PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE From
National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI's secret
relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work based on seven
years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives including reports from Mussolini's spies
inside the highest levels of the Church will forever change our understanding of the Vatican's
role in the rise of Fascism in Europe. 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. In most
respects they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout the other
thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and Il Duce had many things in common. They shared a distrust
of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and
were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. (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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. The Pope and Mussolini brims with memorable
portraits of the men who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi
Venturi Pius's personal emissary to the dictator a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini's
Rasputin Victor Emmanuel III the king of Italy an object of widespread derision who lacked
the stature-literally and figuratively-to stand up to the domineering Duce and Cardinal
Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli whose political skills and ambition made him Mussolini's
most powerful ally inside the Vatican and positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the
controversial Pius XII whose actions during World War II would be subject for debate for
decades to come. With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI's papacy the
full story of the Pope's complex relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told.
Vivid dramatic with surprises at every turn The Pope and Mussolini is history writ large and
with the lightning hand of truth.
