Keith Fimian, the Republican candidate for Virginia’s 11th Congressional District, came under attack by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in a series of mailings and video clips; he was accused of “rolling back women’s rights,” and being “an officer of an organization that promotes a group so extreme they encourage women to be more submissive.” The organization DCCC referred to is Legatus, a Catholic group of CEOs founded to bring their faith-based values to the workplace; Fimian belongs to Legatus.

Pope John Paul II addressed Legatus saying, “The world needs genuine witness to Christian ethics in the field of business, and the Church asks you to fulfill this role publicly and with perseverance.” According to the DCCC, then, Pope John Paul II was extending his support to an organization that wants to rob women of their rights.

In its campaign, the DCCC said that Legatus “promotes groups supporting a radical agenda.” That is an outright lie. In fact, Legatus doesn’t promote any group. Like many organizations, it has a “Links” section on its website that lists various sister organizations; as is customary, Legatus makes it clear that it does not necessarily endorse everything said on these outlets. The DCCC knew this, but chose to lie anyway.

The website that the DCCC referred to in its attacks is a Christian group called e5 Men; the biblical reference to women cited in the DCCC’s ad was taken out of context so as to embarrass Fimian.

We issued two news releases defending Fimian and called attention to the despicable acts of the DCCC. In the September 10 Washington Post, Bill Donohue was quoted as accusing the DCCC of lying about Fimian and misleading the public on Legatus.

In our releases, we did not hold Gerald Connolly, Fimian’s Democratic opponent, responsible for the smears against Fimian, but we requested that he denounce the anti-Catholic bigotry that these ads sponsored. Connolly, a Catholic, failed to denounce them, even though he was the beneficiary of these attacks.

We called upon the head of the DCCC, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to intervene and immediately stop these scurrilous ads. We noted that it would behoove her to put an end to all of the anti-Catholic efforts before everything blew up in the face of the Democratic Party.

Bill Maher’s new movie, “Religulous,” opens October 3. He lampoons Catholicism, Judaism and Islam, though we know that he has a special contempt for our religion.  Here’s a sample of his thinking.

November 10, 1999, on “Politically Incorrect”: “The synagogue—and I’m not Jewish, but I was raised Catholic—was never as corrupt as the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, which is people, not God running it, OK, hugely corrupt, did horrible things through history, maybe…because they were that powerful.”

“Priests are supposed to be celibate. They’re not having sex with women…. Just with the boys.”

March 20, 2000, on “Politically Incorrect,” discussing the Annunciation: Maher commented that the Archangel Gabriel didn’t tell Mary that she was pregnant with Jesus, rather he showed her that his “horn had turned pink.”

July 11, 2000, on “Politically Incorrect,” discussing celibate priests: “Be fruitful and multiply. What’s more weird than being celibate? There’s nothing more perverted than that.”

August 9, 2000, on “Politically Incorrect,” discussing sex abuse: “Look, it’s just a fact of life. Priests, a lot of times, molest boys, OK? They are celibate and it’s a magnet for homosexual pedophiles.”

October 27, 2000, on “Politically Incorrect,” discussing Halloween: “Christianity is grafted on paganism… And it’s all about a man in the sky who’s going to send you in a burning lake of fire if you screw up…. What is scarier than drinking the man’s blood every Sunday? That’s not a spooky ritual? Here kids, drink his blood and eat his body. Like that’s not pagan? What can be more pagan than that?”

May 7, 2002, on “Politically Incorrect”: “You’re right. In African countries, they [priests] rape nuns.”

May 8, 2002, on “Politically Incorrect”: “I have hated the Church way before anyone else.”

May 24, 2002, on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” discussing being raised Catholic: “Well, I wasn’t raised Jewish. My mother is Jewish. But I never even knew I was half-Jewish until I was a teenager. I was just so frightened about the Catholics and everything that was going on there in the church—and I was never, you know, molested or anything. And I’m a little insulted. I guess they never found me attractive.”

