e 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 sins, however, are in the errata of historical facts—beginning right on page one, where Pollard states that the Second Vatican Council was called in 1961 (it was 1959, in a communication of Pope John XXIII to the cardinals assembled at St. Paul’s Outside-the-Walls in Rome).
Two further examples might also give American readers pause. In his assertion that the Vatican had no representation at the Evian Conference of July 6-15, 1938 (not July 6-12, as Pollard has it), at which some 32 nations came together to discuss the growing humanitarian plight of Germany’s Jews, it is not that the Vatican deliberately absented itself or that it ignored the proceedings. In point of fact, the American Catholic James G. McDonald, the adjutant for Myron Taylor at Evian, worked in concert with Count Enrico Galeazzi, and through him, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Secretary of State, to keep the Secretariat abreast of the situation. McDonald met personally with Pacelli shortly after the conference concluded and the American briefed him on the Nazis’ “racial primitivism” that posed a threat not only to Europe’s Jews, but to the Church as well. While no one can consult every source, there are two absent from Pollard’s bibliography that might have helped him to reach a more nuanced analysis of the situation: Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 edited by Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg (Indiana University Press, 2009) and John F. Morley’s Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 1939-1943 (KTAV, 1980). Although the Evian meeting came to naught, many other avenues were opened by way of the European nunciatures and apostolic delegations around the world—particularly the United States.
Second, Pollard’s suggestion that Clare Booth Luce was viewed with apprehension at the Vatican does not match up with the evidence. Luce was instrumental in arranging for a U.S. tour in 1947 of Alcide de Gaspari, the Italian leader of the Popolari and a political juggernaut amo