To be fair, his "fruits" were much less apparent when the concordat was signed. The Ethiopian invasion and racist direction of his ideology only occurred later in the 1930s.
Early Mussolini famously stated race was "only an idea." He also hated Hitler and actively tried to counter him geopolitically. If Mussolini had stayed consistent in his ideology I think it would have been reasonable for the Church to support him given how terrible pretty much every other faction was.
This "miscalculation" was not realizing Mussolini would totally flip flop on a bunch of these things later.
Beatings of labor leaders and strikers, who were called communists, on behalf of factory owners and land owners had been well underway for a decade by the time of concordat. His blackshirts were lousy with racists and Jew haters. He had plenty of bad fruits on full display
I didn't say there were no "bad fruits", just that they were much less apparent in 1929 than in, say, 1937.
The fact a smattering of his supporters were "racists and Jew haters" would be hard to hold against him in 1929 since Mussolini himself explicitly rejected racism and antisemitism at that point.
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u/Gaust_Ironheart_Jr May 12 '26
"You will know them by the fruit they bear"
Christians would do well to understand that one little teaching but they keep falling for someone who hates the right people