This summer, The Tidings will present a monthly roundup of book reviews, each tied to a particular theme. This week, the reviewed books address issues of politics and religion in North America; Catholic-Jewish relations in the context of Nazism; and Christianity's place in western culture.

Politics and religion in Canada and the U.S.

God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It

By Jim Wallis. HarperSanFrancisco (San Francisco, 2005). 384 pp., $24.95.

Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society: Essays in Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy

Edited by Douglas Farrow. McGill-Queen's University Press (Montreal, 2004). 201 pages, $19.95.

In the United States, there is a strict separation of church and state, but no one is at all surprised that religion is heavily mixed up in politics. In Canada, it's just the opposite: The constitution recognizes the supremacy of God, yet politicians won't pray in public for fear of offending those who may not have any religious beliefs.

Those two contradictory attitudes --- in more ways than one --- are amply demonstrated in these two books: the Rev. Jim Wallis's "God's Politics," and "Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society," edited by Douglas Farrow, a professor of Christian thought at McGill University in Montreal.

Rev. Wallis, an evangelical Christian well-known for his work at Sojourners, a nationwide network of Christians active in social justice issues, starts with the assumption that Americans by and large accept that the Christian Gospel has something vitally important to contribute to public debate and the common good. His book --- now a New York Times best seller --- was published in the aftermath of a terribly divisive federal election that saw U.S. President George W. Bush return to power with the help of Christian allies. It is subtitled "Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America."

Rev. Wallis laments that Christian beliefs have been manipulated and distorted to help the Republicans to power. Then he accuses the Democrats of being too one-dimensional to make room in their party for those whose faith encompasses a pro-life stance on abortion, euthanasia and other sexual moral questions.

"I have never seen such outrageous behavior by a political party in trying to manipulate religion for its own agenda while so disrespecting the faith of millions of other believers who disagree with the Republican political agenda," Rev. Wallis fumes. "What do such tactics say about the Republicans' respect for the black churches, when the African-American vote was again almost 90 percent for the Democrats? Is something wrong with their faith? Do black churches ban the Bible? The Republicans virtually claim to own religion. And the Democrats still don't seem to know how to take back the faith."

Rev. Wallis, throughout his career as a public theologian and editor of Sojourners magazine, is a natural ally of Democrats. He espouses similar positions on many issues close to the hearts of Democrats: tax reform to help the poor, medical coverage for all, opposition to the war in Iraq, to name just a few. Yet he is unabashedly pro-life, though his opposition to abortion is highly nuanced; he is more comfortable with the Democrats' vocabulary on abortion, such as "reducing the need for abortions," than an outright ban.

Rev. Wallis offers an approach to public policy arising out of the Bible's Old Testament prophets. And he borrows considerably --- with due credit --- from Catholic social teaching to offer a program that is neither right or left in political terms, but puts the poor first and the common good at the center of all political questions. It is a platform that Republicans are unlikely to find attractive and Democrats would, though they would first have to get over their phobia about religion.

Meanwhile, "Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society" grew out of a 2004 conference at McGill that drew participants from around the world. Subtitled "Essays in Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy," it contains essays from various perspectives: Islam, by Prince El Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan; Judaism by David Novak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto; Catholicism by Jean Bethke Elshtain, an ethics professor from the University of Chicago; a judicial and secular perspective by Beverly McLachlin, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada; and several that could be classified loosely as Christian humanist.

The starting point for these essays is an alarm at how aggressive secularism is pushing religion out of the public square. Some, such as Prince El Hassan, point out the positive contributions of religion to the public good. Others, such as Ian Benson, a lawyer and head of the Centre for Cultural Renewal in Ottawa, argue that secularism is not simply a natural and benign movement but is itself a creed for those who are enemies of any form of religion.

In his own essay, Farrow traces the problem back to the early days of the Enlightenment and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), whose work "The Social Contract" proposed that any religion that claims to know the truth must be rooted out of society. In its place, he offered a sort of civil religion with patriotic devotion at its core and the head of the state as the arbiter of truth. Hence human beings replace God as the source of all moral authority.

There is little optimism in these essays, and much to inspire anxiety over the place of anyone who wants to promote public policy out of their faith convictions.

Yet both books demonstrate the lasting power of faith as a motivator for reshaping society. At the same time, they also show how the relationship between church and state has evolved so differently in two countries that are such close neighbors.

---Joseph Sinasac

Required reading for Catholics and Jews

The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945

By Gerhard Schoenberner. Fordham University Press (New York, 2004). 294 pp., $35.

Christ in Dachau

By Father John M. Lenz. Roman Catholic Books (Fort Collins, Colo., 2005). 328 pp., $29.95.

The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII

Edited by Joseph Bottum and David Dalin. Lexington Books (Lanham, Md., 2004). 282 pp., $29.95.

Two reprints of classics and a new collection of essays are three books that should be read, or I should say experienced, by both Catholic and Jewish communities.

First, we should take up this new reprint of the classic "The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945," by Gerhard Schoenberner, which presents in words and pictures what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust (inarguably the worst crime against humanity in history). Then we should take up the new reprint of the classic "Christ in Dachau," by Father John M. Lenz, which shows in word and picture what happened to the Catholic clergy of Europe who objected, even in the slightest of ways, to Nazism's great intent to destroy all religion in Europe and to replace it with its own "Third Reich" or "heavenly kingdom" on earth. Then, to understand where Pope Pius XII stood during these years, Catholics and Jews should read "The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII," edited by Joseph Bottum and David Dalin.

"The Yellow Star" and "Christ in Dachau" will be grim reading for Catholics and Jews alike. But they must be read, and their photographs assimilated, by both communities, for they document something that actually happened within the lifetimes of many of us. They are a record of the total breakdown of a civilized society, the destruction of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, and the less systematic but devastatingly effective attack on Europe's Catholic leadership.

