Download The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe AudioBook Free
From National Book Prize finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping report of Pope Pius XI's magic formula relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven many years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including accounts from Mussolini's spies inside the best levels of the Chapel, will permanently change our knowledge of the Vatican's role in the go up of Fascism in Europe. The Pope and Mussolini instructs the storyline of two men who arrived to electricity in 1922, and collectively changed the span of 20th-century history. Generally 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" acquired many things in keeping. They distributed a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely defensive of the prerogatives of these office. ("We've many interests to safeguard," the Pope announced, soon after Mussolini seized control of the federal government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his electricity and achieve his politics goals. In a obstacle to the traditional history of this period, when a heroic Church will battle with the Fascist program, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role to make Mussolini's dictatorship possible and keeping him in electricity. In trade for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Chapel acquired lost and gave into the pope's demands that the authorities enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last many years of his life - as the Italian dictator grew ever before nearer to Hitler - the pontiff's trust in this treacherous bargain started to waver. With his health faltering, he started to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini's anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too past due. Horrified by the menace to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican's interior circle, like the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a collaboration that had served both the Chapel 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: Dad Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius's personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini's Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of wide-spread derision who lacked the stature - virtually and figuratively - to stand up to the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of Express Eugenio Pacelli, whose politics skills and ambition made him Mussolini's most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and situated him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose activities during World Conflict II would be subject for debate for many years to come. With all the recent beginning of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI's papacy, the full report of the Pope's intricate relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every change, The Pope and Mussolini is record writ large and with the lightning side of truth.
