Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican (review)

After years of anticipation, the Vatican archives for the papacy of Pius XI (1922–1939) were opened to scholars in September 2006. Given the dramatic events in Europe during those inter-war years, and especially the advent of both the Fascist regime in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany, as well as controversies about the Vatican’s role in dealing with the rise of modern totalitarianism and racism, the archives attracted great interest. Fattorini was one of the first scholars to publish findings from those archives (the portion of which dealing with German relations was opened earlier, in 2003). The book under review is the clear, English translation of the book that Fattorini originally published in Italy—Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini: la solitudine di un papa (Turin, 2007)—with the addition of a new introduction.

The title given to the English edition is a bit misleading. The book focuses almost entirely on Pius XI, a complex figure both in human and political terms. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini make little more than a passing appearance until the second half of the book. The first 30 percent of the book provides an insightful examination of the worldview of Pius XI, a former Vatican librarian unexpectedly catapulted, after a brief period as papal nuncio to Poland and only months after being made the archbishop of Milan, to the papacy. The following 20 percent focuses on the pope’s reaction to the victory of the French Popular Front in 1936 and the Spanish civil war, which began that same year. The second half of the book details the pope’s anger at the persecution of the church in Germany and at Mussolini’s increasing embrace of the Nazi ally.

The picture that Fattorini paints is of a pope who sprang from the antiliberal, antipluralist, and highly conservative ambience of the Italian church of those decades, but who gradually realized that his instinctual preference for authoritarian regimes was coming at a high cost in light of the new form of political religion that was evolving in modern totalitarianism. Fattorini clearly sketches the pope’s growing distaste for Hitler and anger at the pagan nature of the Nazi worship of race and blood. Throughout, she shows how Eugenio Pacelli, Vatican secretary of state beginning in 1930, who later succeeded Pius XI as the controversial Pope Pius XII, tried to restrain the pope’s growing tendency to lash out publicly at Hitler and the Nazis and at Mussolini insofar as he seemed to be imitating Hitler. The acme of these attempts came on the heels of the pope’s death, when Pacelli ordered the copies of the pope’s intended major address on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran accords destroyed, fearful that his criticisms of the Fascist and Nazi regimes would create tensions with those powers. He also concealed the existence of the draft encyclical denouncing racism and antisemitism that Pius XI had secretly prepared.

This book provides an extremely useful look into Pius XI’s last years, offering for many readers the first benefit of the archives opened in 2006. Other recent works offer a fuller examination of the pope’s relationships with Nazi Germany.¹ For this reviewer, Fattorini’s emphasis on the pope’s anger with Mussolini during the last year of the pope’s life may leave some readers with the mistaken impression that the pope was not engaged in highly productive relations with Mussolini throughout the great majority of his years as pope. Indeed, the pope continued to benefit from the police-state aspects of the Fascist regime virtually until the last months of his life. But future work, by Fattorini and others, that can benefit from more time with the mass of newly available archival material in the Vatican, and with the equally large amount of archival material in various state archives—especially Italian, French, German, British, and American—will undoubtedly continue to fill out this dramatic and extremely important history.