David Kertzer has now written four books with the word “pope” in the title.
It is a surprising trajectory. A longtime Brown University faculty member and former provost, Kertzer trained as an anthropologist, centering his work on Italy. His early work focused on bread-and-butter anthropological topics such as family structure, demography, and ritual. For example, his second book, Family Life in Central Italy: 1880–1910, seemed somberly titled to repel the general reader.
Over the past two decades Kertzer has shifted gears. His decision to study the modern papacy—more precisely the papacy from the election of Pope Pius IX in 1846 through the death of Pius XI in 1939—was part serendipity. The opening of Vatican archives for the period through 1939, accomplished in stages but completed in 2006, sparked a surge of interest in the newly available sources, and Kertzer and his research assistants were among the first to successfully mine them. But the shift also came with a sense of mission. Kertzer’s own family history was intertwined with Roman history, and the city’s Jewish population. His father served as a rabbi and chaplain in the United States military during World War II. He helped bury Jewish GIs killed on the beach at Anzio when the Allies invaded the Italian mainland, and conducted a Sabbath service in Rome’s major synagogue when the city was liberated in early June 1944.
The first product of this new direction was The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997), a bestselling account of Pius IX’s condoning of the 1858 kidnapping of a Jewish child in Modena, near Bologna, who had been secretly baptized as an infant by an Italian servant. Because of this baptism, and because it was presumed by officials of the Inquisition that a baptized child should be raised by Christians, the boy was taken away from his family on the order of church officials and effectively raised in the Vatican. There he became a protégé of Pius IX and was ordained a priest. He never returned to the home of his bereft parents.
The kidnapping spurred massive international protests and, in Kertzer’s plausible view, prompted once sympathetic European leaders to abandon their support for papal control of much of what is now Italy. (The New York Times, for example, published twenty articles on the case in one month.) So too did it catalyze an international Jewish community into more vigorous defenses of Jewish communal and human rights.
Kertzer’s account is fair to all involved, as he darts from the anguished parents to combative newspaper editors and the recalcitrant pontiff. Contemporary Catholic defenses of the kidnapping now make for discouraging reading, ranging from claims that the parents should never have employed a Catholic servant to the declaration that the young boy’s evident satisfaction with his new situation—recall that the boy was six years old when taken—justified strict observance of loosely enforced laws. (That a priest employed at a major seminary would justify the kidnapping in a recent article in First Things suggests the persistence of Catholic obscurantism on the topic. Readers should look at historian Kevin Madigan’s lucid vivisection in the February 23 issue of Commonweal.)
Kertzer the anthropologist shines in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, reading court documents to superb effect in order to better understand the family dynamics in the Mortara household and among the Catholic servants they employed. Steven Spielberg has recently agreed to direct a film version of the Mortara saga, working from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, his collaborator in the Oscar-winning Lincoln, and it will be interesting to see the visual vocabulary they bring to this troubling episode.
Subsequent volumes quickly followed, with ever more emphasis on the papacy. Kertzer’s tone also became more confrontational, as suggested in a string of hyperbolic titles: The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (2001); Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State (2004); The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2014).
The last volume received the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and it displays Kertzer’s strengths as a scholar and writer while suggesting some of his fixations. Brilliantly researched—in both Vatican and Italian state archives—it portrays the troubled relationship between Pius XI and Mussolini, both coming to power in the same year, 1922, and each initially seeing the other as a supporter of his larger goals. Famously, Pius XI signed a 1929 concordat with the fascist government ensuring, for example, that Catholic doctrine would be taught in Italian public schools. Only in the late 1930s did the guarded alliance collapse, over Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler and Pius XI’s frustration with racial laws and increasingly bold fascist attacks on the church.