A Conversation between Jon Meacham and David Kertzer, author of
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the
Rise of Fascism in Europe
When Pope John Paul II first announced the opening of Pius XI's
archives, what made you think there might be an untold story
buried inside?
The Vatican’s alliance with Mussolini has long been
controversial. Historians and journalists formed two camps. On
one side were those who cled that, far from being an ally, the
Vatican was Mussolini’s greatest adversary during the twenty
years of the Fascist regime. On the other side, people charged
that the Church offered the regime crucial support. Yet until
the 2006 opening of the Vatican’s archives—and with it a series
of other Church archives—the controversy remained unsettled.
The Pope and Mussolini is based on more than seven years of
archival research. Tell me about one or two documents you
uncovered that were breakthroughs in your understanding of these
two men and this era.
There were so many revealing documents, of so many different
kinds, that it is hard to identify just one or two. Perhaps the
most dramatic—what could even be called a kind of “smoking
”—was the three-page text of a secret agreement between the
Vatican and Mussolini reached two weeks before the racial laws
were first announced. The trail of documents I unearthed shows
the pope’s shadowy, but fascinating, Jesuit personal envoy to
Mussolini, Pietro Tacchi Venturi, spending the days before the
agreement going back and forth between the pope and the dictator
to work out an accord. Shockingly, it states the Vatican’s
agreement to make no objection to the racial laws as long as they
were no more repressive than the popes’ own restrictions on the
Jews in the days of the Papal States. And in fact the laws that
were soon announced—expelling all Jewish students from the
schools, firing all Jewish teachers, forbidding Jews from holding
other positions of influence—were similar to those that had been
in effect in Rome as long as the popes held power there.
But not all of the most revealing documents were to be found
in the Vatican archives. We know more about what was going on
behind the scenes in the Vatican in these years than for any
other time in history thanks to the dense network of spies the
Fascists placed in and around the Vatican. These too shed much
light on the pope and what he was dealing with.
In the final months of his life Pius XI began to realize he had
made a poisonous bargain with Mussolini and fascism. He tried to
change the course of the church's relationship to Mussolini and
Hitler, but it proved too late and he died in February, 1939 as
the world was sliding into catastrophe. How much do you think
Pius XI understood about what was coming to Italy, Europe, and
the church?
Pius XI was in many ways a tragic figure. His mentality was
formed in a certain conservative Church ambience of the late
nineteenth century and people should not act according to their
own beliefs and conscience, but according to the directives of
the Church hierarchy.
It was only after he had been pope for over a decade that
Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Mussolini’s own increasing
efforts to portray himself as a demi-god began to challenge the
pope’s worldview. Something similar might be said about his
attitude toward the Jews. He came from a Catholic environment in
which the Jews were not only demonized as the crucifiers as
Christ, cursed by God, but viewed as part of an occult conspiracy
ed at enslaving Christians and achieving world domination.
Yet in his own city of Milan, he had gotten along with the small
Jewish community and indeed even took Hebrew lessons from the
local rabbi. Watching how his views of Jews percolated in the
years leading to the Holocaust is to see a man struggling with a
conflict he does not entirely comprehend.
As for his understanding of what was coming by the late
1930s, the newly available archives make clear he was convinced
that Europe was hurtling toward a cataclysm.
Do you think there was a moment where a road or course not taken
could have changed things significantly?
A huge a of attention has been paid to the question of
the “silence” of Pius XI’s successor, Pius XII, during the
Holocaust. This has turned into a rather heated debate over
whether Pius could have affected German behavior by forcefully
denouncing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. I don’t want to get
involved in that debate here, but what is clear to me is that the
popes had much greater influence over Italians than they did over
the Germans. Of course the popes themselves were all Italians,
as were virtually all the members of the Curia. And while only a
third of Germans were Catholic, Italians were overwhelmingly
Catholic. So the interesting question for me is could the pope
have prevented Italy from allying with Nazi Germanyz/ Might
Italy never have entered the war on Germany’s side if the Vatican
had acted differently? This is a huge question and I am not sure
if it has ever been posed in quite this way before.
Jon Meacham is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American
Lion, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin and Winston, and American
Gospel. The former editor of Newsweek, he is an Executive Editor
and Executive Vice President of Random House.