Giuliana Chamedes has written a powerful, well-researched, and welcome synthesis of the Vatican's designs on creating a Catholic internationalism in the twentieth century. The first sixty years of the twentieth century, argues Chamedes, were a fight over the shape, the contours, and the political vision of internationalism, whether liberal, communist, fascist, or Catholic. And the papacy was not absent from that fight over what type of internationalism should come to dominate, but rather, popes and papal diplomats were aggressive, focused, and astute in seeking to position a Rome-controlled Catholic internationalism as a viable rival to competing visions of the new global order after World War I.

How did the papacy seek to do it? What was their secret weapon? Chamedes argues that concordats—officially recognized ecclesiastical treaties—were the legal mechanisms by which the papacy intended to gain both legitimacy as a sovereign power in its own right as well as sufficient agency in safeguarding Catholicism's privileged religious community status within nation-states, both old and new. Canon lawyers and diplomats were the Vatican's legal soldiers, intent on remaking first Europe and then the rest of the world. And, as Chamedes shows, the Vatican was quite successful in signing concordats with newly formed states in Eastern Europe, as well as managing to come to terms with both Italy and Germany.

The problem for the Vatican, Chamedes reveals, was actually not that the concordat policy was unsuccessful, but that it, in fact, worked. And yet the policy worked with precisely the wrong regimes, at least in hindsight: ethnonationalists, anti-Semites, and fascists. Other historians have covered the same ground as Chamedes here, such as David Kertzer, Stewart Stehlin, John Pollard, and others. But what Chamedes rightly shows—and shows in a particularly fresh way—is that the Vatican emerged from World War I in a curiously strange position. The papacy was dead set against Wilsonian liberal democracy because Rome feared the separation of church and state and liberal anticlericalism. The concordat policy was first launched to counter liberal democracy from pushing Catholicism out of public life in the aftermath of World War I. But—as became apparent soon enough—the political forces who held similar antipathies toward Wilsonian liberalism were often right wing, militaristic, imperialist, and anti-Semitic, and had a penchant, like the Vatican, for painting Bolsheviks as Jews and Jews as Bolsheviks. By the 1930s, then, with liberal democracy less of a threat in Europe, the Vatican redeployed its concordat policy toward fighting communism. In essence, Chamedes shows, the Vatican's biggest successes in diplomacy paved the way for fascism in Europe. After World War II, the Vatican softened on democracy and, by the 1960s, finally gave up the idea of the confessional state altogether.

Chamedes did research in over a dozen archives in at least four different countries. The book is a monumental triumph for transnational research as she manages to cover a huge swath of the twentieth century in terms of geography and national religious and political organizations. She does briefly mention Mexican anticlericalism in the aftermath of revolution but, in my view, perhaps does not give enough importance to the way Mexico became a feedback loop for the hardening of the Vatican's anti-communist Catholic internationalism. And perhaps it matters little. Even if the Vatican gave more attention to, say, Chile and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s than her book admits, Chamedes is most certainly right in centering Europe in the papal imagination. The Vatican's crusade was really about Europe, even while the papacy could not have foreseen that one hundred years later the crusade for the soul of Catholicism would become about everything but Europe. In that sense, Chamedes's book charts the last stand to save a world the Vatican eventually lost, the papacy changing in the end, finally coming to an uneasy truce with that vague misnomer known as modernity. In fact, as Chamedes suggests, the Vatican's twentieth-century crusade was its own process of modernization from which it emerged altered, changed, no longer the same.

The book will no doubt be required reading in graduate seminars and in advanced undergraduate classes on Catholicism and European history. I highly recommend it.