Penguin Random House
David Kertzer
Dupee University Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Italian Studies
Brown University
“A masterly character study of a flawed, tormented leaderand a cautionary tale about the perils of both-sides-ism.”—The New Yorker
“Kertzer brings all of his usual detective and narrative skills to [The Pope at War] . . . the most comprehensive account of the Vatican’s relations to the Nazi and fascist regimes before and during the war.”—The Washington Post
“Definitive.”—The Boston Globe
“David Kertzer has spent decades excavating the Vatican’s hidden history . . . winning a Pulitzer and capturing Hollywood’s attention. [His] new book . . . documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the pontiff’s impact on the war is underestimated. And not in a good way.”—The New York Times
“Remarkable.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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A damning picture of a holy man who chose to remain silent about the mass destruction of European Jewry.”—Haaretz
“A highly readable, a character-driven history well-paced with textured personalities, and a wealth of granular detail . . . [Kertzer] rarely editorializes—the facts are numbingly powerful.”—National Catholic Reporter
“A riveting history and valuable lesson for our time about the perils of neutrality.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A captivating account of palace intrigue . . . [his] revelations . . . make sense of a papal tenure often excused away by apologists and, until now, not fully understood by scholars.”—The Forward
Click to see the video of his conversation
with Ron Duncan Hart on
"The Vatican, Forced Baptism and the Jews"
When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him.
In 2020, Pius XII’s archives were finally opened, and David I. Kertzer—widely recognized as one of the world’s leading Vatican scholars—has been mining this new material ever since, revealing how the pope came to set aside moral leadership in order to preserve his church’s power.
Based on thousands of never-before-seen documents not only from the Vatican, but from archives in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, The Pope at War paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Nazis began their systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews. The book clears away the myths and sheer falsehoods surrounding the pope’s actions from 1939 to 1945, showing why the pope repeatedly bent to the wills of Hitler and Mussolini.
Kertzer twice won the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best book in Italian history. Kertzer co-founded and for a decade co-edited the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He served as president of the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and co-edited the book series New Perspectives on Anthropological and Social Demography for Cambridge University Press.
His book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and is published in 17 languages. In 2005 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, The Pope and Mussolini, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015. His most recent book, The Pope Who Would be King, published in 2018, tells the story of the Roman Revolution of 1848.
The Pope at War is based on his recent research in newly opened Vatican archives on Pope Pius XII.
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