Mussolini wanted to restore Italy to what he saw as the grandeur of the pre-Christian Roman empire. Both Nazism and Fascism embraced the idea that Christianity was a "slave-revolt" conspiracy that grew out of Judaism and destroyed Rome.
Does it really surprise anyone that Catholics preferred the tyranny of Fascism to the oblivion promised them by Communists? They played the same game with Fascism that they play with tyrannical regimes today. They spoke out against what they thought unjust, but were careful not to provoke retaliation from the state. Conversely, while Mussolini and Hitler both opposed Christianity, they could not move against it openly without provoking mass uprisings against their rule. They fared better in Italy than in Germany because Italy is overwhelmingly Catholic, whereas in Germany, the Nazis could pit the Catholics and Protestants against each other. Ultimately, conservative Catholics helped to topple both Mussolini and Peron from power.
The Fascists did not defend property, they simply adhered to the more doctrinaire Marxist idea that states must progress through a capitalist or bourgeois democratic stage before evolving into socialism. The Soviets had dispensed with this idea. Mussolini's Fascist proramme included "progressive" taxes, a minimum wage, protectionism, confiscation of war profits and nationalisation of munition industries and of all industrial farms employing more than 100 people.
In October 1928 Mussolini instituted a ceremony in which patriotic citizens presented their national savings certificates as a burnt offering on an ancient altar of Minerva. The church's 1931 encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno condemned Fascism's "Statolotry," the "pagan worship of the state" and they later condemned the racial laws Mussolini passed in 1938.
Mussolini supported traditional marriage for purely materialist reasons. He wanted to increase the population. This was an entirely Nationalist concern and had nothing to do with religion. No Communist country has ever succeeded in abolishing marriage as this is a completely impracticable goal.
Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum – On Capital and Labour (1891) - “The family has at least equal rights to the state.”
Compare to:
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." - Benito Mussolini - 1932.
Left-wing Fascism: An Intellectual Disorder
Nonetheless there still seems to persist in some minds the view that two groups as antagonistic as the Nazis and the Communists or the Fascists and the Communists just cannot have been ideological blood-brothers. Let me therefore try this little quiz: Who was it who at one stage dismissed Hitler as a "barbarian, a criminal and a pederast"? Was it Stalin? Was it some other Communist? Was it Winston Churchill? Was it some other conservative? Was it one of the Social Democrats? No. It was none other than Mussolini, who later became Hitler's ally in World War II. And if any two leaders were ideological blood-brothers those two were. So I think it is clear that antagonism between Hitler and others and between Mussolini and others proves nothing. If anything, the antagonism between Hitler and other socialists and between Mussolini and the "Reds" is proof of what typical socialists both Mussolini and Hitler were....And, in fact, the very title of Lenin's famous essay, "Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder" shows that Lenin himself shared the judgement that he was a Right-wing sort of Marxist. Mussolini was somewhat further Right again, of course, but both were to the Right only WITHIN the overall far-Left camp of the day.
...Further, there is something odd about the way people tend to look at how much Mussolini did for the workers, conclude that it was not much, and then conclude that he was not much of a Leftist. But how many Leftist politicians would qualify as Leftist by the criterion of whether they were of net benefit to the workers when in office? The common economic failures of Leftist regimes tend to affect all the population, with no exemption for the workers. To judge politicians as they are normally judged (by their ideology), therefore, Mussolini was very much an extreme Leftist. Was Stalin of net benefit to the workers? Given the very poor standard of living in the Soviet Union that the Gorbachev reforms revealed, it seems unlikely. Do we for that reason say Stalin was not really a Leftist?
This is the only part of my comments you have bothered to address, but you don't want to discuss it?
If you don't want to discuss it, then please don't!
How would you like it if I blamed the atrocities and destruction of Marxism and Communism on Jews? You do the equivalent when you blame anti-semitism on Christians.