For many years, Anglophone scholars lamented the lack of scholarship on Christian Democracy: a political formation that was one of the most powerful and foundational in twentieth-century European history (and elsewhere, too). Endless books were produced about Nazism and Communism, but there is a case to be made that Christian Democracy shaped Europe just as much as them. As Rosario Florenza and Bjørn Thomassen point out in this excellent study, it is harder to make that claim today. In the last ten years, many excellent volumes in many languages have appeared. This, though, is the first in English to chart the long career and afterlife of Christian Democracy in Italy: one of the countries in which it had the most extraordinary, if under-studied, impact.

Italy’s Christian Democracy is a synoptic study of the political phenomenon in Italy, from the eighteenth century to the present. There are, of course, many ways to study political movements. The authors signal their own approach in their subtitle: this is a book about the “Catholic encounter with political modernity.” They assume, not without warrant, that the crucial feature of Christian Democracy was that it represented an accommodation between Christianity and liberal democracy. They assume that the best way to study Christian Democracy is through the published writings of Christian Democratic intellectuals and politicians (this is not an archival study). As I will explain below, these decisions do come with drawbacks—ones that this book shares with others in the field (my own included). But at the same time, it can prove remarkably illuminating.

The book is divided into ten chapters, which carry the study of Italian Christian Democracy from the French Revolution to the Present. While the authors do not do so, the reader can group the chapters into four parts. The first three chapters are, in my view, the weakest part of the book, if only because the story they tell is so familiar. They describe the religious turmoil unleashed by the French Revolution, Pope Leo XIII, and his attempt to confront liberalism through a new “Social Catholicism,” and so on. They describe as well the “first generation” of Italian Christian Democrats, led by Luigi Sturzo, who was banned by the Fascist regime in 1926. Few scholars in the field will learn much from these chapters. The second part of the book, chapters 4 and 5, is to my mind more interesting. These chapters focus on Christian Democracy under Fascist rule, sidestepping the much-studied relationship between Mussolini and the Vatican. Their interest, instead, is in how the experience of Fascism and, especially, World War II, nourished a second generation of Christian Democratic thinkers. Led by Alcide de Gasperi, they came out of the Second World War without a coherent movement, but with a set of shared experiences and ideas about Catholicism’s role in the world: the need for religion to find a way to make peace with nationalism and, even more importantly, with liberal modernity, lest Italy fall once again into ruin.

The third section of the book, comprising chapters 6–8, concerns Christian Democratic governance in the heyday of the party. The party truly was a juggernaut during this time, and the authors do a real service in showing the kinds of intellectual currents and debates that were coursing through it, and against it: some Catholics in Italy resented the liberal, national character of the party. Far from the handmaiden of the Vatican, Italian Catholics were reading the works of, especially, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier. De Gasperi emerges in this section as the main protagonist of the book (though the reader is introduced to some very interesting figures, most memorably Giuseppe Dossetti). The crowning moment of this section comes in the 1960s, when the party, under the leadership of Aldo Moro, opened to the left and found common cause with Italian socialists.

The fourth part of the book, chapters 9 and 10, brings the story to the present. The reader can sense some disappointment from the authors in these sections. They seem to genuinely admire many of the figures described earlier, but it is hard to find much to glamorize between the assassination of Moro (1978) and the dissolution of the party (1994). The party had been in power for too long and was becoming sclerotic and corrupt. This led to its eventual demolition, amidst scandal, and the scattering of Catholic votes and Catholic thinking (against the backdrop, of course, of a general secularization). The authors explore the burgeoning consensus between some Catholic leaders, including bishops, and the political forces represented by Silvio Berlusconi.

For all of its breadth, I do think that there are some surprising gaps and omissions in the book, which are to me indicative of a methodological conservatism in the field of the history of Christian Democracy. The history profession as a whole has been enlivened in recent years by new levels of attention to marginalized voices: to sexual minorities, racial minorities, colonized subjects, and more. Histories of Christian Democracy have been reluctant to make these turns, and readers of this volume will find little about these subjects.

It is not that the issues did not matter! In the authors’ own telling, issues of gender and sexuality were absolutely central to the history of Christian Democracy in Italy: the party’s stances on abortion and divorce caused enormous headache and controversy. But why did the party have those stances, and which voices were silenced, and who was harmed by them? For that matter, what role, if any, did Catholic intellectuals or politicians play in the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Church in recent years, and which were being hushed up in the years under study here? One would think that a study of Catholicism and politics in the twentieth century, published in 2024, would address these issues.

The authors are equally silent on the issue of empire and immigration—issues that do so much to define faith and politics in Italy today. After all, for much of the period under study in this volume, Italy was an imperial power, but the issue hardly appears here. The authors might reply, with some justice, that the issue did not come up very much in their sources. I would respond, though, that this might indicate a problem in the way that the sources were chosen. There is no doubt that party leaders were dealing with issues of decolonization, immigration, immigrant rights, and more. Even if this was happening on the sidelines of the party, those sidelines have now become the front lines, and it is to my mind incumbent on historians to ask new questions as present conditions evolve.

Those remarks are aimed as much at the field as they are at Forlenza and Thomassen. I’d like, in closing, to return to the genuine achievement of their book. Like many today, I am extremely worried about the apparent disappearance of stable, center-right parties. Across the democratic world, parties like those were necessary to the stabilization of liberal democratic politics. Many of those parties were Christian Democratic, which is one reason why the field is such an important one, and why it matters to have sober, readable books like this one. This book is heartily recommended to anyone looking for a one-volume study of Christian Democracy in Italy.