Dubbi e cautele dei papi sulle «crociate» negli anni della guerra totale

Through the examination of several emblematic turning points—from the Great War to the wars in Ethiopia and Spain, up to World War II—the essay highlights how the perspective of the “crusade,” although not officially adopted by the Magisterium, continued to exert a strong symbolic mobilizing power, often escaping Rome's control. In an era marked by total and local wars, forced population displacements and genocides, political collapses and civil wars, a picture emerges in which the difficulty of deciphering the pope's words was not an accident, but one of the structural elements of the Holy See's global presence.