No Hero

David Kertzer, The Pope at War:

The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler

(Random House)

Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli in 1876, assumed the papacy on the eve of World War II, in late winter 1939, and steered the Vatican through history’s most devastating war.  His stewardship during this perilous time has attracted much attention, often polemical, from scholars and the public, making him arguably the 20^th century’s most controversial pope.  Two contrasting appraisals of the pope during the war years have emerged.   David Kertzer, Brown University professor and one of the English-speaking world’s leading scholars of 20^th century Italy, summarizes them at the outset of his most recent work, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler.

To his defenders, Pius XII was a heroic figure who had to maneuver between belligerents to keep the Vatican and Catholicism afloat at all amid the tumult of war.  To paraphrase Josef Stalin, the Pope had no legions available to defend the Vatican.  Rather, his institutional defense of the Vatican had to rely upon guile, political maneuvering behind the scenes, keeping a low profile, and remaining on good terms with all the era’s belligerents.

The alternative view is highly critical of Pius XII, especially his steadfast refusal to use the moral authority of his position to speak out against the treatment of Europe’s Jews, even when it was brought to his attention that Nazi Germany’s all-too-evident persecution of Jews had given way to their extermination.  In this view, the pope was easily intimidated and manipulated by Axis dictators Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, and “ever apt to embrace expediency over principle” (p.xxix).   John Cornwell’s biography, Hitler’s Pope, whose title Kertzer characterizes as deliberately provocative, captures the spirit of this perspective.

Kertzer is closer to the second view.  But he adds nuance to both in no small measure through a treasure trove of documents maintained in the Vatican archives on Pius XII’s time as pope, sealed upon his death in 1958 and not reopened until March 2020.   Kertzer is the first to take full advantage of the recently released documents, which include internal Vatican memoranda prepared at the pope’s request, along with reports sent to the pope from his nuncios and other church leaders across Europe during the war years.  He skillfully blends these documents with others from Italian, German, French, British, and American archives, especially diplomatic notes and cables, many of which have themselves only recently been declassified.  The recently available documents allow him to tell a “more complete story” (p.xxix-xxx) of the controversial pope’s actions and why he took the decisions he did.  The result is a work that is likely to stand for many years as the definitive work on Pius XII during World War II.

In a narrative that revolves around diplomatic documents, especially notes of meetings between Vatican officials and representatives of other governments, Kertzer casts much light on the book’s central area of inquiry, the pope’s reaction to Nazi Germany’s unfolding project to exterminate Europe’s Jews.  Kertzer gives full due to the view of the pope as the heroic guardian of the Vatican’s institutional interests during the war years.  Yet, his circumspect and through presentation of evidence leaves little doubt that if speaking out for embattled Jews and prioritizing saving of Jewish lives was the measure of heroism during World War II, Pius XII was no hero.

From the time war broke out in Europe in September 1939, Kertzer shows the pope besieged – seemingly, almost daily – with entreaties for him to use the moral authority of his position to speak out on behalf of the victims of Nazi atrocities, Jews and non-Jews alike and, in case after case, declining to do so.  The Vatican’s interest in Jews under Pius XII was confined to exempting those who had converted to Christianity from anti-Semitic actions undertaken in both Germany and Italy .  Otherwise, the pope’s priorities were elsewhere, including protecting Catholics in Nazi-occupied countries and Rome from allied bombing.

Pius XII was no fan of Hitler.  He was alarmed by the efforts of Hitler’s regime to “weaken the church’s influence, diminish its hold on youth, and discredit key aspects of its theology” (p.479).   But the pope also viewed Germany as Europe’s “strongest bulwark against what he regarded as the church’s greatest enemy, Communism” (p.xxxvi).  Above all, Kertzer writes, the pope’s highest priority was to “safeguard the church and thereby protect its God-given mission of saving souls” (p.34).

