Donald Dietrich

October, 2007

Donald J. Dietrich, Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition. Transaction Publishers: To order, call (888) 999-6778.

Reviewed by Kenneth D. Whitehead

Hardly anyone disagrees today about how bad Hitler and the Nazi regime were for the world. Besides unleashing World War II, Hitler had plans to exterminate entire peoples—plans which he proceeded to carry out before the eyes of a too-long unbelieving world in his Holocaust against the Jews and others considered subhuman, and which surely did mark some kind of evil low point even amidst all of the other violence and horrors that characterized the unhappy 20th century.

Nazism was especially bad for the Germans themselves. They lived under it longer than anyone else and suffered greatly from it, even though as a people they also furnished the principal means by which Hitler was able to inflict it upon the rest of the world for a time. German Catholics, in particular, were placed in the unenviable position of living under a government run by elements who only later finally came to be seen as criminals and madmen. While these criminals and madmen were in power, however, they constituted for German Catholics “the governing authorities” to whom St. Paul teaches Christians must be “subject,” since “there is no authority except from God and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). The Church has generally interpreted this teaching to mean that good Christians must normally obey the duly constituted “powers that be” where they live—but obviously not to the point of falling into sin themselves.

Thus, living under the Nazi regime did constitute a genuine moral dilemma for Catholics and for the Church. This was especially true at first, when it was not always as easy for people living at the time to see the evil of the regime as it is for us today looking back. As the regime’s evils unfolded, many of them could be interpreted, at least for a while, as mere aberrations or excesses. If the Western powers themselves went on for years trying to “do business with Hitler,” it is at least understandable that Christians living under the regime should perhaps have tried to do the same more extensively and for a longer period of time than we would consider to be wise or even moral today.

So while resisting pretty much from the outset some obvious evils—such as the Nazi takeover of the media, education, youth activities, and the like—the Church did also try to accommodate the regime in other ways. For example, the concordat which Pope Pius XI concluded with the Nazi regime in 1933—it was signed by the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII—is much criticized today, but nevertheless provided the legal basis for the Church to try to deal with the regime at all.

Donald J. Dietrich is a professor of theology at Boston College and a specialist in German Catholic history. He has written other books, notably on the subject of why some Catholics in Germany supported and others opposed the police state. In Human Rights and the Catholic Tradition, he focuses on the experience of German Catholics as they attempted, in the light of their faith, to deal with the barbarism of the Nazi era and the problems and conflicts brought about by Nazism and the Second World War.

One of the author’s basic premises is the incompatibility of Catholic moral teaching with Nazism. Hence, as the true nature of the regime became clearer, both the Church and individual Catholics generally became more opposed to it and more inclined to mount various forms of resistance to it (although the penalties for resistance of any kind could sometimes be drastic!). But these developments were neither automatic nor particularly rapid. As Dietrich notes, “until it was too late, most Germans…did not realize that the Nazis wanted something totally revolutionary.”

The incompatibility between the Catholic faith and the Nazi regime was real. Dietrich examines and documents how Catholic moral teaching came to be applied to what was actually going on in Germany. His main focus is not on what the Church or the Catholic bishops were doing or reacting to, but rather on what Catholics themselves were doing and reacting to. In particular, he covers in some detail how various Catholic theologians and thinkers gradually came to see, and hence to condemn, the evils being perpetrated by the Nazis.

Not only did these thinkers and theologians finally reject the tenets of the regime. In the course of the Nazi era, they succeeded in developing a new personal and existential theology of the human person—emphasizing the dignity of the human person—which became one of the pillars of the official teaching adopted on this subject by the Second Vatican Council. This new approach proved essential in enabling the Church to participate as a full partner in the debates and discussions concerning democracy and human rights that took place after World War II. Both the vocabulary and the concepts of this new theology were largely developed by German theologians in reaction to the brutality of the Nazis.  Some of these same German theologians also proved to be very influential at Vatican II.

The major achievement and importance of this book, in fact, lies in Dietrich’s survey and analysis of the thinking of a number of major Catholic thinkers and writers who developed this new theology in reaction to Nazism. They include such still well known figures as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, or, in the next generation, the Jesuits Gustav Gundlach and Karl Rahner as well as the latter’s student, Johannes B. Metz. The degree to which some of these writers at first thought they were obliged to come to some kind of accommodation with Nazism was a surprise to this reviewer—although, of course, that stance did not endure.

The author also includes chapters on Nazi terror, sometime Catholic ambivalence towards the Third Reich (especially at first), the scope of Christian resistance, and resistance in the daily life of German Catholics. Dietrich is not uncritical of the overall Catholic record. He does not think the Church opposed Nazism as vigorously as she should have; this was because she continued to seek “institutional survival” instead. “Nazi ideology was critiqued by the Church when it affected the institution…but accepted when it focused on nationalistic patriotism.”

“Since the churches sought institutional survival,” he further generalizes, “meaningful resistance did not spring from Christian churches but from their members’ attempts to uphold their faith.” He includes an interesting chapter on how average German Catholics in practice often did act on their Catholic and Christian principles, contrary to what the Nazi regime was urging.

Dietrich is especially critical of what he sees as the inadequacy of the general Catholic reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression against the Jews in particular. He thinks Catholics and the Church tended to see and condemn only “pagan racism,” and hence did not always take the full measure of the evil of the virulent and indeed lethal brand of anti-Semitism which, in the hands of Hitler’s minions, led to Auschwitz and the Holocaust against the Jews.

Though he is critical, however, Dietrich’s book is in no way an attack on Catholics or on the Church in the way that has become familiar in the anti-Pius XII books which have continued to appear; the authors of these books accuse the wartime pope as well as German Catholics of being sympathizers and even collaborators with the Hitler regime. On the contrary, Dietrich himself documents many instances of Catholic resistance even as he also judges that the Catholic resistance could have been stronger. Nevertheless, his own focus is so narrow in this book that he scarcely touches upon the Pius XII question at all, even though this would seem to be almost inescapably related to his own chosen subject matter. The period of German Catholic history with which he is concerned is exactly contemporaneous with the period during which the pope and the Church in Germany have been accused by a veritable legion of critics of having been “silent” in the face of Nazi persecution, if not actually enabling of it.

Not only is all this scarcely mentioned or even referred to, but Dietrich actually includes references to such anti-Pius authors as Susan Zuccotti, Michael Phayer, David Kertzer, and even Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, as if the biased, inaccurate, and agenda-driven “scholarship” of these writers merited serious consideration. Meanwhile he seems totally unaware of the considerable and formidable body of work produced by Catholics over the past decade in defense of the unjustly slandered wartime pope. This is a serious deficiency, considering the author’s subject matter.

Again with his narrow focus, Dietrich also seems oblivious to the fact that another Holocaust is currently going on before our very eyes in the current war on the unborn being waged by means of legalized abortion. He correctly draws the conclusion from the Nazi period that “dehumanization…does seem to be the crucial component needed for sanctioned murder.” Yet he also refers at one point to what he calls “the pro-choice culture of today” as if this were a wholly neutral fact and not another case of “state-sanctioned murder.” Yet the great value of this book lies in how it brings out the way German theologians grew in their understanding of the evil being done around them and reacted creatively. Should we not be doing the same in the face of the Holocaust that confronts us?

Kenneth D. Whitehead is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League. His survey of the recent books on the Pope Pius XII controversy can be found on the League’s website: www.catholicleague.org.

 

by Robert P. Lockwood

(1/2001)

When John Cornwell’s book Hitler’s Pope[1] was released in the United States in 1999 it generated intense media coverage. Cornwell painted Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) as virtually a silent collaborator in the face of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution.” While the alleged “silence” of Pius XII was central to media coverage, Cornwell’s thesis went deeper than that. There was a reason for the “papal silence” that had little to do with fear or even anti-Semitism (though he broadly hinted that Eugenio Pacelli was at best unsympathetic to Jews throughout his life).

According to Cornwell, Pope Pius XII willingly sacrificed the lives of Jews on the altar of papal power: “Pacelli’s failure to respond to the enormity of the Holocaust was more than a personal failure, it was a failure of the papal office itself and the prevailing culture of Catholicism. That failure was implicit in the rifts Catholicism created and sustained – between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the secular, the body and the soul, clergy and laity, the exclusive truth of Catholicism over all other confessions and faith. It was an essential feature of Pacelli’s ideology of papal power, moreover, that Catholics should abdicate, as Catholics, their social and political responsibility for what happened in the world and turn their gaze upward to the Holy Father and, beyond, to eternity.”[2]

Critics generally dismissed Cornwell’s book as sensationalism with little serious or original scholarship. Ronald J. Rychlak in Hitler, the War, and the Pope[3] effectively rebutted most of Cornwell’s major assertions. Cornwell’s aim was to discredit Pius XII, and through him, his successor, Pope John Paul II. Cornwell wrote that Pope John Paul II “has reinstated the ideology of papal power. Pluralism, he believes, can only lead to centrifugal fragmentation; only a strong Pope, ruling from the apex, can save the Church…Pacelli’s monolithic pyramidal model of the Church has once again reasserted itself.”[4]

It was striking that little attention was given to this important conclusion. Cornwell was using the Holocaust to advocate and argue for a particular position within the Church on the role of papal authority. His book was written as an advocacy paper against the leadership of Pope John Paul II within the Church and in favor of a particular so-called liberal vision of how the Church should function. It was surprising that few were struck, particularly Jewish commentators, by this use and abuse of the Holocaust for internal Church debate. In retrospect, it appears blasphemous to the memory of the millions slaughtered by the Nazis.

Similarly, Garry Wills in his recent book Papal Sin uses the Holocaust to score points in an attack on papal authority.[5] Wills’ book is a wide-ranging screed in opposition to myriad Catholic beliefs.[6] Papal Sin refers to what Wills calls the “structures of deceit” that he contends are inherent to the papacy. Wills charges that the Catholic Church exists in a system of lies, falsifications, and misrepresentations meant to artificially prop up papal authority. The whole structure and belief system of the Church, from sacramental and moral theology, to ecclesiology, Marian beliefs and the essential understanding of Christ’s death as atonement for the sins of mankind, are part of a fabricated “structure of deceit” according to Wills. In discussing the Nazis and the Holocaust, he essentially regurgitates Cornwell’s thesis. Wills argues that all the actions of Pope Pius XII during the years of Nazi power were calculated responses meant to defend papal authority. Again, like Cornwell, he uses the Holocaust as a means to put forth a particular anti-papal perspective within the Catholic Church. The horror of the Holocaust is utilized as a tool to make points in an internal Church debate.

