Did the Catholic Church support Hitler?

How did the Catholic Church come to have dealings with the authoritarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Ambrosio Chiani reveals why the papacy decided to strike up these deals with dictators. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Ambrosio explains how the politically neutral Curia came to be affiliated with Maslies dictatorship after the First World War, and why this had even more disastrous consequences when Hitler rose to power. Your book traces the Catholic Church across the twentieth century, and today we're gonna be talking specifically about its interaction with authoritarian regimes and World War Two. But before we start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to write this book? So by training and profession, I am an academic historian who teaches at the University of Kent.

I'm really interested generally in history about how regimes or institutions lose power. And for the twentieth century there's no more dramatic loss of power than that of the Catholic Church, both in terms of territory and also in terms of faith followers and spirituality. I guess the immediate trigger for writing this book in conjunction with my publisher was the announcement in twenty twenty that the papers of Pist Twelfth.

The Pope of the Second World War. would be finally released and we would get an inside perspective. Into the church. And since then there have been a lot of studies in Italian, German and French. which have not really been accessible to the British public. They've had really interesting findings, and I wanted to bring that

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