the pope and mussolini by david i kertzer

Horrified by the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican's inner circle, including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had served both the Church and the dictator for many years.

With his health failing, he began to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini's anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Yet in the last years of his life - as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler - the pontiff's faith in this treacherous bargain started to waver. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had lost and gave in to the pope's demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. In a challenge to the conventional history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role in making Mussolini's dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. ('We have many interests to protect,' the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Yet Pius XI and 'Il Duce' had many things in common. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. In most respects, they could not have been more different. The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history.

The pope and mussolini by david i kertzer