While the role of Vatican Radio has often been cited in the voluminous and rapidly growing scholarly literature on the role played by the Holy See during the Second World War, few scholars have attempted to study it systematically. Indeed, the major previous publication on the subject was written by the author of the book under review (Raffaella Perin, La radio del papa. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017). With the opening in 2020 of the Vatican, and other ecclesiastical, archives covering the papacy of Pius XII (1939–1958), Perin, on the faculty of Catholic University of Milan, has now returned to her earlier subject, deepening our knowledge of the activity of Vatican Radio during the war.

Perin skillfully weaves together the available materials, a particular challenge as the Vatican kept neither audio copies nor written transcripts of these broadcasts. Adding further complications is the fact that the broadcasts were aimed at a variety of countries in a variety of languages, and each national program was to a considerable extent autonomous. Pius XII continued the system installed by Pius XI in entrusting the broadcasts to the Society of Jesus, but a different group of Jesuits took charge of each national/linguistic program.

Perin has assembled various digests compiled by the governments monitoring Vatican Radio, as they did in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, to shed light on the nature and content of the broadcasts. At the same time, taking advantage of those recently opened Vatican and Jesuit archives, she explores the relations between the pope and his secretariat of state and the Jesuit leaders responsible for Vatican Radio during the war.

The author is an expert in the broader history of the Vatican and the Second World War and her book provides rich historical context for the story she tells here (reflected, not least, in her 67 pages of endnotes). As she shows, there was considerable heterogeneity in attitude toward the war, and the belief in the role that the pope should play, within the Vatican and, indeed, within the Jesuit order. Perin cites a number of scholars in demonstrating how cautious, and indeed fearful, the pope was about offending the Germans and their Italian Fascist partners during the war. In these pages, she shows how this caution played out in the broadcasts of Vatican Radio.

In the last years of Pius XI’s life, and indeed until his death in February 1939, Vatican radio regularly addressed the persecution of the Church in Germany. The scripts used for the different language broadcasts were not at the time reviewed in advance by the Vatican but rather were supervised by the vicar general and the superior general of the Jesuit order.

Pius XII himself made an early appearance on Vatican Radio, sending a radio message in April 1939 to congratulate Franco on his victory in the Spanish Civil War, and praising him and his collaborators for showing “very noble Christian feelings” (p. 87). Continuing a well-established Vatican position, a belief that Catholic authoritarian regimes offered the best possible system of government continued to be expressed in broadcasts in the early years of the war, especially in those intended for Spain and Latin America. This principle would later be reflected in warm radio tributes to Pétain in Vichy France.

Shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland initiated the war, the German embassy to the Holy See warned the pope against any broadcasts critical of German policies. As a result, the pope ordered Vatican Radio to suspend programs on conditions in Poland, with the subsequent caveat that programs focusing on dire conditions in Soviet-occupied Polish territory could be broadcast. This reflected the policy followed by the Vatican’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore romano, as well. To further guarantee that the pope’s directives were followed, Vatican Radio was instructed to submit all scripts for programs in advance to the Secretariat of State for approval.

As Perin shows, tensions within Vatican Radio, reflecting larger tensions in the hierarchy of the Church and the Society of Jesus, nevertheless continued to be reflected in the diverse programming in different national radio broadcasts. Both the Jesuit responsible for North American broadcasts, Vincent McCormick, and the one responsible for French broadcasts, Emmanuel Mistiaen, did what they could to express, however indirectly, criticism of the Axis war and National Socialist persecution of the Church.

Perin devotes a major chapter to the subject of “Vatican Radio, Racism, Antisemitism, and the Shoah.” Here she enters into what is certainly the most contentious of the debates surrounding Pius XII and the war. She argues that the pope’s – and hence Vatican Radio’s – failure to condemn the mass murder of Europe’s Jews is to be attributed not only to the pope’s fear of offending Hitler. It was, she suggests, also a product of “an anti-Jewish legacy, which recognized the Jews’ right to existence and bodily integrity, but did not allow a defense that would have made the individuals the bearers of civil rights like all other people” (p. 117). Meanwhile, the German broadcasts on Vatican Radio – which those in the Third Reich listened to at their peril, as listening to foreign broadcasts was a crime – included the reading of messages from German bishops. Among these was the reading in September 1942 of the message that grew from the recent bishops’ conference at Fulda. In their message, the bishops stressed their support for “the heroic soldiers fighting and dying for their country,” and reminded German Catholics that “obeying the orders of the authorities was a religious duty,” one the pope himself had reiterated (p. 146).

With the publication of The Popes on Air historians now have a rich picture of the complex and variegated role played by Vatican Radio during the Second World War.