The latest author to enter the field of the Church and the Holocaust is James Carroll. A former Paulist priest and award-winning novelist, Carroll’s new book is Constantine’s Sword.[7] Carroll’s stated goal is to present a “history” of the Church and the Jews to show the linkage between Catholic belief and the Nazi Holocaust. “Auschwitz, when seen in the links of causality, reveals that hatred of Jews has been no incidental anomaly but a central action of Christian history, reaching to the core of Christian character. Jew hatred’s perversion of the Gospel message launched a history, in other words, that achieved its climax in the Holocaust, an epiphany presented so starkly it cannot be denied…Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. The most sacred ‘thinking and acting’ of the Church as such must at last be called into question.”[8]

Cornwell, Wills and Carroll all state that they are practicing Catholics, and such is no doubt the reason all three books found publishers. It is not likely that mainstream publishers would have handled such works that evidenced what in a non-Catholic’s hands would have appeared to be anti-Catholic diatribes. The Catholicity of the authors, to the publishers, gives all three works legitimacy, if you will, that would not exist if the authors were non-Catholics. (And makes the charge of anti-Catholicism, on the surface, easy to refute: how could a book be anti-Catholic if the author is Catholic?). But more to the point, the authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism, which resulted in the Holocaust, is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism. We will note these later. However, it is important to understand that fundamentally, Carroll’s purpose is to put forth a laundry list of liberal bromides for Church reform and uses the context of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust to push this reform agenda, as both Wills and Cornwell. As Carroll himself observes, “Human memory is inevitably imprecise, and it is not uncommon for the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.”[9] That neatly summarizes the whole point of this book. While Carroll may be more astute than Cornwell, and less virulent than Wills, his objectives are the same. Which, again, appears to be bordering on a blasphemous use of the horror of the Holocaust for Church politicking.

Carroll’s book is described as a “history” of the Church and the Jews, but it is a great deal more personal rumination than serious historical, or theological, study. Throughout the book, the reader encounters a young Carroll with his mother, Carroll the student, Carroll’s trials and tribulations as a priest, Carroll the father, Carroll the husband, along with dying friends, childhood buddies, and various pilgrimages throughout Europe. Half of the action seems to take place as Carroll ruminates at various sidewalk cafes or churches.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent. He makes a single apparent reference to the Catechism of the Catholic Church[10] but calls it the “World Catechism.”[11] In its very early development stages some referred to the Catechism project as the “Universal Catechism,” but it was never called the “World Catechism.” And it has been in publication for eight years and a bestseller under the title, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This is not, therefore, a book that pays much attention to mainstream Catholic theological, scriptural or historical scholarship, nor attempts to portray and interpret Catholic beliefs with any degree of balance.

Constantine’s Sword, at the risk of understatement, is a lengthy book that actually argues little but avers grandly. Like Garry Wills in Papal Sin, Carroll makes assertions, backs them up when possible with assertions of others who share those assertions, then considers the matter settled. He asks is “it possible that the dominant memory of Christianity’s foundational events [reviewer’s note: the New Testament], a memory that features Jesus’ conflict with the Jews and then his followers’ conflict with the Jews…has enshrined a falsehood?” He then cites Crossan that, indeed such is the case and refers to various aspects of the New Testament as the “longest lie.”[12]

Carroll’s goals are worthy: an investigation into the source and history of anti-Jewish acts, atrocities and polemics within the 2000-year history of the Church and within the course of Western civilization. To deny that such a history exists would be to live a lie. Understanding that history, and knowing that it may have been a factor in allowing European Catholics and Protestants to turn a blind-eye toward Nazi atrocities against the Jews is to acknowledge a painful, and indeed horrifying, reality. This was central to the Vatican’s statement on the Shoah[13] and to that part of the papal apology of March 2000. But to make the assertion, as Carroll does (despite a few protestations that the Nazis did, in fact, carry out the “Final Solution,” not the Catholic Church) that Catholic theology, history and belief were fundamental and direct causes of the Holocaust is scurrilous and betrays another agenda more fully spelled-out in the concluding section of Constantine’s Sword when Carroll calls for his Third Vatican Council.

In recent years, of course, it has become part of conventional wisdom that Pius XII was silent in the face of the Holocaust and that the Catholic Church, despite saving more Jewish lives than any other entity at the time, was virtually a collaborator in the “Final Solution.” Why has this essentially baseless charge become accepted as fact? Robert George in an afterword to Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope, charges bluntly that “the myth that Pius XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’ lives and breathes on anti-Catholic bigotry. It can do so for the simple reason that anti-Catholicism remains ‘the anti-semitism of the intellectuals’…The defamatory falsehoods…originate in, and are to a large extent sustained as part of, alarger effort to undermine the credibility and weaken the moral and cultural influence of the Catholic Church. Why? Because the Catholic Church – and, within the Church, the institution of the papacy – is the single most potent force on the side of traditional morality in cultural conflicts with communism, utilitarianism, racial individualism, and other major secular ideologies.” ^[14]

It is also necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. That is a reality the chattering classes want to ignore. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

The roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitic racist frenzy, and that of European society as a whole, are found not in Catholic belief but in the cultural rejection of Catholic belief in the Enlightenment and pseudo-scientism of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th centuries. Rather than a continuum from a beginning in the New Testament, rabid racial anti-Semitism was born in the stew of competing 19^th century liberal ideologies of nationalism, racialism and eugenics, ideologies fought almost solely by the Church and that still have impact in the 21^st century. These were the views of the elite and enlightened, who scoffed at the Church and invented a hundred secular legends still with us today to show the Church as the enemy of this new, modern thinking. Carroll, of course, is not ignorant of the impact of these theories or that the Church stood almost alone in opposition to them. To Carroll, however, these theories were merely part of a whole. Though such theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other. “If Hitler’s paranoia about Jews was fueled by the grafting of the secular and neo-pagan racism of modernity to the stock of ancient and medieval Jew-hatred, why does that remove Christian history from the center of the story? The stock remains the stock. Modern secularists found a new language with which to slander Jews, but their impulse to do so – here is the point – was as rooted in the mystery of religion as any grand inquisitor’s.”[15] But it is that fundamental premise that is wrong. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not caused by religious differences between Catholics and Jews, or anti-Jewish outbursts during the First Crusade. His hatred was a fundamental rejection of both Christianity and Judaism. His hatred was of faith in anything but the Aryan race and the German nation-state. His beliefs and his rationalizations derived from the stew of anti-Catholic secularist philosophies, not Catholicism. He did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist and racist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll finds the foundation error of Christianity in the construction of the New Testament itself. The Gospels writers, he argues, laid the foundation for anti-Semitism in the very way they wrote the Gospels. They did this, Carroll charges, by de-emphasizing the Roman responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus in order to placate Roman authorities. The evangelists and New Testament writers also reflected in their scripture a division between the Jesus movement, (Carroll’s general term for nascent Christianity), and Jews who would not accept Jesus. Finally, in a phrase borrowed from Crossan, a “prophecy historicized,”[16] distorted their work. This means that seeing Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies led to outright falsehood about the life, teachings and, in particular, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The charge is that the story of Jesus was re-written and elements “invented” in order to tie Jesus more closely to messianic prophecies from the Old Testament. This is the “longest lie” of the New Testament, according to Carroll.

Of course, this is a far cry from mainstream post-Vatican II biblical scholarship, represented by the late Father Raymond Brown, that generally view the Gospel texts as fairly accurate recollections of the life and teachings of Jesus written by those close to Him in time. Carroll’s sources represent an extremist view of biblical scholarship and he bases his fundamental theory of Scriptural interpretation on the shaky – at best – conclusions of the Jesus Seminar activists. His whole thesis is based on invention and speculation 2,000 years after the fact.

There can be little doubt that a way of reading New Testament scripture could lead to anti-Jewish sentiment or, rather, be an excuse for anti-Jewish sentiment. This certainly happened. However, the roots of Christian-Jewish divisions are more clearly found in both the Christian understanding of who Jesus was – the promised Messiah – and in early Church history where Jews and Christians became deeply divided, than in Scriptural directives. False scriptural interpretation and misunderstanding have often infected Christian life (and was the source of the difficulty in the famous case of Galileo[17]) but that does not mean that Scripture is wrong. It means that the interpretation given by some to Scripture is wrong. As Carroll states at one point, if “Christian Jew-hatred did not originate with the Jew Jesus, no matter how it developed, then it is not essential to Christian faith.”[18] All would agree with that assessment. Unfortunately, Carroll himself does not. He believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment which, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll centers his discussion of the roots of alleged Catholic anti-Semitism on the Gospel accounts of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. “Scholars agree,” Carroll writes, “that within a relatively short period of time, the followers of Jesus had constructed an account of his last days that would become the source of each of the four Gospels’ Passion narratives…Where scholars differ – and this difference is relative to our attempt to name the ultimate source of anti-Jewish contempt – is on the question of whether the Passion story thus told is essentially a historical or literary composition.”[19] Clearly, we will find that Carroll believes that most of the Passion account reflects a “prophesized history” rather than “history remembered.”[20]   The theory goes that the “Jesus movement” of the first century, at war with the Pharisees for control of the “true Israel,” enveloped the Passion narrative in anti-Pharisee myths that would in turn establish an anti-Jewish contempt in Christianity. And so, Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best: “Immediately after Jesus’ death, the circle of his friends began to gather. Their love for him, instead of fading in his absence, quickened, opening into a potent love they felt for one another. Their gatherings were like those of a bereft circle, and they were built around lament, the reading of texts, silence, stories, food, drink, songs, more texts, poems – a changed sense of time and a repeated intuition that there was ‘one more member’ than could be counted. That intuition is what we call the Resurrection.” [21]This appears to be an understanding of the Resurrection for the brie and white wine set, rather than a Catholic and Christian understanding.

Constantine’s Sword is a slogging journey through the history of the Church over the two millennia. He touches down here and there when it suits his purpose. For example, while the treatment of the 12^th through the 16^th centuries is endless, he barely touches on the nearly eight hundred years from Constantine to the calling of the First Crusade – which leaves a rather sizeable gap in the alleged causal linkage of anti-Semitism in the Church from the Gospels to the Holocaust.

After meandering quickly through the age of the early Church fathers, Carroll arrives at what he sees as a decisive point: Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD. Briefly, Constantine was battling for eventual control of the Roman Empire. At the Milvian Bridge he would secure control of the Western Empire and, in 324, become sole emperor of the Roman Empire. Before the critical battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine claimed to have seen a vision of the Cross, and the Christian symbol was placed on his standards on the day of battle. After his victory, the Edict of Milan was issued ending the persecution of Christians. Ruling until his death in 337 AD, Constantine promoted Christianity as the religion of the Roman state and involved himself closely in internal Church affairs, though he was not actually baptized a Christian until a few days before his death. Though his ending of the Christian persecution was a critical point in Church history, his imperial involvement in Church affairs established a long-standing dispute over the rights of rulers in temporal and ecclesiastical affairs of the Church.

Carroll sees Constantine in a different light. Though his “political impact on Christianity is widely recognized,” Carroll writes, “his role as a shaper of its central religious idea is insufficiently appreciated.” Carroll claims that the “place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine.”[22] This would lead, according to Carroll, to a central theological tenet of Catholicism that wrongly focused on the death of Jesus as atonement and reparation for sin. Thus the concept of salvation would come to dominate Christian thinking as the meaning of the life of Jesus, His death on the Cross an act of atonement for sin. This was an intention that Jesus never had, according to Carroll.