June 20, 2002, on “Politically Incorrect”: “Pope John Paul canonized [Padre Pio] and the reason it sticks in my craw is because it just seems like they needed a saint badly, because they had a lot of bad P.R. with the whole, you know, we’re having sex with the kids thing.”

May 7, 2003, in his one-man show, “Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home”: “What’s the reason for this insanity? [He had been discussing Islam.] One word: religion. The Catholics got away with f***ing kids.” When the audience gave a mixed reaction, he said, “Oh come on! Get the rod out of your a**!” He then impersonated a priest saying to an altar boy, “Put some more lotion on Father,” and said, “Holy lubricant, Father!”

“Don’t regulate drugs: regulate religion. I was raised Catholic and I was not molested. I’m a little insulted. Apparently, I wasn’t attractive enough.”

“The problem is they drill it into your head when you are very young. Well, when you are four years old you believe in Santa Claus too. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the Virgin Birth, sure! When you’re a priest everyday spewing this bull**** about the apple and the snake, etc., you can see him just saying, ‘Ah f*** it, just blow me kid!’”

“Come on, it’s so gay, the Church! With the robes and the smoke and the kneeling in front of the priest with your mouth open [doing an imitation], eating God.”

February 15, 2005, on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country”: “We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder. If you look at it logically, it’s something that was drilled into your head when you were a small child. It certainly was drilled into mine at that age. And you really can’t be responsible when you are a kid for what adults put into your head…. When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with European nations and Canada and nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us.”

April 8, 2005, on “Real Time”: “People waited in line for 24 hours to see the pope’s [John Paul II’s] body and when they got to see the pope they smelled worse than he did.”

“For those who could not make the funeral, the Vatican has asked that in lieu of flowers, just stop touching your d***.”

“American Catholics say we love the pope, he should be a saint but he is kind of full of s*** on everything we believe.”

April 13, 2007, on “Real Time”: The comedian showed a picture of guitarist Keith Richards in his “New Rules” segment and said, “New rules, snorting your father isn’t crazy” (this was a reference to Richards’ hoax about snorting the ashes of his dead father). Maher then showed a picture of a Catholic priest giving Communion, saying, “Eating your father, that’s crazy.”

May 22, 2007,  on “Real Time,” urging gays to start their own religion: “And it’s easy to start a religion! Watch, I’ll do it for you: I had a vision last night! A vision! The Blessed Virgin Mary came to me—I don’t know how she got past the guards—and she told me it’s high time to take the high ground from the Seventh Day Adventists and give it to the 24-hour party people. And what happens in the confessional stays in the confessional. Gay men, don’t say you’re life partners, say you’re a nunnery of two. ‘We weren’t having sex, officer, I was performing a very private Mass, here in my car. I was letting my rod and staff comfort him. Take this and eat of it, [our emphasis] for this is my roommate Barry. And for all those who believe there is a special place for you in Kevin.’”

January 7, 2008, on “The Late Show with Conan O’Brien”: “You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith…. That makes you a schizophrenic.”

January 28, 2008, on “Real Time,” on the Virgin Birth: “But I think it is much more likely that there could be space ships from outer space, than what a lot of things people believe. People still believe, you know—excuse me I know I may inject religion into every show but UFO’s are a lot more likely than a space god flew down bodily and, you know, who was the Son of God and, you know, had sex with a Palestinian woman.”

February 4, 2008, on “Larry King Live”: “They accuse me of being a Catholic bigot. First of all, I don’t have it out especially for the Catholics. I think all religions are coo-coo. OK? It’s not just the Catholics. I’m not a bigot. Just because I wish for the demise of an organization that I think is entirely destructive to the human race, that doesn’t make me a bigot. I also wish for the demise of Hamas and the KKK. Not that on every score the Catholic Church is the same as those two organizations. I’m not a bigot because I root for their downfall.”

April 11, 2008, on “Real Time”: “And, finally, New Rule: Whenever you combine a secretive compound, religion and weirdos in pioneer outfits, there’s going to be some child-f***ing going on. [laughter] [applause] [cheers] In fact, whenever a cult leader sets himself up as ‘God’s infallible wing man’ here on earth, lock away the kids.

