The Lateran Treaty

When Italian troops entered Rome in 1870 and the Papal States ceased to exist, Pius IX refused to recognise the loss, declined the terms the Italian state offered unilaterally, and remained within the Vatican. His successors did the same for nearly sixty years, describing themselves as prisoners in the Vatican, refusing to appear in public in the city and discouraging Italian Catholics from participating in national politics. This standoff was known as the Roman Question, and it left the papacy in the odd position of claiming a temporal sovereignty it did not exercise while resident in a state it did not recognise.

The pacts signed on 11 February 1929 ended it in three instruments. A treaty recognised the sovereignty of the Holy See over the Vatican City State, a territory of some forty-four hectares, and recognised the Italian state and Rome as its capital. A financial convention compensated the Holy See for the lost territories. A concordat regulated the position of the Catholic Church in Italy, providing for religious instruction in schools, civil recognition of church marriages, and the church's freedom in appointments.

The Roman Question was over. Vatican City remains the smallest sovereign state in the world, and its existence dates from this agreement rather than from any medieval grant.

The Italian signature on the pacts was Mussolini's, and the circumstances have been argued about ever since. The fascist government wanted the prestige of settling a question that had defeated liberal Italy for two generations, and wanted Catholic acquiescence in its consolidation of power. The Holy See wanted the guarantees the concordat offered for Catholic institutions and education, and a resolution of an anomaly that had become untenable.

Assessments differ sharply among historians. Some read the agreement as a hard-headed bargain that secured the church's institutional position and its independence, and note that the relationship deteriorated within two years, with a papal encyclical of 1931 protesting against the suppression of Catholic Action and asserting the church's right to educate. Others hold that the pacts conferred substantial legitimacy on the regime at a critical moment, and that the political neutrality the church accepted in Italy had costs that were paid later.

The concordat outlasted the regime that signed it. It was revised by agreement in 1984, ending Catholicism's status as the sole religion of the Italian state and altering the arrangements for religious education and church funding, while leaving the sovereignty of Vatican City untouched.

The atlas records the settlement and names the dispute about its politics rather than resolving it, because the historians who work on the period have not resolved it either.