The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe Audiobook (Free)

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From National Publication Honor finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s top secret relationships with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven many years of analysis in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reviews from Mussolini’s spies in the highest degrees of the Chapel, will forever transformation our knowledge of the Vatican’s about The Pope and Mussolini: THE TRICK Background of Pius XI as well as 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 guys who found power in 1922, and together changed the span of twentieth-century history. Generally in most respects, they cannot have been even more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in keeping. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to unexpected suits of temper and had been fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their workplace. (“We’ve many interests to safeguard,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied within the various other to consolidate his power and obtain his political goals.

In a challenge to the conventional history of the period, when a heroic Church does struggle with the Fascist program, Kertzer displays how Pius XI played a crucial part to make Mussolini’s dictatorship feasible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Chapel had dropped and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. However within the last years of his life-as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler-the pontiff’s beliefs in this treacherous discount started to waver. With his health failing, he begun to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Horrified from the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s internal circle, like the upcoming Pope Pius XII, battled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a collaboration that had served both the Chapel as well as the dictator for many years.

The Pope and Mussolini brims with unforgettable portraits of the guys who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s personal emissary towards the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of common derision who lacked the stature-literally and figuratively-to endure the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, whose politics abilities and ambition produced him Mussolini’s most effective ally inside the Vatican, and situated him to achieve success the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose activities during World War II would be subject matter for debate for decades to come.

With the recent opening from the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the entire story of the Pope’s complicated relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every change, The Pope and Mussolini is normally history writ large and with the lightning hand of truth.