The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism Book

Eye-opening book about the relentless anti-Semitic propaganda campaign by the Catholic Church from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to World War II, drawn from archives of the Vatican made publicly available in 1998. After reading this book, the existence of popular European attitudes toward the Jews that made the holocaust possible will n longer be a mystery - and the book does not even address the many Protestant, Orthodox, and nationalistic anti-Semitic efforts going on at the same time. It shows what a comfortable fallacy it is to lay all the blame for the holocaust on Hitler and the Nazis, rather on European attitudes more generally.

The book focuses on the role of the Popes and their Secretaries of State, and directly contradicts the Church's own investigation published in 1998 which minimized and white-washed the Pope's and entire Church's involvement. Church periodicals, including those directly supervized by the Vatican and Pope, published attacks week after week, month after month, including blatantly false stories about Jews killing Christian children for blood for religious rites, Jews taking control of Catholic countries, Jewish-Masonic conspiracies, Jews bringin on themselves pogroms and other attacks by Christians by being so uppity, greedy and threating to Christian well being, Jews as the great enemy of the Catholic Church, as the poluting factor in contemporary life now that they could mixon on an equal footing with Christians, as incapable of being loyal citizens of any country, etc. It blamed them for freemarket capitalism, socialism and communism (all 19th-century developments that the Church disapproved of). Most of the anti-semitic charges heard from the Nazis and from anti-Semites today appear in Chruch propaganda, particularly from 1880 onward.

As a member of the Fascist Grand Council in Italy said in 1939, "We fascist Catholics consider the Jewish problem from a strictly political point of view.... But it comforts our souls to know that if, as Catholics, we became anti-Semities, we owe it to the teachings that the Church has promulgated over the past twenty centuries."