Joseph Bottum - The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII

The Pius War

The Pius War

Responses to the Critics of Pius XII

Edited by
Joseph Bottum and
David G. Dalin

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Copyright 2004 by Lexington Books
First paperback edition 2010

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The Pius war : responses to the critics of Pius XII / edited by Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Pius XII, Pope, 18761958. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (19391945) 3. World War, 19391945Religious aspectsCatholic Church. I. Bottum, J. II. Dalin, David G.

ISBN: 978-0-7391-0906-5 (cloth alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-7391-4567-7 (pbk. alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-7391-4596-8 (electronic)

Printed in the United States of America

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Joseph Bottum

The Pius War is over, more or less. There will still be a few additional volumes published here and there, another article or two from writers too slow off the mark to catch their moment. But, basically, in the great argument that has raged over the last few years about the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, the books have all been written, the reviews have all been printed, and the exchanges have all simmered down. It was a long and arduous struggle, vituperative and cruel, but, in the end, the defenders of Pius XII won every major battle. Along the way, they also lost the war.

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 Hitlers Pope , and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust . David Kertzer ended his accusations with 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 Constantines Sword . So, for that matter, did Daniel Gold-hagen 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 XII and 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 wellalthough, 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, Rychlaks work was picked up by the book-publishing arm of the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor .

Those are both fine presses in their way, and Rychlak has done well for them. But one can reasonably point out that Our Sunday Visitor is not quite at the level of distribution, advertising, and influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf, and Vikingthe large houses that issued the books against Pius. The religious commentator Philip Jenkins recently suggested this disparity in publisher sends a message that the mainstream view is the guilt of Pius XII, while praise for the pope belongs only to the cranks, nuts, and sectarians.

Jenkinss suggestion is worth considering. Still, no one can say Piuss supporters were squashed or censored. In just six years, Margherita Marchione managed five books in praise of the pope. The Thomistic philosopher and novelist Ralph McInerny, aggravated by the wave of slurs, issued a splenetic volume called The Defamation of Pope Pius XII , while Justus George Lawler (a writer best known in Catholic circles for his liberalism) penned a witty evisceration of Piuss critics called Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust . Jos Snchez added Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust , and a slew of German and Italian books might be mentioned as well, prompted, for the most part, by the popular visibility of the English-language criticisms even in Europe.

But it was primarily in book reviews and responses that the defenders of Pius XII fought out the warwhich is the reason that David Dalin and I decided to edit this book, The Pius War , a collection of reviews, deliberately chosen from both the scholarly and popular press.

Every pope precipitates biographies, hagiographies, and maledictions, like the dropping of the rain; it is part of the job to be much written about, and the works on Eugenio Pacelli that began to appear when he became pope in 1939 seem innumerable. (Well, actually, it turns out not: In the extraordinary, eighty-thousand-word annotated bibliography that concludes this volume, William Doino Jr. has actually attempted to enumerate them. It is a task for which he may be remitted years in Purgatory.) But no supporter has yet produced a book-length biography in the wake of the recent years of extended blame. Even Rychlaks Hitler, the War, and the Pope was essentially reactive, devoting a thirty-page epilogue to a catalogue of the errors in Cornwells book.

We have seen this pattern before. Rolf Hochhuths play The Deputy premiered on the German stage in Berlin in 1963, and its picture of a greedy pope, concerned only about Vatican finances and silent about the Holocaust, immediately caused a firestorm of comment from the world of public intellectuals. Everyone who was anyonethe literary critic Alfred Kazin and the philosopher Karl Jaspers, to take just two examplesfelt compelled to weigh in.

Hochhuth himself faded away when he tried to extend his censure to Winston Churchill, penning a play in 1967 that claimed Churchill had ordered the murder of the Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski and, later, the murder of the pilot who had crashed Sikorskis plane. Unbeknownst to Hochhuth, the pilot was, in fact, still alive, and he won a libel judgment that badly damaged the London theater that had staged the play. Thereafter, Hochhuth found it harder to get a hearingalthough, interestingly, the current notoriety of Pius XII seems to have resurrected the playwright to some degree, and in 2002 the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gravas released a movie version of The Deputy with the English title Amen (or Eyewitness , in other copies).