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

The Vatican against Nazism and Fascism on the eve of the Second World War.A tired pope watching the crisis unfold and considering what action to take against the new enemies of Christianity. Pius XI died on 10 February 1939, just after having finished writing the address he hoped to deliver to the Italian bishops on the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pact.That text dealt harshly with Nazism and Fascism and was written in solitude.It was a discourse that Mussolini feared and that the pope did not survive to deliver. This moment captures the spirit of Emma Fattorini's book, a work that employs newly available and unpublished documentation from the Vatican Secret Archive to rewrite a fundamental page of twentieth-century history.Pius XI came to view the 1930s as a "conflict of civilizations," a crisis which could only be resolved by a return to the Christian roots of the West.He was a pope who strongly defended the Jews because, in contrast to other elements in the Catholic hierarchy, h