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.
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 protect the church.
For this presentation, David Kertzer will be in conversation about his latest book, The Pope at War, with Charles R. Gallagher.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David Kertzer is the Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science, Emeritus, and Research Professor at Brown University. His latest book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler, was published with Random House in 2022, as well as British, Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, and Chinese editions. David’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, published with Random House in 2014, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2015. It also won the American Historical Association prize for best book in Italian history. Eleven foreign editions have been published. Most noteworthy among his numerous other published works is The Popes against the Jews, published with Knopf/Vintage in 2001, which examines the Vatican’s role in the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and has been published in Italian, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Brazilian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Portuguese, Czech, Chinese, Turkish, and British editions. David’s The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, published with Knopf/Vintage, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1997 and has been published in eighteen foreign editions. Kertzer is an authority on Italian politics, society, and history; political symbolism; and anthropological demography. Past president of both the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, he is co-founder and served for many years as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2005 Kertzer was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2006 to 2011, he was the Provost of Brown University.
Charles R. Gallagher, S.J., is Professor of History at Boston College. For the 2024-2025 academic year, he is serving as the Francis C. Wade Chair at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. In 2017, he was the William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust, & the Jews, at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. In 2009, his book, Vatican Secret Diplomacy: Joseph P. Hurley and Pope Pius XII (Yale University Press, 2008), won the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Gilmary Shea Prize. His 2021 book, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front was published by Harvard University Press and won a Catholic Press Association Award for History. Gallagher is interested in religion and right-wing movements, the Holocaust, American Catholicism, Vatican diplomacy, and the intersection of religion and espionage. His current Wade Chair project looks at how German intelligence recruited, retained, and used Catholic clerics to act as spies in the United States during World War II.