The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe Author: David I. Kertzer | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EBRUAZS | Format: EPUB
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe Description
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.
Praise for The Pope and Mussolini
“Much more attention has been given to the Vatican’s compromises and complicity with Hitler, but Kertzer tells a fascinating and tragic story of its self-interested support for Mussolini when he was vulnerable early on.”
—The New Yorker “Vividly recounted.”
—USA Today “Captivating . . . the real
Da Vinci Code—only it’s rigorously documented and far less implausible.”
—San Francisco ChronicleFrom the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 9313 KB
- Print Length: 592 pages
- Publisher: Random House (January 28, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EBRUAZS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,467 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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I heard Mr. Kertzer speak in DC a few nights ago, purchased the book, and read it right through in just a couple of days. It is a gripping, well-told, well-documented and largely appalling story that should be read by anybody interested in the origins of World War II and in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Pius XI and Mussolini each had their own reasons for supporting each other, but in the end it was a disaster for everybody concerned. The Pope was blinded by his own lust to regain the stranglehold he once had over the Italian people, a dominance which was lost once the Papal States were absorbed into a united Italy in 1870. He and the rest of the hierarchy were obsessed with the supposed dangers of democracy, Protestantism, separation of church and state, the imaginary world-wide Jewish Conspiracy that somehow controlled both Communism and Capitalism, freedom of thought and association, Freemasonry, etc. etc. and were more than eager to let a ruthless totalitarian state help the Catholic Church regain its old glories. Mussolini, for his part, needed the visible backing of the Vatican to maintain the loyalty of Italy's Catholic faithful. Kertzer's book fully describes the rise and fall of this unholy alliance.
Though the author spent seven years in research for this book through previously secret records from the Vatican and other sources, I am amazed by just how much of the sordid story has been a part of the public record all along. If there has been controversy among historians and others over just how much support the Vatican provided Mussolini, much of it must be because of a refusal in some quarters to admit the all-too-real fallibility of the political judgments of the Catholic Church.
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