Kertzer’s account is also a story of how Italy experienced the war years, with the pope’s relationship to Mussolini figuring as much in the story as his relationship to Hitler.  In this sense his work constitutes a natural sequel to The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, reviewed here in 2016.  There, Kertzer captured the improbable but mutually beneficial relationship between Mussolini and Pacelli’s predecessor, Pius XI.   The Vatican under Pius XI benefitted enormously when Mussolini’s Fascist regime reinstated the church’s privileged position within Italian society.  Moreover, the  Vatican looked upon the Fascist party as the only force that could preserve order in Italy by serving as a bulwark against the existential threat of Soviet communism.  Vatican support under Pius XI in turn played a major role in legitimizing Mussolini’s explicitly anti-democratic regime and allowing it to consolidate power.

The symbiotic relationship between Mussolini and the pope continued under Pius XII.  As Europe lurched closer to war in 1939, the newly elected pope was “committed to maintaining the church’s mutually beneficial collaboration with Italy’s Fascist government and was eager to reach an understanding with Nazi Germany,” Kertzer writes.  The pope considered Mussolini his “best bet” for exercising a “moderating influence” (p.474) on Hitler, who seemingly was bound to determine Europe’s fate and that of the church.   The pope was particularly shaken by rumors that Germany intended to oust the pope from the Vatican once victory was obtained, or even do away with the Vatican altogether.  That meant that he didn’t want to present himself as the enemy of Germany.

Kertzer shows Pius XII entertaining doubts about the wisdom of Italy’s belated entry into the war in June 1940, just France was about to fall.  But Mussolini had surprisingly strong support throughout the church hierarchy in Italy, along with solid initial backing from the Italian people, and the pope’s misgivings over Italy’s decision to go to war on Hitler’s side “largely evaporated” (p.156).  While trying to maintain a public stance of neutrality, the pope did nothing to “discourage Italy’s most prominent churchmen from giving their vocal support to the Axis war” (p.208).

* * *

In 1939, the same year that Pacelli became pope, Mussolini’s government instituted the Italian “racial laws,” harsh measures aimed at turning Italy’s relatively small Jewish community into second class citizens.  Non-Italian Jews were ordered to leave the country.  Jewish children were barred from the nation’s schools, and Jewish schoolteachers and university professors were dismissed.  Jews were also barred from the military and civil service, from working in banks or insurance companies, from owning large businesses or farms, and from employing Christian household help.  No criticism of the Italian racial laws “would ever escape the pope’s lips or pen,” Kertzer writes, “not in 1939, nor over the following years in which they were in force” (p.472).  But while the pope “offered no public sign of displeasure with the anti-Jewish campaign generally,” he lobbied strenuously for “exemptions on behalf of Catholics who had formerly been Jews or were the children of Jews” (p.54).

Through his access to recently released materials, Kertzer sheds much light upon secret negotiations between the Vatican and Nazi Germany that began in August of 1939, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland.  Hitler’s negotiator was Prince Philipp von Hessen, not only the son-in-law of Italian King Victor Emmanuel but also a man who, Kertzer indicates, stood second only to Albert Speer as a Hitler favorite.  Van Hessen was bargaining for the Vatican and the Catholic Church to stay out of politics.   The negotiations continued after the German invasion of Poland.  While the pope remained, as Kertzer puts it, “eager to reach an understanding with Hitler, at the same time he wanted the Führer to know that any agreement depended on a change of those German policies that had harmed the church” (p.91).

The negotiations went nowhere.  As far as we know, there was never an explicit offer on the table that the pope agree to give Nazi Germany a free hand to deal with what was euphemistically termed the “Jewish question” as it saw fit in return for the Vatican’s priorities, genuinely deferential treatment of German Catholics, a strict hands-off policy toward the Catholic Church, or guaranteed exemptions for Jews who had converted to Christianity.  But one shudders to think what the pope’s reaction might have been had von Hessen put any of these offers on the table.

