The Catholic Church was radically unprepared for the twentieth century. After Italian unification and the loss of Catholic territory, the popes isolated themselves in the Vatican and refused to compromise with the modern world. An authoritarian institution with medieval forms of governance, the church struggled to confront democracy, nationalism, socialism, the scepticism of science and growing demands for gender equality. The papacy’s instinct was to find new friends among the dictatorships that came to power in the 1920s and 30s; agreements were reached with Mussolini’s fascist regime, Hitler’s Germany and Salazar’s Portugal. 
  
And so began what Ambrogio Caiani calls Catholicism’s flirtation with evil. The price was silence. The church failed to confront the most terrible crimes of the century and to show empathy for the victims. Pope Pius XII never once condemned the Holocaust and he prioritized the Church’s safety over the victims of Nazism. A similar impulse to protect the institution led to the world-wide scandal of denial and cover ups of child abuse in Catholic schools and orphanages. 
Ambrogio Caiani’s gripping narrative contrasts the often heroic and compassionate work of Catholic priests and lay people with the unfortunate compromises made by the Vatican. Reforming popes introduced the possibility of a more open and inclusive institution in the 1960s, but their successors made the church ever more combative, railing against heresies like contraception, female ordination, homosexuality and liberalism. The result has been empty churches across the Western world.
 
This is a story of bizarre intrigues and spies, financial malpractice, sexual scandal, casual cruelty and resistance to change. It provides a fascinating insight into an extraordinary body that occupies half a square kilometre of Roman real estate but commands the allegiance of over a billion people.