Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen’s Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity is a welcome contribution to a burgeoning literature on the role of the Catholic Church in the making of modern European politics. Drawing upon the work of social theorists such as José Casanova and Talal Asad, who challenged the conventional equation of European modernity with secularism, historians including Samuel Moyn, James Chappel, Giuliana Chamedes, Piotr Kosicki, and Maria Mitchell have illuminated the centrality of Catholic political movements for the reconstruction of post-1945 Western Europe. At the heart of these studies is the political ideology of Christian Democracy. Forged amid the crucible of European industrialization, mass politics, and the world wars, Christian Democracy rose to power through decisive electoral victories in postwar Italy, West Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

Forlenza and Thomassen both contribute to this historiography and build beyond it. Through a theoretically nuanced and empirically rich study of modern Italy, they show that the task for contemporary scholarship is no longer simply to demonstrate that religion continued to matter in twentieth-century European politics, but to describe precisely how religiously motivated politicians and voters honed their political beliefs. The study’s core claim is that Christian Democracy offered a comprehensive alternative to liberal, conservative, socialist, and fascist ideologies by anchoring secular politics in Catholic-inspired ideas of personhood, dignity, and subsidiarity. While previous scholars have explored these tenets of Christian Democratic ideology, Italy’s Christian Democracy presents a novel account of their origins. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “political spirituality” (8), the authors argue that scholars should take the religious content of Christian Democratic ideas seriously, not so much as a matter of theological doctrine but of personal conviction. The case for an anthropological approach to political thought is bolstered through the authors’ emphasis on the “transformative” or “liminal” experience (9) that sparks a profound reassessment of an individual’s political worldview. For European Christian Democrats of the mid-twentieth century, the confrontation with fascism and total war marked such a liminal moment.

While this reviewer would have appreciated further comparisons to other European countries, Forlenza and Thomassen make a convincing argument for the distinctive features of the Italian case, one that has been surprisingly neglected in the literature on Christian Democracy. As the geographic and institutional center of global Catholicism, Italy occupied a singular place in the European Catholic imaginary. Italian Christian Democrats could draw upon older national myths describing Italy as the meeting ground of Europe’s Roman and Christian heritage. Moreover, church-state relations in Italy were uniquely framed by the struggle over the status of the Vatican territory following the wars of Italian unification, resolved only in the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

Italy’s Christian Democracy offers an expansive chronology, situating the “transwar” period (1930s–1950s) at the center of most studies of European Christian Democracy within a trajectory extending back to the French Revolution. The first three chapters trace the early genealogy of Christian Democratic ideas in Italy from the late eighteenth century through the First World War. Especially illuminating is the authors’ reading of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, often viewed as a breakthrough in the Catholic Church’s engagement with industrial society and political modernity. Instead, the authors underscore the contradictions of the Vatican’s position: Rerum Novarum outlined a distinctive Catholic alternative to socialism, foreshadowing a key aim of Christian Democracy, while rejecting party politics altogether. This section culminates with a discussion of the Italian People’s Party (PPI), formed in 1919, the short-lived precursor to the postwar Democrazia Cristiana (DC). Two chapters then address the period of fascist dictatorship. These chapters center on the struggle of the lay Catholic Action movement to retain its autonomy in Mussolini’s dictatorship, and the eventual shift of its leading intellectuals into opposition during the war.