At the same time, Constantine’s exercise of authority in the Church, particularly in the name of Christian unity, brought a heretofore unheard of emphasis on defined doctrinal orthodoxy. Church authority (which would evolve into papal absolutism) now entered the Christian scene as well.[23] Constantine, in Carroll’s view, was a very busy man. In any case, Carroll contends that the combination of these theological and legalistic forces centered on Constantine boded ill for the Jews who would be seen as the ones who “killed Christ” on a newly-emphasized cross, and whose failure to recognize their own Messiah was the ultimate heresy, the ultimate insult to Christian evangelization, and made them the first “dissenters” from unity of faith.

All this, of course, sounds a bit like a 16^th Century anti-Catholic tract during the Reformation, or one of Jack Chick’s contemporary pamphlets claiming Catholic descent from a Babylonian mystery religion. The over 275 years after Christ and preceding Constantine showed a steady development of an understanding of a distinct Christian faith as well as the development of a rich community, liturgical and theological life. Concerns over unity of belief are evident in the earliest years of the Church[24] and a bewildering list of various heresies addressed by the Church long pre-date Constantine. The anti-Nicene fathers of the Church, apologists such as St. Justin Martyr, and early theologians such as St. Irenaeus, who described a world wounded by Adam’s sin but healed in Jesus, show an early Church developing an ordered set of beliefs rooted in Christ, distinct liturgy, and an insistence on Christ as the means toward salvation and eternal life. The theological concept of Christ’s atonement for sins was hardly a late-developing concept ingeniously inserted into Catholic life by a theologically illiterate Roman emperor, but is taught directly in the New Testament and in the writings of the early Church fathers. Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll’s central thesis is that emphasis on the Cross as both a form of devotion and source for a theological understanding of the Christian message – enhanced by the legend of Constantine’s mother Helena finding the True Cross in Jerusalem – had a devastating impact on Christian self-understanding and on the attitude the Church would develop toward the Jews. Seeing the death of Jesus as central to God’s redemptive plan, the Cross ushered in a “teaching of contempt” toward Jews, a teaching that will lead over the centuries to the Nazi Final Solution. The actual destruction of the Jews once Christianity is backed by Roman imperial power, Carroll contends, is only prevented by the theological intervention of St. Augustine (354-430). Augustine would argue in The City of God that Jews had a specific role in God’s saving plan in that “a continuing Judaism would serve as a source of authenticity for the prophecy-based claims of Christianity.”[25] At the end of the Sixth Century, Pope Gregory the Great would forbid any violence against Jews. Carroll argues that with the foundational theology of contempt established, however, the seeds of anti-Semitism had been planted by the Church, such official proclamations not withstanding.

It can be argued, of course, that the opposite holds true. Racial anti-Semitism had existed in the Roman Empire long before Christianity was a majority faith or even a known faith distinct from Judaism. Particularly with the Jewish Diaspora from the Holy Land throughout the Empire after their revolution was defeated by Roman soldiers in 70 AD and the temple destroyed, the Jews were viewed as a people apart. By the practices tied to their faith that reinforced their separateness from Roman society, the Jewish people were considered a distinct and disliked racial minority. Anti-Jewish attitudes were certainly inherited among Christians as the infant Church more aggressively attracted non-Jews to the burgeoning faith. But to claim that the reason for anti-Jewish attitudes in Western culture was a result of Christian Scripture and Christian theology requires that a history of anti-Semitism older than Christianity be ignored.

The pagan faiths disappeared over the centuries from Constantine to Pope Gregory the Great as the Roman world became essentially Christian. Judaism, however, did not disappear. Carroll suggests that the reason for this is an inherent anti-Semitism within Christianity that required the continued existence of the Jews. The logic doesn’t hold. He blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

After establishing his central premise – that Christianity is anti-Semitic in its foundational texts and that Constantine by his centralizing notions and “theology of the Cross” formalized anti-Semitism within the Church’s structure and devotion – Carroll proceeds to describe what he sees as a linkage through history of the Church to the Final Solution by portraying anti-Jewish actions in European history. Leaping ahead from Augustine to the Crusades 700 years later, where Jews were violently attacked, (attacks consistently condemned by the popes and the hierarchy), Carroll claims a “miscarried cult of the cross is ubiquitous in this story, from Milvian Bride to Auschwitz. The ‘way of the cross,’ which is another way of saying ‘crusade,’ is the definitive epiphany, laying bear the meaning of what went before and what went after, even to our own time.”[26]

Though Carroll’s book can bend a coffee table at 756 pages, his litany of anti-Jewish incidents in Western history is spotty and lacking historical nuance. He touches on various events within Western history such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Plague, the Council of Trent and its aftermath, the French Revolution, the Dreyfus Affair, the Kulturkampf and concludes, actually quite briefly, with the Holocaust. Throughout these diverse and complicated historical trends and events, he sees a theology of the Cross and Church teaching on the atonement as being the dominant factor in generating anti-Jewish violence and anti-Semitic racism. This just doesn’t hold to be the causative factor that Carroll alleges in these complicated events.

Serious historians, for example, acknowledge an upswing in anti-Jewish actions in parts of Europe at the time of the calling for the First Crusade in 1096. The reasons given by historians for this development vary. Some point toward resentment that Jews were primarily the moneylenders of an infant capitalist Europe as the Church taught money lending for interest sinful among Christians. Others point to a growing urbanization that was disrupting old forms of civil life. Still others have pointed to a re-born sense of both evangelization and conformity within society. Led by a stronger papacy, the Church saw its mission to sanctifying the world through a combination of the Church’s need to reform its institutional life, free itself from control by secular lords, and to build a Christian society. There was also the growing fear that, “Those who dissented from belief or behaved in a manner that was explicitly defined as un-Christian appeared no longer as erring souls in a temptation-filled world, but as subverters of the world’s new course…”[27] This certainly played a role in enhancing a view of the Jews as outsiders in the creation of the Christian world.

Carroll, however, attributes the rise in anti-Jewish outbreaks directly with the Crusades and its emphasis on the Cross. While certainly crusading rhetoric involved at times slander of Jews – and violent anti-Jewish outbursts – the era was far more complicated than Carroll’s simplistic notion of cause and effect. Certainly, there was a renewed emphasis on evangelization and religious conformity. But the primary concern of the era for the Church in Europe was internal reform that would lead to spiritual awakening among Christians. Additionally, a stronger papacy would lead to greater protection – rather than a greater threat – for the Jewish population of Europe. The Church and the hierarchy roundly condemned attacks on Jews by the first crusaders. Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, [28] the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks. (This would be clearly seen in the Reformation where anti-Semitism exploded in Protestant Germany where the local church was under the complete control of local authorities.)

Carroll sees the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, under Pope Innocent III, as another part of the linkage between the early Church and the Holocaust. Citing Hans Kung’s interpretation, he sees the council as fundamentally changing the situation of the Jews both legally and theologically.[29] The Council was a historic event in Church history, solidifying two centuries of Church reform. The Council “tackled an enormous range of issues, all of them practical: the establishment of orthodox teaching, especially on the sacraments – this was the Council which defined the doctrine of Transubstantiation – new regulations requiring every Christian to get to confession and communion at least once a year, improvements in record-keeping in Church courts…rules for the better discharge of episcopal duties and especially preaching ands catechizing in the language of the people, and reform of the monasteries. Behind much of this the distinctive concerns of the Pope can be detected, and the Council was the high point of the medieval papacy’s involvement with and promotion of the best reforming energies in the Church at large.”[30]

Carroll points out that certain conciliar decrees, however, placed restrictions on Jews and such legislation did isolate the Jewish community more formally. Among the restrictions the Council asked for was a special form of dress so that Jews could be more clearly identified, that Jews should be forbidden to go out during Holy Week and that they be forbidden from holding public office. It is clear that in such anti-Jewish regulations, Church leadership was reflecting some of the worst aspects of contemporary culture. At the same time, it is also clear that any number of such regulations were also intended – from the perspective of the time – to protect Jews from attacks. The Holy Week legislation, for example, was clearly intended for their protection, as Holy Week became in certain areas a time for attacks on Jews.

Carroll was more concerned, however, that this Council clearly showed the “universalist absolutism of Roman Catholic claims” to the teaching of Christ which “is causally related to the unleashing of Catholic anti-Judaism.”[31] In other words, Carroll sees a stronger Church, with a stronger papacy and with certitude of belief as generating anti-Semitism because Jews are “the original dissenters.” Yet, such a causal link is never established. In fact, greater centralization of the Church would generally result in a lessening of anti-Jewish practices. As will be seen in the discussion of the Spanish Inquisition, severe anti-Jewish activities took place more often where papal authority was co-opted by local authorities, or where Church authority had succumbed to secular authority. For example, anti-Jewish actions increased during the Plague years of the 14^th century where Church authority was less effective. “Blood libel” stories had evolved, claiming that Jews would sacrifice Christian children, or that Jews conspired to poison wells. The papacy quickly condemned such stories, but they persisted in different areas by local legend. Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^thCentury, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

Carroll, of course, does not see the anti-Jewish legislative aspects of the Lateran Council as its most damaging aspects. Papal authority and “Catholic absolutism” are his greater concerns. And most important, he sees the Council as firmly establishing in Catholic thinking the theological concept of Christ’s death as atonement for sin. To Carroll’s thinking, this central Catholic belief is fundamental to anti-Jewish attitudes as the “longest lie” created by New Testament writers. What Carroll does not concede, however, is that central to the concept of Christ’s atonement in Catholic belief is that He died for the sins of all mankind. Proper understanding of that belief means, as has been understood in Catholic doctrine since the days of the early Church fathers, that Christ died because of sin. The concept of “Jewish deicide” – that the Jews “killed” Christ – is contradictory to that essential Catholic belief. Christ died, according to ancient Catholic belief, because of the sins of all, not the actions of a few.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised. His claim that a “theology of atonement” generated anti-Semitism is self-contradicting, as such an understanding removed any concept of alleged Jewish “guilt” in the death of Christ by teaching that all mankind was guilty.

When Carroll moves on to discussion of the Inquisition he falls into the historical trap of seeing the Inquisition both as a consistent papal-dominated institution that existed in a clear line from the 13^th century virtually to the mid 20^th century, as he considers his one encounter with the Index of Forbidden Books in the seminary as “my inquisition.”[32]Carroll states that the Inquisition was the means that “Catholic medieval absolutism exacerbated anti-Jewish religious hatred, fueled new levels of violence, and sponsored an even more hysterical conversionism, which, when up against continued Jewish resistance, finally led to modern anti-Semitic racism.”[33]

 To speak of the Inquisition fails to understand that no such individual universal entity existed. The Inquisition as a single unified court system directly responsible to the pope and controlled solely by the papacy is a historical fiction. Even within the Papal States in the 16^th century, the papacy had difficulty maintaining effective control over local inquisitions. The local church in alliance with local secular authority usually controlled inquisitorial courts. Though it began in the 13^th century as a papal-designated juridical system to remove “heresy-hunting” from control of the mob or secular authorities, it evolved rather quickly as a device of the local church and secular authorities to address local, and later national or dynastic goals. There were many inquisitions, rather than a singular “Inquisition.”

