Prisoner of the Vatican: The End of the Papal Monarchy

David I. Kertzer is Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science at Brown University and is the author of ten books on various aspects of Italian 19th- and 20th-century history. Two of his books, "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara" and "The Popes Against the Jews," treat relationships between Italian Catholics and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries. This work, "Prisoner of the Vatican," recounts the acrimonious relationship between the Holy See and the newly unified kingdom of Italy during the period from Italy's annexation of the Papal States in 1870 until the two adversaries settled their differences in Mussolini's Lateran Treaty of 1929, establishing Vatican City as an independent state.

Contrary to the popular conception of history, the Middle Ages didn't end with the Renaissance in Italy. They lasted until September 20, 1870, when according to Professor Kertzer "Europe's last theocratic government was ended." Kertzer writes that "Modern Italy was founded... over the dead body of Pope Pius IX."

Much has been written of Italian history but very little has been accessible in English dealing with the history of the Italian state. Professor Kertzer, given entry to freshly opened Vatican archives, tells a riveting tale of the political intrigues, international back-room deals, skullduggery and corrupt characters operating on both sides of the conflict.

"Prisoner of the Vatican," based on a copious amount of support documentation, is an historian's account of the Roman Catholic Church's covert attempts to subvert the unification of Italy and retain control of its medieval fiefdom known as the "Papal States," not in ancient times but in the final decades of the nineteenth century. For the fifty years following the seizure of Rome and its adjacent territories (that is, nearly all of central Italy as far north as Bologna) by the newborn Italian state, the Supreme Pontiff was a self-sequestered prisoner within the malarial fog of Vatican City, planning to flee Italy and with foreign military help return as the restored ruler of a full third of the Italian peninsula.

During this time, a fragile Kingdom of Italy was besieged from within and without. At the same time Italian, European and Church history changed forever when the pope had himself declared infallible by a Vatican Council. "Prisoner of the Vatican" takes a penetrating look deep into the workings of the Church in its final failure to reestablish the pope's territorial authority.

In 1870, recognizing the pivotal role played by Catholicism in Italian life and anxious to reach an honorable accommodation with the pontiff, Victor Emmanuel II sought an agreement with Pius IX in which the pope would rule the Tiber's right bank ("the Leonine City") while the king would govern the left bank from what was to become the Italian capital. When the senile, power-mad and apparently manic-depressive pope rejected this arrangement, Italian troops seized power in Rome and Pius IX sought refuge in the Vatican palaces, declaring himself a prisoner. Led by Giuseppe Garibaldi and his army of "Red Shirts" and aided by France, the nationalists finally gained complete control in 1878.

Pius IX repeatedly and publicly advertised his hatred for democracy, free speech and a free press, religious pluralism and other modernizing political forces sweeping Europe in the mid-19th century, and for good reason: a united secular Italy, the dream of Garibaldi and his legions, could only witness the end of papal power and Pius counted as a great blasphemy the modern notion that "Church and state should be separate." A Vatican-inspired and funded campaign of intrigues, assassination attempts on opposing leaders, and soliciting the intervention of France and Austria against the Italian government was initiated and even as such attempts invariably failed, the Vatican promulgated a new doctrine, one that in the end would contribute to its political undoing: that of "papal infallibility."

Vatican scheming against the Italian state continued well after Pius's death, and it was not until after the first World War that a pope lifted the ban against Catholics' serving in Italy's parliament or even voting: The animosity between the pope and the state continued until 1929, when Mussolini and the Vatican signed the Lateran Treaty in which the Vatican recognized the legitimacy of the fascist Italian state and was in turn granted the rights of sovereignty and the stipulation that Catholicism be Italy's sole and official religion.

Professor Kertzer sweeps readers along with a riveting, revelatory and very readable tale. No one who reads "Prisoner of the Vatican" will ever think of Italy, or the Vatican, in quite the same way again.

If the book has any fault at all, it is in the deprecating of the role of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his "Red Shirt" legions as agents of change. In Kertzer's view, the battle for Rome was a trifurcated one, with the sides comprising the King and government of Italy, the pope and his retinue led by a truly fiendish Cardinal Antonelli, and an unpredictable Garibaldi and his followers constituting a "loose cannon" on the field of battle. This reviewer would also liked to have seen more attention given to the role played by Italy's Freemasonry movement - which was very considerable - in the demise of papal dictatorship and the birth of the new unified Italian state. Moreover, Professor Kertzer ends his book with a peculiar couple of paragraphs so anomalous in light of the pattern of facts presented as to seem quite an odd and unreasonable conclusion.

Nonetheless, "Prisoner of the Vatican" is an excellent book, beautifully and engagingly written and very complete in both scope and depth. I strongly recommend it to all students of Italian and Catholic Church history.

Today in the afterglow of the papacy of John Paul II, few think of that time when the pope was the wager of wars, commander of armies, the temporal king of vast portions of Italy, an international political leader afforded equal status with of the King of England or the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, a worldly Prince on the Thrown of St. Peter. But, before 1860 that is just what he was. This is a disquieting vision today and that is the reason for the obscurity of this tale, the reason it is rarely told even in Italy where it is the very fountainhead of nationhood.