The second half of the book centers on the DC, from its founding in 1943 through its political dominance and eventual decline over the Cold War decades. The DC experienced a remarkable run as Italy’s governing party from the formation of the Italian Republic in 1946 through the party’s dissolution in 1994. Consistent with their emphasis on personal experience, Forlenza and Thomassen describe these decades through the framework of three political generations. The first, which entered politics after the First World War and participated in the PPI, was exemplified by the DC’s founder, Alcide De Gasperi. Forlenza and Thomassen rightly credit De Gasperi, who served as prime minister from 1945 to 1953, with prioritizing anti-fascist unity over the Cold War struggle against Communism, thereby establishing the party’s independence from the Vatican. Controversies over the DC’s direction after De Gasperi’s resignation were dominated by a second generation that came of age under fascism. Here, the debate between party leaders such as Amintore Fanfani and Aldo Moro centered on the terms of the “opening to the Left,” even as both factions recognized that partnership with the Italian Socialist Party was necessary to maintain the DC’s broad centrist coalition. The third generation, comprising politicians such as Ciriaco de Mita and Arnaldo Forlani who began their careers in the Italian Republic, attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to revitalize the party in an increasingly secular society and to overcome its association with a sclerotic bureaucracy.

One reason for the extraordinary staying power of liberalism, socialism, and fascism, the chief rivals of Christian Democracy, is their ability to adapt to widely disparate social contexts and historical moments. In order to prove the boldest version of the book’s thesis—that “the worldwide establishment of Christian Democratic parties during the twentieth century was perhaps the most important political transformation in modern European politics since the French Revolution” (234)—the authors would need to demonstrate a similar power of adaptation and renewal. The narrative presented in Italy’s Christian Democracy, however, suggests a more conventional reading of post-1960s Western European secularization. Forlenza and Thomassen show how the third generation of Italian Christian Democrats, who lacked a personal connection to Catholic Action or the anti-fascist resistance, turned from a politics rooted in transcendent values to a clientelist, transactional approach. In turn, these politicians found themselves alienated from a society where Catholicism no longer served as a shared cultural foundation, exemplified by the DC’s defeats in referenda over divorce (1974) and abortion (1981). The DC thereby entered a crisis in the 1980s and dissolved in 1994, the same year in which the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister at the helm of a right-wing coalition that included the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

My own research on religion and democratic politics in postwar West Germany forms the basis for my questions to Forlenza and Thomassen. First, do they believe that an alternative policy course from the 1970s could have prevented the DC’s collapse, or was the party hampered by structural features of Italian politics beyond its control? The comparison to Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is potentially instructive. Despite experiencing similar trends toward secularization and challenges from the far right, the CDU remained West, and then reunified Germany’s most popular party in nearly every election since 1949. Germany’s comparatively stronger post-Cold War economy has reduced the CDU’s vulnerability to far-right challengers, a trend only partially reversed with the recent surge of the Alternative for Germany. The CDU has also enjoyed the possibility of alternating, and at times sharing power with a center-left party firmly in the democratic camp. This option was not available in Italy, where the Italian Communist Party formed the dominant opposition for most of the DC’s history.

Second, how did the collective memory of the fascist past shape the politics of the DC? Forlenza and Thomassen recognize that most of Italy’s postwar Christian Democratic politicians were sympathetic to Mussolini’s dictatorship well into the 1930s and turned decisively against fascism only from 1942 to 1945. The authors interpret the shift to anti-fascism as a matter of personal transformation, rooted in an embrace of Catholic values. However, the German historiography would invite further attention to motives of denial and erasure. Indeed, the postwar DC, in cooperation with its Socialist and Communist coalition partners, pushed through a policy of amnesty for all but the highest-ranking fascist officials. How did the Italian decision for amnesty compare with other Western European countries, and was it ever challenged by subsequent generations? In Germany, the media and educational system since the 1960s have promoted a critical examination of the Nazi past that has bolstered the liberal-conservative consensus against the participation of the far right in government—a consensus that holds up, albeit tenuously, today. Did the DC’s failure to critically address its own founding myths prepare the ground for Berlusconi, who came to power challenging postwar narratives of a unified anti-fascist resistance not from the Left but from the Right?

In short, Italy’s Christian Democracy invites readers to ask: To what extent does the contemporary crisis of Christian Democracy lead us to rethink the historical moment of the mid-twentieth century? Forlenza and Thomassen’s important book provides scholars with much-needed tools to approach this question.