Luca Castagna has made a significant contribution to the history of Vatican diplomacy and, in particular, to the history of the Holy Seeʹs relations with the United States. He has skillfully navigated the often tortuous paths of the relations between American Catholics and their fellow citizens and between the American Church, American society, and the Vatican. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American Church was under suspicion in Rome. In January 1899 Leo XIII had condemned ʺreligious Americanism,ʺ a movement more French than American, that sprang from the French translation of the biography of Father Isaac Hecker, founder...

Congress will probably never send a minister to his Holiness, who can do them no service, upon condition of receiving a Catholic legate or nuncio in return; or, in other words, an ecclesiastical tyrant, which, it is to be hoped, the United States will be too wise ever to admit in their territories.¹

These were the words of John Adams writing on August 4, 1779, to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Free of all protocol formality, they did not derive from diplomatic clashes or impoliteness between the Union and the Papal States; rather they reflected and in some ways consecrated...

Woodrow Wilson had never attempted to conceal his sometimes extreme anti-Catholicism. Indeed, it seems that from the time of his first meeting with James Gibbons in Washington in 1913, he addressed the cardinal as “Signor” and did not even ask him to sit down.¹

However, the attitude of the United States president toward the Holy See was not the only reason for the failure of Benedict XV’s attempt to relax the great tension with the United States. It is true that Wilsonian antipapism is rooted in the history and culture of the country, just as it was not unusual that...

Contrary to Wilsonʹs hope, World War I was not the war to end all wars. At Versailles, his attempts to arrive at a compromise enabling the construction of a stable international system regulated by the democratic principles contained in his Fourteen Points of January 1918 were frustrated by the European allies, especially the French, who worked for their respective national interests.

The stubborn, short-sighted attitude of European statesmen made them ʺcontinue to believe they ruled the world, but in fact they laboriously plodded along in an attempt to solve the international problems of their continent.ʺ¹ Incapable of adapting to the...

Giovanni Bonzano proved to be a discreet but convincing supporter of the reorganization that culminated in the setting up of the NCWC.¹ During his years spent at the head of the Apostolic Delegation of Washington, and especially during the war, he had been immersed in the difficulties of reconciling the work of various Catholic associations in the country and that of the episcopate with directives from Rome; he had also had to give in when faced with the ostracism of Wilson and his administration at the time the Holy See had tried to win Americaʹs goodwill in resolving the Roman...

On the afternoon of July 2, 1932, the fifty-year-old governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, landed at Chicago Midway Airport. The previous evening, the Democratic Partyʹs national convention had elected him as candidate to the presidency and, breaking with all tradition, he wished to receive the investiture in person. In constrast to Hoover, whom the Republican Party had renominated its candidate in spite of his incompetent management of the economic crisis, Roosevelt had dispelled the skepticism within his party and won the confidence of the public who saw in his indomitable enthusiasm a hope of escaping from the poverty...

Neither the Neutrality Act of 1935 nor that of 1936 was applicable to civil wars. Nevertheless, fearing protests on the isolationist front on the eve of the presidential elections, Roosevelt applied an arms embargo on both sides after theAlzamiento Nacionalof July 1936 and kept to it right up to the end of the Spanish Civil War. Like many members of his administration, who clearly disliked the Spanish radicals, the president initially saw Francoʹs attack as being essentially antisubversive. However, his perception of the Spanish situation and the repercussions it could have at international level quickly changed. He began...

Gerald P. Fogartyʹs foreword describes the intricate fabric of this book, focusing on the most significant aspects of Luca Castagnaʹs research. Since I have followed its progress and am in some ways responsible for the choice of subject, I should like to underline the importance of the sources used, for they have made it possible, with a many-sided approach, to give an interpretation of the events that is in some ways innovative. The researchʹs point of reference is certain aspects of U.S. history, and on this basis the book deals with the ways in which Vatican diplomacy operated in a...