St. Francis and Mussolini

This book examines the political, cultural, and theological metamorphoses of St. Francis of Assisi, tracing how a figure which today is associated with peace, nature, humility, and poverty served as a pillar of Italian Fascist political religion during the years of the regime. Through archival research, close textual analysis, and historiographical critique, the study uncovers the ways in which Fascist intellectuals, Franciscan friars, and state propaganda appropriated Francis’s image to construct a national saint capable of inspiring sacrifice, hierarchy, and colonial ambition. A key argument of the book is that post-war Italy largely erased the memory of Francis’s "Fascist paint," enabling a new pacifist mythology to take hold without confronting the saint’s earlier ideological uses. Through analyses of cinema by Rossellini, Zeffirelli, and Cavani and more, this book maps this postwar transition and its political stakes. Ultimately, the study illuminates the entanglement of religion and politics in modern Italy, interrogating how a single symbolic figure could embody both Clerico-Fascist nationalism and radical pacifism, and what this duality reveals about Italian cultural memory and its persistent search for absolution. "The afterlife of Saint Francis may be, if anything, even more fascinating than his life on earth. Every age has believed it could find in him something that struck a deep chord and made him seem contemporary. Amanda Minervini’s book examines what at first appears to be the most implausible and grotesque of pairings—the equation of Saint Francis with Mussolini in Fascist Italy. Yet, by the end, we discover that even our own image of Francis as a pacifist and environmentalist is an anachronistic product of myth making." —Alessandro Barbero, author of San Francesco (2025)"The conflation of religion and politics in Italian Fascism is a truism that few would challenge today. Tracing the transfiguration of St. Francis from the patron saint of Clerico-Fascism to a neorealist icon of the bravo italiano, Minervini’s excellent book reminds us that, in Italy, the sacralization of politics is always accompanied by an equally effective politicization of Catholic figures." —Claudio Fogu, Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Italian Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara