Kingdom of Italy

The unification of Italy was accomplished largely at the pope's expense. The Papal States, a territory across central Italy that the papacy had ruled since the eighth century, were annexed in 1860 apart from Rome and its surroundings, which a French garrison protected. When France withdrew during the war of 1870, Italian troops breached the wall at Porta Pia on 20 September and took the city, and Rome became the capital of the kingdom.

Pius IX refused every accommodation. He rejected the Law of Guarantees passed by the Italian parliament in 1871, which offered him personal inviolability, the use of the Vatican and Lateran palaces and an annual payment, on the ground that a right granted by a parliament could be withdrawn by one; he declined the money for the rest of his life; and he declared himself a prisoner. The instruction known as the non expedit forbade Italian Catholics to stand or vote in national elections, which kept a large part of the population out of political life for a generation.

David Kertzer's account, built from the Vatican and Italian state archives, shows how far the quarrel went beyond gesture: the popes lobbied the Catholic powers for the restoration of their territory, and the Italian government treated the papacy as a hostile power inside its own capital. Three popes lived and died without leaving the Vatican, and the standoff lasted fifty nine years.

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.