The Popes Against the Jews

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(basic description of the book to go here)

[edit] Critiques

• Russell Hittinger's "Desperately Seeking Culprits" (The Pius War Lexington Books, 2004, ch.5).
  • "What can explain Kertzer’s failure to read the public documents of the modern popes? Perhaps someone told him that he would find nothing favoring his thesis [that the modern papacy was anti-Semitic]. Indeed…Jews are mentioned no more than a half-dozen times before 1937. Between 1775 and 1937, this is the only sentence in more than two hundred teaching documents that casts the Jews in an unfavorable light: ‘But it knew well that none of the metropolitans or the senior bishops would agree to ordain new bishops who were elected in the municipal districts by laity, heretics, unbelievers, and Jews as the published decrees commanded.’ Here, we have quoted Pius VI’s Charitas (1791). In the second year of the French Revolution, the pope was complaining about that the regime’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy made clergy subject to election by taxpayers, regardless of their religion or complete lack of religion. Unless one supposes that Jews are entitled to elect Catholic clergy, the passage hardly demeans either the natural or civil rights of Jews. In fact, the public documents show clearly that Jews hardly registered on the papal radar screen…Were the popes preoccupied with Jacobins, Liberals, Masons, Socialists, and Laicists? Yes, of course. But not Jews" (49).
  • "Throughout the book, the popes are depicted as omniscient and omnipotent figures, capable of putting Austria and France, the Roman Curia, bishops, monsignors, and journalists into line by the snap of a papal finger; their silence about a particular renegade priest or political movement is interpreted as another instance of papal causality in world affairs" (Ibid. 51).
  • Excerpt from Desperatly Seeking Culprits