Pius XI, Mussolini, and their dangerous game

The Pope and Mussolini

The Secret History of Pius XI and The Rise of Fascism in Europe

By David I. Kertzer

Random House. 549 pp. $32

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Reviewed by Kenneth A. Briggs

Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI played the longest political chess match of any two world figures of the 20th century.

From 1921 to the brink of World War II, each plotted to gain concessions from the other to increase the influence of their causes. The collateral damage in this often bitter struggle was inflicted on Jews and anyone who stood in the way of Mussolini's fascism and Hitler's Third Reich.

The subtitle of David I. Kertzer's book, The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, spotlights how the relatively unknown conduct of a pope who has remained in the shadow of his lightning-rod successor, Pius XII, made the controversies over the church's dealings with totalitarian racism inevitable.

While the second half of this brisk, rigorously documented and persuasive account stays with the two main subjects and their strategic moves against one another, the presence of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, soon to be elected Pius XII, increasingly upstages the main event. Pacelli had been apostolic nuncio to Germany after World War I, then became Pius XI's secretary of state during the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. In Kertzer's telling, Pacelli exercised a conciliatory restraint on Pius XI's increasing antipathy toward the anti-Semitic plague (though his chief concern was Hitler's assault on the church), often by cooling the pope's rage.

When Mussolini imposed laws of oppression on Jews, for example, Pacelli's silent acquiescence became the keynote of the Vatican's response. "Cardinal Pacelli remained Mussolini's most powerful ally in the Vatican," Kertzer writes.

Defenders of Pius XII against still unresolved charges that he failed to stand up forcefully to anti-Semitism will not find favorable evidence in Kertzer's review.

But well before the events sparking the war, Pius XI was creating a remarkable record of his own through a serious of major skirmishes that shaped the course of Italian and Roman Catholic fortunes. In Mussolini, he found a core of common interests and an equally shrewd negotiating partner. They pursued their high-stakes game neither as enemies nor friends, but as chess players. Each drove hard bargains and blew up when they didn't get their way. Each had something the other wanted: the pope needed the dictator's green light to promote church causes in Italy; the dictator coveted at least the pope's implied blessing to undergird his legitimacy.

Kertzer has given that two-decade drama the astute attention it deserves. The focus is political; the personal profiles are sketchy and asymmetrical. Mussolini is depicted more fulsomely in all his impulsive, rakish, womanizing fashion. Pius XI's autocratic, strategic traits are on full display, but aside from glimpses of him fitted out in medieval papal splendor or perpetually dining alone, we learn little about him or how he fared as a church leader or his religious character. His hatred of Protestants, which was both political and personal, is amply documented in Pius' effort to enlist Mussolini's help in suppressing them.

The similarities between them were as striking as their differences. Each insisted on loyalty and conformity, had a fiery temper, and had keen instincts for weaknesses in the other's position. Mussolini, as forever captured in newsreels, was blustery, articulate, and ruthless toward his political enemies. Early in his reign, Pius XI hailed him as "a man sent by Providence." Mussolini saw the pope as an instrument in destroying of political opposition by calling off Catholic dissenters. One measure of the premier's success was the pope's acceptance of the fascist invasion of Ethiopia.

Their major feat, years in the making, was the signing of the 1929 Lateran Accords, by which the pope liberated the Vatican from its captivity enforced by the forces of Italian unity in 1870, and Mussolini won the favor of the Vatican and the pope's pledge to abolish the Popular Party, the Vatican's proxy and the premier's chief nemesis. Il Duce, as he was known, had rejected Catholicism, but swallowed hard and tried to look like a supplicant. He made Catholicism the state religion.

Neither questioned the Christian anti-Semitism that had prevailed over the centuries. Accordingly, Pius XI regarded Jews as infidels and threats to the social order, though he renounced victimization based solely on race or mere presence. His use of the term "exaggerated nationalism" is cited as a coded attack on Nazi racism and an example of the pope's moral distinction. He would eventually declare, "Spiritually, we are all Semites." At the time of his death on Feb. 10, 1939, the pope had the outlines of an encyclical on justice that suggested a stronger stand, but it never appeared. (Kertzer repeats speculation that Pacelli kept drafts and notes from surfacing.)

A blunt moral attack on racism and oppression might have radically shifted the Vatican's posture from the image of self-seeking to sacrificing its own welfare for a greater cause. Pius XI was leaving the scene, with Pacelli in the wings. Perhaps it would have emboldened Pius XII.