The Enemy within: Catholic Anti-Communism in Cold War Italy

This paper analyzes the peculiarity of Catholic anti-Communism in the political and cultural history of Cold War Italy.  It explores the psychological, rhetorical and symbolic dimension of the Cold War by looking at how Catholics depicted Communists in posters, cartoons, and cinema. It argues that, between the late 1940s and early 1950, the anti-Communist political campaign evolved from stressing the Communist as a threat with a specifically foreign characterization to emphasizing its indigenous naiveté. These latter representations incorporated the Communist persona within the national community by recasting the “other” as “enemy” into a parody of it. Catholic anti-Communism was thus built vis-à-vis the peculiar nature of Italian Communism, as well as around normative ideas of what the ideal Italian society should be like—namely the search for order and the need to re-formulate the relationship between the individual and society that had been shattered by the World War II experience.