The Lateran Pacts and What Followed

The settlement came from a government the papacy had not chosen. On 11 February 1929 Pius XI and Mussolini's state signed the Lateran Pacts: a treaty recognising the sovereignty of a new Vatican City State of about forty four hectares, a financial convention compensating the loss of the Papal States, and a concordat that made Catholicism the sole religion of the Italian state, gave the church control of marriage law, put religious instruction into state schools and secured the position of the clergy. The non expedit was long since dead, and Catholics re-entered public life.

The alliance was uncomfortable almost at once. In 1931 the regime moved against the lay associations of Catholic Action and Pius XI answered with the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, condemning a state that claimed the whole formation of the young. When the racial laws of 1938 stripped Italian Jews of citizenship rights, the Vatican protested the provisions that touched converts and the church's authority over marriage, and Michael Phayer's work traces the wider record of the papacy in these years, including the German occupation of Rome in 1943 and the deportations from the ghetto.

The monarchy did not survive the war: a referendum in 1946 replaced it with a republic, whose constitution nonetheless wrote the Lateran Pacts into itself. Catholicism ceased to be the state religion of Italy only with the revised concordat of 1984.