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Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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."

Italian history other than the Roman Empire is almost unknown in the US and what is known is mostly taught in Catholic schools by adherents of the Roman Catholic faith. This book is an eye-opener concerning how Italy came to be unified literally over the dead body of Pius IX who stated that his temporal dominion of the Papal States was absolutely necessary for him to be secure in his position and to provide vital funds to the Roman Catholic Church. The author continues into the 20th century and Pius IX's successors made major efforts to split Italy into three parts, a southern Kingdom like the former Kingdom of Naples or the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, a northern Kingdom for the Piedmontese, and the Papal Sates in between and including Rome with the Pope holding on the central and dominant power in Italy. Although this might seem medieval today to readers in the English-speaking world, one must remember that the critical events took place from 1859 to 1914.

Italian reunification was by no means a foregone conclusion in the face of Papal opposition. Italian was not an universal language on the peninsula, and heart of Italy was the last part to be brought into the Kingdom of Italy under Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia. The primary force for the creation of a modern Italian States came from the Freemasons, most notably the Freemason Garibaldi who already had been a prime actor in South American revolutions. (One tends to forget or minimize the Freemason influence in the construction of democracies starting with the US as not being politically correct.) For some reason Garibaldi and the Freemasons are treated lightly by the author, perhaps because he desires to focus on the Papacy instead, although he does record that the plebisites were solidly for unification. Nonetheless, the dictotomy should be emphasized: to be a Freemason requires the belief in a separation of church and state (but not strictly a secular state in which religion plays no part), while the Popes to the present day oppose such separation.

The author also makes the point abundantly clear that Pius IX ruled like an autocrat in his Papal States, suppressing individual liberties, freedom of speech and of the press, and opposed democracy in any form. Even today Italian schoolbooks and Church propaganda mention the liberation of Rome by Italian troops, thus uniting the country and setting the stage for Rome to be the capital, but do not mention what forces the Italians fought against. The answer, of course, is the Pope's troops. Pius also sought the assistance of France, Spain, Belgium, Austria and Germany to fight against the Italians, but by 1870 France was embroiled in the Franco-Prussian War, Austria had already been humbled by Prussia, Spain was barely hanging on as a power, and Germany under Bismarck was polite but not friendly. The days of the Papacy obtaining large armies from foreign nations to do its fighting for it were over.

A key initiative by Pius when faced with the loss of his temporal dominion was his strong-arm bullying of the Vatican Council into creating the official dogma that the Pope was infallible in 1870. Most people today, even Roman Catholics, think this element of Church doctrine originated in medieval or earlier times, but it was demanded by Pius for his use against those who would oppose him politically. It actually had the opposite effect as many Catholic politicians in France and elsewhere saw through this tactic and felt such a doctrine placed undue pressure on the faithful in the Papacy versus democracy conflict. Pius IX himself, came to believe that France withheld troop support from him in revenge for his becoming infallible.

The title of the book comes from Pius IX's statement that he "was being held prisoner by the Italian state in the Vatican" after the conquest of Rome in 1870. Yet, his confinement to the Vatican was of his own doing -- a policy that was also maintained by Leo XIII and Pius X. It was not until 1914 under Benedict XV that the Papacy began to change its attitude and attempt to make peace with democracy. A result of this refusal to accommodate democracy led to Mussolini and ultimately the situation after World War II when many Italian cities featured a Roman Catholic cardinal and a communist mayor. In many respects, Italy's national weakness in the 20th and 21st centuries stems from the Papacy's stance that Rome is a holy city to be administered by the Pope and should not be the capital of some other temporal nation.

Author Kertzer (a pen name) offers up his scholarship in a wonderful writing style that is almost exciting to read. His portraits of the King Victor Emmanuel, Pius IX, and the other main actors in his drama made the book worth reading regardless of his presentation of a history that should be known by everyone today. One must remember the West is now facing a new push for theocratic states from Islam, and there are likely to be severe religious battles in our future. One needs to understand the Roman Catholic Church's stance on democracy and its insistance on its position as the world's one true religion. This volume explains the modern origins of many current attitudes of the Church and is an extremely important work.

Highly recommended to all.

Hidden here and there within the history of the Roman Catholic church must be dozens, even hundreds of stories that would surpass the best fictional writing. Here is one of them.

We view Italy (and Germany for that matter) as countries, countries with a history going back for thousands of years. But this isn't true. These two countries came together as countries in the middle 1800's. Before that they were a loose collection of city states, small kingdoms I'd guess you call them.

This is one such story. Victor Emmanuel II, the king of an Italy finally united wanted to make Rome/The Vatican a part of Italy. The pope, at that time Pius IX, didn't recognize Emmanuel or for that matter Italy. Thus began this story.

The Pope retreated into the walls of the Vatican, and they remained at impasse until Mussolini finally came to an agreement that stands today where the church recognizes Italy, and Italy agreed that the Vatican was a soverign state.

This is a fascinating and little known story based on recently opened archives.

Now if the author could go back to the Vatican and get the archives on Galileo.

Interesting, detailed story. Typical Kertzer. A must read for students of Italian and/or Church history.