In this second volume of his highly detailed and thoroughly researched biography of Giuseppe Dossetti – one of the architects of post-war Christian Democracy in Italy and a leading exponent of the party's radical wing until his political marginalisation and defeat in 1951 – Enrico Galavotti explores the young university professor's transition from Fascism to democracy during the Second World War and its aftermath. Seminal to Dossetti's vision of Italy's post-war order appears to have been his horrified discovery, through reading back numbers of the Jesuit newspaper La Civiltà Cattolica, that the Vatican had played a pivotal role in ensuring the consolidation of the Fascist dictatorship in 1924–5. Following Mussolini's fall from power in July 1943, Dossetti became convinced that if Italy was to avoid succumbing to the rapidly growing forces of the Communist Party and their socialist allies, the Church would need to nail its colours unequivocally to the mast of democracy and social justice. By early 1945 – when he became active in the resistance movement in the province of Reggio Emilia – he had identified the burgeoning Christian Democrat Party as the main political vehicle for post-war Catholicism in Italy (he had earlier harboured grave doubts about the wisdom of a specifically ‘Catholic’ party given the Church's need to remain as far as possible politically neutral). Galavotti's book, which is based on a wealth of new documentary material drawn from archives in Rome, Milan, Bologna and Modena, charts Dossetti's somewhat turbulent relationship with the Christian Democrat leader, Alcide De Gasperi. The latter's willingness to compromise with former Fascists, who began to gravitate towards the party in ever-increasing numbers from 1946, troubled Dossetti. The book examines in detail the important contribution that Dossetti made to the work of the constituent assembly in 1946–7: though Dossetti was willing to comply broadly with the wishes of the Vatican in ensuring that Church-State relations were regulated according to the Lateran Pacts, he was conscious that the 1929 settlement had been formulated within the highly authoritarian environment of Fascism and needed to be tempered as much as possible by being embedded in a constitution founded on progressive principles. With the Christian Democrats moving rapidly to the right in the course of 1947, as the nascent Cold War shifted the party's main raison d’être away from anti-Fascism towards anti-Communism, Dossetti found himself increasingly at odds with De Gasperi. He declared a wish not to stand for parliament in the country's first general elections in April 1948: Pius xii expressly requested him to do so. Dossetti complied and was duly elected to the Chamber. Galavotti's volume ends with Dossetti poised to take on his final challenge of persuading the Christian Democrats to embrace major socio-economic reforms – a challenge that was to prove partially, if rather fleetingly, successful.