In October 1941, as German aggression extended west to the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, Pius XII received one of the first “unmistakably credible accounts of the massacre of Europe’s Jews” (p.214).  In November 1941, the pope learned in even greater detail about the unfolding mass murder of Europe’s Jews in Eastern Europe.   By January 1942, reports of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews were coming regularly, not only from Jewish and press sources but also from “churchmen in whom he would have complete faith” (p.224).  At least from that point onward, Kertzer writes, the pope was “well aware of the fate that awaited the Jews being deported to Nazi death camps” (p.276).  Yet, he continued to resist pressures to intervene publicly, arguing repeatedly that his words would “hold little sway with the Germans and any papal criticism risked provoking a backlash against the church in German-occupied Europe” (p.276).

Pius XII hoped his annual Christmas address in 1942 would dispel concerns about his failure to speak out against Nazi atrocities.  The pope’s speeches were typically lengthy, Kertzer writes, with a “level of abstraction and abstruse ecclesiastical language that flew over the heads of all but the most erudite church intellectuals” (p.188).  His 1942 Christmas address was also filled with “words that both sides of the war could interpret as supporting their cause” (p.260).  Although he nowhere mentioned Nazis or Jews, the pope lamented on page 24 of his prepared text that “hundreds of thousands of people who, through no fault of their own and solely because of the nation or their race, have been condemned to death or progressive extinction” (p.260).  When the Polish Ambassador respectfully requested that he articulate more definitively his opposition to Nazi atrocities, the pope responded that he had already done exactly that and was hurt that he had not received a word of thanks.   Catholics in Poland would pay a heavy price if he spoke out more directly, he added.

Another preoccupation of the pope came to the fore when the Allies began bombing Turin and other major industrial cities shortly after Italy entered the war in June 1940: that the Allies refrain from bombing Rome.  Then, as Hitler’s war fortunes reversed from late 1942 onward and Italian public opinion turned against the war after an unrelieved succession of military disasters, Kertzer cites repeated instances of the pope setting aside his earlier concerns about the church under an all-powerful Nazi regime and becoming “increasingly worried about the impact of a German defeat” (p.269), with a “new fear, the fate of the church following a victory of the Soviet Union” (p.474).

When the Fascist regime fell in the summer of 1943, Italy’s racial laws were up for revision and the Vatican deemed it opportune to press again the point that it felt the laws were being unfairly applied to Jews who had been baptized, along with baptized children of “mixed marriages.”  A Vatican memo made clear that this was the only change it was pushing for, emphasizing that it was not seeking the revocation of all anti-Jewish laws.   Then, in the fall of 1943, with Germany occupying Rome, Nazi SS leader Henrich Himmler ordered all Roman Jews “transferred.”

Approximately 1,250 Jews were arrested in the round up operation that followed and held at a detention center only a few hundred meters from the Vatican.  Rumors that the pope had blessed the operation circulated.  There is no evidence supporting the rumors but, as Kertzer observes, the pope “had never spoken out either against Italy’s own racial laws or against the Nazis’ systematic murder of the Jews,” thereby allowing such stories “to be spread among the SS and German troops” (p.363).  Vatican intervention even led to the release of some former Jews who had been baptized and some Jews married to Christians.

The remaining Jews were loaded into trucks and taken to the Rome train station, including over 100 children under age five.  The pope by then “could have no doubt about the fate that awaited the Jews” (p.363), Kertzer writes.  Yet, despite numerous pleas  to intervene, the pope’s response appears to have been confined to alerting the German authorities that, despite earlier efforts “some with bona-fide Catholic credentials had been among those forced onto the train” (p.369).  The train that left Rome that October day in 1943 arrived at Auschwitz a week later.  All but sixteen of the Italian Jews on the train perished.

Behind the scenes, Germany’s Ambassador to the Vatican was greatly relieved to be able to inform his superiors in Berlin that the pope had decided not to say anything about the roundup of Rome’s Jews.  The pope has done “everything possible not to strain relations with the German government and the German authorities in Rome” (p.370), the Ambassador reported approvingly.  He went on to note that an oblique reference to the roundup in the Vatican’s newspaper was worded in such a way that it will be “understood by very few people as a specific reference to the Jewish question” (p.371).

