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Who, even among scholars in the field, could keep up with the flood of attacks on Pius XII that began in the late 1990s? John Cornwell gave us Hitler"s Pope , and Michael Phayer followed with The Catholic Church and the Holocaust . David Kertzer brought charges against Pius XII in The Popes Against the Jews , and Susan Zuccotti reversed her previous scholarship to pen Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy . Garry Wills used Pius as the centerpiece for his reformist Papal Sin , as did James Carroll in Constantine"s Sword . So, for that matter, did Daniel Goldhagen when he wrote what proved to be the most extended and straightforward assault on Catholicism in decades: A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair . Meanwhile, the essays and occasional pieces were collected in such volumes as Holocaust Scholars Write to the Vatican , and The Holocaust and the Christian World , and The Vatican and the Holocaust , and Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust , and Christian Responses to the Holocaust "and on, and on, until we seemed to be facing what the exasperated reviewer John Pawlikowski called "a virtual book-of-the-month club on institutional Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust." The champions of Pius had their share of book-length innings as well"although, one might note, never from the same level of popular publisher as the attackers managed to find. In 1999 Pierre Blet produced Pius XII and the Second World War According to the Archives of the Vatican and got Paulist Press, a respectable but small Catholic house, to publish it in America. Ronald Rychlak finished his first-rate Hitler, the War, and the Pope , and the hardback was brought out by a press in Columbia, Missouri, known mostly for printing romance novels. For the paperback edition, Rychlak"s work was picked up by the book-publishing arm of the Catholic newspaper Our Sunday Visitor . Those are both fine presses in their way, and Rychlak has done well for them. But one can reasonably point out that Our Sunday Visitor is not quite at the level of distribution, advertising, and influence enjoyed by Doubleday, Houghton Mifflin, Knopf, and Viking"the large houses that issued the books against Pius. The commentator Philip Jenkins recently suggested that this disparity in publishers sends a message that the mainstream view is the guilt of Pius XII, while praise for the Pope belongs only to the cranks, nuts, and sectarians. Jenkins" suggestion is worth considering. Still, no one can say Pius" supporters were squashed or censored. In just six years, Margherita Marchione managed five books in praise of the Pope. The Thomistic philosopher and novelist Ralph McInerny, aggravated by the deluge of attacks, issued a splenetic volume called The Defamation of Pope Pius XII , while Justus George Lawler (a writer best known in Catholic circles for his liberalism) penned a witty evisceration of Pius" critics called Popes and Politics: Reform, Resentment, and the Holocaust . Jos" S"nchez added Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust , and a slew of German and Italian books might be mentioned as well, prompted, for the most part, by the popular visibility of the English-language criticisms even in Europe. But it was primarily in book reviews and responses that the defenders of Pius XII fought out the war"which is something of a problem. Every pope precipitates biographies, hagiographies, and maledictions, like the dropping of the rain; it is part of the job to be much written about, and the works on Eugenio Pacelli that began to appear when he became pope in 1939 seem innumerable. But no supporter has yet produced a book-length biography in the wake of the recent years of extended blame. Even Rychlak"s Hitler, the War, and the Pope was essentially reactive, devoting a thirty-page epilogue to a catalogue of the errors in Cornwell"s book. We have seen this pattern before. Rolf Hochhuth"s play The Deputy premiered in Berlin in 1963, and its picture of a greedy pope, concerned only about Vatican finances and silent about the Holocaust, immediately caused a firestorm of comment from the intellectual world. Everyone who was anyone felt compelled to weigh in. Hochhuth himself faded away when he tried to extend his censure to Winston Churchill, penning a play in 1967 that claimed Churchill had ordered the murder of the Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski and, later, the murder of the pilot who had crashed Sikorski"s plane. Unbeknownst to Hochhuth, the pilot was, in fact, still alive, and he won a libel judgment that badly damaged the London theater which had staged the play. Thereafter, Hochhuth found it harder to get a hearing"although, interestingly, the current notoriety of Pius XII seems to have resurrected the playwright to some degree, and in 2002 the Greek filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gravas released a movie version of The Deputy with the English title