the history of pi
The End of the Pius Wars
Joseph Bottum
Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope, and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes Against the Jews, and Susan Zuccotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece for his reformist Papal Sin, as did James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.
Meanwhile, the essays and occasional pieces were collected in such volumes as Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican, and The Holocaust and the Christian World, and The Vatican and the Holocaust, and Pope Pius XIIand the Holocaust, and Christian Responses to the Holocaust—and on, and on, until we seemed to be facing what the exasperated reviewer John Pawlikowski called “a virtual book-of-the-month club on institutional Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.”
The champions of Pius had their share of book-length innings as well—although, one might note, never from the same level of popular publisher as the attackers managed to find. In 1999 Pierre Blet produced Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican and got Paulist Press, a respectable but small Catholic house, to publish it in America. Ronald Rychlak finished his first-rate Hitler, the War, and the Pope, and the hardback was brought out by a press in Columbia, Missouri, known mostly for printing romance novels. For the paperback edition, Rychlak’s work was picked up by the book-publishing arm of the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor.
Joseph Bottum
Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler’s Pope, and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust. David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes Against the Jews, and Susan Zuccotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy. Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece for his reformist Papal Sin, as did James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword. So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair.
Meanwhile, the essays and occasional pieces were collected in such volumes as Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican, and The Holocaust and the Christian World, and The Vatican and the Holocaust, and Pope Pius XIIand the Holocaust, and Christian Responses to the Holocaust—and on, and on, until we seemed to be facing what the exasperated reviewer John Pawlikowski called “a virtual book-of-the-month club on institutional Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.”
The champions of Pius had their share of book-length innings as well—although, one might note, never from the same level of popular publisher as the attackers managed to find. In 1999 Pierre Blet produced Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican and got Paulist Press, a respectable but small Catholic house, to publish it in America. Ronald Rychlak finished his first-rate Hitler, the War, and the Pope, and the hardback was brought out by a press in Columbia, Missouri, known mostly for printing romance novels. For the paperback edition, Rychlak’s work was picked up by the book-publishing arm of the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor.