In a lengthy epilogue, Rychlak takes the author to task in his analysis of Cornwell’s inaccuracies and misrepresentations regarding Pius XII’s words and actions. It is a comprehensive defense that offers readers a clear exposition of facts and documents that contradict Cornwell’s theses. Indeed, it is a balanced discussion that must be considered in any discussion of this contemporary and much-debated topic.

The day after the Pope’s election (March 3, 1939), the Berlin Morgenpost stated: “The election of Cardinal Pacelli is not accepted with favor in Germany because he was always opposed to Nazism.” On October 28, 1939, the front page caption of The New York Times was in very large print: “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism; Urges Restoring of Poland.” Again on March 14, 1940, the caption read: “Pope is Emphatic About Just Peace; Jews’ Rights Defended.” In an editorial published in 1941, The New York Times considered the voice of Pius XII “a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas” and praised the Pope for having “put himself squarely against Hitlerism.”

Did Pius XII do the best he could for those who were being persecuted? He definitely did more than any other world leader. In a conflict of unprecedented violence, Pius XII proved to be a man of extraordinary compassion.

The Vatican had sent countless protests to the Nazis. Pius XII could not do more publicly. According to two witnesses, his draft of a protest against the deportation of Dutch Jews was burned. He was careful not to endanger his flock and the potential victims he was trying to save. He had learned a lesson from the deportation and killing of Jews in Holland, including the Carmelite nun Edith Stein, which followed the public protest of the Catholic Bishops. At that time, Jewish Protestants in the Netherlands were reprieved because the Protestant Church under threats canceled its protest.

The Catholic Church, with its international network under the central direction of Pius XII, saved the lives of hundreds of thousands. The record of the Allies during the war in relation to the Pope’s rescue operations leaves something to be desired. I cannot agree with Cornwell’s description of Pius XII as Hitler’s Pope. I totally agree with Ronald Rychlak’s scholarly interpretation of the period. He also shows that Pius XII is not the real target, but John Paul II and the very future of the papacy are at stake.

The foreword to Rychlak’s book was written by the late John Cardinal O’Connor. In one of his final published writings, the Cardinal wrote: “I am indebted to Professor Ronald J. Rychlak for this book Hitler, the War, and the Pope. In his well-crafted pages, he tells us of the story of Eugenio Pacelli, a saintly priest, a skilled diplomat, and a consummate churchman, who was elected pope only months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland.”

Reverend John J. Hughes, calls Hitler, the War, and the Pope “a massive refutation of the black legend depicting Pius XII as passive and silent in the face of the Holocaust out of fear, cynicism, and anti-Semitism.” Noted professor of Political Science from Princeton University, Robert George, in the afterward, explains: “Rychlak has buried the myth under an avalanche of facts and demonstrated that Pacelli’s reputation deserves to be what it was during the war when the New York Times — more than once — praised him as ‘a lonely voice crying out of the silence of a continent,’ and after the war when Grand Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem sent the Pope a special blessing for ‘his life-saving efforts on behalf of the Jews,’ and, at his death, when Golda Meir observed that ‘during the ten years of Nazi terror, when the Jewish people went through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims.’ “

Father Avery Dulles, perhaps the leading Catholic theologian in the nation, has written that Hitler, the War, and the Pope should be “required reading for all who repeat the baseless canards about the ‘silence’ of Pius XII.”

Rychlak’s research took him to the Vatican archives where he reviewed the same documents that John Cornwell had used, and met with the same people Cornwell met. One of those people, Father Peter Gumpel, the “relator” of Pope Pius XII’s cause within the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Vatican City, says Rychlak has put together “an impressive and excellent factual record regarding the strained relations between the Catholic Church and Hitler’s Third Reich as well as the efforts of Pope Pius XII to protect Jews and other victims of the Nazis.” As Father Gumpel has written: “No one who objectively reads this insightful text can have any doubt about where Pius stood during those years of darkness.”

To fully appreciate Rychlak’s response to Cornwell’s allegations and distortions, one must also consult the priceless 183 pages of endnotes with source material identifying and explaining the truth. This book is important reading for both scholars and the general public.

To evaluate Pope Pius XII’s wartime record, one cannot merely focus on individual episodes or limited periods of time. One must examine all the evidence in context. In the Preface (Hitler, the War, and the Pope p. xiii), the author tells us that he “did this by taking world events as we know them to have been and looking at Pius XII’s actions, inactions, silence, and statements in the context of their time.” The result? As the Catholic League reports: “Rychlak’s work puts the claim of the ‘silence’ of Pope Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust to rest.”

