The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–1958 by John Pollard (review)

John Pollard is already well known for his work on the Vatican. Now he enhances that reputation with a sweeping narrative of the evolution of the papacy from World War I through the controversial role of Pope Pius XII in World War II to the cold war. It was a period of great change for the Vatican, as it recovered from the loss of temporal power in 1870 and began carving out a new—and more powerful—role in international diplomacy.

World War I represented the nadir of Vatican influence. In 1915 the Allies signed the treaty of London that excluded the Holy See from taking part in any peace negotiations because of the Italian fear that it might bring up the Roman Question, the situation of the Holy See between the Italian occupation of Rome in 1870 and the Lateran Treaties in 1929. In the nineteenth century, the Holy See had to contend with the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, it faced new enemies: fascism, with which it had to preserve some semblance of accord in Italy; Nazism; and communism. After the Great War, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a sometime ally to the Holy See, was dismembered, and a new world power took its first steps in European affairs. Despite the hostility of the American President Woodrow Wilson toward Catholics and hyphenated Americans, he did, under pressure, visit Pope Benedict XV on his way to Versailles, but then his own government‘s veto of U.S. membership in the League of Nations meant a return to American isolationism. But the seeds were sown, and the Holy See began slowly to appreciate the particular type of republican government practiced by the religiously pluralistic country across the Atlantic. This is one of several important themes that Pollard traces in his monumental contribution to the subject.

Relying heavily on the Vatican Archives, open to February 1939, and on a vast array of secondary works, Pollard traces the adaptation of the Vatican to the new realities of the twentieth century. He sees more continuity than discontinuity from Benedict XV through Pius XI to Pius XII. Although he vividly portrays these pontiffs, he does not neglect the important roles of subordinates such as Domenico Tardini, who served in the Vatican until the 1960s, and Giovanni Battista Montini, the later Pope Paul VI.

Contrary to the charge that Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state from 1929 to his election as Pius XII in 1939, agreed to the dissolution of the German Center party as a pay-off to Hitler for the 1933 concordat with the Third Reich, Pollard shows that the Vatican Archives make it clear that the disbanding of the party left Pacelli “less room for manoeuvre in his negotiations with the Nazis” (p. 252). Pius XI’s condemnation of the Italian build-up to war with Ethiopia, however, fell on deaf ears as leading Italian bishops proved to be more motivated by Italian nationalism than by Christian principles. Failure to prevent the Italian aggression was a low point in the Holy See’s efforts to be impartial in international affairs. But it also provided the backdrop for the Vatican to make its presence felt around the world. In the fall of 1936, Pacelli visited the United States and travelled across the country. Earlier that year, he had visited Lourdes and would later attend the Budapest Eucharistic Congress. Pollard analyzes Pius XI’s encyclical Mit brennender Sorge in 1937 to show that it virtually condemned every aspect of Nazism, although some historians argue that, because the pope did not explicitly name Nazism, he did not condemn it. The difficulty is the practice of popes until recently of speaking in generalities to provide an arsenal of condemnatory language for any similar situations. In Germany, moreover, anyone found in possession of the encyclical could...