Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Alberigo, Giuseppe (Ed.). Giuseppe Dossetti. Prime prospettive e ipotesi di ricerca. [Istituto per Ie scienze religiose—Bologna, Testi e ricerche di scienze religiose, nuova serie, 22.] (Bologna: Società éditrice il Mulino. 1998. Pp. 145. Lire 20,000 paperback.) The three essays contained in this short book deal with the life and work of Giuseppe Dossetti. Included as well are some transcripts oftalks that he gave to young Catholics in the early 1950's. For the fifty or so years before his death in December, 1996, Giuseppe Dossetti served as one ofthe most important voices of Italian Catholicism. His roles as a scholar, a maverick, and an irritant made him all the more valuable to that world. A young canon law professor during the waning years of Benito Mussolini's regime, he joined the anti-Fascist resistance and assumed command of the Committee of National Liberation (C.L.N.) in Reggio nell'Emilla. The C.L.N.'s political ecumenism, however, dissolved after the war when the Communists turned anti-Fascist popular justice into a broader violent attack on conservatives and Catholics. This prompted the idealistic Dossetti to delay his desire to enter the Church and to take up politics as a Christian Democrat. Dossetti made his mark in the Christian Democratic Party (or D.C.) as the leader of an ill-fated left-wing faction of intellectuals, theprofessorini (or dossettiani), which included Giorgio La Pira, Giuseppe Lazzati, and Amintore Fanfani. The faction reached a dead end at the D.C.'s 1949 Congress in Venice, and the defeated Dossetti retired from politics. His departure was interrupted briefly in 1956 when he ran without success for the Bologna mayor's office against the popular Communist, Giuseppe Dozza. Dossetti became convinced that the limitations of Catholic politics rose from the failings of the Italian Church. His earlier intention to join the Church was now inflamed by the desire to reform it. Dossetti settled and worked in the Diocese of Bologna and developed a close relationship with its activist archbishop Giacomo Lercaro. He soon founded one of Italy's most important organizations for the study of the Church, the Centro di documentazione (later the Istituto per Ie Scienze Religiose). Dossetti was ordained in 1959, and Lercaro brought him as aperito to the sessions of the Second Vatican Council. Emboldened by the Council, Lercaro and Dossetti assaulted the Bolognese church with reformist passion during the mid-1960's until they ran afoul of Rome and, some believe, the Americans, who probably questioned their loyalty to the Cold War alliance. That Dossetti met with some U.S. diplomats shortly before resigning 153 154BRIEF NOTICES his administrative position in the Bologna diocese (and before Lercaro was pushed out in February, 1968), certainly raises the possibility. Giuseppe Alberigo's small but valuable book accomplishes what its title proclaims : an examination of where we stand in the study of Don Giuseppe Dossetti . The bulk of the work consists of two essays, one by Giovanni Miccoli on Dossetti's politics, the other by Alberigo on his activity in the Catholic Church. The essays are followed by the transcripts of three talks that Dossetti gave to Catholic youth in the early 1950's. It concludes with Enzo Bianchi's account of Dossetti's spiritual road. Particularly interesting here is the discussion of the monastic association, the "Rule of the Little Family" that Dossetti launched in 1956. Roy R Domenico (The University ofScranton) Cornwelljohn. Hitler's Pope.The Secret History ofPius XII. (NewYork:Viking. 1999. Pp. xiv, 430. $29.95.) John Cornwell, an English journalist, holds that Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII, subordinated his diplomatic actions to the aggrandizement of papal power. This, in Cornwell's view, explains why the pope remained neutral and did not speak out against the Nazis in defense of the Jews in World War II. For this alleged failure, Cornwell holds that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope"(p. 297). Claiming that his work is based on documents used for the first time, Cornwell relies on dubious secondary sources and fails to make adequate use of the eleven volumes of documents published by the Holy See, especially those (6, 8, 9, and...