The Holocaust was literally without precedent in its scope and its aims. The Third Reich vision included the total denial and effective elimination of both the spiritual foundations of European civilization --- first Judaism and then Christianity --- and the establishment of a 1,000-year reign of racist oppression and genocide led by Adolf Hitler as the messiah-like "Reichschancellor."

The late Polish Pope John Paul II, his Italian predecessors Popes Paul VI and John XXIII, and his German successor, Pope Benedict XVI, understood this truth about the Holocaust and inveighed against it. The Holocaust is the defining event of our times, and perhaps for centuries to come. For the central axiom of Nazism, like the central axiom of Soviet communism, was the destruction of humanity's urge toward the good, toward democracy and toward legal rights for the world's religions.

Yet neither Judaism nor Catholicism were, in fact, destroyed by the Nazi onslaught. We survive today to dialogue with each other and to continue our witness to the world, together, that humanity is created in God's image and is oriented toward his divine goal of preparing the way for the kingdom of God.

The third book, "The Pius War," is an important step in this joint mission of Jews and Catholics. The book contains 11 essays answering charges made against Pope Pius XII in the recent string of anti-Pius books. That string began with the now-infamous screed of John Cornwell, "Hitler's Pope" (Viking, 1999). These essays are reactive works, an antidote to the polemical poison of Cornwell and his followers.

The reading public owes the editors of "The Pius War" a debt of gratitude for having brought together these pieces, previously available only in journals. Notable among them are the essays by the editors themselves, one Jewish and one Catholic, and reflective pieces by Robert Louis Wilken, Ronald J. Rychlak, Justus George Lawler, John Jay Hughes, John S. Conway and Michael Novak.

What should make this book a permanent part of any library of 20th-century history is the annotated bibliography of works on Pope Pius and World War II. The Pope Pius controversy has become a field of study virtually in itself. In the annotated bibliography, William Doino Jr. comments on all the works cited in the essays. The bibliography takes up well over half the book and, indeed, could have been a book in itself.

Though I did not always agree with Doino's judgments (for example, I would have given much higher marks to the thoughtful and balanced work of University of Toronto scholar Michael Marrus), the breadth and depth of the work included here will make this a valuable resource for many years to come.

---Eugene Fisher

Christianity and Western European culture

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God

By George Weigel. Basic Books (New York, 2005). 200 pp., $23.

Four Cultures of the West

By Jesuit Father John O'Malley. Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 272 pp., $24.95.

The 40th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council brings to mind Blessed Pope John XXIII's request that the church must continually read the signs of the times. Social critic George Weigel and eminent church historian Jesuit Father John O'Malley offer their perspectives on the church in a time of change.

Weigel's book, "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America and Politics Without God," is a trenchant analysis of the present situation in Europe, which he says is in the throes of spiritual --- and hence, political --- decline. "Christian Europe" is becoming an oxymoron, he contends, especially in light of recent debates to "de-Christianize" the Constitution of the European Union. The "Cube" in the book title refers to the "Grand Arche de la Defense" in Paris, a 40-story hollow cube of glass and white Carrara marble, with offices in its side portions and an empty center in which the entire Cathedral of Notre Dame could fit. The symbolism of this monument is not lost on Weigel, who views the cube as a kind of tower of Babel and the supreme manifestation of Europe's spiritual suicide.

How did it get this way? In a word: war. The barbarity of the last century points to a terrifying fascination with a political game of diplomatic chicken, one that is nearly always calamitous and dehumanizing. How will Europe recover? In a word: Poland. Weigel, biographer of the late Pope John Paul II, holds that this Slavic nation offers the best possible model for deliverance because Poland consistently used the power of its Catholic culture to affect surprising resilience against occupation, secularism, communism and materialism.

It is true that Western Europe's furtive embrace of greater diversity may be to its own peril without further regulation. The immigrant population, especially among African Muslims, is on the rise in many of Europe's major cities and so there are demographic changes that necessarily alter cultural identities. The tempo of Weigel's argument is perhaps marred by his use of an old boogeyman --- radical Islamic encroachments into Catholic countries with waning birthrates. This is something of a paper tiger, at least for now, but increased pluralism is a curious index of the de-Christianization phenomenon that is covering much of European society like a funeral pall.

Father O'Malley's book, "Four Cultures of the West," is also concerned about secularization. He launches his discussion with Tertullian's ancient question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" (Tertullian, trained in Greek philosophy, became a Christian in the second century.)

Father O'Malley is not merely concerned with profane or sacred societies or with reason's alleged tension with faith. Instead, he examines the potential for collision in what he calls four "cultures" in the West: prophetic, academic, humanistic or literary, and performative or ritualistic.

Father O'Malley looks at the rhetoric and the rhetoricians, the messages and the messengers, in each of these cultures. His examples range from the notorious to the obscure. Luther is counted among the prophetic voices; Erasmus is among the humanistic. Rigorous questioning is the hallmark of academic culture; the Liturgy of the Hours, which were meant to be sung, is prayer performed.

In this look at the four cultures --- all loosely defined and deliberately so --- Father O'Malley echoes the medieval Cistercian St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who insisted that people open up the book of their own experience. On every page and through every generation, the signs of the times are written there. We have Father O'Malley and Weigel to thank for showing us a new optic.

---Patrick J. Hayes

The Reviewers: Joseph Sinasac is publisher and editor of the Toronto national newspaper The Catholic Register. Eugene Fisher is an associate director of the U.S. Catholic bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. Patrick J. Hayes teaches theology at Marymount College of Fordham University and is a facilitator in a three-year project, "Passing on the Faith, Passing on the Church," being sponsored by Fordham's Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.