A Peculiar Treaty Form

Royce opens with a brief description of the signing of the Reich Concordat of 1933 as an example of the documented connection via a treaty between the Vatican and authoritarian rulers. He identifies salient literature purporting to describe the moral and institutional ambivalence of the Catholic Church amid the Axis Powers, notes the enduring controversy surrounding the record of Pius XII, and explains how this historiography, as such, is largely responsible for the liberal democratic suspicion of concordats, the international treaties of the Apostolic See. He concludes with a suggestion of what may be lacking from existing scholarship and poses an original research question.