The Popes Against the Protestants: The Vatican and Evangelical
Christianity in Fascist Italy
Kevin Madigan
(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 368 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

“The Popes Against the Protestants” reads like the title of a pamphlet in the shop window of the Protestant Truth Society in London’s Fleet Street. It is actually a study by a Harvard Divinity School professor and historian of medieval Christian practice and thought. This is Professor Madigan’s first excursion into twentieth-century religious history.

Italian Catholic paranoia about the “Protestant peril” began with unification in the mid nineteenth century. The Popes were outraged when, after Rome became the Italian capital in 1870, the Italian government permitted the building of Protestant churches in the Eternal City, most notably the cheekily named St Paul’s Within the Walls, on the prominent Via Nazionale, by the Protestant Episcopal Church of the US.

As Madigan explains, Protestant penetration of Catholic Italy began in earnest after the First World War as Anglo-Saxon Protestant “missions” – chiefly Baptists, Pentecostalists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and the Salvation Army – launched themselves into the peninsula and their influence was intensified thanks to return migration of Italians from America in the 1930s, especially in the South and Islands. Previous scholars were dependent on the Italian State Archives, but Madigan was able to consult documents in the Vatican Secret Archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), a rich source indeed.