The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (review)

Beginning in the late 1990's, a veritable torrent of works appeared that examined the relationship between Pius XII, institutional Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. Mostly written by staunch critics including Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Susan Zuccotti, Garry Wills, and James Carroll, among others, these works revived debates that had broken out in the mid-1960's with the staging of Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, in Berlin in 1963. These works became media sensations in Western Europe and the United States, but also generated a backlash from those outraged either at their poor scholarship and sensational claims or from those resolved to rescue the reputation of the beleaguered pontiff and, more generally, the Roman Catholic Church. This latest book marks one of the most determined efforts to counter allegations made by critics and brings together more than ten trenchant and even acerbic reviews that appeared between 1998 and 2002 from scholars, lawyers, and journalists including John Conway, John Jay Hughes, Kevin Doyle, Robert Louis Wilken, Justus George Lawler, Rainer Decker, Russell Hittinger, Michael Novak, and even David Dalin, a historian and rabbi. Significant portions of the introduction also appeared in Richard John Neuhaus' journal, First Things, in 2004.

Undergirding this work is the premise that the critical reviewers have won all of the battles but lost the larger war. Though some of the reviews are written more moderately, much of this collection is characterized by a strident, even militant tone, one which offers no apologies and few concessions to the critics of Pius XII. Referring to recent works of the American scholar José Sanchez and the Swiss priest Martin Rhonheimer respectively, Joseph Bottum reproaches "the relatively mild efforts to praise the pope" and "relatively mild efforts to disparage him" as "clueless about the situation in which they appear as the proverbial visitors from Mars. Indeed, there is something willful and maddening in their would-be tone of Olympian detachment." His antidote? "In a world of imbalance, what but pressure on the other side can restore the balance that a true scholar is supposed to love? I am convinced that will we [sic] not achieve anything resembling historical accuracy until the presently existing views are cleared away—and thus, that the job for every honest writer who takes up the topic now is to correct the overblown hatred of Pius XII."

At times, the no-holds-barred approach becomes hyperbolic. Bottum neglects, for instance, to point out that Martin Rhonheimer, the scion of a family that was three-quarters Jewish, is also a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross and a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature—certainly no bastions of liberalism or anticlericalism! More importantly, such tactics undermine the efforts of those seeking to rehabilitate the reputation of Pius XII by subsuming the search for historical truth to exhortations to political activism.

But yet this collection is to be strongly recommended both to specialists in the field and a lay audience, even if many readers new to the subject find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of names and works of scholarship mentioned. William Doino's masterful annotated bibliography of works on Pius XII, World War II, and the Holocaust spans more than 180 pages, includes more than 80,000 words and will become the defining bibliography on this topic. Supporters of Pius XII will find a resounding affirmation of their suspicions and positions in this annotated bibliography; critics of Pius will profit tremendously by reading it against the grain. The only substantial omission is an index, which would have made the task of locating individual authors within this bibliography considerably easier.

In his introduction, Bottum speculates why the Pius wars have resurfaced during the last seven years. Phillip Jenkins, he notes, sees it as an updated form of anti-Catholicism, while others point to changing understanding of authority, battles over the future of the...