic. However, he was released after serving only a few months of his sentence. Graziani was never tried for war crimes in Libya or Ethiopia. He died of natural causes in Rome on 11 January 1955, and was buried at Affile, where he had lived.³¹

A monument constructed with public money in Affile in honour of Graziani in 2012 became the subject of international protests, leading to the successful prosecution of three Affile councillors—including mayor Ercole Viri—for the crime of ‘apology of Fascism’. Nonetheless, the people of Affile re-elected Viri as mayor. However, in 2017 Ercole Viri was sentenced to eight months in prison, each of the other councillors being sentenced to six months. In 2019 the Court of Appeal upheld the sentences, but in September 2020 they were annulled by the Supreme Court.

The Duke of Aosta, Graziani’s courtly successor as viceroy, was defeated during the liberation of Ethiopia, and was allowed by the British to surrender with full military honours. Well respected by his captors, he died of tuberculosis in a nursing home in Nairobi, Kenya.

General Pietro Maletti, who masterminded and oversaw numerous atrocities in Northern Shewa, including the massacre of Debre Libanos and the Maletti–Mohammed Sultan jihad, died in December 1940 while fighting the British in Italy’s North Africa campaign. His responsibility for war crimes in Ethiopia was never acknowledged or addressed. On the contrary, he was memorialised in several Italian towns where streets are named after him.

General Alessandro Pirzio-Biroli, who carried out civilian massacres throughout the Amhara region of Ethiopia, gained further notoriety by perpetrating similar atrocities against civilians as governor of Montenegro in Italian-occupied Yugoslavia.

Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII, died in 1958. Following public controversies about his conduct during the Holocaust, exacerbated by the publication of John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope in 1999, the procedure for his canonisation ground to a halt. However, in 2009 he was declared Venerable.

The strongly pro-Fascist Cardinal Archbishop Schuster, who played a leading role in the sanctification of the invasion of Ethiopia and the Great Mobilisation to support it, was declared Venerable in 1994, was beatified in 1996, and is currently in line for sainthood.

Archbishop Giovanni Castellani, the pro-Fascist Catholic cleric who was appointed vicar apostolic of Addis Ababa in March 1937, became apostolic nuncio to Guatemala and El Salvador in 1945. Transferred to the office of the secretary of state in the Vatican in 1951, he died two years later.³²

Recovery

Despite the slaughter of so many of the clergy and their parishioners, the destruction of churches and monasteries, and the loss of a great part of its cultural patrimony, the ‘heresy’ of Ethiopian Orthodoxy, declared as such by Pius XI and denounced so vociferously by the Italian episcopate, was not eradicated. On the contrary, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church recovered and flourished. Emperor Haile Selassie cancelled the Italian attempt to reconfigure the Church and to forcibly cut the link with the Egyptian Orthodox Church. He restored the relationship of mutual respect between the two Orthodox Churches, and resumed the negotiations with the Coptic Patriarchate that he had launched as regent in 1928, aimed at autonomy for the Ethiopian Church by mutual agreement. In May 1942 he sent a delegation to Cairo to request the return to Ethiopia of Archbishop Qérillos. Meanwhile, Bishop Gebre-Giyorgis Welde-Tsadiq was appointed ichegé. Qérillos did return to Ethiopia; by July 1948, five Ethiopian monks had been ordained as bishops, and Ichegé Gebre-Giyorgis was known henceforth as Abune Basilios, bishop of Shewa and abbot of Debre Libanos.

By June 1959 the Ethiopian and Egyptian Churches had reached an agreement regarding their future relationship under which the Ethiopian Church became autonomous, and Abune Basilios was appointed first patriarch of the Ethiopian Church.

The policy of tolerance towards other religions operating in Ethiopia, of which the Catholic Church was a principal beneficiary in the early 1930s, and which was brought to a brutal end by the Italian invasion, was restored after liberation. However, it would be more than two decades for the same spirit of religious tolerance to be introduced in Rome under Pope John XXIII.

The Ethiopian Church entered the 21st century with some 40 million members—the second largest Orthodox Church in the world after the Russian Orthodox Church.

Martyr Saints

Just as the horrors of the Italian invasion and occupation cannot be forgotten by those who lived through them and lost their relatives, friends and loved ones, or who were themselves scarred physically or mentally by the trauma of what they suffered, Ethiopians never forgot the martyrs who attempted to protect their flock from the horrors of the invading armies. The remains of Bishop Pétros were never found, but after liberation Emperor Haile Selassie had a statue of him erected in Addis Ababa near the spot where he was executed, marking recognition of the prelate as one of Ethiopia’s most illustrious martyrs. In due course the statue was moved to the cathedral of St George, and another, larger statue raised in its place, which was, and still is, at the centre of a road junction known as Abune Petros Square.

On 9 May 2009, in Bishop Pétros’s home town of Fiché, His Holiness Abune Pawlos, patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, president of the World Council of Churches and honorary president of the World Conference of Religions for Peace, presided over the opening of a church and monastery complex consecrated in the bishop’s name. Drawing aside a curtain, he revealed a tall marble obelisk inscribed ‘Martyr Saint Bishop Pétros’. The prelate who refused to be part of Mussolini’s terror machinery in return for a life of luxury had been canonised.

The words of His Holiness recalled the exemplary life and martyrdom of the bishop who had been shot for refusing to acquiesce in the invasion: ‘His Grace Abune Pétros has become a great martyr in this world full of temptation. This obelisk erected in his name helps the current generation to remember the great deeds of His Grace Bishop Pétros.’

The patriarch returned to his seat, and the bishop of Northern Shewa, in whose grounds the throng had assembled, rose to say how glad he was to see the commemorative obelisk and the completion of the nearby church in the name of the martyr saint, as well as a new priests’ training centre and a residence for monks.

In 1943 the residents of Gore were able to retrieve the body of Bishop Mikaél from where a small group of his followers had managed to bury him in December 1936. The remains were taken to St Mary’s church, and a statue was erected in his memory at the site of his execution.³³

In October 2016, under the patriarchate of His Holiness Abune Mathias, the Holy Synod in Addis Ababa canonised Bishop Mikaél, who had also been executed in public after refusing to endorse Italian hegemony over Ethiopia.

Two martyrs, who by being true to their holy vows fell victim to Italy’s holy war, had ascended to sainthood.

A new statue of Martyr Saint Bishop Mikaél was erected in the town where he suffered martyrdom in public, his life cut short by a volley of bullets as he stood proudly as a beacon of hope for his fellow countrymen and women during the dark days of the occupation. There too a church was built in his name.

In the town of Cocquio-Trevisago in Lombardy, a street was named in memory of General Pietro Maletti. However, following the revelations of the tv2000 docu-film Debre Libanos³⁴ and the publication in Italy of Debre Libanos 1937 by Professor Paolo Borruso,³⁵ the City Council of Cocquio-Trevisago decided on 10 February 2020 to honour the victims of the monastery of Debre Libanos by changing the street name from via Pietro Maletti Generale to via Martiri Cristiani—the Street of Christian Martyrs.