But this book is not just another in a long list of Catholic bashers. It is the direct result of the honesty and foresight of John Paul II who flung open the doors to the Vatican library allowing historical researchers access to huge hordes of information hitherto only available to Church academics.

The author, Professor D. I. Kertzer is the provost of Brown University where he holds a distinguished chair in Social Sciences. He is one of the best English speaking authorities on Italian studies today. His initial renowned sprang from his book "The Kidnapping of Edguardo Mortara." Edguardo Mortara was the Elian Gonzales his day and the kidnapping of this 7 year old boy from his Jewish parents by officials of the Papal States in 1858 sparked an international incident, turned many against pope Pius IX and helped embolden the forces for Italian unity. This incident is mentioned only briefly in "Prisoner of the Vatican" but this latter book is obviously an ambitious extension of the former.

The book begins in the 1850s with what I think is far too little explanation of the political ferment that lead to Italian political and territorial unity, but perhaps such social analysis is beyond its scope. It then describes the intersticine conflict of pope Pius IX's Vatican Council (Vatican I) over papal infallibility, King Victor Immanuel's conquest of the Papal States following his unification of the rest of Italy, mostly through popular uprising, and then the military conquest of Rome itself in that year of war, 1870. It describes in great detail how Pius IX then holed-up in the Vatican and portrayed himself to the world as a prisoner despite sincere assurances of safety from Victor Immanuel. The book describes in detail the complex political dance of the major powers of Europe, particularly Austria, France and Germany, around the papal isolation. These powers cared little to liberate the pope from the center of this dance but cared greatly to advance their own position. The result 44 years later was World War I.

Much of the book is long quotes from letters, notes, newspaper articles and decrees of the time; it is very well researched and chronologically organized. Knowing the sensitivity of the subject, Professor Kertzer appears to have kept his interpretation intentionally sparse, allowing the people actually involved to tell the story. This makes the book a bit dry; it is a work for those few eager for doer, date, and detail. The style is straightforward with understated drama, little flourish and a freshman vocabulary. The ending is sudden and somewhat unsatisfying but the story had to stop somewhen.

One cannot understand the second half of the 19th century, the unification of Italy and Germany, pre-World War I France or the evolution of socialist and anarchist movements in Europe without understanding the significance of the pope's unsuccessful attempt to maintain temporal power in Europe. It would be difficult to find a better starting point for inquiry into this complex and until now obscure story than "Prisoner of the Vatican."

David Kertzer provides a detailed account of the Vatican's attempts to return the Pope to his temporal throne, reigning over the former Papal States, for many years following the successful unification of Italy. Exercising one of the very freedoms that the Vatican had vowed to suppress if returned to temporal power, Kertzer uses his freedom of expression to give us a fair, honest, and balanced treatment of events. His history does not come off as being anti-Catholic, but it deals (factually) with issues that others might wish to avoid in order not to appear being so. It is, therefore, a rich source, taking us behind the scenes to experience the very human side of the Vatican. If it is a rule that all governments engage in disinformation and spin, then David Kertzer shows us that the Vatican is no exception. He also reveals the tightrope that the new nation of Italy straddled in its first years, governing a people who were, for the most part, faithful Catholics who did not always know how to make distinctions between loyalty to faith and nation while also working with the rulers of other European nations whose citizens were struggling with those distinctions. One comes away we a new respect for those early leaders of Italy who held on when challenged from within and from without to their newfound freedom and newly founded republic. I highly recommend this and Kertzer's other books.

Documents buried in Vatican archives have only recently been made available to some historians, and David Kertzer's access to some of these records lend a lively touch to his political and religious history PRISONER OF THE VATICAN: THE POPES, THE KINGS, AND GARIBALDI'S REBELS IN THE STRUGGLE TO RULE MODERN ITALY. In 1870 Pope Pius IX and his successor decided to go into exile secretly to attract support among the faithful for the papal cause: to conspire against Garibaldi and the king of Italy to control the Italian state. It was a brilliant move: popes became prisoners of the Vatican for sixty years and even considered moving it outside Italy. A riveting true story of religion and a political scheme which changed the world.

The subtitle of this book is a bit misleading: there didn't appear to be a "secret plan" to recapture Rome from the new Italian state. Most of what happened was rather straightforward, and done by diplomatic means. In any event, this is an extremely interesting book about a little-known subject. Of course, everyone knows the basic story of the taking of Rome from the Pope by the new Italian state, but after that, nothing. This book very well fills in the knowledge gap by showing how the new state "bent over backwards" to try and mollify the Papal folks, only to be rebuffed at every turn. From the vantage of more than 125 years of Italian sovereignty over Rome, we can see how foolish the fears of the Pope actually were, but hindsight is the best sight. At the time, the Pope felt he was protecting the sovereignty and independence of the Papacy by having a temporal land under his control. This is fascinating history at its best, and I strongly recommend it!