IF YOU HAVEN’T been able to read all the writing about Pius XII, the Catholic Church, and the Holocaust, you needn’t feel too bad. Not even scholars in the field have been able to keep up. By my count, there have been at least fourteen books on the subject in the last three years, with the threat of more to come.
Some of these run contrary to type. The very liberal Catholic Justus George Lawler, for instance, constructs a witty and learned defense against Pius’s attackers in his recent “Popes and Politics.” But mostly the books keep to their origins. John Cornwell detests John Paul II and contemporary Catholicism, so his book “Hitler’s Pope” is an unrelenting bash at Pius and the Church during World War II. Ralph McInerny is a conservative Catholic philosopher and mystery writer, so his “The Defamation of Pius XII” is a ceaseless defense. Garry Wills wants major reform in the Church today, so his “Papal Sin” extends the attack to include the entire history of Catholicism. James Carroll has extolled fashionable leftist causes since back in the days when he embarrassed his Air Force general father by preaching against the Vietnam War to a congregation of military officers, and guess which side Carroll’s book “Constantine’s Sword” comes down on?
