Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made (review)

In the ongoing controversy surrounding the Holy See and the conduct of the popes under Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, most historians have centered primarily on the actions or inactions of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939–1958). In this important work, originally published in 2007 in her native Italian, Emma Fattorini, professor of modern history at Sapienza University of Rome, shifts this debate and concentrates on the pontificate and person of Achille Ratti, Pius XI (1922–1939). Though her citations do not sustain this fact, she builds upon an argument first set forth by Frank J. Coppa in his broadly conceived work The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust (Washington, DC, 2006) and continued in The Policies and Politics of Pope Pius XII (New York, 2011), in which Coppa contrasts a feisty, intransigent Pius XI with a compromising, nearly accommodating Pius XII, especially in their relations with the government of Adolf Hitler. To her credit, Fattorini’s nuanced argument does not engage in polemics, but instead convincingly shows the very different leadership styles of Ratti and Pacelli. In turn, Fattorini confirms that, in the final years of his pontificate, Pius XI found himself isolated in his opposition to Nazism and alone within the walls of the Vatican.

Fattorini portrays Pius XI as both an authoritarian and a combative figure, but also as a compassionate and sympathetic one. Influenced heavily by a theological worldview incorporating devotion to the Sacred Heart and allegiance to the Kingdom of Christ, Pius XI sought to combat the evils of secularization by working to ensure that the interests of the Catholic Church both preceded and guided the interests of the state. Fattorini surmises that this was the reason the pope first showed an “initial close affinity for fascism,” which allegedly would enable the Church to use Fascism’s authoritarianism “to erect a Catholic state” (38–39). Already by the mid-1930s, Pius XI appeared to waver from this path, most notably when he condemned the Italo-Ethiopian War “as an unjust war of conquest” (7). This change of direction became even more profound in March 1937, when Pius XI recovered from a four-month sickness that had nearly taken his life. Fattorini believes that this illness had engendered a spiritual turn for Pope Pius XI—one that enabled him to focus less on the creation of a triumphal temporal Catholic kingdom and more on the spiritual nourishment of a deprived and lost Europe. To this end, Pius XI separated himself more and more from the Fascist and National Socialist governments. This included giving what amounted to unconditional support to Cardinal George Mundelein, the archbishop of Chicago, for his public criticism of Germany’s assault on Christianity. Still, as Fattorini points out, although this anti-Christian attack worried most Vatican officials—especially because of what increasingly closer cooperation between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy might have meant for Catholicism in both countries—it clearly seemed to have bothered Pius XI even more. In fact, according to Fattorini, Pius XI’s concern was much greater than that of officials because it included European Jews.

Though not free from the traditional Christian and economic anti-Judaism of his day, Pius XI rejected National Socialist’s racial antisemitism and, especially after his illness, came to realize the even greater danger that such racial hatred posed for the unity of humankind. This led Pius XI—in contrast to many in the Vatican—to view National Socialism as the most serious threat of all at the time, even greater than the one posed by communism; this eventually led to his September 1938 condemnation of antisemitism while speaking to a group of pilgrims from Belgian Catholic Radio, which Fattorini movingly recounts.

Such thinking ultimately led Pius XI, in late January 1939, to prepare a speech that would address these concerns, but which...