Pius XII’s timidity prevented him from being a moral leader

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler
David I. Kertzer
Random House, 672 pp, £31.16

David Kertzer, in a book published in 1997, describes himself as “a social anthropologist who became interested in historical questions”. Questions about the relationship between the modern papacy and the Jews, especially in the Italian context, drive Kertzer’s research. As he explained in The Popes against the Jews (2001), his inspiration came from the efforts of his father, a rabbi, to build positive relationships with Christians, especially with Catholics. The Pope and Mussolini (2014), a study of Pius XI for which Kertzer won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Pope who would be King (2018), the story of the early tumultuous years of Pius IX as ruler of the Papal States, paved the way for a book on arguably the most controversial pope of the twentieth century.

The Pope at War shares with its two predecessors a dramatic sense of history. Each book begins with a “cast of characters”. For Kertzer, human beings make history. His gift for riveting narrative serves the dramas that he unfolds. His story of Pius XII comes with several subplots. The pathos is palpable in the plight of the Jews subject to Fascist Italy’s antisemitic racial laws on the eve of the Second World War, or the arrest of Italian Jews at the end of 1943 for deportation to death camps. How relevant, however, are the interludes featuring Mussolini and his young mistress, Clara Petacci?