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

Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican: Pope Pius XI and the Speech that was Never Made. By Emma Fattorini. Translated by Carl Ipsen. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 260. Cloth $25.00. ISBN 978-0745644882.

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...