The many inquisitions that took place existed sporadically in different regions, at different times, and to meet different local needs. The medieval inquisition barely existed, for example, in Spain and Portugal. For hundreds of years, the inquisition in many places existed only sporadically, if at all. In the 16^th century, it existed primarily in Spain, Portugal, the Papal States and other Italian cities. It existed sporadically – dominated by the state – in France and, early, in England.

Carroll’s argument is that the Spanish Inquisition created “racial” anti-Semitism and, as such, was generated by the Church and linked directly to Nazism. Spanish anti-Semitism was not a religious prejudice, but a racial one. It derived from the success in Spanish culture of Jewish converts to Catholicism and the goal of a racially unified Iberian peninsula, free of the “foreign” Muslims and Jews. In 1391, anti-Jewish riots swept through Spain. More religious than racial – though this has been disputed – these riots led to major forced conversions of Jews to Christianity. These Jewish converts would be called conversos or New Chistians, to distinguish them from traditional Christian families. Theconverso identity would remain with such families for generations.

Converso families were welcomed into a full participation in Spanish society not available to Jews and they would soon become leaders in government, science, business and the Church. Though it was legislated in certain areas that those forced to convert could return to their own religion, many did not. These converso families obviously faced the scorn of those who remained Jews. At the same time, however, over the years the Old Christians saw them as social-climbing opportunists. They claimed that they secretly maintained the faith of their forefathers. It would be complaints about these alleged “secret Jews” that would lead to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition.[34] Curiously, Carroll argues, with no documentation, that most of these converts remained “secret” Jews. It is a curious argument because it accepts as fact the reason given for Spanish persecution of the Jews. In fact, after a generation, most of these converts were as Catholic as the Old Christians. But racial prejudice against their Jewish ethnic roots remained. They were considered racially apart. The children’s children of these converted Jews were not considered “pure” Spaniards and would become the primary target of the Spanish Inquisition.

Carroll points out that in 1449, the city council of Toledo passed an ordinance decreeing that no converso of Jewish descent may hold office. Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) responded furiously, excommunicating the drafters of the regulation. He wrote that “all Catholics are one body in Christ according to the teaching of our faith.” The King of Castile, however, formally approved the regulation.

“If the beginning of what we think of as modern antisemitism can be located anywhere, it is here,” Carroll writes. “The shift from religious definition of Jewishness to a racial one is perhaps the most decisive in this long narrative, and its fault lines, reaching into the consciousness of Western civilization, will define the moral geography of the modern age. The Church’s worry, for example, that its very own conversos were corrupting Christians would find a near permanent resonance in the modern European fantasy of Jews as parasites – successful and assimilated, but feeding on the host society. The ultimate example of this image would emerge in Germany, of course, but the fear that led Nazis to regard Jews as bloodsuckers to be excised was anticipated by the Iberian suspicion that Jews were more to be feared as assimilated insiders than as dissenting outsiders.”[35]

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism. And that is why Pope Nicholas, and successor popes, would deplore the actions of the Spanish Inquisition against the conversos. In Rome, it was viewed not as an attempt to root out heresy, but as a means to attack generations of successful coverts.

In March 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand ordered the expulsion – or conversion – of all remaining Jews in Spain. Many conversos had already fled to Rome and the Papal States where they would be free of persecution. Those who remained Jews fled to Rome as well, known as the most tolerant of European cities toward Jews. The intent of the declaration of expulsion was more religious than racial, as Jewish conversion was certainly the intent, not “the beginning of a strategy of elimination”[36] as Carroll contends. While many Jews fled, a large number converted, thus aggravating the popular picture of secret Judaizers within the Christian community of Spain. Up through 1530, the primary activity of the inquisition in Spain would be aimed at pursuingconversos. The same would be true from 1650 to 1720. While its activities declined thereafter, the inquisition continued to exist in Spain until its final abolition in 1824.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”[37]

If there is a connection between the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust generated by the German Nazis it is in the racial hatred that motivated both. It is not, however, to be found in a connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Germany. And it is certainly not to be found in the faith whose leadership spoke out forcefully against the attacks on theconversos, or a theology that argued that conversion knew no racial boundaries.

Carroll leaps from the early Spanish Inquisition to the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called by the Church in response to the Reformation. He points out that the Council had very little to say about the Jews. The Council primarily concerned itself with Church renewal in light of the Reformation and defending clear Catholic teaching in response to Protestant attacks. Among those clear Catholic teachings confirmed, as Carroll points out, was that “responsibility for the death of Jesus belonged to sinners – to all persons, that is, in their having sinned. The old question Who killed Jesus? Was explicitly answered: Human sinners did.”[38] The declaration by Trent was another contradiction of what Carroll asserts throughout his book: that the theology of the atonement created anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for the death of Jesus and led directly to the Holocaust.

But Carroll argues that if “this perception had maintained its firm hold on the moral imagination of Christians, the history of Jews would be quite different. That something else happened, beginning with the Gospels’ own scapegoating of Jews, only proves Trent’s point that ‘we’ are sinners.”[39] Perhaps, however, the exact opposite is true. The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

The inquisition in Rome was established during the Reformation period and has generally been regarded by historians as one of the more lax courts. The inquisition court in Rome should not be understood as a universal court, but as one of the inquisition courts within the Papal States. As in most regions, the local Roman court focused primarily on clergy wrongs and on issues of lifestyle – adultery, drunkenness and other forms of impropriety as Rome did not have a racial problem withconversos, [40] and the Inquisition itself had nothing to do with the Jewish population. Pope Paul III (1534-1549) had authorized the inquisition in Rome as a means of protecting the Church there from the influence of the Reformation in 1542. He was a protector of the Jews who banned various anti-Jewish activities. Pope Paul IV (1555-1559), however, had a short but troubled reign. It was Pope Paul IV who established the separate Jewish ghetto in Rome, enforced segregationist regulations on Jews and, mistakenly, affirmed the “blood purity” statute in Toledo that had rightly been condemned by previous pontiffs. Carroll sees both events as a definitive sign of the Church embracing, despite the reforms of Trent, a definitive anti-Semitic stance, particularly in its seeming endorsement of the Spanish racial policy of limpieza de sangre aimed at the conversofamilies of Jewish ethnic heritage. Carroll explains that the “culture-wide trauma of the Reformation was part of what prompted the shift in papal strategy toward the Jews,”[41] a shift that Carroll sees as momentous.

Limpieza de sangre was part of the “blood purity” restrictions on Jews who had converted to Catholicism and limited their ability to hold public office or offices within Spain. This was the ugly racial element that had infected Spanish society. As we have seen, Pope Nicholas V rightly condemned limpieza vociferously. Pope Paul IV as a cardinal “had singlemindely devoted his whole life to reform of the Church…(yet) under Paul IV reform took on a darker more fearful character. Creativity was distrusted as a dangerous innovation, theological energies were diverted into the suppression of error rather than the exploration of truth. Catholicism was identified with reaction…For the rest of the Tridentine era, Catholic Reformation would move between those poles, and it would be the task of the popes to manage the resulting tensions.”[42]Depending on the perspective of the individual pontiff, restrictions on Jewish life within the Roman ghetto would wax and wane. His decision on limpieza, however, was reversed and generally abandoned from Catholic life outside of Spain. A few orders with strong Spanish roots, such as the Jesuits, maintained a form oflimpieza. But no serious student of history would make the claim that this unique Spanish cultural prejudice reflected overall Church practice. Carroll himself recognizes that the anti-Jewish racial theories of the 19^th Century that created the anti-Semitism of the Nazis had no relationship to Spanish limpieza.

Pope Paul IV’s pontificate was short. New popes would reverse his policies – his approval of limpieza was quickly abandoned – and treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book; nor were there theologically infallible papal statements of defining Catholic belief. The Jewish ghetto in Rome is a dark spot on Church history. The long-held notion that popes must be rulers of an independent Papal States or the papacy would be dominated by secular rulers, while theoretically understandable and with historical roots from earlier centuries, placed popes in the difficult position of holding secular authority. Not a few of them exercised that secular authority poorly. That ended in 1870 when Italian nationalist troops occupied the city as “liberators.” But within a generation after, that nationalist tide would also result in the emergence of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascist state.

Carroll marches quickly through the early Enlightenment, represented by Voltaire, touches on Spinoza and the French Revolution, then on to Vatican I (1869-1870) and the declaration of papal infallibility. “Liberalism and modernism,” Carroll writes, “were seen as bearing the fruits of the destruction of civilization itself, and the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the twentieth century. There was much in the new age the Church was right to suspect, so the Catholic strategy of arming the leader of the Church with the spiritual mace of infallibility made some sense.”[43]

His understanding of the definition of papal infallibility as conferred on the papacy in 1870 is not, of course, the definition given by the Council. Vatican I dealt with the office of the papacy and the nature of papal authority because these issues were at the very center of the life of the Church in the 19^th Century. The emergence of the modern liberal states had reconfirmed to many within the Church the vital importance of the ancient belief of the central authority of the bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter. There were divisions over such a definition, however. Some argued that it would be inopportune to make such a definition in the turmoil of the 19^th Century, while others wanted papal infallibility applied to virtually everything the pope said or wrote. The accusation is made that a definition of papal infallibility was demanded by Pope Pius IX and forced on an unwilling Council by papal pressure, curial conspiracies, and squelched debate. However, debate went on for months, and the final definition of papal infallibility fell far short of the desires of the “ultramontanes” who wanted an elevated definition of infallibility. The fact was that consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

Carroll sees the definition of papal infallibility as a “pivotal event” for his story as “the Church’s relationship to the modern fate of the Jews is entertwined, in a particular way, with efforts to extend the political power of the papacy.”[44] Carroll will therefore lock himself in early to the Cornwell thesis that the sole motivation of Pius XII in World War II was the extension of papal power. At the same time, there is Carroll’s blithe acknowledgement of what was taking place in the 19^th Century: “the dark side of the new order would make itself all too clear in the 20^th century.” That is Carroll’s primary reference to what in fact was going on in European thought in the 19^th Century and what it would lead to in the 20^th Century.

The culture of thought in the 19^th Century – secularism, communism, racialism and nationalism – would lead to the First World War, the Communist revolution in Russia, Stalin’s pogroms, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust. That is the dark side to which Carroll refers. It also makes a mockery of his essential argument that the anti-Semitism that played its own role in so much of this horror was the creation of the Church, or sustained by the Church. The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^th century horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^th century. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book. The fundamental blasphemy is that he would do so in order to put forth a meager list of liberal bromides for alleged Church reform.

