PULITZER PRIZE Champion • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE ENTIRE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA CHRONICLE

From National Book Prize finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s key relationships with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven many years of study in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reviews from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest degrees of the Chapel, will forever change our knowledge of the Vatican’s about The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in European countries function in the rise of Fascism in European countries.

The Pope and Mussolini tells the storyplot of two males who found power in 1922, and jointly changed the span of twentieth-century background. In most respects, they cannot have been even more different. One was scholarly and devout, the various other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” acquired many things in common. They distributed a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both had been prone to sudden matches of temper and were fiercely protective from the prerogatives of their workplace. (“We have many interests to protect,” the Pope announced, immediately after Mussolini seized control of the federal government in 1922.) Each relied around the various other to consolidate his power and accomplish his politics goals.

In a problem to the traditional history of the period, in which a heroic Chapel does battle with the Fascist program, Kertzer displays how Pius XI performed a crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored lots of the privileges the Cathedral had dropped and gave into the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. However within the last years of his life-as the Italian dictator grew ever nearer to Hitler-the pontiff’s faith in this treacherous discount started to waver. With his wellness failing, he started to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too past due. Horrified with the threat towards the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle, including the upcoming Pope Pius XII, battled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a relationship that had offered both the Cathedral as well as the dictator for many years.

The Pope and Mussolini brims with unforgettable portraits from the males 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 abilities and ambition made him Mussolini’s most powerful ally in the Vatican, and positioned him to achieve success the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose activities during World War II will be subject matter for debate for many years to come.

With the recent opening from the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the full story from the Pope’s complicated relationship along with his Fascist partner can finally find out. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every convert, The Pope and Mussolini is history writ huge and with the lightning hand of truth.