It was not until June 1945, after Mussolini’s assassination by Italian partisans and Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Allies, that the pope addressed the question of National Socialism in a direct sense.  He highlighted the suffering of Catholics and the Catholic Church during the war and, as Kertzer puts it, “represented the Catholics in Germany as the Nazis’ victims” (p.460).  Yet, the pope “made not even the briefest mention, indeed no mention at all, of the Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews.  If any Jews had been in those concentration camps alongside the valorous Catholic priests and lay Catholics, one would not know it from the pope’s speech” (p.460).  The pope also used his 1945 Christmas day message to denounce the dangers of totalitarianism.   But, as the British Ambassador to the Vatican pointed out, the pope “waited to denounce totalitarian states until the only one left was the Soviet Union” (p.466).

Implicitly but hardly subtly, Kertzer makes perhaps his most telling point about papal priorities by noting that in contrast to any condemnation of Hitler or the Nazis in the war years, Pius XII had “no trouble condemning the dangers of immorality in the areas of women’s fashion, sport, hygiene, social relations and entertainment” (p.201).  The pope was particularly scandalized by instances of women’s immodest dress, along with inappropriate dancing, theater, books and magazines.  He and the Vatican’s moral arbiters who worked for him also excoriated Italy’s popular variety shows, “to which large numbers were streaming as a diversion from the rigors of wartime life” (p.254).

* * *

Only in the book’s final pages does Kertzer render an explicit verdict on Pius XII.  There is a good case that he was successful in “protecting the institutional interests of the church at a time of war,” he writes and adds, with a hint of irony, equally successful in adhering firmly to his “determination to do nothing to antagonize” (p.480) either Hitler or Mussolini.  As a “moral leader,” however, Kertzer concludes that Pius XII “must be judged a failure” (p.480).  What Kertzer makes clear, but does not need to say in light of the mountain of evidence he presents, is that Jews and saving Jewish lives ranked far from the top of Pius XII’s priorities.

 

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

May 19, 2024

Empowering and Sustaining Fascism

David Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini:
The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

      Italy’s fascist government, led by Benito Mussolini between 1922 and 1943, was the 20th century’s first to be characterized as “totalitarian.” By some accounts, Mussolini himself coined the term and boastfully applied it to his insurgent regime.  That regime came to power in 1922, after Mussolini and a small band of activists from the unruly Fascist party engineered the famous March on Rome in October 1922, which resulted in Mussolini’s appointment as Prime Minister in Italy’s constitutional monarchy.  Once in power, the charismatic Mussolini, a master of crowd manipulation known as the Duce, eliminated his political opposition and dropped all pretensions of democratic governance in favor of one-man rule. He recklessly took Italy into World War II on Hitler’s side, was deposed by fellow Fascists in 1943 prior to Italy’s surrender to the Allies, and was executed by anti-fascist partisans in 1945.

     In The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, David Kertzer reveals the surprising extent to which the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church empowered and sustained fascism in Italy.  Mussolini had his counterpart in Pope Pius XI, appointed head of the Catholic Church in 1922, the same year Mussolini came to power. Pius XI remained pope until his death in February 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II in September of that year.  Kertzer, a professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, shines the historian’s spotlight on the improbable but mutually beneficial alliance between Mussolini and Pius XI.

     The Vatican under Pius XI considered Mussolini and his Fascist party to be the only force that could preserve order in Italy and serve as a bulwark against Russian inspired socialism, which the Vatican considered an existential threat to itself and the church. The Vatican benefitted from the explicitly anti-democratic Fascist regime’s measures to reinstate the church’s privileged position within Italian society.  Its support in turn played a major role in legitimizing Mussolini’s fascist regime, allowing the Duce to cast himself as Italy’s “champion of law and order and national pride” (p.26).  Mussolini and Pius XI “came to be disillusioned by the other,” Kertzer concludes, “yet dreaded what would happen if their alliance were to end” (p.407).

