Rating: Summary: Hard Truth, Hard Words Review: This is a tough book. Zuccotti presents tough arguments and asks equally tough questions about the role of the Vatican in Italy during the Holocaust. Her research work and her piecing together the intricate jigsaw puzzle of doucuments has created a text that is difficult to refute and damning in its conclusions. Zuccotti demonstrates convincingly that Pope Pius XII and many within the heirarchy of the Catholic Church were, at best, passive in the face of the rescue work done by so many Italian Catholics, or, at worst, hostile to rescue work. At the same time she suggests, again, with considerable force of documentation and testimony, that the Vatican was quite content to be seen as the inspiration of rescue when in fact the historical record demonstrates otherwise. Trawling through the Vatican's published archival material and linking it up with diocesean archives, Jewish communal sources as well as memoirs and published testimonies of the persecuted, the perpetrators and the rescuers, Zuccotti has given historians a valuable guide to understand some of the complex "why's" of the Vatican's silence and lack of activity during the Holocaust. It is precisely her dispassionate narrative and allowing the sources to speak for themselves that gives this book so much power. The defenders of Pius XII and the Vatican bureaucracy need to either demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt their claims that Pius did all he could or end what has become a re-hashing of old and tired chestnuts that rely on innuendo, suggestion and a mish-mash of attributed quotes. If Pius, or one of his subordinates directed the convents and monasteries of Rome to lift cloister, please show us. If he instructed bishops, even verbally, to assist efforts in rescuing Jews, please provide the references - surely someone must remember them. Zuccotti has done the academic world a great service in this fine scholarly work. For Catholics, and indeed for all Christians, this work is another challenge to seek the truth - even if that truth is unpalatable. Only then can the present Pope's words about reconciliation between Jews and Christians have the full force they deserve. (For the record the reviewer is a believing and practicing Catholic.)
Rating: Summary: Under her very Nose Review: This is yet another piece of anti-Catholic vitriol charading as serious scholarship about World War II.The author claims that Pius XII did nothing to save Italian Jews but she simply ignores the massive, public evidence that he did. She makes no reference to the memoirs of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, personally sheltered by the pope and who recounts the hundreds of Italian Jewish lives saved by the Vatican. She ignores the abolition of cloister in Roman convents and monasteries (a move clearly approved by the pope) in order to provide refuge to persectuted. She claims that she found no "formal order" to this effect and ignores the published testimony of priestsand nuns from the period who cite Pius's approbation of this rescue effort. When she runs up against evidence she can't ignore, she dismisses it as ineffectual. She can't deny the hundreds of diplomatic protests send by Pius against Nazi atrocities, but she finds that they didn't change things much. What was Pius to do? Send in the Swiss Guard against the SS? ...
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