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THE POPE'S LAST CRUSADE by Peter Eisner

THE POPE'S LAST CRUSADE

How an American Jesuit Helped Pope Pius XI's Campaign to Stop Hitler

by Peter Eisner

Pub Date: March 1st, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-204914-8
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

The story of the race to compose a last top-secret encyclical against Nazi racism before the death of Pope Pius XI.

Notwithstanding the spate of current works on the tragic shortcomings of Pius XII during World War II, journalist and producer Eisner (The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II, 2004, etc.) refocuses the spotlight in this relevant study on his predecessor, who did speak out against anti-Semitism and the threat of Nazism—though he was silenced by an untimely death in 1939. Pius XI, an activist pope since 1922 under whom the Vatican ultimately became an independent city-state achieving political and financial stability, had been deeply moved by an American Jesuit priest’s 1937 book Interracial Justice, about his work among poor Maryland blacks, and summoned the author, Rev. John LaFarge, to the Vatican in 1938. In his 80s, Pius XI had a serious heart condition, yet the growing Nazi menace demanded action: The year before, Pius had issued an important encyclical, With Deep Anxiety, slamming the Nazis for racist policies and oppression of Catholics; now, aware he was on death’s door, Pius was determined to go further in a new message he urged LaFarge to write swiftly and in secret. Eisner traces LaFarge’s work in Paris over the summer of 1938 and his missteps in confiding in the pope’s Superior General Ledochowski as a go-between, a shadowy figure who allowed the document to languish while the pope grew more ill. Ledochowski, like the pope’s secretary of state Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pius XII), believed that the pope was imbalanced and that communism (and Jews) was the menace, not Nazism. Eisner closes with excerpts from LaFarge’s powerful encyclical and the chilling suggestion of what might have been the outcome had it been published.

An exciting reminder of how Vatican machinations continue to haunt history.