      Kertzer’s story has two general parts. In the first, he explains how Mussolini and Pius XI pieced together in 1929 what are known as the “Lateran Accords,” agreements that reversed the strict separation between church and state that had existed since Italian unification in 1861 and had been arguably the most salient characteristic of Italy’s constitutional monarchy. The second involves Hitler’s intrusion into the Mussolini-Pius XI relationship after he was appointed Germany’s chancellor in 1933, with devastating effects for Italy’s small Jewish population.

   Mussolini and Pius XI met only once. Their relationship was conducted primarily through intermediaries, who form an indispensable component of Kertzer’s story.  Most noteworthy among them was Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pius XI’s Secretary of State and the pope’s principal deputy in 1930 before being named Pope himself, Pius XII, when Pius XI died in 1939.  Kertzer begins and ends with an account of how Pacelli and like-minded subordinates conspired with Mussolini’s spies within the Vatican to prevent dissemination of the dying Pius XI’s most important final work, an undelivered papal speech condemning racism, persecution of the Jews, and Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany. The undelivered speech was to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Lateran Accords and would have marked an irreversible rupture to the improbable alliance between the Vatican and Mussolini’s fascist government.

* * *

     Mussolini, born in 1883 as the son of a small-town blacksmith, started his political career as a socialist and adhered to the strong anti-clerical positions that characterized early 20th century Italian socialism.  As a young rabble-rouser, Mussolini was “part left-wing wild man and part Don Juan” who “always seemed to know how to become the center of attention . . . [H]e was someone you would rather have on your side than against you” (p.21).  More opportunist than ideologue, Mussolini broke with socialism sometime after World War I erupted in 1914. In a transformation that his former socialist colleagues viewed as “inexplicable and traitorous,” Mussolini “kept the revolutionary’s disdain for parliamentary democracy and fascination with the possibilities of violent action” but “jettisoned much of the rest of Marxist ideology” (p.22).

     The period after World War I was a time of great unrest in Italy, when a violent revolution similar to the one that had recently toppled the Tsarist regime in Russia seemed imminent. The chaos surrounding the end of the war created an opportunity for Mussolini. He had “always committed, above all, to himself and to a belief in his own ability to rise to the top. Now he began to see a new path that could allow him to realize those dreams” (p.22). That path involved presenting himself as the protector of the Catholic faith. In his first speech to parliament in late 1922, without any previous consultation with Vatican authorities, the irreligious Mussolini pledged that Fascism would restore Christianity in Italy by building a “Catholic state befitting a Catholic nation” (p.27).

     Mussolini’s protagonist throughout Kertzer’s story, Pius XI, was born Achille Ratti in 1857, twenty-six years before Mussolini.  Ratti seemingly came out of nowhere to become the head of the Catholic Church in 1922.  For most of his career, he had worked as a librarian, in the Vatican and elsewhere. But Pope Benedict XV unexpectedly sent Ratti to Poland in 1918 as his emissary to the heavily Catholic country, where he witnessed the invasion of the Red Army in the wake of the Russian revolution and developed a “lifelong loathing of Communism” (p.xxii).  Ratti then became a cardinal and was a surprising choice for the prestigious position of Archbishop of Milan.  He had barely begun that position when Benedict XV died. After 14 ballots, Ratti was elected pope in February 1922.

     Once in office, Pius XI assumed a manner that was imperious even by the standards of popes.  Compared to his predecessors, Pius XI was “cold and curt” (p.85) and “lacked any hint of diplomatic skills” (p.85).  He insisted that his own brother address him as “Holy Father.”  He had a proclivity for longwinded speeches and frequent outbursts of a volatile temper.  He was a detail oriented, hands on manager who sought to be informed and involved in even the most minor of Vatican administrative matters.  His love of order and deep sense of obedience to authority “set the tone for his reign” (p.39). His commands were to be followed “sooner than immediately,” he liked to say (p.39).

