Hitler, Mussolini and the Vatican

The Vatican against Nazism and Fascism on the eve of the Second World War. A tired pope watching the crisis unfold and considering what action to take against the new enemies of Christianity. Pius XI died on 10 February 1939, just after having finished writing the address he hoped to deliver to the Italian bishops on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pact. That text dealt harshly with Nazism and Fascism and was written in solitude. It was a discourse that Mussolini feared and that the pope did not survive to deliver. This moment captures the spirit of Emma Fattorini's book, a work that employs newly available and unpublished documentation from the Vatican Secret Archive to rewrite a fundamental page of twentieth-century history. Pius XI came to view the 1930s as a "conflict of civilizations," a crisis which could only be resolved by a return to the Christian roots of the West. He was a pope who strongly defended the Jews because, in contrast to other elements in the Catholic hierarchy, he held the theological conviction that Jews and Christians shared a common origin: "spiritually we are all Semites." So wrote Pius XI in the last years of his life as he contemplated the direction in which the world was headed and came to the conclusion that Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism could be stopped by the Vatican.

List of Abbreviations viii Acknowledgements ix Preface x Introduction 1 1 A Pope's Illusions and The Rebirth of Christian Society 17 2 The Spiritual Turn 40 3 France and Communism as Christian Heresy 60 4 Spain and The Crusade 86 5 Nazism as Public Enemy Number One: Pius XI and Hitler 102 6 "Another Cross That is Not The Cross of Christ": Pius XI, Mussolini, Hitler 131 7 "Spiritually We Are All Semites" 152 8 The End of a Papacy: A Sigh of Relief 177 Documentary Appendix 202 Notes 216 Index 250