Rating: 
Summary: a book of lies
Review: This book describes how the pope kept his mouth shut during WWII. Although he rarely spoke out about the persecution of the Jewish people, he did all he could to secretly save thousands. If the Pope had spoke out against the Protestant Hitler, Catholics may have been persecuted too.
Rating: 
Summary: A Book Worthy of Reading.
Review: It is quite obvious that most of the opponents of this book are of the Catholic faith since all reasonable thinking has been thrown to the wind as it was during the time period when this book was written about. Whether you agree or disagree it is worth a solid 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Poor Scholarship
Review: Cornwell is neither a scholar nor a historian. He completely ignores facts, documents, and the writings of even leading Jewish contemporaries of Pius XII. Cornwell greatly exaggerates his use of Vatican files. Even the photo on the book jacket is incorrectly attributed to the time of Hitler; in fact it was from the 1920's when Pacelli was a papal nuncio to Germany, well before Hitler came to power. The soldier is a Weimar soldier, not a Nazi.One can argue whether or not Pope Pius XII could have been more outspoken, but Cornwell's lack of scholarship and ethical research is inarguable and inexcusable. Viking Press should be ashamed of themselves for publishing this trash. Those who have reviewed this book and praised it should do a little more research yourselves.
Rating:
Summary: This is one of the worst-researched books on WWII written.
Review: Either Cornwell is a shoddy and ignorant researcher or a liar - whichever label he finds less demeaning should be applied. The problems begin with the book cover, which the reader is led to assume to be a picture of Pacelli walking out of a Nazi government building, but which was actually taken during the Weimar government no later than 1929, four years before Hitler was placed into power. It gets worse from there - he claims to have had unique access to archives which have actually been opened to dozens of researchers before him. He claims to have had access to war archives when in fact the archives he worked in only went to 1922. He claims to have discovered unique documents which were actually published years ago in books he should have read but obviously didn't. He claims to have undertaken meticulous research but he failed even to check such elementary sources as the Nuremburg trial transcripts and other standard works on the period, which would have kept him from falling into numerous laughable historical errors. Worst of all for a researcher working on Nazi Germany, not only is Cornwell ignorant of German, he apparently can't even read standard English translations of German sentences, since he translates "Mit Brennende Sorge," which means "With Burning Sorrow" as "With Great Appreciation" and demonstrates complete ignorance of the contents of this great encyclical against Nazism, the only encyclical in the 20th century not written in Latin, an encyclical so strident that Allied bombers braved AA fire and German fighters to to drop 80,000 copies of the encyclical on German soil (a fact Cornwell's meticulous research overlooks). He also ignores Pius XII's role in assisting the German generals who tried to overthrow Hitler during the war. These are the major errors, but since this review must be less than 1000 words in lenghth, I'll hold off on listing the others. In short, Cornwell meticulously avoids mentioning anything in the historical record which shows Pacelli's hatred of Nazism. Cornwell's book comes out as the last of the Holocaust survivors are dying, and thus unable to repudiate the extremely one-sided treatment he delivers. The book compares very well to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," an account of a secret meeting of Jewish elders at the turn of the century who were planning to take over the world. The account was fraudulent, of course, but the "Protocols" fed the fires of anti-Semitism in Europe quite nicely for years and is still accepted in some circles as factual even up to the present day. Cornwell's my-fiction-is-your-reality will undoubtedly do the same for the historically popular anti-Catholic mentality, especially in the U.S. From the point of view of historical research, this book is toilet paper, but if you want insights into the mind of modern anti-Catholics, especially anti-Catholics who claim to be Catholic, John Cornwell's book is a goldmine.
Rating:
Summary: A compelling indictment of moral failure.
Review: John Cornwell has produced a well-researched and thoughtful analysis of the papacy of Eugenio Pacelli and the moral weakness of the institutional church in the face of the most monstrous evil of our time. Preoccupied with the institution of the papacy and blind, willfully or not, to the fate of humanity, Pacelli stands condemned for his lack of spiritual and moral leadership at a critical moment in the Church's history. Repeatedly, as Cornwell shows, Pacelli rejected pleas to speak out against Hitler and the destruction of European Jewry--even when that destruction was underway beneath the windows of the Vatican, itself. Cornwell traces Pacelli's rise through the ranks of the Curia and traces Pacelli's failure to a combination of preoccupation with establishing the supremacy of the papacy within the Church; an authoritarian mindset more comfortable dealing with other authoritarians, such as Hitler, than with democratic institutions; and a callous indifference to the fate of the Jews, bordering on anti-Semitism. Cornwell argues persuasively that if the Church under Pacelli had been vociferous in denouncing Hitler, much of the evil inflicted by the Nazis may have been prevented. This book is a must-read for any serious-minded student of the troubled history of our times.
Rating:
Summary: Cornwell's position obvious from the beginning
Review: A predictable attack on the conservative side of the Catholic Church. Not only is the information presented in the book highly misleading and often time erroneous, the obvious anti-Vatacan bent of the author is abundently clear. The idea that he set out to exonerate the pope, and suddenly found new information is laughable. If I could give it less than 1 I would have.