Amen (or Eyewitness , in other copies). Even without Hochhuth, the wide discussion about Pius XII he initiated in 1963 went on for several years. It produced some overheated journalistic attempts to cash in on the public interest, such as Robert Katz" Black Sabbath and Death in Rome (the latter being the target of a successful libel suit, this time brought by Pius XII"s niece, Countess Elena Pacelli Rossignani). But the era brought forth as well three more serious and scholarly"indeed, by today"s standards, quite moderate and thoughtful"attacks: Guenter Lewy"s The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (1964), Carlo Falconi"s The Silence of Pius XII (1965), and Saul Friedlander"s Pius XII and the Third Reich: A Documentation (1966). The brouhaha also prompted the Vatican to begin releasing material from Pius" pontificate, which appeared from 1965 to 1981 as the eleven-volume series Actes et Documents . In part by relying on these new documents, but even more by simply gathering their forces and investigating each of the incidents taken as the core of the indictment, the defenders gradually tamped down The Deputy "s claims about Pius XII and the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II was a consistent advocate for his predecessor, and even once-popular notions about Pius"that he was, for instance, the great reactionary opponent against whom Vatican II turned"gradually seemed to lose steam by the late 1970s and early "80s. It took more than a decade, but the reactive reviewers appeared to carry the day, and the popular magazine press and major book publishers lost interest. A few commentators noted that the whole thing hadn"t entirely died. The historian Michael Tagliacozzo said he kept an open file labeled "Calumnies Against Pius XII." But most were unprepared when the criticism began again in the late 1990s. To journalists and cultural commentators, Hitler"s Pope seemed almost to come out of nowhere in 1999, and it received almost entirely ecstatic reviews when it first appeared. A few skeptical journalists who remembered the Hochhuth battles" Newsweek "s Kenneth Woodward and the New York Times " Peter Steinfels, notably"doubted Cornwell"s conclusions, but it had been years since they had investigated the topic, and they were unprepared to provide details about the book"s errors. Time was needed for scholars to gin up the machine again, double-check the claims in Hitler"s Pope , and publish the reviews. Some of the results proved deeply embarrassing for Cornwell, particularly the falsity of his boast that he had spent "months on end" in the archives, when he visited the Vatican for only three weeks and didn"t go to the archives every day of that. The Italian letter from Pacelli that Cornwell placed at the center of his book as evidence of deep anti-Semitism had been, he claimed, waiting secretly "like a time bomb" until he did his research. In fact, it had been published in 1992 in a book by Emma Fattorini, who"an actual Italian, not working on a partisan translation"thought it meant very little. By the time all this came out, however, Hitler"s Pope had ridden out its time on the best-seller list. Pius" supporters were better prepared for Susan Zuccotti, and still better prepared for Garry Wills, and David Kertzer, and James Carroll, and, particularly, Daniel Goldhagen, who was especially harried in late 2002. By then, the whole thing had turned into a giant game of "Whack the Mole," with dozens of reviewers ready to smash their mallets down on the next author to stick up his head. Poor Peter Godman, for instance, has recently written Hitler and the Vatican: Inside the Secret Archives that Reveal the New Story of the Nazis and the Church ; before the book was even out of galleys, the scholars had ready a list of Godman"s factual errors, missed documents, and wrongheaded translations. As it happens, Godman appears not to have done a terrible job with Hitler and the Vatican . Despite its tendentious opening"how could the Vatican "not raise its voice against the cruelties of racism, the brutality of totalitarianism [and] the repression of liberties in the Third Reich?" Godman asks, although his own book goes on to prove the Vatican to some degree did exactly that" Hitler and the Vatican seems, on the whole, slightly more a defense than an assault, blaming mostly the Austrian bishop Alois Hudal for what other authors have charged against Eugenio Pacelli while he was nuncio in Germany and secretary of state in Rome. Just as The Deputy moved the archivists in Rome to release Actes et Documents over the next sixteen years, so the current Pius War has prompted an accelerated"by glacial Vatican norms"opening of a few new archives from the pontificate of Pius XI (1922-1939), whom Pacelli served as the Vatican"s secretary of state. Along with an Italian Jesuit named Giovanni Sale (who has been writing a torrent of articles for the Roman Jesuit journal La Civilt Cattolica ), Godman is among the first scholars to have used the new documents. NOT ENOUGH S