Carroll approaches the age of Pius XII and the Holocaust itself after winding his way through the German Kulturkampf and the Dreyfus affair in France. He adds nothing new to his story in either recital. Successful Catholic action in response to the Kulturkampf is seen as setting what could have been a standard in reaction to Hitler, forgetting that Bismarck was not Hitler and the Germany of 1870 was not the Nazi Germany of 1933. The Dreyfus affair – where a Jewish officer in the French army was convicted of treason – was a high-profile case of anti-Semitism within the French army. Carroll uses it to excorciate the French Catholic newspaper “La Croix.” The newspaper, operated by a religious order, engaged in hot anti-Jewish rhetoric during the Dreyfus affair. While Carroll points to this as symbolizing the entrenched nature of Catholic anti-Semitism, it far more reflected a turn-of-the-century Europe where anti-Semitism was increasing as the influence of the Church decreased in the modern secular states and “modern” thought predominated.

The Church and Hitlerism is confined in Carroll’s book to less than 70 pages, about the same length that he gives to his suggestions for Church reform. He begins by restating his essential charge that “(h)owever modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Jew-hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church’s most solemnly held ideology – its theology.”[45] This is, of course, a gross mis-reading of history. Hitler and Nazism were created by a rampant social Darwinism, an ubiquitous European belief that it was a virtual biological imperative that the lower classes be dominated by their racial superiors, the ideology of imperialism, the birth of scientism that would dispel the “myths” of religion, the campaign to radically excise the Church from public life, the denial of the sacredness of the individual for the good of the State or, as in communism, the good of the class, the creation of the myth of the Nitzsche-like Superman who could undertake any evil for the good of his race, and the replacement of Christianity with neo-paganism. The soil and poisoned groundwater for these Nazi aberrations were the views of 19^th century liberalism that were the conventional wisdom of the times. The Catholic Church – its theology – was viewed as the enemy of this modern thought. The Church was not the progenitor of the beliefs that created Nazism. It was one of the last remaining bulwarks in Europe against it. The Nazis killed the Jews. For reasons of an internal agenda against the Church, Carroll would prefer to dismiss that, like a revisionist who would claim the Holocaust never took place, and shift the blame to the Church for his own agenda.

As noted earlier, Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. Like Cornwell, he sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops. He sees the Concordat that Cardinal Pacelli negotiated with Hitler as giving a first blessing and recognition to the regime (which forgets that prior to the concordat, Hitler had concluded a peace agreement with the western powers, including France and Great Britain, called the Four-Power Pact. and a similar agreement was concluded between Hitler and the Protestant churches). Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll doesn’t really spend much time on the Holocaust itself or a detailed look at the entire World War and how the Church responded.[46]He states that from the onset of Nazism, the “Church, for its part, had come to a decision it would stick with, almost without exception, — that the ‘wretched fate’ of the Jews was unconnected to its own fate, or that of anyone else.”[47] Carroll says such things without any necessity for proving that was the Church’s policy. The first formal protest filed by the Vatican under the concordat was against the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. In 1937, Pope Pius XI issued “Mit brennender sorge,” which spoke out forcefully against Nazi racist policy. It assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing, however, with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis. This is not careful scholarship. This is simply a very long anti-Catholic essay.

Carroll concludes his treatment of the Holocaust by the need to go after the death of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who was murdered in the Holocaust and declared a saint by Pope John Paul II. Echoing Garry Wills, he sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to “reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism.”[48] Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Or anybody within Catholic circles for that matter. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

The last section of Carroll’s book begins immediately after the degradation of the canonization of Edith Stein. This is when we find out the true purpose of Carroll’s lengthy attack on the New Testament and the Christian belief in Christ’s passion and death as atonement for sin. This is why he has attempted to set up the Church as the ultimate cause of the Holocaust, while inventing a simplistic history of the Church as the progenitor of an anti-Semitism that preceded its existence. He sees its essential theology as anti-Semitic, its leadership only interested in power. It allowed the Jews to be slaughtered in the Holocaust because it simply didn’t care, and the Church was wrong – fundamentally – in the very Scriptures of the New Testament that is its heart and soul. If anyone else truly believed this, he or she would abandon the Church. Carroll would rather stick around to argue papal infallibility, women’s ordination and priestly celibacy.

Carroll describes the Second Vatican Council as the “beginning of the long-overdue demise of Constantinian imperial Catholicism, as it had been shaped by a medieval papalism hardened in the fires of the Counter-Reformation…The Church’s failure in relation to Adolf Hitler was only a symptom of the ecclesiastical cancer Pope John was attempting to treat.”[49] This is a ludicrous picture of the intent of the Council and of Pope John XXIII’s view of the Church. Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council and was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

Of course, Carroll – much like Garry Wills – argues that while the Council was a historic beginning, it was undermined by Pope Paul VI, a “devoted factotum to Pius XII.”[50] Of Pope Paul VI: “His was the first effort to turn back the tide of Church reform that the Vatican Council initiated, and that program of medieval restoration has been vigorously continued by Pope John Paul II.” [51]Of course, Carroll argues that hopes were too high for Vatican II. A Church incapable of allowing priests to marry or couples to practice contraception is hardly ready for the reform he demands. He calls for a Third Vatican Council that would address the following agenda:

First, the “offensive character (of the New Testament) is part of what the Church must not only admit but to claim. The anti-Jewish texts of the New Testament show that the Church, even in its first generation, was capable of betraying the message of Jesus, establishing once and for all that ‘the Church as such’ can sin.”[52] The Church must understand the New Testament narratives are invented and that any “Christian proclamation that says that redemption, grace, perfection, whatever you call it, has already come is unbelievable on its face.”[53]

Second, Vatican III will abandon the ethos of Constantinian imperial power and the “primary-enforcing ideas of Roman supremacy and papal infallibility.”[54] The “doctrine of papal infallibility amounts to the low point in the long story of patriarchy, a legitimation of Church exceptionalism, a reversal of the meaning that Jesus gave to ministry, and, finally, an abuse of power.”[55]

Third, Vatican III should initiate a “new Christology” that abandons concepts such as the immortality of the soul, messiahship of Jesus, Christ’s death as atonement for sin, the belief that Jesus is the only means of salvation, as well as the very concept of salvation. (“The coming of Jesus was for the purpose of revelation, nor salvation – revelation, that is, that we are already saved.”[56]) This will allow the Church “to embrace a pluralism of belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God.”[57]

Fourth, the Church in Vatican III will abandon “its internal commitment to methods that undergird totalitarianism”[58] In addition, of course, to abandoning such things as excommunication, bannings, censorship and anathemas, this means the Church must also abandon “the idea that there is one objective and absolute truth, and that its custodian is the Church.”[59] The papal apology, Carroll writes, “did not confront the implications of that still maintained idea of truth” and that universal claims “for Jesus as the one objective and absolute truth” must be abandoned. “Vatican III must retrieve for the Church the deep-seated intuition that mystery is at the core of existence, that truth is elusive, that God is greater than religion.”[60] Bishops should be chosen by the people, the whole clerical caste eradicated, and women ordained (though ordination to exactly what is never clarified).

Fifth, and only after the prior four agenda items are completed, the Church must have a complete act of repentance, a repentance of a “failed and sinful Church.”[61]

Rather clearly, the objective solution Carroll has in mind already exists: Unitarianism.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. I do not doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

Much like Wills found it necessary to re-state that he is Catholic no matter what the positions he holds, Carroll concludes this epic with a personal plea for his Catholicity no matter what he believes. Though confessing his shame about his Catholicity, he confesses as well his own collusion in this historic record of the Church that “sanctified the hatred of the Jews.”[62]Despite that, he states that the “most deadly prospect at this point would be to find myself alienated from the community that has been the focus of my ‘backward glance.’”[63]

Perhaps acknowledging that his central thesis is flawed can relieve those fears. No one can argue that members of the Church throughout the centuries, going to the highest leadership within the Church, engaged and endorsed at times in anti-Jewish words, sentiments and actions. At the very same time, many within the Church officially condemned such actions and it was the very Church leadership that Carroll hopes to be abandoned that was most vociferous in that condemnation. It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust. Nazism and the Nazis killed the Jews, and the philosophies that created them still bubble just below the surface. But not in the Catholic Church. Rather, they persist in a vicious secularism and pseudo-scientism that divorces faith from modernity, believes that truth cannot be known, and attempts to convince mankind that it is its own god.

 

SUMMARY POINTS

John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope, Garry Wills in Papal Sinand now James Carroll in Constantine’s Sword all identify themselves as Catholic. The authors’ Catholic identity gives a fundamental agenda to the collective works. In all three works, the essential issues dealt with are used to lay out an internal agenda within Catholicism. While Cornwell and Wills focus primarily on the role of papal authority, Carroll both includes and expands on that theme to question fundamental Catholic beliefs.

Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism which resulted in the Holocaust is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christian expressions of belief, namely the Gospel accounts themselves. He concludes his book with a call for a third Vatican Council to make a series of changes in basic Catholic belief that he envisions purging the Church of this alleged fundamental anti-Semitism.

Carroll’s main sources from a Catholic perspective are disaffected theologians such as Hans Kung and Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Scriptural scholars like John Dominic Crossan from the Jesus Seminar. His primary source on the Church and the Holocaust, for example, is Cornwell’sHitler’s Pope, which he acknowledges in a footnote to have been “controversial,” but that he had reviewed it favorably. His knowledge – or at least his citation – of mainstream Catholic sources is limited to non-existent.

It is necessary to make the Church the cause of the Holocaust because so much of what passes as contemporary enlightened thought and views have their roots not in Catholicism or Christianity, but in the very secular ideologies that laid the true foundation for the Holocaust. So-called enlightened views on euthanasia or abortion, for example, find their philosophical origins in late 19^th century racial eugenics that propagated Hitler’s attack on the Jews. To scapegoat the Catholic Church as the cause of the Holocaust makes a secular examination of conscience unnecessary.

Though theories that led to and created the Holocaust were a fundamental rejection of thousands of years of Judaic and Christian thought, Carroll sees them differently. He sees these enlightenment theories as ideas that grew naturally from Christian origins, rather than an outright rejection. One was merely grafted on the other.

Hitler did not approach the world with a mode of thinking and belief rooted in the 1,900 years of Western civilization. Rather, he was rooted in the 150 years of elitist racist and nationalist thought that had abandoned the Judeo-Christian roots of Western civilization.

Carroll believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment that, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture. He sees anti-Semitism as fundamental to the Christian message as presented in the New Testament.

Carroll dismisses a good part of the historicity of the Gospel accounts and of the whole concept that Jesus died on the cross as a saving act of atonement for mankind. As to the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Carroll is circumspect at best.

Constantine certainly had a strong impact on the early Church that would last for centuries. But Carroll attributes to him far too much impact in the areas of theology, ecclesiology, doctrinal theology and the Church’s hierarchical structure. These were areas of the Church developing for two centuries prior to Constantine and did not spring fully born from a Roman emperor with only a minimal understanding of the faith he embraced to under gird his Empire.

Carroll blames the Church for a cultural phenomenon that preceded it, and points to confirmation in the fact that the Church tried to limit both the severity and violence of anti-Jewish acts through the intervention of Augustine and the proclamation of Gregory the Great. The Jews survived the first thousand years of Christianity by the strength of their own faith and because the Church did not attempt to forcefully eradicate their faith. If Carroll’s premise was true, or as basic to the Christian faith as he contends, Judaism would have disappeared by Christian force and no “ambivalence” in Christian attitude would have stopped it.

