Justus Denied in Massachusetts: Justus George Lawler Responds to a Review of His Book, Were the Popes Against the Jews?

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Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2012 3:13 PM
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Subject: Commonweal review

Just received my May 18 Commonweal wherein JGL takes a nasty left to the kidney, then a hard right to the jaw, followed by a full body-slam to the mat, plus unnecessary eye-gouging and groin kicking. Wow.

Meantime, he's allowed a full minute in a neutral corner after taking a terrible beating. Wow.

I feel like sending a sympathy card.

This bit of whimsy is from an e-mail exchange between two 1954 graduates of Christian Brothers College in St. Louis, both of whom had been among my students half a century ago. It is cited here to deflate the air of high seriousness and to counter the low blows evident in Rev. Kevin Spicer's Commonweal review of Were the Popes Against the Jews? ("Blind Spots," May 18, 2012). Perhaps "high seriousness" is too Arnoldian a phrase for the full-body takedown described above, though the low blows do suggest Dostoyevski's auto da fé ad majorem Dei gloriam.

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that I had thought at some length about where and how to respond to the indictment of Were the Popes Against the Jews? (WPAJ from here on). Then it occurred to me that Commonweal's journalists had presciently devised the ideal instrument, "Continuing the Conversation." As some readers may recall, it was under this rubric that I had made a brief appearance in those pages a couple of years ago with an article on a Jewish refugee's wartime encounter with Pius XII ("The Audience," November 5, 2010). Since that same material was subsequently reworked for WPAJ, it elicited this begrudging and arbitrary observation from Rev. Spicer. "Perhaps the saddest chapter is Lawler's final one, in which he cites the research of William Doino, a popular Catholic journalist." It was Doino who had actually made the discovery of The Palestine Post wartime article written by the young man whom Pius XII told to always be proud of being a Jew. But Rev. Spicer is given to attacks of melancholy, and had at the beginning of his review, after mentioning Kertzer, John Pawlikowski, and Kevin Madigan as targets of my "attacks," concluded: "The result, sadly, is a tedious, polemical, and often angry work." (italics supplied)

But for Spicer, what makes this the saddest chapter is that it doesn't conform to the regnant Hochhuth mythology of Pius XII as more preoccupied with Vatican investments than with the fate of Jews. Hence, too, the reference to "popular journalist." To be "popular" is to cater to the vulgar mob, and to be a journalist is indicative of lowly status, patently inferior to that of real researchers like Rev. Spicer. (It matters little that this also leaves those previously mentioned journalists at Commonweal somewhat less than "prescient.") The simple truth is that there is far more rigorous research and scholarship in Doino's 200 page, internationally lauded and heavily annotated bibliography of works on Pius XII during the wartime period (The Pius War, 2004) than in both of Spicer's Northern Illinois University Press books combined. The facilely dismissed Doino has made genuinely useful discoveries, whereas academics of a supercilious bent like Rev. Spicer usually endorse ideological platitudes or hackneyed trends, e.g., the anti-Semitism of Pius XII, presumably validated "historically" by "The Deputy." (As they say on the street, "Talk about sad!")

But the likely reason for this snide expression of contempt is that Doino wrote in First Things (November, 2008) a critique of Rev. Spicer's book, Hitler's Priests, where among other things he observed that not only the title but also the jacket photo and some of the content aped John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope? A more recent discovery is that Rev. Spicer's engaging title, "Blind Spots," had been deployed by him two years ago on the Internet site "Religion Dispatches"—a perfectly respectable forum for popular bloggers. But that time, it was another Holy Father who...