“Which is why I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound. And this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. [photo of the Pope shown] [mixture of laughter, shock, scattered applause]

“That’s right. The Pope is coming to America this week, and, ladies, he’s single! [laughter] Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Bill, you can’t be saying that the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult! For one thing, altar boys can’t even get pregnant.’ [mixture of laughter and other reactions]

“But, really, what tripped up the ‘little cult on the prairie’—[laughter]—was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands all over the world. Cults get raided. Religions get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their buggery? VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME! [laughter] [applause]

“If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’

“It’s like if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat, but if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re Bear Stearns, and we bail you out. [laughter] [applause] [cheers] And that’s who the Catholic Church is, the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia. [laughter] Too big to fail.

“When the—when the current Pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney—[laughter]—he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the statute of limitations ran out. And that’s the Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.’ [applause]

“Which is fine. Far be it from me to criticize religion. [laughter] But, just remember one thing: if the Pope was, instead of a religious figure, merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of daycare centers where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he’d be arrested faster than you can say, ‘Who wants to touch Mister Wiggle?’”

Media reports about two possibly anti-Catholic films reached us this summer. “Brideshead Revisited” and “Hamlet 2” appeared likely to be affronts to Catholic sensibilities and thus we went to see them so we would be prepared to respond, if necessary. While Hollywood is still not religion-friendly, not every film focusing on religion, particularly Catholicism, merits the response we provided for “The Golden Compass” or “Dogma.”

“Brideshead Revisited” is based on the classic novel by Evelyn Waugh. It tells the story of the Flyte family, all of whose members are portrayed as dysfunctional because of the mother’s rigid Catholicism. The son is a gay alcoholic; the daughter is torn between her faith and her atheist lover; the father is driven into exile with his mistress because of his wife’s repressive Catholicism. Yet, in the end, the beauty and necessity of the faith shines through as the daughter and father both repent, leading to hope that the atheist will follow suit.

While not as overtly Catholic and positive as the book, the movie managed to critique aspects of Catholicism without being anti-Catholic.

The other film, “Hamlet 2,” did not turn out to be anti-Catholic; rather, it is inappropriate in its portrayal of Jesus. It tells the story of a failed actor turned teacher who puts on a musical to save the school’s drama department. In the play, he portrays Jesus with his class singing and dancing with him. The intent is not to mock Jesus, but to make him a celebrity, who is the object of the other characters’ admiration and worship. The film also tries to be politically incorrect in poking fun at stereotypes of gang members, the ACLU, and others.

Neither movie was particularly well done nor did the films find significant audiences. The films have troublesome elements but overall were not as offensive as we initially suspected.

Since the films did not flagrantly attack Catholicism, we used our discretion in not making public statements, which would have drawn unmerited attention to these movies.

Score one for Catholic autonomy and common sense. U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten recently ruled that a Catholic school from Wichita, Kansas had the right to require all its students to speak English. The rule was instituted to protect students from being harassed by those who were selectively speaking Spanish; many of the teachers were at a loss to understand what was happening.

Just before the ruling came down, Bill Donohue discussed this issue with CNN’s Lou Dobbs on TV. Both were uniformly opposed to having the courts interfere with the right of a Catholic school to decide its own strictures.

Donohue took it further. Two days earlier, he told Dobbs, he had witnessed a hit-and-run accident on Long Island. Donohue got the license plate number of the guilty woman driver and made sure the police and an ambulance got to the crime scene immediately. He said he was facilitated in this process because the Latino woman who was hit could speak English. Had she not been able to do so, her own condition would have been jeopardized.

The larger issue, of course, is the right of Catholic institutions to determine their own rules and regulations without government sitting in judgment. So not only did English-only prevail, so did justice.