Pope Calixtus III (1119-1124) issued the papal bull Sicut Judaesis that condemned any violence against the Jews, a bull reaffirmed by 20 of his successors. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached the Second Crusade, would speak out forcefully against anti-Jewish violence and is generally held responsible for limiting such incidents. Though Carroll tries to link a stronger papacy with increased anti-Jewish acts, the opposite appears true. A stronger Church and papacy that can influence secular authorities in European history rather than be controlled by secular authorities, the less likely were anti-Jewish outbreaks.

Carroll’s history consistently shows the opposite of what it intends. Anti-Jewish activities persisted in history despite the Church, rather than because of the Church. When Church authority was weakened, the outbreaks tended to increase. When dangerous racial anti-Semitism would grow in the 19^th Century, the Church was effectively at its weakest in influencing government or society.

There can be no doubt that ignorance and false Scriptural interpretation helped to create an atmosphere of anti-Judaism within Western society. There was, as Carroll shows, an “ambivalence” toward Jews within Catholic teaching that contributed to anti-Jewish actions. While Church leadership forthrightly condemned violence against the Jews, it tolerated abusive anti-Jewish homilies and pronouncements. Church leadership too often shared in the sentiments of the culture. However, Carroll’s fundamental flaw is in arguing that anti-Semitism was the conscious creation of the Church, rather than a cultural legacy to which many in the Church too often compromised.

It is true that the racial prejudice against Catholic families of Jewish stock was the primary instigator of the Spanish Inquisition. However, it contradicts, rather than confirms, Carroll’s basic thesis that anti-Semitism that led to the horror of the Holocaust came from essential Christian theology. Spanish anti-Semitism was aimed at Jews racially. Religion was used as a club of enforcement to knock ethnic Jews down from the successful heights they had attained as Catholics. But the faith was the excuse, not the cause, of Spanish racial anti-Semitism.

The attacks in Spain on the conversos were viewed as despicable in Rome and condemned by the popes. Italians, Henry Kamen has written, “felt that Spanish hypocrisy in religion, together with the existence of the Inquisition, proved that the tribunal was created not for religious purity, but simply to rob the Jews. Similar views were certainly held by the prelates of the Holy See whenever they intervened in favor of the conversos. Moreover, the racialism of the Spanish authorities was scorned in Italy, where the Jewish community led a comparatively tranquil existence.”

The thesis that the “Jews killed Jesus” was a popular misinterpretation of the New Testament that the Church taught as wrong in its theology of atonement. If anti-Semitism persisted, it was because it was persistent in the popular imagination, not in the teachings of the Church as Carroll claims. Again, anti-Semitism existed despite essential Church teachings, not because of them, as Carroll charges.

Treatment of the local Jewish community in Rome would vary from pontiff to pontiff. Popes would change and policies would change. These policies were generated as papal governance of the Papal States, however, not pronouncements of the universal Church. And what Carroll sees as a continuous linkage was shifting sand. There was no uniform anti-Jewish policy aimed at the local Jewish community from papacy to papacy. The policies reflected the emphasis and mind-set of individuals. However, the different perspectives popes adopted show anything but a continuous chain that is the fundamental thesis of Carroll’s book.

The fact was that at the First Vatican Council consensus emerged, except for extremists on each side, which spelled out a definition of papal infallibility clearly in line with Church tradition and the theology of the papacy. The Council proclaimed no new teaching that extended papal authority beyond a point the Church had understood for centuries.

The stew of secular philosophies that led to these 20^thcentury horrors was a creation of the 19^th century, that had limited roots in the so-called Enlightenment of the 18^thcentury. These philosophies were definitive breaks with Christian thinking, not evolutions. As Paul Johnson notes, they involved the “birth of the modern” – an entirely new way of viewing self, one’s role in culture, one’s entire mode of thinking and acting. These were not subtle changes or a grafting on to Christianity. These were philosophies that the Church fought against because they were a fundamental break, a fundamental confrontation, with an entire Christian philosophy, theology, culture and worldview. Carroll’s failure to present that adequately in order not to upset his thesis that the Church was to blame for the Holocaust is the fundamental flaw of his book.

Carroll regurgitates the central thesis of Cornwell. He sees the revision of Canon Law promulgated in 1917 – in which a young priest Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII was involved – as the motivating factor in the Church’s reaction to the rise of the dictators. According to the theory, papal absolutism was the driving force of Vatican foreign policy. The Vatican would surrender anything – and bargain with the devil himself – in order to gain authority over, for example, the appointment of bishops.

Though Carroll dismisses such claims, the Vatican had no choice but to conclude such a concordat, or face draconian restrictions on the lives of the faithful in Germany. Pius XI would explain that it was concluded only to spare persecution that would take place immediately if there was no such agreement. The concordat would also give the Holy See the opportunity to formally protest Nazi action in the years prior to the war and after hostilities began. It provided a legal basis for arguing that baptized Jews in Germany were Christian and should be exempt from legal disabilities. Though the Concordat was routinely violated before the ink was dry, its existence allowed for Vatican protest, and it did save Jewish lives.

Carroll assumes that a calculated decision by Pius to work behind the scenes through his papal representatives and through the existing vehicles of the Church to save as many lives as possible, was a callous decision to leave Jews to their fate. It assumes that hurling thunderbolts from the Vatican – which all who lived through Nazism understand would have had no possible impact on Hitler – would have accomplished something or saved more lives. This is mere conjecture based on hindsight. None of the critics of Pius have yet been able to put forth a concrete alternative that Pius could have developed to save more lives than were saved by the Church in that period. Throughout the war years, the Church would save more Jewish lives than any entity that existed at the time.

Disagreeing with the tactics of Pius is one thing. Stating that the Church abandoned the Jews does not reflect any kind of reality. Which is one of the most frustrating aspects of Carroll’s entire “history” of the Church and the Jews. It is not history at all, but an amateur’s meditation on various historical events skewed to reflect the prejudices of his own thesis.

Echoing Garry Wills, Carroll sees the canonization of Stein as an attempt by the Church to claim victimhood in the Holocaust and to reaffirm the religious superiority of Christianity over Judaism. Like Wills, he can cite no source for this conjecture, or documentation that cites any such reasoning from Church leadership. Pope John Paul II stated, which is a fact, that she died at the hands of the Nazis because she was a Jew and a Catholic, in retribution for the Church speaking out against Nazi deportations of the Jews in the Netherlands. The death of Edith Stein – and the death of Maxmillian Kolbe – are the only cases of people slaughtered by the Nazis in the concentration camps that a certain circle within Catholicism feels comfortable publicly degrading.

Critical to Pope John XXIII’s thinking was that the Church must reach out to the world and not see itself as a faithful remnant that hides from the world. The purpose in John’s mind was to certainly remove liturgical encrustation, defensive theological formulations and aspects of the culture of Catholicism that prevented outreach to the modern world. However, the purpose of such was not to convert the Church to modernism, but for the Church to be better able to evangelize the modern world. This has been the hallmark of the papacy of Pope John Paul II, who as a bishop attending the Council, was a strong supporter of the intent and spirit of Vatican II.

The five-point agenda for Vatican III is the purpose of Carroll’s book. One cannot doubt the sincerity of his horror in the Holocaust, or his disgust at the anti-Jewish history that exists within the history of Western civilization and that members of the Church have been a part of it. But his purpose, clearly, is for “the past to be retrieved in ways that serve present purposes.” Those purposes are Carroll’s five-point agenda for creating a Catholicism that would fit his particular vision. He would do so by undermining the Gospels, dismissing 2000 years of Catholic theology and dismantling the papacy and the priesthood. He would, finally, have a Church that would disconnect from Jesus as the source of truth – that truth can be known, and truth can be evangelized.

It was not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, or the Church belief in an objective and universal truth that persists in Christ, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust.

 