One of the toughest questions for natural law theorists to handle is how to justify the claim that there is intrinsic to human nature an objective standard of morality like the natural law when so many individuals and social groups act as if they know of no such theory. Now, the nihilistic answer at the core of utilitarianism and other forms of relativism (that there is no such intrinsic and objective standard) quickly falls victim to our basic intuitions about the heinous nature of actions like torturing the innocent, cold-blooded murder, or rape. Even when one gains agreement that there is a natural law, some will argue that violation of that law tends to be the result of conscience grown weak by neglect or actually erased by a moral decline in one’s culture. So, even if the problem begins for an individual as a defect of will in neglecting what one does know, the reason for the wrongdoing turns out to be a defect in knowledge: we no longer know what we ourselves, or other members of our culture, once knew. In short, the apparent ignorance about right and wrong in our contemporary world is a genuine ignorance, and the honest search for the truth is doing the best we can.

This explanation may at first seem persuasive. But Budziszewski argues that the real answer is what the classical natural law tradition represented by Thomas Aquinas has always argued: that the core principles of natural law are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.” This is to say that the problem remains one of volition, not of cognition, for the moral law is genuinely known to all. It is not merely that only the first practical principle (that good is to be done and evil avoided) is known always and everywhere, but that what Aquinas had named the secondary precepts such as honoring one’s parents and not stealing should be counted among what we cannot not know.

Granting the occasional exception, the reason why so many individuals and groups act as if they do not know the objective standards of morality must then be sought in voluntary suppression of the truth and not in ignorance, let alone in the chaotic vacuum presupposed by the nihilist who holds that there simply are no such truths to be known. To use the language of contemporary psychology, the current moral decline is the result of being “in denial.”

As the result of the author’s hard-won teaching experience, he offers any number of effective practical strategies for stirring up the knowledge of moral truths in a conversation-partner who is busy denying them. One may, for instance, want to remain steadfast in turning the question back onto a recalcitrant skeptic who rhetorically asks how we can know that even murder is wrong. One has to be ready to hold such a relativist’s feet to the fire: “Are you at this moment in any real doubt about murder being wrong for everyone?” Perhaps a long uncomfortable silence will let the naïve relativist squirm back into recognition of the truth. Another tack would be to dissipate the smoke generated when we are faced with hydra-headed objections to some basic truth. Budziszewski reports on the realization that dawned on a young friend whom he confronted with the question: “Suppose we took a few weeks and I answered every one of your objections to your complete intellectual satisfaction. . . . Would you then believe?” Getting the friend to say “No, not even then” turned out to be the moment in which the friend realized that the real problem was not in his mind but in his will.

In 1995 the Archbishop of Vienna continued the commentary with a second series of 52 articles (published in 1996 with the subtitle “Sources of the Faith”), dealing with “The Celebration of the Christian Mystery” (CCC Part Two). The English translation by John Saward of Volume Two of the commentary is the subject of this review.

Whereas the Catechism itself is a massive, detailed reference work, Living the Catechism of the Catholic Church is a clear, simple, highly readable introduction to the major themes of that catechetical resource. In presenting the sacramental economy, the author preserves the same sequence of topics and hence the overall structure of the CCC (thus unobtrusively bringing the fruits of Thomistic theology to the People of God).

Schönborn’s brief meditations on the sacraments frequently begin with a current question (e.g., about the reason for baptizing infants), misunderstanding (a caricature of contrition) or controversy (“Who celebrates the liturgy?” — to which the principle answer is: “The whole Christ,” CCC no.1136). Having noted the “objection,” the author then conversationally proceeds to the sed contra, that is, to a concise statement of the full, traditional Catholic teaching on the particular subject. Schönborn’s low-key but skillful use of this method demonstrates that he knows not only the Church’s doctrine but also the Church’s contemporary flock very well.

Because It is the “source and summit” of the Church’s life, ten meditations are devoted to the Holy Eucharist and the Mass. The various aspects of the Blessed Sacrament (sacrifice and communion, Real Presence and pledge of future glory) are held nicely in balance. Pastoral questions such as “Continuity and change in the Mass” and “Ecumenism at the Lord’s Supper?” are addressed irenically.

One meditation introduces the “Sacraments of Healing,” followed by three on the Sacrament of Penance or Reconciliation and one on the Anointing of the Sick. Here, especially, Schönborn’s pastoral acumen is apparent as he moves adroitly from the commonplace (but inadequate) secular wisdom about faults and failings, sickness and death to the Church’s Good News about redemption and forgiveness, God’s mercy and Christian suffering.