By Ronald Rychlak For about 20 years, author John Cornwell wrote as a disenchanted, former Catholic. Some of his early books sold well, but he really hit the big time in the past five years. He still writes books highly critical of the Catholic Church. Now, however, he writes not as a bitter former seminarian, but [...]
by Carl E. Olson (Catalyst 12/2004) Two years ago I was engaged in an e-mail exchange with a Fundamentalist pastor, who wrote: But as an effort to still save your soul, if indeed my concerns for you are true, may I urge you to reexamine the Mariolatry of the Church you have bought into. I will [...]
by William A. Donohue (Catalyst 10/2004) “It is no secret that the Bush administration is engaged in the most radical assault on the separation of church and state in American history.” When I first read that sentence, I wondered about the sanity of the author. Upon reflection, I still do. Susan Jacoby, who penned that line [...]
by Kenneth Woodward (Catalyst 9/2004) Ostensibly, this is a book about the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. But like everything Breslin writes, it is really about himself. Or rather, it is about him writing a book about clergy abuse. He wants us to know that he has lost faith in the church of [...]
by Ronald Rychlak (Catalyst 5/2004) During World War II and for years after it ended, Pope Pius XII was heralded as a staunch opponent of the Nazis and a champion of their victims. Then in 1963, as the result of a piece of fiction written by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, a controversy arose about whether the [...]
by Eugene J. Fisher (Catalyst 4/2006) Patrick J. Gallo, editor, Pius XII, the Holocaust and the Revisionists: Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2006. 218 pages. PB. NP. Sister Margherita Marchione, Crusade of Charity: Pius XII and POW's (1939-1945). New York: Paulist Press, 2006. 284 pages. Ronald J. Rychlak, Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the [...]
by Kenneth D. Whitehead (book review, Catalyst 7/2003) Daniel Silva, The Confessor, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003. HB; 401 pages. $29.95. What Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph McInerny has aptly called "the defamation of Pius XII"—in his excellent book with that title—has unfortunately been so widely successful in the culture at large that many people [...]
by Joseph De Feo (Catalyst 3/2003) Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.” The foregoing lines represent an apt condensation of Professor Daniel L. Dreisbach’s thesis [...]
by Ronald Rychlak (Catalyst 3/2005) John Cornwell's new book, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, turns out to be a deeply flawed attack on Pope John Paul II. That's right, the final chapter is actually an attack on the current plaintiff. Cornwell is disturbed by John Paul's "conservative" positions on celibate clergy, women priests, artificial [...]
by Bronwen McShea (Catalyst 1/2003) Daniel J. Goldhagen’s latest book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, purports to be a much-needed “moral philosophical” contribution to a troubled field of scholarship. Standing on the shoulders of other critics of Pope Pius XII’s wartime Church—James Carroll, [...]
