Holy War
About This Book
In 1935 Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, an independent state, in a war of conquest that set off a sequence of events leading to the Second World War. Historian Ian Campbell looks at the invasion through the relationship between two churches, arguing that the Italian Catholic hierarchy helped make it possible. Italian bishops blessed the campaign as a crusade against what they described as the world's second-oldest national Church. Cardinals and archbishops gathered Catholic Italy's support for Mussolini's armies by branding Ethiopian Christians heretics and schismatics and declaring that the attack was a task given by God. Campbell draws on thirty years of research to document the killing of thousands of clergy of the ancient Ethiopian Church and the burning and looting of hundreds of its old monasteries and churches. He also describes how a jihad against Ethiopian Christendom was stirred up and armed, on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. The final part of the book follows what happened after Italy surrendered to the Allies: the atrocities were pushed out of the historical record, and several of those most responsible were set on the path to sainthood.
ISBN: 9781787384774
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