Kenneth D. Whitehead October 2010 Hitler, the War, and the Pope (Revised and Expanded) by Ronald J. Rychlak. Our Sunday Visitor, 2010. University of Mississippi Professor of Law Ronald J. Rychlak published a book ten years ago with the same title as that shown above. This new book, just published, is presented ten years later as a “revised and expanded” version of the earlier book, and while it definitely is that, this bare description greatly understates the degree to which this new book now covers virtually every aspect of the Pope Pius XII question, and thus has been transformed into what must now be considered the definitive book on the subject. If you have this book, you have everything you might ever need to defend the record and reputation of the World War II head of the Catholic Church. The earlier edition was already notable for the taking up and dealing with by means of well-documented facts and carefully thought-out arguments the unjustly criticized pontificate of Pope Pius XII and, in particular, in evaluating the pope’s reactions and behavior in the face of the holocaust against the Jews brought about by Hitler and the Nazis. As most people are aware, within about a half dozen years after the death of Pope Pius XII, questions began to be raised and accusations made about the pope’s behavior during World War II: the pope was allegedly passive and “silent” in the face of Adolph Hitler’s “final solution” to the “Jewish problem”—which consisted, as nearly everybody also knows, in the well-known Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. Although nobody has ever explained how merely “speaking out” by anybody could ever possibly have stopped the Nazi juggernaut, Pope Pius XII was nevertheless blamed anyway. His failure to “speak out” in the way that the postwar critics who rose up against him thought he should have spoken out meant that for them he had actively contributed to the evil wrought by Hitler and the Nazis; he was somehow held to be complicit in Hitler’s “final solution” and hence himself “guilty.” Once the pope’s “guilt” was established in the public mind in this fashion, what the late Notre Dame Professor Ralph McInerny aptly called the “defamation” of Pius XII, got going in earnest and ballooned into the veritable anti-Pius “industry” that has lasted down to our own time. Book after book and study after study all supposedly established that the wartime pope had been given to cold diplomacy rather than caring concern; that he was perhaps himself anti-Semitic (or at least indifferent to Jewish suffering); that his hatred of Communism blinded him to the evils of Nazism; that his many years of service in Germany as a papal diplomat had made him uncritically pro-German; that he was only concerned with the security of the Church and of Catholics; that he was unduly fearful of retaliation against any action that might be taken by the Church; and that, in the end, perhaps, he was just simply a moral coward. All of these allegations and others against the pope have now been carefully identified, dissected, and answered in this book by Professor Ronald Rychlak using citations, argumentation, and documentations which in the end are not just irrefutable but are overwhelming. It turns out that there never was any case against Pope Pius XII, none. As the rabbi who contributes a Foreword to this book remarks, the “case” against Pius XII really consisted all along in “lies, slander, malice, and a desire to thwart justice.” Professor Rychlak documents this in relentless detail. He has delved into virtually all of the allegations or suspicions that have been lodged against the pope; he has examined the evidence for them; and has provided the answers which should be persuasive to any fair-minded person. He appears to have read or consulted practically everything that has ever been written about the Pius XII controversy, pro or con. More than just showing that Pope Pius XII was not silent and guilty in the face of great evil, however, the author shows rather that, on the contrary, he was really a brave and saintly man for whom a “cause” for canonization is currently pending in the Catholic Church based on voluminous testimonials to the heroic virtue of the man from those who actually knew him and worked with him. Although Pope Pius XII was the head of an officially neutral state in the course of the worldwide fighting going on between the Allies and the Axis powers, and hence did not openly favor an allied victory, he also headed up during that same wartime period the Catholic Church’s extensive efforts throughout the war to help victims, refugees, and displaced persons, including Jews. There is abundant documentation throughout this book that the pope and the Church provided enormous assistance specifically to Jews—contrary to allegations still often made and still unfortunately widely believed. Rychlak cites examples of Jews being helped or hidden not just by monasteries, religious houses, or seminaries; he cites examples where Pope Pius XII personally helped Jews. The book itself consists of eighteen chapters which cover the situation of the papacy going back into the nineteenth century, as well as chronicling the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Germany and Italy following World War I. Several chapters deal with the pontificate of Pope Pius XI in the 1920s and 1930s in the course of which Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would be elected pope himself just before the outbreak of the war in 1939, played a vital and significant role. He was, in fact, the architect of many of the policies and action of Pope Pius XI, who, however, never came in for as much criticism as Pius XII did. The World War II years, as well as the policies, actions, and conduct of Pope Pius XII in the course of them, are covered in a separate chapter for each one of the war years. The pope and his curia did not in any way, shape, or form “collaborate” with the Fascists or Nazis, but simply endeavored to survive under what amounted to the very difficult conditions of a wartime occupation by them. A very important addition to this “revised and expanded” volume is a new chapter entitled “The Play and the KGB Plot,” in which the author goes into the background of the infamous stage play, The Deputy, by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth. It was this crude and slanderous play which, in the 1960s, started the ball rolling in the “blame game” against Pius XII. Although Hochhuth claimed that his depiction of the wartime pontiff was based on historical facts, the play was anything but factually based. Rather, it consisted of blatant fabrications which, as Rychlak shows, had originally been concocted and assembled in the Soviet Union in order to discredit the Church. Rolf Hochhuth was either a Communist himself or a dupe. Moreover, the play itself, both in Europe and America, as the author also shows, was produced and largely promoted by known Communists in the theater world of the day. The defamation of Pius XII, in other words, really did start out as a result of a “Communist plot”! Yes, there really was one in this case! The amazing thing is that this myth of a bad pope went so far and lasted so long, considering its true origins. It really has to be considered one of the more successful subversive efforts ever mounted by the Communists. And the sad fact too, of course, is that this false myth of a silent and guilty and “collaborating” pope has, unfortunately, endured down to our own time in the minds of many people. As is well known, entire books, often well received and touted by today’s elites and the media, have been published bearing titles such as Hitler’s Pope, The Popes Against the Jews, and The Silence of Pius XII. Professor Rychlak devotes another entire chapter to refuting those he calls “The Critics” of the wartime pope. In this chapter, he very knowledgeably and competently takes on, among others, such anti-Pius authors as John Cornwell, Saul Friedländer, Daniel Joseph Goldhagen, and Susan Zuccotti. It is when he closely examines “the case” mounted against Pius by such authors that he discovers and demonstrates how groundless that case against the pope really turned out to be. The anti-Pius writers—especially the Catholics among them such as Michael Phayer and Garry Wills, or the ex-Catholics such as James Carroll—really ought to be ashamed of themselves in the light of what the true facts about Pius XII turn out to be. Most of these facts have been there all along. Now that Ronald Rychlak has assembled, organized, and published them, there is no longer any excuse for these critics. One is really hard pressed, in fact, to understand just what the motive had to be for so many to come out blaming and defaming Pius XII in the way that they did. No doubt some people always wanted a convenient scapegoat. It would also seem that the animus of many against Pope Pius XII was really an animus against the Catholic Church. Even then, however, it remains hard to understand how the false myth about him could ever have grown up and persisted the way it has. The appearance of this book ought to herald the end of any further possibility of credibly continuing to maintain the accusations against the wartime pope—but don’t hold your breath! Of course, other fine writers such as Sister Margherita Marchione, Rabbi David Dalin, William Doino, Jr., Patrick Gallo, Robert A. Graham, S.J., Ralph McInerny, and Michael O’Carroll, among others, including Ronald Rychlak himself in his 2005 book, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII Saved a Half Million Jews from the Nazis, have all been making the case for a good number of years now against the detractors of Pope Pius XII. Time has been required for all of this material to sink in, but that it will sink in is surely inevitable in the long run since, as the old proverb has it—and as we must hope—“Truth is mighty and shall prevail.” And with this new and definitive edition of Hitler, the War, and the Pope by Ronald J. Rychlak we now have between the two covers of one book the evidence that Pope Pius XII, far from being a dupe or a tool of the Nazis, was actually an effective and honorable—and saintly—Vicar of Christ. The book contains a good Index and Bibliography, as well as photostats of nineteen of the more important key documents. There are also no less than 137 pages of densely packed Notes, which often contain material as interesting and revealing as the main text. Kenneth D. Whitehead is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League. He has himself written and spoken on the Pius XII question. His 2002 review article, “The Pius XII Controversy,” is posted on the Catholic League’s website, www.catholicleague.org.

Copyright © 1997-2011 by Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. *Material from this website may be reprinted and disseminated with accompanying attribution.

By William A. Donohue

“I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic church.” That is how Frances Kissling, the president of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC), explained her mission to a reporter from the magazine, Mother Jones. As the record shows, her rhetoric is anything but empty.

One way that Kissling works to attack the Catholic Church is to challenge

the status of the Holy See at the United Nations. The Holy See is a sovereign state and has maintained a diplomatic corps since at least the 15^th century. Kissling is determined to try to convince the 170 countries around the world that exchange diplomats with the Holy See that it is unworthy of such recognition. To that end, she has orchestrated a “See Change” campaign to strip the Vatican of its permanent observer status at the U.N.

“Vatican representatives have misrepresented, distorted and lied about what women want.” This is the language that Kissling chose to characterize the Holy See at the outset of the Fourth U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing. Following the precedent she set in Cairo, Kissling sought to remove the Vatican delegation from the Beijing Conference. She failed in that attempt but not in her quest to condemn the pope and the entire Catholic Church.

CFFC is often described as the nation’s largest Catholic pro-choice organization. This is twice wrong: it is not Catholic and it is not an organization. It has been openly denounced by both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops as being a fraud, and it has no members. Funded almost entirely by pro-choice foundations, CFFC is not only an oxymoron, it is the establishment’s most persistently anti-Catholic letterhead.

CFFC was founded in 1973, setting up shop in the headquarters of New York’s Planned Parenthood office building. Once Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, CFFC joined with the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, moving decisively to counter efforts for a Human Life Amendment. Its first president, Father Joseph O’Rourke, was expelled from the Jesuits in 1974; he served as CFFC president until 1979. Kissling took over in 1982 and has been responsible for shaping the anti-Catholic agenda of CFFC more than anyone else.

Kissling has long thrived on direct confrontation with the Vatican. In October 1984, CFFC ran an ad in the New York Times titled “Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion.” The ad, which was designed and placed through Planned Parenthood, maintained that there were differing “legitimate Catholic positions” on abortion. Such reasoning has become a staple of CFFC thought and informs its approach to Catholicism in general. For Kissling, there can never be enough dissent from the Catholic Church.

The credibility of CFFC hangs on its alleged Catholicity. The media court CFFC because it allegedly offers a contrasting voice within the Catholic community on the subject of abortion. Now no one doubts that there are some Catholics (approximately one-third) who differ with the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. The question, however, is to what extent can CFFC be considered a Catholic group? Deny it the status of a Catholic organization and CFFC collapses to simply another player in the pro-abortion lobby.

The following statement is typical of the way CFFC distorts Catholic teaching: “The bishops won’t tell you, but CFFC will: There is an authentic prochoice Catholic position.” It was due to misrepresentations like this one that on November 4, 1993, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) released a statement stating, “many people, including Catholics, may be led to believe that it [CFFC] is an authentic Catholic organization. It is not. It has no affiliation, formal or otherwise, with the Catholic Church.” The bishops added that CFFC “is associated with the pro-abortion lobby in Washington, D.C.” and “attracts public attention by its denunciations of basic principles of Catholic morality and teaching….” And in May 2000, the president of the NCCB, Bishop Joseph Fiorenza, denounced the group for its rejection and distortion of the Church’s teachings on life issues.

Despite what the bishops have said, Kissling continues to appropriate the Catholic label in descriptions of both herself and CFFC. It is true that at one time she spent six months in a convent. But it is also true that her procurement of abortions, done illegally overseas in abortion clinics that she founded, is enough to merit her excommunication from the Catholic Church.

Kissling herself does not dispute the fact that her identification with Catholicism is based on her own definition of what it means to be a Catholic. “When I say I came back to the Church, I never came back on the old terms…. I came back to the Church as a social change agent; I came back to woman-church.” Admitting that she is “not talking about coming back to Sunday Mass, confession,” and the like, Kissling asserts that the hierarchy of the Church “doesn’t deserve our respect.”

Perhaps the most severe blow to the reputation of CFFC came on April 21, 1995. That was the day the National Catholic Reporter printed a letter by Marjorie Reiley Maguire blasting the reputation of CFFC. Maguire, an attorney who is divorced from the ex-Jesuit and Marquette theology professor, Dan Maguire, was for years a prominent CFFC activist. Indeed, she and her radical husband were once the CFFC’s poster couple. But like many others who came of age in the sixties, Maguire began to have second thoughts. Included in her intellectual migration were second thoughts about CFFC and Catholicism.

In her letter, Maguire branded CFFC as “an anti-woman organization” whose agenda is “the promotion of abortion, the defense of every abortion decision as a good, moral choice and the related agenda of persuading society to cast off any moral constraints about sexual behavior.” She explains that it is not the Catholic Church that is “hung up on sex.” Rather it is liberals who are obsessed with sex. Questioning the right of CFFC to call itself Catholic, Maguire said, “When I was involved with CFFC, I was never aware that any of its leaders attended Mass. Furthermore, various conversations and experiences convinced me they did not.”

In spite of all this, the media continue to portray CFFC as a Catholic organization in good standing. Yet even a perusal of CFFC’s literature should be enough to convince anyone that CFFC has no love for the Catholic Church or for any organization that proudly defends the Church. Its 1994 publication, “A New Rite: Conservative Catholic Organizations and their Allies,” lists as “the enemy” groups that range from the National Catholic Conference of Bishops to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

At the top of the “enemies list” for CFFC is Pope John Paul II. At the time of the Cairo Conference on Population and Development, Kissling wrote, “If there is a devil in Cairo, it can only be released by the pope’s obstructionist meddling.” In similar fashion, Kissling stokes the fires of anti-Catholicism by charging that “The Vatican cannot be allowed to set policy for the whole world,” as if the delegation from the Holy See was doing something untoward by simply stating its position as a duly elected member of the United Nations.

Indeed, it is not below Kissling to assert that base appetites motivate the Vatican. For example, the Vatican’s opposition to abortion-on-demand is not seen as a moral position. Rather its stance “is about money and power, not about spirituality.”

