UNITED STATES
San Francisco Chronicle
David D’Arcy
Published 3:43 pm, Friday, February 7, 2014
The Pope and Mussolini
The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
By David I. Kertzer
(Penguin; 549 pages; $32)
As Benito Mussolini consolidated power in the 1930s, forging alliances with Hitler’s Germany and invading Ethiopia in a vainglorious bid for a new Roman Empire, the only consolation for Italians might have been that God was on their side.
This was anything but the case, writes David I. Kertzer, a Brown professor, in his captivating study of the uneasy bond between Pope Pius XI and Il Duce. Each man mistrusted the other, but the reclusive pope feared the march of communism, Protestantism and anything modern. Mussolini’s roots were in strident anticlericalism, yet church support in Catholic Italy was crucial for tightening his grip.
In exchange for fiery anticommunism and crucial backing of Vatican policy goals, Italian Fascism got a pass from a silent church on its political monopoly.
Long before the war with Britain and France started in 1939 (when Pius XI died), democracy in Italy was lost, along with many lives, with far more to come. If politics is about holding one’s nose while interests are served, the stench here is overpowering. You won’t learn about steel production or railroad strikes from Kertzer, but you will learn what men in power did and failed to do.
The story begins in 1922, when Italy was stumbling in the wake of World War I’s devastation. Benito Mussolini, once an anti-Catholic socialist (named for the Church-hating Benito Juarez), leveraged nationalism into mass thuggery and found that he needed the acquiescence of the Catholic Church to get Italians’ approval.
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