The home of both the Vatican and the largest Communist party outside of a Communist country, it offered a fascinating case for studying how people dealt with competing calls of political party and church. But not long after I arrived in Waltham, the anthropology department chair, Alex Weingrod, who had himself worked in Sardinia, suggested I consider Italy for my dissertation research. Though I was already interested in the links between politics and religion, I had no idea I would spend my adult life studying Italy. I arrived on campus right out of college, a new doctoral student in anthropology. Looking back now on the unlikely path that led me to write “The Pope and Mussolini,” I realize the book would never have been written had I not ended up at Brandeis in 1969. But first, in an introduction written especially for Brandeis Magazine, Kertzer describes how he came to his galvanizing topic. An excerpt reprinted in the pages that follow, the book’s dramatic prologue, offers a sense of why. Even before its publication this winter, the volume, written with a you-are-there clarity and urgency, was stirring up excitement and debate. Kertzer’s book, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe,” has been dubbed “a sophisticated blockbuster” by historian Joseph Ellis. Kertzer, PhD’74, has written a book that reveals exactly how deep and damaging those ties were, drawing on materials found in recently opened Vatican files. Eight decades later, Brown University professor David I. In the 1920s and ’30s, Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini relied on and used each other in their quest to preserve and protect their respective institutions, the Catholic Church and Italy’s Fascist government.
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