Pope Pius XI was convinced that the Catholic Church could play a vital role in ending Ireland’s Civil War. In early 1923 he instructed canon lawyer Msgr Salvatore Luzio to visit Dublin, establish relations with the new Irish Free State and tell Éamon de Valera’s anti-treaty rebels they must lay down their arms. The secret mission leaked after an Irish priest in Rome heard Luzio had been buying thick underwear and deduced he was off to a colder climate.
As Ambrogio A Caiani recounts in this sprawling but intelligent and strongly opinionated history of 20th-century Vatican politics, however, the mission was “an abject failure”. Luzio got nowhere with Dev, attracted fury from WT Cosgrave’s government for meeting their enemy first, and found the powerful Irish bishops “like twenty-six popes”. He went home a disappointed man, telling colleagues he was “glad to have escaped with his whole skin”.
According to Caiani’s cogent thesis, this diplomatic fiasco was symptomatic of a deeper malaise. The Church, he argues, had still not psychologically recovered from losing its “earthly kingdom” when Italian reunification took away the Papal States. Dubbed the prisoners in the Vatican, successive popes “pulled up the drawbridge” against a rising tide of nationalism.
“When it came to empires and monarchies, Catholicism had millennia of experience,” the author notes. “The nation state, however, was a more complex organism that needed delicate management.”
READ MORE
Flirting with Evil is essentially a 400-page charge sheet of blunders and scandals that resulted from this identity crisis. As its provocative title suggests, Caiani accuses the Vatican of making neo-Faustian pacts with Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes that dismally failed to protect their victims. He finds the Church equally guilty of alienating its flock by retaining authoritarian stances on social issues, outsourcing its finances to international money launderers and putting its own reputation first when protecting clerical paedophiles.
Unlike many books that deal with these issues, Caiani writes more in sorrow than in anger. Italian-born and Irish-raised, the University of Kent lecturer describes himself as “a passionate liberal Catholic” who believes his Church must spiritually renew itself through measures like such as the ordination of women. He writes that it has consistently produced saintly individuals such as Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish friar who volunteered for death by starvation at Auschwitz so a younger prisoner could live.
In other words, Caiani’s nuanced judgments focus on hating the sin, not the sinner. He calls out Pius XII’s feeble attempts to appease Hitler and Mussolini, but acknowledges the Church’s vulnerability during the second World War, summed up by Stalin’s scornful quip: “How many divisions has the pope got?” Pius did at least offer secret aid to heroes such as Kerryman Msgr Hugh O’Flaherty, the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican whose underground network saved about 6,500 Jews and Allied soldiers from the death camps.
The Easter Rising, the Provisional IRA campaign and the moving statues at Ballinspittle all left the Vatican feeling that some local clergy needed a belt of a bishop’s crosier
Caiani’s multifaceted narrative covers a huge amount of territory, from the Mexican Revolution to the Spanish Civil War and the Polish trade union movement. Each pope from this period gets a potted biography, while other character sketches include Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the gorilla-like Vatican Bank president who famously declared, “You cannot pay pensions and salaries of Church officials with a few Hail Marys.”
Some welcome light relief comes from the US National Legion of Decency, which protested against blasphemous Hollywood films with the Curia’s backing but, like as Father Ted’s Down With This Sort of Thing anti-film protest, sometimes only succeeded in boosting a film’s audience.
As you would expect, Ireland pops up frequently in Caiani’s chronicle of tangled Church-state relations. De Valera’s 1937 Constitution has often been caricatured as a sectarian Catholic document, but it did not go far enough for Pius XII, whose response after receiving a draft was: “We do not approve, neither do we disapprove; we shall maintain silence.” The Easter Rising, the Provisional IRA campaign and the moving statues at Ballinspittle all left the Vatican feeling that some local clergy needed a belt of a bishop’s crosier.
As for what Caiani calls the “horrible phenomenon” of clerical sex abuse, his forensic analysis destroys the Church’s generic defences, such as that “it was just a few bad apples”. He also ventures to hope that the worst revelations are over and that a smaller, poorer, humbler institution can get back to basics by “spreading the optimism and solidarity of Jesus’ teachings”.
As Pope Leo proved last April with his blistering speech about “a world ravaged by a handful of tyrants”, the Church has not entirely lost its moral authority. Flirting with Evil makes uncomfortable reading for any true believer, but at least this impeccably fair-minded book concludes that the relationship was never fully consummated.
Andrew Lynch is a freelance book reviewer
