The Pope and Mussolini
The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
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By:
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David I. Kertzer
About this listen
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 20th-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’ 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.
©2014 David I. Kertzer (P)2014 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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“Revelatory...[a] detailed portrait of the inner workings of the Vatican in this period... The general outlines of this story have always been matters of public record, but Kertzer’s book deepens and alters our understanding considerably. The portrait that emerges from it suggests a much more organic and symbiotic relationship between the Church and fascism. Rather than seeing the Church as having passively accepted fascism as a fait accompli, Kertzer sees it as having provided fundamental support to Mussolini in his consolidation of power and the establishment of dictatorship in Italy.” (The New York Review of Books)
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On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons began perhaps the most crucial debate in British parliamentary history. On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government and also of Britain - indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson's fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government's defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe's tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister's resignation.
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Spectacular Narrative History Book
- By Nostromo on 11-30-18
By: Lynne Olson
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Indian Summer
- The Secret History of the End of an Empire
- By: Alex von Tunzelmann
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the British Empire withdrew from India, igniting the exhilaration and turmoil of a newly free society. In this vivid, atmospheric popular history, Alex von Tunzelmann chronicles these times through the most prominent figures.
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Such an interesting piece of History made easy
- By Diego on 01-23-12
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Gandhi
- The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948
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- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
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This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.
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Well researched and heart touching
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By: Ramachandra Guha
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The General
- Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved
- By: Jonathan Fenby
- Narrated by: Robin Bloodworth
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No leader of modern times was more uniquely patriotic than Charles de Gaulle. As founder and first president of the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle saw himself as "carrying France on [his] shoulders." In his 20s, he fought for France in the trenches and at the epic battle of Verdun. In the 1930s, he waged a lonely battle to enable France to better resist Hitler's Germany. Thereafter, he twice rescued the nation from defeat and decline by extraordinary displays of leadership, political acumen, daring, and bluff, heading off civil war and leaving a heritage adopted by his successors of right and left.
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Book Great Read. Narrator Horrible-slow dead voice
- By marigoyle on 10-23-13
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The Fall of Heaven
- The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
- By: Andrew Scott Cooper
- Narrated by: Assaf Cohen
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
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In this remarkably human portrait of one of the 20th century's most complicated personalities, author Andrew Scott Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He highlights the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world's top five powers.
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Excellent account of a pivotal and sad time
- By Guerin Shea on 09-05-16
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Gorbachev
- His Life and Times
- By: William Taubman
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 32 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save.
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The Man Who Changed The Course Of History
- By Jean on 12-30-17
By: William Taubman
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Lioness
- Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel
- By: Francine Klagsbrun
- Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
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Golda Meir was a world figure unlike any other. Born in tsarist Russia in 1898, she immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills that would eventually catapult her into the inner circles of Israel's founding generation. Moving to mandatory Palestine in 1921 with her husband, the passionate socialist joined a kibbutz but soon left and was hired at a public works office by the man who would become the great love of her life.
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The persistent mispronunciations of Hebrew and Yiddish words ruined this performance
- By YH-O on 12-30-18
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Rasputin
- The Untold Story
- By: Joseph T. Fuhrmann
- Narrated by: Curtis Sisco
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A century after his death, Grigory Rasputin remains fascinating: the Russian peasant with hypnotic eyes who befriended Tsar Nicholas II and helped destroy the Russian Empire, but the truth about his strange life has never fully been told. Written by the world's leading authority on Rasputin, this new biography draws on previously closed Soviet archives to offer new information on Rasputin's relationship with Empress Alexandra, sensational revelations about his sexual conquests, a re-examination of his murder, and more.
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The Legend of Rasputin
- By S on 05-02-13
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Adolf Hitler
- By: John Toland
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
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Based on previously unpublished documents, diaries, notes, photographs, and dramatic interviews with Hitler's colleagues and associates, this is the definitive biography of one of the most despised yet fascinating figures of the 20th century. Painstakingly documented, it is a work that will not soon be forgotten.
