ar thumping of Communist party candidates across Italy, but failed to stem Soviet encroachments in Eastern Europe. The pope kept order in his own house, issuing encyclicals meant to curb certain theological tendencies throughout Christendom. Pollard notes some instances where Pius XII was interested in reform, and goes so far as to deny Pope John XXIII credit for the idea of Vatican II. With all of the activity in Rome surrounding the liturgical renewal, Pollard argues, the only thing that prevented Pius from formally calling a Council was his death.
The multi-volume Actes et Documents du Sainte Siège relatif a la Seconde Guerre Mondiale is used with great facility and frequency, but Pollard does not include other important source material that could help round out the picture of international Vatican relations. Notably missing are references to Cardinal Celso Constantini’s wartime diaries (see Bruno Fabio Pighin, ed., The Secrets of a Vatican Cardinal: Celso Constantini’s Wartime Diaries, 1938-1947, trans. Laurence B. Mussio [McGill-Queens University Press, 2014]) and the notebooks of Monsignor Joseph Hurley, the first American to work in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Though Pollard does use the United States Foreign Relations, he makes very few references to any of the archival holdings in the United States. I count only two, relating to documents at the National Archives. This inexplicable allergy toward American sources does not serve the project well.
Where does that leave this volume in the historiography of the papacy? The first attempt at bringing a deep analysis of the Vatican’s diplomatic power lies most proximately with Jesuit Father Robert A. Graham’s Vatican Diplomacy: A Study of Church and State on the International Plane (Princeton University Press, 1959). Though it is neither a treatise on the history of papal diplomacy nor a manual for understanding Vatican politesse, Graham sought to initiate an English-readership into the mysterious field of Vatican diplomacy as such, which for much of the last century has meant the establishment of concordats. Legations sent by the Holy See to mitigate conflict or to establish diplomatic relations with states demonstrate papal authority in the civil realm, especially after 1929, when the pope was considered not only the head of a universal church but a leader of an independent nation-state.
More contemporaneous with our day, Pollard’s book joins works such as Luca Castagna’s Un ponte oltre l’oceano: Assetti politici e strategie diplomatiche tra Stati Uniti e Santa Sede nella prima metà del Novecento (1914-1940) (il Molino, 2011) (recently translated as A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two Wars [Catholic University of America Press, 2014]) and Stephen J. C. Andes, The Vatican and Catholic Activism in Mexico and Chile: The Politics of Transnational Catholicism, 1920-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Pollard is primarily, though not exclusively, focused on Europe, so Latin America, Africa, and Asia get short shrift. Consequently, he lessens the significant impact of things like the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico from 1926-1929 or the failure, on the part of the Vatican, to create a Catholic action movement in Mexico. Relations with Catholic countries were hardly ever uniform, and it is sometimes a challenge to see the actual motivations at work. While he does fine work in singling out some of the Vatican’s efforts at making concordats, he does not mention the fact that periodically they were not necessary. For instance, the Partido Conservador, a Chilean political party affiliated with the Church, was already a powerful force in national events, making the Vatican’s quest for a concordat with Chile somewhat superfluous.
There are other problems. There are scores of typographical and grammatical errors in this book, which is very frustrating given its cost and the significance it carries for the Oxford History of the Christian Church series. Frankly, it does not seem as if anyone bothered to proofread the text. The worse si