Description
In the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, the Vatican made a devil's bargain with fascist leaders. Anticipating that their regimes would eliminate a common enemy--namely Marxist-Leninist communism--two popes essentially collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini, and the fascist dictators in Spain (Franco) and Croatia (Pavelic).This is the damning indictment of this well-researched polemic, which for almost five decades in Germany has sparked controversy, outrage, and furious debate. Now it is available in English for the first time. Many will dismiss Deschner--who himself was raised and educated in a pious Catholic tradition--as someone who is obsessed with exposing the failings of the church of his upbringing. But he has marshaled so many facts and presented them with such painstaking care that his accusations cannot easily be ignored. The sheer weight of the evidence that he has brought together in this book raises a host of questions about a powerful institution that continues to exercise political influence to this day.
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A major publishing event, this is the first English translation of the book originally published in German (as Mit Gott und den Faschisten) in 1965. The book, examining and detailing evidence for collaborative policies between the Catholic Church and Fascist regimes of Europe before the Second World War, has been controversial since then, but its detractors have failed to counteract the massive evidence that the author marshaled to support his thesis that the Catholic Church had chosen to support Fascist regimes on the premise that such collaboration would unite them against their common enemy--Marxism-Leninism. This collaboration had led to enormous suffering and war crimes, covered up since then, especially in the traditionally Catholic countries of the Balkans and Austria. Deschner, the author of the massive Criminal History of the Church calmly and methodically presents the evidence of collaboration and cover-up, from Italian fascism to Spanish Civil War, from Hitler's Germany, to Croatian atrocities, and the part the Catholic Church had played in the early stages of the Second World war itself, including the partitioning of Czechoslovakia and the Church's tacit approval of the invasion of the USSR and its turnabout in an attempt to save face and protect itself from recriminations in the early post-war years. A fierce condemnation of the hypocrisy of religious establishment, this is required reading for students of both religious and European history. An appendix includes some criticisms leveled against the book since its publication and the author's responses to them. Annotation ©2014 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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