How the Vatican fought to defeat secular liberalism and Communism

A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe
GIULIANA CHAMEDES
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 440 PP, £28.95)
Tablet bookshop price £26.05 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Contemporary historians often refer to the twentieth century as a short century, considering its first two decades, up to the end of the First World War, a ­conclusion to the previous century. Giuliana Chamedes’ study of Vatican policy, though lengthy, concentrates on an even shorter period. It ends effectively with the declining years and death, in 1958, of Pope Pius XII. Eugenio Pacelli is, in fact, the main protagonist of the events investigated here, and he is ­presented as perhaps more villain than hero.

Pacelli, one of the drafters of the Code of Canon Law promulgated by Benedict XV in 1917, proposed the use of law, in the form of concordats, as a tool for Vatican diplomacy. Achille Ratti, the future Pius XI, used this tool as nuncio in the Baltic States, and Eugenio Pacelli, when sent by Pius XI to be nuncio in Germany, did the same.