Pie XI et la France: L’apport des archives du pontificat de Pie XI à la connaissance des rapports entre le Saint-Siège et la France by Jacques Prévotat (review)

This book gathers together twenty articles based on presentations at a December 2008 conference at the Istituto Sturzo in Rome. The presenters, mostly French scholars, met under the direction of historian Jacques Prévotat, who both edited and contributed to this timely book, which takes stock of the Secret Vatican Archives for the pontificate of Pope Pius XI that opened in September 2006. The contributions herein represent the fruit of the first two years of research activity supported by the École française de Rome. The main themes treated in this collection include relations between Pius XI and the French government, the foreign policy of the Holy See in the wider world, the condemnation of Action française, the mission of the Catholic intellectual, and the Holy See’s attitude toward both missions and mysticism.

After a documentary inventory by Gianfranco Armando, François Jankowiak analyzes the negotiations that led to an implicit rapprochement between France and the Holy See, an entente cordiale—after a quarter century of discord—based on a tacit acceptance of the Republic’s lay legislation on the one hand, and the authority of the Catholic hierarchy on the other. The dynamic personality of the civil servant and modernist Catholic Louis Canet is treated by Fabrice Robardey, particularly his work of reintegrating and reorganizing the Catholic Theology faculty at the University of Strasbourg. Agathe Mayeres highlights the benevolent attitude of the Holy See toward Louis Massignon’s efforts at fostering better understanding between Christians and Muslims and to finding a peaceful solution to the problem of Palestine. A particularly effective use of new documentary sources can be seen in Laurence Deffayet’s contribution on the 1928 suppression of the Amis d’Israël, a controversial decision debated by historians, but traced here to the group’s advocacy of reform of the Good Friday liturgy, a change that would only come on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. Other essays in this section include Laura Pettinaroli’s inquiry into the disgrace of Vatican diplomat Monsignor Michel d’Herbigny and Marie Levant’s convincing picture of France as a “terre de consolation” for Pius XI during the Age of the Dictators.

Prévotat contributes the first piece dealing with the Action française controversy, highlighting the sensitive diplomacy conducted in 1926 by chargé d’affaires Valerio Valeri between the departure of nuncio Monsignor Bonaventura Cerretti and his successor, Monsignor Luigi Maglione. The latter, Frédéric LeMoigne asserts, subsequently conducted an adroit behind-the-scenes diplomacy that systematically promoted candidates associated with social Catholicism to vacancies in the French episcopate. Articles by Magali della Sudda and Claude Troisfontaines treat respectively the roles of French Catholic women and the philosopher Maurice Blondel in responding to the condemnation of Charles Maurras’s movement. Catholic intellectuals receive further attention in François Trésmolières’s examination of the attempt by Dominican Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange to have Jean Baruzi’s controversial study of St. John of the Cross placed on the Index and philosopher Jacques Maritain’s behind-the-scenes supporting role in this endeavor.

The remaining pages are devoted to topics of doctrinal, educational, and apostolic interest. Marie-Thérèse Desouche offers a subtle historiographical revision in her article on the 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, seeing in the instituting of the Feast of Christ the King not the reactionary gesture of an intransigent pope, but an assertion of the independence of the spiritual realm— even an eschatological emphasis in Church teachings that would bear fruit later in the century. Pius XI’s appraisal of modern sexuality is covered in essays...