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Strange Person
- By Mark on 11-25-14
By: John Toland
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The Last Days of Stalin
- By: Joshua Rubenstein
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
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Joshua Rubenstein's riveting account takes us back to the second half of 1952, when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin's murderous regime. He was poised to challenge the newly elected US president Dwight Eisenhower with armed force and was also broadening a vicious campaign against Soviet Jews. Stalin's sudden collapse and death in March 1953 was as dramatic and mysterious as his life. It is no overstatement to say that his passing marked a major turning point in the 20th century.
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JUST A LITTLE TOO DULL
- By Count B on 08-06-16
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Gandhi & Churchill
- By: Arthur Herman
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 29 hrs and 19 mins
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In this fast-paced epic, best-selling historian and master storyteller Arthur Herman spotlights two giants of the 20th century. Gandhi & Churchill shows how their 40-year rivalry revolutionized India and the British Empire, paving the way for a new era. Gandhi championed India's independence, Churchill the British Empire.
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A motif that works well
- By Maine Dave on 11-30-09
By: Arthur Herman
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De Gaulle
- By: Julian Jackson
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 41 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In a definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept Nazi domination of France, Julian Jackson captures this titanic figure as never before. Drawing on unpublished letters, memoirs, and resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archive, he reveals how this volatile visionary put a broken France back at the center of world affairs.
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Extremely British approach to de Gaulle
- By Keith on 05-31-19
By: Julian Jackson
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Munich, 1938
- Appeasement and World War II
- By: David Faber
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 19 hrs and 5 mins
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On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back to London from his meeting at Munich with the German chancellor Adolf Hitler and was greeted with a hero's welcome. As he paused on the aircraft steps, he held aloft the piece of paper, bearing both his and the Fuhrer's signatures, that contained the promise that Britain and Germany would never go to war with each other again.
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Great insight into the events of 1938
- By Carolyn on 05-18-13
By: David Faber
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Trotsky
- Downfall of a Revolutionary
- By: Bertrand M. Patenaude
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
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In Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford University lecturer Bertrand M. Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky's tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall ofa Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history's most famous yet elusive figures.
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Good Trotsky Book, BAD conclusions at end
- By Darius on 02-09-15
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A complex and contradictory figure, Mussolini won the fascination of many statesmen and writers, and their wives. From his early years raised in the traditions of revolutionary Italian Socialism, to his violent execution by Communist partisans at the end of World War II, we watch Mussolini's power ambitions erode his political ideals, as he evolves from brilliant orator and journalist to empire-building dictator enforcing his authority by death squads.
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Tune In is the first volume of All These Years - a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy by the world's leading Beatles historian. Mark Lewisohn uses his unprecedented archival access and hundreds of new interviews to construct the full story of the lives and work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
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Insanely great
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What listeners say about The Pope and Mussolini
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- Erik Kreider
- 08-24-20
Amazing account of a pivotal period
Riveting account of a pivotal period of the 20th century. Contrary to some reviews, I thought the narrator did a fabulous job of communicating the characters and personalities of various protagonists. The author did a brilliant job assembling so much information into the account with cohesive flow. It was routinely difficult to stop lstening.
A key lesson: Career politicians will universally abandon core values in exchange for political advancement. Sometimes even Popes.
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- Kindle Customer. a downs
- 06-24-15
fascinating but complicated. listening was good.
struggled to finish as became tedious. more Vatican/catholic history than war history. However the narrator did sound as if interested in the read
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 07-27-15
ONLY HUMAN
David Kertzer reminds the world that organized religion is only human. Religions are subject to the goodness and sins of human nature. Whether one believes in a Supreme Being or not, actions of organized religion are freighted with human error. Kertzer is only one of many who have exposed the perfidy of organized religion. His target, in “The Pope and Mussolini, is the Roman Catholic Church.
Cardinal Ratti becomes Pope Pius XI during the ascension of European Fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s. Ratti is characterized as a pedantic, conservative, and sometimes bellicose Christian believer in, and defender of the Roman Catholic Church.
