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The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
Random House
February 2014
On Sale: January 28, 2014
592 pages
ISBN: 0812993462
EAN: 9780812993462
Kindle: B00EBRUAZS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction | Historical
From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes
the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work,
based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist
archives, including reports from Mussolini’s spies inside
the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our
understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism
in Europe.
The Pope and
Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power
in 1922, and together changed the course of
twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not
have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the
other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had
many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy
and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to
sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the
prerogatives of their office. (“We have many interests to
protect,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized
control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other
to consolidate his power and achieve his political
goals.
In a challenge to the conventional
history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle
with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a
crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and
keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support,
Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had
lost and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police
enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last years of his
life—as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler—the
pontiff’s faith in this treacherous bargain started to
waver. With his health failing, he began to lash out at the
Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic
racial laws before it was too late. Horrified by the threat
to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle,
including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain
the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had
served both the Church and the dictator for many years.
The Pope and Mussolini brims with
memorable portraits of the men who helped enable the reign
of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s
personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known
as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of
Italy, an object of widespread derision who lacked the
stature—literally and figuratively—to stand up to the
domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio
Pacelli, whose political skills and ambition made him
Mussolini’s most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and
positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial
Pius XII, whose actions during World War II would be subject
for debate for decades to come.
With the
recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s
papacy, the full story of the Pope’s complex relationship
with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid,
dramatic, with surprises at every turn, The Pope and
Mussolini is history writ large and with the lightning
hand of truth.
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