Bill Donohue is often asked by the celebrity page of the New York Post, “Page Six,” to offer an edgy comment on some current attack on the Catholic Church. In September, he was asked to comment on the upcoming book, 101 Places To Have Sex Before You Die; one of the recommended places is the confessional.

Here was Bill’s response: “The kind of people who would have sex in the confessional would also have sex in the graveyard. And I don’t mean with each other.”

The local ABC affiliate news show, “Eyewitness News,” liked Bill’s quip so much they sent a camera crew to interview him about his remark for the evening news.

Attempts to stop the referendum in California on gay marriage failed, but they succeeded in Florida in derailing the referendum on school vouchers. Regarding the California initiative, all the state’s bishops signed a strong statement urging Catholics to support the traditional understanding of marriage as a male-female union.

The November results will be closely watched.

As soon as the September Catalyst came out, Catholic League members started bombarding Paul Myers with their comments. The Eucharist-desecrating professor from the University of Minnesota complained that “I’ve recently seen a significant surge of howling mad Catholics shrieking at me.” He ascribed the surge to Catalyst.

He’s lucky we’re Catholic, otherwise the response might have been dramatically different.

The latest barrage of criticism was actually the second surge. Myers and University officials got hit with tons of e-mails over the summer when this issue broke: we provided contact information on our news releases. Getting hit twice will surely send a message—Catholics do not take kindly to stunts like Myers pulled.

Thanks to all those who registered their concerns. Your input is positively invaluable.

The University of Central Florida (UCF) student who walked out of Mass with the Eucharist (he later returned it), and who inspired University of Minnesota professor Paul Myers to desecrate the Communion wafer, was  impeached over the summer for his behavior by his fellow student government officers. The student, Webster Cook, still had to await the final vote on whether he would be removed from office. When school was resumed this fall, the student senate voted to oust him.

Myers wrote an article about this on his blog site entitled, “The Catholic League Gets One Petty, Cheap Victory.” In it he predicted that Donohue would be “gloating” over the news. He was half-right: Donohue wanted Myers punished as well.

We are still struck by the fact that students at UCF treated this matter more seriously than the administrators at the University of Minnesota did in handling Myers when he desecrated the Eucharist—he got off scot-free. All because of cowardice.

Maybe it’s time the students gave the administrators a crash course on ethics. They certainly came up short on Myers.

Tom and Phyllis Coté from New Jersey spotted this Election Year prayer in a Florida Catholic newspaper in 2000. It is just as relevant today—perhaps more so—and that is why we decided to share it with you.

[Please note that because of space limitations, we simply cannot print many of the beautiful prayers and other materials that our members send us. This is a one-time exception.]

O most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy, at this most critical time, we entrust the United States of America to your loving care. Most Holy Mother, we beg you to reclaim this land for the glory of your Son. Overwhelmed with the burden of the sins of our nation, we cry to you from the depths of our hearts and seek refuge in your motherly protection. Look down with mercy upon us and touch the hearts of our people. Open our minds to the responsibilities that accompany human freedom. Free us from the falsehoods that lead to the evil of abortion.

Grant our country the wisdom to proclaim that God’s law is the foundation in which this nation was founded, and that He alone is the True Source of our cherished rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. O Merciful Mother, give us the courage to reject the “culture of death” and lead us into a Millennium of Life. Trusting in your most powerful intercession, we pray: Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, we fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, our Mother, to thee do we come, before thee we stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not our petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer us. Amen.

By: William Doino, Jr.

Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann (Random House)

Two years ago, Pope Benedict XVI delivered an address in Regensburg, Germany on the relationship between faith and reason. That speech, which challenged elements of the Islamic world, created a firestorm of controversy, subjecting the pope to insults, abuse and even threats. But a considerable number of people—and not just Catholics—rose to the pontiff’s defense. When the dust settled, even some who had rushed to criticize Benedict realized that he had actually done something important—and brave—opening up a long-overdue debate.

What the pope did, at Regensburg, was spark a public dialogue on a very touchy, even taboo subject: what happens to a religion—in this case, Islam—when it detaches itself from reason, and succumbs to intolerance and violence.

