RaffaellaPerin<scp>:</scp>The Popes on Air: The History of Vatican Radio from its Origins to World War <scp>II</scp>. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024; pp. 288.

In recent decades significant scholarly attention has been focused on the “silence” of the Vatican of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War, and particularly on the persecution and genocide of European Jewry. While most of these studies have examined papal pronouncements, encyclicals, statements, and the Catholic print media, relatively little attention has been given to one of the Vatican's most powerful media tools — Vatican Radio. Raffaella Perin's The Popes on Air: The History of Vatican Radio from its Origins to World War II has capably begun to fill this void. The book's research methodology, which is commendable, provides some clues as to why this gap in the historiography remained until now. The dearth of radio transcripts in the Vatican archives, the declassification of some of these records only in 2020 (when the full archives for the pontificate of Pius XII were opened to researchers), and the intermittent restrictions of access to these during the COVID pandemic, provided one set of challenges. Another obstacle was the wide range of script writers and languages in which Vatican Radio was broadcast. For this, the author examined the transcripts of radio monitoring services in American, British, French, German and Italian archives. What emerges is a fascinating picture of the Vatican's use of radio as a means of communications with the global Catholic diaspora in a crucial period of European and world history. Perin traces the origins and expansion of Vatican Radio from the early 1930s, outlining initial anxieties over this new medium (would Catholics now listen to the mass at home instead of attending it?) to embracing the potential of radio to amplify and universalise the presence of the pope in the lives of the faithful. By the outbreak of war, Vatican Radio had become a crucial means of communications to the faithful in the various theatres of conflict. Significantly, Vatican Radio operated at arms length from the papal secretariat, allowing it considerable autonomy in formulating its broadcasts. The Society of Jesus, led at that time by Wlodimir Ledóchowski, had a significant role in the crafting and delivery of this programming, with Jesuit figures such as Vincent McCormick, Robert Lieber (a close aide to Pius XII), and Emmanuel Mistiaen writing and presenting programmes in various languages for Europe and the Americas. While the Vatican's official neutrality at times hindered the pope's ability to denounce the totalitarian states directly, Vatican Radio (though technically monitored by the Vatican secretariat from 1941 on), could often function as a proxy, offering various condemnations of the Nazi, Soviet and Fascist regimes (including those of Jozef Tiso's Slovakia and Ante Pavelić's Croatia). Anti-communism was a frequent theme on Vatican Radio, where critiques of Soviet doctrine and ideology began before the war and expanded during the conflict. As Perin outlines, anti-Nazi broadcasts were also prepared and delivered in a variety of languages, including German, in which the service condemned the Hitler regime's views on race, religion, eugenics, statolatry and violence, using papal teachings and statements to propose an alternative model of social and political life. Significantly, the severity of this censure varied according to the writer of the programme and the language of broadcast. Among the most robust critics of Nazism was Emmanuel Mistiaen, S.J., whose programmes (written from within the Vatican) offered such direct condemnation of Nazism that Pius XII moved to temper him lest these critiques brought reprisals upon German Catholics and the Vatican itself. While Mistiaen and others continued in their attempts to undermine and denounce Nazism, the English language broadcasts of Vatican Radio, many written by Vincent McCormick, S.J. and broadcast in the United States, Britain and the wider anglosphere, encouraged American intervention and, by early 1943, alluded openly to the Vatican's preference of an allied victory in Europe. Despite charges from Axis diplomats that these broadcasts violated the pope's neutrality, the Vatican consistently defended them (while at times also attempting to censor them), claiming that Vatican Radio operated independently, and did not represent the official voice of the papacy. It was this flexibility, claims Perin, that allowed papal views on the war to be disseminated while mitigating direct censure or reprisal. The autonomy of Vatican Radio did not lead to a clearer or more emphatic denunciation of the oppression of European Jews, as the later chapters of this work make clear. While some broadcasts did censure Nazi deportations of Jews to concentration camps and emphasised the equality of all races under divine law, the theological anti-Judaism which had shaped the Vatican's response to Jewish persecution and the Holocaust was evident also in the programming of Vatican Radio. Worse still, as Perin outlines, some of these programmes continued to invoke ancestral Catholic stereotypes of the Jews as deicides, infidels and heretics, urging their conversion to Catholicism as their only path to salvation (both in the earthly and spiritual sense). The service also reflected the Vatican's general apprehensions towards Zionism, where the return of the Jews to Palestine was regarded as a theologically and historically bankrupt notion, and threatening to Catholic interests in the Holy Land. Emmanuel Mistiaen did deliver some programmes in French which expressed sincere solidarity with the persecuted Jews of France, and several German-language broadcasts critiqued the deportations of Jews in Croatia and Slovenia. In the main, however, Vatican Radio broadly reflected the Vatican's own well-documented chariness on the issue of Jewish persecution and genocide, despite the ostensible autonomy it had from the papal secretariat. The Popes on Air is a methodologically impressive and clearly written work which shines light on a largely unknown aspect of Vatican communications and media during the Second World War. Though it traces some of the contours of the Vatican's well known wartime positions (its general circumspection on the persecution of Europe's Jews, its denunciation of totalitarian systems of the right and left, and its eventual preference of an allied victory), it also reveals the diversity of viewpoints within the wartime Church. This ranged from those such as Mistiaen and McCormick who attempted to inform Catholics of the atrocities unfolding across Europe in the starkest terms, to others who sought to defend papal neutrality and sovereignty during the depths of the conflict, anxious to preserve the institutional Church at a moment of grave crisis. In sum, this is an enlightening study that only deepens our awareness of the moral and political discordancy of the wartime church of Pope Pius XII.