The Pope and Mussolini

The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe

By: David I. Kertzer

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

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.

Amazing account of a pivotal period

Riveting account of a pivotal period of the 20th century. Contrary to some reviews, I thought the narrator did a fabulous job of communicating the characters and personalities of various protagonists. The author did a brilliant job assembling so much information into the account with cohesive flow. It was routinely difficult to stop lstening.

A key lesson: Career politicians will universally abandon core values in exchange for political advancement. Sometimes even Popes.

fascinating but complicated. listening was good.

struggled to finish as became tedious. more Vatican/catholic history than war history. However the narrator did sound as if interested in the read

ONLY HUMAN

David Kertzer reminds the world that organized religion is only human. Religions are subject to the goodness and sins of human nature. Whether one believes in a Supreme Being or not, actions of organized religion are freighted with human error. Kertzer is only one of many who have exposed the perfidy of organized religion. His target, in “The Pope and Mussolini, is the Roman Catholic Church.

Cardinal Ratti becomes Pope Pius XI during the ascension of European Fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s. Ratti is characterized as a pedantic, conservative, and sometimes bellicose Christian believer in, and defender of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Pius XI agrees to support the government of Benito Mussolini in 1929 in return for the creation of an independent Papal State in Rome. Mussolini agrees to pay the church approximately $100 million for formally confiscated church land. Pope Pius XI acquires for himself and future Popes the right of independent rule, religious interpretation, and Christian doctrinal dictatorship. In return Mussolini gains the support of the Roman Catholic Church, the dissolution of Catholic political parties, and a title as II Duce, “The Leader” of Italy. At the stroke of a pen, Mussolini becomes a hero of Italian Catholics (over 90% of the population) and the totalitarian leader of Italy.

Pius XI compromises his morals and paves the way for Pius XII, a closet Christian anti-Semite, who becomes a Hitler’ collaborator by tacitly endorsing the immoral belief of religious purity. Though not widely known at the time, Cardinal Pacelli acted as a “too clever” intermediary between the German and Italian governments to undermine the growing discontent of Pope Pius XI with Germany’s treatment of Christians and Jewish converts to Christianity. Pope Pius XI commissions a new Catholic encyclical to condemn German treatment of Catholic citizens but dies before publication. Pope Pius XII (Cardinal Pacelli) buries the last encyclical of his predecessor in the archives of the Vatican library.

An important critical study

This book does not seem to set out to destroy a targeted group but rather to study the politics of fascism and its engagement with Pope Pius XI and the Catholic Church in Italy. Pius XI and Mussolini were both strong personalities, who negotiated what each needed by affording reciprocal support for the other. The usual focus on Pius XII and his role during the Third Reich is best understood here against the background of what this book studies, the reign of Pius XI and the Church's complicity with Mussolini and fascism. Pius XII is a sidelight in this book but the one who ultimately chooses not to stand against Hitler and the Third Reich for the sake of preservation of the Church rather than to protect those targeted in Hitler's genocide.

Truly prescient

As the global theatre expands, it would be wise for all of us to learn from past mistakes.