Rating:
Summary: Old lies and prejudices
Review: Applying Mr. Cornwell's logic, one could just as easily call John Paul II "Abortion's Pope." After all, although John Paul has spoken out against abortion, is universally known and reported in the media to be against abortion, and has done everything in his and the Church's power to aid unwed mothers and infants in need of care, he hasn't spoken out more forcefully and called upon Catholics to rise up against the regimes that support abortion. This reveals -- or so the argument would run -- a deep-seated, albeit hypocritcally concealed, sympathy toward the practice on the part of John Paul. Somehow, given Mr. Cornwell's leanings, I don't think we'll see that book anytime soon. In his 1991 semi-autobiographical "Hiding Places of God," he depicted himself as an agnostic. He did once enter the seminary, however, where, as he describes on page 24 of "Hiding Places of God," he "took delight in attempting to undermine the beliefs of my fellow seminarians with what I regarded as clever arguments; I quarreled with lecturers in class and flagrantly ignored the rules of the house." This book is nothing more than the old lies, anti-Catholic bigotry, and more of Mr. Cornwell's "clever arguments" masquerading as academic impartiality. Read Pierre Blet's book instead.
Rating:
Summary: As a review in Newsweek says: "Deeply flawed"
Review: This book is getting a lot of attention. But all the reading I have done, especially the testimony of Jewish leaders during and after WWII concerning what Pius XII did to help the Jewish people, makes me very skeptical about Mr. Cornwell's allegations. I would urge everyone to suspend judgment until they have read a lot of other evidence. A great deal of material, pro and con, can be found on the Internet by searching on "Pius" and "Holocaust". At present, Amazon is bringing up "Pius XII and the Second World War: According to the Archives of the Vatican" by Pierre Blet, et. al. as a book that others who have bought Mr. Cornwell's book have also purchased. I would point out that Pierre Blet is one of the four persons who edited the 12-volume "The Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to World War II". So, he is in an even better position than Mr. Cornwell is to talk about this issue. I realize that he is also potentially biased because he is a Jesuit priest. But then, it is fair to ask what Mr. Cornwell's bias is.
Rating: 
Summary: Not what it claims to be
Review: Cornwell is a compelling writer, and he makes a serious case that Pius XII's legacy was not a positive one. As such, this book deserves consideration. But it is not what it claims to be. Mr. Cornwell would have us belief he was originally sympathetic to Pius XII but that access to previously secret information about the Pope caused him to change his mind. That is, the book claims to be based on new revelation. It's not. It's an analysis of widely known historical information by one critical of the Catholic conservativism that Pius XII advanced. Mr. Cornwell is first and foremost concerned with criticizing the conservative faction that advocates centralized church authority, enforced doctrinal orthodoxy, and the precedence of personal holiness over social action. His analysis of Pius's papacy is a vehicle for this critique. He dedicates considerable attention to the First Vatican Council, to the papacy of the arch-conservative Pius X, and to the current backslash against the progressive legacy of the Second Vatican Council, all topics that bear no relation to Pius XII's role in the Second World War, the book's ostensive subject matter. Mr. Cornwell admits that he gained access to archives in possession of the Jesuits by claiming he was favorable to Pius, but pretends that this was true at the time. This seems to me very implausible, since all of Mr. Conrwell's previous books about the Catholic Church have expressed the same anti-conservative, anti-hierarchic orientation that is so evident throughout this work. Moreover, Mr. Cornwell dislikes Pius XII personally. He is not above repeating gossip about his housekeeper or informing us that his corpse was grotesquely putrified at the time of his funeral. That said, I think the book is worth reading and commenting. I am personally inclined to agree with Mr. Conrwell that Pius XII did more harm than good to the Catholic Church. But readers should keep in mind that this work was not written in good faith.
Rating: 
Summary: A book worthy of serious debate
Review: The pontificate of Pius XII is one of the most contentious ofthe 20th Century. In this book, Cornwell paints a picture of a manwho was not evil. He was simply a man, with human flaws like the rest of us. That, in a sense, is the main thesis of this book. That popes are men, but men who have been saddled with semi-divine powers and can do no wrong. Witness the knee-jerk cries of "bigotry" that go with most of the negative reviews of this book. More sanguine and scholarly reviews commend Cornwell's scholarship and conclusions -- that Pope Pius XII did not say enough. In one scene from the book Cornwell notes how 2,000 gentile women protested the Gestapo arrests of 10,000 male Jews in 1943 Poland. Their protest worked. 10,000 Jews were saved from certain death. The collorary is that Catholics in Nazi Germany were hamstrung by Rome -- unable to speak out against the horrors of the Nazi regime. What would have happened had they been able to do so? And all for the power of Rome. Catholicism is more than Rome -- the word does mean "universal" after all. But when Catholics are required to follow the teachings of the men in Rome, and not the teachings of the one man who matters, there is only conflict. In the end, the church cannonizing this deeply flawed man and not his immediate successor (John XXIII) is indicative of how removed it is from the true message of Christ.
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