Since 9/11, the danger of a militant, irrational, hyper-politicized Islam has taken center stage; but the history of that radical ideology remains largely unknown. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is an excellent primer; but there have been subsequent, more focused studies on the people who brought this plague into the modern world. Among the best is Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam. Written by Rabbi David Dalin (author of the bestselling book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope) and John Rothmann, a teacher and political commentator in San Francisco, it is a powerful and unforgettable portrait of Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Though unknown to many, al-Husseini was one of the most influential Arab figures of the twentieth century—and not for the good. Born in 1895, he grew up in Jerusalem and Egypt, where he attended the prestigious Al-Azhar University before dropping out. Though undereducated, he was a skilled self-promoter, cultivating an image of himself as a leading spiritual thinker. Dalin and Rothmann write:

“Al-Husseini never completed his academic studies at Al-Azhar University, a fact that would remain a source of controversy for his Muslim critics over the years. Since he’d dropped out of Al-Azhar without completing a degree, or the course of study necessary for ordination for a Muslim cleric and legal scholar, his Muslim opponents were able to belittle his academic credentials and maintain that he did not have sufficient accreditation to hold the position of mufti and spiritual leader in the Muslim religious community. Throughout his public career, al-Husseini tended to reinvent his own autobiography, claiming credentials and professional experience that he did not in fact possess.”

It is to the credit of the Muslim intellectual community that they were the first to recognize al-Husseini as a con man. Alas, before any of this criticism could take hold, geopolitical events intervened. World War I broke out, and al-Husseini became an officer in the Turkish army, enabling him to build up his thin resume, then parlay that into an ambitious political career. After the war, he returned to his native Jerusalem and began agitating against the British Empire (which then controlled Palestine), developing an intense brand of Arab nationalism.

“A charismatic and spellbinding orator,” write Dalin and Rothmann, “he [al-Husseini] mesmerized crowds on the street corners and outside the mosques of his native city and soon attracted a significant political following.” A frequent contributor to influential Arab journals, he developed a hostility toward Englishmen and Jews—the former, because he thought them imperialists; the latter, because of their desire for a Jewish state in Palestine. Al-Husseini was not the only Arab leader who held such views, but he was certainly among the most militant: unlike moderate nationalists, who were ready to accept a Jewish state, al-Husseini rejected all such compromise, and maintained that “any cooperation with the Jews was out of the question.”

Despite his reputation for militancy, the British appointed al-Husseini the new mufti of Jerusalem, in hopes of appeasing Palestinian activists. It was a move they would come to regret.

In the interwar years, the mufti, far from serving the interests of the Middle East, fanned the flames of hatred against anyone who opposed his militant designs. His rhetoric became Hitlerian. The Jewish community was the mufti’s prime target—he even sponsored pogroms against them—but he didn’t hesitate to persecute mainstream Muslims if they got in his path, either. By the late 1930’s, al-Husseini had become such an incendiary figure that the British moved to quarantine him, but he fled, eventually ending up in Nazi Germany, where he embraced Adolf Hitler.

The heart of this book concerns the mufti’s relations with the Third Reich, and how he helped lay the groundwork for the toxic ideologies that still haunt the Arab world. Dalin and Rothmann argue that al-Husseini not only fell under the spell of Nazism, but influenced it as well. When al-Husseini finally met Hitler in person, in late 1941, all differences between the two were put aside for a common cause: the elimination of the Jewish race. The details that emerged from that fateful meeting, as documented in this book, are chilling. The authors observe that the two unlikely allies eventually became “partners in genocide.”

Icon of Evil is not the first work to expose the Nazi-al-Husseini connection, but it is the most accessible and convincing. Over the years, a number of commentators have tried to cast doubt about the closeness of the mufti’s relationship with Hitler, and/or his involvement in the Holocaust. But the evidence laid out in Icon of Evil—shocking wartime photographs, al-Husseini’s correspondence with leading Nazis, and newly released archives—prove he was hardly a passing acquaintance. Al-Husseini was more deeply involved with the Third Reich’s war crimes than any comparable non-German figure. And the evidence of his guilt continues to mount.