Sometimes Kissling resorts to spin, as she did after the papal encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. In this teaching letter, Pope John Paul II decried drugs, war, international arms trade, environmental destruction, overuse of the death penalty, infanticide and experimentation on human embryos, calling them “the culture of death.” Kissling’s response was remarkable: “What he calls the ‘culture of death’ is really human freedom, being able to make choices based on conscience.” This not only distorts the message of the Holy Father, it shows a hubris that is disconcerting.

CFFC, of course, contends that it is a Catholic abortion rights organization having nothing to do with anti-Catholicism. Yet even its most eloquent spokespersons can’t explain why its board members continue to show up on TV shows that deal with issues that have nothing to do with abortion, but have everything to do with discrediting the Catholic Church. Or take, for example, bigoted comments made about people like the late John Cardinal O’Connor. Kissling once said of the New York Archbishop that he is “the kind of man who, if the church still had the power to burn people at the stake, would be right there lighting a fire.”

In word and deed, Catholics for a Free Choice is anti-Catholic. That is why it does not deserve to be given a platform of legitimacy by any respectable organization.

This first appeared as a guest column in the October 10, 2002 issue of The Daily Catholic (vol. 13, no. 113), www.dailycatholic.org

 

Bill Donohue on Battle Buds: “There are few civic duties more important than helping veterans reintegrate into society, and there is no organization that provides greater assistance than Battle Buds. Founded by Tim O’Connor and Peter Gaudet, this supervised mentorship program helps returning veterans get anchored and find needed services, thus enabling them to contribute to society; it’s a win-win for all of us.”

For more information, see battlebuds.org. To donate, contact buds@battlebuds.org.

January 3
Madison, WI—In a split decision, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a 2002 suit brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The panel found that the city of La Crosse’s sale of its Ten Commandments monument to the Fraternal Order of Eagles (the monument’s original donor) was constitutional. The anti-religion group wants to excise religious expression from the public square.

March 9
New York, NY—A U.S. Court of Appeals decision granted AmeriCorps teachers the right to teach in religious schools, so long as they provide instruction in non-religious subjects. If they do provide religious instruction, the hours worked will not count toward their service hours and they may not wear the AmeriCorps logo. The ruling disappointed the Anti-Defamation League, which challenged the program on constitutional grounds.

March 29
San Francisco, CA—The “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” a group of gay men who dress as nuns in outrageous costumes, held a “Hunky Jesus” contest at Dolores Park. The winner was “Viva Las Jesus,” a man dressed in a gold loincloth.

April 7
Tangipahoa Parish, LA—The ACLU asked a judge to jail or hold the school board in contempt because a community member recited a prayer over the PA system before a high-school baseball game.

April 19
Catholics for Free Choice, an anti-Catholic group, attacked Pope Benedict XVI as soon as he was named the new pontiff. Headed by Frances Kissling, the group lectured the new pope on what he must do during his first 100 days to satisfy them. Nothing short of a wholesale rejection of what the Catholic Church stands for was brazenly put forth by Kissling.

April 27
Odessa, TX—People for the American Way and the ACLU condemned a decision made by the school board of Odessa that added a Bible class to its high school curriculum. The class was passed not as a religion class, but as part of a history/literature course. Nonetheless, the two groups accused the class of promoting religion.

May 2
Planned Parenthood began a campaign to have its members give Pope Benedict XVI advice on abortion and reproduction health. Posted on its website was the following: “The ultra-conservative views of new Pope Benedict XVI pose a serious threat to the health and rights of women and girls around the world. Please write a Letter to the Editor letting the new Pope know how you feel about his dangerous stance on reproductive rights and sexuality.”

May 9
The Catholic League website was hacked and its homepage changed. The following text is some of what was posted:

PRI[11 was here
F— BUSH – F— SHARON
FREE PALESTINE – FREE IRAQ
Morocco Rulez

May 12
The Catholic League website was hacked a second time. The following text is some of what was posted:

Defaced by PRI[11!! Agauain?? Hmmm why?
well the site was defaced okay? then what?
FBI? police? LOLZ nah

May 15
Members of the Rainbow Sash Movement, a radical gay activist organization, entered churches across the country to protest the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality. The group’s May 2 press release said that the purpose of its presence was to “counter the lies that Pope Benedict XVI is promoting about our community”; it also said that many gays and lesbians saw the new pope as an “aggressive homophobe.”

May 19
The PAC arm of MoveOn.org, the Internet-based organization funded by George Soros, made a despicable statement on its website against the pope and American Roman Catholics. As part of its campaign protesting Republican efforts to change the filibuster rules governing Federal court appointees, MoveOnPac.org posted a picture of a smiling Pope Benedict XVI holding a gavel outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Above the picture was the following inscription:

God Already has a job….
He does not need one on the
Supreme Court
Protect the Supreme Court Rules

May 31
London, KY—A judge’s decision to offer drug and alcohol offenders the option of attending worship services instead of going to rehab or jail upset the ACLU. The group claimed that the judge raised some “serious constitutional problems.” It maintained that the judge “strays from government neutrality towards religion,” when all he did was to provide another option.

June 5
The National Secular Society asked Bob Geldof, the producer of Live8, to rescind his invitation to Pope Benedict XVI to attend the event. The event’s purpose was to expand awareness of poverty in Africa, but the National Secular Society in its press release decided it was the proper time to attack the pope on the use of condoms:

Bob Geldof could make one big difference to the plight of Africa by demanding that the Pope immediately lift restrictions on the use of condoms. If he does not, then the million marchers ought to converge on Vatican City to condemn the Pope’s intransigence. If the Vatican accepted the invitation, the National Secular Society would do its best to ensure that everyone who is contemplating joining Live8 is made aware of the shameful part the Pope and his predecessor have played in the spread of AIDS in Africa. Involving religion in this event—especially one very controversial element of one particular religion—will change the nature of the protest. Live8 must be for everyone—it must not be hijacked by one particularly inappropriate religious personality.

June 7
The ACLU showed its bigoted colors when it protested a decision by a commissioner in Harris County, Texas naming a new 865-acre park after Pope John Paul II. The ACLU, we hasten to add, not only has no problem with schools and parks named after Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it does not object to the holiday that honors his legacy.

June 22
Chicago, IL—A federal judge ruled that the Pentagon can no longer spend money to ready a Virginia military base for the Boy Scouts. This ruling followed an ACLU suit claiming that the Defense Department was violating the First Amendment by sponsoring the events of an organization that requires its members to swear an oath to God.

July
Catholics for a Free Choice issued “The Making of a Papacy: A Report on the First One Hundred Days of Pope Benedict XVI,” which was replete with charges that the new pope had failed to renounce Catholicism during his first 100 days. In doing so, the group confused its mission with that of the new pontiff’s.

October 13
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) president Neil Giuliano issued an alert asking his members to contact NBC’s “Today” show to protest its decision to invite Bill Donohue on the program. Giuliano accused Donohue of defaming gays and using “malicious smear tactics.” Then, on October 24, when Donohue was called by Viacom’s gay cable channel, Logo, to appear on its news program, Donohue said he would do so on condition that Giuliano agree to debate him. The invitation was granted but Giuliano said no.

October 30
Tijeras, NM—The ACLU filed suit against the village of Tijeras, NM to force it to remove a small cross from the village seal. The seal also contained a Native American religious symbol, but that was of no interest to the ACLU.

October 31
Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, said the following about the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court: “Not only is the Court not representative in terms of race and gender, but also in terms of religion—with Alito, the majority of the Court would be Roman Catholics, which would underrepresent other religions, not to mentions nonbelievers.” The Catholic League quickly denounced her selective interest in proportional representation.

November 5
Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Evangelical organizations and others of trying to “Christianize America.” He demonized Christian groups by charging that they were seeking to advance their “Christian worldview.” Their goal, he proclaimed, was “to Christianize America. To save us!”

December 1
Salt Lake City, UT—American Atheists filed a federal lawsuit attempting to get the state of Utah to remove steel crosses from roadways. The crosses were placed there to memorialize Utah Highway Patrol troopers who were killed in the line of duty.

BishopAccountability.org purports to be an abuse watchdog, but in reality its only real agenda is to discredit the Catholic Church. Its latest stab at Pope Francis brings further discredit to its reputation. Indeed, it represents McCarthyism.

BishopAccountability.org highlights five cases where Cardinal Bergoglio may have had knowledge of abuse allegations, but it is clear that it has no evidence that he knew about any of these cases. Moreover, only one of the priests was an archdiocesan priest from Buenos Aires (more on him below); two were religious order priests and two were from other dioceses.

The report estimates that between 1950 and 2013, “more than 100 Buenos Aires archdiocesan priests offended against children.” Again, the report cites no evidence for this claim. It further undermines its credibility when it makes a strained analogy: it compares the size of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires to the number of priests accused in the dioceses of Manchester, New Hampshire; Providence, Rhode Island and Los Angeles, California. Even a high school dropout would have chosen a Latin American analogy.

The report tries to sound authoritative by compiling a list of 42 clergy who have been accused of abuse in Argentina. Perhaps it thought that no one would check its own sources. We did. Here is what we found:

•  Thirty-four of those priests had no connection to the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires.
• One was acquitted when the allegations could not be proved.
• One was tried in the U. S. and the charges were dismissed before he moved to Argentina.
• One priest admitted to abusing a 15-year-old in the Diocese of Quilmes, and was transferred to the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires to live.
• One priest was credibly accused in the United States, and was then assigned to missionary work by his order. He was sent to Buenos Aires in August 2013, after Bergoglio was elected pope.
•  One priest was accused of abuse in Uruguay, and was then transferred to Buenos Aires.

Of the three remaining clerics, only one was an archdiocesan priest, Father Carlos Maria Gauna. He was accused of inappropriately touching two girls (he allegedly touched their buttocks) at a Catholic school, and was disciplined as a result. One was a Marianist brother, and there is no evidence that Bergoglio ever heard about, much less failed to report him. Finally, he is accused of commissioning a “secret” study of a Salesian priest, aimed at discrediting the accuser, but absolutely no evidence is provided to support this charge.

We sent a copy of our response to the heads of each U.S. diocese.

Bill Donohue comments on the latest left-wing attack on the pope:

BishopAccountability.org purports to be an abuse watchdog, but in reality its only real agenda is to discredit the Catholic Church. Its latest stab at Pope Francis brings further discredit to its reputation. Indeed, as will be demonstrated, its report on the pope is pure McCarthyism.

Yesterday, it published a report on Pope Francis’ record with priests accused of abuse in Argentina when he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The report accuses Bergoglio of not having addressed abusive priests during his tenure as Auxiliary and Archbishop of Buenos Aires (1992-1998 Auxiliary; 1998-2013 Archbishop) or as president of the Argentine Bishops Conference (2005-2011).

The report is so seriously flawed that even a high school dropout could shoot holes in it. To read our analysis of it, click here. The heads of every diocese in the U.S. are being sent a copy of our analysis, along with a statement about our previous research on BishopAccountability.org.