"The Pius War will likely remain the definitive answer to the slew of malicious and misleading books that have in recent decades assailed Pius XII for his "silence," or worse, during the period of Hitler and the Holocaust. Turning the tables, Rabbi Dalin makes a persuasive case that Pius should be honored as a "righteous gentile" in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Of inestimable value, and the product of years of laborious effort, is an annotated bibliography by William Doino, Jr. It is almost two hundred pages in length and will become an indispensable reference for all responsible writers on Pius XII, the Holy See, and the Hitler era. The Pius War includes a brilliant critique of John Carroll's Constantine's Sword by Robert Louis Wilken. The attack on Pius, Wilken notes, is about ever so much more than Pius: "At the end of the day, in spite of the enormous effort to lay bare the sins of the Church over two millennia, Constantine's Sword is not really a book about Christian theology of the Jews. Its subject is Christian theology tout court, and its polemic springs from the currently fashionable `ideology of religious pluralism'-what might be termed horror at strong opinions. Carroll wants a Christianity that celebrates a `Jesus whose saving act is only one disclosure of the divine love available to all,' and calls for a pluralism of `belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human effort to express God.' What we have, then, is a rather conventional cultural critique of Christianity. The Jews are the victims par excellence of the excesses of revealed religion. But what Carroll forgets is that the Jews, too, believe in revelation. If Christians, on the basis of Scriptures and the Christian tradition, cannot confess Jesus as Lord, can the Jews, on the basis of Scriptures and Jewish tradition, claim that they are the elect people of God? In Carroll's brave new world there will be neither Jews nor Christians." On the specifics of what Pius did or did not do, could or could not do, during the Holocaust, and also on the larger theological questions addressed by Wilken and others, The Pius War will likely be an important resource in advancing the cause of Pius XII toward his canonization." -- First Things