In 2006, for example, two German scholars published a study revealing a Nazi plan to slaughter half a million Jews living in wartime Palestine—a project that was to be carried out with the enthusiastic cooperation of al-Husseini: “The grand mufti of Jerusalem,” concluded the study, “was the most important collaborator with the Nazis on the Arab side and an uncompromising anti-Semite.” Only the military successes of the Allies prevented the Holocaust from moving to the Holy Land. But al-Husseini’s evil succeeded elsewhere. At the invitation of Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, al-Husseini actually helped establish a Muslim Waffen SS unit that slaughtered 90 percent of Bosnian Jewry; and it was the mufti who, advising the Germans, nixed a 1943 plan that could have transferred 4,000 Jewish children to safety.

How, you might ask, could a spiritual leader, one supposedly devoted to a religion of peace, possibly collaborate with mass-murderers? He did it with an ease that frightens. Al-Husseini simply twisted his faith and read into it everything he wanted, much like the politically-driven jihadists do today, distorting Islam.

Despite his collaboration with Nazi war crimes, al-Husseini escaped justice after World War II, and continued to influence other Arab leaders—among them the Islamist Sayyid Qutb (a forerunner of Osama bin Laden); Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO; and Iraq’s General Khairallah Talfah, an uncle of Saddam Hussein. In one of the book’s most gripping sections, Dalin and Rothmann show how Talfah conveyed the mufti’s teachings and techniques to his nephew, poisoning the future Iraqi dictator with Nazi-like tendencies, which he made extensive use of later on.

By the time he died in 1974, al-Husseini had left behind a legacy of prejudice and bloodshed like few others. His life and writings continue to motivate the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda, and his followers continue to read and reprint two of al-Husseini’s favorite books: Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the notorious anti-Semitic fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That his modern followers often deny the reality of the Holocaust—which al-Husseini actually participated in—is another irony to the mufti’s dark story.

The book’s conclusion is striking and direct: “As the founding father of radical Islamic anti-Semitism in the twentieth century, al-Husseini remains the inextricable and enduring link between the old anti-Semitism of pre-Holocaust Europe and the Jew hatred and Holocaust denial that now permeates the Muslim world.”

Icon of Evil will doubtlessly be assailed by the “politically correct” community for bringing this story to light. Some will say its conclusions are too sweeping and harsh. But such accusations will be unfair—as misguided as those launched against Benedict’s Regensburg address. Dalin and Rothmann abhor prejudice of every kind; and are careful about focusing exclusively on al-Husseini and those who share his militant mindset: in no way do they seek to impugn all Muslims, many of whom reject Islamic radicalism—and often fall victim to it. In fact, properly understood, Icon of Evil is a plea to reject fanatical ideologies of every sort—not just those which pervert Islam—and as such, is very much in harmony with Pope Benedict’s efforts to unite the world’s religions against evil.

“In a world threatened by sinister and indiscriminate forms of violence,” said the pope recently, speaking to an Islamic group, “the unified voice of religious people urges nations and communities to resolve conflict through peaceful means and with full regard for human dignity.” In response, Sheik Mohamadu Saleem, executive member of the Australian National Imams Council, replied: “Muslims should become more inclusive and universal in their understanding of their religions. At the same time, significant segments of the Christian and other religious communities should overcome their misconceptions and prejudices of Islam and Muslims. If Muslims, Christians and other faith communities reach out to one another and build bridges rather than erect barriers, the whole of humanity will rejoice forever.”

I am sure the authors of this important book would wholeheartedly agree.

William Doino, Jr. prepared the “Annotated Bibliography of Works on Pope Pius XII, the Second World War and the Holocaust” that appears in The Pius War: Response to the Critics of Pius XII, edited by Joseph Bottum and David Dalin. He is also a contributing editor to Inside the Vatican.