A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars by Luca Castagna (review)

On January 10, 1984 the Holy See established full diplomatic relations with the United States for the first time since 1867 when the U.S. Congress had cut funding for the American pontifical mission in Rome, resulting in its closure. The appointment by President Ronald Reagan of the first ambassador to the Vatican was the culmination of 117 years during which relations between the two governments endured a lengthy, but slow maturation.

In his book A Bridge Across the Ocean, Luca Castagna, professor at the University of Salerno, reconstructs these complicated relations between 1914 and 1939. Originally published in 2011 in his native Italian, Castagna’s work is an informative and insightful account of the gradual but uneven and uneasy thawing of the relations between the Holy See and the American government during these two crucial decades. He sheds light on the intricate diplomatic interplay between the Holy See, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, against a political and social background, highlighting “the disturbing international scenario of the twenties and thirties” (xv). Castagna shrewdly navigates between the primary sources he uses from the Vatican and the United States and analyzes them with the existing literature on the topic. The narrative that emerges from his study is a page-turner.

The year 1917 arguably represents the lowest point in the chaotic relations between the papacy and the American government. Two recognized moral authorities collided. President Woodrow Wilson, a staunch Protestant, offered a polite but firm fin de non recevoir to Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Note of August 1, 1917. The long history of American anti-Catholic bigotry is not enough to explain this rejection. A deep ingrained sense of the separation of church and state led Wilson to not only oppose the papal attempt at mediation but also to support Italy with its refusal of the Holy See’s participation in the Versailles Peace Conference as stipulated in article 15 of the secret treaty of London, an article inserted to avoid a much-feared internationalization of the “Roman Question”—the issue of the pope’s temporal rights to the Papal States after the Italian unification movement. Although this story is already well documented, Castagna places it within the broader American context of revived anti-Catholic nativism which is balanced against cautious support from the American Catholic hierarchy represented by the elderly Cardinal James Gibbons. The meeting between Wilson and Benedict XV on January 9, 1919, the first of its kind, did not provide any reason for the Holy See to celebrate.

Castagna vividly describes the post-war years and convincingly argues that the relations between the Holy See and America did not improve until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in 1932. Most interesting is Castagna’s explanation that, in an apparent paradox, it is under the anti-Catholic Republican administrations (1921–1933) that the Catholic Church in the U.S. organized itself at the national level and became a unified and structured force on the political and social scene, after “reflect(ing) on their role within the troubled American society of the 1920s” (70). The National Catholic War Council (NCWC) was to be the privileged instrument for this new role. Castagna retraces its origins and development, weaving an intricate scholarly fabric of the maneuvering of the cardinal of Boston, William Henry O’ Connell in his attempt to have the NCWC suppressed by Pius XI and the pained reaction of the American bishops through a petition drafted by the Board of the Catholic University of America. The order was eventually retracted and the NCWC became “an effective instrument of pressure on the federal government” (82).

The signing of the Lateran Treaties between Pius XI and Mussolini in 1929 signaled what Castagna calls “a new era for Vatican diplomacy, as it was for relations with the United...