The Vatican Files: La diplomazia della Chiesa. Documenti e segretti by Matteo Luigi Napolitano (review)

Matteo Luigi Napolitano (b. 1962), the author of The Vatican Files, is an associate professor of the history of international relations at Rome’s Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi. This is one of several studies that he has produced in Italian dealing with the papacy and its diplomatic activities, including Pio XII tra guerra e pace (Rome, 2002; reviewed ante [90, 2004]).

Napolitano concerns himself in this book with a number of controversial issues that have arisen in the relations of the Vatican with different nations during the past 150 years. Specifically, they include the unification of Italy; the Lateran Treaty; Pope Pius XI’s opposition to totalitarianism; the career of Cesare Orsenigo as papal nuncio in Adolf Hitler’s Germany; the controversy about the alleged silence of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi persecution of the Jews; the case of Giovanni Frignani, the policeman who arrested Benito Mussolini after the fall of the Duce’s government; the evidence of the thawing of relations with Moscow under Pope John XXIII when the latter received the 1963 Balzan Peace Prize with the support of Nikita S. Khrushchev; Giovanni B. Montini and his dealings with communism; the relationship of Pope John Paul II to Poland as well as to Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald W. Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, and to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; the Wikileaks revelations; and a number of other related issues in Vatican diplomacy that remain current and divisive.

Certainly, The Vatican Files is a study of great interest to contemporary historians since it is characterized by clarity in its explanations that decipher the complex and burning issues in the relations of church and state while concentrating on the relevant documents and secrets. In his analysis of the different issues, Napolitano is careful to distinguish between interpretation and objective evidence in arriving at his conclusions to the problems that he is examining and to conclude most of his fifteen chapters with a helpful summary of his views. Likewise, he comes up with information grounded in unpublished and secret sources that have become available since those controversies originally came to light.

Of those issues that deal with the Vatican and Germany, the ones relating to Pius XII, especially his role during the Holocaust or the Shoah, have drawn the most attention in these pages. This is understandable since this issue is the one that has evoked the most comment among the pope’s critics and defenders. In this controversy, Napolitano defends the pope by pointing out that Pius actually did all he could to help the Jews despite critics who claim that the pope gave no instructions to help Jews. The contrary evidence is forthcoming from Napolitano, who makes use of sources such as John XXIII, who stated that he simply carried out the pope’s orders to save Jews; the documents of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Rome; and a number of other reliable testimonies that focus on the problem.

Perhaps the most interesting consideration (and the author’s most extensive one apart from those issues dealing with Pius XII) has to do with the role that John Paul II played behind the scenes in guiding Poland to its ultimate independence from the Soviet Union and his support of the Solidarity movement. Of special interest are the pope’s dealings with Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev and with the American presidents, especially Reagan. Although the relationship between Carter and the pope was evidently a very warm one (for example, the president signed his letters to the pope “Vostro in Cristo” and “Suo in Cristo,” pp. 289, 293), the relationship with Reagan reminds this reviewer of the cover story in Time for February 24, 1992, on the “Holy Alliance” between the Vatican and Washington, DC—a story that was further developed in His Holiness: John Paul II and the Hidden History of...