15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Prisoner of the Vatican: The End of the Papal Monarchy, February 22, 2008
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.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Untold history, June 2, 2005
This review is from: Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (Hardcover)
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!
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