Volume 47, Number 5 · March 23, 2000
The Pope, the Nazis & the Jews
By István Deák
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
by John Cornwell
Viking, 430 pp., $29.95
The Vatican and the Red Flag: The Struggle for the Soul of Eastern Europe
by Jonathan Luxmoore, by Jolanta Babiuch
London: Geoffrey Chapman, 351 pp., $27.95 (paper)
The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965
by Michael Phayer
Indiana University Press
Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler
edited by Frank J. Coppa
Catholic University of America Press, 248 pp., $24.95 (paper)
The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI
edited by Georges Passelecq, and Bernard Suchecky, Translated from the French by Steven Rendall, with an introduction by Garry Wills
Harcourt Brace, 329 pp., $14.00 (paper)
Few twentieth-century statesmen have been more enigmatic, contradictory, or controversial than Pius XII, who was Pope from 1939 to 1958 during one of the world's, and the Catholic Church's, most trying periods. Pius was an ascetic; his face pale, his hands nearly translucent. He did not drink, smoke, or have any other obvious vices. His breakfast was a piece of bread and a glass of warm milk; for the rest of the day he ate not much more than that. He saw himself as Christ's most humble servant, yet no other pope in recent times has surrounded himself with more pomp and none enforced a more rigid etiquette. He did not doubt that he was God's sole vicar on earth, responsible for the spiritual welfare of all humanity, yet, at least according to his critics, he hardly ever spontaneously addressed an ordinary human being: when he took a walk in the Vatican gardens, he expected that workers would vanish into the bushes as he passed.
Review, 7121 words
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