      Pius XI denounced the French Revolution as the “origin of much evil, spreading harmful notions of the ‘rights of man’” (p.84).  He contested the secular, modernist notion that in turning away from the Church, society was advancing; rather society was lapsing back into a “state of barbarism” (p.49). The pope’s vision of the role for the Vatican in society was at heart “medieval” (p.49), Kertzer contends.

     Although Pius XI and Mussolini seemed to have little in common, Kertzer notes that the two men were nonetheless alike in many ways. “Both could have no real friends, for friendship implied equality. Both insisted on being obeyed, and those around them quaked at the thought of saying anything that would displease them” (p.68). The two men also shared important values. “Neither had any sympathy for parliamentary democracy. Neither believed in freedom of speech or freedom of association. Both saw Communism as a grave threat. Both thought Italy was mired in a crisis and that the current political system was beyond salvation.” (p.48). Like Mussolini, Pius XI believed that Italy needed a “strong man to lead it, free from the cacophony of multiparty bickering” (p.29).

     Never under any illusion that Mussolini personally embraced Catholic values or cared for anything other than his own aggrandizement, Pius XI nonetheless was willing to test Mussolini’s apparent commitment to restore church influence in Italy.  Mussolini moved quickly to make good on his promises to the Vatican. By the end of 1922, he had ordered crucifixes to be placed in every classroom, courtroom, and hospital in the country. He made it a crime to insult a priest or to speak disparagingly of the Catholic religion. He required that the Catholic religion be taught in elementary schools and showered the Church with money to restore churches damaged during World War I and to subsidize Church-run schools abroad.

      Through a tendentious back and forth process that lasted four years and forms the heart of this book, Mussolini and Pius XI negotiated the Lateran Accords, signed in 1929. The accords, which included a declaration that Catholicism was “the only religion of the State,” ended the official hostility between the Vatican and the Italian state that had existed since Italy’s the unification in 1861.  The Italian state for the first time officially recognized the Vatican as a sovereign entity, with the government having no right to interfere in internal Vatican affairs.  In exchange for the Vatican’s withdrawal of all claims to territory lost at the time of unification, Italy further agreed to pay the Vatican the equivalent of roughly one billion present day US dollars.

      The historic accords offered Mussolini the opportunity to “solidify support for his regime in a way that was otherwise unimaginable” (p.99).  Pius XI saw the accords as a means of reinstating what had been lost in the 1860s with Italian unification, a “hierarchical, authoritarian society run according to Church principles” (p.110). Newspapers throughout the country hailed the accords, emphasizing that they “could never have happened if Italy had still been under democratic rule. Only Mussolini, and Fascism, had made it possible” (p.111).  Yet, neither Mussolini nor Pius XI was fully satisfied with the accords. The pope “would not be happy unless he could get Mussolini to respect what he regarded as the Church’s divinely ordained prerogatives.  Mussolini was willing to give the pope what he wanted as long as it did not conflict with his dictatorship and his own dreams of glory” (p.122).

     In the aftermath of the accords, Mussolini became a hero to Catholics in Italy and throughout the world and his popularity reached unimagined heights.  With no significant opposition, his craving for adulation grew and his feeling of self-importance “knew no bounds. His trust in his instincts had grown to the point where he seemed to believe the pope was not the only one in the Eternal City who was infallible” (p.240), Kertzer wryly observes. But as Mussolini’s popularity in Italy soared, Hitler came to power in nearby Germany early in 1933. The latter portion of Kertzer’s book, focused on a three-way Hitler-Mussolini-Pius XI relationship, reveals the extent of anti-Semitism throughout Italy and within the Vatican itself.

* * *

     Hitler had been attracted to Mussolini and the way he ruled Italy from as early as the 1922 March on Rome, and Mussolini sensed that when Hitler came to power in 1933, he had a potentially valuable ally with whom he had much in common. Pius XI, by contrast, abhorred from the beginning Hitler’s hostility to Christianity and his treatment of German Catholics. He viewed Nazism as a pagan movement based on tribal nationalism that was contrary to the Church’s belief in the universality of humankind. But Pius XI initially found little that was objectionable in the new German government’s approach to what was then euphemistically termed the “Jewish question.” Pius XI’s views of world Jewry were in line with thinking that was widely prevalent across Europe in the early decades of the 20th century: Jews were “Christ killers” bent upon destroying Christianity; and Jewish influence was behind both the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the amoral, godless capitalism centered in the United States.

