Pietro Tacchi Venturi
He was also one of the architects of the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which ended the "Roman Question" (a dispute over the status of the papacy since the Italian unification), and recognized the sovereignty of Vatican City, which made it an actor of international relations.
[1][2] A claimed attempt to assassinate Venturi with a paper knife (actually the result of a homosexual lovers' quarrel), one year before the treaty's completion, made headlines around the world.
appeared in two volumes in 1911 and 1913, and included Ricci's letters as well as his Commentarj della Cina (Commentary on China), the Italian manuscript that had been previously published only in the expanded and edited Latin version of Nicolas Trigault (as De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas).
[11] Venturi was an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who believed the Catholic Church was threatened by a "worldwide Jewish-Masonic plutocracy" and advocated putting all Italian Jewish bankers under police surveillance.
[12] In September 1926, Venturi gave Mussolini a pamphlet entitled Zionism and Catholicism accusing the Jews of wanting "to destroy current society and dominate the world themselves, as their Talmud proscribes".
In May 1928, already internationally known for his role as a negotiator, Venturi survived an attempted assassination by "Signor De Angelis" with a paper knife, receiving only a neck laceration when he ducked out the way.
[5] Venturi claimed to have been the victim of an international conspiracy organized by an anti-Fascist group based in Paris led by Gaetano Salvemini, but the police were highly doubtful of his story.
[14] It was established during the police investigation that Venturi was a homosexual who had "illicit relations" with young men he picked up on the streets of Rome and took back to his apartment for sex, and the murder attempt was just a lovers' quarrel.
[21] At the urging of Venturi, Mussolini wrote a second book – Una Conversione – about his conversion to Catholicism, meant as a sequel to his twenty-year-old novel which was extremely critical of the church: Claudia Particella: l'amante del Cardinale (translated and published in English as The Cardinal's Mistress).
[24] Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Partito Popolare Italiano, a Catholic political party in Italy, credits Venturi with ending the dispute.
[26] The terms of the agreement were meant to give the Vatican a role in "Fascist Youth Education" and required that the Catholic organization be devolved to the diocesan level, with no centralized hierarchy, and that chaplains be attached to the Balilla chapters.
[30] Upon the election of Pius XII by the papal conclave, 1939, it was announced that Dom Francesco Tomasetti (d. 5 May 1953[31]), the procurator general of the Salesian Order, would replace Venturi as the unofficial messenger between the pope and Mussolini after "a struggle of another kind, less open but having many of the same elements as that over the choice of Secretary of State".
Pius XII also sent Venturi to Brussels for mediation negotiations with regard to the Danzig crisis in the summer of 1939 in an attempt to avert World War II.
[43] In August 1943, when Marshall Pietro Badoglio, Mussolini's successor, was contemplating a complete rescission of Italy's anti-Jewish laws, Venturi met with the Secretary of the Interior and requested that only the portions affecting Jewish converts to Catholicism be repealed.
[45] Venturi assured Maglione: I took care not to call for the total abrogation of a law which, according to the principles and traditions of the Catholic Church, certainly has some clauses that should be abolished, but which clearly contains others that have merit and should be confirmed.