Pope Pius XI agrees to support the government of Benito Mussolini in 1929 in return for the creation of an independent Papal State in Rome. Mussolini agrees to pay the church approximately $100 million for formally confiscated church land. Pope Pius XI acquires for himself and future Popes the right of independent rule, religious interpretation, and Christian doctrinal dictatorship. In return Mussolini gains the support of the Roman Catholic Church, the dissolution of Catholic political parties, and a title as II Duce, “The Leader” of Italy. At the stroke of a pen, Mussolini becomes a hero of Italian Catholics (over 90% of the population) and the totalitarian leader of Italy.
Pius XI compromises his morals and paves the way for Pius XII, a closet Christian anti-Semite, who becomes a Hitler’ collaborator by tacitly endorsing the immoral belief of religious purity. Though not widely known at the time, Cardinal Pacelli acted as a “too clever” intermediary between the German and Italian governments to undermine the growing discontent of Pope Pius XI with Germany’s treatment of Christians and Jewish converts to Christianity. Pope Pius XI commissions a new Catholic encyclical to condemn German treatment of Catholic citizens but dies before publication. Pope Pius XII (Cardinal Pacelli) buries the last encyclical of his predecessor in the archives of the Vatican library.
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5 people found this helpful
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- David Bossman
- 09-03-18
An important critical study
This book does not seem to set out to destroy a targeted group but rather to study the politics of fascism and its engagement with Pope Pius XI and the Catholic Church in Italy. Pius XI and Mussolini were both strong personalities, who negotiated what each needed by affording reciprocal support for the other. The usual focus on Pius XII and his role during the Third Reich is best understood here against the background of what this book studies, the reign of Pius XI and the Church's complicity with Mussolini and fascism. Pius XII is a sidelight in this book but the one who ultimately chooses not to stand against Hitler and the Third Reich for the sake of preservation of the Church rather than to protect those targeted in Hitler's genocide.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-05-24
Truly prescient
As the global theatre expands, it would be wise for all of us to learn from past mistakes.
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- Alan
- 06-06-14
A good listen
Very very very good account of the relationships of Pope Pius XI and the future Pius XII with Benito Musillini and to a lesser degree, Adolph Hitler.
Pius XI originally was please to find a working partner in Il Duce as he saw the chance for the Vatican to grow in influence against Pius XI's two ideological enemies, the Protestant Movement and Communism. Additionally Pius XI did not believe in a representational type of government.
Where Pius XI began to have serious rifts with Musillini was over the newly passed anti-Semitic laws. Pius XI believed that christian compassion should extend to the Jews. Additionally, Pius XI also held different ideas when it came to baptized catholic jews.
The future Piux XII, the papal secretary of state, favored strong ties to Mussilini and by extension, Adolph Hitler. Upon XI's death, XII ordered the total ban on the yet unpublished XI's papal encyclical which was viewed as very unfavorable to Hitler and Musillini. Both XI and XII have "a lot of 'splanin to do." Pius XII always had a cloud of antisemitism hanging over his head and this book greatly adds to that belief
Buyer beware tho ..... Lots and lots of Italian names most of which are superfluous to the main story.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Karina Inigo
- 07-14-15
It is not narrated well - the delivery does not keep it as captivating as this book should be
It is an incredible story that if narrated by the right person can be very captivating.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Gary LA
- 04-29-15
Award winner
I selected this book because it won the Pulitzer Prize. It was better than I imagined. The author did a tremendous amount of research. He is excellent story teller. He discovered collaboration by some Catholic leaders that has been covered up.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Linda B
- 08-25-18
worth the time keeping the characters straight
loved the detail and perspective. after a few chapters the names were easy to remember because the writing was so specfic to each person invojved.
great reminder of the periles faced and choices made that informs the world today
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1 person found this helpful
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- Christine Trillo
- 03-11-22
Well researched and composed
This book was very well researched and composed showing the history between Pope Pius XII and Mussolini.
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