     Prior to the Hitler’s advent to power in Germany, Mussolini’s views on Jews had been more liberal than those of the Pope. He did not regard Italy’s small Jewish population as a threat to the Italian state.  After Hitler made a triumphal trip to Italy in 1938, however, Mussolini pushed through a series of “racial laws” which in many senses mirrored measures Hitler was taking in Germany to resolve the “Jewish question.” The racial laws defined the “Jewish race” to include those Jews who had converted to Catholicism. They excluded Jews from the civil service and revoked the citizenship of foreign-born Jews who had become citizens after 1919.  All Jews who were not citizens were ordered to leave the country within six months.  All Jewish teachers, from elementary school through university, were fired.

     In a second wave of racial laws, Italian Jews were expelled from the Fascist Party; banned from the military; and barred from owning or directing businesses having more than a hundred employees, or from owning more than fifty hectares of land.  In pursuing the racial laws, Mussolini had obviously fallen under the sway of Hitler. Yet, Kertzer refrains from probing  the motivations behind Mussolini’s thorough and sudden embrace of Nazi approaches to the “Jewish question,” noting simply that Mussolini was “eager to impress the Nazi leadership and undoubtedly thought nothing would please it more than taking aim at Italy’s Jews” (p.293).

     The racial laws were presented to the Italian public as a reinstatement of traditional Catholic teachings on the Jews.  Pius XI and the Vatican initially criticized only their application to Jews who had converted to Catholicism.  Neither the Pope nor anyone else in the Vatican “ever voiced any opposition to the great bulk of the racial laws, aimed at stripping Jews of their rights as Italian citizens” (p.345).  Yet, as his health deteriorated and war appeared ever more imminent in Europe in late 1938 and early 1939, Pius XI began to see the racial laws and the treatment of Jews in Italy and Germany as anathema to Christian teaching.

     Kertzer’s story ends where it begins, with Pius XI near death and seeking to deliver a speech condemning unequivocally Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, racism and the persecution of the Jews on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Lateran Accords.  The speech would have marked the definitive break between the Vatican and Mussolini’s Fascist regime.  During Pius XI’s final days, Eugenio Pacelli, the future pope, worked feverishly with other Vatican subordinates to preclude Pius XI from delivering the speech. After the pope’s death, at Mussolini’s urging, they sought to destroy all remaining copies of the undelivered speech.

     Their efforts were almost fully successful. The words the pope had “so painstakingly prepared in the last days of his life would never be seen as long as Pacelli lived” (p.373).  The speech did not become public until 1958, when Pius XII’s successor, John Paul XXIII, in one of his first acts as pope, ordered release of excerpts.  But passages most critical of Mussolini and the Fascist regime were deleted from the released text, “presumably to protect Pacelli, suspected of having buried the speech in order not to offend Mussolini or Hitler” (p.373).  The full text did not become available until 2006, when the Vatican opened its archives on Pius XI.

* * *

     Kertzer’s suspenseful account of Pius XI’s undelivered speech demonstrates his flair for capturing the palace and bureaucratic intrigue that underlay both sides of the Mussolini-Pius XI relationship.  This flair for intrigue, in evidence throughout the book, coupled with his colorful portraits of Mussolini and Pius XI, render Kerzter’s work highly entertaining as well as crucially informative. Although his work is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of Mussolini’s regime, his emphasis upon how the Vatican abetted the regime during Pius XI’s papacy constitutes an invaluable addition to our understanding of the nature of the Fascist state and twentieth century totalitarianism under Mussolini.

Thomas H. Peebles
La Châtaigneraie, France
April 11, 2016