Celso Costantini. The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal: Celso Costantini's Wartime Diaries, 1938-1947. Edited by Bruno Fabio Pighin. Translated by Laurence B. Mussio. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. xxviii + 488 pp. $34.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-7735-4299-0.

Reviewed by Emanuele Sica

Published on H- (October, 2014)

Commissioned by Niamh Cullen (University of Southampton)

The years 1938 through 1947 arguably mark by a civil war that tore apart the Italian social and one of the most controversial periods of modern political fabric. Italian history. At the start of that decade, the Ital‐ This dramatic period is here unfurled ian Fascist regime inebriated the Italian populace through the eyes of Cardinal Celso Constantini, with famboyant rhetoric after the successful the secretary of the Congregation for Propagation Ethiopian campaign of 1936. Meanwhile, Benito of Faith, the Vatican organization responsible for Mussolini strengthened his friendship with Adolf the spread of Catholic faith through its missionary Hitler, frst with the -Berlin Axis in 1936 and work. From his privileged position at the top of later formalized by the in 1939. Vatican society in the heart of Rome, in his diary, While Western democracies, such as Great Britain Cardinal Constantini described the evolution of and France, seemed impotent to quench Italian international and domestic politics by meeting expansionism, Mussolini's domestic prestige with an impressive number of senior civil ser‐ soared. Few dared oppose him in public vants, politicians, professionals, and Fascist of‐ while roaring crowds were hailing what seemed cials. Among these dignitaries stand the fgure of at that time the birth of a new Roman Empire. , Mussolini's son-in-law and Italian Ten years later, Italy was in sore shape. The foreign minister during the war. The two had al‐ Italian war efort had been nothing short of a dis‐ ready met repeatedly in China during the 1930s, appointment, resulting in the deaths and captivity when Ciano was the consul in Shanghai and later of hundreds of thousands of Italians abroad. To Mussolini's representative in Beijing while Con‐ add insult to injury, after the demise of Il . in stantini was the frst apostolic delegate in China. June 1943 and the subsequent armistice, the Ital‐ Constantini described Ciano as an intelligent and ian peninsula became a theater of war between educated person, unlike many other uncouth Fas‐ German and Allied forces, a struggle compounded cist leaders, with, however, a big stain: although H-Net Reviews skeptical of Italian participation in the war which the cardinal's beloved nephew Luciano, an ar‐ he judged premature in light of the paucity of Ital‐ tillery Alpine (mountain soldier), killed in March ian military means, Ciano did not explicitly op‐ 1941 on the Greek mountains. pose Italy's alliance with Germany and the subse‐ While the diary spans over a decade, most of quent entry into war. its entries focus on 1943-44, when following the To be sure, Cardinal Constantini's judgment of September 1943 armistice, most of the Italian the Fascist regime was equally ambivalent. The peninsula was militarily occupied by the Ger‐ Fascist regime at its inception had been eyed mans. One could almost see Cardinal Constantini rather favorably by the Catholic Church, and this hunched on his desk with an anguished expres‐ stance is evident in his diary (see, for instance, his sion as he was describing Rome's darkest hours: diary entry on June 12, 1940). After all, not only from the destruction of the San Lorenzo's neigh‐ had Mussolini proved a bulwark against the rise borhood by the Allied bombing campaign to the of Communism in the 1920s, but he also actively utter shock at the news that the king and prime sought a rapprochement with the . The minister, General , had ignomin‐ negotiations led in 1929 to the Conciliation iously scampered away to the southern tip of the (known also as the Lateran Pacts) whereby the Italian peninsula, moving to the account of the ar‐ Italian state ofcially recognized the sovereign rival of German columns, "the new Landsknecht," state of the Vatican City and sanctioned the and the Gestapo massive roundups in the frantic Catholic religion as the sole religion of the Italian search for Partisans and Jews. The arrival of Al‐ state, in return for the Holy See's noninterference lied troops on June 5, 1944, in fact proved to be a in Italian domestic and international afairs. This deliverance for the people of Rome, prostrated by marriage of heaven and earth, acknowledged by months of hunger and constant fear from both Cardinal Constantini as a major achievement of the bombardments and the German occupation. Pope Pius XI and Mussolini (February 5, 1945) The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal opens a nonetheless slowly turned sour by the Fascist al‐ window on the war years of the Fascist regime, liance with which led Italy into a and presents insights of the growing opposition disastrous war. Cardinal Constantini, since the within Italian society to Mussolini's dreadful deci‐ frst months of war, did not refrain from criticiz‐ sion of joining the fray in 1940. A product of a pa‐ ing the botched war efort both on pragmatic ternalistic church, Cardinal Constantini's conser‐ (Italy as woefully unprepared) and ethical vatism explains the benevolent image of the Fas‐ grounds (Italy's alliance with Nazi Germany and cist regime in its frst decade and his suspicious‐ its aggressions against its neighbors such as ness of anything on the left of the political spec‐ France and Greece). Understandably, as the war trum. Yet he also staunchly opposed to the injus‐ dragged on, his scathing comments on the Italian tices of a totalitarian regime and its shift to a vi‐ leaders became judgments without appeal, from cious anti-Semitism and repressive apparatus. To dubbing Mussolini as "a paper strategist who has this end, Cardinal Constantini did not hesitate to led Italy to so many defeats" (March 15, 1942, p. hide for six months , the leader 130) to tagging King Victor Emmanuel III uncere‐ of the Catholic political party, the Democrazia moniously as "a man bereft of high political prin‐ Cristiana, who would become the most important ciples and religious conscience (December 6, 1943, prime minister in immediate postwar Italy. p. 238). Such harsh judgments were arguably in‐ As a frsthand account of the last years of the fuenced not only by the Holy See's pacifsm en‐ Fascist regime and the frst period of reconstruc‐ shrined by Pope Pius XII's heavy lobbying against tion, the book will certainly appeal to scholars fo‐ the war in the late 1930s, but also by the death of

2 H-Net Reviews cusing their interest on the Holy See, the history of modern Italy, and the history of the Fascist regime. However, those looking for new insights on the controversies of Pope Pius XII and his role to stop the Holocaust will be disappointed. If noth‐ ing else, Cardinal Constantini had only words of sincere praises for the head of the Catholic Church, and his stance is indeed hardly bafing.

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Citation: Emanuele Sica. Review of Costantini, Celso. The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal: Celso Costantini's Wartime Diaries, 1938-1947. H-Italy, H-Net Reviews. October, 2014.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42447

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